The Cobra Event (41 page)

The tunnel went down a slope, turning south. It passed underneath a parking lot and then underneath Bowery Street, and headed downtown along the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, a strip of greenery and playgrounds on the Lower East Side. It was 3:20 on a Sunday morning, and when police cars and F.B.I. cars suddenly began pouring into the neighborhood, and police teams began running down into subway entrances, there were not too many people around to notice, although patrons of nearby clubs were drawn to the activity and stood out in the street wondering what was going on. Since reporters listen to the police radio, television news trucks soon headed for the Lower East Side, tracking reports of a possible terror incident. The Cobra Event had been kept a secret, but the moment Cope slipped away, and the operation turned into a chase, it started to blow into the media.

The BJ 1 tunnel was going deeper underground, and Cope followed it. At first it headed south, but then it curved eastward, away from the Sara Delano Roosevelt Parkway, and it passed in a swooping curve under the old heart of the Lower East Side, under Forsyth Street, Eldridge Street, Allen Street, under Orchard Street, and then it headed due east under Delancey Street.

Cope knew where he was going, in a general sense. He had explored these tunnels on foot, and he had memorized a variety of routes of escape. This route was perhaps his best bet, he thought. He was heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, which rises from Delancey Street, connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn. He felt that he could hide his explosive devices either somewhere in a tunnel, or perhaps he could leave them in the open air where they would blow and plume into the city. He did not want his pursuers to find the devices. That was the problem. If he left them here in the tunnel, the devices would be found and perhaps disarmed. His leg hurt, and it was slowing him down. He had cut his knee while scrambling out of his building.

The tunnel began to rise, and it curved to the northeast. He saw lights ahead. It was the platform of the Essex-Delancey Street subway station, a complicated station at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

I will get out here, where I don’t have to take the stairs up to the street.

The tunnel came out close to the Essex Street platform. A couple of hundred yards past the platform, the tracks headed up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The platform was deserted. In the distance Cope could see lights. That was his way out. They wouldn’t think to block this way.

Meanwhile, a group of New York City police officers were sweeping a set of stairs to the Essex Street platform.

Cope was hurrying along the tracks by the platform. He heard a sound of running footsteps, voices shouting; he saw movement on the stairs, and he turned around and retreated the way he had come. He faded into a niche in the wall back in the BJ 1 tunnel, listening to their radios crackling. They were searching the platform. It was certain that any moment they would come into the tunnel looking for him. What to do?

He knew that an F.B.I. team was coming down the BJ 1 tunnel behind him. He was trapped between the F.B.I. and the New York City Police Department.

I should do it here. Set it off. He hesitated. But the issue wasn’t so simple. He wasn’t absolutely certain he was infected with the virus. Maybe he wasn’t infected. It is hard to choose to die. It is easier to choose to be alive, as long as you have life left in you.
There might be a way out
.

He heard the rustling sound of the space suits, the pounding of their light rubber boots. They were coming fast.

He moved out of the niche and crept along the wall, and entered a dark area, some abandoned rooms. Ducking, moving fast, he hurried through the rooms. He was not more than forty feet from the police officers on the platform. He found some old air-blowing equipment, broken and unused machinery. A refrigerator. Where to go? For a moment he thought that he could climb inside the refrigerator. It had been painted black—weird. But it was too small; he couldn’t fit in there. He got down on his knees and curled up against the wall, beside the black refrigerator.

He opened his bag and pulled out a bomb full of viral glass. He opened one end of the tube, and tugged out the detonator wires. If he crossed the wires, shorted them out, the bio-det would explode. He would die, but his life-form would live and go into the world.

THE ESSEX STREET STATION
contains a large abandoned area that was at one time a trolley-car station. The police officers, having swept the platforms, prepared to move out into the trolley area. At that moment, the Reachdeep team arrived at the Essex Street platform. The ninjas had a conference with some of the police officers. Cope seemed to have vanished.

“He could have gone onto the bridge, there,” a policeman said. “Either that, or he’s in that trolley area.” Meanwhile, he was wondering: If these agents are wearing space suits, what am I getting exposed to down here?

“You guys stay back. You don’t have protective gear,” Wirtz said to the police officers. The F.B.I. people did not have flashlights, while the police officers did. They borrowed the officers’ flashlights, and began to sweep through the trolley area, shining the lights left and right, moving among columns. Hopkins, Austen, and Littleberry remained where they were, standing on the subway tracks near the BJ 1 tunnel with no flashlights. In their suits, with the soft, clear helmets around their heads, it was difficult to pick up sounds, but Hopkins thought he heard something at his back. He spun around and found himself facing a group of abandoned rooms heaped with trash. He saw some air blowers and what looked like a black refrigerator. The sound seemed to have come from behind the refrigerator.

Hopkins drew his gun. He circled around the refrigerator. Nothing there. He looked around, and he looked down at the dust. The black subway dust. On the far side of the refrigerator, he found what appeared to be recent scuffmarks. Then he noticed blood. Several fresh drops of blood.

He opened his pouch and pulled out his Boink and a swab. He swabbed the blood and stuck it straight into the sampling port of the Boink. The device gave off its peculiar chime. On the screen it said “
COBRA
.”

Hopkins spoke quietly into his headset. “Breaker. Emergency. It’s Hopkins. We’re on him. He’s near us! Hey!” A veil of silence seemed to have fallen over his radio headset. This was a dead zone. “Frank! Frank, come in!” he hissed. “Anybody hear me? We’re tracking on Cope!”

Hopkins heard fragments of Masaccio’s voice. He couldn’t understand what Masaccio was saying.

“Frank! Come in!”

While he was talking, Hopkins was turning around slowly, trying to see into the darkness. He turned to Austen and Littleberry. “Lie down on the floor, please.” He moved forward, inching around some machines. “Dr. Cope! Dr. Cope! Please surrender yourself. You will not be harmed. Please, sir.”

There was nobody there.

But on the far side of the machines he found an open doorway leading to an unlit area heaped with trash. Homeless people had been living there. Hopkins moved forward, creeping along the wall in semidarkness, wading through trash, ready to dive for cover. He came to an opening in the wall. It was a low tunnel, about three feet high, full of electrical cables.

Hopkins debated what to do. He could hear snatches of talk on his headset. “Frank! Masaccio! Wirtzy!” he called. No dice. Should he go into the tunnel? He had his Mini Maglite flashlight, but it wasn’t exactly useful for night operations. Nevertheless, he switched it on, getting ready to dive if the light drew gunfire.

Nothing happened. He shone the light down the tunnel.

He yelled over his shoulder: “Mark! Alice! Go back and find Wirtz! There’s a tunnel.”

He bent over and entered the tunnel, shining his minilight along the electrical cables. The tunnel went straight ahead. He moved quickly now, hunched over, concentrating on the problem at hand. Was Cope himself lost, or did he know a way out? He wondered if at any moment a shock wave would ram down the tunnel, from the bomb going off. It seemed pretty clear that Cope had been heading for the Williamsburg Bridge, but that his escape route had been cut off by the police. He had been heading for the open air. He wanted to blow his bomb outdoors at night.

Hopkins had gone an unknown distance down the tunnel when he realized that he was being followed. He stopped. It was Austen, directly behind him. He turned to face her. “You don’t have a gun! You don’t have a light!”

“Get going,” she answered.

“You are a pain in the ass.”

“Get going, or give me your light.”

“Where’s Mark?”

“He went back to find Oscar.”

Without another word, Hopkins surged forward, annoyed with Austen, but most of all angry with himself. He felt responsible for having let Cope get away. If a lot of people die…don’t think about that. Keep on Cope. Find him.

Hopkins and Austen moved along through the tunnel. Sometimes they had to crawl on their hands and knees. The electrical cables were alive, no doubt, and Hopkins wondered if he or Austen would wind up being electrocuted if they touched a broken insulator. The only good thing about these power cables was that perhaps Cope would fry first.

Then Hopkins noticed something troubling. His flashlight was becoming fainter. The beam turned a distinct yellow.

The electrical tunnel led southwest from the Essex-Delancey Street subway station under the Lower East Side, heading downtown. Hopkins and Austen came to a right-angle bend, and then another. The tunnel continued for several blocks, passing under Broome Street, under Ludlow Street, under Grand Street. Hopkins and Austen came to a crossing point in the tunnels—a choice of three routes to take, three tunnels.

They stopped. Which way to go? Hopkins got down on his knees and started searching for blood on the floor with his minilight. There was no blood. He noticed a puddle of water lying on the floor of the right-hand fork. The puddle had been recently splashed. Cope had gone this way. Hopkins was disoriented. He had lost his sense of direction, and he wasn’t quite sure where he and Austen were headed. In fact, they were entering Chinatown.

Now the tunnel narrowed into a crawl space. The going became very difficult. Hopkins got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl forward on his belly, sliding over electrical cables. The cables felt slightly warm, and he could feel them vibrating. As he crawled, he talked with Austen on his radio headset.

“
Dr. Austen
. Will you stop now, please? Just stop. You’re going to get yourself hurt.”

She did not reply.

They had gone an unknown distance when they came to a steel plate blocking the way. It was a small access hatch. He tapped the hatch lightly with his gloved fingertips. It creaked and began to move.

“What is it?” Austen said behind him. “Move your feet.”

“I can’t move my feet. Lie down, please, there could be gunfire.” He pushed gently on the hatch, his gun ready, and the hatch opened with a drawn-out creak. The sound bounced away into deep echoes and then silence. A vast black space loomed beyond the hatch. Hopkins shone his minilight around the space.

It was an enormous underground tunnel. Where the hell are we? Hopkins thought. What part of the city is this? His flashlight beam did not penetrate far into the tunnel, which seemed to extend a great distance, lost in blackness. It was a double tunnel, with a line of concrete columns marching down the middle of it. Twisted and bent pieces of steel reinforcement bar stuck out of the walls like black thorns. The hatch opened out of a wall about ten feet above the floor of the tunnel.

COPE HAD
a flashlight, but he didn’t want to use it, because he thought it might give him away. At intervals he flicked it on and off, but mostly he moved through the tunnel with his hand on the wall, going by sense of touch. He had no idea where he was.

When he had arrived at the hatch he had turned on his light and looked around. He lowered himself into the big tunnel, holding the bag in his hand, trying to protect it. He landed hard on the concrete floor, and an ominous cracking sound came from inside his bag. One of the large glass tubes had cracked. That was too bad. Best to leave it here.

He checked to make sure the chip timer was running, and then he placed the glass cylinder in a shadowy corner by a column. It contained some 435 hexagons of viral glass along with bio-det explosive. Then, flicking his light on and off, he moved along up the tunnel, his bag lighter now, but still containing one large bomb, the grenades, and the gun. The tunnel sloped upward, curving gently to the right. He knew where he wanted to be. He wanted to be outdoors. It was a soft gentle night out there, almost windless, a perfect night.

The tunnel was a stretch of unfinished subway running under Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It was one of a number of planned subway routes in New York City that had been partly built but never finished. This was a length of tunnel intended for the never-completed Second Avenue subway line.

HOPKINS LEANED OUT
of the hatch door. What he saw looked like a subway tunnel, but there were no train tracks; the floor was smooth concrete. Hopkins swung himself out of the hatch, hung on the lip, and let go. He landed on his feet. Austen dropped down next to him.

He said: “I’m giving you a direct order to freeze. I am the chief executive—”

She brushed past him.

The unfinished subway tunnel ran from north to south under Chinatown. It headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River. As they proceeded along the tunnel, Hopkins played his light around, holding his gun at the ready. There seemed to be no exits from this tunnel.

Hopkins tried his radio again. “Frank? Wirtzy? Are you there?”

There was no radio service in the tunnel. They kept walking, Hopkins shining his minilight around the columns, until they came to a set of metal stairs leading up to an open doorway. The question was whether Cope had gone up the stairs or had continued to follow the tunnel.