The Thieves of Faith (33 page)

She smiled and nodded. There was no fear in her eyes, only confidence. Michael was amazed at her force of will. And though he thought her overly optimistic, he was glad, for if she really knew what she was facing, she would be feeling as scared as he was and he didn’t need to deal with that right now.

Michael looked at the water, watching the currents ebb and flow around where the rope protruded. He focused himself, stuffed his regulator in his mouth, and jumped in. He pulled his mask down and quickly went under, allowing himself to adjust, to allow the play of the light to cut through the churning waters. The current was strong, pulling against him, sucking him toward the pipe. He wasn’t worried about the trip in as much as he was the trip out. They would have to pull themselves along the rope against these raging waters, something that could prove to be harder than anything he had done before.

Michael’s harness held him in place as the waters pulled him. The suction was worse than terrifying, it was like he was being pulled to his death and he was letting it happen. Susan jumped into the water, immediately submerging next to him.

Michael gave her the thumbs-up sign and released the guide line from his left hand while letting it feed through the clip. The water began pulling him, he was going in feetfirst, looking down as he went. He could begin to see the tunnel up ahead. It was sheer blackness against the dark walls. The light on his helmet danced about with his movements. The opening was fifteen feet below the surface and five feet in diameter. Michael could see tiny bubbles and sediment in whirlpool currents swirling into the pipe. Michael looked back. Susan was five feet behind; there was no panic in her eyes, though Michael thought that might change once they entered the tube.

He continued feeding out his line, moving closer to the entrance, keeping his legs together, his feet pointed. It required no effort, the suction doing all the work. And before he knew it, he was in.

It was like being in the middle of a tornado; the current was a whirlwind around him. If he didn’t have the rope to steady himself, he would surely have been tossed against the pipe walls, end over end, sucked down to who knows where. He counted off the rope’s ten-foot increments; he had estimated the grate to be one hundred and twenty feet in. Keeping his orientation was difficult at best; there was no way to track your bubbles to see which way was up as they were caught in the vortex.

He tilted his head back and could see Susan right behind him, keeping pace.

Forty feet in. Michael slowly played out the rope, fighting the current.

Eighty feet in. Michael moved his head slowly about, directing the beam of his light around the tube for any sign of the grating.

One hundred feet in. Susan had maintained the five-foot distance as Michael had directed. Michael continued to look back, concerned about his unwanted companion. Though he considered her an added burden, distracting him from his primary goal, he still respected her confidence, stronger than he had expected.

One hundred and twenty feet. No sign of the Liberia entrance. Michael slowed up, Susan followed suit. They both looked about, but there was no sign of any passage. Michael fed out his line one foot at a time, his head turning to and fro.

And then he saw it, up ahead, at the one-hundred-and-thirty-foot point. He inched his way toward it, careful not to overshoot his mark as he knew it would be an effort to fight the current and pull himself back. More important, he had to conserve his energy for the trip out. As he approached, he could see that the opening was three feet square, actually recessed two feet into another tunnel. Michael stopped his momentum and reached up through the current and found a grate. He used it to pull himself into the new tunnel and pulled out his knife. He looked about the grate; there were no screws to loosen, no locks to pry. He wedged himself in the tunnel and pushed the metal obstruction. Without any resistance, the grate gave way, pushing upward on thick hinges.

Michael looked back at the safety line and up into the new tunnel. With all of his strength, he tugged and pulled on the grate, ensuring its viability, its strength. This was the trickiest and most dangerous part of the whole operation. He knew there was no room for failure. Michael grabbed the edge of the grate and clipped on a new rope, a safety line, securing himself. He then unhooked from the guide line and quickly pulled himself upward.

Ten feet up he swam. The current here was minimal compared to the torrent he had just left. He played out the rope from his waist as he went, his head finally breaking the surface. He looked around. He was in a cistern. The harsh light from his helmet bounced off the moist walls. The room was large, man-made, of brick and granite with a low ceiling and vacant torch mounts along the wall. A single door on the far side of the room.

He wasted no time. He dropped back under the water and swam down. Susan looked up at him from the main pipe, the water whipping her body back and forth. Michael gave her a thumbs-up and motioned her to move toward him. She reached up and secured her safety line on the grate, reached back and unhooked from the guide line. The current was still strong; Michael could see her hair sticking out of her helmet swirling around her head.

Michael offered her his hand but she ignored it. She pulled herself upward toward Michael, up into the tunnel.

But then, without warning, the iron rod on the grate to which she had secured her line snapped in two. And with that, the suction pulled her back down into the tunnel. Her hands scrambled for a hold, but it was useless. Before Michael realized what happened, she was gone. Sucked into the darkness of the whirlpool pipe.

Chapter 35

B
usch stood in the middle of the operating theater
, his pulse running higher than he had ever felt it, higher even than his most tense moments back on the force. He had never felt farther far from the law than he did right now. Ten stories below the seat of power of the Russian government—about to steal from them—was not where he imagined he would be after retiring from the police force. He thought about Jeannie and his kids and his promise: he would come back unharmed. Though Jeannie had told him not to come back at all, he knew she was speaking out of anger; it wasn’t the first time she had figuratively kicked him out. He tucked those thoughts along with his fears in the deepest part of his being and looked around.

The operating room was truly state of the art: computerized and engineered with precision right down to the auto-directional lights in the ceiling. The cameras, stationed at multiple locations, made the space appear more like the set of a movie than an operating room. It was as if they were about to dissect an alien, not operate on an innocent woman.

“We’re not sightseeing,” Nikolai said from the doorway, looking at his watch. “We’ve got to move.”

Busch took one last look at the room and turned to the far wall, where the large window ran nearly the distance of the thirty-foot wall. He stared at his reflection, unable to see in the darkened room beyond, when the lights flashed on. Nikolai entered the audience observation area, its plush red-cushioned chairs sitting upon multiple tiers. Nikolai was saying something, his lips moving, but Busch didn’t hear a sound.

Busch walked out of the room down the short hall and entered the theater.

“Give me a hand, will you?” Nikolai said, passing Busch a large roll of tan putty. Nikolai held an end as Busch walked backward, allowing it to play out along the length of the room like a small rope. Nikolai and Busch crouched down and began stuffing the rope of putty into the carpet seam along the wall just under the baseboard. It was a malleable mixture Michael had concocted from potassium nitrate, sugar, and desflurane, all packed around a magnesium wire. Nikolai pulled from his pocket a small box with two prongs. He stepped into the far corner of the room and grabbed a small potted fake fern. He slipped the prongs into the putty where it protruded slightly and moved the fake plant back in place.

Without warning, the chime of the elevator rang, startling the two men. Nikolai hit the light switch and they both ducked down. Busch quietly closed the door only to hear the click of the latch clang like an alarm, echoing off the theater walls. Nikolai and Busch inched their way up the three stairs and hid behind the uppermost row of seats.

After a moment, someone in doctor’s whites entered the operating room. He was walking slowly but with purpose. He seemed to be listening, closing his eyes for short spells as he took long, unhurried steps. The reed-thin man looked to be in his mid sixties, though Busch couldn’t be sure. His face was craggy, acne-scarred. His stern black eyebrows gave him an authoritarian presence, one that he seemed to project even to an empty room. He walked about, occasionally touching the equipment, examining a drawer full of surgical tools. He was like an actor walking the stage hours before the curtain. Shaking off the jitters, trying to come to terms with his nerves. But this man’s eyes were confident, he carried his body with assurance. There was no doubt: this was the man in charge of the operation.

He turned right toward the window. Busch and Nikolai reflexively ducked, though the man couldn’t see into the darkened room. He tilted his head, staring at his reflection as Busch had stared just moments before. He was studying himself, pulling in his shirt collar, straightening his tie.

“It’s Skovokov,” Nikolai whispered. “He’s an arrogant
kozel
.”

Skovokov stared at the glass and subtly smiled, chilling Busch’s heart. This was a man who was enamored with his own brilliance, for surely he was not proud of his scary visage that reflected back at him. Nikolai spoke. “Any doctor who desires an audience while he works deserves to be destroyed by his own ego.”

Busch looked at him, unsure of what he meant by “destroyed.”

Skovokov turned away from the glass and walked out of the operating room. Both Nikolai and Busch breathed a sigh of relief—

Then the door to the theater opened. Busch and Nikolai splayed themselves on the upper tier floor. Busch could just see Skovokov enter the room. He walked in several steps and turned to observe his operating area, his stage.

Busch held his breath, his mind reeling off prayers for deliverance from this moment.

Skovokov stood at the window, looking out, his right hand in his pocket, his left hand busily scratching the back of his head. Busch could see the glint of a wedding ring and briefly pondered who could possibly love a man like this.

And just as suddenly, Skovokov walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Busch and Nikolai waited three minutes before opening the door just a crack. The air was silent, there was no one about. Nikolai ventured out into the hall and heard the fading whine of the elevator.

“He’s gone.”

Nikolai followed Busch down the hall and paused as Busch opened up the half-height elevator door. Busch flipped on his flashlight, hunched his six-foot-four frame, and hopped into the elevator pit. Nikolai jumped in behind him. They both looked up as the elevator cab rose into the darkness of the shaftway. Suddenly, ten feet above their heads, the series of lasers flashed on, moving higher, following the escaping elevator cab. And as the cab was swallowed by the dark, the shaftway became a crisscross mosaic of intersecting red beams.

“I would say that is not the best route for escape,” Fetisov said.

Busch turned his attention to the electrical panel and opened it up.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Nikolai asked. “This isn’t exactly your background.”

Busch ignored Nikolai as he examined the inner workings of the system. “You’re sure they are bringing Genevieve down at six-fifty?”

“Yeah.” Fetisov nodded. “How do you know what switch we are going to need to throw later?” Nikolai persisted.

“Listen, you don’t question me and I won’t question how you were able to get all the supplies, particularly the Semtex. And how about all of your intel—Lord knows where that came from.”

Nikolai thought a moment, then smiled. “Fair enough.” And he took a step back. Busch ran his finger down the schematics taped to the wall and nodded his head. He turned back to the panel, thumbed a large red switch, and smiled with the satisfaction of finding what he was looking for. “This is the one. Just flip it and the cab shuts down.”

“I guess Michael was right,” Nikolai said as he watched.

“About?” Busch closed the elevator panel, took one last look upward at the unending barrier of lasers, and climbed out of the elevator pit.

“Two things, really,” Nikolai said as he followed Busch. “That you may be big but you aren’t dumb.” Nikolai climbed out of the pit and closed the door.

“Gee, thanks,” Busch said as he shook his head.

They silently headed down the hall to the air vent tucked two feet below the ceiling. Nikolai pulled it off the wall.

Busch came up from behind and gave him a leg up into the vent hole. Busch grabbed the edge and squeezed his large body up through the small vent. “And the second thing?” Busch’s voice echoed within the vent shaft.