Dantes' Inferno (43 page)

Think of gas, electricity, water, oil, steam, fuel and waste, heat and coolant flowing through a maze of conduits and pipes inside tunnels, all laid out beneath the four thousand square miles of the LA basin.

In this way, every building, every high-rise and warehouse, every subway, every airport, every bus station and train station and gas station is interconnected and allowed to breathe, eat, shit.

Welcome to the underground infrastructure of any megalopolis.

Welcome to the belly and the backbone of Los Angeles—the place where she is most vulnerable.

Welcome to the core of urban existence.

M intends to shoot it all to hell.

Not for the last time in his life, he is a dead man. First it was Simon, then Ben Black. What happens from here on out is up to M and Dantes.

M will create change through molecules; they are his god—those invisible jots, those fragments, those bonds to be broken, resulting in explosive reaction.

Dantes will create change by revisiting the past.

M hasn't seen sunlight for almost thirty-six hours. He's been too busy with final touches on Project Inferno to come up for air. That doesn't matter much because his desire for close, dark spaces has turned to a pressing hunger.

M has come to worship darkness.

Only in her soft arms does he find fleeting peace.

Darkness and revenge—sweet, sweet revenge.

Here, beneath the city, the earth surrounds him.

If I was mad, I'd never return to daylight
.

But he isn't mad, he thinks, smiling to himself. A lesser man would never have survived the loss, the imprisonment, the torture. He isn't a lesser man; he's just a guy who settles old scores.

One for his sister, Laura's, death.

One for his scars.

One for loss of innocence.

One for disillusionment.

One for his years in that hellhole.

One for the torture.

One for the Tomahawk missiles.

One for the loss of his god and his soul . . 
.

And who will pay the price?

While he works, he gazes up at the metal racks where two cables join in a lead sleeve. He wraps his hand around the molded sleeve, feels the warmth of a live thing—the heat, the faint vibrations of a heart or a pulsing neuron.

Phase two:
a series of explosions will rip open the city's nervous system. He has chosen strategic locations.

One: just beneath the Criminal Courts Building complex, the nerve center of LA's Superior Court.

Two: Los Angeles International Airport with its jet fuel feeder lines.

Three: First Interstate World Center and the Central Library.

Four: Santa Monica–Golden State–Pomona–Hollywood Freeway interchange.

Five: Santa Monica–San Diego Freeway interchange.

Six: Los Angeles Harbor, San Pedro.

Seven: Union Station and the nerve center of the city's transportation (to finish the job he started with the MTA tower).

Eight: the war room at the dams.

Initiation is easily accomplished by a remote dialing system hooked through the city's own communication system. He is pleased with this simple solution. He has spent more than a year infecting this city; like the AIDS virus, he can turn LA's cells against themselves.

The beast is crouching in the bowels of the city
.

The monster has spread her tentacles of death and destruction
.

And the beast, the monster, goes by the name of technology.

From New York to LA, the phone companies relegated their POTS (that's plain old telephone service) lines obsolete.

All that perfectly good copper conduit crisscrossing the city, laid neatly in place underground and forgotten. It's so much easier to just lay new fiber-optical cable.

Well,
almost
forgotten.

Digital subscriber companies remember that copper conduit; they might even rejuvenate those once-defunct lines for their clients, sending superfast, supercompressed
information fifteen hundred feet in less than half a nanosecond.

Ben Black, bomb tech for hire, remembers the copper, too. Miles and miles of it with the power boosters already built into the conduit—the power to do the big jobs.

It's all so simple—it's done with a variation on cluster radioscopes and telescopes—the very large array of explosives. You simply synchronize a dozen smaller scopes to create one massive one.

Simon says, hook up a phone at point A.

Call point B.

After two rings, the call is forwarded to point C.

Ditto, point C to point D.

It's a chain reaction, a party line that stretches from LA Harbor to LAX to Water & Power to the war room at the dam to the flood channel at Ballona Creek to Union Station to the Red Line hubs.

But the best part is the payoff.

At each and every point—A, B, C, D—he's wired a thirty-second delay to a primer charge; the primer connects to the main charge, the main charge is C-4 and PTN.

When the first call goes through, an electrical spark zooms along that good old copper conduit, the phone rings, the delay is triggered by the spark, and the call—hence the charge—is forwarded on to the next daisy in the chain. Meanwhile, the first bomb goes
BOOM
.

But that's the second phase.

Phase one:
a series of explosions will neatly pop gas lines as they cross over and intersect with LA's steam pipes, sewers, and 2,370 miles of storm drains. The gas will do what comes naturally—it will saturate available space, creating one massive bomb just ripe for initiation.

But don't forget what truly matters to M:
phase one
will offer freedom to a prisoner.

John Freeman Dantes will share in the glory with M because Edmond Sweetheart will make that possible. Sweetheart is an honorable man, and he will come after Angel Face.

Now M gazes at the charge that is set in an eight-inch bored hole just above his head. This work was completed last week. The charges must be set close to detonation time because they are sensitive, and like beautiful and restless women, they don't like to be kept waiting.

Just checking
. He tamps fixative around the base; he has set each of four charges on a delay. They should be accurate, contained, doing only the damage that he anticipates.

M is directly beneath the LA City Detention Facility.

He closes his eyes, listening very carefully.

Yes, there it is:
tap, tap, tap . . 
.

He lifts his wrench.

Tap, tap, tap . . 
.

He's the kind of guy who doesn't leave the house without a pair of M26A1 frag grenades in his pocket. A real Boy Scout. Always prepared.

Devil's Hand: The Life and Death of Terrorist Ben Black
(International Press, 1999)

5:39
A.M
.
Except for headlamps, it was pitch black in the storm drain.

The county flood control truck didn't exactly hurtle. Pete—supervisor with the Army Corps of Engineers' Los Angeles flood control—kept his foot lightly on the accelerator, maintaining an average speed of thirty miles per hour; but navigating a subterranean tunnel—the effect of light curling up this concrete cylinder driven deep through hard rock and earth, light flaring at the edge of total darkness only to die out—made for optical, spatial, and energetic illusions. It made for intense discomfort.

“We've got about twenty-four hundred miles of storm drains under LA,” Pete said, tightly. “Flood control can take up to a hundred and forty-six thousand cubic feet of water per second before the LA River overflows. When she does flood, it's a hell of a sight. Bad seasons in thirty-six, sixty-nine, and the nineties.”

Sylvia was wedged in the front seat between Pete and Sweetheart. In spite of his size—or perhaps because of it—Sweetheart had an acute self-awareness: he always knew what place his body occupied in space, and his physical boundaries were meticulously maintained. Sylvia thought most babies must take up more space.

“Right now,” Pete continued, “I'd say we're under our zero point . . . Main and First Streets.”

Which would put them directly beneath downtown Los Angeles; they were approaching the locus point—the intersection of Vignes and Cesar Chavez.

Sylvia bit her lip nervously, staring out at the walls as they drove; although graffiti had become scarce after the first quarter mile or so off the LA River, a few displays—the work of brave and definitely
not
claustrophobic artists—were fleetingly visible. No elegant bison or big cats. Instead, there were skulls, swastikas, gang symbols, gargoyles: guardians of the underworld. Each one a statement: I was here, I existed long enough to leave my mark. A discourse on the human need for procreation, belonging and identity, and the inevitable.

FUCK EVERYTHING

DEVILS RULE

DEATH WINS

Urban cave paintings. LA's new Avignon.

“Who came down to hell to fetch his true love back to earth?” Pete asked in a voice that was too loud for the tight, dark space.

“Orpheus.”

“Who fought the Minotaur so he had to follow some string to get out of the maze . . . you know that one?” Pete turned toward Sylvia, his face alive with nervous energy. The truck came perilously close to scraping paint on concrete.

“Theseus,” Sylvia said sharply. Sweetheart was too damn quiet.

“I knew that—” Pete braked suddenly. “Hey . . . what the . . .?”

Sylvia peered out into the briefly illuminated subterranean cylinder. Her throat felt uncomfortably tight.

“Somebody's been sleeping in my bed,” Pete said quietly. He opened his door, set one leg outside, and flashed his torch on a pile of rags, a rough foam mattress, a few fast food wrappers.

Sylvia peered at the makeshift camp, following the flood control employee. “Have you ever run over anybody?”

“Almost squashed two transients once . . . missed 'em by inch—Jesus H. Christ—” Pete's voice dropped out of sight.

A deep rupture in the belly of the drain had left a jagged concrete gash—roughly three feet across. It was passable on foot, but the truck wasn't going to like the jump.

“What the hell?” Pete asked, shaking his head. “I'm going to send out a marker on this one.”

“I want to scout on ahead,” Sweetheart said. He squatted down, running his fingers along the edge. He sniffed his hand. “He used RDX tape. All he had to do was run it along the cut he wanted.”

“Give me a minute to mark down our bearings,” Pete said in a somber voice. He disappeared inside the truck, his mind on his business. By agreement, any transmission would be relayed ASAP to Special Agent Purcell and the LAPD—another search team was active beneath the city—but that meant leaving the deepest and most remote areas of the storm tunnel to find a location with reception to transmit.

The truck's headlamps illuminated a word spray-painted in black:
CAINA
.

“In the ninth circle, the
Inferno
,” Sweetheart said quietly, “Caina represents treachery against family, against a kindred spirit.”

Sylvia shivered, suddenly cold in the dank, moldy tunnel. M had marked his trail.

Pete joined them, his features drawn, his voice sharpened by anxiety. “If you want, we can scout ahead a ways.”

They left the truck—following headlamps—traversing the drain on foot. The stench of foul water, moldy earth, and things unthinkable caught in their throats. In places, a sharp chemical odor hit as if they were wandering in and out of noxious clouds.

After a long five minutes, the drain had curved just enough to shake off most of the light from the truck's beams. Now their flashlights cut through darkness like three yellow blades; the world was made of instants, abrupt illuminations, inches sliced away from the dark whole. Sweetheart slowed behind the others. From what Sylvia could tell, he was examining the concrete wall where something had snared his curiosity: beneath a metal plate, an electrical conduit—and a neat cluster of wires.