The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) (3 page)

Chapter 1

November 27, 3:02 a.m., present day

Tunnels under New York City

Subway tunnels breathe. They exhale when trains come and inhale when they leave. Their concrete lungs fill with smoke and soot and rubber and the scents of a hundred ladies’ perfumes. When trains aren’t running, the tunnels hold their breath. They might let wisps of warm air drift into the cold night, draw in slow nips of bracing frost, but mostly they sit still, waiting for trains to bring them back to life.

A thousand times a day their breath coursed over Joe Tesla’s body. It was not so warm as human breath, nor yet so cold as stone. He was used to it, now.

Because he lived here, underground, in the tunnels of New York City.

He had not felt sunlight on his skin for 181 days, and he might never feel it again. His skin, long pale, had whitened. He looked like a vampire, except that he didn’t have the teeth for it.

He didn’t have the teeth for a lot of things these days.

Not so long ago, he’d had plenty of teeth. Sharp ones. Now he wasn’t much use to anyone.

Edison nudged his hand with a cold nose, brown eyes concerned. Edison was his psychiatric service animal—a patient and affectionate dog who’d inherited the best genes of his Labrador mother and golden retriever father. When Joe got upset, the dog brought him back, brought him home. Edison pulled Joe through the darkness. He’d have been lost without him.

He scratched Edison in his favorite spot behind his ear. The dog’s tail thumped the hard train ties. As always, Joe counted, and with each number its corresponding color flashed through his mind: the number one was cyan, two blue, three red, four green, five brown, six orange. Edison stopped wagging his tail, and the colors and sound faded. This late, quiet filled the empty tunnels, broken only by the occasional squeak of a rat, or the rustle of tiny paws across paper blown down from a platform.

No passenger trains ran this late—Joe had long since committed their schedules to memory. Of course, trains were occasionally moved to new stations or out for servicing at night, so his system wasn’t foolproof, but with Edison’s keen hearing and Joe’s knowledge of places they could hole up along the tracks while trains went by, it had been pretty safe.

Joe didn’t need much to keep them safe down here: a metal flashlight he’d discovered on the mantel of his new home, a pewter badge to show transit workers, and the heavy ring of old-fashioned keys hooked to his belt and covered with a polar fleece bag to quiet the jangling. Those keys were said to grant him access to every underground door and platform. So far, they had.

Right now he stood in a vast room deep underground northeast of Grand Central Terminal. Here the tracks merged together under Manhattan before reaching the station’s forty-four platforms (green, green). Since they had been built a century before, many of the tracks were no longer electrified. It was a good place to let Edison explore without worrying that he’d electrocute himself on the third rail.

Joe rummaged through his backpack. His questing fingers found a roll of duct tape, a bag of dog treats, and, at last, the glow-in-the-dark tennis ball. He pulled it out. “What do you think, boy?”

Edison’s tail wagged in approval, brown eyes glued to his hand.

Joe tossed the ball in an arc across the old sidings, and Edison ran after it in a streak of gold. The dog returned with it, and he threw it again. He liked watching the glowing ball careen off tracks and roll under parked train cars, liked to see Edison having fun.

Edison bounded about, abandoning himself to every moment. Joe couldn’t remember a time when the same could be said about him. Maybe Edison could teach him that, too.

Ball in his mouth, the dog loped back again. This time he didn’t drop it at Joe’s feet. Instead, he dropped the wet ball in his hand, a sign that he’d lost interest in playing. Joe tucked it into his jacket pocket and wiped his hand on his pants.

Above, tons of rock hung between him and the sky. It was very different from his beginnings—he’d spent his childhood with only the thin metal skin of a travel trailer separating him from the elements, and often not even that. Whenever he could, he’d slept outside in a sleeping bag. He’d gazed at the night sky from fields across the Midwest, sleeping with quiet stars above and the circus animals moving in their cages around him for company, everyone waiting for the next performance. Now he, too, was trapped in a cage, because his brain, once his greatest ally, had betrayed him.

Enough. No self-pity.

Joe adjusted his night-vision goggles and turned toward home, Edison ranging ahead. The world glowed an eerie green, the best the goggles had to offer. He found them more reassuring than a flashlight. The white beam felt out of place down here, more unnatural than night-vision green.

He’d bought Edison canine night-vision goggles, too. Not hard to find. War dogs used them, but Edison didn’t like them. He’d wear them with a weary air of resignation if Joe made him, but Joe didn’t force the issue. Edison’s eyes were good in the dark. Turned out, dogs could see almost as well in darkness as cats. The
tapetum lucidum
at the back of a dog’s eye refracted the light back through the retina, like a cat’s or a bat’s.

Joe swept his gaze along the tunnel. This one was cut and cover. It had been built by tearing up the street above, cutting the tunnel, then covering the top back up and replacing the street on top. Most of the tunnels this high were cut and cover.

He liked them better than the deep-bore tunnels because they had more room on the sides to get out of the way of trains. Deep-bore tunnels were drilled with a big round drill. They were barely large enough for the train cars. He and Edison could be spread across the walls like tomato paste if they got caught there off guard at the wrong time. Even there, if he flattened himself against the side, he’d survive a passing train. Edison would be safe, too, so long as he didn’t panic, and Edison was never one to panic.

Counting each step, Joe marched toward home. He used the short strides he’d developed for walking in the tunnels. Instead of measuring his stride by the length of his legs, he measured it by the distance between train ties. It had felt awkward at first, but now it was his natural gait down here. When he went back to the stations and shops topside, it took him a few minutes to switch back to the same gait as everyone else.

Edison stopped to sniff a foul-smelling object on the ground, probably a dead rat.

“Don’t roll in that!” Joe called.

Edison had, before. He often brought the odors of dead rats or rotten food into their home, and Joe had to toss him in the giant claw-foot tub and scrub him clean with Balenciaga soap. Edison didn’t like the scent any more than Joe liked the stench of dead rats, but since Joe had to do most of his shopping at the luxury stores in Grand Central Terminal, Edison had to take what he could get.

The yellow dog gave him a hurt expression, as if he would never think of coating himself with the stink of a dead rat, and trotted to stand next to Joe’s leg. Joe bent and ruffled the animal’s soft ears. “Good boy.”

The dog stayed close to his leg as Joe walked toward home. He’d warned Edison about the dangers of the third rail, but Joe didn’t like to take chances and kept him to heel when he could.

They arrived at a round metal door faced with an ornate pattern molded into the Victorian-era steel. On it, Joe tapped his own addition—a high-tech electronic keypad. Nineteenth-century security combined with twenty-first-century technology kept people, and the occasional floodwaters, out of the most personal part of his domain. He entered an eight-digit code on the keypad. At the green light, he inserted an old-fashioned key from his key ring, turned it, and pushed open the heavy door.

He took off his night-vision glasses and entered a large tunnel floored with wooden planks long worn gray with dust and soot and lit by amber bulbs strung along the ceiling. The bulbs looked old enough to have come from the workshop of the original Edison—Thomas himself.

His Edison bounded ahead. Joe followed along the planks toward home. As always, he paused before entering his house, amazed that he lived there.

The amber lights illuminated the neatly painted facade of a full-size Victorian house. Surrounded by stone, it looked as if someone had chiseled a house-shaped cavern into the schist, then teleported a building into it. He blinked, but the house was still there when he opened his eyes. Even now, his mind had trouble fathoming it. It was completely incongruous, but it was real. A three-story Victorian house built deep underground.

Nearly a century before, the eccentric lead engineer on the construction of Grand Central Terminal had been granted the weirdest perk Joe had ever heard of—a house buried in the tunnels far below Grand Central Terminal, deeded to his family in perpetuity, combined with access to all the tunnels in the system. It was his key ring that Joe carried on his belt, and the keys on it had opened every underground door that he had come across.

The engineer and his wife had raised their children in this fantastical house in the world beneath, taking them up in the elevator each day for school and outings. A few articles about their unusual living situation had appeared in turn-of-the-century newspapers, and then the world had moved on and forgotten.

The engineer’s children had opted for lives aboveground. Following generations had used the family house only for parties. Joe’s ex-girlfriend Celeste Gallo and her twin brother, Leandro, Joe’s college roommate and old friend, were the final heirs to the house. Ever since Leandro had told him about it, Joe had itched to see it, but had never found time until he became trapped in New York not far from the house’s entrance.

Tonight, Joe gazed at the house. The wooden facade glowed bright sulfur-yellow with clean white trim and gingerbread accents picked out in brick red. It resembled the famous painted ladies lining Alamo Square in San Francisco, except that this house stood a hundred feet below where it ought to.

Buried treasure.

He could see why Leandro had fought so hard to keep it after September 11, when the government had tried to have it closed down as a security risk. But Leandro’s great-grandfather’s contract had proved ironclad, and the house had stayed in Gallo hands.

He was just grateful that he’d persuaded Celeste, with whom he shared a complicated romantic history, to let him live here. It hadn’t been easy, and Leandro had fought it. Leandro had claimed, “Digging Joe into a bigger hole is just enabling him.” Leandro had told Joe that what he really needed was a good kick in the pants. That would cure his agoraphobia, and he could fly back to his life in California.

That wasn’t going to be possible.

Celeste had won in the end because, like everyone else, Leandro couldn’t deny her anything she wanted. So, the house was Joe’s.

Edison stood in front of the front door, wagging his tail. He was ready to sack out. So was Joe.

As he walked up the stairs to open the door for the dog, he had an uneasy feeling. He and Edison had been exploring the tunnels for months, and they’d encountered only the occasional maintenance worker down this deep. Tonight, Joe had come across unfamiliar prints. They’d had pronounced ridges, more like hiking boots than the simple straight-line treads of the shoes worn by most transit employees, and they had ranged across dozens of the lower tunnels.

He’d met homeless people underground before, of course, clustered near subway platforms or in the upper tunnels, but no one had ever dared to come as deep as Joe’s house.

Until now.

And Joe didn’t like that at all.

Chapter 2

November 27, 4:25 a.m.

Carrie Wilbur Home for Adults with Special Needs

Oyster Bay, New York

Ozan Saddiq loved coming to New York because he could visit his brother, Erol, in the home. He couldn’t care for Erol in his own home, because he didn’t have one, and both of their parents were dead, so he paid a fortune to keep him in this expensive facility, and Erol repaid him by being happy. Erol excelled at being happy.

Erol liked Ozan to stay by his bed while he slept, so that was where he sat. The home didn’t allow overnight visitors, so Ozan had to break in at night, after everyone left—a simple task for a man with his talents.

Ozan studied the familiar room, the one constant in his nomadic existence. Erol had his own room, for an extra fee, decorated with manatees and sea turtles. The carpet was aqua blue as were the walls. Even his comforter had an aquatic theme—sea turtles swimming on a blue background with bright yellow fish nibbling on their shells. Ozan watched his brother breathe—almond-shaped eyes closed, yellow-framed glasses folded on the nightstand, body abandoned to a deep sleep Ozan could only imagine.

Chance had given Erol a genetic blueprint with Down syndrome. It could just as easily have been Ozan in that bed.

Ozan tucked the cover under his brother’s soft chin and turned to the demands of his latest client—Dr. Dubois. He wanted the job done immediately. He always did. Ozan had worked for him a few months before—driving a Navy boat laden with cargo he was forbidden to look at to a certain GPS location and then scuttling it. As the ship had sunk beneath the oil-black waves, he’d untied the motorized dinghy and piloted it across miles of open ocean to Florida.

Before he’d sunk the vessel, he’d examined the cargo. Corpses. One hundred and three of them. One hundred had had no visible wounds and might have died of natural causes. Three had had their throats slit with a savagery that spoke of great anger and strength, one of them burned beyond recognition. When the doctor had contacted him again this time, he’d doubled his fee.

He took a teacup from its place on Erol’s nightstand next to a picture of the two of them together at the New York Aquarium. Ozan had brought his own thermos of Turkish tea, brewed strong like their mother used to make. It would be a long night for him.

He inserted the memory stick into its port in his laptop, aware that he would be unable to copy anything from it and the data would erase itself twenty-four hours from the time he viewed it. He could memorize details quickly, another gift he’d received from their parents that Erol hadn’t. It was a useful talent in his business.

Because Ozan’s business was killing.

Like many men, he’d learned to kill in the Army. Like few, he was very good at it. People noticed the care, if not the pleasure, he took doing it, and those people put him in touch with others who would pay for his unique gifts.

He was an aficionado of death. He could be quick and brutal, or slow and elegant. What he was, above all else, was discreet. His murders were viewed as accidental deaths when required, or pinned on others if necessary. He rose to the demands of each occasion.

His prey always underestimated him. A slight man, he didn’t seem like a threat. With black hair cropped short, compact small hands, graceful movements, wide brown eyes—he looked like a waiter.

Erol snorted in his sleep. It sounded like a laugh, and Ozan smiled at him before returning to his reading. For this job he must locate the target, known only as Subject 523, and kill him. That part was straightforward.

A moth fluttered against Erol’s bedside lamp. Ozan’s hand flicked out and caught it. He held the creature against the hot bulb with his forefinger. It waggled its tiny legs as if it could escape him. He held it there, ignoring the pain in his finger until the faint smell of burning hair reached his nostrils, then he let it go. The dead moth fell to the nightstand, and he brushed it to the floor.

He read the next paragraph of the file, twice, surprised by the requirement that he send the doctor a very particular kind of proof that he had completed the job. He wasn’t squeamish, but the strangeness of the request startled even him.

He read on. If the subject possessed classified documents, they must be returned unread. If the subject had shared those documents with others, then additional targets might need to be defined. But he didn’t think on that yet. He would deal with each challenge as it came, examine it thoroughly, then let it go.

A few minutes of research on his laptop dug up a press report that told him Dr. Dubois wasn’t telling the whole truth about his target. Clients rarely told the entire truth, but the flash of disappointment made him frown. It wasn’t that they lied, it was that they thought him naïve enough to believe them. As if he were Erol, open and trusting.

He scanned the article. A homeless man had beaten an unidentified businessman to death with a hammer outside the Grand Central Hyatt a few weeks before. The businessman need not remain unidentified—Ozan recognized his picture in the newspaper. They ran in the same circles, competed for the same jobs, although his fees were reportedly lower than Ozan’s. Regardless, he wouldn’t have been an easy man to surprise or overpower, even by a hammer-wielding crazy man.

Ozan must assume that the murdered man had pursued the same quarry as he, and he’d not only been killed while doing so, he’d also attracted attention, which made Ozan’s job much more delicate. The target had been on the run for an indeterminate amount of time before the murdered colleague had found him. Then the target had killed the man sent to kill him, and more time had gone by.

For this man he should take his time, be even more thorough and careful than usual. The man was dangerous, and Ozan wanted to know all the variables in play.

Instead, he was to rush, as the doctor had made it clear that the subject must be dead within four days. After fumbling about for months, they had given Ozan ninety-six hours.

What could possibly be so urgent?