Last Chance to Die by Noah Boyd (good books for 8th graders TXT) 📕

As Vail started in that direction, Carson said, “Steve, you’d better wait for the cops.”

“Either of you have a flashlight?” Vail asked.

The kneeling man pulled one out of its carrier on his belt and handed it to him.

“I’ve got a feeling that door is no longer sealed,” Vail said.

Without turning on the light, he followed the corridor until it turned right. As soon as he looked around the corner, he could see the door. It was made of steel and was three times the width of a room door. And it was open.

Before entering, he stood and listened. He couldn’t hear anything, so he leaned his head in. It was dark except for the ambient light from the bank’s storage space. The tunnel itself was concrete—floor, walls, and ceiling—six feet wide and maybe seven feet high. He snapped the flashlight on and then quickly off so he wouldn’t provide a lasting target. Thirty yards in was a concrete bulkhead with a gate, a lock and chain lying on the deck next to it. Without turning the light back on, Vail started toward it, his Glock raised to eye level. What is it with me and tunnels? He flashed back to the electric train tunnel in which he’d been buried alive during the Los Angeles case. Maybe I should wait for the cops.

Then he thought about Kate. When he’d been an agent, after a while there was a gamelike quality to working cases. They rarely took on any real urgency, any real consequence. If he failed on one, there were dozens more to take its place, and he still got to go home and watch the game that night. But he was getting just one shot at this, and it was ahead of him in the tunnel. He couldn’t risk losing the only lead that could free Kate. Whatever might happen to him was no longer a consideration.

When he reached the gate, he turned his light back on. Once he determined that the shooter wasn’t on the other side, he picked up the lock. It appeared to have been cut with a bolt cutter—and, from the surface rust, not recently. That meant the tunnel was a planned escape route, so Vail didn’t have to worry about being ambushed, because the shooter wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and anyone foolish enough to pursue him. At least it sounded like a good enough theory to let him rationalize throwing caution to the wind. He turned on the light and broke into a trot.

Another hundred yards ahead, he found a second bulkhead with the padlock cut away. Vail noticed that the odor in the tunnel was becoming more pungent, and he thought he could detect the slightest trace of methane. The air was stale and felt heavy in his lungs. He tried to measure his rate of breathing to see if his lungs were requiring more oxygen, but he wasn’t feeling light-headed, so it probably wasn’t going to be a problem. Besides, the shooter had apparently been through here before without a problem.

After a few more minutes, Vail found himself at a three-way fork in the tunnel. Stopping at its intersection, he turned off his light and listened. There wasn’t a sound. After turning the light back on, he could see he was standing in a couple inches of water that had accumulated because the floor at the intersection was an inch or two lower where the old switching tracks had been removed. In the left-hand passage, the floor was dry. The same in the center. The floor of the right branch revealed some partial footprints left by the shooter’s wet shoes. Vail took the right branch and after ten feet turned around and compared his tracks against those of Sakis. The rate of drying was difficult to judge, but the early tracks weren’t that much different. He was still close enough for Vail to catch.

Seventy-five yards later, Vail came to a right turn. It was impossible to tell what direction he had traveled in, but he thought it was initially south and now possibly west. As he was about to make the turn, he heard the sound of metal on metal. He peeked around the corner and saw another bulkhead with a steel gate. The man he’d been chasing, illuminated by his own small flashlight, was busy working on something attached to the ceiling of the tunnel. Vail drew his weapon and carefully inched forward.

When he got to the gate, he saw that it was chained and locked shut from the other side, separating the two men. Carefully, Vail pushed his Glock through the bars, aiming it at Sakis. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if three linear-shaped charges had been attached to the ceiling in a triangular pattern. Each one had wires coming down from it to an electrical detonator. Vail snapped on his flashlight and said, “I guess I’m a little early.”

Sakis looked up, unruffled, keeping his hand on the detonation box. “You are. I thought maybe I lost you at the fork. If not lost, at least delayed.”

Vail could hear a slight accent in the man’s speech but couldn’t tell its origin. “Why don’t you carefully set the box down and come over here and unlock the gate?”

“You are evidently not a student of game theory. What you are proposing is a zero-sum game—all the advantage goes to you while I lose.”

“I’m fairly certain that zero-sum games are exactly what gun manufacturers have in mind. I believe their collective motto is ‘If you have the gun, you win.’ ”

“But this detonation box makes it a non-zero-sum situation.”

“Actually, this is more like a game of brinkmanship. We’re each promising to cause the death of the other to gain an advantage. I could kill you with one shot, and if I did, you would flip that switch and set off the charges on the ceiling.”

“True,” Sakis said, smiling. He raised the box in