Abernathy nodded. “He might not be aware of its existence. I’m assured he’s babbled like a brook.”
“He’s weak,” Roarke said. “She knows it, and love him or not, she’s canny enough to keep him out of certain areas of the business. She might know Cobbe. He’s her type, isn’t he? Professionally, personally.”
“Warrant’s coming through,” Eve said, just as McNab let out a hoot.
“Broke the block. Scanning.”
“Wait!” But Roarke’s warning came an instant too late.
As the scan penetrated, lights flashed on inside the house. Three quick pulses, before it all went dark.
“Fail-safe alert. Bugger it.”
“We’re go!” Eve shouted. “Go, go! Find him,” she ordered McNab and pushed open the cargo doors of the van. “Move, move. I don’t want a cockroach getting out of the building. Move! Get that security down. Get it down.”
She held by the front entrance, weapon drawn, as Peabody scrambled out to stand beside her.
“Second floor!” McNab shouted. “Single heat signal. On the move. Moving fast.”
“Battering ram!” Eve ordered. “Callendar, scan this door for explosives. Roarke! Get out here and get us in or I’m breaking the door down.”
Roarke jumped out of the van.
“Clear on boomers, Dallas, but the scan shows those doors are steel behind a wood veneer. We’d have to blow it.”
“Give me a bloody minute,” Roarke muttered as he worked. “A bloody minute.”
“Still moving, LT,” McNab called out. “On the main floor now.”
“Keep on him.”
“Five layers.” Roarke set his teeth. “I’m through two.”
Eve pulled the mini blaster out of his pocket, shifted, aimed at one of the windows.
It barely rattled, but alarms began to shriek, and the lights pulsed and pulsed again.
“Fucking fortress. Get me in.”
“Three down, and there’s four. Don’t rush me.”
“Moving fast, down to basement level, southwest corner.”
“What the hell for?” Eve rolled heel to toe, heel to toe, ready to move. “Secure room? He’s trapped anyway. He’s trapped in there.”
“And there’s the last.” Roarke shoved open the door and was in a step ahead of her.
Lights flashed, white, then black, white, then black. Alarms screamed.
“Clear it,” she ordered Peabody and the uniforms with her. “Cover the front. Kill those damn alarms, Feeney!” She snapped other orders to the rest while she bolted for the southwest corner, and another secured steel door.
“Son of a bitching bitch!”
“I’ll have it.” Roarke pushed her aside. “I’ll have it.”
“Scan it first. I don’t want to get blown up here.”
Steel door on the basement level, she thought. Secure area? But why go down instead of out? Why—
“Smuggler?” she said to Roarke.
“Yes, bloody buggering hell. She’d have a way out. A way in, a way out.”
“Dallas!” McNab yelled in her earpiece. “He’s gone. He’s just freaking gone. Poof. He’s nowhere. I swear to Jesus, it’s like he ran through a goddamn wall.”
Roarke yanked open the doors.
The alarms died. The lights went off again, then came back and held steady.
Halfway down, she saw the next door fit into a wall that should have led nowhere.
“I’ll have it,” Roarke told her. “But I’ll tell you it’s the way out. The way of getting things in and out underground.”
Steady as the steel of the door, he worked on the locks. “From this location, and considering its purpose? This likely leads to the docks, and with splits along the way that come up elsewhere. A warehouse, another building, a transpo station.”
She pulled up her comm to organize the manhunt.
Whitney jogged down the steps as Roarke disengaged the locks. He opened the door to a tunnel, pargeted and dry, and large enough to accommodate a compact truck. She heard the echo, distant, already distant, of an engine.
“He had his vehicle in there, or a vehicle. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I want a team of four uniforms to follow it, see where it goes. If it splits, two teams of three. In constant communication.
“We’re going to shut this place down.” She stared at Abernathy. “We’re going to shut the bitch down who gave him this hole to hide in. You have your people pick her the fuck up. She’s an accessory to murder. She’s harbored a fugitive. You pick her the fuck up.”
She yanked out her comm. “I need to shut down the bridges, the tunnels. He knows he has to get out, find another hole, bide his time.”
“I’ll handle that,” Whitney told her. “The mayor’s going to have some objections. I’ll handle it.”
“Yes, sir. He’ll have had a go-bag ready, cash, ID. Passport,” she considered. “This place would have elevators, but he didn’t use them. Grabbing what he needed to take on the way down. He can pilot. Closest transpo station with global shuttles?”
“Southside. Near the docks,” Roarke told her.
“Let’s go.”
“We’re in this takedown, Dallas,” Jenkinson told her.
“Then get in the van. Officer Carmichael.”
“We’ll secure the scene, Lieutenant, and begin the search.”
“Affirmative. You find anything, I know about it.”
When she got out to the vans, all of her detectives, the EDD team, and Whitney stood by them.
“Every-damn-body?”
“We’re in this until he’s down,” Baxter told her.
“Southside Transpo. Move. Peabody, alert security at the center they have a fugitive heading their way. How fast does this thing move, Feeney?”
“She ain’t built for speed, but I can coax some out of her.”
So saying, he peeled out from the curb.
“He has to find a way in,” Roarke told her. “He’d want to try at least to avoid the cams as much as possible. There’s no overseas flights at this time of the morning, not commercial, so that would mean he’d need to wait for at least another hour. He’d try for their private area, as that runs twenty-four/seven.”
“Private shuttle depot, Feeney.”
“He’d need to bribe someone, and quickly, to get up,” Roarke continued. “Or steal one. Or simply kill his way onto one.”
“He’s not that far ahead of us. If he gets one, they can track it.”
“Off and on, but there are ways around that. He’d have to fly low. He won’t be after filing a flight plan.”
“Where would he go?”
“Ireland’s his root, and where his mother is. But it would be brainless.”
“Abernathy?”
“I’m already contacting my superior,” he told her. “We’ll have people at the Dublin centers. But I agree, he’d have to anticipate that. The problem—” He grabbed on where he could when Feeney swerved around a turn. “The problem is he could go anywhere if he hijacks a long-range shuttle.”
“Then we better stop him here.” Yanking out her comm, she began blasting out orders for patrols.