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Lyon, Alek, and Markus approached the open metal door built flush to the ground. It hadn’t been hard to find once Lyon looked up the original blueprints for the house.
Follow the tunnels, find the entrance.
“Going in,” Alek said into the microphone attached to his headset. “Stand by.”
It was after midnight, the sky dark overhead, stars shimmering in a moonless sky on the outskirts of the city. Somewhere deep inside the woods surrounding Ivan’s house, Lyon’s men waited.
Just in case.
If he had to use them, it meant things had gone to shit. But he was banking on another way.
“You’re sure he doesn’t know you know about this?” Markus asked as they climbed down a set of metal stairs into a dark concrete room.
“I’m not entirely sure Ivan even knows it exists,” Lyon said.
They moved into the room, and Lyon reached up to turn on the light attached to his helmet. He had no idea if the tunnels were structurally sound, or even if they were still passable. The helmets were a precaution, and a plan B was in place if they couldn’t access the house through the tunnels.
But that plan — attacking the house from the front with the men they had, hoping the element of surprise would be enough to get them through the door — would be noisy and dangerous.
They wouldn’t need it. The tunnels would get them there. Lyon felt it in his bones.
“There you are,” Alek said, spotting the tunnel entrance on the far side of the room.
They stepped into it without speaking.
The tunnel was smaller than Lyon would have hoped, the ceiling barely high enough to give Lyon’s head clearance, the sides near enough that he wouldn’t have been able to spread his arms.
“What the fuck is that?” Markus said, pointing the flashlight at the rotted wooden slats covered with dirt under their feet.
“Tracks,” Lyon said. “For the coal carts.”
“How did you find out about this place?” Markus said.
“Jesus,” Alek muttered, clearly annoyed with Markus’s questions.
“Sorry,” Markus said. “This place is creepy as fuck.”
Lyon didn’t disagree. The close quarters were bad enough, but the familiar smell — of dirt and concrete and things buried in the dirt beyond the tunnel walls — caused sweat to break out on his hairline.
The clatter of the metal cart.
Blood.
The bite of a knife.
Screaming. His.
His shoulder suddenly ached, the one that had been dislocated when he’d been Vadim’s prisoner, and his skin was hot under the Kevlar and other tactical gear they were all wearing.
“It’s okay,” Lyon said, forcing his voice steady. Maybe talking would distract him enough to get his body under control. “Contrary to my reputation, I was a curious child. My father used to bring me to Ivan’s quite often, and Ivan once mentioned that it had been built by a famous architect. I looked it up, just for fun, and found the original blueprints of the house.”
“And you never mentioned it to Ivan?” Markus asked.
Lyon focused on the light illuminating a few feet in front of him, on the sound of his own voice echoing through the tunnel. “I didn’t want to seem strange, and I assumed Ivan already knew.”
“Odds of being greeted by AK fire when we exit this tunnel?” Alek asked.
Lyon thought about it. “Fifty-fifty.”
