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“Who else is down here, Sneggs?”
“Five teams of twenty covering every stretch of sewers. But this is the closest entry point to where our suspect abducted someone last night. That gives us an advantage.”
Liam gave his team their orders and they set off in either direction. If these sewers were a hiding place for a notorious criminal, then he only had the rest of the morning to enjoy his free life.
***
Liam went on ahead with the east team, leading the onslaught, channeling his military days. How could he forget the days of trawling across barren Iraqi terrain with his comrades, taking out men in the name of war? Sometimes, he missed wartime camaraderie, but he’d been discharged for a good reason. His neck couldn’t take it anymore. But despite the injuries, Liam Snegg still had the strongest lower half in the game today.
He strode through the filth and grime faster than the other members of his team could run on land. He was praying, begging to find a living soul down here so he could put his sprinting skills to good use. Back in college, he’d been the star quarterback for Washington Commanders. Sneggs the Legs, the boys called him, because once he had the ball in his hands, nothing would stop him getting to that end zone. He could cover fifty yards in about seven seconds. At the time, must have been around 1990, some people said it was a world record. It might well have been, but Liam didn’t have the resources to check it out, because it wasn’t long after that the military beckoned.
Now, Liam was coming to the twilight of his career, and catching this world-renowned criminal would be the icing on the cake. Go out in a blaze of glory, retire with police honors, and get that fat pension for the rest of his days.
“Sneggs, hold up,” one of his team called. Liam turned back to find Clark Connors pulling on a steel door.
“Storage hole, Connors. There’s about ten of them in total. We can’t get in there.”
“Yeah, but shouldn’t we? You told us to turn this place inside out. What’s the point of being down here if we’re leaving rooms unchecked?”
Another officer fiddled with the door handle. “This has been tampered with too,” he said. “Look at the door frame. Someone’s scratched this to pieces.”
Liam rushed over, half-annoyed. If there was one thing he hated it was covering old ground, but his team had a point. He trod through the water and leaped up onto the bank. He inspected the door frame.
“Goddammit, you’re right.”
“You know what I mean, Sneggs? What if our guy heard us coming and hid in one of these side rooms? It’s not like he’d have time to get up a ladder and out into the city.”
“And he wouldn’t do that in broad daylight,” another officer said.
They both had great points. One of the advantages of this manhunt was that Tobias’s escape options were limited. He couldn’t exactly pop his head out of a manhole in the middle of Washington, D.C. If Tobias heard them coming, he’d find a place to hide out down here.
Liam tugged on the door, rattling it inside its frame. He pondered their next move.
Another officer yanked the handle, barely moving it an inch. “This is deadbolted to hell, Sneggs, but we could crowbar it open with enough manpower. We got the tools,” he said, “but I don’t want to explain to the chief that we damaged city property, you know?”
Liam looked up and down the sewers. What had the chief said? Scour every single corner of these underground passages. Leave no stone unturned.
And he wasn’t going to get that police commendation by leaving rooms unchecked.
“Then you boys just blame me, alright? I don’t give a damn about damaging city property. If this room is big enough to hold someone then we need to get in there.”
“Crowbar? Halligan? We got both.”
A saw or jackhammer would be better, Liam thought, but they didn’t have them available.
Liam rapped his knuckles against the steel to gauge the depth. Pretty deep, he concluded.
But then he heard something on the other side.
A shuffle.
Was it his doing?
He held his palm up to his team to be quiet and moved his ear to the steel surface.
Rats? Dripping water?
No. Something else. “There’s something alive in here,” Liam shouted.
