Ingrams & Assoc 4: Beneath the Surface Ch. 04

Dermot ignored this, turned to April and me and said, "As you can tell dear, tensions are a bit high here. Hello Thomas, nice to see you again, although I wish it wasn't under these circumstances."

I was staring at the maps on the walls, and realized he was talking to me. "Oh yes, glad to see you too, Dermot."

"Get these idiots out of here Roman. And you..."said agent Trubas, looking right at me, "You go back to your little cave and you fucking stay there, right? There are people looking for you and if they find you, it'll go worse for you. If stick your head out and they don't take you apart, I will. We'll deal with this. You just stay out of our way. Before you go, take this..."

He thrust out his card to me, and I took it.

"If you see anyone, or hear anything, you call ME, ok? I want to hear it." He put special emphasis on the word "me".

"But, I don't really want to hear from you at all unless you do see something. Capiche?"

His attention was already focused back at the main table, with its documents strewn around, not at me. I'd been dismissed.

I looked back to the maps, trying to memorize them, even as we were hustled out of the room. I knew how to find her, if only she remembered the story I had told her. And if she had access to a toilet. I just needed to get back to my tunnel apartment and start looking, and thanks to the FBI, I knew where to start.

I didn't say anything to April. If I had, she'd have just told Dermot, and he'd have told the FBI and then they'd have gotten on my case, and I - and Megan - didn't need that. I just needed to work alone. I knew I could find her, if she remembered my story. I needed to do it. I even had a few ideas about what to do if I did find her.

The immediate problem though, was to get back to my little office/apartment in the tunnels, and not be seen doing so. From what the FBI had said, I had little doubt it was being watched. But, as with most things, the people watching it would not really be thinking about what it really entailed. The apartment was part of the tunnels. Tunnels. Which, by definition, led somewhere.

All I really had to do was get in the tunnels elsewhere, where no one was watching, and I could make my way to the apartment through those tunnels, and those watching above ground would have no idea I was there. I was assuming they hadn't actually stashed someone in the apartment itself, like they did in the movie 'Pulp Fiction'. I had to hope they hadn't. I had to get into the apartment - or at least the storage in the cabinets stashed outside - because that's where my portable SRI gas chromatograph machine was stored. And it was custom made - all the chromatograph machines made by SRI were custom, so its not like I could just stop by Best Buy and pick up another one. Plus, there were some other things stored in the storage room outside my apartment that I'd need. In all honestly, that's what the apartment really was meant to be - storage rooms for stuff used in the tunnels. It was only really converted to an apartment by my predecessor. But some of the rooms were still storage - for stuff the EPA uses, things I used in my work, and some storage of items that other people who occasionally used the tunnels required. The University of Boston for example. They constantly had gaggles of students in the tunnels, doing research of some sort or another. We'd given them one corner of a storage room to stash stuff they used frequently; stuff that was cumbersome to pull up and down the stairwells that led down to my little domain. And I would need some of that stuff, if my plan to find Megan worked. So either way, I needed access to my apartment. And I had to hope they hadn't left someone in there, because if they had...well, I had no idea what I'd do.

But first, I had to get there. I know I've given the impression that everything that happens around the Boston tunnel system is built around my little apartment, but that's not even close to the truth. I'm not the only employee that runs around in the tunnels - there are quite a few others, and they are based at various depot locations around the city. We have vans, stashed with equipment for us to go down into the tunnels - some are even portable labs. They have hazmat suits, little powered winches, generators for lighting, ladders, all the stuff you'd need to go and work in the tunnels.

I didn't spend much time at these depots but I knew them and had a passing acquaintance with some of the people working at them. So off I went to the one nearest my place. I got April to drop me off, after she'd checked us into some safe house the FBI had set up for us. Far too dangerous for us to check into a hotel in Boston - they'd be looking for us there. When she asked what I had planned, I mentioned I needed to check into work, and this was the safest way to do it. I told her I'd make my own way to the safe house later - that I couldn't just sit around and wait for the FBI to maybe, perhaps, possibly do something. I needed something to do in the meantime, and maybe trumping around in the tunnels was that thing. It wasn't completely a lie either. I had learned something from Megan and April about telling a fiction based on fact.

She sat in the car, looking at me suspiciously. I could see her debating with herself about what to do and in the end she just shrugged and told me to be careful, and then drove off.

I signed in to the local depot and then signed out a van - no one cared what I was doing there, or that I was on sabbatical. Only my boss knew that anyway, and no one at the office would even consider calling him. Why would they?. I made sure the van was equipped with sample taking equipment. I then drove it to a road junction that was close to where my apartment was, but still several streets away. No point in taking risks for the sake of it.

I clambered out of the van, parked on the edge of the road, then put up my cones and work horses around the drain - I wasn't too worried, because it was a wide two lane road, and the manhole cover was in the middle of the junction, so it wasn't too hard for cars to go around it, and wouldn't disrupt the flow too much. I then levered up the manhole cover - which is harder than it sounds. Those things are heavy and designed to not come up unless you have the right tools. Once that was done, I put on a hazmat suit and clambered my way down. There was a handhold metal ladder built into the edge of the hole making it easy-ish to go down.

It took me about thirty minutes of swishing through the crap in the tunnels to get to my apartment, and while I was on my way, I couldn't help but notice the levels were slightly higher than they should be. There was a blockage somewhere and I knew that once this was over, I'd have to look into that.

Once I got to the apartment, I debated going in. I didn't actually need to - everything I needed was just outside in the storage rooms. And if I was quiet, even if there was someone waiting in my place, they would never know I was there. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I did my best to be as quiet as possible. Luckily the locks on the door were combination locks, so keys weren't required.

It took me two trips to get what I needed - the chromatograph and the other stuff. The other stuff - tanks and the pump - were awkward to move through the tunnels, but I got it done. It took a couple of hours, but it was worth it. I was ready to start the search.

I debated going back to the safe house for a shower, since even though I'd been wearing the hazmat suit, I was pretty sure I still stunk. Running around the sewers and carrying heavy stuff for two hours will do that. But then I decided not to. Megan was depending on me. I needed to see if I could figure out where she was as soon as possible.

For the next three hours, I drove around the city, stopping at drain entrances relatively close to each of the houses marked on the FBI maps, and taking samples, to see what I could find using my portable chromatograph. I made sure the manhole covers I chose were far enough away from the houses that I wouldn't be seen. This would give me the chance to move closer to the houses if I found anything. I would track it back, take other samples and be sure it was coming from one of those houses. I couldn't pinpoint the exact house, because the way drainage is set up, multiple houses share the same pipe, that leads to the larger pipe, that then combines to larger pipes and so on. Where I was looking, I couldn't really go deep into the tunnels because the pipes were too small, with radius of barely two feet. I could get in there, but I would have to be on one of the small-wheeled platforms we use to navigate those tunnels. No opportunity to turn around, and if there was a lot of shit in the tunnels, you were Shit Out Of Luck. That's tunnel humor. I know, not that funny.

It took me four stops before I hit paydirt. I found Ammonia Hydroxide in the samples. There's no reason why that should be there, and to be sure, I moved the van slightly closer to the row of houses, to confirm that the concentrations of Ammonia Hydroxide were getting higher, so I could be sure that what I was tracking really did come from those houses. It did.

I was absolutely sure this was Megan. She had access to a toilet, and she was dumping whatever she could find - whatever she had access to - down it, so I could track the unusual compounds and locate her, exactly as I'd done in the story I told her, of the kid and the plant food mixed with other stuff. If I had to guess, I'd imagine the chemicals came from her makeup.

I now knew were she was, with about 95% certainty.

So there I was, in the van, sitting over the manhole at the corner of Day Street and Kenney Street in Mission Hill, the fourth place the maps in the FBI office has said Megan might be held. It was one of the Boston outfit's known safe houses. The house itself was on Kenney Street, about four or five houses down. Nondescript three-story standalone, wedged in to the other houses on the street. Not a walk up - it wasn't terraced - but it might as well have been.

So what to do now?

That was indeed the question. The fact is, I had a plan. A crazy assed plan.

I had mentioned to April the idea of giving myself up in exchange for Megan. But I'd thought about it on the plane home and decided not to do it. Not because I didn't want to - I'd do anything required to get Megan back alive, and if I had to die to do it, well, she was worth it and I knew I had no future with her anyway, so my personal future wasn't that great. It would be no great loss to anyone. It was more than worth it as a bargain, my life for hers.

But the reality was that if I tried to trade myself for her, they'd wind up having both of us. I would have no real ability to be sure they'd let her go, and even if they did, they'd try and grab her again instantly. She knew too much. And I had absolutely no doubt what would happen in that situation. Right now they thought I was the ringleader, and I've no doubt they weren't pressuring Megan too hard because they thought they knew what they needed to. Once they got me, they'd find out pretty soon I wasn't the boss - I had no illusions about my ability to withstand torture, and the fact is, I didn't have any facts or information to give them. I could try and make stuff up, but they'd soon find out it wasn't real.

And then they'd start in on Megan and I couldn't bear that. Me giving myself up would just get us both killed. It was no solution, so came up with a different plan.

However, I was also very aware that the FBI would be pissed to high heaven if I went ahead with it. They would expect me to just let them know and leave it to them. They probably wouldn't be thrilled about what I'd already done, and I was unsure about what they'd if I did let them know what I knew. The fact is, what I had was not conclusive. I mean, it was for me, but for them? The practical upshot of me letting them know would be that they'd shift most of their observation to the house on Kenney Street, but still look for corroborating evidence.

And even if they did find it, their reaction would almost certainly be some kind of swat team breach. Flash bangs - yeah, I watched movies - lots of guys in body armor and automatic weapons and so on. Too dangerous. I wanted to save Megan, not have her wind up killed in a rescue attempt.

My plan was better. I could incapacitate almost everyone in the house, allowing me to enter it with very little resistance. The problem was, I ran the risk of overdosing people and possibly putting them in coma. Also, I couldn't just incapacitate just that house. I would have to basically put all the houses in the row to sleep.

My plan was this. I had, in my possession, several canisters of halogenated ether. If that doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard of, I'll put it in easier terms to understand. It's basically an air based anesthetic. Halogenated ether is basically the aerated form of a type of anesthetic (in this case, I think it was Sevoflurane. Not that it really matters). Or to put it most simply, it's a knockout gas.

I only really have it because the University of Boston stores it in my storage cabinets. They use it in studies of animal infestations in the tunnels. When they decide to do a study, they come to me and ask where there might be an infestation - and honestly, they are all over the place. There are lots of places in the tunnels where it's warm, relatively dry and with access to enough of a food source that rats, bats and so on, set up home. I've not seen any alligators yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I've certainly found snakes in the tunnels, both domestic and exotic.

So they go, block up the exits, gas the critters, then go in and either tag them or do whatever they do with them for research purposes.

But the practical upshot of which is that I had a bunch of gas canisters of knock out gas that would work on humans as well as animals stored in my storage cupboards.

The issue now was how to introduce that to the house where Megan was being held. But I had a solution to that, too.

The fact is, we get blockages all the time in the tunnels. As I said, there are lots and lots of pipes of a diameter that we can't get internal access to. There's definitely ways to unblock them - steel snakes and rotors and so on. But most of those have physical limitations, in that a steel snake is only so long, and once it goes past a certain length, both the rigidity and the ability to actually break through a blockage is very limited. And sometimes the blockage is past that length. So our solution is to use a heavy-duty air compressor and increase the air pressure in the pipe to the point that the pressure will blow out the blockage.

It's actually pretty simple - we block up the pipe with sandbags, so it's airtight, poke an air pressure sensor through the bags, push the end of the compressor tube through the bags, and turn it on. Watch the air pressure go up, then, when it starts going down again, you know you've blown out the blockage. As I said, simple.

Now we do that only down stream of houses. You don't do that going up stream, into the houses, for a couple of reasons. First, it's private property, and generally handled by private companies, like Roto Rooter, who have expertise in dealing with household plumbing. But the main reason is that what actually happens once the blockage is removed is that the air pressure blows forward and pushes the air through the u-bends of the toilets and sinks. The practical upshot of which is that whatever is in those u-bends (and often what's in the pipes, just sitting there) gets blown out of the toilets and sinks. It's messy, nasty, smells and not good business, obviously. No one wants their toilets erupting shit all over the place. It's very unappetizing.

But, in this case, it could work. The air pressure pipe has a small connector that allows me to attach the tanks of halogenated ether - which is actually how we get the gas into the area's we want to anesthetize the animals. So I would hook up the tanks to the pipes going into the houses, turn it on and hope to god I got the calculations of how much ether to mix with the air, to be sure I knock out everyone but not kill them.

It was a risk. The reality is that the toilets are going to explode with water / sewage everywhere, so it's not like the people in the houses weren't going to know something is up. I had to be sure that the amount of gas I added was correct, so they would be either completely out or very groggy before I entered the house. And then I had to contend with whatever was in the house. Plus, I had to take the risk that not everyone would be as impacted by the gas as each other. People in rooms away from the toilets and sinks - or behind doors - wouldn't get as much gas as those close to those rooms with sewage system access in them. To be sure, they'd be impacted, but it's entirely possible they would still be awake and cause me trouble. It doesn't take much to point a gun and fire it.

And lastly, I would be impacting other houses in the row. I could get close enough to set up my little knock out plan so it would ONLY be this row of houses that were affected, but the reality is that several other houses would be effected. I'd be knocking out other people, and there were a lot of legal implications with that.

It was a plan full of risks. The best thing might really be to call the FBI and let them deal with it. I say 'best', but honestly, it probably wasn't. That's what I was telling myself, anyway.

The fact is, they had Megan now. And if the whole situation weren't sorted out, these guys would eventually realize that holding her was a bad idea. They'd do stuff to her, torture her, and eventually decide that holding her was too risky. They'd almost certainly realize that the FBI was sitting outside, observing them, and then they'd definitely "dispose of" Megan; she'd be too dangerous to have around.

And how long was that? Was I prepared to just wait for the FBI to make up their mind? It wasn't lost on me that Megan had gotten grabbed while she was with two FBI guys who lost track of her, so I wasn't exactly brimming with confidence at their expertise. I had a plan I could put into operation now, not later. I could make this happen now, and with what I thought was a higher degree of chance of keeping her alive than any frontal assault. Sure, I wasn't that experienced -okay I wasn't experienced at all - in this kind of thing. But honestly, how experienced do you need to be in order to contrast attacking a house where most of the people in it were already knocked out, versus attacking a house full of people who were totally alert?

I also knew that if I took this to the FBI, I'd be pushed out. They'd already expressed their opinion of me quite eloquently.

The only way forward as far as I could see, was for me to force the issue. Pump the gas in, then, as I was ready to go in and get Megan, call the FBI and let them know what was going on - that I was going in, regardless of what they wanted.

I had no doubt that even if this came out with Megan intact and the bad guys incapacitated, I would end up in custody. But I was ok with that. Megan would be safe - that's all I cared about.

The thing is, I'd already decided what I was going to do. Really, all I was doing was justifying it. I needed to get in there and rescue Megan - Me. Not someone else. I needed to know it was done.

So here I was, making decisions I really had no business making. I was going in. And just before I did, I was going to call the FBI and let them know what I'd discovered, and what I was going to do. And then the chips would fall where they would.