Chapter 22 - The Iron Tunnels Beneath the Loop
The silence in the freight tunnel was absolute, save for the rhythmic drip of condensation and Clara’s ragged breathing.
"No, no, no," Mara whispered, setting her weapon down and peeling off her tactical gloves to press a warm palm against Clara’s forehead. "You’re barely thirty-four weeks. We have time. We have to have time."
"My body doesn't care about our timetable, Mara," Clara groaned, her back arching against the wet masonry. A sharp tremor ran through her limbs. "The contractions... they started the second the explosion hit. It feels like a vise."
Mara glanced down at the flooded tunnel floor. Below Chicago's frozen streets lay an ancient, sixty-mile subterranean network of narrow-gauge freight tunnels, abandoned since the mid-twentieth century. Up above, sirens wailed across the Loop—fire trucks racing toward the Grand Avenue explosion, police cruisers responding to the firefight at the pier. But down here, there was no cavalry. There was only the Board’s hit team cutting through the steel blast door behind them.
The distinct screech of a motorized cutting torch hissed against the iron door forty yards back. Blue sparks flickered through the frame’s hairline seams.
"We have ten minutes before they breach," Mara said, her military training taking over, suppressing the panic rising in her chest. She strapped the titanium briefcase to her chest harness, hauled Clara's arm over her shoulder, and hoisted her sister to her feet. "Lean on me. We take the tunnel toward the State Street junction. There’s an emergency access shaft under the old Marshall Field’s building."
"Where is Lily?" Clara choked out, taking a staggered, agonizing step through the ankle-deep freezing runoff. "Mara... if anything happens to me, tell me Lily is safe."
"Lily is with Detective Vance," Mara said firmly, her boots splashing rhythmically through the murk. "He took her to the safehouse in Oak Park before we met David at the dock. She's warm. She's eating. She's waiting for her mother."
Clara swallowed the sob rising in her throat, drawing strength from the mention of her seven-year-old daughter. The memory of finding Lily trapped inside that gold-rimmed luggage cart at the Grand Opening flashed behind her eyes—the girl’s bruised wrists, the silent terror in her eyes when she pointed at David and Eleanor Voss.
"They won't get my baby," Clara whispered through clenched teeth, her hand pressing hard into her belly as another contraction ripped through her lower abdomen. "Neither of them."
Suddenly, Mara stopped dead. She raised her flashlight.
Reflected in the beam, thirty feet ahead at a tunnel fork, lay two fresh chemical glowsticks, their eerie lime-green glow washing over a pair of freshly severed communication cables.
Someone was already down here.
Mara shoved Clara into an alcove behind an abandoned coal car and raised her sidearm. "Stay down."
From the shadows of the left spur, a figure emerged. Tall, wearing a soot-stained trench coat over a paramedic’s uniform, carrying a heavy trauma kit. The man raised two open hands into the beam of Mara’s light.
"Don't shoot, Captain Bennett," the man said in a soft, gravelly tone. "Dr. Julian sent me. He said the Grand Opening wasn't going to end with champagne."
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Mara kept the iron sights aligned with the bridge of the man’s nose. "Identify yourself, or I put two in your chest right now."
"Name is Eric Cruz. Trauma nurse, tactical underground network," the man replied calmly. "And if you don't let me examine your sister right now, she’s going to hemorrhage to death in this sewer before the Board ever finds you."
