“From the Rockefeller Center concourse,” the caretaker said. “There’s a passage that cuts under Fifth into a, um, bomb shelter. Back in the sixties, Cardinal Spellman, God rest his soul, got quite, I guess the word is paranoid, after the Bay of Pigs incident. He was convinced New York was going to get nuked. So he allocated some funds for an undisclosed construction project.
“A bomb shelter was built off the archbishops’ crypt. With the Rockefellers’ permission, an alternate escape passage was dug to the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center, where they now have shops and such. I’ve never been through the passage; no one has since they built it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I butted in angrily. “You knew we were looking for a way to get in, Nardy.”
“I thought things could be resolved peacefully,” the caretaker said quietly. “Now I know otherwise. Poor Father Miller. He was a good soul.”
One thing I loved was when citizens decided to manipulate the police for their own political reasons. I was about to tear into the old man for obstructing justice when Oakley cut me off with a shake of his head.
“Do you think you could show us the way in, Mr. Nardy?” Oakley said calmly.
“Absolutely,” the caretaker said.
Oakley called into his radio and ordered half of his commando team to the command center.
Finally some action, I thought. Finally a break for the good guys.
I was sick of talking, too. Just like Jack.
“Going somewhere?” Oakley said, eyeing me with surprise.
“With you,” I said with a tight smile. “You never know when you might need to negotiate.”
Chapter 62
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of weapon loading and intense strategy briefing, I joined a dozen joint task force FBI and NYPD commandos. We followed the caretaker, Nardy, into 630 Fifth Avenue.
I was all but swimming under a borrowed night-goggle headset, heavy vest, and tactical shotgun. Only the occasional creak of a combat boot could be heard as we moved quickly through the red marble chamber of the Art Deco lobby and down the stairs.
Commander Will Matthews had cleared the street concourse below at the beginning of the siege, and it was a little creepy as we trooped through the silent, deserted mall-like corridor. There were Christmas decorations and lights blinking through the plate glass of upscale clothing stores, toy shops, and a food court, but the aisles and the tables were empty.
It reminded me of an old horror movie my son Brian had made me watch with him the Halloween before about people running away from zombies in a mall. I quickly dispelled the déjà vu when I remembered the title.
Dawn of the Dead.
Nardy stopped at an unmarked steel door beside a Dean & DeLuca gourmet food store. He removed a prodigious ring of keys from the pocket of his rumpled slacks. His lips moved as he sorted through them, in prayer or counting, I wasn’t able to tell. He finally selected a large, strange-looking key from his ring and handed it to Oakley.
“That’s it,” he said, crossing himself. “God bless you.”
“Okay, everyone,” Oakley whispered. “Radios off and my team in front. Make sure the suppressors are screwed down tight. Have your night goggles ready for going in lights-out. Single file, space yourselves out. Listen for my signal.” He turned to me. “Mike, last chance to go back.”
“I’m all in,” I said.
Chapter 63
THERE WERE METAL flicks of weapon safeties being released and then a slightly louder one as Oakley turned the lock.
The door made a loud creaking groan as it swung in. We stared over the barrels of our weapons into an unlit concrete-lined corridor.
“Mom always said if I played my cards right, I’d make it to Fifth Avenue,” Oakley whispered as he flipped down his night goggles and stepped into darkness behind his MP5.
When I turned down my goggles, the lightless tunnel went to an eerie lime green. Twenty feet in, we had to duck under a thick bank of rusting iron cable ducts. Another thirty feet after that, we passed along a teakettle-hot steam pipe that was as big as the side of a gasoline truck.
The grade of the tunnel took a sharp pitch downward, and we arrived at a long set of spiraling iron stairs also heading down.
“I always wondered what they spent the second collection on,” Oakley said as he descended. “Anybody who spots a dude with horns and a pitchfork has standing orders to squeeze until he hears a click.”
At the bottom of the two-story staircase was a riveted metal door with what looked like a steering wheel in its exact center. If I didn’t know better, I would have said we had somehow arrived at the engine room of a ship.