The Sacred Vault_ A Novel - Andy McDermott [68]
Eddie returned the phone to Zec, using all his willpower not to say out loud the thought dominating his mind: Khoil was lying. Nina wasn’t with him, the delay of the satellite connection proving she was still in India. The moment Khoil - who from the instant response on his side of the call clearly was in the States, eager to take personal delivery of the Talonor Codex - got what he wanted, she would be killed.
And so would the man who obtained the Codex for him, Eddie knew. But all he could do for now was play his part - and hope that Plan B worked.
His phone trilled. ‘Lola?’
‘Everything’s ready,’ said Lola. ‘You remember the locker numbers?’
‘Burned into my mind.’
‘Okay. Good luck.’ She rang off.
Eddie stood, picking up a large black leather briefcase with gleaming steel trim. ‘That was the go-signal,’ he told Zec. ‘I’ll meet you back here when I’m done.’
‘With the Codex.’
‘Obviously with the fucking Codex. You just be ready with Nina.’ He headed for the doors, glancing back at Zec . . . then past him, to a couch. Dressed in a suit, reading a newspaper, Mac briefly looked up at him. At his feet was another black briefcase.
Eddie stepped outside, feeling the bite of the December cold as he pushed through the crowd and walked to the end of 44th Street. The United Nations complex rose on the other side of First Avenue, a towering grid of lights against the dark sky.
He raised his phone again. ‘Matt? It’s Eddie. I’m ready.’
‘Roger that, mate,’ said the Australian. ‘We’re in the pipe, five by five.’
On the far side of the UN, a boat bobbed in the East River. Radi Bashir shivered in his thick coat as he gazed nervously at the glowing glass slab of the Secretariat Building. He didn’t know what the rules were regarding boating off Manhattan, but he was sure they were breaking them by dropping anchor in the busy waterway. Any official attention they attracted would undoubtedly be magnified when it was realised that all three of the boat’s occupants were foreign nationals . . . and two of them were Arabs.
Karima popped up through the hatch to the lower deck. ‘Eddie just called. He’s going in.’ She ducked back. With a last look round for any boats that might belong to the NYPD’s Harbor Unit, Rad climbed down after her.
Matt Trulli had set up shop in the small cabin, two laptop computers and a complex remote control unit crammed on to a little table and secured with duct tape. A porthole was open, cold air coming through it; below it was a large spool of fibre-optic cable, the slender but strong glass thread running out through the window. The spool was connected to one of the laptops - and the other end of the line to the Remotely Operated Vehicle currently picking its way through a water pipe beneath the river’s western bank.
‘All right, you little beaut,’ Matt muttered, using two joysticks to guide the ROV. ‘Go on in there . . .’ On the laptop’s screen, a view from one of the robot’s cameras revealed a fat, plastic-sheathed cable disappearing into the darkness of the circular channel. The spool slowly turned, the robot’s fibre-optic control cable feeding out as it moved forward.
The ground under Manhattan was criss-crossed by myriad networks of underground conduits, from subway tunnels to steam pipes to the city’s telecommunications backbone. This particular system, originally constructed in the early twentieth century to provide the city’s fire hydrants with a supply of water straight from the river, had been out of use for almost a quarter of a century, superseded by more powerful pumping systems - until an enterprising telecoms company realised they were the perfect way to spread the hundreds of miles of fibre-optic lines needed to meet the city’s ever-growing demand for broadband without having to dig up half the streets in Manhattan.
The cables had been installed entirely by robots, designed to crawl through the narrow, flooded