State Of The Union

Once again, the man expertly ducked down trying to get out of the line of fire. Scot kept the flashlight on him as he fired, only to see him disappear right through the wall. It was not the first time he had seen that trick and Harvath was beginning to understand why the man might feel so familiar, but there was also something else-something he couldn’t explain.

Crawling back under the canopy of smoke to where he had left DeWolfe, Harvath asked, “Can you stand up?”

“Of course I can stand up,” replied DeWolfe, angrily. “The guy just got the drop on me. That’s all. I’ll be fine.”

“Where’s your gun?”

DeWolfe was silent.

“So he got your gun too?”

“Don’t start with me, Harvath.”

Harvath held up his hands. “I’m not starting anything. I’m just trying to assess the situation.”

“I don’t need a gun. His ass is mine. I’m telling you. I’m going to get that motherfucker if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Harvath could understand the operative’s frustration. Nobody liked being bested. “Alright, alright, but we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

When they reached the stairway and opened the door, the thick smoke and quickly rising fire made it obvious that they were going to have to find another way out of the building.

“What do we do now?” asked DeWolfe.

“Let’s go see if we can get your gun back.”

Harvath led DeWolfe to where he had watched their attacker seemingly disappear through the wall.

“What are we looking for?” asked DeWolfe.

“Some sort of false door or panel. I saw the guy vanish, so I know it has to be here.”

As the pair searched, the room seemed to get hotter, and the air more difficult to breathe. DeWolfe, who had been rapping every square inch of the wall with his knuckles, said, “Harvath, I’m not seeing anything and we have to get the hell out of here.”

“There’s got to be something,” replied Scot. “Keep looking.”

“There isn’t anything.”

“So you’re telling me the man who was shooting at us just disappeared? I don’t buy it.”

“Well if we don’t get out of here soon, we’re both going tobuy it.”

DeWolfe was right. Harvath bent down, with his hands upon his knees, to get a clean breath of oxygen and that’s when he saw it. Bathed in the brilliant beam of his flashlight was the almost imperceptible outline of a small trap door. Harvath glanced around at the heavy displaced furniture and understood why the shooter had been so frantically moving things around.He was trying to find this trapdoor.

Harvath waved DeWolfe over and silently instructed him to lift the door, while he readied his weapon. When the communications expert sprung the hatch, Scot swung his pistol and flashlight back and forth across the small opening, but nothing was there. Carefully, Harvath slid into the crawlspace with his H amp;K ready to take out anything that moved. The entire space looked like some sort of labyrinth in miniature. As Harvath wriggled his way along, he found side passages on the left and right, branching off at regular intervals, just like the bedrooms on the second and third floors.

Following one of the junctures off to his right, Harvath’s suspicions about the purpose of the crawl space was confirmed when five feet in, he found a large monocle attached to a braided cable mounted to the floor in front of him. Harvath peered into the monocle and was granted a perfect, albeit relatively dark view of the bedroom beneath. Apparently, Madame Putzkammer was not above spying on her customers.

As Harvath looked around at the relatively outdated, yet still highly effective surveillance equipment, he realized that the King George was not only set up to take still pictures of their customers in action, but audio and video as well. And from the looks of it, Frau Putzkammer had probably been up to it for a very long time.

“Harvath!” yelled DeWolfe from the main passage behind him. “I think I found the Madame.”

Harvath crawled back out of his side tunnel and backtracked to DeWolfe. Inside one of the other side tunnels was the body of a woman shot once in the head. It had to be Nixie’s mother. The resemblance was unmistakable.

“What do you want to do with her?” asked DeWolfe.

“There’s nothing we can do,” replied Harvath. “The tunnels are too tight to drag her with us.” After turning around, he began leading the way forward again. Thirty feet later, the choking smell of smoke mingled with ripples of something else-fresh air.

The main passageway opened up onto a large ventilation shaft that looked to run the full height of the building. Glancing up, Harvath could see the night sky between the blades of the slowly oscillating fan. He climbed into the shaft, followed by DeWolfe and they carefully made their way up and out onto the roof.