The Midnight Ride, page 11
Now, forty minutes later, four subway cars and one crossed river away from that warehouse in South Boston, the two-hundred-year-old bronze eagle was under Hailey’s arm, and the strange book with blank copper pages was tucked in Nick’s back pocket. And they were standing at the front entrance to one of the top math-and-science-focused universities in the country, a veritable mecca for the types of people Nick had pretty much avoided all his life—and Nick had no idea why they were there. But from the moment Hailey had taken the eagle from Gail, and started to inspect it, wings to claws—she’d suddenly changed.
She’d seen something on that eagle that had made her eyes widen and made her breathing go a little funny. Something that had gotten that mind of hers churning and set them off on the six-mile sprint to this place. And no matter how hard Nick had tried, she hadn’t yet let him in on whatever it was.
Nick shifted his gaze back to the stone building.
“You don’t exactly fit the profile,” he finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“No offense, but you don’t scream MIT.”
Hailey smiled.
“Is it the hair?”
“Maybe the way you react to dead bodies.”
“Trust me, I’m crying on the inside. You’re not exactly breaking down, either. And you knew those people.”
“I don’t like this any more than you do.”
She didn’t seem convinced. Nick felt his cheeks flush. He didn’t mind being judged—professionals in robes had done it to him more often than he’d liked to admit. But for some reason, he didn’t want Hailey to get the wrong impression.
“I take things. But I don’t hurt people.”
“Taking things hurts people.”
Nick didn’t have an answer for that. He could have pointed out that he’d found her hiding in a casino, that she hadn’t called the police on him after three dead bodies, and that she’d been by his side ever since she’d seen the photograph of the stolen Vermeer. But the truth was, her words cut deeper than he wanted to admit. He’d always drawn a stark line between himself and the sort of criminals he’d found himself locked up with at Shirley. He was a thief, sure—he’d gone from being a teenager who’d broken into the neighbors’ homes when they were away to a young adult knocking over ATM machines and parking meters. And then the short hop to real B&Es—gas stations, convenience stores. But it wasn’t until he’d moved onto banks that he started to realize sooner or later, lines get crossed no matter how well you planned things out, or how careful you tried to be.
Case in point, the job that had gotten him sent to Shirley for a medium haul. He’d hit five banks in six weeks, all without a hitch—because he’d worked fast and had never gotten greedy. All of them, sleepy branches after hours, outdated safety systems and underpaid security guards with shift changes so predictable, you could use them to set your watch. He’d kept to the teller drawers and avoided the vaults and deposit boxes—gotten in and out in under ten minutes each time, avoiding cameras and silent triggers with ease.
Job number six should have gone just as smoothly. And in fact, it had been going smoothly; Nick had come in through an underground parking garage, disabling two separate alarm systems, and had emptied the teller drawers, avoiding the packets of big bills with the dye charges and the oddly rigid-looking twenties stacked on the pressure alarm triggers. He’d been about to make his way back through the garage—when he’d nearly run headfirst into a portly security guard coming out of the bank manager’s private bathroom. The guy had still been working his belt closed when he’d seen Nick and realized what was happening. Then they’d both gone for the guard’s holstered .45.
Nick still didn’t know whose finger had touched the trigger. But the guard had ended up in intensive care with a bullet in his thigh, inches from the sort of artery that would have put Nick in prison for the rest of his life instead of five years. And the noise from the firearm had ended Nick’s string of good luck, alerting a passing patrol car. Not that Nick would have left the security guard to bleed out on the floor of the bank—or at least, he liked to think he wouldn’t have. Half a decade in prison made those sorts of calculations hazy.
In any event, as much as he’d liked to have been able to hit down at Hailey from the moral high ground, he knew it was a losing proposition.
Instead, he pointed at the building ahead of them.
“Are we going in? I assume we’re here for a reason.”
Hailey nodded but made no move to continue up the steps. Instead, she kept scanning the curb. Nick realized she was looking at the cars parked at the meters. Most were new models, probably expensive. Then her eyes settled on an older make—a nineties model Ford Taurus covered in bumper stickers beneath a bowed birch tree.
Hailey headed toward the car, gesturing for Nick to follow. As they got close, she looked around them to make sure nobody was nearby. Then she opened her purse, started digging through the contents. Nick caught sight of casino chips—lots of them. Mostly yellows. Christ, there had to be more than ten grand in there. But Hailey pushed past the chips and retrieved a flask.
As Nick watched, she opened the flask and dumped the contents on the sidewalk. Nick got a whiff of something familiar in the breeze.
“Is that apple juice?”
Hailey handed him the flask, then pointed toward the Taurus.
“I bet you’re good with cars.”
“My dad worked on them a little between jobs, and he used to take me with him.”
His dad had always been between jobs. The longest gig he’d held was when Nick was seven or eight. Roofing work at some construction site at Fort Point Channel. Until he’d gotten canned for drinking on the job. Which was great—it gave him more time to drink at home.
“Not fixing them,” Hailey said. “Breaking into them.”
Nick eyed her.
“You looking for a new stereo?”
“Not the stereo. The battery. I need about twelve ounces of battery acid.”
Nick raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a thermal flask,” Hailey continued. “I like my apple juice cold. So, it’s lined in glass. The acid won’t be a problem. And I’m guessing these older cars are easier to get into, easier to tinker with.”
“You want me to break into that car, take out the battery, and fill this flask with battery acid?”
Hailey nodded. He waited for more, but she was back to playing lookout, making sure the sidewalk was still clear. Nick looked from the flask in his hands to the object wrapped in the towel beneath Hailey’s arm. He had no idea how these things were connected—but he’d gone this far already.
When things go sideways…
Nick headed toward the car.
Chapter Seventeen
Five minutes later, Nick was again two steps behind Hailey, and the vague discomfort he’d felt on the street outside had shifted into something truly palpable as they crossed the cavernous lobby of 77 Massachusetts Avenue, a grand space that was mostly vertical, with pillars rising a hundred feet from the polished marble floor to that glowing, hollow dome. There were two balconies ringing the atrium and a glass skylight directly overhead. From the inside, the obscenely tall windows overlooking Mass Ave. behind Nick had an almost church-like feel to them, and even the air in the vast room felt crisp and serious.
“They call this Building Seven,” Hailey said, as she led him forward. “It was actually built twenty years after most of the rest of the campus, because they wanted to add an entrance on Mass Ave. It’s not quite as domineering as Building Ten, which is the one behind this one, with the bigger dome. People sometimes call that one ‘the center of the universe.’”
“Sounds charming.”
It wasn’t just the scale of the place that made Nick want to turn and head back toward the comforting alleys of South Boston; the air itself was heavy on his skin, and he half expected someone to come running out from behind one of the pillars, pointing and screaming at him that he didn’t belong.
Hailey must have noticed the way he was lagging behind, because she gave him a quick look over her shoulder, an expression he hadn’t seen from her before. Sympathy.
“Everyone feels like that the first time they walk in here. Especially the new students. They call it impostor syndrome. The sense that you’ve fooled someone, that any minute you’re going to be found out and asked to leave.”
Nick was surprised she’d read him that well. He was usually better at hiding what was going on inside. At Shirley, it had been a survival mechanism. Cons would use anything they could against one another, and insecurities were like fault lines. Apply the right amount of pressure on an insecurity, and the hardest criminal would shatter like cheap glass.
“You’re a student here?”
“After a fashion. I’m in the graduate school. Applied mathematics.”
Nick wasn’t sure what that meant, other than that she was probably damn good with numbers. Then again, the bar for him was pretty low. He’d dropped out of school somewhere between the first and second week of ninth grade.
“A lot of MIT grad students spend their nights at the casinos?”
Just like that, the sympathy was gone, and she was once again leading him across the open lobby, toward the far side where two huge pillars embraced the entrance to some sort of interior hallway.
“You’d be surprised.”
They passed through the pillars, and Nick found himself peering down what appeared to be an endless corridor, lined on either side with doors to various classrooms. The corridor was lit by fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling, and seemed to be a place of constant motion; there were people, mainly students with backpacks, going in both directions, keeping to one side or the other, depending on direction. It was like some sort of human traffic experiment, along some endless stretch of enclosed highway.
“This is the Infinite Corridor,” Hailey said. “It runs over eight hundred feet and connects a large part of the campus. There are five levels, including one underground. It’s kind of the spine of the university, and it’s like this most of the time. Everyone going somewhere, all at once. But a few days a year, everything stops; because of a quirk in geography, the setting sun is in alignment with the corridor and the sunlight shines down the entire length of the place. It’s pretty cool. The kids call it MIThenge.”
Hailey noticed his expression.
“It’s cooler than it sounds. Or maybe it’s not. But some of us get off on that sort of thing. A happy confluence of design and accident.”
Nick tried to think of something smart to say back at her, but instead shrugged.
“You people have a lot of time on your hands.”
Hailey turned, but not down the hallway—instead she headed toward an elevator right past the entrance and hit the down button with the heel of her hand.
“Basement level?” Nick asked.
“A little deeper,” she said, as the elevator doors whiffed open.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, and Nick had thoroughly lost his bearings.
Initially, he’d been correct; they’d taken the elevator to the basement level of the Infinite Corridor, and followed the long, industrial lit hallway at least a hundred yards under the MIT campus—but that was only the beginning. From there, Hailey had pointed him through an unmarked doorway to a stairwell that had led even deeper underground; when that stairwell had ended in another unmarked door, Nick had been surprised to find it locked. Hailey had pushed him aside, then produced a key from her purse. A moment later, they were in another hallway, very different from the bustling corridors above.
This hallway had smooth cement walls and an unfinished floor. There was visible ductwork running along the ceiling, and there were steam pipes riding up junctures in the walls. Even so, there were more doors along either side, some with numbers, many without.
“Research laboratories, storage rooms, data centers, electrical stations,” Hailey had explained. “But I couldn’t tell you for sure. There are so many of these tunnels, literally miles of them. They run under the entire campus, and there are multiple levels. They go on forever.”
Nick had looked behind them, then ahead. They seemed alone; the only sound had come from their own shoes against the cement floor.
“Do other students come down here?”
“On occasion. Actually, it’s kind of a rite of passage—hacking the tunnels. In fact, one graduating class put a partial map of the system on their class ring. But I don’t think many people have explored all of it. Some of these tunnels go back decades, or longer. And there are plenty of secrets down here. This is MIT, after all.”
They had taken a hard right turn and descended down a narrow ramp, to another stretch of tunnel.
“Beginning before World War II,” Hailey continued, “MIT developed a very close relationship with the Department of Defense. A lot of advanced weapons and war technology was developed here, in secret labs, often using student research. Radar came from MIT, and tons of work on radiation. There’s even a nuclear reactor somewhere on campus.”
“For real?”
“A lot of these doors don’t have labels or nameplates for a reason. Things have changed over the years, but you don’t shed a history like that overnight.”
They’d gone the next ten minutes in near silence, Nick wondering how close they were to that nuclear reactor while Hailey followed some internal compass to wherever they were going.
When she finally came to a stop, Nick found himself in front of another unmarked door. Hailey worked the lock with a second key from her purse—and then ushered him inside.
* * *
Hailey hit the lights, bathing the rectangular space in a florescent glow. Even so, it took Nick’s eyes a moment to adjust, not because of the flickering ceiling tubes, or the fact that there were obviously no windows so deep below the campus; but because there was just so much to see, all at once, a visual barrage that had his rods and cones playing twister.
The room was long and split-level; the area closest to the door looked like some sort of engineering lab, with low metal tables and shelves cluttered with computer equipment and electronics gear. Nick recognized a few of the items, from laptop computers—some opened up and in pieces, others in more respectable form—to what appeared to be a collection of antique ham radios that had been taken apart and put back together. But deeper into the room, the place got more confusing. The central area seemed like some sort of library; embraced on all sides by tall, corrugated shelves filled with books. The titles that screamed out at Nick all had something to do with math and physics; and not the sort of math or physics that he’d have had any chance of recognizing, let alone understanding. No algebra or geometry; this was all high calculus, quantum theory, strings and quarks. There were also shelves lined with books that looked much older than the rest—some with tattered, yellowed covers, some with no covers at all. They looked antique, even older than the ham radios.
Beyond the library, there was what appeared to be a small bedroom. A futon on the floor, a set of drawers, and then in the far corner, a sink in front of a pair of vanity mirrors. And beyond the mirrors—that’s where things got really strange.
Hailey was already stepping past the futon—where she gently deposited the eagle, still wrapped in its towel—as Nick heard the door shut and lock behind them. It was only when she stopped in front of the mirrors, checking her face and hair, that Nick finally found his voice.
“What is this place?”
Hailey laughed. Then she reached up and took off her blond hair, placing it gently on a mannequin head behind the sink.
Nick raised his eyebrows. In all the craziness, he hadn’t even realized that Hailey had been wearing a wig. Her real hair was wavy and brown, and ran down past her chin. She was working on her eyelashes, now, softening her look.
“I think it used to be a lab,” she said. “Something to do with early computing hardware. Big consoles, the kind that used to use punch cards. A lot of that kind of electrical stuff was here when I found the place. The newer stuff, I brought in over the years. Kind of a hobby. Well, multiple hobbies.”
“You live here?”
She finished with her eyelashes, then started on her makeup, using a sponge to take some of the color out of her lips and cheeks. Nick took the moment to look past the sink to the farthest reaches of the room, toward an alcove with one wall lined with hangers, holding what appeared to be costumes. Clothes for all sorts of different settings and occasions, from shiny, sparkly gowns to leather and lace. There were more wigs, lining a waist-high shelf covered in more mannequin heads. And in front of that, a full-sized blackjack table, complete with a casino-level shuffling machine. Scattered about were dozens of decks of cards, some opened, some still pristine.
Nick turned back toward Hailey. Without the wig, with some of the makeup gone, she looked more natural, vaguely, perhaps partly non-white, though Nick couldn’t have guessed her heritage without more to go on. Her cheekbones were still high and sharp, but there was something softer about her. Maybe it was this place. She clearly felt at home here.
“Who are you?” Nick asked.
Hailey smiled again, briefly, at the mirror.
“Does it matter?”
“You’re a professional gambler? That’s what you were doing in the casino? Playing cards?”
“I play cards, but I’m not a gambler. I’m a card counter.”
Nick knew a lot of gamblers; everyone in prison gambled, one way or another. Like the cons and the redheaded kid. Card counting, he knew, was a little different.
“So you cheat. But it’s still gambling.”
Hailey ran a brush through her hair.
“Card counting isn’t cheating, and it isn’t gambling. It’s math. You keep track of the cards and take advantage of the moments when you have a mathematical advantage over the house.”
“Yet when I met you, you were being chased through the Encore by a couple of casino goons.”
