The men quickly set off toward the north, darting from one shadowy area to the next, scurrying through the pools of light like cockroaches escaping into the shelter of darkness. Soon, they turned toward the west, and now the tunnel was narrower, its ceiling lower, its lights more distantly spaced. The men, though, were almost as familiar with the tunnels beneath the streets as they were with the streets themselves, and they slowed not at all as they moved deeper and deeper into the maze. So far they hadn't needed to speak at all, for each of them knew exactly where they were. The real challenge wouldn't come for another half hour, when they descended to a level none of them had visited before.

With luck, one member of the party would bag the trophy tonight.

More likely, tonight would be nothing more than reconnaissance, as it usually was whenever they began the exploration of a new territory. The teams would split up, each team mapping the passages they explored, searching the byways and shafts, familiarizing themselves with the terrain.

For many, the reconnaissance was nearly as satisfying as the bagging of the trophy itself, although in the end the kill would always be the ultimate prize.

So how the fuck do we get out of here?"

Jeff could hear the fear behind Jagger's angry words-the same fear that had been burning away his own sense of hope.

Up!

That's all they had to do-get up to the surface. But as he tried to remember how he'd arrived at the airless room in the first place, tried to recall the twists and turns as he'd been led through the tunnels under the city, he realized it was impossible. He had no idea where they might be-no idea of how far he'd come from the subway station. Jagger had said they brought him down from the hospital, which Jeff assumed was Bellevue, but who knew how far from the hospital Jagger might have been taken?

What's more, he had no idea how deep beneath the city they might be.

Since the shot-and the scream that immediately followed it-had dictated the direction of their initial flight, they'd kept moving straight ahead. The tunnel, just tall enough so Jeff could walk upright, seemed to have been hacked out of the native rock itself. Pipes ran along the floor, large pipes that Jeff was certain were water mains. He was also fairly certain that they must be moving either north or south, under one of the avenues.

Not Park-the commuter trains from Grand Central ran under Park.

Unless they were south of the station. The trains to the suburbs all ran north, didn't they? He wracked his brain, trying to remember. But there were so many trains running in and out of the city all day-not just from Grand Central, but from Penn Station as well.

And the subways.

How many were there?

Dozens.

And aside from the subway tunnels, how many others were there under the city?

Hundreds.

A dim memory came back to him, of a class he'd taken last fall. It seemed like another life-had been another life. Evenings with Heather Randall in his tiny apartment on 109th Street, just west of Broadway. A life that now seemed so far removed that even the memories seemed to belong to someone else. But then the memory of the class-a semester on urban infrastructure-came into sharper focus, and he could almost hear the professor's voice.

"No one really knows what's under the streets of Manhattan anymore. A lot of people know parts of it-there are maps of the water system, maps of the gas mains, and maps of the trains and the subway systems and the electrical grid. But there is no map of all of it."

As they'd followed the flashlight beam, which already seemed to be weakening, Jeff had tried to keep his eyes trained upward, looking for a shaft that would take them to the surface.

Now they'd found one. Directly above his head rose a narrow shaft with a rusting ladder anchored in rotting concrete.

"One of us goes up that shaft and sees where it leads," he said.

Jagger shook his head. "I ain't goin‘. Could be anything up there."

"So what do you want to do, just keep walking? We're going to have to go up sooner or later."

Jagger peered up at the hole. "Doesn't look like it goes anywhere."

"It's got to go somewhere-if it doesn't, then why's it there?" He reached up and grasped the lowest rung of the ladder. "Give me a boost." As if he weighed no more than a child, Jagger raised him up until he was high enough to get a foot onto the bottom rung. "Shut off your light," he said as he switched on his own. "No use wasting the batteries."

"What if you don't come back?" Jagger asked.

"I'll be back," Jeff told him. "You think I want to be down here by myself? Just stay here and I'll be back in a couple of minutes."

He started climbing, creeping up the corroded ladder. Though he knew it had to be his imagination, the shaft seemed to be growing narrower, tightening around him until he felt he couldn't breathe. Panic welled up in him. If he got stuck-

You won't, he told himself.

But the higher he climbed, the worse the claustrophobia got. His skin was clammy now, his heart pounding, and his chest felt as if it were being squeezed by a boa constrictor.

Steeling himself against his rising panic, he kept climbing.

Then, above him, he sensed something.

Something was there, in the darkness above him.

He shined the light upward.

Two red eyes glinted.

It was a rat, no more than three feet above him!

He shied away from the rodent, his body jerking reflexively. His back slammed against the wall of the shaft behind him as one knee smashed into a rung of the ladder. The rat, baring its teeth and hissing at him, suddenly disappeared, and for a moment Jeff succumbed to the panic that had been building inside him since he'd begun climbing the shaft.

Where had it gone? Where could it have gone?

Down! It was coming down at him! He flashed the light around desperately, searching for the rat, but it had vanished. Then, as his panic subsided, he saw another passage going off to the side, three feet above his head. The hope that had been nearly extinguished by the claustrophobia and panic surged back, and he scrambled upward until he could see down the new passage.

Far in the distance he saw something that dissipated the terror of a moment before.

Light. Far away, barely visible, but utterly undeniable.

A way out.

CHAPTER 15

"Come on, Jinx, you know the rules. Move it along."

The girl barely glanced up from the greasy magazine she'd fished out of a trash barrel twenty minutes earlier. "What's the big deal? Is Mickey Mouse afraid I might pick his pocket?" She edged away as the patrolman moved closer. "Hey, come on, Paulie-what'd I ever do to you?"

Paul Hagen, who'd been working Times Square for most of his twenty-year career and was only now allowing himself to imagine a retirement that didn't begin by getting either shot or sliced up, couldn't remember how many Jinxes he'd seen over the years. And she was right-she hadn't ever done anything to him. And five years ago he probably wouldn't have bothered to speak to her unless he'd caught her with her hand in some tourist's pocket. But that was five years ago, and this was today, and Times Square wasn't what it used to be. In a lot of ways, Paul Hagen missed the old days, when Times Square was ground zero for all the people who couldn't survive anywhere else in the city, a place where they could make a life in their own way, hanging out with all the other losers. Hagen had learned to accept that part of it early on, the first couple of years he'd been patrolling the streets. There were two kinds of people in the world: regular people and scumbags.