"Adder," she said softly. "Report, please."

Heather Randall and Keith Converse were moving slowly through a darkness that was almost complete. According to the maps they'd found sketched in Carey Atkinson's notebooks, they were in the second sector of Level 3. The darkness was almost complete, but using the night vision goggles, Keith could clearly see what lay ahead. Through the eyepieces, the tunnels seemed to be lit by a surrealistic green light that appeared to have no source at all. Heather, following him, was blinded by the darkness and finding her way only by keeping her right hand on Keith's shoulder. The vibration in her pocket startling her, her hand jerked away from Keith, and for a moment she felt a surge of panic as her only link to another person was broken. Then her fingers found Keith again, and his hand closed over hers.

"What happened?" he whispered.

She was about to answer when she felt the vibration again, but this time realized it was the tiny radio they'd found in Carey Atkinson's backpack. They'd thought it was a cell phone until they discovered it had only two buttons, one labeled PWR the other TLK. When they'd turned it on, the screen had glowed slightly. There was a single earpiece, the kind inserted directly into the ear canal. A tiny hole on the face of the instrument appeared to be the microphone. Keith concluded it was a radio of some kind, though he hadn't seen anything like it before.

They toyed with the idea of using it, but quickly rejected the notion, for that would betray to whomever it might contact that it was no longer in Atkinson's hands. Now, as it vibrated a third time, Heather whispered, "The radio-I think someone's trying to call Atkinson."

"Put in the earplug and hit the power button," Keith whispered back. "But don't say anything. Not a word."

Heather fumbled with the earplug for a moment, then carefully went over the surface of the radio with her fingers. The power button was on the right, the talk button on the left, but she pressed neither until she was certain she held the radio right side up. Then, her forefinger shaking, she pressed the button. There was a moment of silence before she heard a voice, with the crystal clarity of digital technology.

"Adder? Report, please."

Eve Harris listened to the static-free silence, willing Carey Atkinson's voice to reply to her. The radio had the best range of anything yet developed, but in the maze of concrete tunnels, even this system's range was severely limited. The five miles it could reach in open space with a direct line of sight was cut down to half a mile, at best, in the tunnels. That should have been sufficient, however, because the gamekeepers and herders knew to keep the quarry well within the perimeter of the hunting ground. Though reception might be fuzzy in certain areas, every sector of every level was within the radio's range, and unless one of the hunters strayed too far, she should never lose contact with any of them. And this connection sounded as if it was clear.

Clear, or not there at all.

"Adder?" she repeated, her voice taking on an urgent note as her sense that something had gone wrong grew stronger. "Report, please. Now!"

When she still heard nothing but silence, she switched frequencies. In less than a minute she had determined the locations of Perry Randall, Arch Cranston, and Otto Vandenberg, and assured herself that at least they were operating well within the hunting ground.

Monsignor McGuire, like Carey Atkinson, didn't respond; but the cleric's radio had at least emitted the static that was missing from Atkinson's. Finally, she switched back to the original frequency she'd entered. "Adder," she said one more time. "Do you read me?"

But no voice emerged from the tiny speaker in her own radio, and a moment later, certain something had gone wrong, she severed the connection.

Heather's hands were shaking so badly that she nearly dropped the tiny radio, and when she pulled the earplug loose, she made no attempt to wind the wire around the radio itself, but instead just stuffed the whole thing deep into her pocket. Keith reached out to find her, felt her shivering, and steadied her against himself. "What happened?" he asked. "What did you hear?"

"A voice," Heather breathed. "It was asking for ‘Adder,' asking him to report. When I didn't answer, the radio went dead." She hesitated, and when she spoke again, her voice trembled and had a note of deep fear. "I was just going to take the plug out of my ear when the voice came back…"

"And…?" Keith prodded her gently.

"I recognized the voice, Keith," she whispered, barely audible. "I know it sounds crazy, but I'd swear it was Eve Harris!"

The name struck Keith like a body blow, and his first instinct was to find an explanation. Eve Harris was the one person who had tried to help him, tried to-

And then he understood.

She hadn't been trying to help him at all. She'd only wanted to find out what he was doing.

"I'll kill them," he said softly. "I swear, I'll kill every single one of them."

CHAPTER 35

Jeff shut off the tiny penlight that had been in Monsignor McGuire's small backpack and closed the cleric's notebook. At first he hardly believed what he'd read, but as he slowly turned the pages, he realized that every page bore out the strange story Jinx had told him. He even recognized the name listed on the page before the one that was headed with his own. Jeff knew that Tony Sanchez had been in the Tombs before he himself arrived there. They'd been in adjoining cells for a few days, and the night before Sanchez was to be transferred to Rikers Island, he'd been bragging about how good his lawyer was.

"You shoulda heard him, man," he'd crowed. "Made it sound like it was all the bitch's fault. Shit, man, time he was done, the assholes on the jury figured she musta cut herself up!"

"But they still sent you up, didn't they?" Jeff had asked.

Sanchez's grin had barely flickered. "What's a fuckin‘ year? I'll be out in six months."

But a week or so later someone had told him that Sanchez escaped from Rikers. "Don't know how-dogs tracked ‘im to the bridge and that was it-like the fucker just vanished."

But according to the book Jeff was now holding, Sanchez hadn't vanished at all. He'd been "bagged" in something called Sector 1 of Level 2 at 11:32 p.m. on November twelfth.

The name of the victorious hunter was "Rattler."

A cold numbness had spread through him as he turned the pages of the bizarre logbook, but coming to the hand-sketched maps that filled the last few pages of the book, the numbness was forgotten as he realized what he was holding-the key to the maze of tunnels. As he studied them, though, his hope began to fade, since he had no way of knowing where on the map he, Jagger, and Jinx were located. But on the final page of the section containing the maps, he thought he saw a pattern emerge. He looked more closely, struggling to remember once again the route he'd used when he went to search for water. Slowly-so slowly that at first he thought he was imagining it-the path in his memory began to emerge from the jumble of lines.

Each page mapped a small sector of a specific level, with lines representing tunnels and circles marking the places where shafts connected one level to another. He felt the heat of excitement as he recognized their exact location-even the alcove in which Jagger had hidden was marked on the map. His excitement growing, he turned back through the pages of maps, piecing them together, matching the shafts marked on one page to those on the next, linking ends of the tunnels in the margins of the page until slowly the entire area began to take shape in his mind. And as the fog of confusion that had lain over the labyrinth began to lift, another memory stirred in him-a memory of the class he'd taken in the last semester before he was arrested.