Pierce’s eyes widened, a flash of ancient, unrepented guilt flaring across his hideous features.
"That boy wouldn't take the payout!" Pierce snarled, his hand trembling as he lifted the sputtering red road flare in his left hand. "He was eighteen years old! He had no business touching county business! We built this city out of the dirt, Lennox! We made this county work! And no schoolteacher's brat from Atlanta is going to tear down fifty years of progress because of some dead nigger from nineteen-eighty-four!"
The sheer, venomous brutality of his words ignited an inferno in my chest far hotter than the burning timber above.
Pierce brought his thumb back on the hammer of the .357, cocking the cylinder with a heavy mechanical click, his eyes locking on my forehead.
Before his finger could apply the three pounds of pressure needed to drop the firing pin, Marcus Hayes fired.
THWIP-THWIP!
Two suppressed 5.56 rounds tore through Pierce’s right shoulder and collarbone. The impact spun the heavy police chief around like a top. The revolver flew from his nerveless fingers, splashing into the black water, while the lit road flare dropped from his left hand, tumbling toward the pool of accelerant at his feet.
I lunged forward with everything I had.
I hit the concrete floor in a hard slide through the oily water, my right arm shooting out across the sludge. My fingers clamped around the sizzling, sulfurous casing of the road flare inches before the open flame could touch the pool of gasoline.
With a violent flick of my wrist, I hurled the flare backward into an empty concrete drainage sluice, where it extinguished with a sharp, angry hiss.
Marcus was on Pierce in half a second, planting a combat boot directly in the center of the chief's back, pinning him face-down in the muck. Pierce screamed in agony as Marcus twisted his shattered right arm behind his back, ratcheting a pair of steel flex-cuffs around his thick wrists.
"Randall Pierce," Marcus growled into the chief's ear, his voice colder than the grave. "You're under federal arrest for attempted capital murder and treason against your oath of office."
I didn't wait to watch him secure the prisoner. I scrambled to the vault door.
"Ava! Ava, are you in there?!" I yelled, pounding my fists against the scalding steel wheel.
From the other side of the heavy door came a weak, frantic banging. "Isaiah! Please! The smoke is coming under the seal! I can't breathe!"
"Step away from the door, Ava! I'm turning the wheel!"
The steel wheel was searing hot. I grabbed it with my tactical gloves, planting my boots against the wall for leverage.
The wheel was rusted, jammed tight by heat expansion.
"Marcus! I need leverage!" I shouted.
Marcus sprinted over, grabbed a two-foot steel pry-bar from his tactical pack, and jammed it through the spokes of the wheel. We both threw our entire body weight against the bar.
SCREEECH!
With a deafening groan of screaming metal and tearing rust, the internal locking lugs retracted inside the frame. I seized the handle and yanked the heavy door outward.
A thick cloud of gray smoke vented from the chamber.
Ava Reed was lying on the concrete floor just inside the threshold, coughing violently, her blonde hair matted with sweat and soot, clutching an oversized green canvas military duffel bag to her chest like an infant.
I scooped her up in my arms, pulling her out of the vault into the corridor. Marcus immediately slapped an emergency spare respirator over her face. Ava inhaled deeply, the pure oxygen hitting her lungs, her eyes snapping open in profound, weeping relief as she recognized my face through the smoke.
"I got them," she choked out, her voice barely a whisper behind the plastic mask. She feebly patted the heavy canvas bag in her arms. "I got... the real books, Isaiah. Chief Pierce had them in the incinerator hopper... but I pulled them out before he could light it. The original nineteen-eighty-four transfer deeds... with Walter Sterling’s personal notarization."
Above us, the structural timbers of the main foundry gave way with a sound like a freight train derailing.
BOOOOOOM!
A catastrophic roar shook the sub-basement. Tons of collapsing brick, molten steel roofing, and burning crossbeams crashed down onto the reinforced concrete ceiling above our heads. Fractures webbed across the overhead archway, dropping showers of pulverized concrete and burning slag into the water around us.
"THE WHOLE FACILITY IS COLLAPSING!" Marcus roared, grabbing Pierce by his collar and hauling the wounded chief to his feet with one violent jerk. "MOVE! MOVE TO THE STAIRS!"
I hoisted Ava into my arms, the heavy canvas duffel bag slung tight across my shoulder. Marcus shoved Pierce ahead of him, using his weapon light to cut through the blinding, suffocating darkness as we sprinted back down the trembling corridor.
Flames were now pouring down the concrete staircase like a waterfall of liquid fire.
The primary escape route was cut off.
"The ventilation shaft!" Ava gasped, pointing with a trembling finger toward an iron maintenance hatch set into the western wall of the tunnel. "It leads out to the old slag ditch behind the rail bed!"
Marcus didn't hesitate. He dropped Pierce onto the floor, drew his sidearm, and put three rapid rounds into the four rusted hinges of the iron hatch. He kicked the heavy plate inward with a thunderous blow.
"Go! Go!" Marcus shouted.
I shoved Ava through the narrow rectangular opening first, then tossed the canvas duffel bag containing forty years of evidence into her lap. I scrambled through the tight sheet-metal tunnel right behind her, scraping my shoulders against raw rivets and peeling rust.
Marcus grabbed Chief Pierce by his belt, dragging the groaning, bleeding police chief through the shaft behind us like a sack of dead weight.
We crawled through forty yards of pitch-black ductwork as the ceiling behind us caved in with an earth-shattering roar. A blast of compressed, superheated air surged through the shaft, scorching the backs of our jackets and blowing us out through the rusted exterior exhaust louvers onto the muddy banks of the slag ditch.