He was lying on his back, with his zip-tied wrists beneath him. He was on the side of the cart closest to the tunnel’s right wall, and he didn’t quite fit; his shoulder and hip hung over the edge by an inch, just missing the wall as it grazed by.

Through his clothing, he could feel the sharp, machined edge of the cart’s flatbed deck. Nothing fancy or rounded over. This thing had not been built for toddlers to sit on while their parents shopped for groceries. It was solid and rough and utilitarian. It was industrial equipment.

Dryden arched his body just enough to ease the pressure between his lower back and his bound wrists. Enough to move his wrists. He shifted them sideways, an inch, three inches, six inches—he stopped, feeling the sharp edge beneath his hands. He turned his wrists until he was sure the band of the zip-tie, stretched between them, was pressed against that edge.

None of it would be visible to the three behind the cart; his body concealed everything.

He slid the zip-tie against the edge. Small movements. An inch forward and back, slow but with heavy pressure—all the weight he could bring to bear on it.

Time’s almost up.

It wasn’t intuition telling him that. Just simple perception: the drumbeat of the rolling cart had begun to slow down. The group was coming to the end of the tunnel.

A second later, the narrow ceiling above him gave onto a wider one. A square space at the end of the passageway. From where he lay, looking straight up, he could see the gathered group ahead of the cart. Could see a single doorway on the wall at the end, where the group had bunched up for some reason. He saw four or five of them crouch and reach down for something, and heard the grind of some heavy object sliding and then being lifted.

It had to be the door. Like all the others in the complex, it had been torched off its hinges and left lying there, right in front of the open frame. Pierce and his men, having come in by this route, would have stepped right over the door the first time. Now, with the cart in tow, they had to move it out of the way.

It would take ten seconds at most.

Still working on the zip-tie, Dryden turned his head twenty degrees to the side. He made the movement look slow and lethargic—a hopeless man letting his head roll. He darted his eyes farther in that direction, and saw the shelving unit in the corner, exactly where it had been in 1989.

The shelves had been full then; they were empty now, as he’d expected.

He let his head turn another ten degrees, and took in the very bottom of the shelf stack—not the lowest shelf, but the four-inch gap beneath it.