Joe shook his head. “No way. You’re stuck with me.” He gestured over his shoulder at Kunkle, adding, “You’re probably stuck with him, too, but that’s because he’s a crazy bastard, in case you hadn’t guessed.”

Seamus actually chuckled at that.

Joe dragged over a small armchair from near the window and sat on its edge, a few feet before the bomb-shrouded source of the information he was after—fully conscious of his own vulnerability. For the moment, neither he nor Willy had a choice. They were trapped by the trigger they’d inadvertently set off. But Joe also knew that in due course, the hasty team’s bomb expert would create a so-called booby trap lane through which safe passage would be better ensured. That would be his and Willy’s chance to hand the scene over to those better equipped to handle it.

But he knew something else, too—that what he’d just told Seamus Kyle was no lie, and that for whatever strange reasons, both Willy and he would in fact stay put. It was in their natures to do so, in their DNA as first responders. The adage has it that firefighters enter places others are running from. Cops of their pedigree are no different.

Without giving any of this thought, Joe leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and quietly said, “Okay, Seamus. Tell me what I need to know.”

Christian Mock and the others were making headway. The balance to these operations was to quickly and cautiously mark a route of least resistance and maximum safety. Each room was entered carefully, checked electronically for radio signals, studied through special goggles for infrared beams, accompanied by prayers that nothing more sensitive—like covert, less defeatable PIRs—was lurking in the mix.

What gave Mock hope as he progressed was that he was locating traps. Not taking the time to disarm them—this is where the compromising nature of his role came in—he either marked them with colored “bypass” indicators as he went, or simply avoided them by leading his teammates along another route.

There was a lot of talk throughout. These high-risk entries tended to be noisy, if only marginally comprehensible. Two major pitfalls in such tense environments were that people got too quiet, or, if they spoke, used misleading language. The solution, again reflective of training, was to use coded words, virtually nonstop, identifying problems tersely and with clarity, and presenting solutions everyone understood. For example, instead of “Look out,” or “Be careful,” the word used was “Bosco,” since in and of itself, it could neither be mistaken for anything else, nor uttered by anyone beyond these four to confuse them. Less playful a word—which none of them wanted to hear—was “Avalanche.” As the word implied, it meant all else had failed and that you were free to save yourself as best you could—usually against all odds.

“They grabbed kids,” Seamus explained. “Boys. They’d been doing it for years. That’s what this place is for. It’s a fuckin’ torture chamber.”

Joe frowned. “Together? The two of them?”