Carter raised his hands. “Sorry, but we mere mortals are a bit confused by what’s going on and don’t understand wave forms or what noise you’re even looking for.”

Burke rolled his eyes as he continued on toward the exit. “I’ll explain in the car.”

Chapter 70

August Burke slid behind the wheel of his ’67 Firebird, leaving Nic and Carter to fight over their seats.

“I can’t cram my legs back there,” Nic said.

“I’m old. I may break a hip crawling out of this thing. It’s all fun and games until someone breaks a hip.”

“Let’s move!” Burke said, feeling the urgency of time slipping away from them.

Nic reluctantly slid into the backseat, and taking his place up front, Carter said, “What were you listening for back there?”

“An explosion,” Burke replied.

“I think one of the cops on scene would have heard an explosion. And that didn’t sound like one. It barely even registered. Sounded like a tree falling or something,” Nic said.

“Shaped charges. Blowing the sealed escape tunnel.”

“Our hostage-takers wouldn’t have had time to dig a tunnel.”

“They didn’t dig the tunnel. Okay, let me start at the beginning. The CIA is preparing to enter whatever secure facility that the false front of GoBox is hiding. There was no point in fighting with them over control of the vault room because we would need the pass-codes, the thumbprints, and the retinal scans in order to get in. Just like what our thieves needed.”

“Right, but maybe you could have—” Carter started to say.

“I’m not nearly that good, but thanks for the vote of confidence. The point is that we don’t need the entrance to the secure facility. We need its exit.”

“Wait,” Nic said. “Why go to all the trouble of having a super-secure entrance when there’s another way in? Why would you have two ways to get at whatever secrets you’re keeping?”

“No engineer would design a facility without an emergency exit. What if something broke, there was a fire, a tornado destroyed the GoBox building, name your unforeseeable circumstance. If something like that happened, all of the people inside the lab or whatever is down there would be trapped. There’s always an emergency exit.”

“But the emergency exit doesn’t have to be accessible or even visible,” Carter said. “Hence, the shaped charges. The exit was actually covered over and sealed with concrete somewhere and could only be opened once, in case of an emergency. Like fire alarms where you have to break the glass to pull them.”

“Right. Our bad guys weren’t just going to sit down in some underground room and wait for the CIA or whoever built the room to come root them out. And they obviously couldn’t come back up through a GoBox building that was crawling with cops.”

“Do you think they could still be there?” Nic asked.

Burke shrugged as he turned onto the street he had been viewing on the computer from an aerial perspective. “Unlikely. But if we hurry, we may be able to backtrack our way down into the hidden facility before the CIA can send in their response team.”