Zack glanced down between his feet—and realized that Marsh was right; he’d traversed the distance faster than he’d thought, and he really was now only a handful of yards above Nick Patterson’s denim jacket. No doubt, at that distance, Nick—and presumably Hailey, below him—had heard the radio. And yet the man hadn’t moved any deeper down the shaft. Perhaps he had realized that it was futile—that there would be officers at the bottom of the shaft as well as the top, that they were indeed trapped?

Zack hooked the radio back to his belt, and carefully undid the snaps on his holstered .38, while lowering himself the last few rungs—

By now, it was so dark he could barely see more than the shape of Nick’s shoulder.

“It’s over,” he said, into the darkness. “I’m Agent Lindwell with the FBI. Nobody needs to get hurt—”

He paused, because even in the darkness, he could see that something was wrong. The way Nick’s shoulder seemed to hang off the rung—the angle wasn’t right. Slowly, Zack stretched out his leg, reaching with his shoe until he could touch the denim—then gave it a little kick—

And the material gave way beneath his shoe, because that’s all it was, material. The jacket came loose from the rung and fluttered downward, spinning and twisting like some sort of denim gull until it was lost in the blackness of the shaft.

Zack redid the snaps of his holster. It had taken him at least ten minutes to climb down there, which gave Nick and Hailey a pretty good lead. Marsh would be fuming, no doubt, but if Zack felt anything, it was a slight pull of admiration.

Then he reached for his radio and started back up the rungs.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

I think we can slow down,” Nick coughed, between breaths, as he jogged behind Hailey down a narrow, poorly paved alley. He considered himself in pretty good shape, but the mad dash up the steps of the monument followed by the nerve-racking journey back down, mixed in with the stream of evacuating tourists, had taken more out of him then he’d expected. And once they were through the park and out of the shadow of the great obelisk, Hailey had set off at a pace that had him gasping by the time they’d moved through the more residential and pricey Charlestown neighborhoods, and into the warren of older, run-down buildings that ran along the commercial docks behind the better-known shipyards.

Hailey finally slowed, halfway down the alley. There was a chain-link fence to her right, separating them from a series of floating docks on the edge of the harbor. On her other side, a jumble of bait shops, convenience stores, supply outlets, but no foot traffic that Nick could see.