Holy Rollers (42 page)

“This is gonna be a pain in the ass,” he said.

“Would you rather make twenty or thirty trips up and down these stairs?” Chase shook his head. “Anyway, this will be faster. Just shove a box and let it slide. When it gets stuck, get it unstuck and shove it again.” He tapped his head. “I invented this gravity thing, and it’s awesome.”

“Yes, you’re brilliant, Grant.” Chase planted a kiss where Grant had tapped his head and said, “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Chase pushed, and the footlocker rolled over the lip and began sliding down the spiral staircase. After grinding its way down a half dozen steps, it came to an abrupt stop.

$ $ $

Merribaugh locked the basement door behind him and, for extra measure, threw the deadbolt. That was the easy part; the hard part would be getting out.

He raced through the tunnel to the core of the Great Cross, trying to analyze the strange grinding—almost metal-on-metal—he heard from the stairwell. It had to be true; somehow, someone had breached his security.

For nine years no one had known about the hollow core of the Great Cross except himself and Hurley. Not even Enright had known. But now someone had not only discovered their secret, they’d found the way in, which Merribaugh always considered a double—maybe even triple—security measure.

And if they wanted to get into the cross that badly, that could only mean they knew what he and Hurley had been secreting there for almost a decade.

He stepped into the well at the base of the staircase and that grinding from above—accompanied by loud bangs, as if something heavy were being dragged down the metal staircase—became louder. He looked up, but could see nothing in the gloom. Still, he had a job to do…for himself, as well as Hurley.

“Who’s there?” he yelled, knowing it was unlikely his voice would carry over the noise above him. Which is why he was surprised by a voice coming from above him, but not too far above.

“Who’s
there
?” was the gruff answer.

Merribaugh swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I demand you leave. Leave, or I’ll call the police.”

“No, you won’t,” growled the other man’s voice.

Well, he was correct, after all. He wasn’t going to call the police, and the man knew he wouldn’t, because then Merribaugh would have to explain why approximately seven million dollars in United States currency was hidden in the Great Cross.

Point to the stranger.

Still, he had to get them out of there. His next bluff had better work.

$ $ $

They stood at the locked door to the basement for a few minutes, not quite sure what to do until Tolan shrugged and dryly said, “Want to shoot our way in?”

“You know,” said Waverly, “Fifteen years on the job and I have
never
fired my service weapon. Isn’t that something?”

“Never?” Tolan lifted an eyebrow. “I think I killed four people in my first couple of months alone.”

Leonard, standing on the periphery, sighed. “You guys really don’t have to put on an act for me. I believe you have guns, and I believe they work.”

Tolan grinned. “Just toying with you, Platt. Want some peanuts?” Leonard shook his head. “Good. I’m out.”

“So anyway,” said Waverly, running a hand quickly along his forehead, smoothing out his hair, “you’re
sure
there’s no other exit from the basement?”

“Pretty sure,” Leonard said grimly. “It’s been a while since I was down there, but to the best of my recollection it’s just a storage room. Only one way in, and one way out. Not even any windows.”

Waverly spotted Chris Cason running across the lawn toward them and said, “Guess we’re about to find out how good your memory is. Oh, and before Cason gets here, are you working with those guys he says abducted him? The ones he thinks are atheist homosexual terrorists?”

Leonard shook his head. “I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I highly doubt there are terrorists running around the Virginia Cathedral of Love.”

“And why are
you
here, again?”

Now that he realized law enforcement was all about repetition, Leonard’s nervousness was rapidly dissipating. No one knew repetition better than a bookkeeper, except maybe a CPA. “Again—for maybe the hundredth time—I missed the place. I spent a lot of time here over the years, and I figured tonight—”

“Would be a good time to visit, what with all the people around who came to see
The Sound of Music
.”

“Exactly.”

Waverly smiled. “Okay. Just checking. You see, we know you’re gay, Leonard. And that’s just great. Seriously, not a problem for us. But Cason talks about homosexual terrorists, and you’re a homosexual. You don’t look like the terrorist type to me, Leonard, but…”

“How
do
you know my name, anyway?” That still bothered him.

“You’d be surprised what I know.” He turned and greeted Cason. “Did you get the keys?”

“Captain Enright told me that Mr. Merribaugh has the only set.”

Waverly turned and ruffled his freshly neatened hair, deep in thought. “Okay,
now
we have a problem.”

$ $ $

There was a long metal-on-metal squeal, and then a half dozen loud bangs, and Merribaugh found himself covering his ears. This madness had to come to an end.

“I’m coming up,” he announced to the darkness. “And I have a gun.”

“I’m here,” said the other man. There was a brief pause before he added, “And I don’t need no gun.”

Which took a considerable amount of wind out of Dennis Merribaugh’s sails. Still, he climbed a few steps.

Maybe
both
of them were bluffing. That’s what he hoped, at least.

$ $ $

One hundred forty feet above Merribaugh—and maybe 130 feet above Farraday—Grant and Chase worked in near darkness to correct the angles of the heavy footlockers on the narrow staircase. When the loads were repositioned, first Chase and then Grant used their feet to encourage gravity, and the boxes groaned down another half dozen steps before coming to an abrupt stop, again wedged between the railing and wall.

“This is getting ridiculous,” said Grant. “I’m starting to think two dozen trips up and down the stairs would have been a better idea.”

“If there was only some way to…Wait a minute!”

“What?”

Chase thought his brainstorm through, and only when he was satisfied it was good said, “The oil!”

“Huh?”

“The motor oil we took out of the boxes!”

“What about it?”

“Maybe we spread it on the stairs and the toolboxes slide more smoothly.”

“It’s expired,” said Grant. “Like, three years ago.”

“For engines, maybe. But it can still lube the stairs.”

Grant thought about that, then smiled. “I think you might’ve just saved us a lot of work and time. Good job.”

“I’ll go get it. Be right back.”

$ $ $

A small caravan of black SUVs—identical in every detail to the vehicles that had brought Waverly, Tolan and the junior agents to the Virginia Cathedral of Love—finally turned off the highway and onto Cathedral Boulevard. If Waverly hadn’t stopped checking his watch, he would have been annoyed to know they were more than a half hour late.

But the agents had another concern at the moment. Namely, should they shoot their way in to the Rev. Mr. Dennis Merribaugh’s basement sanctuary? Or wait for him to come out voluntarily?

“You know what they should teach us at the academy?” asked Tolan, more to fill time than for any other reason. “Lock-picking.”

“That would be a useful skill,” Waverly agreed. “No one learns that anymore.”

Leonard, standing near them but not quite with them, except for those times they wanted to ask him the same damn questions, had finally had enough. He was starting to not care much about the money, especially since it appeared his confederates had deserted him. Maybe they’d left the campus altogether. There was certainly no reason to think they’d found their way into the Great Cross, which Leonard was still mostly convinced was solid and impenetrable, no matter what Chase had said about spirals or squiggles or whatever.

He decided it was an appropriate time to ask, “Since we’re all just standing around and I’ve got nothing to do, you think it’d be all right if I take off?”

Waverly smiled, but shook his head. “No, Mr. Platt, I don’t see that happening.”

$ $ $

Chase uncapped the bottles of motor oil, and starting at a point thirty steps or so below the spot where the footlockers had jammed, began liberally pouring it over the stairs, slowly backing up until he reached them.

“That should help,” he said, tossing the last empty bottle over the railing.

$ $ $

“What the hell?!” Merribaugh was mid-step when a slick empty plastic bottle hit him in the head. It didn’t really hurt; it was more of a surprise.

Although not quite as much of a surprise as the large man who suddenly loomed out of the darkness, knocking down his cocked index finger and thumb before he had a chance to react.

“A finger gun?” asked the man. “You were threatening me with a finger gun?”

Merribaugh hung his head in shame.

“Now,” said the man, “I personally think it would be a smart idea for you to get out of here before someone gets hurt. And by someone, I mean you.”

This, Merribaugh thought, as he slowly retraced his steps down the underground passage, was going to be extremely difficult and uncomfortable to explain to Dr. Oscar Hurley.

$ $ $

Chase kicked the first footlocker, then Grant kicked the second footlocker, and then gravity and past-its-expiration-date motor oil worked together to do their job. Just like they’d hoped.

Problem was, they worked together to do their job a little too well.

$ $ $

Unseen by anyone except the elderly security guard—who in any event no longer had full confidence in his faculties—Dr. Oscar Hurley left Cathedral House and hustled to his personal car, pausing only to throw a few armfuls of possessions into the trunk. He assumed he’d be back, and very soon, but with the FBI and other assorted unsavory types swarming through the Virginia Cathedral of Love that night, it was the last place he should be.

In the morning, when he could accurately assess the damage from a safe—and remote—vantage point, he’d be better able to handle things. It might take a lawyer, or maybe an entire firm, or maybe the entire Virginia Bar Association, but he had enough friends in high places that any damage would be neither permanent nor deep.

But in the meantime no one—not even Francine—would know where he was.

He started the car, pulled out of his parking space, and got almost one-tenth of a mile down the road before a black SUV cut him off, veering into his lane and forcing him to a stop.

$ $ $

Grant smiled and high-fived Chase in the darkened stairwell. “
Now
they’re moving.”

And they were. The two very heavy footlockers—weighted down further with seven million dollars in cash, give or take—moved effortlessly down the well-oiled staircase, picking up speed as they followed its spiral. Looking down from twenty—now thirty—feet above the racing boxes, Grant had an unsettling thought.

He hollered to be heard above the noise, even though Chase stood next to him. “Do you think maybe it’s
too
slick?”

“Nah, listen to them go.”

“I’m just worried about—” Grant started to say, but stopped at a new sound, a sound that could only be the deafening noise resulting from a violent collision between two very heavy footlockers and one not-as-strong-as-it-looked concrete wall.

“—runaways.”

Forty feet below where they stood, a floodlight now illuminated the interior of the Great Cross. And their hearts sank.

$ $ $

The campus—which had been so silent for much of the evening, even as two thousand people watched Walter Pomeroy’s version of
The Sound of Music
revision in all its born-again glory—was suddenly bustling with activity.

A dozen FBI agents—some guarding the handcuffed Dr. Oscar Hurley; Waverly and Tolan trying to figure out how to get Merribaugh out of the basement—stood with guns drawn.

Captain Joseph Enright—followed by the two junior agents, who’d just freed him on word that backup had arrived—stormed down the road from Cathedral House, but lost steam when he saw the black SUVs parked at all angles and Hurley in cuffs.

Chris Cason took in the chaos with confusion. If this was the end of the world, he knew God, at least, would appreciate
Ant!

Leonard Platt took it in with the certainty that he would be the next to be cuffed, as soon as Waverly and Tolan were bored toying with him.