Power and Empire

Pausing in the pitch blackness, he fought the urge to gag and strained to hear any sign of the departing woman. When he heard nothing, he drew his pistol and decided to take a chance with the flashlight. Ryan found himself completely alone at the bottom of a deep tube of red brick and mortar, approximately thirty feet in diameter. It looked like an old grain silo set in the ground. Four arched brick doorways — each about the same size as his six-foot wingspan — ran from the sides of the cavern with what was presumably sewage flowing out of the two doors to his left, and into the two to his right, toward the Río de la Plata. The bricks at the base of the arch to Jack’s immediate right had telltale splash marks on one side. Closer inspection revealed hairlike moss just below the surface. The color of unripe limes, the moss swayed and billowed with the current like some kind of primordial ooze. By holding the powerful beam of the Streamlight at a low angle, Jack could see an obvious trail of discoloration in the moss, made by the weight of recent footprints. Most of the moss was undisturbed. He followed, moving slowly, pistol held back near his waist and flashlight slightly away from his body. Every few seconds he stopped and listened, but he heard nothing except the gurgle of flowing water… or whatever this was.

Buenos Aires was old, first settled sometime in the late 1500s. It was already a thriving city by the time the thirteen American colonies north of the equator declared their independence from England. There were tunnels under cities all over the world, the Catacombs beneath Paris; waterworks of an old wool business under Bradford, England; and abandoned sewers crisscrossing subterranean New York City. Ryan remembered from his history classes at Georgetown that Jesuit priests used a series of hidden tunnels here to move secretly between their numerous churches — both in centuries past and in more recent times of bloodshed during the “Dirty War,” when the military junta ferreted out communist insurgents and anyone else they deemed to be a dissident. Some of the tunnels had been discovered and were now in the guidebooks. Some remained hidden. Others had been flooded by overflowing groundwater and sewer systems. This one was covered with a wooden door, obviously known to someone besides the Asian woman. Small niches, approximately a foot high and half as deep, were built into the brick walls, as if meant for statuary, leading Ryan to believe this tunnel wasn’t originally intended to be a sewer.

He passed three smaller archways splitting off from the main tunnel as he sloshed along, one to the right and two more to the left. The trail of discolored moss told him to continue straight ahead. Twenty minutes after he’d first splashed down in the tunnels, Ryan came to another rusted iron ladder on the wall. The tunnel continued into the darkness, but the ladder was wet. Someone had recently climbed up.

Ryan felt like he’d been going generally east, and he suspected he was somewhere near the marina on the Río de la Plata, but it was impossible to know for sure without going up to peek out. When he stood completely still, he thought he could hear laughter.

He holstered his pistol and dropped the flashlight back into his pocket. Faint pinholes of light shone down from something at the top. Ryan hauled himself upward rung by rung, going slowly enough to let the sewage drain from his boots. He was careful not to slip. Walking through shit was one thing. Going for a swim in it was a whole other ballgame. He was reasonably certain he’d been vaccinated against hepatitis. Probably. Maybe. He began to mull over the idea of contracting cholera or jungle rot or whatever bug might swim up a person’s toenails from fetid water. A bath in Clorox was starting to sound inviting by the time he wrapped one arm around the top rung and put the flat of his hand against a metal grate.

Ryan pushed up slowly, peering under the edge at a pile of steaming donkey crap inches away. He knew very little about barnyard scatology, but the donkey that had manufactured the stuff happened to be standing right above it. A quick look around said he’d not been going east at all, but north. The dirt streets and broken block buildings could be nowhere else but Villa 31—the same place where the tall brunette had disappeared.

Frenzied Spanish voices, most male but at least one female, jerked Ryan’s attention to his left. His vantage point from under the donkey cart allowed him to see little but a set of scrambling feet. They were small and wet, and sliding under the donkey cart, directly for him.

Ryan barely had time to yank his head back into the tunnel before the Asian woman shoved the metal grating aside, pulling it shut behind her as she slid feet-first into the hole — landing squarely on Ryan’s knuckles where they curled around the pitted metal rung. Ryan was strong, but the impact of 120 pounds of fleeing woman knocked him off the ladder.