Sympathy For the Devil by Terrence McCauley Read Free Book Online Page B

projects back in Israel.
    Hicks showed the developer the evidence and made him an offer: give him the ground floor and basement of one of his new buildings and enough space for a sub-basement beneath all three buildings and forget about it. No rent, no lease, no sale. Say no, and the family finds out you’ve been laundering money for the PLO.
    The developer complied.
    The result was the University’s New York office: a hidden concrete shelter buried beneath the basements of three townhouses on West Twenty-third Street. The University had arranged for secure contractors to build the facility quietly and quickly. Some creative manipulation of the city’s building department’s records allowed the construction to occur without government interference.
    The garden apartment on street level was just for show. It looked benign enough from the outside: curtains on the windows, lights in the windows, even furniture and a full book case if anyone looked inside. People on the upper floors paid a good amount in rent, too.
    The stairs down to the basement from the garden apartment looked normal. The boiler served the two legal apartments above, but the washer and drier had never been used. The basement was merely a stop-gap that led to the subbasement. It was sealed by an ordinary looking wooden door with a large knob and lock. But there was no key to the door and the knob didn’t turn. The door could only be opened by reading the biometrics in Hicks’ hand when he gripped the doorknob while a camera scanned his facial features at the same time. When the two matched, the hatch opened.
    It was an independent structure built with steel re-enforced concrete. The facility ran off the city’s power grid, but had three backup generators as well as a gas fueled back up. It had its own HVAC unit complete with filters and sensors that could detect radiation and poisonous emissions.
    The entire building above him could get obliterated by a nuclear blast and Hicks would still be able to operate for three weeks before he’d have to venture outside.
    The computer system, like his handheld, was tied wirelessly to the University’s secure network, with a redundant cable line piped directly to the mainframe, which was only activated in an emergency.
    But that night, he was just glad the damned place had heat because he was freezing.
    Hicks put on a pot of fresh coffee as soon as he shrugged out of his parka and heavy boots. He brought the dead man’s camera to the work station and booted up his computer before replacing his guns in the armory. The armory was the size of a walk in closet that was larger than some studio apartments in Manhattan. It was filled with more Kevlar vests, automatic weapons, explosives, and ammunition than most police precincts. The facility was a designated fall back position for the University, meaning that if it ever needed to, Hicks’ office could become a forward operations base. He couldn’t envision a scenario when that would be necessary, but then again, he hadn’t imagined an attack like 9/11 either.
    Despite its status as an official University facility, he’d managed to keep its exact location secret from everyone except the Dean. Jason had spent the last six months trying to figure out where it was, but Hicks kept stonewalling him, more out of enjoying Jason’s frustration than anything else. The less that bureaucrat knew, the better.
    Hicks secured the armory door and went back to his living area to change out of his clothes. His personal living space was in the farthest corner of the room from the work station. Although the bunker was also his home, he viewed it as primarily a workspace. He didn’t have any posters or personal photos or personal touches of any kind. He liked it that way. Besides, he had no family worth remembering anyway. Just the computer equipment, a bed, a walk in closet for his clothes and other gear.
    Hicks waited for the coffee to finish brewing and tried to keep his thoughts