After Mr. Joyce hopped out of the cab, it took them less than a minute to maneuver the massive truck into position. As Tony got the manhole open with the hook, Mr. Joyce removed a blueprint from his clipboard and knelt with Tony at the rim of the hole.
“Start jackhammering right there,” he said, pointing into the manhole, a little left of the center of its south wall. “Should be about six feet in. It’ll look like square aluminum ducting, the same you would see in an HVAC system. Text me immediately when you see it. Oh, and watch those electrical cables at your back while you’re working, if you don’t wish to get fried. Half of them are uninsulated, and all of them are quite live.”
“You got it, Mr. Joyce. I’m, uh…on it,” said Tony, repeating an advertising expression that Con Edison had used in their commercials a few years before.
“This is no time for joking, Tony. Just get to work,” Mr. Joyce said.
CHAPTER 6
WHEN MR. JOYCE got to his feet, the other Supervac truck they had stolen was just pulling up to the curb. His partner, Mr. Beckett, climbed down from the cab in the baggy nondescript Con Ed getup with sunglasses. He could almost have been Mr. Joyce’s double, except his goatee was jackrabbit white instead of reddish-brown.
Without speaking, both men crossed the sidewalk and descended the steps into the 168th Street subway station. MetroCarding through the turnstile, they bypassed a sign directing them to the A train and found the concrete corridor for the number 1 line elevator.
“This station is one of the deepest in the entire system, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said as they stepped off the elevator onto the bridge that connects the uptown and downtown sides of the massive arched number 1 line’s underground station. “We’re presently ten stories below street level.”
Mr. Beckett nodded. He was pleased with his partner’s automatic use of their code names now that they were finally operational. All the exhaustive lessons he’d given his young partner about tradecraft had definitely sunk in.
“Why does it say ‘IRT’ here while upstairs, on the A line, it says ‘IND’? What do the initials mean?” Mr. Beckett wanted to know.
“It doesn’t matter for our purposes,” Mr. Joyce said, frowning. “You will find it boring.”
“No, I won’t. I promise. We have time to kill before that fool Tony gets to the air shaft. I’m curious. You don’t think I enjoy your little history lessons, Mr. Joyce, but I actually do.”
Mr. Beckett was right. Science was Mr. Joyce’s forte, but history was his true passion. Since he had arrived in the country years before, he had found the history of America, and especially New York City, surprisingly rich and fascinating. He was looking forward to delving into it more deeply at his leisure once all was said and done.
Especially, he thought, since he was about to make a great deal of the city’s history himself in the coming days.
“The abbreviations actually mean nothing anymore,” Mr. Joyce explained. “They’re just old subway nomenclature, remnants of the time when the city subway system was divided into lines run by separate companies instead of the current unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority. IRT stands for Inter-borough Rapid Transit, while IND stands for a company called the Independent Subway System. You may have noticed the abbreviation BMT on other lines, which stands for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. I could go into detail about the three lines and how they fit into the subway system’s famous color-coded numerical and alphabetical signage if you wish.”
“No, that’s okay. I need to stay awake,” Mr. Beckett said and laughed.
“I told you that you would find it boring,” Mr. Joyce replied with a sigh.
“On that, as on most things,” Mr. Beckett said as he clapped his protégé playfully on the shoulder, “you were annoyingly correct, my friend. How does it finally feel to be out of the lab and into the field?”
Mr. Joyce watched as a pigeon suddenly flapped out and down from a tunnel ledge above them and started pecking at some garbage between the uptown rails. Then he shrugged.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t feel. I think.”
Mr. Beckett smiled widely.
“That is why you are so valuable. Now, give me damage estimates again in tangible human terms.”
“At the minimum, we’re looking at massive damage to the tunnel, shutting down service for months, and obviously terrifying this city like nothing since nine eleven.”
“And at the maximum?” said Mr. Beckett, hope in his bright-blue eyes behind the shades.
Mr. Joyce folded his hands together as he closed his eyes. Mr. Beckett thought he looked almost Asian for a moment, like a pale, goateed Buddha.
“We collapse a dozen city blocks, destroying the hospital complex, much of Washington Heights, and killing thousands,” Mr. Joyce finally said.
Mr. Beckett nodded at this pensively.
“And we go when, again?” he said.
“Tomorrow night.”
“So many decisions,” Mr. Beckett said, gazing north as a downtown-bound 1 train pulled, clattering, into the station. “So very little time.”
CHAPTER 7