Kill Alex Cross

trying to start up just a few miles from here. It was a world apart, that’s for sure. Branaff House was the crown jewel of an eighty-acre campus, with the kind of restored beauty that persuaded parents to part with forty-five thousand dollars a year for middle school.
    It was also where the Coyle kids had last been seen. What had happened to them?
    I started in the main foyer. According to the reports I’d read, this was where a fight had broken out that morning, between Zoe and Ryan Townsend.
    It hadn’t lasted long, and Secret Service Agent Findlay immediately pulled both of the Coyles away from the scene and into an adjacent lecture hall.
    At 8:22 a.m., Findlay had radioed his team that he was giving the kids two minutes alone to speak privately.
    At 8:24, he opened the door again and found the lecture hall empty.
    About ninety seconds after that, the van driven by Ray Pinkney had gone tearing off campus through the east gate — without Ethan and Zoe on board, as it turned out.
    What that left was a three-and-a-half-minute window, from the last time Findlay saw the kids, until that van left the school grounds.
    Somewhere in there, a kidnapping had taken place.
    So what happened in those three and a half minutes?
    I let myself into the lecture hall and closed the door behind me.
    The room was high-ceilinged, with several austere portraits looking down from the walls. It was a little creepy, actually, but definitely imposing. It made even a big man like me feel small.
    Whatever had gone down in that room, Zoe and Ethan couldn’t have been there for long. The clock was ticking on those three and a half minutes, whether they knew it or not.
    There were two doors at the front, both covered by the same security camera in the hall outside. The only other possible exits were the five windows at the back.
    Agent Findlay had reportedly found the center one unlatched, and I went to it now.
    I hopped up on the heat register, slid open the window, and ducked outside.
    It was an easy drop to the ground, landing me behind a thick tangle of lilac bushes.
    Footprints found in the dirt that day confirmed that two people Ethan and Zoe’s size had come this way.
    But where did they go from here? Were they still alone at this point? When exactly did things turn horribly wrong?
    We had just a few facts. The rest of the scenario was mostly supposition.
    But there was one other known piece of the puzzle, and I needed someone here at the school to show it to me.

GEORGE O’SHEA WAS the head of maintenance at Branaff. He was a big, redheaded fireplug of a guy, with arms that bulged against the sleeves of his uniform the same way his gut strained at the buttons in front. I found him in his basement office under the main building.
    “Nice to meet’cha,” he said, half crushing my hand. “I’m guessing you came down to see the tunnel? Headmaster’s office called ahead.”
    “If you have a minute,” I said.
    “Come on with me. I’ll give you the nickel tour, five cents off today.”
    “Much obliged. Thank you.”
    There had been a lot of speculation in the press about the underground passage at Branaff, and a lot of assumptions that it figured into the kidnapping somehow. What wasn’t public knowledge was that Ethan and Zoe’s electronic locators had both been found down here, smashed to pieces at the far end of the tunnel. Whether someone had deliberately put them there to throw us off the scent or dropped them on their way through was still a question mark.
    I followed O’Shea through the basement, to an old black steel door at the back. It looked original to the building, except for the brand-new hasp and padlock that had been bolted on.
    The custodian used a key from his retractable ring to open it for me and then flipped a light switch just inside.
    “Whole thing’s like a T,” he said, leading the way. “Straight on, it’s just a sealed-up hatch where the old coal barn used to be. But if we take a right turn up there, it comes out in the groundskeeping shed down by the playing fields.”
    It was supposedly true that Noah Branaff had used this tunnel as part of the Underground Railroad, back in the nineteenth century. It had clearly been refitted since then, with riveted I-beams, a poured concrete floor, and tile on the domed ceiling. Mostly it was used for storage now.
    There were mesh lockers with cleaning supplies near the entrance and gardening tools and sports equipment as we got closer to the far end. Very