The Twelfth Card

which Sachs looked down into, sighing.
    “You okay?” Yu asked.
    “Fine,” she said cheerfully and started into the hole. Thinking: The claustrophobia in the Sanford Foundation’s archives was nothing compared to this. At the bottom she took the shovel and pickax Yu had given her and began the excavation.
    Sweating from the effort, shivering from the waves of panic, she dug and dug, picturing with every scoop the foxhole collapsing and trapping her.
    Pulling out rocks, dislodging the dense earth.
    Forever hidden beneath clay and soil . . .
    “What’s in view, Sachs?” Rhyme asked through the radio.
    “Dirt, sand, worms, a few tin cans, rocks.”
    She progressed about one foot under the building, then two.
    Her spade gave a tink and stopped cold. She scraped away soil and found herself facing a rounded brick wall, very old, the mortar clumsily smeared between the bricks.
    “Got something here. The side of the cistern.”
    Dirt from the edges of the foxhole skittered to the floor. It scared her more than if a rat had traipsed across her thigh. A fast image came to mind: being held immobile while dirt flooded around her, crushing her chest, then filling her nose and mouth. Drowning on dirt . . .
    Okay, girl, relax. Sachs took several deep breaths. Scraped away more soil. Another gallon or so of it spilled out on her knees. “Should we shore this up, you think?” she called to Yu.
    “What?” Rhyme asked.
    “I’m taking to the engineer.”
    Yu called, “I think it’ll probably hold. The soil’s damp enough to be cohesive.”
    Probably.
    The engineer continued, “If you want we can, but it’ll take a few hours to build the frame.”
    “Never mind,” she called to him. Into the speaker she asked, “Lincoln?”
    There was a pause.
    She felt a jolt, realizing she’d used his first name. Neither of them was superstitious but there was one rule they stuck to: It was bad luck to use their first names on the job.
    The hesitation told her that he too was aware she’d broken the rule. Finally he said, “Go ahead.”
    Gravel and dry dirt again trickled down the side of the foxhole and sprayed her neck and shoulders. It hit the Tyvek suit, which amplified the sound. She jumped back, thinking the walls were coming down. A gasp.
    “Sachs? You all right?”
    She looked around. No, the walls were holding. “Fine.” She continued to scrape away dirt from the rounded brick cistern. With the pickax she chipped away mortar. She asked Rhyme, “Any more thoughts about what’s inside?” The question was meant mostly for the comfort of hearing his voice.
    A sphere with a tail.
    “No idea.”
    A fierce bash with the ax. One brick came out. Then two. Earth poured out from inside the well and covered her knees.
    Damn, I hate this.
    More bricks, more sand and pebbles and dirt. She stopped, cleared the heavy pile off her kneeling legs and turned back to her task.
    “How you doing?” Rhyme asked.
    “Hanging in there,” she said softly and removed several more bricks. A dozen of them lay aroundher. She turned her head, shining the light on what was behind the bricks: a wall of black dirt, ash, bits of charcoal and scraps of wood.
    She started to dig into the dense dry earth that was inside the cistern. Nothing cohesive about this goddamn dirt, she thought, watching the loose brown rivulets stream downward, glistening in the beam from her hard-hat light.
    “Sachs!” Rhyme shouted. “Stop!”
    She gasped. “What’s—”
    “I just looked over the story of the arson again. It said there was an explosion in the basement of the tavern. Grenades back then were spheres with fuses. Charles must’ve taken two with him. That’s the sphere in the well! You’re right next to the one that didn’t go off. The bomb could be as unstable as nitroglycerine. That’s what the dog was sensing, the explosives! Get out of there fast.”
    She gripped the side of the well to pull herself to her feet.
    But the brick she was holding suddenly gave way, and she fell onto her back as an avalanche of dry earth from inside the well poured out into the foxhole. Stones and gravel and dirt flowed around her, pinning her bent, cramping legs and spreading fast toward her chest and face.
    She screamed, trying desperately to climb to her feet. But she couldn’t; the flood had reached her arms.
    “Sa—” She heard Rhyme’s voice as the headset cord was ripped from the radio.
    More dirt cascaded over her body, helplessly frozen under