Page 31 of Trapped With the Secret Agent

“They sounded so close. How is that possible?” Georgia asked in a hushed voice.

“There must be cracks and fissures in the rock,” he whispered back. “We have to be very careful and very quiet. We don’t want them to hear us.”

“Were they the terrorists?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know? It could have been anyone.”

His answer was a long time in coming. “I know a little Arabic.”

He probably knew a little of a lot of languages. “What did they say?”

“One of them talked about the hostages. He was ordered to give them some water, but nothing else. The other didn’t see the point in giving the American dogs anything since they would all be dead soon.”

“American dogs? You understood all that?”

Peter glanced at her briefly. “Yeah.”

“You know a lot of Arabic.”

He shrugged again. “I’m not fluent.”

Fluent? She stared at his back in astonishment. Who was this guy?

He knew too much about way too many things. What a nuclear warhead looked like, how to read Russian, how to behave in a hostage situation, where the secret tunnel was. He could twist himself like a pretzel and use his watch like a power tool. It didn’t make sense that a simple photojournalist could know or do all that. But if he wasn’t who he said he was, who was he? Had she put her trust in the wrong man?

The bottom fell out of her stomach. If he wasn’t who he said he was, then he’d been lying to her since the moment they met.

She shook her head. She’d looked into his eyes; they were clear and unwavering. No one could be that good of a liar.

They walked in tense silence, stopping every few feet to listen to the sounds filtering down to them. At first it was only voices, male voices, low and grating, and frighteningly close, but Peter pulled her along steadily, quietly. After a long time, a set of stone steps took the tunnel deeper into the ground and the echo of voices ceased. Soft whispers of other sounds reached them, some identifiable, some not.

“I can hear cars,” Georgia said, incredibly relieved to detect the droning sound of engines as if miles away.

“We’re probably under a street.”

Georgia looked up at the cracked ceiling nervously. “How far under?”

“Probably pretty deep, or this tunnel would have been discovered during construction of the road or sewer or something.”

A short while later, the tunnel curved upwards and to the right. Many stairs led up to an arched alcove and a wall.

“A dead end?” Georgia asked.

“No, another hidden door.”

Georgia groaned. “Again?”

“It would appear so.”

“What do we have to do this time? Stand on our heads to get it open?”

“Nothing so acrobatic I hope.” Peter swept the light back and forth across the barely discernable door and stone walls in an obvious search pattern.

Georgia watched him, a queasy feeling growing in her stomach. “Don’t you know how to open it on this side?”

“No, it never came up.”

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