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The concrete felt cold even through the insulating layers of my coat and cotton pullover.
    I was overcome by a prideful little flush of accomplishment, a curious if short-lived pleasure to have made it this far without detection. The flush almost at once gave way to a chill as a more rational part of me demanded to know
what the hell I was doing here
.
    I seemed insanely compelled,
driven,
to travel into ever darker—impossibly bleak—conditions, to the heart of all blackness, where the darkness was as condensed as matter had been the instant before the Big Bang spewed forth the universe, and once there, beyond all hope of light, to be crushed until my shrieking spirit was pressed from my mind and from my mortal flesh like juice from a grape.
    Man, I needed a beer.
    Hadn’t brought one. Couldn’t get one.
    I tried taking slow deep breaths instead. Through my mouth, to minimize the noise. Just in case the hateful troll, armed with a chain saw, was creeping closer, one gnarled finger poised over the starter button.
    I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.
    The air didn’t taste remotely as good as a cool Corona or a Heineken. It had a faintly bitter tang.
    Next time I went chasing after bad guys, I’d have to bring a cooler full of ice and a six-pack.
    For a while I conned myself with thoughts of all the eight-foot glassy waves waiting to be surfed, all the icy beers and the tacos and the lovemaking with Sasha that lay ahead of me, until the feeling of oppression and the claustrophobic panic gradually lifted.
    I didn’t fully calm down until I was able to summon a mental picture of Sasha’s face. Her gray eyes as clear as rainwater. Her lush mahogany hair. The shape of her mouth curved by laughter. Her radiance.
    Because I’d been cautious, the kidnapper was surely unaware that I was present, which meant he would have no reason to conduct his business without benefit of a lamp. Being unable to see his victim’s terror would diminish his twisted pleasure. The absolute darkness seemed proof to me that he was not dangerously close but in another room, shut off from here but nearby.
    The absence of screams must mean that the child had not yet been touched. To this predator, the pleasure of hearing would be equal to the pleasure of seeing; in the cries of his victims, he would perceive music.
    If I couldn’t detect the dimmest trace of the lamp by which he worked, he wouldn’t be able to see mine. I fished the flashlight from under my belt and switched it on.
    I was in an ordinary elevator alcove. To the right and around a corner, I found a corridor that was quite long and perhaps eight feet wide, with an ash-gray ceramic-tile floor and poured-in-place concrete walls painted pale, glossy blue. It led in one direction: under the length of the warehouse that I had recently traversed at ground level.
    Not much dust had filtered down to this depth, where the air was as still and as cool as that in a morgue. The floor was too clean to reveal footprints.
    The fluorescent bulbs and diffusion panels hadn’t been pulled out of the ceiling. They didn’t pose any danger to me, because power was no longer supplied to any of these buildings.
    On other nights, I had found that the government’s salvage operation had stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base. Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense accountants had decided that the effort was more expensive than the liquidation value of the salvaged goods.
    To my left, the corridor wall was unbroken. Along the right side lay rooms waiting behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors without markings of any kind.
    Even though I was currently unable to consult with my clever canine brother, I was capable of deducing on my own that the slamming of two of these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn me down here. The corridor was so long that my flashlight couldn’t