***I do not own White Collar or its characters***
Peter put a warning finger to his lips and began stepping forward as lightly as possible. The faint sound of the voices increased in volume as the team advanced. Maybe this won't even be a chase, Peter hoped. They approached a leftward curve in the tunnel, and Peter glimpsed a reflection of foreign light from around the corner.
"Flashlights off," he whispered at the men behind him, and in an instant their section of the tunnel blacked out. Thrown into higher relief, the reflected light bounced unsteadily, as if someone kept moving or jostling a flashlight. Peter heard one person speaking, occasionally pausing, but couldn't make out the words with the terrible acoustics. He drew his firearm and motioned his team forward again, this time with intent of discovery.
Peter turned the corner to discover four men squeezed into a tunnel intersection. Three of them were burly but unfamiliar, and the fourth was Edwards himself, just flipping a cell phone shut. "FBI, all of you put your hands in the air!" Peter said firmly, raising his weapon. Before the sentence fully escaped his lips, though, Edwards made a hand signal that had the three unknowns whipping out their own handguns.
One of them fired before Peter could even think of pulling his own trigger. He heard the bullet whiz past his ear, barely burying itself in the dirt wall. "Retreat, retreat!" He yelled, frantically pushing everyone back in the corner. A firefight in a narrow tunnel almost guaranteed injuries and death, and apparently Edwards wasn't afraid to engage in war with federal agents.
"Damn it. Is everyone all right?" As everyone confirmed their status, he could still hear charging footsteps in the distance as his fugitive escaped into the dark passageways. He felt like punching the wall, but a dangerous situation like this left little room for emotion.
He radioed Jones. "We just sighted Edwards, there are four of them. They opened fire. I plan to follow at a distance until they get somewhere more open."
"Copy," came the response a second later. "We haven't seen anything. We'll go back to the beginning and then follow your markers. I'm your backup."
"Copy that."
Peter wished he had found Neal first. They could really use that GPS to figure out Edwards' destination. Right now, all he could do was follow at a distance and hope. When he judged the sounds of running a safe distance away, he had the team follow it again. Luckily, the echo-less chambers left no confusion about which tunnels Edwards had chosen. However, after two minutes of pursuit, the sounds disappeared completely. Peter kept going until he came to another fork, but he heard nothing but silence from both choices.
This time he did pound the wall in frustration, but his anger stalled when his phone rang. Neal again, finally. "Where are you?" he answered expectantly.
"Batt…keep left…pa—" was all he got in response.
"You're breaking up, Neal." Either the con hadn't lied about imminent battery death, or one of them hit a bad patch in Edwards' wired tunnels.
More static, then, "…painting…" followed by silence as the call dropped. Peter's guilt started to gnaw at the pit of his stomach. How would he find Neal now? A tracker only worked if one knew how to get to its location. His sense of urgency increased. If he couldn't find Edwards, he would go after the con in his charge. His fondness for Neal had grown greater than he cared to admit. Any friendship, in fact, overstepped official professional boundaries. But Peter couldn't deny his pang of fear as he listened to Neal's only form of communication fizzle into the depths of the labyrinth.
He attempted to puzzle together the pieces of Neal's broken message. "Painting" could mean anything. This whole case started with a painting. Maybe Neal found it, or maybe Edwards mentioned something. "Keep left," however, rang clear as directions. Keep to the left fork, or forks. Had Neal meant to keep to the left always, or was that just a piece of the instructions? Do I have anything left to lose in this investigation?
"Let's keep going," Peter said, instructing the rest of the team as he aimed for the next left fork. Wherever this path led, it beat completely giving up on Neal. Four left turns later, Peter started to doubt again until his flashlight caught something shiny near the next junction. Shiny and… gold?
The watch looked familiar, though out of place on the dirty floor. Peter picked it up and immediately recognized it as he examined it up close. He'd seen the timepiece nearly everyday, decorating Neal's wrist. Peter found it near the right fork. A tiny spark of excitement made the darkness of the tunnel less bleak as Peter ploughed forward, spotting another shiny item near the next split. This time, a silver lock-pick lay on the right side.
*********
The door opened inward with an ear-grating squeak. Finally. To Neal, the ten minutes of navigating Edwards' tunnels without the small light of his cell phone seemed like an hour. Edwards' long-windedness ate his battery, and he was uncertain of what Peter heard of his last call. He counted on the fed's sharpness and competency, because if Peter lacked either tonight, Neal's life lay at Harry Edwards' mercy.
The cavity's blackness matched that of the tunnel, but supposedly this room used electricity. Neal felt for the hanging chain near the wall to his right and got a grip on it after some fumbling. With a light metallic zip, a single bulb dimly lit the room at its center, and Neal's eyes widened in reverence.
The circular chamber's diameter measured only about twenty feet, but literally hundreds of valuable artifacts crammed into the space. Sculptures, antique furniture, even Tiffany lamps, all of them authentic at least to Neal's casual overview. Instinctually, he wanted to examine every last one; see them, hear them, and feel them, knowing their histories and values. The thrill of forbidden objects would have overwhelmed him if he didn't have a job to finish. Even if he survived, if he failed to fix this he would find himself back in a maximum security cell, and effectively that would end his life as well.
Paintings, all framed and carefully preserved, leaned up against the perimeter on the right. Beautiful, every last one, but he stopped short when his eyes landed on the cool colors and subtle undertones of an unmistakable Vermeer. The characteristic daylight from a window off to the left reflected off the serene face of the singer, her accompanists lost eternally in continuo. Neal gripped the elaborate frame in both hands. He hardly believed he currently feasted his eyes on the most valuable stolen painting in the world.
His daydream cut off abruptly when he heard rapid footsteps approaching in the tunnel. Neal lifted the twenty-four by twenty-seven inch painting with a grunt. The frame's weight made his ribcage protest with a sharp pain. Frantically, he ignored it as he searched for an exit, or anything else remotely helpful. There had to be a back way out, right? Instead, a glint of polished steal caught the corner of his eye. A substantial section of metal etchings leaned next to the paintings, many sized close to that of a standard sheet of paper. Neal did not recognize the artists; shiny newness eliminated the old classics. He paid little attention to the also unknown designs, as the glare from the dim light made his vision spin again. He only heard Edwards' voice nearing the doorway, and without another thought leaned The Concert carefully against a wall and swept several steel etchings into his arms.
So, it's not my favorite chapter for various reasons, but I'm pretty sure it's penultimate at this point. I like art history too much to resist the description. Thank you for the reviews!