Chapter 45 - The Anvil’s Secret
The sound of rubber soles against wet crushed limestone was nearly imperceptible, but fifty years around running lathes makes an old machinist's ears sensitive to the slightest change in pitch.
Two men. Moving along the western wall to flank the breaker panel.
I didn’t head for the door. I headed for the trapdoor behind the central tool crib.
My father, Thomas Reed, had bolted the massive eight-hundred-pound Peter Wright anvil into the foundation slab in the autumn of 1954. It was forged in England from solid wrought iron with a tool-steel face, resting upon a white oak stump sunk five feet into the earth. For four decades, I had struck red-hot steel on that very face, never questioning why the concrete apron surrounding the base was poured four inches thicker than the rest of the shop floor.
I dropped the Remington into the crook of my arm, reached behind the oxygen-acetylene tanks, and hauled out my twenty-ton hydraulic bottle jack.
I wedged the jack beneath the steel lifting lugs my father had welded onto the oak cradle—lugs I had always assumed were meant for moving the stump with an engine hoist. I pumped the handle.
*Clank. Hiss. Clank.*
The hydraulic seal screamed under the load, but slowly, inexorably, the eight-hundred-pound anvil and its oak pedestal began to rise. There was no grinding of stone; the entire assembly swung upward on a hidden, counterbalanced grease-pivot set into an oil-drenched recess below.
Beneath the oak stump lay no dirt.
Revealed under the sweep of my penlight was a slab of half-inch cold-rolled armor plate, secured by a four-tumbler mechanical lock mechanism and a heavy rotary bypass valve.
"Check your basement safe, Arthur," the woman’s voice echoed in my head.
My fingers trembled slightly as I knelt on the cold concrete. The brass key from 1968 didn’t fit a door. Its square spindle matched the center socket of the bypass valve perfectly.
Before I inserted the key, my eyes caught a glint of copper wire snaking out from beneath the edge of the steel hatch.
I froze, barely daring to breathe.
The wire ran directly into the secondary conduit of the shop's natural gas line—the line feeding Clara's heat-treating furnace on the upper floor. It was spliced into an electronic blasting cap wired to a pressure-differential switch.
The mechanism was terrifyingly simple: the moment Clara turned the valve on the furnace tomorrow morning, the pressure drop in the gas pipe would close the circuit on the blasting cap, detonating whatever rested inside this subterranean vault. The blast would blow the entire foundation out from beneath the shop, collapsing the building inward and vaporizing all evidence under two thousand degrees of burning diesel and propane.
"Julian Sterling was just the dog," I whispered, cold sweat stinging my eyes. "These people build tombs."
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From above, the faint squeak of a rubber boot against the sheet metal of the shop door cut through the silence. The latch rattled.
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