Free Under Siege by Stephen Coonts

After assassinating the President, he would be the quarry. If he could do the unexpected, stay one jump ahead of those who hunted him, the chase would be-ah, the chase would be sublime, his grandest adventure.
    And if he lost and his hunters won, so be it. Nothing lives forever. For the mountain lion and the bull elk and Henry Cbaron, living was the challenge. Death will come for the quick and the bold, the slow and the care 11 the wise an the foolish, each and every one.
    Death is easy. Except for a moment or two of pain, death has no terrors for those who are willing to face life. Henry Charon’s acceptance of the biologically inevitable was not an intellectual exercise for a philosophy class, but subconscious, ingrained. He had killed too often to fear it.
    Now he reached that place in the tunnel he had found on his last visit. It was in a long, gentle curve, halfway up the wall. As he had been walking along he had momentarily felt a puff of cooler air. Investigation had revealed a narrow, oblong gap just wide enough for a wiry man to wriggle through. On the other side was an ancient basement, the dark home of rats and insects.
    After checking the area with his flashlight, Henry Charon squirmed through the gaping crack, which was lined with stones at odd angles. He was now in a room with a dirt floor and walls of old brick. The ceiling was a concrete slab. Above that, Charon had concluded after an afternoon of discreet pacing, was dirt and an asphalt basketball court.
    This basement was at least a century old. The house which had stood above it had apparently been demolished thirty or forty years ago during a spasm of enthusiasm for urban renewal. The ceiling slab had not been poured here, the edges were not mated to the brick walls in any way. No doubt the demolition contractor had thought it cheaper to just cover the hole rather than pay to haul in dirt to fill it.
    There was no way out of this room except through the subway tunnel. That was the bad news. The good news was that the subway tunnel was the only entrance. A man would be reasonably safe here for a short while if he could get in without being observed.
    Air entered this subterranean vault fi-from several cracks in the brick walls and around the large stones that choked the opening through which coal had once probably been dumped into the basement. Charon suspected that nearby
    other basements, other century-old ruins of nineWashington, and the dark air passages were by mts to go back and forth, He checked the supplies he had brought here on two evenings last week, on his last trip to Washington. Canned food, a stemo stove, a first-aid kit, two gallons of water, three blankets, and two flashlights with extra D-cell batteries. It was all here, apparently undisturbed. He examined one of the blankets more carefully with his flashlight. A rat had apparently decided it would make a good nest. He shook out the blanket and refolded it.
    He picked up a handful of dirt from the floor and sifted it through his fingers. It was dry, the consistency of dust. That was good. This would not be a safe place to be if water in any quantity ever came in.
    Charon turned off the flashlight and sat in the darkness near the exit hole, listening. The sounds of traffic on the street twenty to thirty feet over his head were always there. Faint but audible. There was another sound too, of such low frequency as almost to be felt rather than heard. He eased his head out into the tunnel for a look, then crawled out. Now he heard it, a faint rumble. It seemed to be coming down the tunnel.
    Standing in the subway tunnel he reinspected the hole with the flash. He wanted to leave no obvious evidence that anyone had been in there. Satisfied, he walked south as the rumbling noise faded again to silence. Not total silence, of course. He could still hear the street sounds from the world above.
    If Tasson just wanted George Bush assassinated, that would be a large enough challenge to satisfy anyone,