Belsey wound his window down and heard a helicopter. It appeared a few seconds later, grazing the top of the smoke, too streamlined for police. As it got closer he saw it was an army Lynx, low enough for the machine guns to be visible. Welcome to Wiltshire. Michael had been right to take precautions.
A second helicopter joined it from the west, stirring up the smoke trails. Fumes started creeping into the car and Belsey wound the window back up. The orange pall was now swallowing cottages as it drifted southwest.
He drove on. Smoke congealed, smothering the world. Visibility reduced to a foot or so. There was a bellow of horn, then a green Bedford military truck filled his windscreen. Belsey skidded up the grass verge. Ten seconds later he passed a motorbike on the ground, a camper van in a ditch. Then a convoy of armoured personnel carriers tore past. The countryside was releasing its military.
He checked the mirrors. Someone was on his tail. A flatbed truck appeared from the haze. Its khaki-clad driver waved for him to pull over. Troops appeared at the entrance to the village cradling submachine guns. The soldiers started waving too. Someone had a megaphone:
“Stop now. Do not proceed. This village is closed.”
Belsey proceeded. How can you close a village? Objects loomed and vanished: civilian cars, a bus shelter. The police-band radio relayed orders for Wiltshire Police to stay away. Then it cut altogether. They’d jammed the signal. A third helicopter joined the first two, trying to slice through the expanding tangerine fog with a beam of light.
Belsey navigated blind. He aimed for Hill View House. Dogs barked from trees on either side. Red lights flashed on a temporary sign by the roundabout: ROAD CLOSED.
He drove past. Two armed men in overalls and respirators tried to block him, then dived out of the way. A bullet ricocheted off the undercarriage of the Skoda and took out his front right wheel. He slid down in his seat as a second smashed a wing mirror. Belsey careered past the church, narrowly missed the phone box and crashed into the woods by Easton’s old holiday home. He scraped to a stop with a branch bent against his windscreen. Ahead of him, wedged deeper into the trees, was a white Vauxhall Vivaro. Belsey grabbed the Webley and his torch.
The Vivaro’s engine was still warm to the touch, back doors open, packaging for detonation cord and explosives on the floor of the hold. Belsey stumbled on towards the cottage, following a trail of broken branches and scuffed ground. He ran past the cottage to the hillside, over the crest of the hill to what Belsey hadn’t seen last time he was here and could barely see through the orange smoke: high chain-link topped with barbed wire. Beyond it, built into the side of the rocky incline, was a small door into the grass.
The fence had been cut. Belsey ran for the gap.
The explosion threw him backwards. He found himself on the ground with soil and stone raining into his face. He covered his head. His ears were ringing. A black dot occupied the centre of his field of vision. Then it faded. As he got to his feet again he realised that some of the ringing was from alarms.
He crawled through the cut fence. Patches of grass smouldered, puddles of flame dotting the field. The hill itself had been torn open to expose concrete and metal. He could feel the heat coming off the fallen bricks. The air was even thicker now, dust mingling with the orange smoke. Broken lengths of wire hung across the newly ripped entrance.
Belsey climbed over the warm rubble. He pushed through the wires and found himself in a narrow aluminium duct. It ended abruptly at a sheer drop with an emergency ladder nailed into the rough stone of the air shaft. Belsey couldn’t see the bottom as he started to climb down.
53
FIVE MINUTES’ DESCENT AND HE WAS IN WHAT LOOKED like a cramped corner of the old mine, chipped limestone walls interrupted on one side by flat twentieth-century brickwork. The bricks surrounded a black, blast-proof door. Belsey pulled it open and walked through into neon light.
He stood beside a ventilation fan the size of a jet engine. Its twin stood motionless at the distant end of a train platform. Strip lights ran the length of the ceiling. A row of wooden guards’ booths faced the tracks: Consent to Searches. Decontamination Mandatory. Shrill, metallic alarms echoed from the depths of the bunker.
Belsey walked down the platform to the checkpoint and past the booths into a reception hall with steep escalators on either side like frozen waterfalls. Two boards hung down on chains, giving a choice of sectors: Cabinet, Air Ministry, Communications, Hospital . . . Beyond the hall was a crossroads. The passageways leading out from here were wide enough to drive two cars side by side.
Belsey saw movement ahead and ran. Emergency lights striped the darkness. Doorways led into small rooms. Soon he found himself in a zone of offices: chairs wrapped in brown paper, one room with twenty or thirty black telephones tangled on the floor. The air was damp. There was a crushing loneliness in the place. It entered through the nostrils and stuck in the chest, tightening to claustrophobia. After five minutes the offices became bedrooms, with narrow iron bed-frames. Then he reached another crossroads: square concrete corridors, no sign of life. The alarms were fainter now. He ran again, trying to note landmarks: tendrils of seaweed-like growth across the bricks, a pair of sewing machines on a wooden box. He found a guard’s booth with a signpost beside it: BBC Studio ½ mile, Telephone Exchange 1 mile . . . It had a map of more local facilities pasted to the wall: a dentist, a police station, two workshops, a laundry. Belsey was making his choice when doors began to slam: someone less than a minute away, searching, lost as he was.
“Jemma!” he called, and her voice came back so faint he thought he might have imagined it.
“Nick!’
Then a scream. He headed for the scream. Into the Government Sector, according to the checkpoints. The Government Sector had whitewashed walls. Signs pointed down dark corridors: Intelligence Staff, Treasury, Home Office. It was unlit: no alarms, no lights. Belsey switched his torch on. Another scream. The corridor ended at a set of double doors and he pushed through into what looked like a long laboratory with extractor hoods, tea urns on the floor, a row of bread ovens. A few seconds later he was in a canteen with long benches. He tried calling Jemma’s name again. Silence.
He headed onto the main thoroughfare. Rooms looked familiar. He knew he hadn’t doubled back. Don’t lose it, he thought, not now. He arrived at an intersection with a dead rat by the wall and made a mental note of it. There was a different smell now, of places more forgotten, more fungal. He ran past IV-drip stands and crates of cutlery into a long storeroom, its stacks of cardboard boxes rotted into a landscape of half-subsided formations. He aimed his torch.
“Nick, he’s got a gun.” Jemma’s voice was clear. He couldn’t see her. A shot whistled past. He moved into the cover of a cardboard stack. Next time he looked they were in the open, two hundred metres beyond him: Jemma with her shorn scalp, Easton with head torch and fume mask. He had equipment strapped to him: rucksack, tool belt, a gun in one hand, a map in the other. Jemma was cuffed to the tool belt. The gun was a semi-automatic of some kind. He fired it again. Belsey waited. In the silence that followed he heard another sound, this one from the maze he’d just passed through. Flapping wings, he thought. Was that possible? Birds. Or maybe the rumble of thunder. It took him a moment to realise it was a lot of heavy military boots.
“Nick!”
A stack of boxes tumbled towards him. Doors slammed on the far side of what was now a more jagged landscape. Belsey pushed his way through, choking on clouds of powdered milk. The sound of boots had become a constant drum roll. He stepped through rotten cardboard, over mounds of ashtrays and nail brushes. He could hear military commands. The sign on the door out of the room wasn’t inviting: NO ENTRY. DANGER.
Belsey opened it and stared.
A lake stretched away from him, black water rippling beneath a low brick sky. He followed the ripples with his torch and saw Jemma splashing, falling. Easton had one hand around her neck, the other holding his rucksack out of the water as he plunged forwa
rd.
Belsey jumped in. The water was freezing. It lapped at his thighs. He held the Webley and torch at chest height and chased as best as he could. The bottom of the lake sloped downwards until the cold clenched around his stomach. Difficult striding. He didn’t fancy a confrontation in the water. Jemma’s cries echoed off the vaulted brickwork.
Easton was cutting across diagonally. He knew where he was going. Belsey kept in their wake. The far shore appeared, and Belsey saw them haul themselves out of the water before disappearing further into the tunnels beyond.
He dragged himself out thirty seconds later and lay dripping onto a grated walkway. There was a notice on the wall.
WEST CENTRAL SECTOR
SEVERE STRUCTURAL DAMAGE
ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.
Belsey got to his feet. A ramp sunk away from the water’s edge. Belsey followed the drip trail under low pipes, down a long, tight corridor. He could smell something awful lingering. They were approaching the scene of whatever had occurred. He turned the corner and saw Easton and Jemma sixty metres ahead. Easton had the rucksack off, mask up, working away at the final barrier: a small, dented black door. He had pliers in one hand, gun in the other, det cord and plastic explosives at his feet. Belsey kept close to the wall. Jemma was uncuffed but anytime she moved Easton raised the gun.
“Michael,” Belsey said. Easton fired towards him. Belsey pressed himself back against the bricks. He inched closer, watching explosives being moulded, watching the gun hand. He heard the sudden roar of churning water behind him, shouted commands.
“Give her to me. I’m not going to stop you.” Easton looked at Belsey. Belsey snapped the Webley and let the bullets spill to the ground. Easton waved Jemma away and she ran. She collapsed into Belsey’s arms, then slid from his arms to the ground.
“Are you OK?” Belsey asked, not taking his eyes off Easton. He couldn’t hear her answer. It was a stupid question. Easton was alone with the door now. He needed his hands free to sort the detonation cord, but that meant putting his own gun down. Belsey could see him trying to decide. He glanced around, met Belsey’s eyes. Then he put his gun down and picked up the pliers.
“There’s nothing there. Michael. What do you expect to find?”
No response. Belsey picked up one of the bullets. He looked at the black door, at Easton sweating, almost home. The cord was rigged around the door handles. Get it open, Belsey thought.
Too late.
The corridor was tangled in red and green lines, a cat’s cradle of laser sights.
“Step away!”
Easton took a lighter from his pocket. He clicked it as floodlight drowned the corridor. Belsey squinted in the sudden glare.
“Step away with your hands raised or we will fire.”
The cord’s safety fuse sparked. Easton moved aside. Everything happened at once. Someone shot. The cord blew. There was intense heat, and now everyone was firing, a barrage of metal against metal. The passage filled with acrid smoke. Then silence.
Belsey put his hands up. It seemed prudent. He expected they might do away with him now, under the cover of this moment. They’d shown they could do it efficiently enough. Someone said: “Hold fire.”
Easton lay on his back. He’d lost an arm and the left side of his face. Belsey walked over, hands still raised. No one shot him. It seemed this was the actual army rather than some faction of the intelligence services bent on his destruction. He checked there was nothing among the entrails that was still live, ticking or burning, rigged to make a final statement. He paid his last respects. Blood soaked his shoes.
“Step away.”
Belsey straightened. He could hear someone tending to Jemma. Beyond Easton’s body, the metal door lay off its hinges. Belsey tried to see through the gap. He stepped closer. Then he found himself stepping through.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The space was vast, with a domed ceiling high above structures that were themselves two or three floors tall. Supporting pillars rose several hundred feet to the roof. The buildings sheltering beneath the dome formed what appeared to be a street carved from charcoal.
The smell uncoiled in his chest. He had only experienced something like it once before, after a fire at a hospital. You felt it in the bones, sad and sinister. He stepped between the buildings, climbing over debris and fallen beams. Walls had collapsed, revealing shelves, charred desks, piles of books and deep drifts of singed paper. Somewhere in the police part of his brain he was reading the damage, looking for evidence of arson, accelerants, for whatever kept them trapped. He was imagining being eight here. How terrifying. How odd. You would try to escape. Maybe get lost in the maze beyond. And then, to find you could never return . . . He passed stumps of what looked like cinema seats, a small room with the remains of the alphabet around its walls. Then the path opened out and he arrived at a central square bordered by individual stone buildings.
He was turning, wondering where you’d retreat to, what you’d do in the final moments, when he saw it, across the square. Its roof was gone but the bar survived. Belsey stepped over what remained of the Red Lion’s front wall. It had seen better days. Glassware lay in sooty shards. He picked up a pewter tankard. A single stool waited by the bar. He swept the ash off and sat down.
Soldiers passed on the other side of the crumbled wall, following the beams of their headlamps, guns lowered. They were silent now. Their lights reached the outer shell of the domed chamber revealing murals painted onto concrete, smoke-blackened depictions of the seasons, fields of corn, phases of the moon. Belsey watched paratroopers, bulky with armour, lowering themselves from hatches in the dome itself, abseiling down and stopping mid-descent, twisting on their ropes.
He was barely aware of the rest. Someone grabbed him. There were stairs, dogs, an electric buggy. He emerged through a narrow doorway into the grounds of a military base with whitewashed barracks and the largest sky he’d ever seen. Jemma lay on the grass, wrapped in a foil blanket, receiving oxygen. Belsey lay down a few feet away from her.
“Sorry,” he said.
He declined the oxygen. He breathed Wiltshire air. Scraps of orange smoke unravelled, marbling the sky like drops of blood in water. The air smelt of grass and boot polish. He watched a flag of the Royal Air Force stroke the breeze, then closed his eyes.
Epilogue
FAMILIES CROWDED THE TRAIN TO WILTSHIRE, STANDING in aisles, gazing out as the city became suburbs and then brown fields. Belsey changed at Chippenham, accompanying the throng onto the antiquated branch line that would take them towards Piltbury. He could smell bonfires.
Men and women had gathered at Piltbury station, wrapped in waterproofs. It took him a moment to realise that they were all here for the ceremony as well. The event had brought minicabs out from the adjacent villages. There was a tentative sense of festivity.
All were heading for the new memorial. It had been sited at the top of the hill, above the village, not so far from the vent Michael Easton had blown. People moved towards it like a matchday crowd, clogging the village’s narrow high street.
The national papers ran Piltbury and its secrets for several days. There was outrage and some penitence. It had been, the politicians agreed, a different world, with the threat of nuclear war, two superpowers, and undoubtedly different people in government. Soon other stories hit the news and interest began to move on. Belsey was suspended on full pay. Senior people scratched their heads. Two days of debriefing had left him and his anonymous interviewers drained. They weren’t a great deal older than he was. Besides, all he could reveal was a succession of poor decisions. He may have caused someone somewhere a degree of embarrassment but he felt sure the intelligence services would reform themselves around the wound.
Belsey’s tribunal was set for November. He helped Jemma sell her story, which brought in more than a crate of dusty champagne would have done. He couldn’t sell his own due to the ongoing investigation into his conduct, but he ensured Monroe had everything, as some form of
insurance for himself as well as favours returned. Monroe spun it out and coined in heavily. He got the scoop on the sabotage and mentioned everything apart from the true identity of Ferryman. Belsey asked him about this, over drinks in the Jamaica, and got a vague answer about family privacy, which made him laugh into his pint. But Belsey thought he understood. A secret’s nothing once it’s shared. Sometimes you want to keep a little back. Or maybe someone had had words with Tom Monroe. Polite ones, anonymously, about where to draw the line. Maybe they gave him money too. Monroe’s book on the subject was due out around Christmas.
Kirsty Craik disappeared. A few weeks later, Belsey heard she’d been moved to the Midlands Specialist Crime Unit. He got a call from a mutual acquaintance on the team, DC Jason Stock.
“She single?”
“I don’t know, Jason. Ask her. Is she OK?”
“She asked me if I’d heard from you. Asking after you, like.”
“Did she?”
“What’s that about? Did you do her, mate?”
Belsey returned to Hotel President. At one point he started packing. Eventually the removal boxes settled in. Sometimes he’d sit at night, listening to the pipes, looking at the picture of the crowd on Walbrook and remember what it felt like, walking beneath London. He had moments, stumbling back along Chancery Lane from the Blue Anchor, turning onto New Oxford Street and glimpsing Centre Point, when it felt like a curtain hadn’t been fully drawn. He was back in that other London. And it felt bittersweet, like passing places associated with a love affair. No one else could see it, or no one else cared, so what kind of knowledge was that? He let the city revert to its cover story. Then, as summer released its grip, he read about the opening of a memorial at Site 3.
PILTBURY WAS QUITE PLEASANT without the threat of death stalking its lanes. Early October felt crisp. He walked, enjoying being out of the city. He had not really noticed autumn until now. Past the Quarry House, past Hill View and a For Sale sign by the road. He peered inside but the cottage was no longer occupied.
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