‘What? What did you learn?’
She paused. Stuffed her hand into her right pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper. Opened it and passed it to him.
He looked at it. It was full of cuneiform script. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t tell me anything.’
She took a deep breath to explain.
But didn’t get the time to talk.
Perhaps it was the darkness had made them feel safe. Or perhaps it was the comfort of speaking to someone, standing eye to eye with another human being who had the same questions and worries, and being able to vent all the thoughts that kept spinning and growing the way thoughts do when they’re trapped inside.
Then again, perhaps it was just because the guards had been moving up the stone staircase in absolute silence, the sounds of their footsteps muted by the huge wooden door at the far end of the terrace.
William and Janine were standing in a narrow passageway, well out of sight of the door, when the unmistakable sound of its electronic lock broke the silence.
‘Afraid of heights?’ she asked, without waiting for an answer.
Before William had a chance to think, she took his arm again, this time pulling him along the terrace and away from the door, and he kept following, worried that the terrace might suddenly come to an end and that her question would start to make sense. Her bare feet hammered on the ground with an almost inaudible rhythm, and William tried to keep pace with her, as quietly as possible with his hard-heeled shoes, and below the banisters the dark abyss didn’t become any less terrifying no matter how far they ran.
Then, without warning, she stopped. Looked at him, serious expression. ‘Two floors down there’s a window. Watch me, and do exactly as I do.’
The next moment, she swung herself out over the precipice.
William’s immediate thought was that she was about to die.
But she didn’t.
As he opened his eyes, he realised this wasn’t the first time she’d gone down that way. Not once did she have to search for a hand- or foothold, she kept reaching out for holes and protruding stones, expertly using them to lower herself one storey down, on to a narrow ledge that ran along the wall. There she waited, halfway to the window she was aiming for.
Looked back up at him. Your turn.
It struck him that he hadn’t answered her question, and he realised she probably wasn’t too interested anyway. But if she were, he would have said yes. No matter how suicidal he was, he didn’t like the thought of falling from a cliff.
Behind him, he could hear the guards’ feet moving across the terrace.
And as he saw the first beams from their flashlights dance over the stone floor, he decided that heights probably weren’t the biggest threat facing him right now.
11
When William climbed through the lead-lined window two floors down, he was so high from adrenalin that even if he had lost his grip and fallen he might not have noticed.
His body was perfectly ready to die.
He’d tried to memorise the few holds Janine used on her way down. It had all looked remarkably easy when she did it, but William hadn’t seen an obstacle course in several years and trying to follow her lead didn’t get any easier, especially with the steep mountain slope beneath him and the guards closing in on the terrace above. He lost his grip several times, fighting to cling on with slippery palms and with his wrists still stinging under the surgical tape, but at the last minute he managed to steady himself and hang on, until he finally lowered himself down on to the narrow shelf beside Janine.
Then came the hard part. Under the overhang, her climbing route continued beneath the ledge itself, and even if the good news was that it shielded them from view, the bad news was there was nothing there to break their fall, nothing but a sheer wall and a long, deep plunge.
But there hadn’t been any time to think.
Janine had hauled herself over, signalling for him to follow, and he did as she instructed, trembling from fear while his fingers kept feeling for the cracks and crevices she pointed at. It was cold, but his shirt was soaking from sweat, and every time he let go of a grip, swung his body in a panicked arc until a hand or a foot made it to the next hold, every time he could hear himself promise all kinds of things to all kinds of higher powers if only he made it to the window in one piece.
When he finally caught sight of Janine’s hand, he grabbed it and let her pull him in to the opening where she was crouching. Pressed himself in next to her, stock still and his back firmly against the small window behind them, aware that the tiniest movement might send him tumbling into the abyss.
She couldn’t help smiling. ‘And when I lived in Nevada I used to do a bit of competitive climbing. Did I mention that?’
‘Just get me out of here.’
She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘Still have the piece of paper I gave you?’
Hardly daring to move, he reached into his pocket to hand back the folded piece of paper with the cuneiform script. And she took it, slid it carefully between the sill and window, pushed up a latch on the inside.
He crawled through, heaved himself down from a deep recess, landed with his feet against the metal floor of a long hallway. And as Janine closed the window behind them, jumped down after him and pointed towards a fluorescent-lit walkway, his mind ran through all the promises he’d made on the way down and hoped they would be open to renegotiation.
As they hurried along the corridor, William could see it was different from the others.
He was completely lost now, it was impossible to determine whether he was above or below the floor with his office and bedroom. Either way, there was no doubt this part of the castle was used for a different purpose. Apart from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and the sterile steel flooring, the hallway was lined with huge steel doors in faded olive-green; at a glance, it could have been anywhere in the world, in any building that had been insensitively renovated in the mid twentieth century.
But while William was lost, Janine had clearly been there before.
She walked with rapid, purposeful steps, and he couldn’t help being impressed by how well she knew the place. Somehow she’d got hold of a key card – he told himself he had to ask her how – and she must have formed the same plan as William: to map out as much of the building as possible, to learn its weaknesses and shortcuts and security loopholes and then, eventually, try to escape.
A plan that had just hit a brick wall. Somehow, they had set off an alarm. The guards were looking for them. And whatever might happen if they were caught – when they were caught, he thought to himself – they wouldn’t be getting another chance.
At the end of the corridor, cutting across the ancient stone passage, was a massive door in the same faded green steel as all the others, and with the usual electronic lock next to it.
But this time, the diode refused to turn green. As Janine held up her plastic card, the way she’d been doing at all the doors leading to the terrace, all she was met with was an obstinate click and a low tone informing her that something was wrong.
She tried again. Same response. And again.
She knew what it meant. And yet, she tried again. And once more.
Finally, her shoulders sank in desperation. And she turned to William.
‘They’ve got us.’
Deep down in the heart of the mountain, Keyes was seconds away from missing the three red lines that slowly scrolled downwards on the monitor in front of her.
Minutes earlier, she’d instructed the program to warn her the instant Watkins’ card was used in any of the readers. When Janine tried to open the door, the computer registered the time and location, exactly as it always did, but marking this entry in flashing red to stand out on the screen.
Keyes, however, was engaged in a heated argument with Franquin.
She hadn’t managed to keep quiet. She had told him what everyone already knew: that their security system was a patchwork of upgrades that
made it impossible to work with, and that their cameras were far too few and too poorly positioned. Eventually Franquin had snarled back at her that this was hardly the moment, and then they both snapped.
And all the while, Janine’s flashing rows kept travelling down the screen.
Step by step, further and further down the list as other cards were swiped in other locks and squeezed in as new lines above hers.
It wasn’t until they were about to scroll off the screen altogether that Keyes turned and saw the red rows at the bottom. And in that instant, the argument was over.
Her first move was to alert the guards.
Then, she realised which door they’d been trying to open.
As she lifted her radio for the second time, there was terror in her voice.
When the sound of running footsteps started to echo on the other side of the metal door, it was impossible to tell how far away they were. But they were undoubtedly the footsteps of more than one person, which meant William and Janine were only seconds away from meeting the very guards they’d just risked their lives escaping.
They were trapped in a sealed corridor. Around the corner in one direction were a couple of doors leading to small, windowless rooms, storage facilities or cells or service quarters or whatever they had originally been built for. Regardless, they were nothing but dead ends. Janine had been here before, and she knew all too well that none of them led out of there.
Behind them was the window leading back out to nothing. In front of them a metal door that refused to let them pass. There simply was no way out.
William looked round. Of three bad options, the only thing they could do was to choose the least worst.
‘What’s in the rooms?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Can they be locked from inside?’
She couldn’t say.
He was clutching at straws, but they couldn’t just stay here. As he grabbed her hand, pulled her away from the sealed door, back towards the row of doors down the corridor, he noticed that she offered no resistance.
She was terrified now, the sound of running feet coming ever closer, and she surrendered, allowing him to lead her away, her eyes fixed on the lock. Soon the diode would change, the guards would find them, and everything she’d done these last few months would be wasted.
She was almost apathetic when William opened the first door. Ushered her inside.
And the moment it slammed shut behind them, the red diode turned to green.
Later, when William would ask himself what he expected to find inside that room, he wouldn’t have an answer. Probably because he hadn’t expected to find anything at all. But also probably because whatever he might have expected would have been as nothing compared to the sight that confronted them.
Only the thick pane of acrylic glass prevented the woman from grabbing them.
Like an invisible obstacle, it stopped her hand in mid-flow, a rattling smack that made William and Janine spin around, meeting the woman’s eyes on the other side of transparent, centimetre-thick walls.
She could have been fifty, maybe younger; it was impossible to tell, given the state she was in. Her blanched grey skin was bathed in sweat, her eyes half closed as if exhausted but desperately fighting to stay awake, her hair plastered across her scalp in moist, wispy strands.
She lay in a glass coffin, an adult-sized incubator in the middle of the windowless room illuminated by purple fluorescent lights, as if someone had laid her to rest in a reptile tank.
She let her hand stay glued to the plastic as she breathed raggedly, until gravity took control and pulled her emaciated fingers down to the mattress. Sliding red smears along the pane were the only trace of her attempt to make contact, a vertical roadmap of her hand’s journey downwards, back to its place on the mattress where it came to a lifeless rest on a sweat-sodden, bloodstained sheet.
‘Helena?’
It was Janine’s voice. Though barely more than a whisper, it cut through the silence as sharply as the smack of the woman’s hand had done against the plastic, and William turned, looked at her. Her eyes were fixed on the tank in front of them. She didn’t speak. Merely shook her head, as if she refused to believe what she was seeing.
And the silence seemed to last for ever, until eventually the woman forced herself to turn her head. Lock her tired eyes on to Janine’s.
‘Run,’ she said.
Her voice was barely a voice at all. It was a barely perceptible movement of her mouth, an exhalation of air and hardly even that.
‘What have they done to you?’
The woman closed her eyes. She didn’t have much time left.
‘Run,’ she said again, with unimaginable effort. ‘Now.’ She spoke without opening her eyes. Without moving. Without anything.
‘Helena?’ whispered Janine. No answer. ‘Helena!’
But there was no response.
Not when Janine hammered on the acrylic glass, harder and harder, trying to make contact. Not when she bit her lip to stop her tears, or turned away because she couldn’t bear to see.
And not even a second later, when the door to the corridor flew open, the massive frame bulging like foil where the bolt had been blown out of its socket. Six men surrounded them, maintaining a safe distance, disposable gloves clutching their automatic weapons, white masks over their faces. Shouting at them not to move.
The chase was over.
William and Janine did as they were told. They stood motionless at the centre of the floor, let the guards flood them with questions about where they’d been, which corridors they’d used, what they’d seen and what they’d touched. Their voices were strained, almost scared, and every time Janine or William moved, the guns rattled in their direction to remind them that the slightest show of resistance would have dire consequences.
Eventually, the guards backed out of the room, their sights still trained on the two prisoners. They kept their distance, gestured to William and Janine to follow them through the door that had previously blocked their way.
And they obeyed without a word. Left the room. Marched slowly down the corridor.
Behind them, the door slammed shut into its busted frame.
Inside her glass coffin, the woman whose name was Helena Watkins had already stopped breathing.
12
If Franquin had refocused his gaze, he would have seen his own face reflected in the glass pane in front of him. He’d have seen the concern in his eyes, the wrinkles around his mouth that always grew deeper when he was worried: cracks through an already bumpy landscape, spreading like caverns from the pursed line that was his lips.
But Franquin had more important things to worry about than his appearance. His eyes were focused on the other side of the safety glass, far away into the large, blindingly illuminated chamber.
The window was almost three centimetres thick. Then came a layer of absolute vacuum before the next centimetre-thick pane of the same tempered high-security glass as the first. It was designed to resist anything, made from the same kind of quartz glass as the space shuttle, and all entry and exit to and from the room was via an airlock that had been specially manufactured by another NASA subcontractor.
And yet, he thought to himself, they still hadn’t managed to contain it.
His eyes passed over the long rows of hospital beds. Avoided counting the number of bodies in various sweaty stages of inexorable decline towards an agonising death. Avoided fixing his gaze on anyone in particular, avoided trying to determine who was still alive and who was still clinging on the brink.
After all, he had saved them. At least, that’s what he tried to tell himself.
Most of them had been given significantly better lives; they didn’t have to freeze or go hungry any more, and many of them would long since have been dead if they hadn’t ended up here. What they were going through now was the price they had chosen to pay. Admittedly, they hadn’t been aware of the consequences, not to the full extent, but nevertheless it
had been their own choice. And as his eyes travelled from one bloodstained sheet to the next, Franquin shook off the uncomfortable feeling with the same determination as always. Or at least with the same effort to revive that determination, to make it drown out the nagging voice of his own conscience.
Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture.
In order to save the world, you must sacrifice individuals.
That was his mantra, and he did what he always did, he kept repeating it inside his head until he believed it.
Eventually his eyes reached the wall at the end of the room. The woman slowly walking around inside, back and forth between the beds, sensed his gaze and looked up at him through her misty visor. She wore thick, airtight overalls in a white, rubbery plastic, the air pressure high inside them to ensure that any puncture would push the air out rather than drawing it in, giving her a chance to get out before it was too late. Her eyes were empty, devoid of emotion, but Franquin knew that the same was true of his own. It was the only way to cope.
She stopped at the foot of one of the beds. The sheets were clean, and the man who lay under them, sedated and on his back, had a faint shade of stubble on his face. From a distance he looked perfectly healthy.
Franquin hoped he was. Not for the man’s sake. And not for his own.
But for everyone else’s.
The woman stayed by his bed. Ran though the same routine she’d followed with the other patients. Took readings from the machine by the bedside: heart rate, temperature, oxygen levels. Lifted the sheet and inspected his body. Felt his skin, looked for lesions, let her rubber gloves wander in search for anything that shouldn’t be there. And Franquin waited. Allowed her to take her time.
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