Then all that remained would be everything else.
They sprinted silently through the corridors, Janine in front, at first a dozen steps ahead to show the way, but the distance kept growing and at regular intervals he had to push himself to the brink not to lose her as she rounded the next corner.
It was true that she didn’t have his skills and formal training, but then again it was equally true that William lacked hers.
Or to put it another way: she was in good shape and he was not.
His breaths burned through his throat, as if someone was pulling a red-hot grater up and down inside him, but with every rasp came new air and he had no choice, he hadn’t run for years and now he was running for his life.
That was exactly it. He was running for his life. His, and maybe everyone else’s too.
And he didn’t care how much it hurt, the stone tiles against his soft heels, barefoot so as not to be heard, the vibrations that travelled up into his knees and hips and extra pounds, the breaths he had to take even though his lungs screamed at him to stop, as if that would make anything better. He didn’t care how much it hurt, because sooner or later someone would discover what they were doing and if they weren’t out by then it would be too late.
And they kept running, Janine with well-placed steps, her long hair billowing in the wind and William coming up behind as fast as he could.
They passed door after door.
Pressed Rodriguez’s card against lock after lock.
It still worked the way it should.
And they both prayed silently that it would keep doing so for just a little longer.
It’s the small things that cause the biggest changes, and in this case it was a file of instructions.
The file belonged to Maurice Franquin, and it lay on a table in the blue parliament, and it was the middle of the night and nobody usually reads a file of instructions then.
But Franquin was wide awake.
He’d set aside a few hours for sleep, but life had stepped up a gear and his mind was racing and refused to stop no matter how much he tried. Eventually he’d given in, and decided to read the thick dossier once again, the one with all the regulations and routines that he’d already started to set in motion, and that he would follow to the letter over the next couple of days.
That’s when he realised it wasn’t in his room.
It only took him a second to remember where he had it last, and he stayed under his warm blanket for a few minutes more as he negotiated with himself.
Was it worth it? Would he be able to sleep if he didn’t? Or might it be just as well to go down and fetch it?
He already knew the answer.
He got out of his bed, pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt, felt the cold fabric scrape against his skin the way clothes always do at night, and he reached for his key card and began the long walk down to the underground section of the complex.
The moment he met the hard steel doors, many levels down into the mountain, the forgotten file changed the course of everything.
Suddenly, Franquin’s key wouldn’t work.
He held it up to the reader by the door, as he’d done day in day out, year after year. But the green diode refused come on. The lock protested with an annoying buzz and flashed its red diode at him and what the hell was this?
He wasn’t in the mood. He was too tired to mess around. Okay, he couldn’t sleep, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t tired, and standing around half-dressed in the middle of the night in the depths of a cavernous mountain unable to open a door was the last thing he needed.
He flicked through his phone to find her number.
Knew he’d be waking her up but it couldn’t be helped.
It was her job.
Evelyn Keyes was woken by the sound of her phone, and when she saw Franquin’s name flash she answered immediately.
‘There’s something wrong with the locks,’ he said, not bothering with pleasantries.
‘Wrong?’ she said. Not because she hadn’t heard. But because she wasn’t fully awake and she needed to buy some time.
Franquin repeated himself, told her how he’d suddenly been locked out of the central part of the complex, and read out the code engraved on a metal plate next to the door, digit by digit to let Keyes know where he was.
And Keyes listened. Peered through eyes that wanted nothing more than to close and go back to sleep. But she did what was required: she started up the handheld terminal by her bed, connected to the security system that let her monitor its status remotely, already aware that if some part of the system had locked up she wouldn’t be able to solve it from here but would need to go down to the security centre and please don’t make me, she thought, please let it be something trivial and please let me go back to sleep.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the darkness, her face ice blue from the cold glow of the touchscreen.
And then she froze. Midway through sitting up. As if she realised that this was the calm before the storm, and as if she deliberately wanted to hold on to it for as long as she could.
‘Where, exactly, did you say you were?’
Though she already knew.
And Franquin read the number from the door panel again, and of course it matched the number she’d punched in, as she’d known it would.
There wouldn’t be any more sleep for her tonight.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your key card,’ she said, already on her feet, pulling her uniform jacket over the thin top she slept in. ‘It’s just that you’re not really you.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Franquin.
‘It isn’t you by that door. It’s William Sandberg.’
Rodriguez received the summons from Keyes only seconds after she ended the conversation with Franquin. His immediate thought was that his superiors were idiots.
Of course it had been wrong to give them complete freedom, of course it was stupid to give them key cards, and it had been painfully naïve to believe they’d keep working for them if they weren’t forced to.
Perhaps, he thought as he sprinted through the corridors, perhaps it would have worked if that had been the deal from the beginning, if they’d been recruited voluntarily with full knowledge of what they were doing. But once a prisoner, always a prisoner. That’s the way it worked. And if you turned confinement into freedom, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sooner or later they would try to escape.
He ran to the hallway leading to William Sandberg’s rooms, but he already knew he wouldn’t be there.
If he’d managed to switch cards with Franquin – which he obviously had, and which was so painfully stupid that he cringed on his superior’s behalf – then he’d hardly be sitting around waiting for someone to discover what had happened. On the contrary, Sandberg would already be on his way out, and Haynes would probably be with him, and all they could do was hope they hadn’t managed to leave the castle.
William Sandberg’s room was empty, just as Rodriguez expected.
He pulled open the bathroom door and checked the wardrobe to make sure, but there was nothing in there either, and he ran on down the corridor to William’s workroom.
As the door flew open he stopped dead.
Stared at the wall in front of him.
Fumbled to put his headset to his ear, hands shaking with concern.
‘Sandberg’s gone,’ he said.
Which was exactly what everyone expected him to say.
What wasn’t, were the words he said next.
Several floors below Rodriguez, Franquin and Keyes ran through the maze of corridors. Rodriguez spoke to them over the radio, and Franquin heard him perfectly clearly, yet he couldn’t do anything but ask him to repeat what he’d just said.
It didn’t matter how many times he said it. The words were the same.
And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Half the security detail had already left, and the helicopter was somewhere above central France, on its way back with Connors. The
only thing they could do was to make the best of the resources they had.
Keyes didn’t take her eyes off Franquin, she’d heard Rodriguez in her own headset and now she awaited his orders, even though she knew exactly what they would be.
Franquin held his microphone tight to his mouth. Breathless, running, agitated. But what he said couldn’t have been clearer.
William Sandberg and Janine Charlotta Haynes were not to leave the complex. Not under any circumstances. Whatsoever.
And Rodriguez confirmed that he understood, and signed off.
Keyes and Franquin pushed on, sprinting through the steel-lined corridors of the lower section towards the security centre. And in their heads, Rodriguez’s words echoed, over and over again.
‘They’ve taken everything with them.’ Those had been his exact words.
‘Everything.’
Rodriguez received Franquin’s orders over the radio and turned it off.
He had a security team to wake up. Reduced, but a team nonetheless.
And when that was done they would have two fugitives to catch, and this time they wouldn’t fail.
Nevertheless, he lingered for a second, one more second of silence before everything kicked off.
He stood there, in the middle of the stone floor of William Sandberg’s workroom.
Along one of the walls was the table with the computers.
And along the others there was nothing.
All the rows of code, of cuneiform script, everything that had hung on the walls, printed out in red and black so that William could pace up and down trying to make sense of it. All of it gone.
William and Janine were making their way out.
And with them they were carrying the information that had been kept confidential for more than fifty years.
For every metre William and Janine put behind them the complex seemed to become larger and larger.
They ran through hallways they’d never seen, far beyond the parliament and the server rooms and the medical observation section where infected people lay waiting to die in hospital beds. They opened new doors and descended new staircases, constantly moving deeper into the mountain and hopefully closer to freedom.
With each step they took, new chapters of the Organisation’s past opened up and revealed themselves. Telling them about the people who’d once worked here, researching and struggling with the task, the countless people who’d been eradicated when the first virus spread inside the complex in the eighties.
They passed offices and halls and meeting rooms, spaces designed to accommodate hundreds of people; worn office chairs at empty desks beneath the cold glow of fluorescent lights, relics of another era.
They passed rooms that were storage chambers, and William noted them without stopping, surprised by what he saw even though he knew he shouldn’t be.
Stacked in room after room were crates.
Some were wooden, some were metal. Some were grey and some were painted olive green or different shades of green and brown. And on all of them, there was writing. Some of them in white and some of them in yellow, numbers showing quantities and weight and dimensions, sometimes in Russian and sometimes in English, and Arabic and Japanese too.
Guns. Ammunition. Grenades. What else? Endless reserves of firepower. And of course it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
After all, this was an international organisation. Set up to protect the world.
And nobody knew against what.
There would be thousands of scenarios, thousands of imagined enemies, they had shouted into space and what if someone had answered by coming here, of course there had to be a defence and if you don’t keep weapons in a military base then where would you keep them?
Because that’s just what it was: a military base, command central, research station, all rolled into one. And it was vast.
Vast and deserted.
There was no way to ignore what it was telling them about the personnel who’d been exposed and died, and what they could expect to happen next.
And every time the thought of the virus crossed William’s mind he did the same thing:
He pulled his T-shirt a little tighter.
Not the one he was wearing, but the one he’d fashioned into a bag, put his arms through like rucksack, and where stacks of paper and files were pressed together, thudding against his back as he ran.
The material. The codes and the numbers.
Everything that had hung on his wall and that now hung behind his back and that hopefully would make sense to someone else.
That was their plan, to get it out in the world and into the right hands, hoping that many brains would do a better job than just his own and Helena Watkins’ and Janine’s and whoever had tried before them. And hoping that someone out there, or many people together, would find a solution while there was still hope.
Before the purple circles became a reality.
And they kept running through the mountain, stopping only to hold their card against lock after lock, ran and ran and didn’t know where they were going, but hoping.
Hoping that they were running in the right direction.
Evelyn Keyes used the last few steps to her office to plan her next move.
She wasn’t tired any more, instead her mind was racing through all the controls that would be waiting for her, which monitors she’d start first and which menu and which commands.
First, she’d find the unique code assigned to Franquin’s card. It was long and complex but that’s how the system was designed, she’d find it and feed it into the system and when that was done she’d be able to block his card.
Her next step would be to check where it had last been used. Then she’d know where they were and it would only be a matter of dispatching the security team. And then her work would be done.
Those were her first thoughts. And then she had another thought. And once it had occurred to her she couldn’t shake it off.
What if that wasn’t what she should be doing?
Deactivating Franquin’s card would be the obvious thing to do.
But perhaps it was so obvious that it was precisely what they wanted.
Because there was an alternative.
It was a definite possibility, she thought, that the card they were using wasn’t Franquin’s.
If they’d managed to switch cards once they might well have managed it twice. And yes, that meant putting yourself at unnecessary risk, but it also meant they’d have two clear strategic advantages in the event they were discovered.
The first would come when Franquin realised he had William’s card instead of his.
If Keyes did as they were anticipating, if she went ahead and deactivated his card, everyone would feel confident and secure that the fugitives couldn’t pass any more doors. And that would be advantage number one.
Then the guards would be sent out to fetch them. And that would be advantage number two.
Because the person waiting there wouldn’t be the fugitives.
If Franquin’s card had been switched, if it had ended up with a third person, then someone else would be left standing with a blocked card and guards running towards him with weapons drawn.
And meanwhile doors would continue to open for Haynes and Sandberg, and before everyone realised they were chasing the wrong person the two of them would get further, and, worst-case scenario, even exit the building.
It wasn’t likely, she thought.
But possible.
It was devious and clever, and wasn’t that why they’d been chosen in the first place, because they were clever people?
The only thing she could do now, the only thing to do before she knew who was where and carrying which of all the issued key cards, was to block all the doors for all the cards in one single blow.
That was the ideal solution. It would be a whole lot quicker than punching in codes one by one. And most of all, it would stop Haynes and Sandberg, no matter what card they were using.
Those we
re her thoughts as she rounded the corner to her office.
There wasn’t anything left of her tiredness.
She saw the door ahead of her, and she knew exactly what to do and in what order.
It was the smell that told them they were heading in the right direction, and as soon as they felt it they picked up speed. They were so near now that they simply couldn’t fail; it would be unforgivable and disastrous and mustn’t be allowed to happen.
It smelled of air.
There was a gentle draught coming from somewhere, and it could only mean that not too far away there was a way out.
They moved faster, down the sloping passage, feeling the temperature drop. It filled with them with hope but also with anxiety.
And they almost missed it.
The small corridor that opened up in one of the walls.
It was dark and innocuous and looked like another dead end, and why would they make a turn when the corridor they were running in was steadily sloping downwards? But after a couple of steps the chill suddenly faded, and they realised what it meant.
They turned back.
Fumbled along the wall for a light switch.
The passage was long, straight and ice cold. The ceiling was lined with fluorescent tubes that blinked into life; the floors were worn, with black scuff marks trailing off into the distance.
Rubber wheels. Trolleys.
Janine and William exchanged glances; one said ‘Deliveries!’ and the other nodded in agreement. This was where supplies came into the castle, computers and food and mail and yellow envelopes. They were on the right track. If this was where things came in, it was also where they would find a way out.
At the end of the corridor was a metal door.
And when the diode turned green and the door swung open, the cold air hit them as if someone had just opened a window.
Chain of Events Page 35