On the far side was a cavern, natural or perhaps blasted out, it was hard to tell which, but it formed a vast hangar and the door opened directly on to a loading platform.
It smelled of oil and rubber and exhaust fumes.
There were no vehicles, but the smell told them there usually were; perhaps it was just luck that the hangar was empty now.
Or, more likely, they had already started evacuating the castle and the cars and the trucks were already on their way somewhere else.
Whatever the reason, they were now just one door away from freedom.
Below the platform, the ground was covered with asphalt. Painted lines marked zones for loading and unloading and parking, arrows showed where to drive and stop and give way. And at the far end of the hangar, a huge archway ended in a tall, rusty, rolling gate.
A gate to freedom.
Folded sheets of metal, a massive chain linking them together, rusty rails stretching up towards the ceiling and bending in where the door would rattle its way up and let them out.
And Janine ran across the loading platform. Down the steel stairs. Sprinted over the asphalt.
And, for the last time, pulled the blue key card from her pocket.
Franquin realised he hadn’t let himself breathe for several minutes.
He stood behind Keyes, watching as her hands danced over the grey-green plastic keyboard, switching between screens and monitors and working methodically without a word.
It took it time. Everything that should have been easy required a number of steps and several pushes of buttons in the right order. But neither of them said anything, neither of them complained about equipment or its state or its age, they both knew it too well and things were already too critical to waste time talking about it.
Because critical they were.
The bank of monitors above them showed slanted images from surveillance cameras dotted about the complex. But there was no trace of Sandberg, no trace of Haynes, and while the monitors kept flicking from camera to camera, Franquin kept repeating the same mantra to himself.
They must still be around.
They must be between cameras.
They must be. But he couldn’t stop worrying that they weren’t.
Eventually, Keyes leaned over towards the microphone on the control desk.
‘This is Keyes,’ she announced. ‘I’m disabling your key cards starting now.’
She didn’t do anything.
Which meant she already had.
All the cards were blocked and no door would open for anyone, not without her explicitly unlocking their card first.
‘Everyone report to me from your nearest door,’ she said, ‘and I’ll reactive you one by one. Over and out.’
She leaned back in her chair. No tapping of keys, just silence, accompanied by the emptiness on display in the monitors.
Neither of them spoke. Both too intent on watching as the screens jumped from image to image.
The corridors. The meeting rooms. The offices.
The transit passage. The loading bay. The hangar.
And outside, barely visible in the darkness of the night:
The rolling gate. The turning area. The steep mountainside.
Images everywhere, light blue and flickering and low definition.
All of them empty. No signs of life, no glimpses of movement.
They kept their eyes on the monitors, waiting. And then Keyes turned to him.
‘There are two possibilities,’ she said. ‘Either they’re somewhere inside the complex where there’s no camera. In which case, we’ll get them sooner or later.’
He didn’t answer. That was the either. The problem was the or.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘they’re out. And if they are, we don’t have much time.’
Franquin had already come to a decision. ‘How many men do we have?’
‘Six. Plus Rodriguez.’
‘Good,’ Franquin said. ‘Tell them to report immediately.’
She transmitted the orders over the radio.
One by one they heard the guards report their positions, and one by one they held up their cards at a door somewhere, and when they appeared on her screen as a new red line, Keyes could confirm who was who.
One by one she unlocked their cards, and the guards ran into the next section and the next, down towards the cargo hall and the only way out, and all the time Franquin stood motionless with his eyes glued to the screens.
Now and then one of the guards would pass a camera, sprinting downward according to orders.
But still no Sandberg. Still no Haynes.
And this just weeks after the incident with Kraus.
It couldn’t happen again. They couldn’t be allowed out.
It simply wasn’t an option.
45
William ran barefoot across the freezing asphalt, but even so he couldn’t stop laughing.
He was free.
They were free.
Janine sprinted ahead, steady strides along the painted lines on the side of the road, straight posture and fit as a middle-distance runner, not a hint of fatigue after their race through the complex.
Not that there was much evidence of his exhaustion either. He was only twenty, maybe thirty metres behind her, but he was going at full speed and all the pain and stress he’d had to fight through, all the thoughts and doubts he’d had to push aside, all of that was gone now. She could keep up that speed for hours without him falling behind, that’s how good he felt. He could run for the rest of his life, they were out and they were free and everything was intoxicating and marvellous.
They’d done it.
Janine’s plan had worked. Switching the key cards and taking the documents had been crazy, it shouldn’t have worked. But that was life: nothing went the way it should.
Gradually the night blindness from the corridor lights started to fade, and the landscape around them came into focus in all its icy clarity. The single-track road they were running on, short dashes painted down its sides and no streetlights above. A thin veil of freezing mist sparkling under the star-filled sky. The mountains behind them sloping downward, together with the road, carrying them down towards the low-hanging plain that was the rest of the world.
And freedom.
Far in the distance they could make out the lights of what must be a main road.
There, they would find people. There, they would find cars.
And sooner or later, someone would either lend them one or give them a ride, and then they’d be on their way out of there.
Then they’d save the world.
They’d get to a city, go public with the codes and the verses, copy them and send them to universities and to hospitals and to governments and companies all over the world, to anyone who could possibly help. And then they couldn’t possibly fail.
Someone somewhere would find the key, and labs across the globe would manufacture a virus that worked, because if humanity was given the chance to save itself that’s what it would do.
Anything else was unthinkable.
And Janine and William would make it happen.
Behind them the sheer cliffs receded, and they ducked away from the road where someone might see them, cut across the upland meadows, and the ground was uneven and cold and hurt under their soles.
Soon enough their absence would be noted. The alarm would be raised.
But by then, they’d be far away from here.
That’s how it was going to be, simply because it had to.
They’d been running for fifteen minutes when Janine noticed the shrubbery as a black silhouette against the night sky.
They were still barefoot, scared to stop and put their shoes on, not because they believed anyone was chasing them, but because they wanted to make sure no one would be able to catch up.
Hopefully, they didn’t have anything to worry about.
Hopefully, nobody had discovered that they were gone, and hopefully they wouldn’t be missed until tomor
row morning when breakfast was delivered and neither of them could be found. First they’d check their beds, the bathrooms, then their workrooms. Only then would the guards raise the alarm, but by then they’d be long gone. And with a little luck they’d be impossible to find.
It wasn’t tomorrow morning that was the problem, though. It was now.
Now they were running across grassy meadows, two adults on flat, open ground, and even in the dark it wouldn’t be too hard to pick them out.
Janine peered at the bushes, wondering if they were thick enough to shield them. Whether it would be possible to disappear among the branches. Perhaps they could hide there, if someone turned up and if they hadn’t come any further than this.
Behind her, she heard William. Still tight on her heels. But the question was how long he’d be able to keep up.
And she had to make a decision. Either to veer into the cover of the bushes and risk tearing up their naked feet on branches and roots, or to carry on in the open and risk being seen.
She slowed down. About to call out to him, to ask what he thought.
Then she heard.
Footsteps. From several directions.
William wasn’t the only one behind her.
And she stopped breathing, spun around as silently as she could, scanned the darkness trying to see.
As she did, she saw William Sandberg’s face.
Illuminated in white against the black night sky.
And that couldn’t be a good thing.
The moment the first flashlight hit him right in the eyes, William realised what was happening.
He reacted without thinking: he threw himself to the side, a gigantic leap mid-stride that almost cost him his balance, but he regained it and carried on, running faster and darting from side to side to prevent the light beams from locking on him again.
They’d been found.
And the flashlight was accompanied by more. One after the other they lit up and he had four beams to avoid now, no, five, they swept through the night like stray lighthouses over a black sea, and that was all he could make out, which obviously didn’t help.
The light had hit him right in the eyes, and the night blindness that had finally disappeared was back with full force.
And he ran, ran as fast as he could, bare feet on the frozen soil. It was uneven and it hurt and every time his foot hit the ground sooner or later than he’d expected, the blow travelled like a stab of pain through his body. And all he could think about was Janine.
He strained his eyes.
Somewhere in front of him was a row of bushes.
It wasn’t far away; he’d seen it as a dark outline before the flashlights came. Janine had steered them towards it, probably because she was thinking the same as him, that with a bit of luck they could melt into them and hide, and perhaps the bushes were still their only way out.
In the corner of his eye the light beams kept moving, sweeping over the landscape, and he saw the bushes getting closer and closer, just another couple of metres. It was going to be his only chance. He picked up speed in a final spurt, now or never, and at that moment he heard the voice from behind.
‘There!’
It took him a split second to see what it meant.
Janine.
She was trapped in one of the lights.
She was already halfway into the bushes, but the branches were tired and sparse and it was like hiding in an open square.
The beams were gathering on her, following her every step.
And eventually she realised everything was lost. And stopped.
Waited.
In the darkness William watched it happen.
Saw the guards rush up to her, two, three, four of them, pushing her down on the ground and screaming things in French that he didn’t understand yet knew full well what they meant.
He stood there, breathless, looking at the bushes that were supposed to save them but that weren’t going to help at all.
And sooner or later the flashlights would find him too, and then it would be over.
The first thing he saw was his own breath.
How it suddenly became visible in the dark, revealing itself in front of his eyes, seal-grey clouds against the black sky.
And for a second he didn’t understand why, as if his eyes saw it first and forgot to ask his brain, and a second later came the realisation and by then it was too late.
Someone’s light had hit his breath.
His own lungs had betrayed him.
He stood still in the middle of a field, illuminated from all sides and impossible to miss, and the next moment he was bundled to the ground with knees in his back and voices in French.
William Sandberg had failed.
It had been up to him, and now it was over.
He hated himself so deeply that when the syringe was shoved into his neck, robbing him of consciousness, it almost came as a relief.
46
They met at dawn, as the protocol dictated.
It ought to have been emotional. And it should have given them hope.
And yet they felt neither.
The cars had returned from the night’s business and were waiting on the turning area outside the gate, crates were loaded into trunks and cargo spaces, and people climbed into their allocated seats and waited to depart.
Nobody asked questions, because there were none to ask.
Everyone had their instructions, everyone checked what they were supposed to, nothing was left to chance. Behind them the huge metal door rolled shut and Keyes confirmed that the mountain was sealed.
They were moving on to a new chapter.
And all they could feel was fear.
Deep inside the mountain, in the server room, Connors stood listening to the fans and the computers and felt the mountain sigh with emptiness.
He was the only one left.
They’d followed the protocols to the letter, they’d made four trips to prepare for the others’ arrival, now one task remained and it fell to him. The computers hummed around him, hummed as if nothing had changed, and without a clue that the things they were doing they were doing for the very last time.
One last dump of the data was all that remained. Everything was to be stored on portable devices, and then he’d take it with him: the codes, the cipher keys to read them, the cuneiform symbols that hid inside.
The verses. The predictions. Everything would be saved for posterity. They were to keep them safe until it was all over. And if they survived, if they came out on the other side, then the knowledge would be carried on into the new age.
It mustn’t be lost. That was how he’d written the scenario. It was his job to make sure.
And one more thing.
He wished he could avoid it, but things were what they were.
Responsibility. An overrated thing to have.
On the helicopter pad, the pilot was waiting to take off.
But before it could carry them both to their final destination, they had an engagement at an abandoned military firing range.
By the time the convoy of black vehicles arrived at the airfield it was full daylight. The Organisation’s private jet stood waiting on the apron, and the cars drove out on to the tarmac and parked alongside it.
Rodriguez stayed in his passenger seat, watching his colleagues as they climbed the shaky metal steps up into the plane. Rolled his blue key card between his fingers, a card he’d never need to use again, but that he’d taken anyway as a memento.
Assuming there was a future. Assuming there would ever be a chance to remember this as a past.
‘By the way…’
A voice, next to him. It was Keyes. She’d returned to the vehicle to collect her belongings, and now she leaned in through the door, gave him a dry look.
‘… you know that isn’t your key card?’
Rodriguez looked back at her.
‘It’s Franquin’s. The card they used to get out was yours. I’m going to leave it to you to work
out how that happened.’
Her smile grated like sandpaper on bare skin. It was snide, revelling in his discomfort. Then she turned and walked to the jet.
Rodriguez remained in his seat.
She’d set him up, charmed him the same way he’d charmed her. And he’d said that he was smarter than her, and she must’ve been laughing inside as he said it; he could see her face and couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the thought.
Haynes. Janine Charlotta Haynes.
She was a worthy adversary.
It didn’t make him any happier about what awaited her.
47
The run-down motel on the country road was none too impressive, but there were people inside and everything seemed open and that was all that mattered.
They were unbelievably tired.
Leo had driven the entire night and seen the dawn come, they’d passed signs that said Leipzig and Kulmbach and Nuremberg and they hadn’t eaten or slept, and sooner or later you have to.
Even so, they drove by the motel with its flagpoles and neon logos and signs with rates, and Albert pushed the car even harder, onward and southbound, passing a couple of exits before he finally swung off on to a side road that took them to a small, sleepy village.
They had no choice.
As much as they would have like to park in front of the motel and check in and collapse into bed, they knew there was no way they could risk keeping the car.
They’d been lucky not be discovered already. And they had to act before their luck changed.
They parked outside a supermarket. Bought a parking ticket from the machine and stuck it on the dashboard, one more innocent car waiting for its owner among the other cars. But instead of going inside they turned north and walked back up the road they’d just driven down. What had taken them ten minutes in the car took them an hour on foot.
They got a room on the ground floor. The view consisted of a melting pile of ploughed snow, the minibar was an empty refrigerator that refused to stay closed, and the twin beds were covered by bedspreads adorned with a pattern that Albert and Leo could only hope was intentional and not the result of years of complicity in guests’ private lives.
Chain of Events Page 36