They headed downwards, because down was where they needed to go. There they would find windows where they could exit and carry on descending until they reached the server room. And then they would make sure the material would never be read again.
They had just emerged on to a landing. A large, open hallway, linking the stairs they’d come down to the next set of stairs. In one direction, a long corridor extended into the distance, and on the other side of it shimmered the cold blue light of the night sky.
A window.
Janine signalled to William, that’s where we’re going, and he was right behind and ready to go, and just as they were about to, they saw the silhouette.
At first, they couldn’t make out who it was. All they could see were the dark contours of a man at the other end of the hallway, his features invisible in the darkness beyond the window.
He stood with his legs apart. But this wasn’t the posture of a guard; his gait was unstable, as if his legs were spread to help him stay on his feet, and his arms were extended in front of him, one hand on the grip of a black handgun.
Aimed straight at them, ready to fire.
‘Connors?’
Janine’s voice. Half-question, half-exclamation.
It was Connors, but he’d changed: he was sweating, his eyes strained to look at them, pain radiating from every part of his body.
‘Stay where you are,’ he said.
William put up his hands, palms flat in front of him: Wait, I’ve got something to say. Take it easy.
He took a step forward, a single step, but that was enough to make Connors back up, tense his arms, his right forefinger so tight on the trigger he could feel the resistance from the spring.
‘Do not come over here. And listen.’
‘I want you to listen to me,’ said William. ‘We’re going to be all right. If you trust me, Connors, we’re going to get through this.’
Connors shook his head.
‘I’m not.’
That was all he had to say.
‘You’re infected,’ William said.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ said Connors.
And that was a yes.
William could have asked him how and when and why. And Connors could have told them. Not that he knew for sure, but he could guess; in all likelihood it was someone he’d met when they prepared the evacuation – perhaps he’d shaken someone’s hands, or maybe the pilot had and then they’d infected each other. It was the way it was. There was no one to blame but himself. He had written the protocol, and it had become his own death warrant.
‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ he said.
‘We wouldn’t have. If we’d had a choice.’
It was Janine again. And Connors looked directly at her, his eyes begging for forgiveness, knowing what she’d been through the last couple of months, knowing how much she’d suffered and all to no avail.
‘There’s no saving us,’ said Connors.
‘We think there is.’
‘It can’t be stopped.’
‘We know that.’
Silence returned. And when William broke it, his voice was calm, a stillness settling in the corridor, the feeling of a hostile situation that was slowly becoming a conversation.
‘We’re not here to stop the virus.’
Connors. Confusion in his eyes.
‘Then why?’ he said.
‘We’re here to stop ourselves.’
The cold moonlight grew across the tarmac floor. It started as a slither, spreading into a sheet of blackish blue across the painted lines and arrows and all the way up to the loading dock at the far end of the chamber, before the rolling door clicked into its housing in the roof.
Outside stood Franquin. His three men. Flashlights playing across the hangar. Scanning for movement, for shadows that didn’t belong, for anything that might constitute a threat.
But there was nobody there. And Franquin left two of the men outside to watch the entrance, set the door to close again and signalled to the third guard to follow him.
He placed his key card on the reader by the interior door, continued through the long neon-lit passage with its scuff marks, and on to the steel corridors that waited on the other side.
Connors looked straight across the corridor, his features twisted in a sceptical frown.
What Sandberg had said was breathtakingly simple.
And yet he couldn’t believe it.
For thirty years they’d been working here. And for thirty years before that, hundreds of other men and women had searched for answers, deciphering codes and making calculations and trying to stop the human race from coming to an end, and none of them had thought what William had thought and he couldn’t take that.
Not one of them had looked up and taken that one step back and widened their perspective.
It tortured him to think of it, but he said nothing, he just stood there with his eyes smouldering with resistance while the seconds passed in silence.
It occurred to William their roles had been reversed. Suddenly he was the one opening doors inside Connors, doors that Connors hadn’t seen before, and now he was the one stepping over the threshold and finding himself in free fall, exactly as William had done.
A page in a book. A book on a shelf.
And William spoke slowly and carefully and kept his voice low.
He used the same words Janine had said at the kitchen table.
‘If we’d never discovered what we have inside us,’ he began. ‘If we had never been paranoid enough to find sequences in our own DNA, if we hadn’t interpreted them and read about our own demise? Then, would we still have created this virus?’
His voice was soft and to the point, as if he already had the answer but wanted Connors to get there by himself.
‘I have been asking myself that question,’ said Connors. ‘More times than you can imagine.’
‘And what did you conclude?’
Connors glared up from under his eyebrows, as if William was being sarcastic, as if the whole conversation was beneath him and he didn’t want to answer.
But the truth was that he had never concluded anything. Every new answer had turned into its own question and he’d stopped asking a long time ago. Once the virus became a reality there was no alternative but to focus on the problem at hand, dedicate every resource to finding a solution, and that’s what they had done.
‘When I demanded access to all information you had,’ William said, ‘remember what you told me? You said that the fewer who knew, the better. You said there’s knowledge we’re not meant to have.’
He said it with emphasis, to make Connors see where he was heading. As the echo of his voice died away, the corridor was enveloped in silence.
‘You’re saying I was more right than I knew,’ Connors said eventually.
‘Than any of us knew,’ added William.
Then it went quiet again. And slowly Connors lowered his weapon.
He looked William in the eye, then Janine. His gaze was clear now, he knew what they were trying to say, knew what had to be done, no matter how much it pained him.
‘You’re going to destroy the material, aren’t you?’
‘What happens, happens,’ said William. Which was a yes.
‘And the only thing we can do is to make sure it never happens again,’ said Connors. He had understood. And either he could choose to trust William or he could stick to his protocol, the one that he’d written himself and claimed was the only possible way out. If he chose William’s path it meant everything he’d done for the last thirty years, all his thoughts and plans and conclusions, all of that had been wrong and pointless and not worth a thing, and it wasn’t easy focusing on thoughts like that with an itch spreading through his body, telling him he was about to die.
He shook his head, as if in answer to a question he hadn’t said out loud.
He’d planned it all. He’d drawn up the guidelines for how they’d survive, how to get to safety, how to cheat
death when nobody else would. And how well did that go?
Then along comes someone with a totally different plan.
Perhaps it was time to let someone else take the helm. Perhaps.
Eventually, he reached a decision.
‘I can make it to the security centre. I’ll unlock the complex for you.’
When every lock in the complex switched from red to green, Franquin’s attention was elsewhere.
He was on familiar ground. The tracks on the road still had him worried, but there had been nothing to suggest that anyone had tried to tamper with the hangar gate, and there was no other way in, unless they came by air.
He’d come as far as the long, cool corridor, the one that sloped down and where there was a draught from outside, momentarily hesitating over whether to go on alone or bring the guard with him.
And the moment the locks switched to green, his gaze was directed down the passage he’d just come through. He’d left his last guard behind to watch the hangar as the protocol instructed, but now he was debating whether it would be better to ditch the routine, settle for two men on the outside to guard the entrance and bring the third along for protection.
But he had everything he needed to access the computer, log in to the system and retrieve all the sequences and codes. It was a one-man task, and it wouldn’t take him more than a minute to accomplish his mission.
Telling himself that the protocol was there to be followed, he left the smell of fresh air behind and set off along the corridor. Key card in his hand. Never thinking for a second that the locks might already be open.
The strategy Connors presented was far better than their own, and would put a definite stop to the risk that anyone would read the codes again.
Janine and William raced through corridor after corridor, passing doors that stood unlocked and with diodes in shiny green, moving through the network of concrete and metal passageways without having to change floors.
And finally they stood before the room they’d passed only two nights before.
Everything was heavier than they imagined. But there were carts for the purpose and they lifted and struggled and loaded them up, as efficiently as possible, working as fast as they could, knowing that time was running out.
Connors didn’t have too long.
And for what they were about to do, they needed him to be alive.
The distance shrunk by the minute and none of them knew.
Not Janine, who worked in silence, dragging crate after crate across the floor and placing them firmly in front of William.
Not William, who stacked them at right angles on top of each other, praying under his breath that the thin cart underneath would hold.
Not Franquin, who hurried up through the complex, staircase after staircase, his heels clicking like gunshots on the hard floors.
And not Connors. He stood in front of the monitors; he’d only seen them pass in one direction, which meant they must still be busy in the storage area.
He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the itch, the knowledge of what was happening to his body, but most of all he tried to shut out the feeling that this was what they had all experienced. All the men and women he didn’t know, those whose names he’d been careful not to learn, those who’d lain in their beds behind the glass and felt their bodies decay without knowing why. It had been his fault that they went through this agony. His and everyone else’s, and it had been completely in vain, and that was the feeling he tried to shut out, that was what he couldn’t bear thinking of now.
His skin was itching, his back was itching, his arms too, and the more he thought about it the worse it got. And even if he didn’t scratch, he knew that his skin would soon start to disintegrate.
He stood there, watching the monitors.
He wanted to see Janine and William return, wanted to be allowed to stop fighting, wanted to let the end come and set him free.
And next to him was the computer that controlled the locks. That monitored the doors and showed what cards were swiped and where.
And he didn’t give it as much as a glance, because why should he?
The doors were open. And William and Janine had run straight through them all; he knew which room they were in, and there was no reason whatsoever why he should be watching that monitor.
But if… If indeed he had.
Then he would have seen Franquin’s card being logged at door after door. He would have seen line after line pop up on the screen every time he passed a door, from the corridor with the rubber marks, through the abandoned passages, away from the level with the draught and on and upwards. And habit is hard to break, all the locks along his way were already shining in green, but Franquin was hurrying and had his key card ready, marching through door after door without a clue that he wasn’t the one unlocking them.
And if Connors had looked at the screen he would have seen.
And if he’d seen, he would have acted.
But he didn’t.
And Franquin carried on making his way up.
They could only fill two carts, but that was also as much as they could move. And when the carts were loaded to the brink, William took one and Janine the other, and they pushed them out into the corridor. It was hard going, but they had no one to complain to, and slowly they started following the route that Connors had directed them to.
The power of their load was more than enough.
And once the process started, nothing would be able to stop it.
At last, the moment came that Connors had been waiting for. William and Janine passed the camera on their way back after an eternity that probably hadn’t lasted more than fifteen minutes. And he gave a sigh of relief, turned to exit the control room.
That’s when his eyes fell on the monitor.
And the lines from Franquin’s key card, travelling up the screen as he used it again and again and again.
Connors hesitated for exactly two seconds.
He didn’t have more time than that. When the seconds had passed, he did the only thing he could.
The timing was perfect and the irony complete and none of it was intentional.
Franquin had just reached another door and pushed his card against the reader when he realised that everything was wrong. He realised it because the box switched from green to red.
His body went stone cold. The door had been open and suddenly it wasn’t. And there was no reason in hell why that should be.
He held up his card again, tried over and over, but the box buzzed and shone red and the lock refused to open.
He felt a sudden anxiety in the pit of his stomach, and he turned, ran back along the corridor to the door he’d just come in through. To his frustration, it wasn’t open, either.
He was stuck in an underground passageway beneath a castle with no way out.
Connors called out to them down the corridor. Called to them to stay where they were.
‘Franquin,’ he shouted. ‘Franquin is back.’
Three simple words. In a tone that said it all.
‘Where is he?’
‘Right now,’ said Connors, ‘he’s trapped between two doors. One storey down. He can’t go anywhere. But the problem is, neither can you.’
He could have explained. But his strength was running out. He was sweating and exhausted and it was getting worse by the minute, and somewhere below them was Franquin with a key card whose code he didn’t know. He wasn’t Keyes. And if only he’d known how to block it, just that one card, so that Janine and William could run away while Franquin remained trapped, then there wouldn’t have been a problem. Aside from his itching back and stinging eyes, but that was something no one could fix, not even Keyes.
He closed his eyes for a second. Somewhere in the distance he’d heard William’s voice, he’d heard it asking what to do, and he couldn’t tell if it was one second ago or ten.
He summoned his energy, forced himself to come back. Looked at them, down the hall.
‘Ther
e’s only one way,’ he said. ‘How long will it take you to unload the carts?’
William looked into the room next to him. It had taken them fifteen minutes to load up; unloading shouldn’t take more than five.
‘I don’t have a choice,’ Connors said. ‘For you to get out, the doors have to be unlocked. And the moment I open them for you…’
The rest of the sentence didn’t need to be said.
If Franquin caught up with them, he wouldn’t be as forgiving as Connors.
‘I’ll give you exactly five minutes. After that the doors will open. When they do, I want you to get back up into the castle and out of here.’
William nodded, but nobody moved.
‘What about you?’ asked Janine.
There was concern in her voice. A sincere and heartfelt concern that made the question real, and for a moment Connors seemed stunned, almost as if it was the first time he’d allowed himself to consider it.
‘I think we know what happens to me,’ was all he said.
He said it with a smile, but it was a smile devoid of joy.
And they watched him where he stood across the hallway, alive but sentenced to death, watched him without knowing what to say. There was nothing evil about Connors. He was a good man in a strange place, and everything he’d done had been well intentioned.
He deserved a better fate. He deserved to come with them, to get out of there and see the world recover, to sit in a pub some day in the future and drink a beer and know that life went on.
‘How’re you doing?’ asked William through the silence.
‘We’ve got pills,’ Connors replied. As plainly as he possibly could. ‘I’ll be okay.’
Nobody spoke. But their eyes showed that they didn’t believe him.
Chain of Events Page 44