by Daniel Cole
“DCI Baxter,” a voice buzzed urgently in her ear. “I still can’t get hold of Agent Rouche.”
“Just keep trying,” she replied as she grabbed the arm of a passing staff member. “We need to close the station! You have to stop people coming in.”
The man nodded and hurried away as Baxter’s radio went off again.
“What?” she shouted in frustration.
“Apologies. I’m patching you through to a DI Lewis with the Imaging Team.”
“Now?!” asked Baxter as the automated male voice announced the imminent arrival of the train.
“We’ve just spotted Lucas Keaton on a CCTV feed from five minutes ago. Trying to get you updated information now.”
“That’s good news . . . Where?”
“He’s there . . . at the station . . . He’s down there with you!”
Baxter looked in concern at the heaving crowd, trying to picture the photograph she’d shared with her team.
“Description?” she requested.
“Wearing a dark jacket, dark jumper.”
Everyone was wearing a dark jacket with a dark jumper.
She went to push the transmit button to relay this latest development when a piercing squeal of feedback tore through her ear. Instinctively ripping the earpiece out, she noticed her colleagues react in similar ways, sharing anxious looks as the transmission broadcast snippets of distant screaming, warped and distorted, a mutilated choir of voices.
“Rouche?” she murmured, but only static clicks answered her. “Rouche, can you hear me?”
There was a rumble on the tracks.
Baxter turned her back on the crowd and stared into the dark mouth of the tunnel, the horrific noises still emitting from the earpiece in her hand a chilling prelude to an unknown horror.
Slowly, she moved to the edge of the platform. A delicate spiderweb above her began to quiver in anticipation.
A clattering emanated from the darkness, a galloping sound, vibrations underfoot of a monster advancing. The warm breeze preceding it was stale and laced with metal like blood-tainted breath, and then two bright eyes pierced the gloom as the train rushed toward them.
Baxter’s long hair was blown across her face as the first smeared window flashed by, a dirty crimson veil concealing what lay within.
There were screams as people started to panic, climbing over one another in a desperate bid for escape, blocking the stairway down toward the Piccadilly line platforms as well. Nightmarish images flashed by, scenes from inside the brightly lit carriages lingering longer as the train slowed: people running for the doors, bodies pressed up against the glass, a face crying for help, blood-covered hands reaching skyward for a god that was never coming for them.
Baxter realized that the tiny speaker she was holding had gone quiet and tentatively placed it back in her ear as a set of double doors came to a stop in front of her. Beyond the smudged windows, the carriage lights flickered intermittently behind cracked casings. She could no longer hear the noise of the stampeding crowd behind her, only the set of cheerful beeps assuring that this was just a stop like any other.
The metal doors slid apart . . .
As hundreds of panicking passengers burst free of the train only to find themselves still trapped, a body slumped out onto the platform at Baxter’s feet; the glazed look in the man’s eyes confirmed that he was beyond saving. An electrical popping accompanied the failing lights as she stepped up into the carriage, struggling to comprehend the devastation.
There were gunshots somewhere farther along the platform and then the hollow thud of bare feet running toward her.
Spinning around, Baxter held her arms out defensively, by pure luck catching the woman’s hand as she slashed at her. They dropped to the carriage floor, the tip of the stained knife slicing through her lip on impact.
The feral woman was on top of her, her shirt hanging open to reveal the scarring beneath as she pushed her entire weight down onto the knife. Baxter cried out as she struggled to hold the woman at bay, her arms trembling with the effort.
The knife inched closer, scraping across Baxter’s front teeth when she turned her head away from it. Recalling Rouche’s advice at the prison, she reached up blindly and tore at one of her attacker’s eyes.
The woman shrieked and recoiled as Baxter kicked out at her and scrambled backward. Her attacker thrashed around like an injured animal for a moment before rushing at Baxter once more.
Two much closer gunshots sounded as a pair of gaping wounds disfigured the scar-tissue tattoo that adorned the woman’s chest. She released the knife in her hand, dropped gently to her knees, and then slumped forward onto the floor.
“You OK, boss?”
Baxter nodded and got to her feet, holding a hand over her throbbing lip.
“Rouche!” she called, checking faces as she stepped between the injured.
“DCI Baxter,” said a voice in her ear.
“Rouche!”
“DCI Baxter!” the voice demanded.
She held a finger to her ear:
“Go ahead,” she answered as she continued the search.
Two more gunshots were fired nearby.
She winced, having missed the transmission: “Go again.”
“DCI Baxter, we’ve lost sight of Lucas Keaton.”
Rouche gasped for air.
Pinned to the floor of the rearmost carriage, he could feel his own warm blood trickling down his neck from the deep wound in his shoulder. He was trapped beneath the deadweight of his muscular attacker, whom he had shot five times in order to cease the indiscriminate massacre. He had been immobilized by the excruciating pain in his chest where the panic-stricken people he’d managed to save had trampled him in their desperation to escape. Something was grating inside him every time he took a breath.
He could feel heavy footsteps resonating through the floor.
“Clear!” someone shouted.
The footsteps moved closer.
Rouche tried to call out, an inaudible gasp all he could muster . . . He tried again.
He heard the boots step right over him and start moving away.
“Please!” Every time he exhaled, he had to fight even harder to force the air back into his lungs.
“Hey . . . Hello. It’s OK. Take my hand,” he heard one of the voices say. “You close your eyes for me, all right?”
“We’ve got someone trapped under here!” another shouted. “I need some help!”
Rouche filled with hope and couldn’t understand what was happening when the voice then announced: “OK. I’ve got her. I’ve got her. Let’s go.”
He listened to the footsteps change pitch as they reached the solid platform floor, leaving him alone with the dead once more.
“Baxter!” he tried to call out, barely able to hear his own whispered cry for help.
His breathing was becoming shallower, his muscles fatiguing beneath the weight pressing down on him as he surrendered to the realization that he was going to bleed out onto the dirty vinyl floor long before anybody found him.
He had failed.
Baxter ran back out onto the platform and stared into the sea of people fighting their way above ground. Fear had spread through the crowd like fire catching, every individual blinded by self-preservation, each and every one consumed by panic, all oblivious to the detrimental effect that their actions were having . . . all but one.
As a group of people stumbled forward, Baxter spotted a face on the far side, eyes not pointed upward toward safety like the others but watching the train, watching them, as they searched for survivors.
Their eyes met across the crush.
It was Keaton.
She hadn’t recognized him from the photograph but from the key-shaped wound torn across his right cheek from where she had, unknowingly, confronted him at Phillip East’s Brooklyn hideout.
She opened her mouth to broadcast his location.
And then he was gone, swallowed up by the surging crowd.
&n
bsp; “Team 3: continue the search,” Baxter’s voice ordered through Rouche’s earpiece, dragging him back to consciousness. “Teams 1 and 2: your target is Lucas Keaton. Man the exits. We can’t let him leave the station.”
The name was like a shot of adrenaline to Rouche’s failing body, muting the pain enough for him to slowly pull his pinned arm out from underneath the heavy man and wrap his fingers around the brown pole protruding from the carriage floor. Feeling his chest ripping and cracking under the strain, he gritted his teeth and dragged himself free, kicking the bearded man’s limp body off him as he took an agonizing but euphoric breath.
The handcuffed woman on the floor had not survived the evacuation stampede.
Rouche reached for his service weapon and staggered to his feet, panting from the exertion required to achieve so little.
He allowed himself a nod skyward.
He hadn’t failed.
He was precisely where he needed to be.
Chapter 40
Tuesday, 22 December 2015
5:04 P.M.
“Police! Move!” yelled Baxter, as the heaving throng inched gradually toward the blocked stairway. She scanned the crowd for Keaton. After a moment, she spotted him. He was already at the foot of the stairs, glancing back anxiously, looking for her.
As he began his scramble above ground, she could see that he was holding something.
“Eyes on Keaton!” she shouted into her radio. “Bakerloo stairway, heading up. Be advised: suspect has something in his hand. Treat as a trigger until we confirm otherwise.”
A gap opened up in front of her. She pushed through, gaining several meters in just a couple of seconds.
“Disarm by any means necessary.”
“Baxter, can you hear me?” wheezed Rouche as he ascended the emergency stairwell at the far end of the platform, his damaged microphone screeching back at him uselessly.
He was still able to hear the rest of the team’s transmissions as he joined the hordes rushing toward fresh air. Holding his wounded shoulder, he struggled against the current, searching for where the endless river of people was emerging from.
There was a loud crackle of distortion in his ear.
A moment later, he spotted a dark shape on the ground up ahead. Flickering between hurrying legs, he could make out the shape of a body-armored officer lying facedown at the top of the escalators.
“Shit!” He looked back at the sea of people disappearing through exits all around him.
With slightly more space to maneuver, the evacuees were now moving at walking pace toward the waiting night.
They were running out of time.
He ran blindly into the crowd, barging a route through the crush as he searched in desperation for Keaton.
“Officer down! Officer down! Top of the Bakerloo escalator,” Baxter announced into the radio, only realizing that it was Special Agent Chase as she checked for a pulse.
She didn’t find one.
At each of the exits, a lone FBI agent faced the impossible task of locating a single face among the army of people advancing toward them. Meanwhile, London Underground staff struggled to hold a swarm of inconvenienced commuters at bay outside the station’s entrance.
Out of the hundreds of people hurrying away from her, just one glanced back.
“Keaton’s ten meters from Exit 3!” she updated the team. “Do . . . not . . . let him out!”
She started pushing forward, relief washing over her when she spotted Rouche beyond the open ticket barriers, making a beeline for Keaton.
“Rouche!” she called after him.
He was too far away to hear her.
Rouche had noticed the man with the scar looking back every few seconds.
The man, however, had failed to notice Rouche.
Following directions to Regent Street, St. James’s, and Eros, he was only a few congested meters behind as they started to pass the threshold into the building storm.
“Keaton!” Rouche tried to yell, pointing toward him, his hoarse whisper almost inaudible. “It’s Keaton!”
The agent hadn’t heard him, but Keaton had, looking back to discover just how close his pursuers were.
Rouche caught sight of the black device in his hand as Keaton lowered his head and passed within inches of the FBI agent, breaking into a run the moment he emerged into the freezing night.
Rouche clambered up the stairs to join the mayhem on the street, the metal wings of Anteros silhouetted against the iconic neon signage. The evacuation of the station had spilled out onto the road, bringing the heart of the city to a complete standstill, car headlights stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction.
Beneath the starless sky, the blue snow fell unabated, lit by the flashing lights of emergency-service vehicles. The sudden drop in temperature burned his lungs. A stabbing, short, sharp coughing fit deposited watery blood into his hand as he spotted Keaton running southeast along Regent Street.
Rouche took off after him along the busy pavement, weaving between the oversized jackets and armfuls of shopping bags, the warm blood trickling down his sleeve painting a meandering trail for Baxter to follow.
Baxter waited for a break in the frantic transmissions.
It sounded as though every siren in the city was wailing, her earpiece crackling with harried updates from SO15 as they closed in on another of the bombers:
“Requesting air support,” she panted into the radio. “DCI Baxter in pursuit of . . . Lucas Keaton . . . along Regent Street . . . towards the park.”
Nearly twenty meters behind, she reached the crossroads with Pall Mall, almost colliding with a scooter that was darting in and out of the stationary traffic. She continued along Waterloo Place, the bronze figures that reside there emerging ominously out of the blizzard.
Baxter sprinted between them, her radio buzzing in her ear, fighting to make itself heard over the howling wind as she reached the steps that descended toward the dark void that was St. James’s Park.
“Lost sight of suspect,” one of the assorted voices announced in her ear as she eavesdropped in on their operation. “Does anyone have eyes? Does anybody have eyes on suspect?”
“Confirmed: northeast corner of the square . . . No clear shot.”
Rouche couldn’t breathe and he was losing ground, Keaton’s spectral silhouette flickering on the far borders of his vision.
Suddenly, the roar of helicopter rotor blades sliced through the night air, a searchlight blinding him before sweeping toward the entrance of the park, illuminating the monument standing guard—a dark angel, rendered in blackened bronze. Azazel.
And then it was gone, the circle of light chasing blindly after Keaton as Rouche stamped dark footprints across the pristine frozen scene. Ahead of him, the snow-laden weeping willows were bent double over the icy water, as if the lake had lured them in, only to freeze while they drunk greedily from it.
The city had disappeared, nothing but the storm existed beyond the borders of the park. As they reached an open space, Rouche released the magazine from his gun and reloaded.
He ceased his pursuit and took aim, the frozen lake reflecting the spotlight back up at the heavens.
Keaton was no more than a shadow, growing smaller with every passing second.
Trying to suppress the pain in his chest, Rouche extended his arm, lining the sight dead center on the figure’s back. He embraced the wind against his face, judging its speed and direction, adjusting accordingly, waiting until the beam bathed his target in light.
He exhaled to steady his limbs and then very, very gently squeezed the trigger.
“Take the shot!”
“Civilian down! Target wounded . . . No visual. Repeat: I no longer have a visual.”
Baxter had been distracted both by SO15’s transmissions as they hunted their prey and by the trail of bright red blood staining the ground when the crack of the gunshot cut through the snowstorm. She could see that Rouche had stopped up ahead, but Keaton had been engul
fed by the whiteout.
Her throat burning, she caught her breath and continued after them.
Keaton had dropped to the ground instantly, framed in the unsteady circle of light.
Rouche walked over to the injured man, who was reaching desperately for the device a few feet away; long, gasping breaths rose up from his prone form like clouds of smoke.
“Rouche!” Baxter shouted in the distance, her voice barely audible.
He looked up to see her running toward them.
As Keaton dragged himself over to the small black box, Rouche stooped down to pick it up, discovering that it was a mobile phone.
A little disconcerted, he flipped it over to look at the screen. A moment later, he tossed it away from him and turned to Keaton with a murderous expression.
Six feet away, the uploaded video, destined to be viewed by tens of millions of people across the world, entertained itself as flake by flake it was claimed by the snow.
During the forty-six-second film, a tearful but unremorseful Keaton claimed responsibility for everything, all the while holding up photographs of his family crudely annotated with their names and the dates on which they died . . . Not once did he make any mention of Alexei Green or his beloved lost fiancée.
“Rouche! We need him! We need him!” yelled Baxter as she watched her partner press his gun into their prisoner’s temple.
A spotlit performance on a dark stage.
“Where is it?” she heard him shout over the noise of the helicopter somewhere overhead, suggesting that the recovered device had not been what they had hoped.
She had almost reached them.
“Shots fired! Shots fired!” her earpiece buzzed. “Suspect down.”
Rouche struck Keaton viciously with the heavy weapon, but the man simply smiled up at him through bloodied teeth as the snow turned crimson beneath him.
“Rouche!” Baxter shouted, sliding up to them.
She dropped to her knees, sinking into the powder, then pulled at Keaton’s clothing as she searched desperately for the source of the blood loss. Her fingers found the gaping exit wound beneath his shoulder before her eyes did. Sliding the sleeve of her jacket up over her hand, she pushed it deep into the wound.