Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  Jake stepped aside, avoiding the tangle of man and machine, then stooped to grab the bike’s handlebars and was running and mounting it before the fallen biker could yell “Asshole!” at his back.

  His height gave him an advantage, as did the bike’s smaller, lighter frame, but it wasn’t much of an advantage once they hit the open road. As long as there were people—lost and looking for leadership—the messenger bike was more maneuverable, which made up for the motorcycle’s greater speed.

  In the distance a pack of dogs howled, the chorus reminding him they faced another night in Dogland. Snow couldn’t be far away.

  The killer reached the end of the block. There were cars there, all at a standstill, most long since abandoned.

  The killer looked back over his shoulder, almost as if he were making sure Jake was following, then eased his motorcycle into a gap in the snake of traffic that was barely there, between a yellow cab and an SUV, before accelerating the wrong way up Broadway.

  Gritting his teeth, Jake stood on the pedals. His weight put more force behind his movements. He pedaled as hard and as fast as he could, the wind battering his face and hair, but no matter how furiously he pumped, the killer was getting away. Jake forced more speed out of his burning thighs, every muscle tense, quivering, as the bike’s frame veered violently beneath him.

  Mercifully, for the length of Broadway, past the back of Zuccotti Park, across Cortlandt and Dey and Fulton, right past where the new Fulton Street station was still going up, nothing was moving.

  There was a lattice of scaffolding before the cement barricades cut the street down to two lanes. Jake didn’t slow, but the killer did, needing to weave a way around abandoned vehicles.

  Then the street widened beyond the barricades as City Hall came in sight. The killer leaned into the curve, making Jake think he’d swing right, but at the last moment he straightened and stayed on Broadway.

  The wide avenue made it easier for Jake to keep the killer in sight. The guy slowed up slightly under the flags of City Hall, crossing Chambers, as if playing with Jake.

  Jake’s legs were on fire. Every muscle burned. There was no way he could maintain this pace and they both knew it. But the killer wasn’t opening up the throttle and leaving him flailing around behind him, he was enjoying the chase too much.

  As long as the Honda had gas in its tank he could disappear off into the distance. Jake had a finite amount of strength left, and the gradual rise was burning it up fast. Somehow he was going to have to force the guy off his bike.

  The killer crossed Duane.

  Jake was still half a minute behind him, and weaving between pedestrians was no easy task.

  The street was lost in the shadows of the two buildings on either side of the road.

  The killer twisted around in his seat. He had his gun in his hand. The real one this time, not his fingers. The man’s bike veered left, unbalanced as he leaned back. This was all that saved Jake’s life.

  Jake hunched down over his handlebars trying to make himself small. The move slowed him. He felt rather than heard the shot as the killer fired at him.

  The crack of the gunshot was dislocated by the sounds of the city, at once unique, at once terrible, and yet almost negligible in terms of the actual noise it made. But then, how much noise was a life worth? That one solid muffled sound of the bullet piercing the skin? The deathly quiet whisper of air and lead through the silencer? The rush of displaced air the second before sound catches up with the agony of impact?

  There was no pain beyond the sting—like a wasp, angry, unexpected—as the bullet tore through his jacket sleeve, digging into the tense muscle of his bicep. The sudden flare of pain was intense and almost toppled him from the bike as he reared back. A second shot missed, the killer overcompensating and firing wide to the right. Jake heard the crump of it tearing into the side of one of the abandoned cars behind him.

  They were just coming up on the New York Public Records building when the killer angled his motorcycle to the right, hard, hopping the curb and going back onto one wheel as he ploughed across the wide, plaza-like sidewalk in front of the building. As his front wheel came down, he braked hard. The back wheel slewed out beneath him when he planted his foot, bringing the bike around.

  He faced Jake, engine idling, and raised the gun. This time he took the time to aim.

  Jake didn’t even think about it; he threw himself off the bike, hitting the deck hard and rolling across the asphalt as three quick shots tore into the blacktop inches from his face. He pushed himself up and hurled his body sideways, putting a truck between himself and the shooter, only to hear another succession of bullets drill holes in the metal panel above his head.

  Fuck.

  Jake crawled forward another couple of feet and heard the engine revving. The killer was moving to get a better angle to take him out.

  He was effectively trapped behind the truck. He couldn’t move—not unless he wanted a bullet in the head for his troubles. All he could do was listen to the throaty grumble of the Honda’s engine.

  Someone screamed.

  That sound reinforced the fact that he wasn’t alone out here. There were innocent people standing in line to become collateral damage in this showdown. It was like something out of The Godfather: that fucked-up scene where Sonny’s car gets riddled with bullets while he’s sitting inside it, blood and glass everywhere.

  “Get down!” he yelled, like they needed telling.

  Another shot and it was pandemonium, people running without thinking, anywhere away from the sound of gunfire spitting their way.

  And when the shooting stopped, there was only the sound of panic.

  He couldn’t hear the Honda’s deep-throated rumble anymore. It was gone.

  He rose slowly to his hands and knees, and crept along to the edge of the truck, risking a glance into the plaza. The killer was nowhere to be seen. Rising to his feet, Jake slammed his fist on the truck’s hood, hard enough to dent the metal.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  Chapter Ten

  COQUELLES, A TINY COMMUNITY WITHIN PAS-DE-CALAIS, on L’Européene autoroute, was two hours north of Paris.

  It took Sophie ninety minutes to make the drive on the stolen bike.

  The highway was full of stranded cars and desperate people. It was like riding through some Hollyweird version of a postapocalyptic landscape. Coquelles comprised a few hotels and a shopping center. It was also where the French side of the Channel Tunnel descended beneath the sea.

  The terminal building was dark.

  London was her only logical destination.

  She could have gone deeper into Europe, through Luxembourg into Germany, and looked to hide out in the Alps, but that wouldn’t help. She knew what was going on. She was one of the few people on the planet who did. It also meant she knew that there were several places being adjusted—that was what her paymasters had called it, adjusted, such a bland word for what was taking place—just as Paris had been. The two prime targets in this hemisphere were now London and New York. Knowledge in this case was dangerous for her health.

  Yesterday flying would have been faster—less than an hour in the air to Heathrow—but with all the electronics going down there was no way she was boarding a plane, even if they could get one airborne. Going home to New York was out of the question. Thanks to the tunnel, London wasn’t.

  Not that it would be easy.

  The journey from Gare du Nord in the heart of Paris to St. Pancras should have been about the same as the drive to the Eurostar terminal, a couple of hours, but without the trains she was being forced to improvise. The people out to get her were too, so it wasn’t all bad.

  At the top of the hill, Sophie pulled off the rue du Moulin and braked, stopping along the hard shoulder. It was quiet here, mostly because the trains weren’t running, but it wasn’t deserted. She watched a guard pace along the black lines of the tracks as they disappeared into the tunnel entrance.

  One man.<
br />
  Was he really alone? The one man guarding the last frontier? It felt too easy. She didn’t know what she’d expected, really, a line of armed soldiers standing at the mouth of the Channel Tunnel ready to turn back the screaming hordes?

  Unlikely, to say the least.

  Well, unlikely until the powers-that-be worked out just what the hell was happening, and by then the military response would be so far behind the curve it’d be too late to make a damned bit of difference.

  Sophie wheeled the bike around and walked it back away from the edge, then dismounted and stretched, working the kinks out of her spine and getting the blood flowing again. It was a sign of age, even if she didn’t feel old. There was of course a psychology to it; ten years ago she could have run the fifty kilometers through the tunnel in a respectable marathon time, now the thought of another couple of hours in the saddle felt like cruel and unusual punishment.

  Thinking about the old days made her think of Jake Carter.

  She would have paid a lot of money to be a fly on the wall when he picked up her message. It was hard not to wonder what he thought of the whole I’m not who you think I am line. It had been deliberate. She knew what he was like when tugging at the threads of a mystery: he wouldn’t rest. She could have just said, Hey, Jake, it’s me. I need to talk to you, but that wouldn’t have been half as effective. It was a cheap trick, but she didn’t feel bad about manipulating him.

  She knew where he was. She had known for a while now. It was part of the job after all—she monitored people. She gathered intel on who might or might not prove useful in the grand scheme of things, and Jake Carter had a skill set which made him worth watching. His choice of post-Army career was fitting in more ways than one, but there was no escaping the irony that he’d wound up back in New York, right where she needed him to be. The breakup hadn’t been good. She hoped he’d eventually put two and two together and find the link between her and the redefining of the city. With the networks down, there was nothing else she could do but trust that he was still the same stubborn bastard he’d always been, and gamble that he wouldn’t walk away from trouble when it found him.

  Because that was the point of her call: to make sure trouble found him.

  He was the one person she knew was clean. That meant he was the only person she could trust. The grim reality was that she wasn’t getting out of this, now that she’d made a stand against them. She knew that, but she didn’t want to face it on their terms. It had to be on her terms. That meant she needed to get her ducks in a row, make sure the contingencies were in place, and then wait for the ride to stop. It was only a matter of time, and somewhere along the line she would get off. But until then she was determined to be the biggest fucking pain in their ass as possible, and that meant getting the fuck out of Paris.

  Of course, they’d expect her to go to London. That couldn’t be helped.

  The rest would be up to Jake. She just hoped he was big enough and ugly enough to take care of himself.

  Instinctively, she looked over her shoulder. The road was clear so she clambered back onto the bike.

  The road ran just above the tunnel entrance, no more than a hundred feet from the edge where the hill abruptly cut off, its side planed away by a sheer concrete wall. Below that, twenty-five feet down, was a wide concrete service road, and then another drop, closer to forty feet this time. To the side was an incline, grassed over, but man-made, complete with a sidewalk at the far side. The incline ended beside the train tracks.

  Sophie gunned the engine and raced the bike straight toward the edge. It was a long way down. She’d gotten the Egli-Vincent up to sixty when the ground disappeared from beneath it and she surged over the edge.

  There was a breathless moment where there was nothing between her and seventy feet of drop, then a bone-jarring impact that traveled all the way up the ladder of her spine, rattling her teeth, as she hit the grass incline. The Egli-Vincent’s wheels kicked up dirt and grass, biting deep as she wheeled it around, then raced down the incline, covering the distance to the tracks in seconds.

  There was a low chain-link fence between her and the tunnel proper. She didn’t have time for finesse.

  The guard had seen her. He shouted something into his radio, then broke off and raised the rifle at his side. She had no way of knowing if his call would bring help or if his radio was as dead as the rest of the world’s electronics. It didn’t matter. She barreled right through the chain-link fence, hitting it head-on. The bike’s speed tore the fence down, and the Egli-Vincent drove straight over the barrier. She pivoted again, taking the bike off the concrete lip and kicking out the back wheel to twist midair. The bike landed on the tracks facing the dark, gaping hole that was the Channel Tunnel’s entrance.

  “Arrête!” the guard shouted, running toward her. He fired a warning shot. “Arrête!”

  Sophie didn’t need warning. She hunkered down over the handlebars and gunned the engine instead. The Egli-Vincent roared, tires spitting gravel, and powered forward, the sheer force of the engine unleashed over the short distance between her and the terrified guard. He couldn’t stand his ground without being mowed down.

  Self-preservation kicked in; he hurled himself out of the way and Sophie disappeared into the dark mouth of a world beneath the sea.

  * * *

  It wasn’t completely dark, and it didn’t much feel like a tunnel. It felt more like a vast nuclear bunker.

  Emergency lights ran at ceiling height along one side of the cylindrical concrete tube, offering enough illumination to see the tracks stretching out ahead of her as well the walls closing in around the vanishing point.

  The tunnel was wide enough to accommodate two trains passing, and had offshoots for emergency vehicles and maintenance workers. The dark smears where water seeped slowly through the concrete were unnerving. The roar of the engine intensified, amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the tunnel.

  Thirty-one miles under the incredible press of water.

  She looked at the speedometer, running the numbers in her head. At current speed she’d reach the other side in a little less than half an hour. The question was what would be waiting for her when she got there.

  There wasn’t much one French border guard could do to stop her. The tunnel didn’t have blast doors they could seal to prevent her from getting off sovereign French soil, but if their radios were shielded, they could get word to their British counterparts in Folkestone. She was going to be coming out of the tunnel hot.

  But she had a thirty-one-mile drive to think about what she’d do at the other end, more than enough time to run through her options and come up with a plan. It wouldn’t be a good plan, but it was better than no plan.

  The tunnel was straight, the center of the track reasonably level, but the sleepers every few feet promised a jarring ride, so she hopped the rails and followed the flat gravel track running alongside the rails until she reached a branch in the tunnel which took her through to a second, much smaller tube.

  She could almost reach out with her hands and touch both sides at once as she roared down the flat surface of the maintenance tunnel. It was an alien landscape, harsh, new, clean, with acoustics that meant the engine’s roar swelled to deafening levels, folding in on itself as the echoes reverberated through the cramped confines.

  Sophie was armed: she had her pistol and her knife. She could do a lot of damage with either of them if she had to. One-on-one she’d hold her own in any fight. Two-on-one the odds were still stacked in her favor. Three-on-one things would set a little hairier, but she had nothing to lose. That meant she wasn’t afraid of getting hurt. That, in turn, meant she was much more dangerous than any men who might be waiting for her at the other end of the tunnel, because they had wives and children and things they didn’t want to lose weighing them down. Yet she didn’t want to kill anyone else unless she really had to.

  Unfortunately, she might not have a say in it.

  Sophie put her head down and drove, thunderi
ng through the tunnel so fast the emergency strip lights blurred into pulsing lines on either side of her head.

  Twenty minutes later, the brand-new Egli-Vincent burst out of the Channel Tunnel entrance like a runaway train, engine racing, wheels a blur as it hit the open air like a flame.

  Six guards were waiting for her.

  Not enough, no matter how good they thought they were.

  She was better.

  The bike’s sudden appearance caught them off-guard, even though they’d braced themselves, taunted by its roar for minutes before it finally appeared.

  She deliberately steered for the biggest and ugliest of the men in front of her, standing point with a submachine gun leveled at her. The gambit was a simple—and desperate—one: she had to assume he wanted to stay alive.

  He had less than twenty feet to decide. Not enough time for rational thought to take over. He was operating purely on instinct as he squeezed off a burst of gunfire. The bullets tore up the road in front of her because, as she’d hoped, he had no intention of killing a defenseless woman.

  She didn’t so much as veer an inch from her path. She needed him to know she had no such qualms as she surged forward.

  He bought the gambit and hurled himself out of the motorcycle’s path, leaving a gaping hole right at the front of their line.

  She raced through the center of the line, taking the Egli-Vincent’s speed into the red zone. There was nothing between her and London.

  Chapter Eleven

  “WE HAVE A PROBLEM, MR. ALOM.”

  “Then fix it. That is what we pay you for.”

  “It’s not as easy as that.”

  “It is. You might like to think it is more difficult, but in reality things are only as difficult as you make them. This is business. Nothing more, nothing less. And in business you strategize, you prepare, and you capitalize, and then, if you are lucky, you make a killing. We aren’t trying to win friends here. There is nothing to be gained in being cautious. We must be bulls. If there is a problem, you deal with it. That is what you do. There is no room for doubt. The plan is solid; we have at our disposal information none of the competing factors are party to. Today is all about follow-through. Today, with the grace of the old gods, we become kings of the world.”