The Lazarus Vault

by Tom Harper

  After a few metres, the passage ended in a slitted grille, alternating bars of greater and lesser darkness. Ellie wriggled herself around and kicked at it until it came loose. She pushed off, slithered through the mouth of the hole and landed on her feet.

  She looked around. By the light of her head-torch, she could see twin rails curving into the darkness, with a third rail gleaming silver between them. She stepped back, pressing herself against the wall. Somewhere nearby, the throb of a jackhammer filled the tunnel.

  The tracks hissed and began to glow. A white light appeared from around the bend, bearing down on her.

  By the time Destrier reached the bank, he was as close to panic as he’d ever been in his life. He left his car in the alley, behind the two Range Rovers that had already arrived, and went straight to the fifth floor. He’d no sooner reached his office than he had the Claridge’s concierge on the line, wringing his hands down the phone as he described finding Mr Blanchard passed out on his bed. ‘He is breathing normally,’ he assured Destrier. ‘We have summoned the doctor as a precaution and he will be here very soon.’

  ‘Any signs of violence? A burglary?’

  The concierge sounded shocked. ‘Of course not.’

  Destrier rang off and despatched two of his men to Claridge’s to get a better picture. ‘If he can open his eyes, bring him here at once.’

  He was about to check the security log, when the phone rang again. He almost ignored it, but the sixth sense that had kept him ahead of trouble so long warned him to check the number. The moment he saw it, he knew it couldn’t wait.

  A mechanical voice, inhuman. ‘Do you know who this is?’

  Destrier swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what has happened.’

  Destrier told him as much as he had guessed. ‘I can’t be sure until we speak to Blanchard. And get hold of Ellie Stanton.’

  At the other end of the line, there was a sucking sound like a valve opening and closing. ‘There are only two keys to that vault, and one of them is around my neck. Presumably the other is in Miss Stanton’s hands. Inside the vault.’

  ‘Can you –?’

  ‘I will be on my plane within half an hour. Stay there.’

  Even deadened by the electronics, the threat in his words was evident. Destrier felt a sudden, urgent need to justify himself.

  ‘If Blanchard hadn’t –’

  ‘Blanchard knew what he was doing. You were supposed to protect us.’

  The line went dead. Destrier was still staring at the phone when one of his men walked in.

  ‘We can’t get into the vault until the old man gets here,’ Destrier told him.

  ‘Don’t we have a plan for if someone gets in?’

  ‘The plan is anyone who actually reaches the sixth floor doesn’t make it past the fucking booby prize. There isn’t a plan for this.’

  ‘At least she won’t be going anywhere.’

  Destrier turned back to his computer and opened the security log. In the monitor’s pale glow, his face was blue as a corpse.

  ‘Oh my Christ.’

  02:01 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 26 : OPENED

  02:02 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 27 : OPENED

  02:04 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 27 : INTRUSION DETECTED

  ‘Another intrusion?’

  ‘It isn’t an intrusion, you stupid fuck. She’s broken out.’

  Steel hissed on steel. The white light brightened, rushing forward along the tangle of dust and cables that ribbed the tunnel walls. Ellie knew she should move, but there was nowhere to go. The shaft she’d crawled out of was too high to get back in; the deep tunnel too narrow to get out of the way. She stood on the track and let the light blind her with its brilliance. It seemed to be taking a long time. Was this the last thing her father had seen?

  She closed her eyes. The light drummed through her eyelids. She heard a screech and the heavy protest of metal – the driver must have seen her, but she knew it would be too late.

  The noise faded away, echoing down the tunnel. Was this what dying was like? She hadn’t felt the impact – but then, she supposed at that speed she wouldn’t.

  She opened her eyes and winced. A few metres away, an angelic radiance shone straight at her face. Was this her judgement? What should she say?

  A shadow moved in front of the light, blocking it out.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? You almost got yourself killed.’

  Ellie shielded her eyes with her hand. A black man in yellow overalls and a white helmet was standing in front of a flat-bedded dolly. He sounded angry, though there was a softness in his voice that evoked warm places far away. He looked her up and down.

  ‘Where’s your vest and helmet?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Bloody contract staff.’ He turned away. ‘You can explain this to the Bank manager.’

  The Bank manager was a grizzled man with a sharp face and a badly fitted suit. Ellie had prepared a story while she waited outside his office, but he wasn’t interested. He just pointed to a shelf above his head, sagging under a collection of vinyl-bound booklets.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘That’s the contract for this job. It tells me everything: how long the screws have to be, how many rats I have to kill, how many sheets of bog roll I’m allowed to wipe my arse.’

  He pressed his fingertips together and stared at her.

  ‘It also tells me how many staff members I’m supposed to get killed. You want to guess how many?’

  Ellie stayed silent.

  ‘Goose-egg. Zero.’ He sipped a plastic mug of coffee. ‘You got lost and almost ran into a train. That’s a safety incident, and the contract says we can’t have those. They want me to report it – but if I do, that’s three days I’ll spend up to my tits in paperwork. We’ll get behind on the job – except the contract says we can’t do that either. So I’ll spend another three days writing a report to explain why that’s happened. Then we’ll be a week behind. The contract says we have to pay compensation if we get a week behind. I’ll get a bollocking from my boss, and I’ll have to write another report. Two million commuters will be cursing my name, and all because some silly cow took a wrong turn down a tunnel. You read me?’

  She did.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Ellie was too tired to invent something. She stared at the map on the wall behind him.

  ‘Hainault.’

  ‘Hah. Born to do this job, were you?’ He didn’t want an answer. ‘What did they hire you for?’

  ‘Cleaning.’

  ‘It’s always the bloody cleaners,’ he observed, to no one in particular.

  *

  Above ground, a new day would be beginning. All the chorus of Ellie’s old life would be there – the streetsweeper on the corner of Gresham Street, the delivery driver, the newsagent lifting the shutter on his shop – but they would find other people to wave to, honk at, ignore. The old day hadn’t finished for Ellie: she was trapped in the night that would never end. She wandered through the darkness with the cleaning crew and the rats, scraping away the human residues that accreted on the station walls, fluff and hair, cloth and paper. It felt like stripping a corpse.

  Her shift ended at five. She took off the overalls and took her bag from the locker they’d given her. A foreman led the crew up the silent escalators to the gates, but Ellie hung back. She’d spent all night in the tunnels, and ended up no more than a few hundred yards away from Monsalvat. They must have worked out how she’d escaped by now – surely they’d check the Central Line stations when they opened.

  She waited until the others had left, then summoned her courage and stuck her head around the Bank manager’s door.

  ‘How do I get home?’

  For a moment she thought he’d bite her head off. But something in her face, desperation or exhaustion, seemed to spark a rare flash of pity in him.

  ‘Where do you need to go?’

  As far away as she c
ould – the end of the world if possible. She looked at the map on the wall again.

  ‘Ealing.’

  ‘There’s a ballast train coming through in five minutes. It can take you as far as Acton.’ He scowled, though she thought he meant it kindly. ‘Otherwise, you’ll probably try and walk it and I’ll end up with another incident on my hands.’

  Ellie rode with the ballast to West Acton. In the cold pre-dawn mist, she found a payphone on the platform and dialled the number she’d been given. Harry answered at once.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ There was no triumph in her voice, only the flat line of exhaustion. ‘Where do we meet?’

  Monsalvat staff called it the war room, though they usually meant it metaphorically. Screens on every wall brought in newsfeeds, financial information, graphs and spreadsheets; they could also be used to extend the room into infinite space for video conferencing. The cleaners hadn’t been in yet: at seven o’clock that morning it was still littered with the detritus of the Talhouett takeover battle: folders and papers, coffee cups slowly curdling, pizza boxes and stale doughnuts. A dozen men had gathered around the table, with Blanchard and Destrier at their head. At the far end, removed from the others, an old man sat in a wheelchair. His body was skeletally thin, hunched over as if against the cold: the skin on his face was white and scarred with wrinkles, though his clear eyes were blue like a baby’s. Tubes and wires trailed from a metal collar around his emaciated neck, binding him to the wheelchair. Each time he breathed, a small arsenal of pumps and valves wheezed into action, pushing and sucking the air from his lungs. Yet there was no doubt that every man in the room deferred to him. Not out of pity or respect, but from fear.

  ‘We put men on the platforms at Bank and Liverpool Street stations the moment they opened,’ Destrier was saying. ‘Somehow, she got away.’

  He glanced at the man in the wheelchair, like a dog expecting to be kicked. The blue eyes stared back unblinking.

  ‘The good news is, she’s still got her phone on her. We got a trace on it an hour ago. Acton, of all places. Must have taken the Tube. We sent a team, but by the time they’d got there she’d gone underground again. Heading east, back into the city.

  On the walls, the graphs and numbers had been replaced by maps and satellite images, with the Underground network superimposed. The security log was displayed behind Destrier, hanging over him like a death sentence.

  From his wheelchair, Michel Saint-Lazare made a coughing noise. Everyone turned. He must once have had a natural voice, but no one there – except, perhaps, Blanchard – had ever heard it. When he spoke, it was really the machine behind him speaking.

  ‘She must come up again. When she does, you will be ready.’

  On the grey boulevard of the Euston Road, among the youth hostels and union offices, St Pancras Station stands like a redbrick fairytale castle: a lofty symphony of turrets and pinnacles, spires, mullions and arches. In the 1960s a generation that loved neither beauty nor fairy tales almost demolished it. But it survived, and now towers in newly restored splendour as England’s gatehouse to Europe.

  Behind the brick façade, near where the trains pulled in, a portly gentleman in an overcoat clutched his hat as he stared up at the great glass roof curving above him. He was a poet; snatches of his verse lay scattered across the floor in gold, as if they’d spilled out of his briefcase. He didn’t move. His bronze eyes would never tire of the view.

  The man beside him was much less serene. From a distance you might have taken him for the statue-poet’s brother: the round figure made rounder by the overcoat; the spaniel legs and pug-nosed face. He even wore a hat. He scanned the concourse like a thief, glancing up at the huge clock every few seconds as if waiting for someone. Even that early in the morning, the station was busy with businessmen taking the first trains to Paris and Brussels.

  He stiffened. A dark-haired girl in jeans and a sweatshirt, no coat, was walking towards him. She carried a backpack, but wore it across her chest the way anxious tourists sometimes do. He fell into step alongside her.

  ‘You made it here. Thank God.’

  She didn’t reply. What was there to say that could possibly fathom the last twenty-four hours?

  ‘You got it?’

  She cupped a protective arm over the bag, like a mother-to-be cradling her belly. ‘Can you tell me what it is, now?’

  ‘Something we’ve been waiting a long time to get back.’ He half-reached to take it, but she recoiled; he drew away. Clearly she wasn’t ready yet.

  ‘I can’t tell you what an achievement this is.’ He sounded like a headmaster at prize day. ‘You’ve no idea how many men have failed where you’ve succeeded. It’s an amazing …’ He struggled for the word. ‘… victory.’

  It won’t bring my dad back. Or Mum.

  ‘I tripped an alarm,’ she said flatly. ‘They know it’s gone. They’ll be all over London looking for it.’

  Harry nodded. ‘We had men watching the bank: it lit up like a Roman candle around two a.m. We feared the worst.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Could they have followed you?’

  ‘Not the way I came.’

  Harry reached inside his pocket and pulled out a slim paper wallet. ‘Not where you’re going, either. I’ve booked us on the next train to Paris.’

  ‘I didn’t bring my passport.’

  ‘There’s one in the envelope. Your name’s Jenny Morgan now. Once we get to Paris, we can go right across Europe without leaving a trace. We’ll keep you safe, Ellie. I promise.’

  They descended the escalators to the departure lounge and waited twenty minutes for their train to be called. After everything she’d endured, that was almost the hardest part. She watched the seconds tick over on the clock, counting them off until she thought she’d go mad. Harry bought her a coffee, but she let it go cold in her hands. At last the announcement came; they shuffled up a moving walkway on to the platform and took their seats on the train. Ellie stared out of the window, willing the train to move, watching the queue inch aboard. Everyone seemed to have vast amounts of baggage, which took forever to stow. Families with children going away for half-term; businessmen extending their trip to the weekend; backpackers on the next leg of their journey. And two men in long black coats and black leather gloves, who carried no luggage at all.

  A weary dread seeped into Ellie’s blood. She clutched Harry’s arm.

  ‘Those men. They’re Blanchard’s.’

  Harry sat bolt upright. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘They were at my mother’s funeral.’ She felt the same overwhelming helplessness she’d felt in the tunnel, unstoppable light bearing down on her. ‘But how did they get here?’

  ‘They must have followed you.’

  Ellie stared at him blankly. ‘They couldn’t have.’

  Harry glanced down at the bulge in her jeans pocket. ‘You didn’t bring –?’

  She pulled the phone out of her pocket and stared at it, the black plastic so smooth and beguiling. Red writing gleamed under the mirrored surface as the phone began to vibrate. It was ringing.

  Harry jumped to his feet and pulled her up. ‘Get out of here, Ellie! Go!’

  He ran down the carriage. A steward tried to stop him, but Harry pushed past, shouting something about forgetting his umbrella. He pulled a backpack off the luggage rack and dived onto the platform. Ellie hesitated just a moment, then grabbed her bag and ran the opposite way.

  At the end of the platform, a guard in a peaked cap blew a whistle. The doors slid shut with a hiss. The signal turned green.

  Tripping over outstretched legs and bags, Ellie reached the train door just as the door locked. She hammered at the button, but the door wouldn’t open. The platform began to move: through the window, she saw Harry and the two Monsalvat men like mannequins in a shop window. Harry had been wrestled to the ground; one of the men crouched over him, while the other searched the backpack he’d stolen. She watched, a spectator at an exhibition, as the tab
leau drifted out of sight. She wanted to scream, but the sound wouldn’t come.

  Pinned to the platform, Harry looked up into his enemy’s face and felt the needle slide into his vein.

  ‘This won’t kill you,’ the man told him. ‘We just want a chat.’

  Beside him, the other man had finished digging through the stolen backpack.

  ‘It’s not here. It must be on the train.’

  Harry heard footsteps running across the concrete, but he wasn’t expecting a rescue. He supposed they’d have some kind of story ready. He could feel the poison creeping through his body: soon he’d be in no position to deny anything.

  They’d pinned his arm to his side, but he could still reach his coat pocket. He slid his hand in and felt for the capsules. There were two: he’d meant to give one to Ellie, but there’d been no time.

  His captor got to his feet and started explaining to the station staff how Harry was an escaped patient from a private mental hospital. He’d stolen someone’s bag – was there any way of returning it to the poor victim? They’d sedated him; if the station guard could just help them lift him …

  The movement loosened the grip that held him. It was all the time Harry needed. He ripped his arm free, and in an instant had the capsules popped in his mouth. He bit down on both, just to be sure, while his captors tried too late to wrench his mouth open.

  With his last living thought, he prayed they wouldn’t catch Ellie.

  Ellie got off the train at Ebbsfleet. The staff tried to stop her, to explain you couldn’t use the Eurostar for domestic journeys, but she screamed and wept about a family emergency and in the end they let her go. She scanned the platform, terrified that Blanchard’s men might have anticipated her move and got there first, seen the commotion she’d made. But it had only taken fifteen minutes, and even Blanchard couldn’t conjure a faster way to get across London. She watched the train pull out of the station, a wasteland of concrete, arc lights and chain-link fences that looked like some kind of prison camp. On board, in the luggage rack above Ellie’s empty seat, her mobile phone emitted its invisible signal, describing her progress towards the Channel Tunnel and France. With any luck, it would be hours before they found she wasn’t with it.