Aftershock

by Sam Fisher

  ‘Listen,’ Pete said, extending a hand. ‘Let’s start again, shall we?’

  The boy looked at Pete’s palm. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘My name’s Peter Sherringham, and this is Maiko Buchanan. We’re part of E-Force, a rescue...’

  ‘E-Force? Fuck me! I’ve seen you in the papers. Wow! I see your badges now.’

  ‘Okay. So, we’re good?’ Mai asked.

  ‘Yeah! Shit, we need you, I can tell ya. Place is a fucking mess.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Me? I’m Archie Barnet. Don’t like Arch, just Archie.’

  ‘Okay, Archie. Have you seen anyone else?’

  ‘Yeah, there’re a few of us up in Reception. Some of ’em are buggered up proper. I’ve just got this scratch.’ And he tapped his forehead.

  ‘I guess the elevators are out?’ Pete said.

  ‘Yeah, but there’re stairs. I know every nook and cranny of this place.’

  ‘Well then, Archie, you’d better lead the way.’

  35

  Archie took them along the corridor to a wide door marked ‘SERVICE STAIRS’. The sound of their footfalls echoed around the concrete walls. The stairs were narrow and spiralled up three flights to another door labelled ‘RECEPTION’. It opened onto a narrow passageway. Mai and Pete followed Archie and they came out into the vast void of the main Reception of the Neptune Hotel.

  Even after being shaken to its foundations, the place was still magnificent. The sculpture of Neptune stood imperiously, undamaged amid piles of debris. The four giant chandeliers that had been suspended above the sculpture had not fared so well. Each had crashed to the ground, shattering into tens of thousands of pieces. The white marble floor was covered with glass and slithers of metal. Two bodies lay in the wreckage, a man and a woman, each wearing a red uniform. The man’s neck had snapped and his head was twisted at an obscene angle. The woman lay on her front, a field of glass shards protruded from her back; the deep red of her blood had soaked her uniform.

  Archie, his face drained pale, looked at Mai and Pete. ‘Yes, Trevor and Margo. They worked at the desk. I checked them earlier, but they’re dead.’ His voice cracked with emotion. Turning, he picked a way across the carpet of glass towards the curved dark wood counter. A computer screen lay on the floor immediately in front of the desk, the screen smashed. Papers and small office items were scattered everywhere. As they approached, they could see the head and forearms of another body protruded from under the end of the counter.

  Mai arrived first and went down on one knee. The victim was another woman, young, perhaps early twenties, her blonde hair wet with blood. A great gash ran across her face. Mai checked for a pulse. ‘Natalia,’ Archie said from where he was standing slightly behind Pete. ‘It was her twenty-first today. We had a little party round the back there.’ He pointed to a door close to the desk. ‘While the posh do was goin’ on in Gamma. We ’ad champagne and all...’ He suddenly burst into tears, sobbing like a toddler.

  Mai stood up and walked over to the boy, placing an arm around his shoulders. She let him sob for a few moments then she said, ‘Archie. I know this is hard, but we really need your help. You said there were other survivors.’

  He stopped crying as suddenly as he had begun and wiped his eyes with a grimy sleeve. Straightening his jacket, he cricked his neck theatrically. ‘I’m fine,’ he said unconvincingly. Then he cleared his throat. ‘We ’ave a job to do. This way.’

  He led them over to the other side of the desk and along a wide corridor that took them into another narrower passageway. At the end, a door stood ajar. Archie pushed on it.

  There were four people in the room. They were all members of staff, three men and a woman, still in their red uniforms. The woman and two of the men lay on seat cushions on the floor, the fourth, a younger man, perhaps in his late twenties, was sitting in a chair, his arm bandaged from elbow to wrist. He looked alarmed as the two members of E-Force walked in.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ricky. Friends,’ Archie announced to the man.

  Mai walked over to the injured people lying on the floor and moved from one to the other. The men were unconscious. They were middle aged, each with gold stripes on the sleeves of their uniforms. After checking vital signs, Mai removed an electronic medscanner from a shoulder bag. The device, the shape and size of a ballpoint pen, bleeped and she surveyed the readings on her wrist monitor. She gave each of the men a shot of powerful painkiller and then moved on to the woman. Her face was bleached white and smeared with blood from a cut on her chin. The left side of her face was blackened by a bruise. She flinched as Mai approached.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

  For a moment, the woman couldn’t speak, then she cleared her throat and swallowed hard. ‘Sandra ... er, Sandra Rimmer.’

  Mai ran the medscanner slowly across the woman’s forehead, down each side of her face and neck and over her chest, checking the monitor as she went. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Head trauma, but not serious.’

  Mai stood up, walked over to the man called Ricky and repeated the process. When she had finished, she strode across the room. ‘Two of them have concussion,’ she said quietly to Pete. ‘One has two broken ribs. He’ll be in a lot of pain when he regains consciousness. The guy in the chair, Ricky, has a fractured ulna. They all have glass lacerations, but nothing life-threatening. I’ve given them shots. You did all this, Archie?’ Mai added, turning to the bellboy.

  ‘St John’s Ambulance Service, Leytonstone branch,’ he said. ‘Always thought it’d come in ’andy one day. I got the cushions from a couple of sofas. It’s the staff recreational area through there.’ He pointed to a doorway. ‘Well buggered though. Managed to salvage the First Aid kit, the kettle, of course, and a couple of other things.’

  Mai smiled. ‘You did very well.’

  One of the two unconscious men opened his eyes. Archie saw him looking at Mai and Pete, clearly terrified. The man gasped and clutched at his side. He looked horribly pale.

  Archie turned to the four injured staff members. ‘This is Maiko and Peter,’ he said, waving towards the new arrivals. ‘E-Force, would ya believe?’ Then he turned to Mai. ‘Ricky Bellamy,’ he said, pointing to the man in the chair. ‘Worked on the main desk with...’ He pulled a face and turned to the three people on the floor. ‘James Hornsby,’ he said indicating the man with the broken ribs. ‘Chief Concierge. Next to ’im is Hugh Gebbly, Assistant Chief Concierge, and Sandra ... well, you’ve been introduced.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ James Hornsby said. He was perhaps 50, heavily built, with greased-back hair dyed uniformly black. At first glance, he looked like an early 1970s Elvis, about the time the singer was turning to fat. ‘We heard what sounded like a blast. The whole place shook and all hell broke loose. It’s a terrorist attack, right?’ he winced again. ‘God Almighty ... my side.’

  ‘You’ve broken three ribs, James,’ Mai said. ‘But I’ve given you some powerful painkillers. They should start to work soon.’

  ‘To be honest, we don’t know what happened,’ Pete said, looking around at the faces in front of him. ‘It wasn’t a bomb. Or at least, we’re pretty sure it wasn’t. But the hotel has been very badly damaged.’

  ‘Dome Gamma?’ Sandra said. There was an edge of panic in her voice.

  ‘Not good,’ Pete said. ‘We know there are survivors, but not many.’

  James stared at Pete, the others looked away, each lost in their own thoughts.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ James asked. ‘You were going for a reccie, Archie.’

  ‘Yeah, I did. Can’t say it helped much.’

  ‘We’ve run scans of the hotel structure,’ Mai said. ‘This dome is the least badly damaged, so you should stay put for the moment. We’ve got the docking bay dry, but we can’t hook up our subs to the hotel.’

  ‘What about the universal dock in Beta?’ Ricky Bellamy asked.

  ‘Tried that first. It’s too unstable
.’

  ‘The emergency subs in Beta. Surely they would be a better option?’

  ‘It looks like the way to Beta from here is extremely hazardous,’ Pete replied. ‘But, if we can’t use the dock here, we’ll be forced to try the Beta subs to get you out.’

  Ricky Bellamy nodded.

  ‘So,’ Pete went on. ‘What we’re going to do is create a connector between the end of the dock we came through and our sub.’

  ‘How on earth you going to do that?’ James Hornsby asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Mai interrupted. ‘We have some interesting materials that can be moulded any way we like. If we can get you guys out, Pete and I will go on to the other domes. Do you know if there are any other survivors in this dome, Archie?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘I ain’t seen no one, but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘I’ll run a scan,’ Mai said, and glanced at Pete before heading for the door to the passageway back to Reception.

  ‘So, we have to get over to the dock, right?’ Hugh Gebbly said, watching Mai’s retreating back.

  Pete nodded and flicked on his comms. ‘Mark?’

  ‘Pete.’

  ‘We’ve found five survivors in Dome Alpha. No serious injuries. Mai and I think the best plan would be to use Morphadin so we can dock the Narcis with the hotel. Now we’ve got the dock dry it should work well. Mai will go up to the surface with them and I’ll press on. She’ll rejoin me later.’

  ‘You got enough Morphadin on the sub?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure. I loaded some extra supplies just before we left the Big Mac. I had a feeling we’d need it.’

  ‘Good. Well, it’s a plan.’

  ‘Mai’s just gone back to Reception. She’s going to run a scan of the dome to see if there’s anyone else alive.’

  ‘Okay, Pete. Keep in touch ... and good luck.’

  Pete turned to the five staff members and was about to explain the plan when the room shook violently. The lights went out. Sandra screamed in the dark. The lights stuttered on, then off, then on again. A roaring sound filled the room. There was a loud boom from beyond the passageway. It came from the direction of the Reception. The floor shook. Sandra screamed again. The rumbling stopped abruptly. Pete heard a sound like swishing swords. It was from close by. He span around and saw a metal beam come crashing through the ceiling. He dived to his left and the beam missed him by centimetres. Rolling onto his side, he crawled under a table close to where Ricky Bellamy had been sitting. The man was nowhere to be seen.

  The table shook and Pete heard the thud of a heavy object crashing onto the table top above him. He covered his head with his arms. A second, heavier object slammed into the table top, knocking it aside. Pete whirled around and a piece of concrete the size of a football flew straight at his face.

  36

  Hang Cheng, Gobi Desert, 22 June 2007

  Mengde Sun surveyed the main control room of the base at Hang Cheng and thought, not for the first time, how astonishingly it had all changed.

  The original base, the one he had overseen, had been closed down in 1992, just when his experiments were beginning to bear fruit. He had always prided himself on his ability to manipulate politicians and the men who held the purse strings of state. He had given them the things they wanted. He had been a great scientific worker for the party. But he had not relied on such ephemera alone. He had always taken out insurance. He had known so many dirty secrets, he could barely manage the information. But it had been good insurance, great insurance, everyone, everyone had been scared of him.

  But then the glorious but geriatric leader, Deng Xiaoping had handed over power to Jiang Zemin, the Eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. And, for the first time in his life, Mengde had been unprepared. For reasons he still did not fully understand, Jiang hated him, and Mengde had nothing in the way of insurance, nothing with which to blackmail the man. Within a month of the handing over of power from Deng to Jiang, Base 44 at Hang Cheng had been closed down, stripped bare and bulldozed. The following week, Mengde was arrested and imprisoned without trial.

  Mengde stared at the banks of sophisticated electronics, the plasma screens and the men in crisp white boiler suits. Then his gaze was drawn to a massive flat screen taking up an entire wall of the room. It reminded him of a time almost two decades earlier when a similar room had stood on this spot. There had been a wall-sized window, behind which experimental subjects had been mutilated and killed in terrible ways. He smiled to himself. He was back. He had served 12 years in China’s worst political prison, Jing Shak. But General Secretary Jiang Zemin had been replaced, just as all leaders are, and he, Mengde Sun, was now back in favour. He had returned to his old job as Party Chief Scientist.

  With the ascension of Jiang, in 1992, fate had dealt him a terrible blow. But the new leader was an old associate, and Mengde Sun knew a great deal about him. Within six months, the Chief Scientist’s base at Hang Cheng had been rebuilt, and it was better than it could ever have been before. He was back, and with greater power than he had ever enjoyed. So much power in fact that he was completely autonomous. No one in Beijing had the slightest idea what experiments he was conducting. He had an almost limitless budget and zero accountability. He was a law unto himself, and he was exploiting it to the full. This was to be an über insurance policy. With work completed on his latest experiments he would be untouchable, and if he chose to, the total control of China, perhaps even the world, would be his.

  ‘Relay station 1 online,’ a technician announced.

  ‘Relay station 2 online,’ said another from across the room.

  ‘Relay station 3 online,’ declared a third technician.

  The wall screen lit up. Mengde settled himself into a leather chair, a much bigger and better chair than he had used in the old days. A technician approached and the tingle of déjà vu passed through the Chief Scientist. But it was not his old lab manager, Yung Sing. Yung had been hanged in Ying Shak. His replacement was a fresh-faced youth, no more than 30, Mengde mused. His ID told the Chief Scientist the kid’s name was Fu Tang. ‘All is prepared, sir,’ Fu said and pointed to a counter in the bottom right of the screen. Then, as Mengde watched, an image appeared. He knew what it was. He had been working on this project, supervising every detail of it for two years.

  A bridge. A bridge half a kilometre long and crossing a series of swampy rivers. It was the Florida Road Bridge, a section of the I-75, 11 kilometres outside Miami. It was early morning, rush hour. The bridge, a 10-lane behemoth, was packed with cars, bumper to bumper, all crawling along at 30 kilometres per hour. The counter in the bottom right corner clicked on. It said: 00.20.

  The room fell silent. The numbers ticked down.

  Mengde felt supernaturally calm. He lived for these moments. These were the times he felt truly alive ... just before he snatched the lives of others. There was an extra delicious frisson about this experiment – who knew how many would die? Who would they be? So-called innocents? Yes, women, children. Oh yes, lots of them, mummies and kiddies on the school run.

  00.02.

  00.01.

  00.00.

  For one and a half seconds it seemed as though nothing had happened, that nothing would happen, that the test had failed. Then the bridge started to vibrate. At first, the motion was almost imperceptible. But after three seconds, the entire structure started to shake and then to rock from side to side. Red taillights flicked on all along the bridge. From the other side of the world, the men in the laboratory at Hang Cheng could hear brakes squeal. Then came the thud of impact and car horns sounding.

  The bridge snapped into three pieces. A middle section 100 metres long simply plunged 25 metres into the swamp, vanishing from sight and taking with it scores of cars. The southern section of the bridge shot up as though it were a drawbridge. Millions of tonnes of concrete and steel levered to the vertical. Cars flew backwards, cascading into others behind them. Trucks jack-knifed and tumbled like falling dominos. Wi
thin 10 seconds, the image on the screen was one of unimaginable carnage.

  Except for the sounds coming from the I-75, 14,000 kilometres away, the room remained absolutely silent. Then Mengde pulled himself up from the chair and started to clap. The sound grew louder. Two of the men at the computers between the Chief Scientist and the wall-sized screen looked around. Turning back, they began to clap in time with Mengde. Soon, everyone in the room was applauding loudly. A technician started to whoop. He turned and embraced his colleague.

  As hearts stopped and lungs collapsed, as heads were sliced from bodies and limbs were crushed to pulp on a Florida bridge, the laboratory at Hang Cheng erupted into ecstatic celebration.

  37

  Gobi Desert, China

  ‘You must be Stephanie.’

  She span around, the light from the beam of her torch darting about like a huge firefly. A man stood a few paces away. He was very tall, dressed in a tatty greatcoat over ragged jeans. His long hair and beard were streaked with grey. He was holding a lantern high in his left hand. It cast a sparse, greenish light across his face.

  Steph instinctively adopted a defensive pose, brandishing the burning branch in front of her like a weapon.

  ‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean to startle you,’ the man said. His voice was a baritone, pure Home Counties. It sounded so ridiculously incongruous, so out of place and time, it was almost comical.

  ‘Who are you?’ Steph said, keeping a tight grip on the burning wood. ‘Where is my friend?’

  ‘Josh? Oh, he’s fine. Your plane crashed, yes? Made quite a racket, I might say! Certain to have woken the neighbours, dear girl.’ He laughed suddenly. Two front teeth were missing.

  Steph held his gaze. He appeared to be in his fifties, but he may have been younger; the beard and hair aged him. Steph weighed things up. His face was thin, the big greatcoat hung off him, he looked undernourished and unhealthy. Possibly unarmed. She could take him, if she needed to. The man seemed completely relaxed. He smiled and tilted his head.