Red Notice

105

Delphine felt like Laszlo’s mule. She was pushed and hustled along the tunnel, fifteen kilos of oxygen tank loaded on her back.

She dragged her feet, partly through pain, partly because she was still hoping against hope that Tom would find a way of escaping from the train and catching up with them.

Not for the first time, Laszlo read her mind. ‘He is not coming back for you, Delphine. So keep moving.’

They passed the body of the old man she had so briefly befriended. She hardly had time to look down at him. It was almost a mercy that Laszlo kept pushing her on.

The stench hanging in the air — of charred equipment and something else, something sickly sweet that she couldn’t quite identify — caught in the back of her throat. Then they tumbled into a segment of the service tunnel that seemed to be filled with burned-out vehicles.

Sambor hauled himself swiftly up a steel ladder set into the wall. Light streamed through a hatch above his head. She watched him push through the two skateboards and disappear. Laszlo hustled Delphine after him. She tried stalling again, but only managed to antagonize her captor.

‘Move!’

Laszlo drew a knife from his belt and jabbed it into her calf, drawing blood. She cried out and tried to jerk her foot away from him, but only succeeded in dislodging her shoe. As it tumbled to the ground, he simply dug the tip a little further into her flesh. ‘If you continue with this foolishness,’ he breathed, ‘I will be forced to remove this from your leg, and insert it into your stomach instead. Your child’s life is entirely in your hands.’

She clambered up the ladder.

Once inside the conduit, she kept her head low to avoid the power lines buzzing overhead. Sambor was standing maybe twenty metres ahead of them, next to a large steel pipe. Something seemed to be strapped onto it, and twenty or thirty slabs of some revolting green substance were piled on the floor beneath it. The reek of linseed made her gag. She guessed it was some kind of bomb.