Red Notice

114

Delphine heard Tom throw himself against the other side of the door; she could almost feel his grunt of pain and frustration as he failed to open it. She threw herself across the airlock and grabbed the handle. Laszlo didn’t move a muscle, just watched her pitiful attempts to wrench it free. It took her six or seven frenzied and fruitless heaves to realize that it wouldn’t unlock until the gas exchange was complete.

As the green LED started to blink, Laszlo shoved her ahead of him through the outer door. She felt his grip harden once more on her arm. He manhandled her up a steel ladder towards a hatch. She tried again to slow him down, but didn’t have the strength to put up much of a fight.

He forced the lever open with his free hand and climbed out, pulling her with him. She ripped off her mask and breathed in until she thought her lungs would burst. After what seemed like hours of tainted oxygen, it was the sweetest air she had ever breathed. She just wished she wasn’t sharing it with Laszlo.

She shuffled away from the hatch, along the mound that covered the outer skin of the conduit, and looked around. The stark geometry of the pipeline had been landscaped to blend in with the hillside. It was camouflaged by squares of grass interspersed with gravel drainage beds filled with lumps of flint, the size of Stone Age tools, that glistened wetly in the sunlight.

She was on high ground, above the tunnel system. The breeze ruffled her hair, carrying the smell of gas towards the maze of rail tracks, sidings, platforms and gantries that surrounded the French end of the tunnel.

Police and military vehicles and fire appliances crowded around its mouth. She was standing beneath a cluster of power lines that sloped down towards an electrical sub-station a few hundred metres below them. Ahead and to either side of her lay a patchwork of fields and copses, and in the distance, just inland from the cliffs flanking the Channel coast, she could see the grey stone spire of a church and a handful of red pantiled roofs of a tiny village. Escalles… Of course. She heard Sambor’s voice in her head: ‘That is still safe? Escalles?’

Laszlo turned his back to her as he closed the hatch. His day-sack was looped across his oxygen set, the straps as loose as they could go. She knew that it contained whatever he needed to detonate the pile of rancid explosive beneath the gas pipe. She had a sudden dreadful premonition of the fireball that would surge along the pipeline, destroying everything in its path. And engulfing Tom…

She stooped low, scooped up a handful of flints, and hurled herself towards him. When she was still a metre away, Laszlo began to turn. She focused on the shape of his head as she leaped at him, swinging her body to the left, her right arm crooked, the flints protruding from between her fingers like Stone Age arrow-heads.

She didn’t care where they connected, so long as they did. Laszlo gave a loud groan and a sigh, like air leaving a balloon. She didn’t feel the stones tearing the flesh above his eye, just the pressure of her arm being stopped dead as the rest of her body carried on swivelling.

He spun round, propelled by the momentum of her onslaught. She swept her left hand, also bunched and loaded, towards its target. This time she could feel the hardness of his skull beneath the blow, felt it scrape across the contour of his head as he sank to his knees. He moaned again, more loudly and with even greater anguish.

She brought her right hand down hard on the top of his head. The flint edges, sharp as blades, cut deep, hitting bone and stripping back the skin. She gouged a thick furrow from his scalp; the flint held its line for a couple more inches and then veered free.

Laszlo slumped to the ground. His hands scrabbled to protect his head, then fell away and he lay still. He was still breathing, but he must have gone into shock.

Delphine didn’t have time to draw breath. He wouldn’t stay like that for long. Dropping the flints, she rolled him over onto his stomach, loosened the straps of the day-sack and pulled it from his shoulders.

Laszlo groaned.

She fumbled for the zip. She could see the loop of nylon cord attached to it, but her fingers didn’t seem able to follow her brain’s instructions. Finally she managed to hook a finger into it and peel it back.

Her mind was filled with the image of Tom on the train, confronting Laszlo and Sambor, the battery in his hand, the two leads connecting it to the detonator on his chest. The plastic square separating the jaws of the crocodile clip that would complete the circuit… His other hand tightening the wire that would wrench the insulator away…

Somehow she’d expected to find something similar inside Laszlo’s precious bag: wires, clips, batteries. A box with a plunger, maybe, or a tangle of different, brightly coloured wires attached to a ticking clock, like in a Hollywood movie.

All she unearthed was some kind of walkie-talkie, a military olive green, with a stubby aerial, a numerical keypad and a red dial, graduated from zero to twelve. At the moment it was set to zero. Alongside the dial was a flick switch, and beside it a small graphic of a lightning bolt that told its own story.

She stared at it, puzzled.

But of course… The device she’d seen strapped to the pipeline would hardly be connected to the day-sack by a long wire. It must be activated by a radio signal.

Laszlo stirred.

She remembered his chilling words: ‘I’ve bet my brother that the blast will be powerful enough to fracture the rock overhead…’

She stared at the radio. What could she do? What would Tom do?

She thought of him again, the battery in his hand, the two leads connected to it…

The battery…

Without a battery, a radio couldn’t function.

She flipped it over, pressed down on the cover and slid it open. Inside sat a square power pack. She lifted it out with trembling hands and disconnected it.

Laszlo’s fist smashed into the side of her head. She went down hard. Another blow glanced off her cheek and flipped her over. Laszlo pulled the knife from his belt. Blood bubbled from his almost-closed right eye.

‘Give it to me.’

‘I don’t have it.’

‘Give it to me!’

She opened her hand. ‘Here.’ She sat up, appeared to be about to hand it to him. Then she hurled the battery as far as she could, down the hill and into the long grass, and smashed the radio casing on a nearby rock.

She watched, fixated, as the sun glinted off the blade of the knife arcing, in slow motion, towards her throat.

‘Killing me and my baby won’t stop him,’ she rasped. She kept her voice taut, determined not to give him the satisfaction of hearing her fear. ‘He will not rest until he finds you. Then he will kill you. I’d want that. I’d want it to happen slowly…’

She felt the cold metal on her throat and a warm trickle of blood ooze down her neck. Her breathing was fast and shallow. As she stared at him, unable to move, everything seemed to freeze. She could feel the breeze in her hair, the sun warm on her skin. She could hear the song of a blackbird in the nearby wood.

It seemed so cruel to be murdered in bright sunlight, with birdsong in her ears and a child in her belly that had never experienced those joys; a boy child who didn’t even have a name.

There was a sound from the hatch, almost like the beating of a gong. She felt the pressure ease on her throat. Laszlo withdrew the knife, but held it for a moment in front of her face. She saw the reflection of her darkly terrified eyes in its blade.

‘You’re right, of course. He comes for you. And if you are not here, he will come for me.’

He drew back the knife and ran its blade down her body, towards her stomach. His good eye stared deeply into hers.

The blade stopped. She could feel its tip starting to pierce her skin. Then he seemed to change his mind. He lifted it away once more and plunged it deep into her right thigh.

‘I really do hope that Tom manages to keep you alive.’ He nodded down at her stomach. ‘And to lose a child is never easy…’

Delphine felt no pain at first, just saw the crimson fountain spurting from the gash in her jeans.

She pressed her fingers against the wound, but was unable to staunch the blood gushing from her severed femoral artery. Faintness swept through her in waves. She felt her hand slide helplessly away, and fail somehow to break her fall.

Her head smacked against the still wet grass, and the light inside it seemed to dim, as if a cloud had drifted across the sun. She could no longer feel its warmth. She heard ringing in her ears. All other sounds now seemed to be coming from a very great distance away.

Laszlo moved swiftly to the two zip-wire harnesses — with a loop of rope at each end and a plastic wheel at its centre — that Sambor had secreted beside the hatch.

He shoved one into his pocket and hooked the other over the nearest power line, slid his hands into the loops and accelerated down towards the sub-station.