Flash Flood

Chapter Thirty-three

They say a drowning man comes up three times. Ben came up and saw Eva’s face. With one hand she was grasping the neck of his suit; with the other it seemed like she was trying to hit him. Ben went under and was dragged up again, spitting and gasping as his mouth filled with foul water. Eva tried to punch him again. This time she got him — hard in the middle of the chest.

There was a loud hissing noise, and then she stopped trying to hit him.

Ben realized he was floating: he wasn’t having to keep himself above the water. The suit felt tighter around his shoulders and chest.

Eva was bobbing beside him, her arms out in a T-shape beside her. ‘You can stop struggling. I just hit your buoyancy valve.’

Where was the shark? Ben spluttered out a warning. It didn’t come out as words, only water.

A few metres away they heard a piercing scream and Ben saw Francisco’s flailing arms and the nose of the tiger shark like the cone of a rocket. Its jaw dropped open and closed around Francisco’s middle.

The sound was cut off as abruptly as it had started. Ben and Eva stayed bobbing in the water, stunned. They seemed to have been swept out of the fierce Thames current. It was no longer a struggle to stay in one place. The top of a tree was sticking up out of the water just a few metres away, and beyond that was the hurly-burly of travelling boats and flood detritus.

They were in some kind of enclosure, like a walled garden. It must belong to the big Tudor building.

And hopefully the shark was still out there with all the rest of the traffic.

Eva was the first to speak. ‘He was bleeding. That’s why the shark was attracted to him.’

Ben remembered the wounds on Francisco’s wrists. Then he had another thought. ‘Eva, don’t you think it’s weird that there’s a shark in the Thames?’

She made a movement, like a shrug, her hands waving gently in the water. ‘There have been porpoises and whales in the Thames before. A shark is par for the course.’

Ben couldn’t fathom her. She reminded him of a very serious teacher at his school, who never laughed or looked surprised at anything.

Eva certainly was a strange girl. But now she had saved his life twice.

Eva swam towards the building and Ben followed. They climbed in through a window like two floundering fish, leaving splashes on the polished oak floor.

Outside, in the water, José couldn’t see Francisco. He was clinging desperately to a lamppost, but the current was battering against him, trying to shake him loose. His police hat had gone and no one could see the markings on the jacket.

The current was winning.

Then José saw a boat coming towards him and made a desperate bid to swim to it. With a superhuman effort he reached its varnished sides and thankfully slapped a hand onto it.

Something hard and wooden came down on his hands. As he fell back into the water he saw an old guy in a black hat like Nelson’s and a red coat with gold buttons, holding a cricket bat.

José submerged and came back up. His ears were full of water but he could see the man’s lips moving.

‘Oh no you don’t.’

Clive Brooks, Sidney Cadogan, Madeleine Harwood and Fat Pinstripe were sitting around a large dining table in one of the bunker’s wood-panelled private dining rooms. The furniture was mahogany. There were even heavy brocade curtains to give the impression of a normal room with windows.

Despite the opulence, Fat Pinstripe was worrying about the accommodation. ‘If we have to stay down here for months, we need to get organized. We should form a bunker committee. Get some rules in this place. Some of these facilities and supplies should be restricted access.’

‘No we don’t,’ said Bel tartly. ‘Instead of counting the toilet rolls, we need to worry about why we ended up here in the first place and work out how to stop it happening again.’

‘You can stay here,’ said a voice at the door, ‘or you can come with us and leave by the Camden entrance. Once you’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, of course, to cover this incident.’

Standing outside in the corridor were two soldiers in disruption-pattern uniform and neat berets.

Bel didn’t hang around. She was the first out into the corridor. More soldiers were going through the rooms and preparing the evacuation. The corridor was teeming with people, like an airport departure lounge. They seemed to be heading in the general direction of one corridor, filing past a soldier with a palm pilot.

Bel went up to the soldier. ‘Have you evacuated the ArBonCo Centre or Charing Cross yet?’

‘We’re getting around to all those places in good time, ma’am. Are you looking for someone in particular?’

‘My son. I was meant to be meeting him.’

The soldier touched the stylus on his screen a couple of times, then handed the palm pilot to Bel. ‘Right, ma’am. Put your details in and the details of any people you’re looking for. Then, when we pick your son up, the database will flag that we’ve got you too.’

Bel thought it sounded dubious: what were the chances that another Ben Tracey was wandering the capital today? But the form asked for plenty of details: her home address, date of birth, middle names; and the same for Ben. She filled it in, handed the palm pilot back and peered at the screen over the soldier’s shoulder.

‘So, have you got him?’

‘We can’t tell you that yet, ma’am, we have to hook up to the satellite. But as soon as we get back to the rescue centre we do a match for all the people we’ve picked up. We’ve matched a lot of people already.’

She stepped away and joined the stream of people starting the walk towards the Camden entrance. How long would she have to wait?

Ahead of her, a tall figure in a suit was getting directions from a soldier with a clipboard. He had sandy-coloured hair and a shirt with an open collar that revealed a healthy outdoor tan. Bel’s sharp eyes recognized him immediately from news pictures: David Atkinson, the Prime Minister of Canada. He had been down here all the time, in another part of the bunker.

She set off dodging through the crowd like a rugger player going for a try, crumpled purple sleeves pushed up purposefully.