The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Sixty-Four

Anton Lindquist felt exactly as predicted, like shit. He’d noticed the first hint of the antitoxin’s side effects while he was still disposing of the dead monkey. By the time he’d finished up in the lab and was finally ready to head for his quarters to get some badly needed rest, his head had started pounding and the nausea was coming on strong.

Udo Streicher’s sudden appearance was the very last thing Lindquist needed. The buggy tore up the corridor and screeched to a halt outside the lab window. Streicher leaped out. His hair was dishevelled, his eyes wild and his nostrils rimmed with white powder. ‘The canisters!’ he yelled. ‘I need the canisters!’

Lindquist showed him where he’d put them in the outer chamber of the main lab room, carefully wrapped in packaging material and protected inside a plastic crate. Streicher ordered him to load it on the buggy. ‘Hurry. Are you sick? Get a grip on yourself, man.’

‘What’s happening?’ Lindquist asked in a faint voice, struggling to keep from vomiting. His face was a ghastly shade of white.

‘We’re under attack by government agents. Take this.’ Streicher drew his pistol and held it out butt-first. ‘You have to protect me. We’re leaving. If we run into trouble along the way, you know what to do.’

‘I’m a technician, not a fighter,’ Lindquist protested, staring at the gun.

Streicher pressed his face so close to Lindquist’s that their noses almost touched. ‘I am your leader,’ he hissed through bared teeth. ‘You will do your duty by me, science boy, or I’ll snap your scrawny neck.’

As the buggy sped through the tunnels with Lindquist riding shotgun, Streicher managed to raise another of his remaining men on the radio. ‘Zwart? Is Wokalek with you? Now listen to me. The bunker has been breached by intruders. Arm yourselves and do whatever is required to repel this attack. That’s an order.’ Without waiting for Zwart’s reply, he switched to the separate radio channel that he and Hannah used.

No response. Where the hell was she? He stuffed the handset in his pocket and yelled at the buggy to go faster.

‘This place is unreal,’ Sylvie said. ‘No wonder we couldn’t find the bastard. How long has he been living down here?’

They’d ditched their transport on penetrating the inner core of the nuclear bunker, and now they were moving on foot through an apparently endless web of rounded tunnels, sweeping from room to room. Ben had no idea exactly how deep they were underground, but an oppressive deadness about the atmosphere made him feel a long way from anywhere. They could have been orbiting Jupiter’s moons, or encased inside a submarine combing the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench. Silence, except for the background electrical hum from the generators and the whisper of the air conditioning.

The place seemed deserted. Ben’s instincts told him otherwise.

He kicked open another door and pointed the MP5 into a room that looked like the dorms on board a naval battleship. Sleeping quarters for the men, and recently used by the look of the rumpled bedding and the smell of stale sweat. Next to it were five more identical rooms, then a canteen filled with tables and hard chairs, and next to that a mess lounge with a big-screen television.

They moved on. More tunnels, more doors. Comfortably appointed reception areas that could have been lifted straight from the corporate headquarters of a fancy legal firm in Zurich or New York. A dining room with a vast walnut table and Persian carpet, gleaming silverware, a marble fireplace, and what looked to Ben’s unschooled eye like original Matisse and Cézanne works hanging on the walls. The post-nuclear holocaust, survived in style.

Further on, they discovered that the bunker wasn’t all about comforts either. Ben had to whistle as they walked through a storage area that seemed to fill about a mile of corridor and contain a bewildering and highly organised inventory of edible and non-edible supplies. Even to begin to catalogue it all would have taken a month.

‘He’s been putting this together for years,’ Silvie muttered, shaking her head.

The armoury section they came across further on beat it all. Ben had been in countless cathedral-sized military arms depots without ever batting an eyelid. He’d once seen inside a former Soviet atomic bunker that had been adapted by the Ukrainian military as a storehouse for more than ten thousand Kalashnikov rifles. That had been an impressive sight, but pound for pound, Udo Streicher’s private small-arms arsenal was in another league just for the sheer dedication, persistence and financial commitment it must have taken to accumulate and gather together this much hardware, even in firearm-friendly Switzerland. Heavy machine guns. Shoulder-mounted rocket grenade launchers. Long-range sniper systems capable of taking out moderate-to-heavy armour from two miles away. Assault rifles from China, Russia and the USA. Submachine guns and combat shotguns and handguns of every make and calibre. Rack after rack after rack, standing both sides of the centre aisle and towering all the way to the curved ceiling.

Ben stopped. He bent down and picked up the small, hard object he’d just stepped on. It was a loose nine-millimetre round, shiny and new, recently unpacked from its crate. He turned it thoughtfully between finger and thumb.

Maybe it was because the moment took him straight back to when he’d stepped on the fired nine-mil casing on discovering the massacre at the monastery. Or maybe it was just some preternatural sixth sense developed over too many years of having to try hard to stay alive. But Ben felt the sudden frisson of tension in his back, in his neck and arms and guts, that alerted him.

He whirled round and found himself locking eyes with the two armed men who’d stepped out from behind storage units fifteen metres away.

It was difficult to tell who opened fire first. Ben squeezed the trigger of his MP5 and simultaneously grabbed Silvie’s arm and propelled her hard behind a stack of ammo crates at pretty much the same instant as the incoming bullets ricocheted, sparking, off the gun racks where he’d been standing just milliseconds earlier. He hit the deck and rolled and kept firing, saw the men dive for cover. His weapon had a hundred-round magazine. But so did theirs.

Within seconds, the armoury was an unsafe place to be.