The Nemesis Program

Chapter Fifty-Six

Ben let the drain cover down with a clang that echoed all through the building. He thrust the disassembled gun into Roberta’s hands, got to his feet and headed quickly towards the door. ‘All right. Stay cool, we still have time to figure something out,’ he said, working harder to convince himself than the other two. He stared up at the roof. ‘If we can’t go under the building, maybe we can go over it. We just need to get to those windows.’

‘And break our legs jumping down to the concrete outside,’ Roberta said sceptically.

Ben pointed. ‘There’s a coil of rope looped round and round one of those girders. See it? It might be long enough to reach the ground.’

‘If it’s not all rotted away to hell,’ Quigley said doubtfully.

‘He’s right, Ben, what if it breaks?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Then I’ll fall and you’ll know I was wrong. But at least I’ll know I tried.’

She looked at him. ‘You’re a persistent fucker, aren’t you?’

‘I get like that when I’m about to die,’ Ben said.

‘How are you even going to get up there?’

Ben thought for a moment. ‘Give me the pistol,’ he said.

She handed the pieces to him and watched, puzzled, as he quickly slotted the frame and slide back together. ‘So now it’s a useless gun again,’ she said.

‘Or a useful hammer.’ Ben gripped it by the barrel end and used its butt against the plaster, reaching up as high up as he could. Three solid whacks did nothing but scrape the gun’s frame.

‘What are you doing, trying to break the wall down?’ Roberta asked him, staring as though he was crazy.

‘Wrong place,’ he muttered and tried again a few inches to the right. This time a chunk of plaster broke away, leaving a hole just about deep enough to get his fingers in.

Seven minutes to go. But seven minutes was a long time if you could stay cool and keep your wits about you. Ben crouched and started whacking the wall at waist level. In a few seconds he’d penetrated through to the stonework. He raised his left foot and stuck it in the lower hole, then gripped the upper hole with his left fingertips and heaved himself upward. The plaster bore his weight as he started chipping another handhold further up.

‘You’ll never make it,’ Roberta said.

‘I don’t see any other way, do you?’ he grunted as he raised himself upwards, clinging tightly to the wall and ignoring the pain in his fingertips. He transferred the scuffed pistol to his left hand and kept working as quickly as he could. In two minutes, hammering like a madman and hanging precariously by his aching fingers and toes, he’d managed to climb halfway to the level of the windows. Roberta and Quigley watched him anxiously as he clawed his way upwards.

‘If I can get up there,’ he called down to them, ‘I can throw down that rope and pull each of you up in turn.’

‘Ben, we only have just under five minutes!’ Roberta yelled.

This was taking too long. Fighting panic, he redoubled his hammering. Bits of plaster rained from the wall and shattered on the concrete below. Sweat was pouring off him. His hands were tingling badly from all the pounding; his toes were becoming numb and he had to will himself to hang on. He was far enough above the floor to fracture both his legs, and probably his spine, if he lost his grip.

You’re not going to fall, he told himself, and kept on hammering and kept on climbing until at last, the gun gritty between his teeth, he was able to tear his left hand from its crumbling finger-hold and grasp the window ledge. Moments later, gasping and blinded with sweat, he hauled himself onto the ledge.

It was only then that he realised how far he’d climbed in such a short time. Roberta and Quigley were small figures forty feet or more beneath him. Ben warily straightened himself up on the crumbly ledge. The tin-plate ceiling wasn’t far above his head, and the section of roof support around which the rope was coiled was just about within his reach. He strained outwards, fingers clawing as he leaned as far into space as he dared — and then a little further. His fingertips brushed the rusted iron girder; then suddenly the coarse rope was in his grasp.

Here we go, he thought.

‘Ben! No!’ came Roberta’s frightened cry from below as he swung away from the window ledge, dangling perilously from the loop of rope. If it had snapped or uncoiled itself from the girder, there would have been nothing to break his rapid descent to the concrete below.

‘Ben, there’s less than three minutes to go!’ Roberta yelled.

Time was streaming away like sand through his fingers. But he still had to try. Dangling from the rope, he kicked his legs up, wrapped them around the rust-encrusted H-section contour of the girder and managed to clamber up until he was perched astride its flat top, gripping its sides between his knees, calves and ankles. The rope was knotted tightly to the iron beam. He worked frantically to loosen it, and in a few seconds it was coming undone. He unravelled the coil off the girder, made one end fast and started lowering the other, praying it would reach the floor. He was pretty sure he could haul the lightweight Roberta up. Quigley’s heavier frame might be another matter, but he’d worry about that when it was happening. Once all three of them were up here, they could use the rope to swing back across one at a time to the window ledge, drop the rope out and clamber down.

At least, that was the idea. Seconds were ticking away like gunshots inside Ben’s head.

The rope reached the floor with two feet to spare. ‘Loop it around your waist and hang on tight!’ Ben yelled to Roberta. She quickly did what he said, then let it take her weight, testing that it would hold her.

Ben wiped his sweaty palms on his shirt. ‘All right, now I’m going to pull you up.’ Wedging his body against the girder, he took a strong grip on the rope and started to haul the rope in towards him.

Roberta was dangling six feet in the air when something started to happen. At first Ben thought it was his own heart hammering so hard that it seemed to make his whole body shake — but then he realised it was the girder shaking under him. A deep thrumming, a quivering barely noticeable at first but rapidly building in intensity. Not just coming from the girder — the entire building was filled with it, even the air seemed to vibrate. The sensation was unsettlingly familiar. It was exactly what Ben had felt inside the De Bourg family tomb, back on the other side of the world.

This was it. Ben didn’t need to check his watch to know what was happening. Right on time, the event Victor Craine had promised was starting. The bastards are really doing it, he thought. It was true. Rage and disbelief and terror mingled with the adrenaline rushing through Ben’s veins as he hauled harder on the rope.

Within moments, he could hear it as well as feel it. A growing rumble, like constant thunder. Rust began to vibrate off the beam, falling down in red powdery flakes. The tin plates were rattling overhead. Down below, Quigley was having difficulty staying on his feet and had to support himself against a wall.

‘Keep pulling me up!’ Roberta yelled. She was twenty feet above the concrete now, swinging in a circle. Ben had stopped as the sickening realisation hit him that this was too dangerous. ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted as he lowered her back down to the floor.

‘Get down on the ground and protect your heads,’ he shouted down at her and Quigley. The American was staggering like a drunk as the concrete underfoot began to heave up and down. He fell into a crouch and curled up with his hands over his head. Roberta yanked the rope away from her middle and did the same. Up on his girder, Ben thrust one arm through the single loop of rope attached to the steel and clung on tight.

The walls were moving, shifting, grinding in their foundations. Cracks appeared and spread everywhere like black snakes across the plasterwork. Chunks broke away and smashed on the concrete below. One of the intact window panes shattered and shards of glass rained down and burst across the floor, narrowly missing Roberta.

Ben held on tighter as the shaking became more intense, but he knew he couldn’t hold on much longer as the vibrating girder gnawed savagely at his gripping legs and arms. The rumbling had grown into a constant roar. At its heart he could sense a deep source of power that, if fully unleashed, would make the small Tesla oscillator’s effects on the De Bourg chapel seem tiny and pathetic by comparison. He could visualise the building’s walls breaking apart and collapsing inwards, taking the centre columns with them; could almost feel himself falling as the roof girders came tumbling down together with a crash followed by hundreds of tin sheets, burying him, Roberta and Jack Quigley in a heap of rubble from which they’d never emerge alive. This was the end. The perfect execution, not just of Craine’s plan but of the three people trapped inside what was about to become their grave.

But just as the terrible quaking seemed set to amplify itself yet further, it was suddenly diminishing as quickly as it had begun. Ben dared to slacken his death-grip on the girder and looked down at the cringing forms of Roberta and Quigley. In moments, the vibrations dropped to nothing — and the building was still standing. They were still alive. Nobody was even hurt.

‘It’s over!’ Roberta yelled, clambering to her feet with a look of jubilation spreading across her face. Quigley stood up too, and the two of them gave each other a high-five and began to laugh like lunatics. Ben wanted to laugh, too. ‘Is that the best you can do, Craine?’ he wanted to shout aloud. The experiment had failed. The artificial quake had burned itself out before it could even do any real damage.

For two or three minutes they were all too weak with relief to do anything. Ben’s muscles were trembling as the tension left him. He rested on the girder and breathed deeply, letting his heartbeat slowly return to normal. The pressure was off them, but only for a short while. It wouldn’t be long before Craine and his men realised the failure of their exercise and returned to finish the job in the traditional way, with a bullet to the head.

‘Roberta!’ he called down to her. ‘Fasten the rope around your middle like before. We’re getting out of here.’

Still laughing, she nodded and stooped down to pick up the end of the rope. As she began to loop it around her waist, a movement out to sea caught Ben’s eye and he glanced out of the now glassless windowpane a few feet away from him. ‘What the—?’ He did a double-take and stared.

The sky was filled with seabirds. Thousands upon thousands of them, a mass formation all flapping at maximum speed towards the shore, as if desperately trying to escape inland from something that was chasing them. Over their distant cawing and screeching came a new sound, a deep growling rumble rising fast like a storm gathering momentum.

Except it was no storm.

Ben’s eyes opened wide as he saw what the seabirds were all fleeing from. A chill tingled up and down his back and into every extremity of his body.

‘Oh, God,’ he muttered.