Authors: Emlyn Rees
Danny hit the ground. He curled into a ball. Smoke billowed past a high barred window as he waited for the rumbling to pass.
What the fuck was that?
he wondered.
A surge of doubt. The first since he’d left the suite upstairs. Eyes flickering, he checked his options. The stairwell led up and down. He could run either way, if that was what it took.
Maybe he’d been wrong, he was thinking. Maybe this was turning into a siege. Maybe the people he needed to find really were still here. They’d waited for the cops and ambulances to close in on the dead civilians outside and now they were letting rip with RPGs.
Or maybe the Brits had flipped and decided to storm this place early. FIDO – ‘Fuck it and drive on’. That was the Paras’ unofficial motto. ‘Who Dares Wins’ was the SAS’s. It wasn’t like the Brits exactly had a reputation for shyness when it came to hitting hard and fast.
But here in the centre of London? He guessed they’d be a whole lot more circumspect than that. More likely they’d be shutting this whole section of town down, hoping to snare whatever terrorist faction it was they thought had instigated this attack.
The rumbling dwindled to nothing.
No gunfire followed. No shouts or breaking glass.
‘What the hell was that?’ Danny grabbed his Bluetooth from where it had fallen to the floor.
‘The limo out front,’ the Kid’s voice came back. ‘Or what was left of it. Fuel tank went off. Flipped it on to its back.’
‘I’m at the stairwell. Where next?’
‘Head down to the first landing. Cut through the laundry. Then into the wine cellars and out the other side.’
Danny took the stairs three at a time.
‘Good news,’ said the Kid, as he reached the first landing.
The Kid’s voice was cracking up again. Most likely the phone’s reception dwindling as Danny moved deeper underground.
‘I’ve cross-reffed the sewer maintenance point here on the building plans against the water board’s records, and it’s marked there too,’ he went on.
‘Yeah, well let’s just hope it’s not part of some Victorian system that got bricked up before we were even fucking born …’
The Kid didn’t answer. Which Danny took as a fairly sure indication of his total ignorance on the matter.
Shit. Fucking great
…
Danny reached the laundry. All bright ceiling lights and artificial floral scents. He looked round for clothes to change into, but all that caught his eye were wisps of black smoke rising in the corner.
A flat steam iron had been left switched on, pressed down on a bed sheet. Another few minutes and it was sure to catch fire. Danny ran across, raised the iron up from the scorched sheet and pulled its plug from the wall.
Then he was off again. No time to linger. He reached the wine cellar door. Tried it. Found it was locked. Saw it was reinforced too. No sense in trying to knock it down.
Opening his bag, he quickly took out and assembled the lockbuster. It didn’t have a hipper name, on account of the fact that it wasn’t on the market yet. It was a prototype, a thoughtful Christmas gift from an old Company friend now working for a Swiss weapons company that specialized in police, military and intelligence hardware.
Danny slipped the gizmo’s barrel into the door lock and squeezed its trigger. It kicked like a mule, then buzzed. A
high-pitched
whine of spinning gears and blades was followed by a tortured metallic crack.
Then he was in.
Darkness. The hum of dehumidifiers. Danny took his torch from his bag and scanned the long, low room. An arched brickwork ceiling. Thousands of bottles of wine in deep alcoves. The torch’s bright white beam flickered over their expensive labels as he hurried through.
Danny knew nothing about wine. Even when he’d been a drinker, it had mostly been spirits and beer. Anna-Maria, though, she knew everything there was to know about it.
And if I ever make it out of here in one piece,
he thought,
I’m gonna bring her back here and buy her the best that they’ve got. In fact, fuck it, if I ever make it out of here alive, I might just drink myself into a goddamn stupor …
The door at the far end of the cellars needed the attentions of the lockbuster too.
‘OK, I’m in a service corridor,’ he said, the second he got through.
The corridor branched left and right. More red brickwork. Crumbling mortar. He guessed he was right down amongst the building’s foundations now. His headset only seemed to confirm this, hissing and scratching like a cat whose tail he’d just trodden on as its reception continued to fade.
‘Fire exit should be just round the corner to the right,’ the Kid’s staccato voice came through.
Danny ran there, opened the door. Cold air and daylight flooded in. He used the convex mirror to sweep left, right and up. Apart from a scattering of cigarette butts across the ancient flagstones, there were no signs of life.
He stepped out into a stone trench. It was T-shaped, running ten feet east, west and south from where he stood. It was six feet wide and ten deep. To the east, a steep ramp ran up towards street level. To the west, a set of bowed stone steps ascended to the hotel garden.
Shafts of bright sunlight shone down through the slats of the interlocking cast-iron grilles above Danny’s head. The hotel’s rear wall stretched up into a burning blue sky.
A blitz of sirens all around. Danny’s heart raced even faster, like any second it might burst.
He ran to a green-painted metal doorway set into a low brick arch. A fluorescent sticker was plastered across its centre. It showed a running water tap symbol, with the words ‘Thames Water’ printed underneath.
‘I’m here,’ Danny said.
‘And is it?’ The Kid’s voice came down the line a little clearer now Danny was outside.
‘Is it
what
?’ Danny’s fingers were already working feverishly.
‘Bricked up?’
Danny smiled grimly. ‘No, just locked,’ he said, kicking it as hard as he could. ‘But not any more.’
Danny peered into the gloom. A maintenance room. Just like the Kid had said. Utilitarian. A wash basin, soap and paper towel dispenser stood in one corner. In the centre, two chairs and a table. A tabloid newspaper lay open at the sports pages. A rack of metal tools was screwed to the mildewed wall opposite Danny, alongside another locked door.
Danny stepped inside, torch in hand. He didn’t bother switching on the bare ceiling light bulb. He shut the door behind him, snapped the thin curved wooden back of one of the chairs in half and then in half again, before sandwiching the broken pieces together and wedging them tight up under the base of the door leading back outside.
Stuffing his shades into his pocket, he checked the date on the newspaper. Only three weeks old. Meaning someone had been working down here recently. Which could only be good news as far as the possibility of this providing a way out was concerned.
Running the torch beam over the tool rack, Danny took one with a T-bar ending, and another shaped like a giant Allen key, assuming they must be for opening manholes and the like, and that he’d no doubt be needing them soon.
Right away, in fact, he now saw, as he examined the locked door set into the mildewed wall. The T-bar tool fitted its outsized
keyhole. He twisted it once right round. Resistance gave way to a click.
He pulled the well-oiled door wide open and for a moment didn’t move. He just stared into the cold dark mouth of the vertical shaft. The beam of his torch followed its metal ladder down for nine or ten feet before it faded into black.
There’d been a time when Danny had been terrified of places like this, a time when darkness had nearly swallowed him up for good. But it was a fear he’d learned to deal with. Not through bravery, but because he’d had no choice. He’d discovered words that had made him stronger. That had helped him block the terror from his mind.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
‘How’s it looking?’ the Kid asked, his voice half-crackle,
half-hiss
.
Danny was still staring, unblinking, into the gaping hole.
‘Danny?’ the Kid said.
‘Wait …’
Move
, Danny told himself.
Just damn well move.
He did it. He took a deep breath and forced himself to climb down the ladder. Rung by rung. Into the dark.
He counted eighteen rungs before he reached the cold concrete floor below. The air was dank and cool. He shone the torch beam three-sixty and saw he’d now entered an eight-foot-high brickwork passage with a metal railing set into its right-hand wall.
He followed the railing for twenty paces until the passage opened out on to a raised brick walkway running the length of a much wider tunnel.
Danny shone his torch left and right. The main sewer tunnel was much bigger than anything he’d expected. Cylindrical. At least twenty foot in diameter. Plenty of room to stand. Big enough to drive a car through, in fact. It was built of Victorian brickwork, with plenty of patches of modern cement repairs in between, like stitch marks holding together an ancient and decrepit quilt.
The sewage channel itself was disused, Danny saw with relief, looking down. No rank, fast-running, icy black river, like he’d
imagined he might end up crawling through. A cold steady breeze hinted at a much wider system of which this was only a tiny part.
More good news. Boot prints. Stamped right here in the dirt on the walkway. Most of them led away from where Danny was standing. Along the main tunnel. To the right. Meaning this walkway had to lead somewhere, he decided, feeling a surge of hope.
Water dripped from the ceiling. Notes chimed everywhere, like raindrops falling into bottles and pans.
‘Kid? Can you hear me?’ Danny said.
Nothing but a faint clicking.
He hurried back up into the maintenance room.
‘Hey, Kid? You there?’
‘I got you.’
‘Looks like you might just have found me a way out …’
‘Well thank Christ for that. But listen, there’s no way your phone’s gonna work in there, Danny. So I’m patching you through that water board plan I pulled up.’
An email pinged on to Danny’s phone screen. An Acrobat file began to download. Danny selected its icon the second it finished. The sewer plans ballooned into view. Danny shrank them down and then scrolled them across with his thumb.
‘Christ, it’s like a warren,’ he said, suddenly daunted by the sheer size of the plans. ‘Which section am I in?’
‘G three.’
Danny scrolled to the grid reference. There was only one dead end in it. It had to be the same one he was standing in now. ‘All right, I got it,’ he said. ‘So which way next?’
‘I’m looking at a street map I’ve superimposed on to the water board’s sewer map,’ said the Kid. ‘So I can kind of see where the tunnels will lead you to above ground.’
‘Only
kind of
?’
‘The scales I’m working with don’t match exactly. But close enough, I hope.’
You’re not the only one
, Danny thought. Thought, but didn’t say. Because there was nothing to be gained from putting the Kid off his stride.
The Kid said, ‘Your phone’s not got the grey cells to synchronize the two maps. So you’re just gonna have to listen to the directions I give you and then make sure you stick to them once you’re back inside.’
Danny traced his thumb across his phone, covering the route the Kid now read to him, memorizing it as he did. The exit point that the Kid suggested he use was nearly three-quarters of a mile away.
‘Where will it bring me up?’
‘A nice quiet spot round the back of a Royal Parks vehicle repairs outbuilding on the south side of Hyde Park, if my guesstimate’s right.’
‘Good. But one other thing …’
The smiling man in the hotel suite. Danny couldn’t get him out of his mind.
‘What?’
‘The wasted limo. I need you to find out who was in it.’ If he was going to discover who’d set him up, then working out who they’d come here to kill was probably a pretty good place to start.
‘Already on it, Danny. I managed to scribble down a partial of the plate.’
There it was: the Kid walking one step ahead of Danny as usual. Yet another of the reasons why Danny thought he was the best.
‘And?’
‘I’m running the number through the DVLA’s database now. We’ll know who the car’s registered to soon enough.’
Danny smiled, his nostrils flaring like he’d just picked up a scent. He felt fresh strength pump through him. So much better to be the hunter than the hunted. He looked back down the ladder. He could do this, he told himself. He
would
.
‘Thanks, Adam,’ he said.
‘Oh Jesus, Danny, don’t.’
‘What?’
‘Call me by my real name. You start doing that and I might start thinking that we really are in trouble after all.’
Danny smiled, in spite of it all. ‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ he said.
‘Good luck, bruv,’ said the Kid.
Bruv
. As in
brother
. As in
brother in arms
. Even though the Kid had said the word in a cod-American accent, Danny knew this was how he genuinely viewed him. As closer than a colleague. Closer than a friend. As
blood
. They’d been through too many tight situations together for it ever to be any other way.
And the feeling was mutual. The Kid was one of only three people left alive who Danny would trust with his life. There was no one else he’d rather have watching his back right now.
He cut the Kid off. Didn’t want to wait any longer. He knew that if he did, he might not go in at all.
As he walked into the tunnel, he transferred the blank swipe card and data stick from his trouser pocket into his rucksack and zipped it tight.
In truth, he knew that these two small items and the Kid were the only real hopes he had left.
Danny set off south along the raised walkway of the main sewer tunnel. He shone the beam of his torch straight ahead and tried not to think of the darkness closing in behind him with every step he took.
He kept moving, following the boot prints. As if he were part of a bigger march. He tried comforting himself with the fact that plenty of ordinary civilians doing their jobs had walked this way before. But memories off the past kept strobing through his mind.
His Nikes crunched dirt and grit. He needed to go straight on for forty metres, the Kid had told him. Then the tunnel would divide into two. Danny should split right, then follow the gradual curve of the sewer through another four junctions, progressing south-west for nearly three-quarters of a mile.
What was going on outside? That was what he wanted to know. Was he even now walking beneath the boots of some watchful, waiting cop? And what if they too had someone who’d strategized smart like the Kid? What if they’d thought of the sewer as well? Not just as a potential route out of the hotel, but as a way in? What if, somewhere up ahead in this labyrinthine system, an infiltration unit was rushing towards Danny right now?
Just keep on
, he told himself.
Don’t give in to the fear.
Time was still the most precious thing he had. He mustn’t waste a second.
Somewhere below him, in the vast curved gutter where Victorian London’s sewage had once flowed, he heard a tiny cascade of mortar dust and the squeaking of rats. The darkness was closing in. But he didn’t break stride.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
Again he remembered the words.
And this time he remembered, too, the circumstances in which he’d first used them. When the darkness had nearly swallowed him up for good. In North Carolina. In another cold hole in the ground. One from which Danny had thought he’d never escape.
After Danny had completed his masters degree in modern languages at NYC, majoring in Russian and Arabic, he joined the Army Rangers. Partly because he’d known it would have made the Old Man proud, because he’d served with them him self. But mainly so he could get away from his parents’ empty New York house, which had long stopped being a home.
Three years on and Danny had been recruited by the CIA. Their Special Activities Division had claimed him soon after, training him up in everything from agent recruitment to defusing bombs. Until finally they’d sent him down the Hole.
It was meant to have been an exercise in endurance and bonding. For Danny and four other clandestine intelligence officers who’d shortly be working as a team operating out of Kuwait, gathering HUMINT as well as carrying out direct actions as and when required.
The Hole was local SAD parlance for the treacherous cave system located less than an hour’s drive from the division’s Harvey Point facility. Danny’s team had been well trained and were equipped for any eventuality they might encounter down there.
But less than two hours after they’d entered the system– already a hundred feet below ground – a flash flood had struck, and Danny had got stranded the wrong side of a deep vertical chimney in a half-collapsed tunnel. He had no rope, no food, no map, and within forty-five minutes his torch flickered out.
He crawled blind. Any way up. Away from the rapidly rising water.
He tried mentally mapping his movements to begin with, counting junctions and inclines. He focused on his compass’s fading luminous dial. He tried not to think of the cold rock against which he kept scraping his bleeding head. Or to listen to the asthmatic echo of his breath, or the rush, gurgle and spit of the water rising up below.
But soon his compass dial faded into the total blackness around him. And Danny found himself biting down on his tongue just to stop himself from screaming out.
He got stuck not long after. Jammed. Unable to go forward or back. Chest too tight even to scream. No way of knowing if the rest of his team had been killed. No way of telling how far into the system he’d now gone. Or when the water would reach him.
Hyperventilating, he was hit by the realization that he’d die down here. Entombed in rock. Drowned, suffocated, frozen or starved.
But he didn’t quit. Something stopped him, penetrated his panic, gave him the strength to move first his fingers. Then his hand. Millimetre by millimetre. Rupturing his knuckles across that sharp knot of rock wedged into his side. Until he finally found himself able to ease off his knife belt and engineer the leeway to twist and turn and tear his body through.
Something kept him crawling. There in the depths of that darkness, inside his mind he found light.
A memory. Her. And a future. The same.
Something to live for, never to stop fighting for.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
Down in that cave system, the words came to him as loud as if someone else were hissing them into his ear.
But in fact they were his own. The same words he’d called out six months earlier to a girl at the end of the first night he’d met her. And – as a kind of joke between them – every time they’d parted since.
Love at first sight. Back then Danny had thought it was a bunch of bullshit. Nothing but a myth. But the girl who’d sat down
alongside him in the subway car late that Tuesday night, as he’d made his way home with several stops still to go, she’d caught his attention all right.
Short blonde hair. Deep blue eyes. Soft, fine features and a
full-lipped
mouth. Her smile kept breaking out like sunlight through a cloud-scudded sky, as she stared in rapt concentration at her newspaper crossword, and one by one filled in the clues.
Three stops later, and without thinking, Danny said, ‘Diva,’ out loud.
She looked at him confused, then back at her crossword. Her pen hovered mid air for a second. Then she turned to him and laughed. A mixture of outrage and amusement.
‘Eleven across,’ she said, staring back down at her paper and reading aloud the clue he’d just solved: ‘
Prima donna making an
eager comeback
… You’re quite right. Diva. Well done.’ Her accent was English, the same as his mother’s. London, he guessed.
She scribbled the four letters into the grid, then looked Danny over curiously, before offering up her paper and pen.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I think I’ve already done as many as I can. So if you want to try finishing it off …’
Another smile, but this time with a challenge in it too, leaving Danny guessing from the fact that her pen looked expensive that she wasn’t planning on walking away from him just yet.
He was right. Even though he only managed the one clue after that, the two of them started talking, and didn’t stop.
He couldn’t exactly tell her what he did for a living, but he told her a more honest version than he told most. Mainly, though, he just listened. And learned how she, like him, had dual citizenship, thanks to her English mother and recently deceased American father. She’d been living in the States now for just over a year, moving round. She’d studied history at college, but still had no real idea what she wanted to do. Currently she worked at a gift outlet at the Guggenheim museum, but she was toying with the idea of one day opening up a ceramics store in Greenwich. She’d moved here from her last place in California for the sole reason that
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was her favourite book.
It was only when the rest of the car finished emptying and the train stayed still that they realized they’d reached the end of the line.
On their way out through the darkening station, he said, ‘So you live near here?’
She didn’t answer. Instead she said, ‘You?’
‘I should have got off five stops back.’
She started to laugh. ‘I was the one before that.’
Outside it was raining. Neither of them had an umbrella or raincoat. He stood out in the street and hailed her a taxi. He got the driver to pull right over on the pavement so she wouldn’t get wet. He held open the door for her as she climbed in. Pulling it shut after her, she mouthed something at him and pressed the window button down.
But he never got to hear whatever it was she wanted to say. The taxi pulled away without warning, leaving him staring after her, watching her waving at him through its rear window as it faded with her into the rain-streaked night.
Only then did it occur to him that he hadn’t even asked for her number.
He started to run. Kept on running. Slipping. Stumbling. Weaving high speed along the pavement, between people and bins, like some crazed NFL quarterback going for broke. Then out into the traffic. Forget jaywalking, he was jay-sprinting. He invented it right there and then.
Twice he nearly caught up with her. But twice the lights changed.
Third time he got lucky. At another set of lights, he collapsed panting at her taxi door. As his nails clawed at her window, she stared out at him with an expression of astonishment and delight.
The window buzzed down. Danny was too out of breath to speak.
‘I finish work tomorrow at six,’ she said.
He got to his feet just as the lights changed.
‘I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me,’ he said.
Nothing had. He’d met her the next evening. The three evenings after that. That was how he’d started to get to know Sally Gillard, the woman who two years later had become his wife.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
It was a mantra that had kept him going through that tunnel system in North Carolina. And three hours later it had brought him up gasping into the twilit air over a mile from where he’d gone into the ground.
Danny never did tell Sally how she’d once saved his life without even being near him. He’d often considered it, but a part of him had always made him hold back, thinking he’d just end up sounding dumb.
Then Sally had died, and the opportunity had passed. It was a secret that probably wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone else anymore.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
As the words ran through Danny’s mind now, down here in the London sewers, it was no longer Sally he was thinking of. He hoped there was a heaven, and that somewhere his wife and son went on. He hoped he’d see them both again one day. But he didn’t know.
I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.
No, when those words ran through Danny’s mind now, they weren’t for Sally. Or Jonathan. They were for Lexie. Not because she needed his help now, or ever might again. But because if she ever did, then he would be there. For Lexie, he would always stay alive.