by Ian Edward
The “cover” story Kate overheard, had already been changed. Now it was a bomb threat. They’d escalated the situation.
Markham and Kate exchanged looks of disbelief. The “cover” story Kate overheard, had already been changed, the situation escalated. ‘Those men are controlling Westmeyer,’ she said, ‘and they’re going ahead with their demolition right now…’
Markham stared back at her, momentarily speechless. He glanced at his watch as though that could offer some kind of help. ‘The task force teams can’t be far off…’
Staff began to move tentatively, with disbelief, out of the labs. Talking amongst themselves they filed past Markham and Kate, ignoring the front lifts and taking the stairwell. The lift doors sprang open and one of the security men stepped out. ‘Okay, people, that’s the way, keep it orderly, and keep moving. Once outside, move to the area in front of the parking station.’
‘I won’t just leave Adam down there.’ Kate pushed off down the corridor, pressing against the staff coming from that direction. Within minutes the floor would be cleared.
Almost immediately she ran into Stephen Hunter. He had separated from Westmeyer and Asquith, briefly remaining in his lab to gather some personal papers while they took the rear lift to the ground floor. ‘Kate, what are you doing, wrong way.’
Kate saw no further reason to maintain the pretence. ‘Go on, Stephen, run, save your own cowardly skin the way I imagine you always do, you…you bastard.’
‘What?’
‘I know all about your secret sub level or whatever it is. I know you and Westmeyer and your visitors are blowing the place to pieces. Adam Bennett is down there and I’m not leaving him. If we don’t get out then that’s just a little more blood on your hands, isn’t it?’
Hunter reached for her. ‘Kate…’
She lashed out viciously, causing him to step back. ‘Go to hell.’ Tears filled her eyes but they were nothing compared to her anger. She swept past him and through the corridor to the rear lift. Markham had caught up to her. ‘Kate, let me go for Adam. You need to leave with the others…Kate, he’d want you to be safe.’
Her finger stabbed furiously at the signal button. Hers and Markham’s eyes locked. ‘I’m not leaving without him.’
The voice on the speakers again: ‘A final call, all staff, if you’re not already moving, please vacate the building immediately.’
There was a chime as the lift door opened. Kate and Markham rushed in but before the door slid shut, a hand appeared, stopping it.
Stephen entered the lift. ‘I had no idea Adam was down there. But if he is, I can help you find him.’
Hank seated himself in front of local editor Eddie Cochrane. A young reporter stuck his head through the doorway. ‘Eddie, the cops just had a distress call from the Westmeyer Institute. They’ve had a threat from some anti-biotech group who claim they’ve planted a series of bombs.’
‘It’s happening faster than I would’ve believed,’ Hank said.
‘Let’s get over there.’ Eddie moved swiftly from behind his desk. ‘Crikey, all my years in this town, I’ve never seen anything remotely like this.’
Twenty minutes later they arrived at the outer gate along the Institute’s perimeter. At the same time, regional TV and radio news vans, and police patrol cars from all over the neighbouring districts, were pulling up. News of the distress signal had spread like wildfire.
Hank stepped from Cochrane’s car and looked over on an amazing sight. Dozens of staff members spilling out all over the grounds. He was stunned to see Jean in the crowd. Hank ran forward. ‘What in the world are you doing here?’
Jean patted his arm with one hand as he clutched the other. ‘No time for that now. But on the way here I saw a boy being bundled into a van. The van came here and I called in the police…but now…’
‘A terrorist bomb threat. I know, Except, I doubt they’re really terrorists.’ Hank surveyed the scene.
‘I haven’t seen the boy anywhere…’ Jean was saying.
Hank had the sickening impression it was all too late.
The water gushed out of the tubes, swirling violently around Adam and the girl, filling the tank rapidly. Adam lunged time and again at the sides, putting the full weight of his body into the slam, and smashing his clenched fists against the glass. As he did he had a vision of the girl in the morgue, with her bruised, clenched fists, frozen at the moment of death by muscular spasm. Now he and the girl were sharing the same fate. He felt an overwhelming sense, not just of fear but of failure. He was an officer of the law. He should’ve been able to save this poor girl.
He guessed she was Elizabeth. Daniel’s Elizabeth.
His fists struck the chamber walls again and again. Useless. Industrial strength double glass.
The girl knew this. She’d been through the ordeal several times before. She knew this was the last time…She was cowering to the side of the tank. The torrent of water thundered down, covering their heads.
Adam pushed himself up on his toes, straining his neck, gasping for air before sinking back below the water level. The tank was almost completely full. Faces flashed across his line of vision; His parents; And Kate and Brian.
And the wide, mischievous grin of a small girl.
Coming to get you, ready or not.
Alana.
The irony became clear as the sound of crashing water ended, the tank now full.
He was drowning.
Asquith’s group had left the building and, moving away from the rest of the evacuees, travelled via the back of the parking station to the extreme southern side of the grounds. From here they tramped over small hills of scattered brush to join the main road. Asquith had arranged for his people to pick them up in the hired cars and whisk them away to Brisbane Airport.
They reached a bluff from where Renshaw, donning binoculars, could see the action surrounding the building. ‘Looks like a bomb squad, moving in…’
‘We’ve allowed more than enough time.’ Asquith keyed numbers into his cell phone. The detonation team was further back in the hills.
‘Blow it away,’ Asquith said into the phone.
Donnelly’s last act, before leaving the building, had been to shut down the entire computer network from the over-riding control booth in the security office. The network ran all the building’s mechanical, electrical and digital systems.
It would have pleased Donnelly no end if he’d known that Kate, Hunter and Markham were in the rear lift, between floors, when the system shut down. He would’ve been delighted if he’d heard the screech of the cables slamming to a sudden stop.
Half a floor above the sub-level, the elevator car’s abrupt stop sent its three inhabitants crashing to the floor. The lights went out and there was a moment of total darkness. They lay stunned, catching their breaths. The side of Kate’s face had connected with the floor, cutting and bruising her cheek and forehead.
The battery-operated emergency light came on and Kate found herself blinking through drops of blood that rolled off her forehead and onto the bridge of her nose. But it didn’t take her long to snap back into focus: she was stuck in a lift, hanging between floors.
Trapped.
Erickson hopped behind the driver’s wheel in the front cab, turned the ignition and pumped the accelerator. The engines rumbled into life. He wanted the engine running so that as soon as the dock doors were open he could back up the slope at high speed. He didn’t want the truck sluggish, with any chance of stalling on the way out.
Switching the gear to reverse, he inched the truck back, its rear almost touching the huge doors.
He jumped down from the rig and sprinted across to the control console, mounted on the east wall. It was at the very moment he strode toward that wall that, just one flight above, Jackson Donnelly shut down the building’s systems. Donnelly, acting on orders from Asquith, did not stop to think, or consider, that the rear doors wouldn’t already be open.
Erickson knew none of this. He punched th
e keys on the console as the lights went out. Nothing happened. He repeated the action.
Still nothing.
Anger rising, he returned to the rig for a flashlight so he could look over the console for the problem. What had happened to the Goddamned lights? He rummaged around, found the flashlight, and shone its thin beam ahead of him across the dock floor. It was then he realised – no lights, no console action – the system had been shut down from above. He wasn’t going to be able to open those doors and the elevators would be useless.
Why had that idiot Donnelly, not allowed him more time? Had any of them even given thought…
He pulled out his cell phone, dialled Donnelly. ‘Service to this area temporarily unavailable,’ came the recorded message, as though to mock him.
He should have gone up with the others, stuck to Asquith’s plans, kept it simple. He dialled the number again and again, cursing to himself louder and louder each time.
CHAPTER SIXTY SIX
Blinking through the water, eyes stinging, Adam became aware of a shadow beyond the glass of the tank. His lungs were bursting, his heart thumping like a hammer against an anvil. He could feel the girl behind him, limbs flailing.
He strained for a clearer vision of the shape beyond the glass. Was he imagining it? Was this how it ended? Hallucinations, visions of ghost-like wraiths…
He heard a sudden whooosh! but could not determine its point of origin. There was a powerful tug, like a rip in the water below.
Pulling down.
His vision blurred, lungs about to explode.
All of a sudden the water was rushing away, the gurgling sound thundering in his ears. Adam looked down to where the entry panel had been opened, releasing the water. He forced himself to hold on. Just a little longer.
The water level receded faster and faster. He grabbed hold of the girl, pointed to the tank’s doorway, and tried to indicate to her that she should keep her mouth closed until the air was free to fill the tank once more.
In desperation, Adam looked again to where the latch had been unfastened.
The figure behind the glass came into focus and Adam could scarcely believe his eyes.
‘What the hell’s happened?’ Kate rasped, forcing herself shakily back to her feet.
Hunter was furiously pressing the EMERGENCY HELP button on the wall panel. ‘Even if this works I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone to hear it.’
A dazed Markham was also on his feet, steadying himself. He looked toward the ceiling. ‘We can get out through the roof panel,’ he said.
‘Then let’s do it,’ said Hunter. ‘There can’t be much time.’ He and Markham boosted Kate up so she could grapple with the panel. Once she’d managed to push it open she propelled herself up, clambering through and onto the roof of the car. There was a splinter of light coming from somewhere above, enabling her to look around the lift well. She could see they were just below the ground level, not far from the bottom of the lift shaft. Something was glinting, metal perhaps, beneath the elevator car’s underside.
The entry doors to the sub-level?
‘We can get down from here,’ she called to the others.
Being the heavier of the two, Markham gave the young scientist a leg booster. Hunter scrambled through the panel space, Kate grabbing hold of his shoulders and pulling from her end. She seemed to be finding energy and strength she didn’t normally possess.
‘The next bit’s going to be tricky,’ Hunter said to Kate. ‘You and I are going to have to pull Brian up.’ He was still catching his own breath as he said it.
‘We can do it.’ Kate was in hyper drive, oblivious to her injury.
‘No time,’ Markham called up to them. ‘You need to find Adam and find a way out. Get help.’
‘He may be right-’ Hunter began.
‘All three of us are getting out of here now.’ Kate was adamant. ‘Come on, Brian. Let’s do this.’
It took another minute, sizing up the situation, before they were ready. Hunter and Kate knelt beside the open panel, reaching down through the space. Markham took several deep breaths and then launched himself, leaping up so that the tips of his feet were propped against the thin metal rail that encircled the car at shoulder height. He reached upwards as he did.
None of them had their co-ordination in tune the first time and Markham fell back, landing on the balls of his feet.
On the second attempt Kate and Hunter grabbed hold of his shoulders as he jumped. Straining every nerve end and muscle, and summoning impossible reserves of strength, they pulled him close enough that he was able to shove his arms through the space and take hold.
He’d barely dragged his whole body through the opening, saying thanks, when the world went mad.
‘Are you okay?’ Adam asked the girl.
Her eyes were swollen, face drained of colour. But Adam noticed she wasn’t coughing and wheezing, deprived of oxygen, in the same way he had been. He took off his shirt and gave it to her to cover her nakedness.
‘Yes…I’ve been through this…before.’
‘I’m Adam, I’m a detective, and I’m going to get you out of here. Okay?’
‘Uhhh.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Thought so.’ As soon as the last of the water had run out, Adam had pulled Elizabeth through the opening. Both were still breathing heavily. Elizabeth fell into the arms of the boy who’d saved them.
Adam, too, placed an arm around the young man’s shoulders. ‘We owe you our lives, Daniel. But what…how, is it, that you’re down here?’
‘I don’t know how I got here. One minute I was in the back yard with Costas and Mrs. Cail and Joey and the next I woke up in a corridor here, near some kind of docking space. There’s a van and a massive truck in there.’
‘And this is the friend you’ve been looking for.’ Adam looked from Daniel to Elizabeth and back again.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, next step for us, let’s find a way out of here.’
‘I can show you the place where the truck and the van came in. It’s back through there, near another …kind of cavern, like this one, but a little smaller.’
‘There’s another one?’
‘Yes. With crocodile pits.’
Elizabeth’s eyes shot open with fright. ‘Crocodiles. Why would there be crocodiles down here?’ Before either Adam or Daniel could respond all three were pushed off their feet by a sudden, invisible, body slamming force, the chamber plunging instantaneously into darkness, a deafening roar exploding like boom boxes in their heads. Hitting the ground with such force, Adam had the bizarre sensation the whole earth had risen up, slamming into his body on all sides, an angry netherworld that didn’t belong here, in the real world, but in the dark, twisted, surreal other reality of some Grimm fairytale.
He lost consciousness.
The Institute erupted in a thick cloud of granite, glass and metal, whipped into a whirlpool as the structure collapsed on itself. Like an earthquake, where the shelves of earth beneath the surface shift and slide and collide with one another, so the levels and sections of the building broke into thousands of fragments, large and small, flung against one another as they crumbled.
Over thirty people, staff and police, ran as the building fell. Few had reached a safe distance as flying chunks of debris started crashing down around them.
Ron O’Malley was with the patrol cars scattered about the perimeter. He reached for the police radio, shouting at the dispatcher: ‘Where are the emergency services!’
His eyes never left the disintegrating Institute. This wasn’t like one of the controlled demolitions he’d seen in the past. Something was wrong. Fires had broken out, shrapnel had spewed out too far, parts of the building still stood.
Asquith’s men hadn’t been ready, he realised.
Chunks of the structure leaned and groaned, slabs of brickwork and giant shards of glass broke away and toppled at random.
They hadn�
�t been ready.
Sirens heralded the arrival of the emergency services.
O’Malley wondered if they were too late. If they’d all been too late. The Institute – and its secrets – was gone.
And there was no sign of Adam Bennett.
CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN
O’Malley and his team moved through the bewildered crowd looking for Westmeyer and his senior executives. Paramedics attended to the staff members who’d received injuries. The wail of sirens was constant now, together with the babble of voices - emergency workers shouting commands - and long, low booms of thunder. O’Malley realised for the first time that rain was falling. When had that started?
What a mess, what a blasted mess.
A dishevelled young woman – she was the front lobby receptionist and one of the first out of the building - was talking with Detective Mike Stanley. O’Malley, picking up on pieces of the conversation, turned toward them. She was saying she’d seen Westmeyer and Donnelly in a small group heading toward the southern perimeter of the grounds. She hadn’t paid much attention, there’d been people everywhere, and the security guys had been issuing instructions to most of the staff.
O’Malley was on his phone again, this time to Wal Hester. ‘Wal, I need you and Megan to lead a couple of units to the south of the Institute. It’s a hilly area, rising above the nearest curve in the main road. You’re on the lookout for a group of middle-aged men in suits. Westmeyer’s mob. Not sure what they’re doing, just make sure they don’t take off.’
‘On our way,’ said Hester.
James Reardon had been one of the last to leave the building. He hadn’t really believed the PA announcement. These things were usually the result of some hoax.
