by Bill Napier
35
Death Squad
Gibson shambled reluctantly into the refectory. The entire team was present and the table was laid with toast, hard-boiled eggs, butter and jam. The croissants looked and smelled fresh, but only Shtyrkov was eating. Gibson’s face twisted in tension, but only for a moment. Svetlana poured him a coffee.
‘Can’t be long now, Charlee.’ Shtyrkov was grinning and Gibson believed that the man had finally lost his mind. ‘Not once they find Hanning has failed to deliver.’
‘I looked further down the signal, about two minutes into it, using Tom’s algorithm – and found another genome, would you believe it? Another billion bytes or so.’ Gibson was speaking without enthusiasm. ‘It doesn’t match anything in the snp database.’
‘Meaning?’ Shtyrkov asked.
‘It’s definitely non-human. Not even primate.’
‘Drosophila? Nematode?’
Gibson shook his head emphatically. ‘It’s far more complex. Whatever it is, it’s biologically more advanced than anything on Earth.’
‘More complex equals superior?’
‘Put it this way. Until I knew more about this entity, I wouldn’t want to meet it on a dark night.’
Svetlana pushed her uneaten egg away, an angry gesture. She was close to tears. Shtyrkov squeezed her hand.
Gibson said, ‘I know. Here we are, frantically working to the last minute for the good of all mankind, and mankind is about to squelch us.’
Shtyrkov asked, ‘I wonder how they’ll do it?’ He seemed detached, almost cheerful.
‘Why don’t we just open the door and run out?’ Svetlana asked.
‘Calm yourself, child.’
Gibson sipped his coffee. It was the best he had ever tasted. Every sense was tingling. He wondered if this was what Shtyrkov was feeling, or whether the temporal lobe stuff was finally getting to him, or whether it was just his impending execution. ‘They don’t give the Nobel Prize posthumously.’
‘Charlee Gibson. For once in your life forget earthly baubles. This discovery is beyond any prize.’ Shtyrkov raised his coffee cup to Gibson. ‘You are a very imperfect man, Charlee, but you have done something wonderful. Your reward is immortality.’
‘I hope Tom and Freya make it,’ said Gibson. ‘I want my immortality.’
36
Pursuit
Sibelius filling the cathedral, scattering off a million stalactites, echoing along a hundred tunnels. A pool glowing blue from hidden underwater lighting. The tour guide had stopped and was talking to his audience. Freya edged her way forwards. A mother with a child said something in German; some joke, Petrie inferred, about their sodden clothes.
And the guide was still talking, over the music.
Petrie looked behind, trying to hide the fear, make it seem like a casual glance. The path they had come down was a giant orange throat lined with needles. There was no sign of pursuit. Not yet.
And the guide was still talking.
At last there was a flurry of laughter, and a little applause, and the inspirational music had risen to a shattering climax and stopped. Now the crowd was shuffling with infinite slowness towards concrete stairs which headed up towards the roof of the cavern.
Freya was well ahead, just a few bodies behind the guide. Petrie was almost taking up the rear. In a minute she had vanished from sight. And then at last Petrie was at the top of the steps. If the Slovak army was waiting there was nothing to be done. Along a short corridor, and out, and blinking in the white glare of snow. A hairpin path plunged steeply down towards roofs far below, just glimpsed through trees. There were no soldiers to be seen. Freya was waiting, letting the crowd flow around her, wet blonde hair over her shoulders. At that moment Petrie believed she was the most beautiful woman on Earth.
The path was slippery and people linked arms or gripped the steel handrail as they started the descent.
The guide locked the exit door. It was sheet metal.
Freya put her arm in Petrie’s and they started slowly down. The snow had compacted to a shiny, hard surface. The guide and the tail-end Charlie were soon ahead of them, striding down the slope with practised ease.
And now the fugitives were alone.
‘What now?’ Freya wondered.
‘We’re alive.’
She was gripping his arm. ‘I wonder about Charlie and Vash and Svetlana.’
Petrie looked back at the door, still only metres from them. ‘It’s solid steel. The soldiers are entombed. Even if they found their way back through the Wormhole, they’d never get upstream against the Styx.’
‘They have guns. If they get through the sump they’ll shoot the lock, like they do in movies.’
Petrie looked again at it, wondering. ‘They’ll never get through the sump.’
Freya said, ‘You’re shaking. Are you cold?’ She held him. For a few glorious seconds he felt her breasts, warm and wonderful, against his chest.
Then he gently disengaged himself. ‘No, I’m terrified. Let’s clear off. By now the army have worked out that we’re either trapped inside the mountain or we’ve found a way out of it.’
They clambered down the path, gripping the handrail, and then left it, ploughing through the snow-deep woods in case of soldiers at the foot of the path. A big fluffy snowball loped down through the trees and passed them at a leisurely pace, gathering speed: a gentle warning that they were at risk from avalanche. On the flat, they crossed a wooden bridge and an icy stream. A large yellow notice told them they had left the Demänovskà Cave of Liberty. And they were now on an ice-covered road winding perilously through steep-sided mountains.
There was a general exodus in progress, cars with snow-chains and skis on their roofs moving slowly down the valley to their right, heading for home after the weekend skiing.
Right was motorway, and the road to towns like Popov and Levoce where you could lose yourself.
Right was the border with Poland, not too far to the north, with big cities like Cracow and Wroclaw in easy reach.
Right was the only sensible way to go.
They looked at each other, and without a word turned left, against the flow.
* * *
Nerves taut and chilled to the bone, they spied the land from trees at the edge of a car park. The nearest humans were two hundred metres away, but still Petrie spoke quietly. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
Freya gave a tense little nod.
Petrie watched the activity quietly. ‘Want to chance it?’
At five in the morning, the big foyer of the hotel was buzzing with life. Two blue tourist coaches stood outside the entrance, engines throbbing steadily, steam coming from their exhausts. Bleary-eyed people, dressed against the cold, were boarding them in twos and threes. The driver was heaving skis and suitcases into the bowels of the first coach, showing every sign of a short temper.
‘We can’t do this,’ Freya said.
Petrie murmured, ‘What else is there? Climb over the mountains?’
‘We have no luggage, no skis. And there’s bound to be a tour operator.’
‘We’ll just have to slip past.’
Freya shook her head. ‘Tom, that’s crazy.’
Petrie looked at the tousled blonde hair, the scratched nose and cheeks, the stained and torn jacket, the Levis stiff with ice and the heavy boots, and felt an overwhelming urge to protect this vulnerable creature while knowing that she was tougher than him. ‘We’ve no choice.’
She took Petrie’s arm, teeth chattering with cold. ‘In that case we’d better get a move on.’
The driver of the lead coach had slammed the luggage doors shut and was climbing into it. Petrie was seized with a sudden dread that they’d left it too late. They picked their way through snow-dusted cars. An overflow of weary passengers was clustered round the second coach. A few others were coming out of the hotel.
They emerged from the car park, passed the first coach; a thin-nosed elderly woman looked down and smiled wearily.
Petrie smiled back.
Merge casually. Don’t be noticed.
The driver, a small, wiry man, was muttering to himself. They nudged their way through a group of young people with bags and skis and little blue boxes. Nobody was paying attention. Petrie was beginning to think they might get away with it. Freya put her foot on the coach step, gripped the rail. The driver looked up sharply, said, ‘Ne!’
Petrie’s heart lurched.
The driver approached Freya and jabbered something. She shrugged. Petrie wondered about taking her arm and saying something about the wrong bus, when a tall, bespectacled man behind Freya said, in German, ‘What about your boxes?’
‘Sorry?’
‘He won’t let you on without your breakfast boxes. Otherwise you could be anyone.’
‘Of course!’ Freya replied in German, put her hand to her head. The little blue boxes.
‘Better be quick.’
Into the hotel. A fat, surly woman behind a trellis table was handing out boxes, and keys were being handed in at the desk. They joined a little queue. The receptionists, two girls nearing the end of the overnight shift, paid them no attention. The fat woman handed Petrie and Freya little blue boxes without looking up. They boarded the bus, the driver glancing at them with an air of suspicion.
The coach was half-empty, and wonderfully warm. They took a seat near the back, Freya at the window. There was a trickle of ski people, and then the driver finally climbed on board and sat heavily down in his seat, and the doors closed with a hiss. There was no tour operator, and nobody counted heads.
The coach moved smoothly away. They looked at each other, too exhausted even to smile, the sudden warmth draining away the last of their energy. Freya leaned her head on Petrie’s shoulder. Her voice was slurred. ‘Colditz was easy.’
‘Alcatraz was a joke.’
Now she was whispering, and Petrie could hardly hear her. ‘As for Devil’s Island…’
He tapped her nose. ‘Now for the hard bit.’
* * *
Colonel Jan Boroviška sighed.
The hand-rolled Don Tomas cigar was carefully placed in the crude ceramic ashtray – a treasure made by a younger daughter at the Gymnasium in the remote past – and he leaned back, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him.
Lieutenant Tono Pittich, standing rigidly to attention at the Colonel’s desk, knew the signs, and longed for a quick release.
‘Tono, how long since you gained your Lieutenant’s badge?’
‘Four years, sir.’
The Colonel nodded thoughtfully but made no comment. ‘And you had an entire platoon at your disposal? To guard two civilians?’
‘That’s true, Colonel, I had a platoon.’
‘And you allowed the two down together in the elevator shaft? Not one at a time, each accompanied by one of your men?’
‘I put four of my men down the shaft ahead of the scientists, and the rest stayed up top. I didn’t see how they could possibly escape.’ The Lieutenant was aware that he was beginning to jabber, but couldn’t stop himself. ‘I didn’t know about the side tunnel.’
The truth was otherwise; the Lieutenant had known about the side tunnel. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the scientists might stop the rapidly falling elevator at its entrance. The young man wondered fearfully whether the Colonel believed him, thought that the story had come out sounding like the lie it was.
‘Did you not have a map of the cave complex?’
Desperately, the Lieutenant wondered if he should compound the lie with another one, and deny that he’d had access to a map. But no, it was too easy to check, and in any case his failure to acquire something as fundamental to an officer as a map could be seen as dereliction of duty. But to admit that he had a map would be tantamount to admitting that he knew about the side tunnel. He was beginning to feel entangled in a web.
‘I had, sir.’
‘I know you had.’ Boroviška took a contemplative puff. ‘We shall go into the matter of your amazing dereliction of duty in due course, Tono. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from where you are standing, it will have to wait. We will shortly be having a visitor.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes. General Kamensky, no less.’ Boroviška spoke softly. ‘What am I to tell the General, Tono? Do you have any suggestions?’
37
Flight by Coach
Between Petrie and Freya, and the Austrians, were several rows of empty seats. This made it gratifyingly difficult to engage the strange, wet young ones in conversation, and in any case nobody seemed inclined to make the attempt. Such desultory chat as there was soon died out, and in the soporific warmth of the coach people dozed or stared morosely out of the window. The countryside was dark and mountainous, the hills barely lit by a crescent moon.
Petrie was too exhausted, too frightened and too wet to sleep, but Freya snuggled into him, shivering, and within minutes she was snoring slightly, her head on his shoulder.
He tried to think it through, but the freezing wetness of his clothes and the awful stress of the past few hours combined to keep him in a sort of stupor. He opened the breakfast box and found himself staring at a small bottle of mineral water, a hardboiled egg and a sandwich filled with some indeterminate gunge. He slid the lot under his seat.
All they could do now, he reckoned, was wait.
The coach took off, and trundled carefully down the narrow, ice-packed road, past the ski hotels, past the Demänovskà Cave. In the lights of the bus Petrie glimpsed a couple of soldiers, tucked away in front of a tourist shop and invisible from the steep footpath leading down from the cave. One of the soldiers, a red-faced farm boy from oxcart country, looked at the passing coach. He stared directly at Petrie, their eyes meeting momentarily; and then the image was gone and Petrie’s hands were clenched into fists and his mind was filled with a simple question: was I recognised?
Nobody stopped the coach. It took a left at a roundabout and picked up speed on a broad road. The snow had gone and there was a pale sliver of dawn to the east. No headlights were pursuing them in the dark. Petrie unclenched his fists. He saw the chemical works, all aluminium pipes and orange smoke stacks catching the dawn light. Freya’s wet hair tickled his nostrils. Suddenly, Petrie was overwhelmed with exhaustion.
Shortly, the bus slowed and turned on to a motorway, and then accelerated to a satisfyingly brisk speed. The countryside here was flat and bleak. In the distance, shortly, Petrie saw a forest of high-rise buildings, shimmering, floating on water and flamingo pink in the light of the rising sun.
He stared stupidly at the distant mirage, mumbled something about a socialist paradise, and flaked out.
* * *
‘Tom!’
Freya was poking his thigh.
Memory flooded back. Petrie looked out in sudden panic. They were in the suburbs of some big city. ‘Is this Bratislava?’
‘I think so. The bus is going to Austria.’
‘What? But the border!’
‘We must get off now.’
Now Petrie definitely recognised the city as Bratislava. They made their way to the front of the coach. Freya said something in German. The driver shook his head.
She turned to Petrie in alarm. ‘He’s not letting us off.’
‘We have to. It’s life or death.’
She spoke to the driver again, sharply this time, but the man simply gave a surly shake of the head. Petrie wondered about punching him.
‘I could start to take my clothes off,’ she suggested.
‘He’d just get the police.’ Petrie tapped Freya on the shoulder and they made their way to the back of the coach.
‘What now?’
‘Wait till it stops. Then we’ll get out of the emergency window.’
Down a broad street, every set of traffic lights turning green as the bus approached. Glorious congestion loomed ahead. Petrie recognised the area. The big Tesco store appeared on the left. The bus stopped. A blue tram pulled up a few feet behind
the bus. They pulled open the window and clambered out, in front of the astonished tram driver. Freya’s boot caught Petrie on the cheek. The coach driver was shouting angrily.
They held hands and dodged their way across the busy street, not daring to look behind. On the busy pavement, they ran.
A couple of hundred metres on, they slowed down to a trot. And then they stopped at a little cluster of market stalls.
‘Where are we?’ Petrie asked, his chest heaving. A red and white tram clattered past them, jammed with commuters.
She pointed. ‘There’s the castle. Let’s head for the Old Town.’
‘I’ve dried off. How about you?’
‘Yes, but I’d kill for a shower.’
* * *
General Kamensky sat with three telephones. Two of them were on the Colonel’s desk and the third was a mobile which he produced from a deep army pocket. For his first call he cleared the Colonel’s office. Boroviška and his Lieutenant stood in the outside corridor while tantalising snatches of phrase came through the door. Then the General was at the door and waving them in while he made a further call.
This second call was to the Chief of Police in Prague. The Czech Republic being an independent state, the call was in the nature of a request. Equally clearly, someone had made sure that this ‘request’ was backed up with all the necessary authority. A third call, identical in content, went to Bratislava.
At last he turned his attention to the officers facing him nervously across the desk. ‘Colonel, I won’t emphasise the magnitude of your failure as I’m sure you are already aware of it. The fact is that your task force had a special assignment, an unpleasant duty but a simple one. In fact, it could hardly have been simpler.’
‘Sir…’
Kamensky waved a hand dismissively. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I turn up here to supervise the – how can I put it? – the terminal arrangements, to find that you have lost two of your charges. Untrained civilians bottled up inside a castle surrounded by a brigade of regular troops!’
He helped himself to one of the Colonel’s cigars, he struck a match on the underside of the table and took a few puffs. Then he sighed. ‘The position is that for this operation to be successful, all the enemies of the state have to be removed. One survivor equals total failure.’
