by Oliver Tidy
They crossed to the old eastbound platform. Access to the tracks had been bricked up long ago. Jalil headed for a heavy-looking door set in the brickwork. He took keys from his pocket and unlocked it. Then he turned to Niki and for Acer’s benefit he said in English, ‘We wait for the next train. Then we go quickly onto the track. Stay close. And we must hurry. Do not step on the rails.’ He checked his watch and turned his blank eyes on Acer, leaving him to wonder whether he was using the enforced delay to explore ways of killing him for the death of his brother, or simply to give something of that impression.
After a long pause Acer felt the concrete beneath his feet begin to vibrate. He heard the familiar growing roar, felt the disturbance of the air, and another train hurtled past the other side of the wall, putting pressure on his eardrums.
Before the noise had faded away Jalil had the door open and was out on the narrow ledge of platform the other side. The tunnel was lit but it was a dim glow that created shadows and uncertainty. Acer was pushed through. Jalil locked the door behind them and hurried along to the sloping ramp at the end of the platform.
They stayed in their order. Acer paid close attention to where he was putting his feet; with his hands locked behind him a stumble would see him land hard on his face, maybe on an electrified rail.
Jalil did not waste time looking left and right. A train would be heard, one would feel the change of air pressure before one would see it. And crossing the lines demanded that attention be paid to where one was putting one’s feet.
Jostling with Acer’s fear for his life was his need to know where they were going and why.
***
98
No one spoke as they navigated the lines and slipped into an unlit tunnel on the opposite side of the tracks. From the platform behind them the mouth of the tunnel had looked nothing more than a shadow on the tunnel’s surface, a big patch of damp, perhaps. It was not a tunnel for a train. It was neither wide enough nor high enough.
Jalil switched on his head-torch. He moved to a box on the wall and threw a switch. The passageway was instantly illuminated by a series of evenly-spaced overhead lights fixed centrally in the tunnel’s arching brickwork ceiling – tens of thousands of red bricks discoloured with subway filth, grime and time laid by skilled craftsmen long before Acer was born. It stretched out a long way in a straight line before bending right. There was tracking for a wheeled trolley and evenly-spaced sleepers. A service tunnel. Acer’s eyes adjusted in time to see half a dozen large rats scamper away from them and around the bend.
Jalil crunched up the compacted shingle ground and Acer was shoved in the back to follow him. As he walked he let his hands bump against the pistol in the waistband at the back of his trousers.
When they got to the bend in the tunnel, Jalil found another power supply box and flicked the lights behind them off and another set in front of them on – another long stretch of brickwork, stones, tracking and shadows. Another distant rumbling started up and within seconds the next train was thundering past the end of the tunnel, sending a shock wave of compressed air up the narrow space that made Acer stagger forwards.
At the next turn the passageway forked into two. The one they were in continued straight and the one to the left branched off in a gentle curve. Despite the chill of the damp air, Acer was sweating under his load, his coat and his anxiety.
Jalil said something in their mother tongue and repeated the task of the lights. They continued on and the way began to curve to the right. The passageway seemed to narrow and lose some of its height.
Eventually, they came to a junction. Two more tunnel-shaped passages led off it, like impenetrably-black holes or gouged out eyes. Acer thought again of Minos’ labyrinth. He thought about how he would find his way back if he got the chance.
The air was thick with dust and damp. They went right. There were no lights. The others turned their head-torches on and the shadows of their comrades danced and distorted into grotesque forms as they moved along more slowly.
Fifty metres further on and they came to a stop. The tunnel continued but to their left an iron gate was set into the brickwork. Acer could smell a change in temperature and damp levels. Jalil fiddled with the lock and the gate creaked open towards them, the noise echoing away in either direction.
Niki spoke and Jalil responded quietly.
In English, she said, ‘Not far now. Not long.’
They all went through. It was just wide enough for two people side-by-side. Acer caught glimpses of the others’ faces in the lights of their head-torches as they organised themselves. For a couple of seconds he had no one behind him. He got his hands under his coat and made sure the gun – his chance, his lifeline – was secure.
Jalil closed the door behind them. Someone took hold of Acer’s arm and pulled him roughly along with them. He soon understood why. With no head-torch he was blind to the uneven ground beneath his feet. He stumbled and tripped and twice it was only the supporting grip that kept him on his feet. The stench they stirred up was nauseating. There were puddles of stagnant, putrid water and the earth had become a thick sludge. Sporadically the noise of a disturbed rodent squealed in the blackness at their feet.
They were all breathing more heavily when they reached their destination. Acer guessed they had covered upwards of five hundred metres from the station platform at a good pace with heavy packs. In another context he would have marvelled at the experience of crossing London under ground on foot.
The narrow passageway opened into a circular space the size of a large room. Their head-torch beams played around the walls as they looked about themselves. It was a junction. Another two small tunnels led off it.
One of them looked up. Acer followed the beam of light as it illuminated the emptiness above them. And the change in air quality was explained – they were at the bottom of a shaft, a deep dry well, perhaps.
As he stared around the space, one of the men bent to fire up a Tilly lamp. Its little gas flame radiated and roared, casting ghastly caricatures around the curving walls.
When Acer’s eyes became accustomed to the brightness he saw that the walls of the place were not brickwork but stone. The shaft above them was not cut from bedrock, rather the stone looked dressed and fashioned. And there were thin mortar joints. Up as far as the light penetrated it was the same and it added to the idea that this was something very old – one of London’s myriad of forgotten waterholes.
But it was not forgotten. Someone had discovered it and now there were people preparing to make use of it.
***
99
Acer was grabbed from behind by both arms and hauled across to the remains of a rusting metal ladder, which rose vertically up the shaft and was fixed to the stonework. One of them pointed his gun at Acer’s chest while the other fiddled with his restraints. In seconds his hands were released, the handcuffs threaded through the rungs and then clamped shut again. The man yanked on Acer’s arms and wrists to test that it would hold him, sending an agonising jolt of pain from wrists to shoulders.
Satisfied, he went back to his work. Acer tested them again, less carelessly, and the result was the same. But worse than the pain in his wrists was the crippling knowledge that with his hands cuffed to something in front of him he had no chance of getting to the weapon at his back.
The lamp had settled down to provide a yellow glow that illuminated the whole area. They began unloading their packs. There was gear already there, too. They were not strangers to this place and it explained how they had navigated their way there so directly and confidently. It also begged the question: what was Niki doing there? What had brought her all the way from Iran by such convoluted methods to this particular place beneath London?
Acer’s attention was taken by the men stopping what they were doing and standing to give Niki room and the full benefit of the light source. As they took a collective step back, Acer was provided with a view of her on her knees in the dirt unfastening the clasps of her distinctive rucksack – the ruc
ksack she had carried from Iran and had never let out of her sight. Acer had supposed that had been because of the money it contained. Now he feared there was something else.
He watched as she pulled the top apart, put both hands inside and slowly withdrew a dull metal tubular casing similar in size to a large Thermos flask. A hush had fallen on the little group.
Niki looked up and at him.
She smiled at him and this time there did seem something genuine about it. ‘I should thank you,’ she said. ‘I would not be here, this would not be here, without your help.’
She stood, picked up the flask and carried it over to him. ‘Look at it.’
He did. And what he saw went beyond the horrors he had imagined. He had thought bomb, explosion, damage, fatalities, a statement, something a city, a country could recover from. What he saw was a universal symbol stamped on the casing, something to strike the coldest cut of terror into the minds of normal people: the symbol for radio-active material.
‘No.’ It came out of him in little more than a whisper. He wasn’t even conscious of producing the word. Something of his life force deserted him, like he’d been unplugged. He slumped. ‘Why?’
She enjoyed his reaction. She didn’t immediately answer him but turned back to where the others were assembling something.
‘Why?’ he shouted. ‘Answer me. Why?’ He yanked repeatedly and hard on the metalwork in his absolute frustration and desperation to get free and do something. He didn’t register the gouging of his flesh under the metal bands, the bruising of his bones, and the excruciating agony that he would have to deal with when his body’s pain-killing defences had dissipated. His outburst earned him a cursory glance from Jalil. In his rage, he shouted at them again and yanked twice more on his restraints with every last ounce of effort he possessed and over the noise of his shouting he felt, rather than heard, something fracture on the rung he was manacled to.
He breathed heavily and deeply in and out through gritted teeth, just dealing with his helplessness and the searing pain that was claiming his wrists. He felt the stickiness of his blood and his hatred for these terrorists, these murderers, these reckless destroyers.
‘Feel better now?’ said Niki.
Acer battened down his outrage, knowing that for now it would be better not to encourage them near him. He focussed on exploring the metalwork of the ladder with his numbing fingers. Where the rung met the rail, he caught and cut the tips of his fingers on the jagged split in the rusting ironwork.
To keep her attention on his words rather than his actions, he said again, ‘Why?’
‘Because I hate.’
‘You’re going to detonate a dirty bomb in the middle of London. You’re going to kill thousands. You’re going to lay waste to one of the greatest cities on Earth. Because you hate?’
‘I will tell you. I will enjoy sharing it with you. I have never tired of telling people about my hatred for the West. But first you must wait. We have work to do. If you continue to make a fuss I will silence you. That does not mean I will kill you. Cutting out a man’s tongue works just as well.’
Because Acer did not doubt the reality of her threat he shut up and watched them work while he continued to probe at the damage he had caused to the ladder.
***
100
By the light of the Tilly lamp and the concentrated lights of their head-torches, they worked without talking, doing what they had come for: preparing Armageddon for London. One of them worked in the three tunnels. Acer understood he was arranging explosive charges. From each he rolled out wires to a box in the central space.
It took them over an hour to complete their tasks. They had worked industriously and without break. They drank from water bottles as they worked and offered him nothing.
His wrists throbbed and stung with the injuries he’d inflicted on himself. Every little movement of his arms caused him to grit his teeth and grimace. He felt a rat run over his feet, tempted out into the light by the intoxicating scent of fresh blood on the air. Acer kicked it away, but it slunk back and it brought company with it.
After the first couple of times they ceased paying attention to the exaggerated fuss he made over the encroaching rodents. He used the activity to mask his further efforts with the cracked metalwork. Gripping the frame in both hands and pushing off with his back from the wall, he was able to prise open a small gap the link of the handcuffs could be forced through. The perspiration ran into his eyes with his efforts and the agony in his wrists went beyond something he would normally be able to bear in silence.
He tested his efforts and the joining links of the handcuffs passed through. If any of them had looked in his direction at that moment the advantage he’d struggled and suffered to gain would have been exposed and quickly dealt with. He forced the links back through the jagged gap and turned his mind to how he would get the gun from the small of his back into his hands in front of him.
He experimented with his available movement. He quickly understood that he would not be able to reach the gun with either hand.
Eventually, their industry eased. They inspected what they’d done. They spoke in hushed voices. Other than them, only the scurrying of the rats penetrated the quiet. The noise of the underground trains were a distant, gentle murmur.
The sweat from his efforts had soaked his shirt. Now it was cooling in the breeze that flowed through the tunnels. But the chill he felt did not only come from his body temperature. They were nearing the end of their time down there. He understood that the sand in the hourglass of his life was also running out.
He explored his miserably-few options. Each amounted to the same thing: violent death – a promised slow one or a sudden and quick one.
They spoke in solemn low tones in their mother tongue and embraced. They were saying farewells and he was confused. Was one of them staying behind? Was one of them going to sacrifice their life in this? And then he remembered what Zoe had overheard, eavesdropping on Niki – Niki was going to heaven and sending America to hell. He had thought that for her this referred to her general future, but now he found a far more sinister and disturbing interpretation of those words.
And then he believed he understood where they were. He used his rudimentary knowledge of the capital and his sense of direction to calculate roughly where they could be and his guess stood up.
Niki came to stand in front of him. The beam from her head-torch shone fiercely into his eyes. He used his hands to cover the break in the ladder’s joint as he squinted back at her.
‘I have saved your life again. It is Jalil’s right to take your life. I have persuaded him to leave you alive with me while I wait.’ Her usual sneering idea of a smile was back at the corner of her mouth. ‘He is comforted that the death you will suffer will be as unpleasant as anything he could manage with our limited time. And I have assured him that the knowledge you will die burdened with will stay with you long after this life and into the next.’
Acer wondered whether she expected thanks for his stay of execution. The news that he would soon be alone with her was something to lift his nerve a notch. For the hope she was inadvertently offering him he kept any feeling of encouragement off his face. He tried to appear a man now empty of fight, broken, resigned to his fate.
The group had a last few mumbled words for each other. The three men collected what they were taking and trudged away without a glance in his direction. He watched the lights of their head-torches slowly fade in time with the diminishing sound of their retreat as they traipsed back along the rough ground, leaving the shaft blanketed in an eerie silence.
***
101
When their footsteps had died away, Niki said, ‘Understand this: I do not want to waste what little time is left listening to you trying to stop this.’
Continuing to play the part of a man reconciled to a fate he could do nothing about, he said, ‘You’ve come all the way from Iran and the history of your damaged existence to organise a nuclear explosio
n beneath the American Embassy. You are preparing to die yourself. I can’t stop you.’
In the flickering light Niki frowned at his fatalistic attitude. She almost looked disappointed, and he could imagine she’d been anticipating goading him and tormenting him further in the last minutes of his life.
‘How do you know we are under the American Embassy?’
‘I will gladly tell you. But before I do, I have some questions. The two VEVAK agents in Dubai – did you kill them?’
Because, like countless numbers before her who believed they had the upper hand over a foe, she could not resist the gloat. ‘No. They were not there to be killed, merely to deter you from going to the British Embassy by playing dead. You made that easy for me. We were never in any danger from the authorities for that.’
‘What about the authorities that came to the ship?’
‘They did what they were paid to do.’
‘And the pirates? Were they your people too?’
‘No. You did well. I should thank you for your efforts on behalf of the Iranian people. If you had not taken the fight to them we might not be here now.’
‘Is that whose name you’re doing this in, the Iranian people’s?’
‘Ask your questions. The time goes.’
‘Why have Zoe snatched from the boat? Why not just have the mother killed if you wanted her silenced?’
‘I needed to be sure of getting here. The woman alive provided a distraction from me. It made getting into your country with my package easier. And if things had gone as they were meant to she would be dead by now.’
‘Was she of value to you during her time working for you? Was that all worth it?’
‘She was a disappointment. Like her husband. But she turned out to have a use.’
‘Don’t you feel any remorse for any of it?’
