“Of course I recognize them, Oskar Fischer, Bernard Hautcret, Peter Gruber, Fodor Kovacs.” Incredulous. “These were all taken in Siberia?”
Sofia nodded.
“And you’re suggesting they’ve overseen the building of a large hadron collider adjacent to the Pacific Ring of Fire?”
“I’m asking if they could have.”
“It’s possible, but it takes a huge amount of energy to...”
“We have reason to believe they have multiple nuclear reactors.”
“It makes no sense. It could destroy the world. Wipe out every living thing. Why would the Russian government want that?”
“The Russian government knows nothing of it. We’ve checked.”
“Then they must close it down.”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. How do you force a close-down?”
“Cut off the energy, that’s the simplest way.”
“From four nuclear reactors, run by a megalomaniac intent on destroying the planet?”
Delaney Atwater wiped his glistening forehead. “Shutting down a nuclear power plant is not simple, as we learned from the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. It is the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry.”
*
Sofia called Marion from her D-Jet as she flew back from Geneva to Milan.
“Reduce the impact? What does that mean?”
“Restrict the total devastation to the local area.”
“Who have we got there?” Sofia paused before replying, Marion already knew the answer.
“Max and Tom. I’m sorry Marion, I really am.”
“I know you are.” Marion’s words were deflated. “Tom’s an exceptional Z5 agent, that’s what matters now.”
A click sounded in Sofia’s headphones as Marion cut the connection. Both knew any more words were meaningless.
*
Doc was back to his old self. Better in fact, because Sofia had made sure his new prosthetic leg, which had been stored in the mini-sub, was fully waterproof.
He swam noiselessly, alongside Max, past the tangle of iron in the devastated submarine dock, where Max and Joy had first set eyes on the matte black Predator powerboat when it had conveyed the five scientists, Mateo Martin, Oskar Fischer, Bernard Hautcret, Peter Gruber, and Fodor Kovacs to the secret entrance.
In its twenty-first century way, this was as impregnable as the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower of London.
Doc and Max knew that forcing their way in would be impossible.
Thinking their way in was the only answer.
They retreated to the opposite side of the dock, clambered up silently, found a hidden perch, and sat and stared.
Max touched Doc’s arm.
Two black heads were bobbing in the water, scanning, as had Doc and Max, for a way in.
Max dug into his backpack and grabbed a pair of night binoculars.
The two swimmers were each wearing hooded black wetsuits. Like nimble gymnasts they hauled themselves out of the water onto a shelf immediately above the entrance. They glanced around to check no one had spotted them and then settled for a patient wait, ready to swing inside the moment the door opened.
In the meantime they were hidden from view.
“I should have thought of that.” Doc scrunched his eyes at Max’s whisper.
“It’s better doing it our way.”
“What way is that? Jump?”
“Fly.” Doc couldn’t resist a broad smile; it was so good to be back in action.
He dug into his backpack for two, modified, wing suits Sofia had stashed away for just such an occasion.
Jet black.
They wriggled into them.
The two gymnasts were wriggling too.
Max lifted his night binoculars.
“What’s up?” Doc had noticed too.
“They’re stripping off their wet suits.”
“And..?”
“Who?” Max had a ‘knew it’ expression in his tone.
“Who?”
“Joy and Sasha.”
As Max spoke he saw Joy slip on a pink cotton beach dress. She looked as sexy as hell in this devil’s paradise. Joy tossed back her hair as she glanced over her shoulders, bare but for two flimsy straps, towards the entrance to the lock. She tapped Sasha on the arm.
Max turned his binoculars onto a massive submarine, approaching with the stealth of a stalking crocodile. Submerged with only its dark grey turret poking up above the waterline.
Doc was staring thirty yards in front of the camouflaged turret, his mouth agog.
There was Jean-Pierre Durand, standing erect, his cloak flowing behind him, gliding, as if on water. The stalking submarine inched its god-like figurehead towards the hidden door.
Doc, Max, Joy and Sasha, watched and waited.
Unexpectedly the gate opened onto a floodlit, underground station and a polished aluminium, bullet-shaped train pulled into the platform. The five scientists were about to step on board when Bernard Hautcret glanced round and saw Durand standing yards away on the water dressed in a resplendent purple robe.
He stretched his arms wide and his cloak billowed as he sprang from the submerged bow onto the floodlit platform.
The five terrified scientists’ eyes widened further, as Joy and Sasha flipped through the entrance and dropped onto the platform just twenty feet away.
Durand span round, an uncontrolled mixture of pleasure and anger searing through his veins.
He strode towards them.
Doc and Max flew in to join the party as the gate slammed shut.
Two against eight? Four against Six? Five against five? Who was on whose side?
Telepathic thoughts raced between Durand, Max and Joy.
“Twin tunnels, one hundred mile radius, four nuclear reactors, twenty duplicate control centres and a thousand slaves.” As Durand’s thoughts ricocheted from mind to mind, Max was dazed in disbelief at the scale.
“Do you really think you can save the world?” Durand bellowed and then, in the blinking of an eye, he reached Joy, hammered Sasha in the stomach — Foreign Legion style - before dragging both into the waiting bullet train. The second the sliding doors snapped shut, it departed at an astounding speed
Doc strode to the terrified scientists and shook each one by the hand. “Doc Palfrey,” he tried to reassure. “We have very little time to stop this thing.”
“You can’t stop it.” Mateo Martin was emphatic. “Once the protons, two teams of trillions, are started they will go on until they collide.”
“And then?”
“We thought we’d discover how the world began.” Oskar Fischer joined in. “Instead we’re going to see how the world will end.”
“Suicide scientists.” Fodor Kovacs shook his head in horror.
“Can we get to where Durand has taken Joy and Sasha?”
“We can.” Mateo Martin tapped a sophisticated touch-screen. “The trains are driverless, on demand, fast — absurdly fast — but have no alarm stop. Instead you just push the red button to shut the doors and race away from the platform if you’re in a hurry.”
“Like Durand did just now?”
“Durand was born impatient.”
Doc, Max and the five scientists, stepped into the carriage. Doc, couldn’t resist hitting the red button. They rocketed away from the station.
Just minutes later the gate opened to receive Fadeyka Semyonov and his fellow trustees who stood dejected and nonplussed on the empty platform. No sign of Max or Sasha. A train pulled in, flooding the platform with light reflecting from its polished aluminium skin. The doors opened. The trustees hurried in. The doors slammed shut. The train sped off.
The doors of the scientists’ bullet train opened onto a hive of activity. Hundreds, of white-gowned, staff stared at flat computer screens in a vast, circular, open-plan space that would do justice to a renovated Wall Street trading floor.Max gawped at the astounding contrast between this and the dank conditions in the resurrected
gulag where he had spent so much time and which was only fit for bats and bugs. But the slaves there looked no less happy than the staff here.
The five scientists, heads bowed, stepped towards the centre to a floor to ceiling, ten-metre wide, glass cylinder, filled with touch-screen monitors.
Inside this secure control room was Durand and beside him Joy clutched at her pink dress holding it in place with both hands. The straps were torn and there were bloody scratch marks on her shoulders.
Durand turned to glance at Doc and the five scientists just long enough for his expression to gloat too late, before wrapping his arm around Joy.
“He’s sealed himself in.” Mateo Martin’s voice betrayed her total despair.
Doc stepped out and, beckoning, led the five scientists towards Durand’s transparent control centre.
Sasha was lying there, a crumpled heap. Max rushed to his side but knew he was dead.
Doc and the five scientists huddled round. One more circle in this vast circular space.
“Can they hear us?”
“Of course I can.” Durand’s voice was contemptuous. “And they can too.” He pointed to the bewildered trustees whose bullet train had just arrived.
Doc ignored them and continued to address the scientists.
Durand continued to belittle him by jumping in with a riposte.
“Speak up!”
Doc did with a question for Mateo Martin.
“What do you mean, sealed himself in?”
Durand provided the answer himself. “It means no one can get in and we can’t get out. Joy and I will enjoy one final fuck while we watch the world come to its glorious end.” Durand drew Joy even closer to him. Joy twisted her face away, her eyes burning fury and her arms covering her breasts.
Doc thwacked the side of the glass cylinder. “Bomb proof?”
“Totally!”
Bernard couldn’t resist. “A nuclear bomb would shatter it.”
“Take me through why we can’t stop this megalomaniac. And, please, keep it really simple, so the idiot in fancy dress knows I’ve got it,” said Doc.
Durand turned dismissively to observe the touch-screen with the map of the Pacific.
It was Mateo Martin who explained. “We’re at the epicentre of a replica of CERN — but not quite an exact replica. We’re three times bigger and lack the most basic safety features. Once an experiment starts it cannot be stopped. As a result there is always a risk that the entire site will blow up or fold down into a black hole. In case it blows up Durand built this bombproof control room for the key scientists. Once a project starts the cylinder is sealed. No one can get in or out.”
“Clear?” Durand’s voiced boomed.
Doc turned to answer his adversary “It’s clear that you’ve trapped yourself like a wasp in a jam jar.” And then turned back to Mateo Martin.
“And why can’t the experiment be stopped?”
“Because it’s fed by energy from four nuclear reactors which, like all nuclear reactors, cannot be turned off with a switch. And Durand cut out the safety stoppers. We never knew why until now.”
“What happens if the experiment starts to go wrong? Everyone here dies?”
“At last! He’s got it!” Durand’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“There’s an evacuation button by every door, but as no one could escape in time, it’s useless.” Bernard spoke with utter despair.
“Push them.” Every head in the room sprang up to stare at Doc and inwardly shout.
“Are you sure?”
Doc nodded vigorously. “Push them all!”
A dozen, white-gowned workers leapt towards the buttons.
Sirens screamed.
An evacuation-prompted stampede erupted.
Not just in the vast open plan office, but throughout the gigantic mines.
It took less than two minutes for the vast room to empty save for Durand and Joy, trapped in their glass cage. Two minutes that led to silence as Durand stared through the shatterproof glass at Doc, and Max.
Durand smiled. “Now what?”
“Now we shut off the energy.”
“Impossible. Nuclear reactors cannot be switched off.”
“No need. Drain the oil from the generators.”
“They’ll seize up and the heat will blow up the reactors.” Bernard looked puzzled as Doc spoke.
“But not the planet.”
Doc and Max’s eyes met.
The five scientists dashed back to the bullet train, on their way to the generator hall and certain death, once their job was done.
Durand lashed out at the glass cylinder in a vain attempt to stop them, but it was Joy who seized the initiative. She grabbed him, tore at his face with her fingernails and head-butted his nose and mouth. Blood splattered and ran down Joy’s flimsy dress. Durand raised his arms to protect himself from this frenzied attack. It was an ill-judged move. Boiling with fury she kneed him brutally in his unprotected groin and as he fell forward she grabbed his hair and threw him against the glass
His head flew back and Durand crumpled to the floor. Joy towered over him. Durand stared up through his bloodied, swollen eyes at her long, lithe legs. She stared down at his humiliated heap. Her eyes locked with Max’s. ‘What are you looking at?’ she cried. “Get out of here!”
The generators seized and the first non-nuclear explosion ripped through the site.
Max grabbed Doc’s arm.
Their flying suits caught the air propelled by the explosion and driven by it they hurtled towards the bullet-train station.
Doc flew onto the train and crashed into the red panic button, Max fell in beside him.
From here fate would see them saved or nuked.
It smiled upon them, turning Doc and Max’s mini-submarine into a torpedo. Propelled by a tsunami wave, they shot out into the Arctic Sea.
And safety.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Get in, get in!” I was shrieking at waddling Iris, yelling to make myself heard above the roar of the hovering Bell helicopter. Warden was charging out of the ranch house towards us.
I kept yelling and shoving.
Ted, jamming the door open with his right foot, grabbed her belt and tugged. Iris fell inside.
Warden, sprinting across the backyard, was closing in. Ted’s left hand clasped mine as I got a footing. As he dragged me on board, we pulled away from the ground and Warden wailed with frustrated anger.
For a moment I mistook that massive cloud formation for a hurricane. “It can’t be?”
I slipped on a headset and looked ahead — it seemed impossible.
Yellowstone was erupting.
One mile high and growing, a mushroom cloud of molten ash. Beneath it, a thousand small earthquakes released a firework display that lit the moonless sky.
In seconds, a thousand trees were consumed by forest-fire.
My eyes ached with the enormity of what I was witnessing.
The pilot pulled us to the west determined to make Bozeman’s Gallatin Field Airport for Ted and my onward journey to New York.
“Divert to Billings Logan.” Ted’s instruction was typically calm.
“Your connection?” questioned our loyal helicopter pilot.
“The Gulfstream’s diverting there too.”
The Bell Helicopter swept east as I turned to Ted.
“Did you know this was going to happen?”
“Durand planned it to be a thousand times worse.”
“Worse?”
“Durand wanted the world as we know it to end.”
“And this?”
“Nothing like that big. And for that we have you to thank.”
“Me?”
*
I spent two restful days in my apartment, lazing in scented, candlelit baths and sleeping in my own bed.
A parcel arrived from Chanel. A midnight blue, backless, halter-neck dress, it was a perfect fit. The accompanying note read: ‘Welcome home, cocktails tonight at The Wareho
use. Benadir, xxx.’
Ted drove me from my apartment on 76th to Greenwich Village. The doorman at the Warehouse ushered us in with a “Welcome back Ms Schobinger.”
It seemed like only yesterday that Benadir had whisked me up to her penthouse apartment. The elevator doors slid open and a huge cheer went up, led by Doc and Benadir.
Tears welled up as I caught sight of them all. Dame Marion — Doc looked so much like her, Sofia and her twins — grinning like Cheshire Cats and clasping Mum to make a perfect threesome. And in the background, with something in his hand, was Max.
His whole body a magnet that pulled me past the others, straight to him.
“Lucille.” He kissed my lips. “You look stunning.”
So did he. Armani suit, black Gucci shoes, but I wasn’t going to say so.
I looked down and saw a Tiffany jewellery box.
“For me?” I could feel myself blush, I hadn’t been expecting this.
“You can open it.”
And I did as everyone crowded around.
“Will I like it?”
“Yes.” Dame Marion’s voice flowed with reassurance. “In fact, I think you’ll love it.”
The lid opened on a watch.
Exactly the same as Mum’s.
The same as?
Or?
I turned it over, and light glinted on the Rose of Jericho.
“Is it?”
Max nodded. “Shall I put it on?”
I felt Father let go as if, for the first time, he had fallen into his endless sleep, with Mum beside him.
“No,” I responded with a kiss. “I can do that. And I’ll never take it off.”
And I did, and I didn’t.
CHARACTERS
Dame Marion Palfrey
Head of Z5, Daughter of Dr Palfrey (see John Creasey’s Dr Palfrey series), mother of Tom Palfrey.
Andy Barlow
Brett Hall’s Manager and chauffeur to Dame Marion.
Dr. Tom (Doc) Palfrey
Rookie Z5 agent. Grandson of Dr Palfrey, son of Dame Marion. PhD in marine biology. Afghanistan veteran. Amputee.
Max Fedorov
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 19
