A slim woman with her hair covered in a headscarf spotted Ben. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ben.
A plump woman in a long skirt, wet up to the knees, answered her. ‘The police said to stay here and we’d be evacuated.’
Ben leaned on the window ledge and looked across to the Houses of Parliament. Now that he wasn’t so high up, the river looked even more vast. A plume of sparks rose into the sky like fireworks. What was it — an electricity substation shorting out? He got out his phone again. The display said there was no signal.
‘You won’t get anything on that,’ said a voice.
A balding man in a light grey suit was watching Ben morosely. There was something smug about the way he said it, as if he was enjoying Ben’s disappointment.
‘No harm in trying,’ said Ben cheerily.
The balding man looked taken aback and moved on. Ben was suddenly reminded of the louts he’d met on the train, seeing what they could do to upset the other passengers. Perhaps one day the pierced bullies might be wearing suits and going bald. That made him smile.
He looked out of the window again. Big Ben said ten to two; his watch said two fifteen. Then he knew the world really had gone wrong: Big Ben had stopped.
A loud bang and a flash shattered the hushed conversations. Ben, along with all the people at that end of the floor, found himself instinctively pushing away from the explosion. All around him he heard screams.
After a few moments everyone stopped and looked back, like wild animals that had been spooked. A cupboard was belching thick smoke into the room. Sparks of orange-yellow and blue light showed behind the door.
Then the chaos started. Everyone began to talk at once. ‘The sprinklers will come on in a minute.’
‘They won’t. They’ll have shorted too.’
The light show continued behind the cupboard door. ‘All the electrics are on fire in there.’
Then Ben noticed that one of the windows was open; a thin man in a dark, sweat-stained shirt was sitting on the window ledge, looking down at the water lapping at the white marble building just a couple of metres below.
Ben remembered the helpless figures hurled by the tide against the concrete walls outside. He pushed through the group of people and seized the man’s arm.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
The man looked at him angrily. ‘I’m a strong swimmer — I can get to that rail bridge over there.’
Ben kept his voice calm and looked into the man’s eyes. ‘I just saw someone die doing that. They must have thought they could make it too. The current is too strong.’
The man’s colleagues were obviously also having doubts. ‘Don’t, Richard,’ said the woman with the wet gypsy skirt. ‘There must be another way.’
Richard sighed, then got to his feet, turned and carefully lowered himself back into the room.
Suddenly the door of the burning cupboard burst open and smacked against the wall. Smoke billowed out, along with a smell of burning cable. From the floor above there was another bang.
As the crowd surged away from the fire, Ben gradually found himself swept to one side. His elbow caught a door handle and he stumbled backwards into an adjoining room — a small meeting room.
The stinking cloud of smoke followed him in …
Chapter Ten
Ben realized that there were three other people with him in the room: sweaty-shirted Richard; a young Chinese man with an identity pass on his belt that said his name was Guang and he worked in the IT department; and a woman in a glittery top. They stared at the smoke filling the room outside, listened to the screams and the sounds of running feet.
‘It’s the transformer for this floor,’ Guang said. ‘It must have shorted. That smoke will be nasty.’
On the other side of the room’s glass wall was a frosted transfer with the ArBonCo logo. It began to blur as the heat melted it. A figure appeared through the smoke and Ben recognized the thin woman in the headscarf he had spoken to earlier. The woman in the glittery top let her in. She came in coughing on a wave of heat, as though she had escaped from an oven.
‘Cheryl, bring her over here to get some air.’ Guang edged around the big table in the middle of the room and opened the windows onto the river. The new arrival leaned on the table, coughing. Cheryl, the woman in the glittery top, put her arms around her shoulders and led her to the window. ‘Come on, Kabeera. You’ll feel better in a minute.’
Ben noticed that the smoke outside was getting thicker. Richard was standing glaring at him. ‘You stopped me getting out. I’d have swum to that bridge by now,’ he told him.
No you wouldn’t, thought Ben, but if I say so we’ll just have a pointless argument. On the wall was a display of rescue equipment for oil rigs, including a big, orange inflatable raft.
‘Maybe we don’t have to swim,’ said Ben. He moved quickly to the wall and pulled the raft down. ‘Help me with this.’
Richard looked at him mutinously, refusing to help.
Ben realized that he couldn’t waste time trying to talk him round. If Bel had been here, she’d have told him he was being an idiot. He’d get the others involved instead. What were their names? Ben searched his brain. Oh, yes. ‘Guang, Kabeera — we’ve got a raft!’ Ben tugged the raft off the wall and laid it on the conference table in the middle of the room.
Cheryl grabbed the other two, and pointed at the raft on the table. ‘Quick, help with this.’
‘Where do we inflate it?’ Guang asked. ‘Everybody look for a valve or a gas canister.’
On the other side of the glass, the smoke was thick and grey, like insulating wool. All the plastic frosting had turned black and charred. Everyone patted the orange material, searching for the inflation valve. They didn’t have much time.
Richard found it. ‘It’s here,’ he called. ‘And there’s no gas canister. So what do we do, blow it up like a balloon?’
It was true. Where there would usually be a tube of compressed gas to inflate the raft, there was just a tab of black fabric. Richard glared at Ben, as though this was all his fault. He really is a sore loser, he thought.
Suddenly, behind them, there was a bang. Cheryl screamed and Kabeera jumped. A jagged spar of glass the height of the door crashed down into the table between Ben and Richard. It smashed into shards like daggers. They stood frozen, shaken. Ben slowly looked round.
The glass door had cracked from top to bottom. The door handle was metal and it must have expanded, sending stresses through the glass. Hot smoke began to billow through the hole.
Kabeera was yelling but the smoke caught her throat and she started coughing again. Cheryl looked at her and suddenly understood what she was trying to say. ‘Use the fire extinguisher!’ she yelled. ‘Blow it up using the fire extinguisher!’
All at once they were acting together, like a team. Ben pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall. Richard smoothed down the fabric of the raft so that Guang could locate the valve again. Kabeera was coughing, but she and Cheryl managed to push the window open wide.
Ben put the nozzle of the fire extinguisher up against the valve and pulled the trigger. There was a hiss as the foam flowed into the material. The raft began to take shape — then stopped.
Ben pressed the trigger again, but the extinguisher was empty. And the raft was only half inflated.
The temperature was rising and the hot smoke was starting to fill the room.
There wasn’t another fire extinguisher; and anyway, there was no time to use it. Guang’s voice rang out. ‘Let’s go!’