Down some steps. Towards the platform. Each step taking them deeper into the earth. Deeper and, he hoped, safer.
Caller is out of coverage area.
Stafford resisted the temptation to dash the Blackberry on the sidewalk. Instead, he took off for the subway entrance.
On to the platform. Lock stopped to catch his breath. The irony suddenly hit him. He was now the bodyguard of a suicide bomber. That was one for the résumé. If he lived.
A tunnel either end of the platform. Deeper into the bowels. Safer. No coverage in the tunnels. He took a big gulp of air and propelled Mareta down the platform towards it, away from the steps.
Stafford had it figured. Plan B. He didn’t need to call the cell. They needed one clear shot? So did he. A single round to anywhere on Mareta’s chest would do the trick.
He was at the top of the steps now. A middle-aged woman in a Transit Authority uniform stood at the bottom, unbelievably having to repel a knot of people headed down into the subway, New Yorkers’ sense of entitlement and an open gate having done the trick. ‘Folks, step back. The subway isn’t open.’
A fat man in a suit asking, ‘So why’s the gate like that?’
Stafford edged his way through the crowd.
The woman lowered her arm across his chest. ‘Subway’s closed.’ Stafford produced Caffrey’s revolver, shot her in the head at point-blank range, then vaulted the turnstile. Screams filled the air, followed by a mad rush to regain the street. Looking back, Stafford saw Ty taking the main entrance steps three at a time, gun drawn, looking ready to dish out his very own severance package. Stafford kept running.
The end of the platform for Lock and Mareta. The reek of stale urine and a single rat splayed dead between the rails.
‘What happens if I live?’ Mareta asked.
Lock had no energy to lie. ‘You die in jail.’
Mareta’s hand went up and she broke free, jumping down on to the track. The electrified rail was inches from her feet. Lock’s heart shuddered almost to a halt as she reached down, half lifted her injured leg over it and kept going.
Lock jumped down after her, losing his footing in a slick brown puddle of water. By now Mareta was pulling herself up on to the other side with a grunt. Stranded between the uptown and downtown tracks, Lock heard a clatter of feet down the steps at the far end of the platform. Then Stafford Van Straten appeared.
Hidden from Ty but visible to Lock, Stafford ducked behind one of the grimy white-tiled pillars.
Stafford saw Mareta on the other side of the platform and raised the stainless-steel revolver, tracking her with metal sights. Best shot in the ROTC. Four years straight.
Lock raised his Sig, punched it out with his right hand towards Stafford. He didn’t track. He didn’t have to. All he had to do was pull the trigger.
The round caught Stafford in the face, pulling up through his right cheek before carrying on through his back teeth, splintering enamel and root, then moving up through his cheekbone and out.
Before Stafford hit the ground, before the revolver clattered on to the platform, Lock gave him the good news twice more.
Tap. One in the throat — a hint of luck to that shot. Lock in the zone.
Tap. A final round in the sternum.
As Ty’s boots hit the platform, Stafford Van Straten’s dead body met concrete.
Mareta had taken off, running back towards the steps. Lock made to go after her, signalling to Ty to go the other way and catch her coming out the other side.
As Lock struggled to climb up off the tracks there was suddenly a hundred yards of platform between them, Mareta limping the whole way but somehow finding speed. The air ahead raged black in Lock’s eyes. His body calling time. Too much time spent on red alert.
Ty shouting his name from what seemed like a million miles away. Confusion. His mind willing his body to work. Willing itself to explain what was happening to him. The vaccine. The bomb. A flip book of possibilities.
Then, a sudden change of direction from Mareta. Away from the steps. Away from the light. Towards the tunnel at the other end of the platform. Lock snapping back inside himself, inside the zone, as Mareta disappeared into the maw of darkness.
Determined to stop the Ghost from performing one last vanishing act, Lock ran down the track.
Ninety-two
A hand clamped down on to Lock’s shoulder. He spun round.
‘Chill,’ said Ty. ‘It’s me.’
‘You see her?’
‘Can’t see shit down here. Got some good news, though.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘They’ve switched off the juice to the third rail and we’ve got JTTF making a push on up from 34th Street. She’s got nowhere to go.’
‘Remember who we’re dealing with here. You got a flashlight?’
‘Yeah. Hang on.’
Ty pulled a Mini-Mag from his belt and rotated the end ring. He shone it down the tunnel, but the beam died ten yards out.
‘Have to do,’ said Lock, with a complete lack of conviction.
Ty lowered the beam so the light pooled at their feet, just enough so they could pick their way over the rails and assorted debris.
Lock glanced back over his shoulder as voices echoed behind them. Reinforcements. Four Transit Authority cops. No bio-suits. Their courage not in question, their judgement less so.
The beam from one of their flashlights caught Lock flush in the eyes. He put his hand up. The cop on point motioned to his colleague to lower it. ‘Jesus, put that damn thing down.’
Ty jogged back to liaise. ‘You guys should have bio-suits on if you’re gonna be down here.’
‘Yours must be invisible,’ said the cop with the flashlight.
‘Our situation’s a little different.’
‘How so?’
‘We’ve both already been exposed,’ Ty told them.
Two of the cops took a step back. The cop with the flashlight made a point of standing his ground. ‘We had a fellow officer killed tonight,’ he said, his voice cracking.
‘All the more reason to let us do this right,’ Ty responded.
One of the flashlight cop’s colleagues started to pull him away. ‘Let’s go.’
The flashlight cop shrugged him off, slowly raising the beam of light and angling it past Lock. ‘So if everyone down here should be in bio-suits, maybe you and your buddy should tell all those people.’
Ty spun back round and tracked the light all the way to where it dead-ended, illuminating a subway train packed with people.
Ninety-three
Six cars. Each with a total capacity of two hundred and forty-six people. Plus a driver. Even allowing for it being two-thirds full, a low-ball figure on New Year’s Eve, that made a thousand people. All underground, in the dark, with Mareta lurking in the shadows giving a whole new meaning to the term Ghost Train.
Lock inched his way towards the side of the first car. It was crammed. Faces distorted against the glass of the carriage window; some terrified, others expectant, most stoic. Lock figured the stoic ones as native New Yorkers. The four cops Lock had asked to hang back and establish a cordon in case Mareta tried to slip past them edged their way up again as Lock reached the rear car.
‘We need to get these people out of here,’ said one of them.
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ muttered Lock, waving Ty round to join him from the other side of the final car.
‘She’s deep in the cut, if she’s even in there at all,’ said Ty.
Lock looked from the cars back to the Transit cops. ‘We got any more trains on this stretch?’
‘Just this one.’
He closed his eyes for a moment, thought back to what Mareta had told him in the cell when he’d probed her about her ability to escape detection, even when the odds seemed impossible. She couldn’t walk through walls, he knew that. But somehow she did.