Within minutes, they were by the glass door. “You’ll need to open it for us,” Jennifer said to the guard.
He shrugged. “Not my job, that,” he said with a nod at the unattended security desk. He looked suddenly round. “Here, what’s all that noise?” There was a commotion far within the complex. He walked back a few yards, to try for a better view. Jennifer’s stomach went cold. Had Jessup’s ruse failed? Had he changed his mind?
“We could try this.” Robert held up Wapping’s forearm, and waved it as if it were a magic wand. Jennifer looked round. Lucky for them, the guard still had his back turned. She told herself not to shudder, and took the limb into her own hands. Cold and immobile as a piece of butcher’s meat, it was surprisingly heavy. She held the implanted microchip a few inches from the sensor panel. A red light began to flash. But the door remained shut.
The code! Jennifer felt another chill in her stomach. Wapping had used an identification code. What had it been? She’d had so many things on her mind on the way in. She turned to ask the guard to go looking for the desk people. She bit her lip. How long would that take? She looked at her watch. She hadn’t checked it on the lower level. The time it now said was meaningless.
She looked up. With a frantic cry of “Michael! Michael!” Tarquin was running forward. He was followed a dozen yards behind by the two guards who’d taken Jessup’s order. One of them stopped and lifted his gun. It had a red aiming light, and this played all over the place. But the guards down here seemed to be under instructions not to fire when close by any of the equipment. He lowered his gun and put up a warning hand to his colleagues.
“Take me with you, Michael,” Tarquin pleaded in Greek. “I understand everything. Don’t leave me behind.
Michael had grabbed Wapping’s arm from Jennifer. He lifted it from within his cloak, and held it up as if it were his own. “Take him away!” he cried in unaccented English. He showed the silver disk. “Take him away!” he repeated, now impatient. Ignoring Tarquin’s long wail, he turned and pressed the barcode against the panel. “Wapping, Francis,” he said slowly and clearly—“CT76482.” With a gentle click, the door slid open. Michael waited for Jennifer to go through. “Doesn’t it close by itself?” he asked. She nodded. Five seconds seemed an awfully long time. She saw Tarquin pulled to the ground. The big guard stamped heavily on one of his outstretched arms. Laughing, he shouted orders at the others.
“Please, Michael—please!” Tarquin squealed in Greek. “Take me with you to Constantinople. Let me behold its wonders….”
The door slid shut with inexorable force. Too late, Tarquin had wriggled free. He got to it and slapped both hands against the glass. From the other side, the three fugitives watched his silent scream. They watched a red splash erupt from his chest, and heard the smack of the bullet. Hands still pressing on the glass, he fell to his knees. His mouth sagged open, and he toppled sideways.
Robert beat the glass with the flat of his hand. “And I thought the Greeks were a shifty race!” Another bullet slammed uselessly into the thick glass, glancing sideways and taking out a sliver. Robert laughed and put up the middle finger of his right hand at the guards, who may have understood that they were shut into their own tomb. He shouted something in Old French that Jennifer couldn’t understand, though its meaning was plain. More bullets turned the inner surface of the glass to something with the appearance of a bathroom window. But the door was closed in an airtight seal that, if Wapping had told the truth, couldn’t be broken for another half hour.
Half an hour! Jennifer thought. She took Michael’s hand. “If I pull you upstairs,” she said, “Robert will push. But we must hurry.”
After the first minute, she and Robert had needed to drag Michael up the long spiral. It was as much as he could do to repeat his trick with Wapping’s arm. They stumbled into a courtyard dim beneath the clouds of a late afternoon sky.
Where next? Trying for Westminster Underground Station would be madness. Even if they got past the suspicious guard, Wapping had used a swipe card on some of the doors, and this was somewhere in another universe. Jennifer hurried into the long room. She looked at the other doors, choosing one where the carpet was also worn. This took them into a filing room that led into a corridor, and then up a flight of stairs into what could only be the entrance hall of Ten Downing Street.
A few years earlier—this was in the Olden Days, of course—Jennifer had nearly been entered for a competition at school that would allow the winners to meet the Prime Minister, and nag him into agreeing to some particularly fatuous use of the taxpayers’ money. Back then, she’d briefly wondered what it must be like to go through that shiny front door. All she wondered now was which of the many old and new locks on the inside of the door would let them into the street. It was, she discovered, an electronic release button behind a plastic bust of Tony Blair.
“There’s an atom bomb about to go off underneath us,” Jennifer shouted at the policemen outside the door who’d trained their guns on her. “It will blow any minute now.” For a moment, they looked back at her. Then, as one, they dropped their weapons and made for the iron gates that separated Downing Street from Whitehall.
A black drizzle was beginning to fall when Jennifer got Robert and Michael through those wide open gates. She resisted the urge to look again at her watch. It was only worth noting that, while deep underground, they’d heard nothing of the helicopters that had scattered gas bombs over the crowds of praying demonstrators. It may have been that Parliament Square was carpeted as thickly with bodies as Oxford Circus had been. In Whitehall, the still heaps lay every couple of yards. Here and there, policemen—most still wearing masks against the now faint smell of brimstone, though many now uncovered—were turning the bodies over. There was no chance anyone might have survived the gassing. This was a search purely for jewellery and cash.
She turned left. “This way!” she shouted in Latin, nearly going over on paving stones made slimy by the polluted rain. She steadied herself and pointed at the high statue of Nelson. “Come on—we must get over there.” Michael’s legs gave way after about fifty yards. For another few yards, she and Robert dragged him along. Finally, Robert stopped and threw him over his shoulder. Now faster, they ran through the gathering darkness towards what might or might not be safety.
From the moment Radleigh had doubled the number of Abigail Hoopers in one universe, Jennifer had been asking what effect this might really have. Perhaps it would have none at all. Perhaps Radleigh had been overpowered, and Sweeting was finding some way to stop the countdown. The continued stability of the world about her had settled her into counting down not from Sweeting’s estimate, but from the banging shut of the upper door to the complex. If they had to keep moving, it seemed more a question of getting away from the scrum of armed and angry guards who would, whenever the half hour wait was over, burst into the courtyard.
She was wrong. As they passed by the Banqueting House, the ground began to shake. At first, it was the merest rumble—as if the Underground were working again, and they were standing above one of its shallower tunnels. One of the policemen looked up as they came within a few feet of where he’d been bending over. She thought he would get out his gun and call a challenge. But he only transferred his glance to the handful of gold coins he was holding up, and called something in a shrill, triumphant chatter that must have been in English but had no meaning to her.