‘It also tells me how many staff members I’m supposed to get killed. You want to guess how many?’
Ellie stayed silent.
‘Goose-egg. Zero.’ He sipped a plastic mug of coffee. ‘You got lost and almost ran into a train. That’s a safety incident, and the contract says we can’t have those. They want me to report it — but if I do, that’s three days I’ll spend up to my tits in paperwork. We’ll get behind on the job — except the contract says we can’t do that either. So I’ll spend another three days writing a report to explain why that’s happened. Then we’ll be a week behind. The contract says we have to pay compensation if we get a week behind. I’ll get a bollocking from my boss, and I’ll have to write another report. Two million commuters will be cursing my name, and all because some silly cow took a wrong turn down a tunnel. You read me?’
She did.
‘What’s your name?’
Ellie was too tired to invent something. She stared at the map on the wall behind him.
‘Hainault.’
‘Hah. Born to do this job, were you?’ He didn’t want an answer. ‘What did they hire you for?’
‘Cleaning.’
‘It’s always the bloody cleaners,’ he observed, to no one in particular.
Above ground, a new day would be beginning. All the chorus of Ellie’s old life would be there — the streetsweeper on the corner of Gresham Street, the delivery driver, the newsagent lifting the shutter on his shop — but they would find other people to wave to, honk at, ignore. The old day hadn’t finished for Ellie: she was trapped in the night that would never end. She wandered through the darkness with the cleaning crew and the rats, scraping away the human residues that accreted on the station walls, fluff and hair, cloth and paper. It felt like stripping a corpse.
Her shift ended at five. She took off the overalls and took her bag from the locker they’d given her. A foreman led the crew up the silent escalators to the gates, but Ellie hung back. She’d spent all night in the tunnels, and ended up no more than a few hundred yards away from Monsalvat. They must have worked out how she’d escaped by now — surely they’d check the Central Line stations when they opened.
She waited until the others had left, then summoned her courage and stuck her head around the Bank manager’s door.
‘How do I get home?’
For a moment she thought he’d bite her head off. But something in her face, desperation or exhaustion, seemed to spark a rare flash of pity in him.
‘Where do you need to go?’
As far away as she could — the end of the world if possible. She looked at the map on the wall again.
‘Ealing.’
‘There’s a ballast train coming through in five minutes. It can take you as far as Acton.’ He scowled, though she thought he meant it kindly. ‘Otherwise, you’ll probably try and walk it and I’ll end up with another incident on my hands.’
Ellie rode with the ballast to West Acton. In the cold predawn mist, she found a payphone on the platform and dialled the number she’d been given. Harry answered at once.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’ve got it.’ There was no triumph in her voice, only the flat line of exhaustion. ‘Where do we meet?’
Monsalvat staff called it the war room, though they usually meant it metaphorically. Screens on every wall brought in newsfeeds, financial information, graphs and spreadsheets; they could also be used to extend the room into infinite space for video conferencing. The cleaners hadn’t been in yet: at seven o’clock that morning it was still littered with the detritus of the Talhouett takeover battle: folders and papers, coffee cups slowly curdling, pizza boxes and stale doughnuts. A dozen men had gathered around the table, with Blanchard and Destrier at their head. At the far end, removed from the others, an old man sat in a wheelchair. His body was skeletally thin, hunched over as if against the cold: the skin on his face was white and scarred with wrinkles, though his clear eyes were blue like a baby’s. Tubes and wires trailed from a metal collar around his emaciated neck, binding him to the wheelchair. Each time he breathed, a small arsenal of pumps and valves wheezed into action, pushing and sucking the air from his lungs. Yet there was no doubt that every man in the room deferred to him. Not out of pity or respect, but from fear.
‘We put men on the platforms at Bank and Liverpool Street stations the moment they opened,’ Destrier was saying. ‘Somehow, she got away.’
He glanced at the man in the wheelchair, like a dog expecting to be kicked. The blue eyes stared back unblinking.
‘The good news is, she’s still got her phone on her. We got a trace on it an hour ago. Acton, of all places. Must have taken the Tube. We sent a team, but by the time they’d got there she’d gone underground again. Heading east, back into the city.
On the walls, the graphs and numbers had been replaced by maps and satellite images, with the Underground network superimposed. The security log was displayed behind Destrier, hanging over him like a death sentence.
From his wheelchair, Michel Saint-Lazare made a coughing noise. Everyone turned. He must once have had a natural voice, but no one there — except, perhaps, Blanchard — had ever heard it. When he spoke, it was really the machine behind him speaking.
‘She must come up again. When she does, you will be ready.’
On the grey boulevard of the Euston Road, among the youth hostels and union offices, St Pancras Station stands like a redbrick fairytale castle: a lofty symphony of turrets and pinnacles, spires, mullions and arches. In the 1960s a generation that loved neither beauty nor fairy tales almost demolished it. But it survived, and now towers in newly restored splendour as England’s gatehouse to Europe.
Behind the brick façade, near where the trains pulled in, a portly gentleman in an overcoat clutched his hat as he stared up at the great glass roof curving above him. He was a poet; snatches of his verse lay scattered across the floor in gold, as if they’d spilled out of his briefcase. He didn’t move. His bronze eyes would never tire of the view.
The man beside him was much less serene. From a distance you might have taken him for the statue-poet’s brother: the round figure made rounder by the overcoat; the spaniel legs and pug-nosed face. He even wore a hat. He scanned the concourse like a thief, glancing up at the huge clock every few seconds as if waiting for someone. Even that early in the morning, the station was busy with businessmen taking the first trains to Paris and Brussels.
He stiffened. A dark-haired girl in jeans and a sweatshirt, no coat, was walking towards him. She carried a backpack, but wore it across her chest the way anxious tourists sometimes do. He fell into step alongside her.
‘You made it here. Thank God.’
She didn’t reply. What was there to say that could possibly fathom the last twenty-four hours?
‘You got it?’
She cupped a protective arm over the bag, like a mother-to-be cradling her belly. ‘Can you tell me what it is, now?’
‘Something we’ve been waiting a long time to get back.’ He half-reached to take it, but she recoiled; he drew away. Clearly she wasn’t ready yet.
‘I can’t tell you what an achievement this is.’ He sounded like a headmaster at prize day. ‘You’ve no idea how many men have failed where you’ve succeeded. It’s an amazing …’ He struggled for the word. ‘… victory.’
It won’t bring my dad back. Or Mum.
‘I tripped an alarm,’ she said flatly. ‘They know it’s gone. They’ll be all over London looking for it.’
Harry nodded. ‘We had men watching the bank: it lit up like a Roman candle around two a.m. We feared the worst.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Could they have followed you?’