Kate tried to stand up again.
‘Stay put, Kate!’ Lou shouted. ‘I can do this.’
The floor started to buckle. Lou lost his balance, tried to grab at the boxes and stumbled into them.
The entire hold began to shake as if it were about to launch from the ocean floor. Kate screamed, the sound coming loud through their comms.
Lou scrambled to his feet, but for a moment he couldn’t get his bearings. He pulled himself along the wall using the gaping doorless holes and found 26AS. Grabbing his way a few feet further, he reached Fortescue’s deposit box.
They both heard the sound at the same moment, turned and saw the inner door of the lock start to open inwards. A figure appeared at the opening.
‘Thank God!’ came a voice through their comms.
‘Jerry!’ Lou exclaimed.
The captain rushed over to them. ‘Where’s Jane Milford?’
‘Her suit…’ Lou started to say.
Derham sighed and looked down. ‘OK, Kate?’
‘I think I’ve broken my—’
The hold rocked and the sound of snapping metal came from directly overhead. A crack appeared one end of the roof and stuttered across the length of the cube, zig-zagging like a fissure on a frozen lake. The walls shook. A torrent of water poured in. Lou grabbed the nearest locker to steady himself and saw Derham struggling to keep upright.
‘Come on!’ the captain screamed above the noise.
‘But the box. I can get it,’ Lou cried. He looked down searching for his knife. He couldn’t see it — it was now under a foot of swirling dark water.
Derham was easing Kate to her feet.
Lou hammered on the door of the security box. ‘Damn you!’
‘Lou… Gotta go, man!’ Derham hollered. He turned and with his spare hand tried to pull Lou round, but Lou shrugged him off and slammed his fist into the front of the box again.
‘Shit!.. You…’
The water was now up to their knees.
‘Lou!.. Please!’ Kate screamed. But he seemed oblivious.
A metal panel broke away from the roof and swung down, screeching as it buckled and contorted.
Derham pulled Kate to him and headed for the door.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Jerry… NO! LOU…!’
Tears of frustration ran down Lou’s cheeks, blurring his vision. He took a gasp of air from the tanks of his suit and hit the door of 19AS one last time. It held, stuck fast.
He felt Derham’s hand grab his arm and this time he did not resist. Spinning on his heel, he stepped forward, grasped Kate’s arm and the three of them hurtled to the airlock door as the cube began to fold in on itself.
47
Five minutes before leaving for a state banquet in Paris, Glena Buckingham was dressed in a pale-blue sequinned cocktail dress her stylist really should have advised her against. She had never possessed much in the way of sartorial sense or style. If she were three billion euros poorer, she would have been viewed as the same nerd she had been at school and at Cambridge University. Jewels, Versace and professionally applied make-up helped, but they did not do a thorough enough job.
She sat with Hans Secker on the balcony adjoining the drawing room. Between them stood a table with a pair of partly consumed gin and tonics. Before them stretched a magnificent view of the Rhône Valley. Glena Buckingham was smoking.
‘So,’ she said, lifting her glass, blue smoke rising from the end of the Cuban cigar in her other hand. ‘We can chalk up a victory, I suppose.’
‘Why the reserve?’ Secker replied. ‘I actually think we should be very pleased with ourselves. A substantial chunk of the Fortescue material has been lost for ever; the rest is at least partially in the public domain and incomplete enough to stop any clever clogs from developing cold fusion within a decade, minimum.’
Buckingham nodded sagely. ‘More through luck than skill,’ she said, turning dark eyes upon her executive assistant and drawing on the cigar. ‘Our best man, Sterling Van Lee, singularly failed in his operation. If the Gods had not been on our side, those two pain-in-the-ass scientists, Wetherall and Bates, would have retrieved the rest of the Fortescue documents and the game would be up. Someone would have developed cold fusion within two to three years, and you and I would be out of a job.’
‘But that did not happen, did it, Glena?’
‘There’s always the danger that given enough inducement, Van Lee or one of his men will blab,’ Buckingham responded icily.
‘Measures are in place to prevent that from happening. Van Lee and his two surviving buddies will not see the sunrise tomorrow.’
‘And Newman?’
Secker took a sip of his drink to cover his unease. ‘We will find him.’
Buckingham exhaled quickly through her nose, drank some more of her gin and tonic, resting its base in her palm. With the cigar clenched between her teeth, she said: ‘I have always been a glass half-full type, Hans.’ She pulled away the cigar and produced a faint smile. ‘And so I accept that we have won this fight. It was a close shave, but we did win.’
Then she lifted her drink again. ‘To victory,’ she said and drained the glass.
48
Professor Max Newman was seated at a table in the Coconut Bar close to the edge of the beach watching the gentle turquoise waves roll across the white sand.
It was early and quiet in the bar. An old TV stood on a shelf in a corner near the bar, the sound barely audible.
Newman twirled the contents of his cocktail glass and took a sip. He had arrived only the previous night, reaching the hotel on the beach in a rickety cab just as a tropical storm broke. And even though he had been helped from the car by a pair of porters with umbrellas, by the time he had reached the reception desk, he was soaked through. Sleeping late, he had enjoyed a full breakfast, armed himself with sunscreen and a straw hat and wandered down to the beach.
The desperate escape from the United States had taken him to Bangkok, Damascus and Tripoli before he backtracked east to Jakarta and then the short hop to Kota Kinabalu. He knew he could never rest and relax, not completely. Not only had he stolen from his own government and passed on sensitive material to a rival state, he had taken large sums of money from the Chinese, and they would not be happy with him now they knew they had paid a fortune for material that had gone public within a matter of days. He could admit to betraying America, he told himself. But he could not be blamed for upsetting the Chinese. It wasn’t his fault that forces beyond his control had accessed the same material and handed it over to the public. Not his fault at all.
He was draining the cocktail glass when he noticed something new appear on the TV: a rather unflattering photograph of Sterling Van Lee.
He got up from the table and walked closer to where the set was perched so he could hear it properly.
‘Another, sir?’ the barman asked.
Newman shushed him and flapped his left hand irritably.
‘… was the leader of the team who stowed away on the Armstrong, killing most of her crew,’ a reporter was saying as the image changed to show the faces of Van Lee’s accomplices. ‘But now, the three who survived the SAS assault on the vessel, Steve Heynerman, Al Brillstein and Van Lee himself, are dead. They were being held in three separate cells at a military detention facility outside Washington. Each of the three men was poisoned. A thorough investigation has begun…’
Newman stood transfixed, feeling his heart race. He suddenly felt a desperate urge to urinate and for a horrible moment he thought he was about to wet himself.