15
Officer Lunz jackknifed forward in his chair. He’d been daydreaming about fishing in his favourite pool in the Taurus foothills when the clanging bell had snatched him back to the control room. He scanned the bank of monitors, his heart thumping in his chest, looking for signs of what might have tripped the alarm.
The images were fuzzy at the best of times but with the sprinklers now filling the corridors with a fine spray, they revealed almost nothing. He could hear the muffled sound of banging and roars of complaint from the twenty or so inmates now being soaked in their cells. At least he hoped that was what the noise was about. He wondered how long it would take for the backup guards to get here. The system was always tripping itself, so response times had been getting slower. The cameras had started shorting out too. The whole system needed replacing, but the city didn’t want to pay for it. Maybe the fact that the sprinklers had gone off this time might make them reconsider.
He reached over to silence the alarm then stopped when he saw a dark shape appear on one of the screens. It was a man stumbling through the spray, an arm covering his face. He was in D section, at the far end of the complex. Lunz pushed his glasses up on his nose and leaned into the screen. The figure left one screen and appeared on another, making its steady way towards him.
He glanced over at the closed door of the control room. Beyond it a gate of steel bars stood between him and whoever was now approaching. He unlocked a drawer in the desk, pulled it open and fumbled his holstered gun from inside. He felt its comforting weight in his hand and continued to watch the dark figure moving from screen to screen, drawing ever closer, while he waited for backup to arrive. The other screens remained empty. It obviously wasn’t some kind of breakout. The figure was also dressed in dark clothes which meant he must be a guard. All the inmates were given light olive army surplus T-shirts to wear. He must have got caught in the spray. Lunz checked one last time that the other screens were empty, then rose from his chair and headed out into the corridor, taking his gun with him — just in case.
Outside, the hiss of the water was much louder. He squinted through the bars at the indoor rain until a uniformed figure appeared at the end of the corridor, stumbling towards him through the water haze. The man shouted something, but his voice was muffled by hissing water and the arm clamped across his face.
Lunz felt there was something wrong. He popped the thumb strap and slid his gun clear of the leather holster. ‘You OK?’ he shouted.
The figure continued to bump its way blindly along the wet walls, one hand feeling the way, the other rubbing his face. ‘Pepper spray,’ he shouted. ‘Someone jumped me — grabbed my keys.’
Lunz stared past him towards the closed door at the end of the corridor.
They had his keys.
They’d attacked him with pepper spray.
It wasn’t a false alarm — it was the real deal.
He gulped damp air, trying to clear his head. He pictured arms reaching through the bars of a cell at the far end of the block, fumbling various keys into the outside locks. How long before they found the right one?
The staggering guard stumbled the last few metres of corridor and banged heavily into the gate, doubling over in a spasm of coughs. Even if they were out and already surging along the corridor, he would have time to open the gate, get him out and lock it again. He could do it. But it had to be now. He ducked into the control room, hit a button on the desk and was back out in the corridor as the gate slid open. The guard was still doubled over, coughing and wheezing, both hands on his face rubbing furiously at his burning skin. Lunz grabbed his arm and heaved him backwards as another loud noise rang in the corridor and a voice from behind made him jump.
‘What happened?’
The backup team had arrived.
‘Breakout in D block,’ Lunz said, adrenalin running things now.
The two cops pushed past, guns drawn, but stopped short of where the water was coming down. ‘Switch the sprinklers off, would you!’
Lunz dived back into the control room and hit a button to cut the sprinklers. He picked up the desk phone and punched a number. ‘We got a casualty coming up from the cells,’ he said, watching the two cops tearing along the dripping corridor on the monitors. ‘Guard got a face-full of pepper spray. I’m bringing him up now.’ He put down the phone just as the two guards passed into the main corridor. Still no movement on any of the other screens. Whoever had jumped the guard hadn’t managed to break out of their cell yet. Lunz started to relax a little. He didn’t see the figure rise up behind him or notice the faint smell of pepper until a jet of it squirted into his mouth and wrenched the breath from his lungs.
16
Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital
There were grey smudges on the handle and the side pocket of Liv’s holdall, graphite powder traces of the forensic scrutiny it had been under.
Inside it was like a time capsule from a previous life: clothes, toiletries, pens, notebooks. She tipped everything out on to the bed, shaking her laptop free from where it had sunk to the bottom. It too bore traces of graphite powder and smelled faintly of the glue fumes they used to raise prints. She hit the power key but nothing happened. The police techs had obviously snooped through her hard drive and run the battery down in the process. She had a power cable, but it had a North American plug on the end, no good for Southern Turkish sockets. She turned the bag round and opened the side pocket. To her surprise, her passport was still inside. She took it out and stared at the scuffed blue cover with the Great Seal in the centre and the words United States of America written below. She had never considered herself to be especially nationalistic or sentimental before, but seeing it now made her want to cry. She so desperately wanted to go home.
The next two things she found did little to help her fragile emotional state. The first was a set of keys. She remembered locking the door to her apartment and dropping them into the bag as she dashed for the cab waiting to take her to the airport. The second was a paper wallet with 1-Hour Foto written on the side. Inside was a collection of glossy prints taken on a daytrip to New York. They showed a younger version of herself and a tall, blond man who looked just like her. It was the last time she had seen her brother Samuel alive. She stuffed them back inside the wallet before emotion overcame her and looked at the small piles of her old life spread across the bed, trying to shake their sentimental meanings and see them instead as a kit of parts to help her escape.
She had enough clothes but no cash, and her credit cards had been maxed out buying her plane ticket over here. Then there was the small matter of the priest and the cop keeping guard in the corridor. If she could create a diversion, she could maybe slip from the room while they were distracted. She thought about the medical staff that came by on their regular rounds. Perhaps one of them might help her, though with the ever-present priest in the room she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to subtly broach the subject, let alone communicate some kind of workable plan. The staff had probably all been vetted anyway and told to report any clandestine contact.
She slid out of bed, careful not to tip her belongings on to the floor, and padded over to the window. The sudden brightness behind the worn blind made her squint, but what lay outside was no help. There was a sheer four-storey drop to the cobbled street below and a tantalizing view of a fire escape snaking down the building opposite. There was also the ominous and unsettling sight of the Citadel, rising above the rooftops and darkening the horizon like a watchful sentinel. She returned her attention to the room, taking stock again of everything it contained, weighing up each item for its possible value in helping her get out.
Apart from the TV and the bed there was very little else: a small table with a plastic cup and a jug of water on it; a row of switches above the bed, a plastic sleeve fixed to the wall containing her medical notes. An emergency alarm cord dangled from the ceiling with a red handle on the end, large enough for a flailing hand to grab. Liv considered what would happen if she pulled it. She had heard the response to other alarms in the last few days, voices and footsteps rushing to surrounding rooms. But although the noise and confusion might create enough of a smokescreen to distract the priest for a moment, all the attention would be on her, and it would be almost
