The Dead Tracks

    Both of us put our hands to our ears and Healy manoeuvred the torch until he found a second speaker high up on the opposite wall. Then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped. The silence was like a shockwave passing across the room.

    Beside me, Healy reached into his jacket and took out his gun.

    I followed the circle of light as he moved it around the room. Now he had the torch and the gun, and I had nothing. I was completely reliant on him. I didn't like the lack of control, but I liked ceding it to Healy even less. It wasn't that I didn't trust him to watch my back — it was that I didn't trust him to watch his own.

    'What is this place?' he whispered.

    It wasn't part of the sewer network. It wasn't a bomb shelter either — or, at least, wasn't built to house people originally. Which meant it could have been a relic from the factories on the eastern edge: some sort of transportation tunnel. Healy shone the torch towards the manhole again. It looked like a new addition, as if it had been hollowed out and drilled through in order to join the area we were standing in. But everything else looked old. I wondered for a moment how Glass had got equipment down here, and how long it had taken him to do it. And then I thought again about him, how meticulous and patient he was. How, ultimately, the time and logistics wouldn't have mattered. He would have got it done, and — as he'd already proved — he would kill anyone who got in the way.

    Healy swung the torch around the room a second time and picked out a thick reinforced door. It looked like a submarine hatch, black and rusting, a hole in the centre where the wheel had once been. It didn't seem to fit the frame, or the frame had been made too big. There were gaps at the bottom and at the right-hand edge, faint light trickling through from the other side. Out of the speaker above it came a constant buzz.

    We edged across the room, Healy slightly ahead with the torch and gun up in front of him. His finger was tight in against the trigger. He had the air of a man who'd used one before, and not just in a firing range. Police warrant cards were marked with an endorsement if an officer had the right to carry firearms. Healy's hadn't been. Wherever he'd learned to fire weapons, whatever he'd done with them before, it hadn't been within the boundaries of the law.

    At the door, he pulled at the hatch. It stuck, juddered in its frame, then came back at us, squeaking as it swung on its hinges. On the other side was a partially lit corridor, a series of glass panels on the right. The walls were tightly packed red brick and the floors polished concrete. At the end of the corridor, the artificial light stopped and there was a vaguely circular wall of darkness. Above us, wires snaked out of another speaker, static buzzing from it, filling the dead air in the corridor. When we stepped through the hatch, we could see the glass panels were windows.

    Just like Sona had described.

    There were three of them, looking into three small rooms, each one about twenty feet square. Everything had been painted white: the brick walls, the ceiling, the concrete floors, the door on the other side. In the first room there was a small table with nothing on it. We edged further along. The second was completely empty.

    A noise from up ahead.

    Healy shone the torch into the darkness at the end of the corridor. It kinked right at the end, past four unmarked barrels. As we moved forward, towards the third window, the sound of static increased. Healy directed the light upwards. Three feet above us was another speaker, pumping out sound. A constant, unbroken wall of noise like someone had hit a dead TV channel.

    We reached the third window.

    In the centre of the room was a hospital bed. A white mattress and white bedclothes on top of that, the bedclothes half covering the legs of the woman lying on it. She was semi-conscious and dressed in a pale blue night dress, lying on her side in the foetal position. One of her hands rested on her stomach. After a while, her fingers started moving gently across her midriff, even as she slept. Tracing the roundness of her belly. The swell of her pregnancy. Eventually she shifted position on the mattress, her head tilting in our direction.

    It was Megan Carver.

Chapter Sixty-six

    There was no door into the room from the corridor and the glass was a one-way mirror. Reinforced. When I tapped on it, it made almost no sound: just a dull whup. We need to call the police. We need a medical team. I took out my phone and flipped it open. There was no signal this far underground. It would only take me a couple of minutes to get up above ground and make the call - but I needed to get to Megan first. I wasn't going to leave her. Not now.

    We moved quickly forward, into the gloom of the corridor, torchlight swinging right to left in Healy's hands. When I glanced at him, I could see the desperation building. Sweat was forming on his hairline, even though it was cold in the corridor. His shoulders had tensed. His muscles had hardened. Up ahead, the barrels started to emerge more clearly in the darkness, all four unmarked except for a serial number at their base in Cyrillic. Healy angled the torchlight across them.

    Then the torch cut out.

    He bashed it against his hand, trying to force new life into the batteries. But they were gone. I got out my phone and flipped it open again. The blue light from the display crawled across the walls and floor, lighting our way for about ten feet. I nodded to his jacket, telling him to remove his mobile. 'One of us needs to move ahead,'

    I said, keeping my voice low. 'We need to stay six feet apart, then we can light more of the corridor.'

    He nodded, discarding the torch on the floor. Then he raised the gun, placed his left hand under the bottom of the grip and put the phone between his teeth. The keypad faced out, the light from the display faintly orange in colour. His face was a mix of nervousness and dread.

    We both broke into a jog as we moved around the corner, footsteps echoing, carrying along the corridor like a muffled drumbeat. There were two doors at the end: a heavy one with rivets facing us, and a second submarine-style hatch on the right. When we got to the one on the right, I reached down to the handle. Healy's eyes snapped to a speaker above us and back to me. We both felt it. A chill. A deep sense of unease. Then I gripped the handle tighter and pushed the door the rest of the way.

    On the other side was a long, narrow room, running for seventy feet. The stone walls were uneven and the ceiling was low, as little as ten feet in places. It was cold. Under our feet was green linoleum, and above our heads were strip lights. The room was completely empty apart from a hospital bed in the centre. Circling it was a full medical set-up: an ECG, a catheter, an IV tube and saline bag, and electrodes looped around one of the bedposts. There was a metal trolley off to the side, instruments laid out on top: surgeon's scissors, scalpels, a mallet, retractors, forceps. The medical area was absolutely spotless and brightly lit. The rest of the room looked like something from the Middle Ages; a snapshot from the ruins of a medieval Castle.

    I edged further in and could make out three white doors, partially obscured by the shadows. None of them had handles. Only keyholes. The nearest to me was the one Megan was in. I darted towards it, glancing back over my shoulder at Healy. Except he wasn't there. Back in the corridor, he'd opened the door with the rivets on. In front of him was a wall of solid blackness; a huge dark mouth.

    'Healy, wait.'

    He just stared at me. He looked dazed, like he suddenly wasn't sure what he was doing. His finger wriggled at the trigger of the gun.

    'Don't go in alone.'

    His eyes drifted to the black space in front of him and then back to me. He knew I was right. He knew it was better to wait, to go in with support. But he didn't wait. Instead he raised the gun, put the phone between his teeth and stepped through the door. Within a second, he was swallowed up and all that remained was the glow of his phone.

    Shit.

    I turned back to the room housing Megan. It was locked. The door moved in its frame when I pressed a hand against it, and had a cheap, hollow kind of feel; like two slabs of wood either side of an empty space.

    I retreated a few steps, then glanced back into the darkness Healy had just passed through. I needed to get to him. I needed to back him up. But I needed to get to Megan more. Healy could handle himself. Megan