Steven Savile - Silver

He waited. Nothing.

She wasn’t coming out. He tried to think. He was really beginning to wish he’d taken the shot when he’d had the chance. She was a professional, which meant, more likely than not, she wouldn’t be carrying anything that identified her or tied her in with whoever had hired her to give Fisher’s place a going over. But even professionals made mistakes. He’d taken her by surprise. She’d run before she could find whatever it was she’d gone there looking for-which meant it was still back there waiting to be found.

He chewed on his top lip, took a deep breath.

Ronan started to walk forward. He felt out each step carefully, scuffing his toe along the rough stones until he found the safety of the next wooden tie. One step at a time he edged his way deeper into the tunnel. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure the light wasn’t too far away for him to make it back when the skin along his forearms prickled. The air around him stirred ever so slightly.

And then he felt it: the telltale tremor of the train shivering through the tracks. A moment later light swept around the corner. He saw her caught in the train’s headlights. She was no more than twenty feet in front of him, looking around frantically until she saw whatever it was she was looking for, and started to run toward the oncoming train.

Ronan knew then he wasn’t going to need to take the shot. The train would do his dirty work for him-but there would be nothing left but blood and guts on the tracks for him to pick over, and only then if he managed to get out of the tunnel himself before the train sheered his body in two. He screamed at the woman. There were no words, just this raw explosion of sound from his mouth.

Inside his cabin, the driver leaned on the horn. In the tunnel the collision of sounds was deafening: the screech of the brakes, the shriek of steel sliding on iron as the wheels locked and slid, the blare of the horn as the driver hit it over and over again, the maddening bark of the loudspeaker ordering them off the tracks, and Ronan Frost’s screams as he watched the woman running hell for leather straight at the front of the train.

And then she disappeared.

Just like that.

One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t.

But there was no bloody detonation of flesh. No impact. No spray of blood across the headlights. No body strewn in pieces across the tracks.

The sight kept him rooted to the spot a second too long.

He felt the next breath die in his throat.

Ronan realized he didn’t have time to run. There was no way he’d make it out of the tunnel and back up onto the platform before the train slammed into his back. He knew what she’d done; she’d run for one of the service stairways.

He looked left and right. The entire tunnel lit up like midday by the onrushing headlights. He couldn’t see anywhere to hide. So much for that god, the thought flashed across his mind. Of all the “last things” he had expected to flood his final moments-beautiful women loved and lost, friends betrayed, lives taken and saved-cursing a make-believe deity hadn’t so much as registered as a possible farewell-to-the-flesh thought.

He thought about throwing himself down and lying flat on his stomach between the tracks and praying there wasn’t a trailing hook dangling from the train’s under-carriage to gut him like a fish and drag him all the way back to the city center.

The headlights were huge now, filling the tunnel. The tunnel itself wasn’t wide enough for him to press himself up against the wall. He looked down at the wheels, then at the tracks and at the curve of the wall, and realized it was his only chance. The horn blared again. Despite the shriek of the breaks the train wasn’t slowing anywhere near quickly enough to save his life. He had seconds to think.

Move.

One chance.

It all came down to the width of the tracks and the aerodynamics of the train itself. All he could do was pray there was an inch to spare.

Ronan Frost hurled himself sideways, hitting the ground hard, and wedged himself into the narrow gap between the iron rail and the concrete wall. He rolled over onto his right shoulder, face pressed right up against the cold concrete. He tried to stop breathing and meltt a trhe wall, making himself as thin as possible. The horn screeched in his ears, so close it could have been inside his head. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to flinch. The wind battered him up against the wall. Suddenly an incredible force tried to peel his head up into the train’s path.

Ronan gritted his teeth and pressed his face into the gravel. The vacuum caused by the displaced air and the train’s momentum tore at his hair. His screams were lost beneath the madness of the hellbound train. An agonized sob tore between his teeth. He resisted every impulse to throw his head back to relieve the pain, knowing that it all that was saving his life.

The duh-duh-de-duh duh-duh-de-duh of the wheels filled his head.

He couldn’t breathe.

The wind displaced by the train pummeled the Irishman up against the concrete wall, and he loved every damned second of that pain because it meant he was alive.

And then it was gone. The train had passed him, and he could breathe again. He lay there for a full thirty seconds, listening to the mad rise and fall of his own breathing, then pushed himself to his feet. He thought about going deeper into the tunnel, chasing the woman up the service stairwell to the surface, but she’d be long gone by the time he reached the top. Still, there was no way she could know he’d survived. In her place he would go back to the apartment to finish what he’d started. He had to assume she’d think like him.

Ronan Frost walked unsteadily toward the light.

He felt a warm, wet stickiness on his cheek and reached up to feel out the damage. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. There was more blood than he would have expected. The gravel had cut up the side of his face.

As he came out of the tunnel, the first of the next wave of commuters had begun to file onto the platform. A few of them looked at him curiously; the others adopted the Ostrich’s if-I-don’t-see-it-it-doesn’t-see-me attitude, deliberately not looking his way. That was what the city had become over the last few years. A decade ago a good Samaritan would have come to the end of the platform to help him up while someone else went for help. Today they watched him suspiciously as he climbed unsteadily back to the platform and walked toward them. He couldn’t blame them. He knew what he must have looked like, battered and bloody and, he realized, still holding the Browning in his right hand.

Ronan holstered the gun.

Walking back toward the entrance he hit the speed dial on the earpiece, but he’d lost the network down in the tunnel. He pushed his way through the barriers, ignoring the stares, and hit the speed dial again and again until Lethe answered: “Talk to me.”

“Lost her in the tunnels and nearly got myself flattened by the 8:30 to South Shields. All in all not the best result.”

“Oh, I’d say the nearly part was a home win. So, fill me in?”

“Female. Middle Eastern origin. Lebanese, if I was forced to guess-she had that look. Five eight with a punch like Tyson. Beautiful. And by that I don’t mean the kind of girl you want to take home to meet your mother; we’re talking life as a willing sex slave.”

“I’ll run her against Six’s active database. If she’s running out of the Middle East, odds are Intelligence has got something on her,” Lethe said in his ear. “Maybe they’ve got a ‘hot assassin’ search string set up.”

“She used one of the emergency service stairwells on the southbound rail, maybe fifty yards inside the tunnel. Can you pull up the schematics and see where she’ll have come out?” Ronan asked, ignoring him.