David Gilman - Ice Claw

The Frenchman had patted his pockets, twelve … thirteen. Stepped back to his office, fourteen … fifteen. Open the door, sixteen. Done what? Reached for something on his desk. What? Cigarettes. He had picked up the forgotten cigarettes, seventeen … eighteen. Repeated his movements again, out of the office, into the hall, nineteen … twenty … twenty-one. The old man had quickened his pace, twenty-two … twenty-three … twenty-four. By now, Max remembered, he would have been back at the door, which was already open. Stepped out-and closed it.

Twenty-five seconds tops. The old Frenchman might have been slow but it was a practiced pace, he did it every night of his life. To the second.

Max’s finger hovered over the master control. Was he about to throw the wrong switch? Holding his breath, he flipped the switch and began a mental count-following the same procedure as the Frenchman. Door … one second. Turn, three … four …

Footfalls pounded on the stairs. Max sneaked a peek around the office door and saw the German, grunting with exertion, reach the hallway. He ducked behind the open front door and watched through the narrow gap between wall and door as the German stopped in the archway.

Five … six … seven …

Max could have reached out from the darkness and touched him.

Eight … nine … ten …

The man gestured and yelled, “Bring the car! Bring the car! We need a flashlight! They’ve escaped! Rhona, schnell! Come on!”

Eleven … twelve … thirteen … fourteen … Max hardly dared breathe. The clock was ticking; the alarm would go off unless he could get out the door and close it. That was his only chance. Come on! Shut up and leave!

Fifteen … sixteen. The German turned back to the stairs. Max heard a car engine start, crunching tires, a car door open and slam. No headlights.

Seventeen … eighteen … nineteen. And then the German’s wife ran into the entrance hall. She hesitated. “Ernst!”

Twenty …

The voice carried. “Up here!”

Twenty-one … twenty-two …

She ran towards her husband’s voice.

Twenty-three …

Max stepped out, grabbed the door …

Twenty-four … twenty-five!

The door clicked shut behind him.

Silence.

Max blew the air out of his lungs with a massive sigh of relief. He leapt down the steps, past the guardian crocodiles to the motorbikes, then slowly and methodically pushed the scissors’ blades into the rear tire of each motorbike. There was an even more satisfying hiss of released air.

Max’s plan had worked better than he had hoped. The Germans’ car had stopped right outside the entrance and the keys were in the ignition. Max didn’t care about noise now.

He kicked the row of bikes. Nice to see the domino effect in action. The bikes clattered down. Handlebars snared wheels, brake and clutch levers dug into engine blocks, and headlights cracked and smashed.

Max adjusted the driver’s seat in the small Mercedes, turned the key, pulled the gear shift from park to drive and let the smooth engine glide him towards the entrance gates. He stopped the car, slid down the window and called, “Sayid, your taxi’s here.”

The boy stepped out of the shadows. “Max!” He climbed inside. “What was all that racket?”

“Fun,” Max said, smiling. “Not half the racket there’s going to be in a-”

The piercing screech of the chateau’s alarm siren sliced through his words. Max and Sayid turned. Figures ran down the steps. Some tried to lift their motorbikes; two bigger silhouettes pointed and shouted something.

Max laughed, pushed his arm out the window and waved.

“Auf wiedersehen , losers.”

Sayid beat his hands on the dashboard and shouted, “We did it! We did it!”

Max turned the car towards Biarritz.

“Put your seat belt on, Sayid. What’s wrong with you? You like living dangerously?”

Fedir Tishenko was superstitious. Portents and signs had guided many great men in history, and Fedir modestly counted himself among them. Had he not been marked by the lightning god’s hand? He doubted if any other human could have survived such a ferocious baptism.

The unseen powers of the universe guided his destiny un-equivocally towards that chosen moment when he would shock the world by harnessing and unleashing the greatest force nature possessed.

But he was also practical. Superstition was the foundation of his belief, but cold logic had given him immense financial power. Desire for anonymity from the world’s media was driven not only by his disfigurement but also by stealth and cunning. Behind the scenes he could influence governments, buy politicians and inflict whatever judgment he deemed appropriate on those who failed to live up to his expectations.

One billion dollars buys a lot of influence and privacy. But he knew that no matter how exact he had been over the years, a tiny speck of the unforeseen could create havoc. Like a Formula One racing driver getting a wasp under his helmet at three hundred kilometers per hour, or a precision piece of high technology getting a microscopic mote of dust in a vacuum-sealed area.

Deep underground he was driven past massive pieces of equipment resembling something a hundred times bigger than a jetliner’s engine, and an enormous disk, higher than a six-story building, gripped and secured by steel frames attached to the rock face. Except this disk did not house fan turbines but energy conductors, overlapping, highly polished titanium tiles, solenoids that would snare and capture, then transmit the raw energy he would soon harness.

Energy crisis? A gash appeared in his crinkled face-a smile.

The world did not understand the meaning of the word energy , or crisis. What he planned would make any such concerns seem as insignificant as blowing out a candle.

Now, as he sat on the electric golf cart being driven through the cathedral-like halls beneath the mountains, a chill prickled his skin. It was not the cold, because massive heat conductors maintained a regular temperature down here at a hundred meters below the surface. No, it was this unexpected complication.

The monk, Zabala, had spent over twenty years searching for proof of some future profound, earth-shattering event. More importantly, it seemed, this evidence was the precise time, the exact hour when the cataclysm would occur. This was the information for which Tishenko had paid Zabala’s closest friend a small fortune. The man had failed to obtain the secret from Zabala, and Tishenko had taken his revenge-the body would never be found. But the man had learned enough to give Tishenko the exact day on which to inflict the terror of his awesome, earth-shattering revelation. He liked that word. Revelation . Yes, it would be that wondrous a moment.

Tishenko’s scientists, tracking powerful weather fronts across the Atlantic, confirmed that the day the storm was expected to strike matched Zabala’s prediction. But for Tishenko there was still a niggling concern. He wanted to unleash his cataclysm at the optimum moment in time for it to succeed. Absolute power demanded absolute knowledge.

Superstition teased at his logic like a child picking a scab. Perhaps the monk had had something Tishenko did not possess, something almost akin to a sixth sense. Zabala had turned to prayer and meditation as well as science and mathematics. He had become like one of those ancient masters who felt an affinity with the universe, who understood things at a superconscious level. Zabala knew things.

And had proved his mystical prediction with facts. Perhaps the scientific community would have still scoffed at Zabala had he lived-but what if they had not? Today’s climate change had scientists so worried that they swapped information like kids exchanging baseball cards. They might just identify where and what Tishenko planned.