Sean Black: Lockdown

‘Yours must be invisible,’ said the cop with the flashlight.

‘Our situation’s a little different.’

‘How so?’

‘We’ve both already been exposed,’ Ty told them.

Two of the cops took a step back. The cop with the flashlight made a point of standing his ground. ‘We had a fellow officer killed tonight,’ he said, his voice cracking.

‘All the more reason to let us do this right,’ Ty responded.

One of the flashlight cop’s colleagues started to pull him away. ‘Let’s go.’

The flashlight cop shrugged him off, slowly raising the beam of light and angling it past Lock. ‘So if everyone down here should be in bio-suits, maybe you and your buddy should tell all those people.’

Ty spun back round and tracked the light all the way to where it dead-ended, illuminating a subway train packed with people.

Six cars. Each with a total capacity of two hundred and forty-six people. Plus a driver. Even allowing for it being two-thirds full, a low-ball figure on New Year’s Eve, that made a thousand people. All underground, in the dark, with Mareta lurking in the shadows giving a whole new meaning to the term Ghost Train.

Lock inched his way towards the side of the first car. It was crammed. Faces distorted against the glass of the carriage window; some terrified, others expectant, most stoic. Lock figured the stoic ones as native New Yorkers. The four cops Lock had asked to hang back and establish a cordon in case Mareta tried to slip past them edged their way up again as Lock reached the rear car.

‘We need to get these people out of here,’ said one of them.

‘No shit, Sherlock,’ muttered Lock, waving Ty round to join him from the other side of the final car.

‘She’s deep in the cut, if she’s even in there at all,’ said Ty.

Lock looked from the cars back to the Transit cops. ‘We got any more trains on this stretch?’

‘Just this one.’

He closed his eyes for a moment, thought back to what Mareta had told him in the cell when he’d probed her about her ability to escape detection, even when the odds seemed impossible. She couldn’t walk through walls, he knew that. But somehow she did.

When they look low, I stay high.

She hadn’t meant it literally, he was sure of that. She’d worked out one simple fact: the art of escape lay in first understanding where your enemy would look.

‘You OK?’

Ty’s voice snapped Lock back into the present. The Transit cops were inspecting the train now. He let them get on with it and pulled Ty to one side. He lowered his voice so no one could hear. A moment later they broke their two-man huddle.

Lock walked back to the cops. ‘Can I borrow your flashlight for a moment?’ The Maglite Nazi handed it over like it was his first-born, and Lock turned to the officer in charge. When he spoke he made sure it was loud enough that they could all hear. ‘You’re right, let’s get the juice back on and move this puppy up back to the platform. But tell the driver to take it slow. She’s in there somewhere. Has to be.’

As the lead cop jogged down to speak to the driver, Lock stayed close to Ty. ‘Soon as it’s stopped at 42nd Street, get the power shut down again.’

‘Roger that.’

Lock directed Ty to walk alongside the lead car while he crouched down next to the southbound tracks. From there he’d get a good view of the underside of the cars as they rolled past.

A few minutes later six hundred volts of direct current passed back through the third rail with a fizz, and the lights inside the cars flickered to life.

As soon as the last car had trundled slowly past, Lock made a point of following it back in the direction of the platform, catching up so that he was parallel with the third car. Two hundred yards up the track he switched off the Maglite. A hundred yards after that, he stepped into a service alcove abutting the tunnel wall, out of sight. Then he waited.

Hours of boredom, moments of terror. That was the job. But where bad bodyguards focused only on what to do during the moments of terror, a good bodyguard realized the real work was done during the hours of boredom. Lock cultivated the ability to stay switched on. To look and see. Not just to listen, but also to hear.

Up the tracks he could hear the passengers disembarking the train and the orders from a swarm of JTTF agents who’d joined the Transit Authority.

‘Stay where you are.’

‘Place your hands above your heads.’

‘OK, now you can move forward.’

That’s what he could hear. But it wasn’t what he was listening for.

Ten minutes passed. His eyes began to adjust to the darkness as the molecules of rhodopsin in the rods of his eyes metamorphosed, allowing him to discern the space around him.

Then came Ty’s voice. Plenty loud so Lock could hear it: ‘Hey, Frisk, the juice off now?’

Frisk exasperated: ‘I just told you it was.’

‘Didn’t hear you.’

Lock’s right hand tightened round the butt of his Sig. Soon she’d make her move. She had to. Once all the cars were searched and they realized she wasn’t there, they’d come pouring down the tunnel. More men. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.

Lock moved carefully, crossed his left hand across his body so that the Maglite rested on top of the barrel of his Sig. He pushed away thoughts of what was at stake. The lives that could be lost. Hundreds of thousands, potentially. Dismissing it from his mind proved a whole lot easier than he would have thought.

One guy jumping to his death from a burning skyscraper horrifies. A million people starving to death seems like what it is, a number.

The only number that mattered now was two. Him. And her.

He settled his breathing. Filtered out the noise from the platform. Stopped listening. Tried to hear.

And then it came. A scraping sound. A rat, perhaps. Again, this time louder, more distinct, more like someone hauling a garbage bag through a pile of wet leaves. Mareta. He closed his eyes, focused on the direction.

It sounded close. He could hear her breathing. She must have been no further than fifty feet from him this whole time.

He swivelled round in one movement. The noise came again. Far as he could tell she was moving down the tunnel, away from 42nd Street.

He centred himself, and clicked on the torch, catching wet, grey-black wall. He lowered the beam to what he guessed would be head height and swept left.

Mareta blinked back at him.

‘It’s over, Mareta,’ said Lock.

Her pupils fell away to dots. She managed a smile. Weak and unconvincing. ‘It’s never over.’

‘This time it is,’ he said, stepping out towards her, the cone of light spreading to the edge of her face as he got closer.

‘Don’t you remember what I said?’

‘All of it.’

‘And about death being an escape?’

A rustle of fabric. He didn’t need to lower the beam to her hands to know she was reaching down for the metal contacts which would trigger the explosive bound around her torso. She’d used her time in the tunnel well, re-rigging the detonator attached to the cell phone so that it once again linked to those hand-held contacts.

‘There’s no escape this time, Mareta.’

He lowered the beam of the torch to her stomach. Her left hand was rigid by her side, the contact wire pinched between index finger and thumb. Her right hand was clenched into a fist, inching its way down to retrieve the other contact wire which dangled from her waist.

‘Stop,’ Lock said, the Sig trained on her.

She complied.

‘OK, that hand there’ — he nudged the centre of the beam at her right hand — ‘bring it up again.’

She began to raise it, away from the wire, her fist still bunched, hard enough that her knuckles showed white. Then, as her right hand came level with her shoulder, suddenly she whipped her arm back, and up. A sudden flash of steel as she launched the knife hidden in her hand at Lock.