"What do you mean they're not sure?" In the shelter of the doorway, Rippner's words resounded dully. He looked out at the wet black cobblestones. "Do you need me to identify the body, John?"
The street surface, scarred with repair, worn by millions of feet. Wheels, hooves. Paving to clay to wet black layers of city. Sewer lines, water lines, phone cables, electricity. History and pestilence. Blood, manure, and bone.
They haven't found enough of her, Carter said.
Rippner's voice was dead in his own ears: "I don't understand."
The driver of the second-to-last train from St. Paul's said he saw what he believed was garbage on the tracks east of the station. Cardboard, he thought. The derelicts drag it out sometime. He didn't have time to stop; he hit it. He thought he heard something hard-- concrete pieces, maybe, small ones-- bumping up along the undercarriage. He called it in. The last train came through, and then the maintenance crew Burton mentioned went out.
They said-- Jackson, what they found-- they think it was the body of a woman, Caucasian, between twenty and forty years of age. Brunette. Petite. They said it was as if she shattered when the train hit her. Shattered, and then the last train passed through, and the rats were already in it when the crew arrived on the scene.
"Shattered--" Rippner echoed, hollowly, to the empty street.
Yeah. Like a block of glass.
"Or ice."
Said Carter, in realization and horror: She had part of the freeze-tech compound. It must have leaked.
"We don't know that, John. We don't know if it was Lisa."
They found her passport, Jackson.
Rippner felt his back bump up against the door of the shop. They hadn't been able to see on the feeds from the CCTV where Lisa had gone after Holborn. St. Paul's was just two stops to the east, on the Central Line. As his brain went numb, he heard himself say: "Someone could have taken her bag."
What did Grant say, Jackson? Did he know--?
"Did they find the rest of her bag?"
They think it was hooked and dragged away by one of the trains. Jackson, focus: Did Grant say anything to you about Lisa?
Rippner said softly: "Are you asking me if Lisa stole the compound, John?"
Carter hesitated, the good manager of managers, the decent man, trying to remain tactful. Was he trying to get it back from--
"Stop," Rippner said. No threats. No shouting. He kept his fury coiled inside him. He knew he was still too much in shock to feel his grief. "She wouldn't have been in this if it weren't for you. We both know that. Contact Becker. Make sure he's safe. Ask him if he's missing anything. Keep me informed about-- the woman on the tracks."
Where will you be?
"I told you. The bookstore. Bloomsbury Court."
*****
The traffic on dark Holborn was sparse. Crawlers walked or staggered in pairs or groups for the next club, or home. Empty cabs prowled; those with passengers darted between the ready-steady-go of the traffic lights like glistening black beetles. A drunken shout bounced now and again, call and wild reply, between the buildings. It took Rippner less than fifteen seconds to jimmy the lock on the bookstore door, using a thin strip of metal that had supported the crease in his wallet.
He stepped over the ankle-level sensors for the door chime, guided the door to a quiet closing behind him. He stood for a moment like a ghost, absorbing the stillness of the place, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Nothing moved. Ahead of him, he saw light, just a trace. He stepped to the right, to the last aisle of the shop, and looked back toward the stockroom he'd looked at briefly two days ago. The door was closed now. Light shone from the crack between door and linoleum floor.
He watched the light as he approached the door. No interruptions, no shadowy passings. No one moving in the stockroom. He held his ear an inch from the pale green panel and listened. A rumbling came and went, distantly, but he heard no sound just beyond the door itself. The handle moved easily in his grasp. He entered the stockroom.
It was much as it had been two days ago: a landscape of steel shelving, books, cardboard boxes, and dust. Only now, on the floor near the northeast corner, a Coleman battery-lamp glowed white, right to the right of a hole in the floor, round and large enough for a large man to crawl down through. It had been covered over two days ago with a pallet and boxes; Rippner saw now the pallet itself and the skid marks on the floor where it had been pulled away from the hole. He'd wondered where she'd come from, the bad-tempered redhead who'd surprised him back here while Lisa waited for him in the shop; now he knew.
He stepped to the hole and looked down. Nothing but blackness. He lifted the Coleman lamp by its handle and knelt by the hole, lowered the lamp into it.
The shaft itself was steel or iron, ribbed at regular intervals. At Rippner's end, someone had tried to block it with concrete fill, to a depth of maybe six feet; the fill had been chopped or scraped away. He could see below the level of the fill metal rungs leading downward. Those rungs were aged and dirty; the rungs where the fill had been were stainless-steel bright, affixed to the rough wall of the shaft with strong hex-headed bolts. Rippner had just stepped out onto the first rung when, far below, something moved.
And, he realized, his was not the only light in the shaft.
Someone was climbing up.
Rippner stepped back out of the hole. He placed the lamp where he'd found it and moved to the side opposite the shaft, so that the person climbing up would be facing away. He unsnapped the locking strap holding the knife he'd taken from Robert Grant, gripped the handle. Waited just to the right of one of the sets of steel shelving.
The light from below cast itself in lengthening shards as the climber neared the surface. Rippner's heart beat slowly. His breathing was calm. His eyes were on the hole in the stockroom floor, and when Bill Morgan emerged from it, wearing a hardhat with a miner's light on it, he wasn't surprised. Morgan switched off the light. He set the hardhat on the floor next to the Coleman lamp.
Then he reached into the pocket of his oilskin jacket, took out an automatic, and fired a shot at Rippner. Behind himself, that quickly, past his own left bicep. The slug struck a spark off the shelf near Rippner's left temple. In the second before Morgan fired again, Rippner threw himself through the stockroom door, back into the shop. The second slug bit splinters from the doorframe in the wake of his passing.
"That must be you, Rippner," Morgan said. "You're not shooting back."
A rustle, a click. A beam of light stabbing out into the darkness of the shop from six feet up. Morgan had put the hardhat back on.
The shop's bookshelves were pass-through, not solidly backed. Morgan looked from the aisle he was in to the aisle two over. The beam from his lamp struck off the dull spines of books like the rising sun glinting off of skyscrapers. It glanced off the dark gray-brown of Rippner's jacket. Morgan fired.
Rippner cried out, fell into the shelves. A crumpling, thudding tumble of books. Then a slow shuffling sound as he dragged himself down the dark aisle, gasping and whimpering in pain, pulling more books down as he tried to stand.
"The problem with never carrying guns, Rippner," said Morgan, as he left his aisle and moved over to the one in which Rippner was dying, "is that eventually you encounter someone who does. And then you're stuck with just a--"
Save for the books on the floor, the row was empty.
Morgan arched around the abrupt and shocking agony of a serrated knife-blade burying itself in his liver. Behind him, Rippner whispered, as he twisted the gun out of Morgan's hand--
"-- just a fucking knife, right--?"
Morgan tried to butt Rippner's face with his hard-hatted head, but by now the blade was out of his liver, and Rippner was hauling him backward by the throat, a wiry forearm like an iron bar compressing Morgan's windpipe, and Morgan was off-balance, his torso arched, as Rippner brought the knife around in his free hand and stabbed him, quick hard punches with the blade to Morgan's exposed belly. One-two-three would have done it, should have done it, only now, for the first time since Carter had told him of the body on the tracks, Rippner was thinking of Lisa--
-- four-five-six, rapid-fire, the bastard should have known not to shoot, seven-eight-nine, and he was going limp against Rippner, she was missing, she was gone, not enough even to identify, and the rats in the filthy black tunnel near St. Paul's feeding on her, ten-eleven-twelve, Morgan's corpse sliding heavily to the floor, St. Paul's, and I saw you there as well as here, you dirty fucking shooting son of a--
The shop door opened. The chime sounded.
"Last time I let you give me shit for not locking that door."
A young man's voice, grumbling to itself. A fumbling in the dark at the front of the shop. A paper rustling, the clunk as a full can of soda bumped up against something solid.
"Nothing's open, Bill," the voice called. More familiar now. Rippner remained where he was. The knife was in his hand; the blade was clear of Morgan's torso. The voice came closer. "Not even fucking Subway. Got a couple crappy sandwiches from a news shop open late on Shitbury-- Shaftesbury-- whatever. Hope you like egg salad, you asshole--"
He came down the far aisle, toward the stockroom door. To Rippner's left. When the young man stepped into the space between the store's aisles and the stockroom, Rippner said:
"Hello."
It was the young man who'd been at the shop two days ago, he of the lousy haircut who'd tried stupidly to help Lisa and Rippner find books by Leslie Charteris. He started when Rippner spoke. He turned and stared. He saw Morgan's body on the floor and said, "Holy shit--"
Jackson Rippner was not a terrorist, but he knew, he knew, the uses of terror. The kid dropped to the floor a paper bag heavy with sandwiches and cans. He didn't then reach for a weapon. He saw the knife in Rippner's hand and took a cringing step away.
Rippner grinned at him.
If Lisa hadn't been missing, if she might not be dead, mutilated, ground to icy pulp and food for rats, he might not have done what he did next. But he was Jackson Rippner, and he understood shock.
He hauled Morgan flat on his back on the speckled floor. He slit open Morgan's sweater and, that quickly, Morgan, too. And with the swift practiced ease of someone who'd studied the anatomy of the creatures he killed and the weapons with which he killed them, he rammed the blade of Grant's knife in up under Morgan's diaphragm and cut out his heart.
"The fuck--" the kid stammered. "Oh, Jesus--"
"You're next," Rippner said. Morgan's heart was warm and slick and solid in his hand. Blood dripped from it, from Rippner's fingers, to the linoleum floor. The bastard shouldn't have shot. Guns were for cowards. He shouldn't have shot. Not with Lisa missing. He tossed Morgan's heart at the kid, underhand, casually. He let the rictus of his grin spread to his eyes.
The heart struck the kid's coat and fell wetly to the floor near the dropped bag from the news shop. The kid stared at it, and then at Rippner. His breath whistled in his throat; his chest heaved. Rippner took a step closer, and the kid let out a sound like the bleat of a terrified deer and ran for the front of the shop.
The Ripper listened for the chime as the boy crossed the threshold. The whisk of the door swinging open. Then he ran after him.
*****
He found something akin to primal joy in the chase. He loved to run; he was built for it; he was good at it. His stride was swift and light, his footing sure, on the gray rain-slick sidewalk along Holborn. The boy was half a block ahead, near enough to catch, but Rippner paced him without closing the distance between them. Stringing him out, letting hope and uncertainty blend to toxic sludge with the adrenaline in the kid's blood. As rodents were wont to do, the boy in his panic retraced his last path: down Shaftesbury to the wide intersection with Charing Cross Road, where he looked the wrong way at the crossing and nearly affixed himself to the front of a honking cab. He pelted on down Shaftesbury, past the news shop at which he'd likely bought the cruddy egg-salad sandwiches, now dark and locked; he veered off to the right, on Wardour Street, and led Rippner into the lingering, leering neon of Soho on a too-early Sunday morning.
A sidestreet, narrow. A side door from a club opening. A doorman or bouncer in white shirtsleeves helping a blonde girl in ratty boho low fashion, a celebrity, possibly, into a cab. The door behind him had yet to swing shut. The boy Rippner was chasing ran through it, into the club.
"Hey--!"
The doorman released the girl and turned toward the club. Rippner swept the man's legs and smacked into the doorframe the face of a second bouncer, a big, buzz-cut guy, on his way to help.
Inside the club, Rippner slowed immediately to a stroll. The venue was tastefully dark, which was good, because by the look of things its decor was still mired in the Sixties. No strippers, though, and the place smelled good. No overwhelming funk of sweat, smoke, and watered-down booze. The kid had stumbled into something exclusive. Which meant that Rippner had roughly a minute before someone called the police.
He took from a cluster of glasses at the bar's end a seven-eighths-gone pint, to the looks of several pairs of lazily curious eyes-- no doubt wondering who he was, not what-- and looked ahead of him, as he walked, glass casually in hand, for traces, a smoke-trail of panic.
There. A narrow staircase in the far corner. Frantic motion, a pounding of soles on carpet, heading up. Rippner set the glass on the nearest table, hearing behind him, now, voices quietly angry and officious as the bounced bouncers asked of the bartenders "Where did they go--?", and went up the stairs.
Another bar on the second floor. Blue lights highlighting black shadows. Quiet music, instrumental. A hallway, doors at intervals, closed. And another steep flight of carpeted stairs to Rippner's immediate right, leading up.
Resounding with footsteps. Rippner ascended.
*****
Seth Patterson had nowhere to go but out. There was a door to his left at the top of the stairs, but it was locked. The landing he was on led back to rest rooms. On his left, as he faced down the stairs, waiting for death to arrive with a serrated blade in its hand, was a black, rain-streaked window reaching from just under the water-stained ceiling nearly to the floor. Seth tested it. Pulled at the rounded rung-handle. A flaking of dust, of old cream-colored paint, as the window lifted in the frame. As his pursuer's head emerged from the well of shadow in the stairs, Seth looked for one awful second into the man's clear inhuman eyes and then climbed out into the darkness.
Wet brick. A ledge slick and slimy with city grime, exhaust, pigeon droppings. He knew he was dead. His heartbeat would shake him free of the building; he couldn't climb along an edge this narrow. On his fourth creeping step, he missed his footing, and--
The knuckles of his flailing left hand rapped against metal. Rungs, gripped. A black ladder leading upward, to the roof. Panting, Seth climbed. To his right, his pursuer was emerging from the window. He looked at Seth, and again Seth saw him smile the death's-head grin from the bookstore.
He'd killed Morgan. Morgan the fucking Terminator. He killed him and cut out his heart.
He cut out his fucking heart.
It was as though his feet had been amputated, or as if both of them were attached to the same leg. He couldn't feel his hands for the cold and the pounding of his heart. Seth slipped when he reached the roof. His shoulder impacted on wet grit.
"You're next," said a voice in the rain.
He stood and ran. Lights of a street to his left, stabbing upward against the rain. His boots slipping and pounding on the gravel and tiles of the roof. And ahead of him--
-- oh, Jesus--
-- an ending, a building opposite. A gap, black, inestimable, between this roof and the next--
A street between the two? An alley? How far? God, how far--?
Seth ran, and, blind with rainwater and tears, launched himself from the roof's edge.
A shadow might have passed him on the right as he jumped. A hand might have tapped his left shoulder.
He nearly broke his right knee, striking it on the edge of the roof opposite the one from which he'd leaped. His knee slipped then, the right one dropping and then the left, and his belly folded around the roof's edge. He slid backwards, the wind punched out of him, into the the gap between the buildings. He thought he saw a flash of light as he lost his breath. His fingers scrabbled and clawed at wet shingles and dirt. The skin of his fingertips tore. His chest went off the edge.
His fingers found purchase and held.
He hung for a long moment, shaking, not breathing, with his legs dangling in the air fifty feet above an alley in Soho. He waited for the serrated blade to punch into the base of his skull. He waited for it to slice the backs of his straining wrists. He waited for the voice again--
You're next.
Nothing. No sound but the rain, a distant thumping of club music, a whisper of tires on wet pavement below, from the street. He looked up, and the man from the bookstore wasn't there with his knife and his terrible eyes, waiting.
Seth hauled himself onto the roof and sat, shaking. He was alone. The man who'd killed Morgan was gone.
*****
Amy Kendrick had just gotten to sleep when her phone rang. It was Morgan's turn in that bloody station tonight, but her body had locked itself into a night-shifter's hours, and settling herself before the sun rose was proving well-nigh impossible. So when she looked at the clock and saw that it was half past three, she kept none of the snap and venom from her voice:
"What?"
Amy? Christ, Amy--?
She didn't bother with the obvious retort: Pick one, you stupid fuck. It was Seth, and he might be one of the world's premiere science-whiz morons, but for now she focused on the fear in his voice.
"Seth, what's happened?"
Morgan's dead. He's dead, Amy. Morgan's dead. He's dead.
Amy sat up. "How, Seth? What happened?"
That man from-- that man with the girl who wanted the Saint books-- Seth was nearly sobbing, from shock or cold or both. He came back to the store. He c-cut his-- he cut his heart out, Amy-- Morgan's dead--
"Where are you now?"
On a roof. I don't know where-- Soho, I think--
"Is he there? The man from the store?"
No, he isn't fucking here. I'm still alive.
"He let you go. Seth, listen: can you get down?"
Yeah. I think. I--
"Get back to the hotel. Lose your coat before you do."
Why? It's cold--
"We'll go tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll go to Marks and Spencer, and I'll buy you another coat, Seth."
Why should I-- It's so fucking cold--
"Seth, he let you go, but he's planted a trace on you. A bug. Please lose your coat. Will you do that for me, before you come in? Seth, will you do that?"
A harsh, wet intake of breath on the line. Y-yes--
"Good boy. I'll call Roland. Get yourself back here."
*****
After he left the boy on the roof, Rippner circled back to the bookstore. The door was closed but unlocked; the fallen books were undisturbed. Morgan was lying on his back in a pristine pool of congealing blood. His hardhat had rolled six feet to the left, away from the gore. Rippner picked it up, tested the lamp. It cast its lighthouse beam toward the storeroom. He put the hardhat on and walked back to the hole in the storeroom floor.
Quick confirmation: nothing moving below, as far as he could tell, at the bottom of the rough metal shaft. Rippner stepped onto the first rung and started to climb down.
He descended, at a guess, between seventy and eighty feet, and when he reached the bottom, his feet touched down on macadam, not dirt or London clay. He was in a stairwell of sorts, a squared enclosure. A doorway opened to his left. He stepped through it into a rounded tunnel, its walls inlaid with dirty white tiles. An arrow on the wall ahead of him pointed to the right, above the words WAY OUT. Rippner went left. The beam of his mining lamp was lost in the darkness ahead, swallowed as the tunnel opened into a greater space beyond. At the mouth of the tunnel was a drop of possibly three feet. Rippner stepped carefully down from the tunnel's mouth into the greater space beyond and found himself where the platform of an abandoned Tube station had once stood.
The rail line, naked at knee-level before him, ran east-west. The tracks were in good repair; the tunnel at either end of the platform was open. The Central Line, west of Holborn Station. He looked to his left, along the length of tunnel in which the platform had stood. The white tiles remained, even though the platform itself was gone. He shone his headlamp onto the nearest roundel set in now-grimy red on the wall and saw in chipped and dirty black the words:
BRITISH MUSEUM
Bootprints in the dust, leading along the floor of the tunnel where the platform had been. Three distinct patterns, sizes, weights. One large male, likely Morgan; a smaller male, possibly the kid Rippner had chased; a third, shod in Red Wing boots, practical but lighter and, by the length of the stride, shorter than the other two. Likely female. All three sets looked as though their makers had been encumbered by weights balanced across their shoulders or against their hips. Rippner followed them. At the far end of the platform tunnel, an access tunnel opened to the left. To Rippner's right, just inside the tunnel, was an alcove like the one he'd left after descending the ladder from the bookstore. The doorway of this one was blocked solid with mortar and bricks.
The dust became more intermittent, and the footprints did, too, just past the skeletal black tip of the arrow pointing the WAY OUT. This time, Rippner took the arrow's advice.
The mouth of the tunnel leading away from the vanished platform of British Museum station opened into a space like an underground cathedral, or at least like an underground church. The beam from Rippner's headlamp reached neither the far wall nor the ceiling. To his right, the frames of elevator shafts and dust-gray stairs ascended into darkness.
Also to his right, more immediately, sat an array of electronic equipment and heavy tools in cases or leather bags. The largest piece of electronica looked like a camera mounted on a heavy tripod; a data cable led from its housing to that of a monitor like a sonar scope resting on what looked to be its own black plastic carrying case. Both units were plugged through a surge protector into a mobile field generator. The generator was humming softly; its casing was warm.
Rippner looked again at the device like a camera pointed at the dusty white tiles--
Imaging equipment. Some sort of deep-level scan, maybe, like an MRI.
Something buried in the wall, here or elsewhere in the station. Something Morgan and his cohorts had yet to find.
But what--?
In his pocket, Rippner's phone thrummed. The dust in the air muffled the echo from his voice, there in that man-made cavern: "Yes?"
Where are you, Jackson?
"Have they found her, John?"
No. No "I'm sorry," though, either. The identity of the woman on the tracks east of St. Paul's was still in question. Becker is safe. He's here; he wants to talk to you. Will you come in?
"I'll be there. I'm in British Museum station," Rippner added.
He could hear the frown in Carter's tone: Where--?
"It's beneath that bookstore off Holborn. Bloomsbury Court. They're looking for something down here. Whoever Morgan was working for. Is Burton still there?
He's checking in with his team at St. Paul's; he'll be back--
"I'll be there soon, John."
Rippner hung up. Before he left the underground passenger hall of British Museum station, he took from one of the leather tool bags a heavy mallet and dealt the lens of the wall-pointed camera a cracking blow. He also checked the trace he'd put on the boy on the roof, back in Soho. According to the micro-fine grid on the screen of his phone, the bug hadn't moved. Either the kid had died of fright or someone wiser and calmer had told him to ditch his coat.
No matter. Rippner knew where the rats came to work.
*****
He didn't return straight to the Savoy. He stopped first at the Aldwych. The guarded "Good morning, sir," from the dark-haired young woman on duty at the front desk told him all he needed to know about his appearance. Asking whether Miss Reisert had left a message would only arouse her suspicions further. Even in passing, Rippner looked, he knew, like a man who had committed an act of violence.
He went to the room, carded the lock, entered. Hours before housecleaning was due, but no signs of ransacking. No messages on the room's main phone set, either. The bed was still unmade; the sweater Lisa had worn to the Tate and to Gordon's still hung over the back of the chair nearest the bathroom.
He looked through the bathroom door and over the sink saw her reflection in the mirror. She was touching up her makeup. She caught him looking and smiled--
Rippner closed his eyes, shook his head sharply. When he looked again, the mirror reflected the edge of the shower stall, white tiles. Nothing else.
Rippner stripped, took a quick shower, brushed his teeth. He picked out clean clothes. Another pair of jeans, a black sweatshirt. The sweater he'd worn to the theatre and through the night was a dark knit in marbled brown and gray, and it showed little of Morgan's blood. Just a stiff rust edging on the cuff of the right sleeve. His jacket, however, as the expression on the receptionist's face downstairs had told him, was another matter. The stains on the right sleeve weren't obviously blood, and rainwater had diluted what gore there was, but the jacket as a whole was a wet, muddy ruin. He put it back on anyway. He guided the door of the room quietly closed behind him, made sure it locked, and returned to the Savoy.
*****
Opening the door, Claire grimaced as she saw him; she gave Rippner plenty of space to enter the suite.
"Your husband owes me a jacket," Rippner said quietly. He shrugged free of the jacket and handed it to her. Claire took it gingerly.
"He owes us both an apology," she replied. "He owes Lisa an apology, too."
While she found a pariah's space for his filthy outerwear in the entryway closet, Rippner took out his phone and cued up the photo he'd taken of the kid on the roof in Soho. A flash like a pocket of lightning in the dark raining air. A face blank with fear, eyes trapped wide open in the shutter's blink.
Claire looked. "Do you want me to start a trace on him?"
"Please." Rippner handed her the phone. He let her go first, then, into the data center her sitting room had become.
Carter was standing, cup in hand, near the room's coffee service. Burton and his team were gone. Professor Becker was sitting on the room's cream-and-green sofa. He rose when Rippner entered.
"Mr. Rippner, I am so very sorry," he said. He was wearing a gray cardigan over a button-down white shirt, no tie. He looked worn out, tormented. "There has been a terrible misunderstanding. I didn't trust Mr. Grant. I was beginning not to trust Miss Hobart--"
"-- with good reason, unfortunately, as it turns out," Carter interjected.
"I thought Miss Reisert was your partner. A fellow agent," Becker clarified. "I suspected Miss Hobart was trying to steal my nanites. I left a sample of neutral material in my room safe, here at the hotel. The live sample-- the nanites themselves-- I placed in Miss Reisert's bag."
Rippner stared at him. "At Gordon's--"
"Yes. When she dropped her napkin. Agent Grant and Miss Hobart were watching my every move; it was my one chance to-- Mr. Rippner, your poor friend--"
Rippner looked to Carter. "Do they know it's her, John? Other than the passport, do they know--?"
"No. Burton says it's the eyes--"
"What about the eyes?"
"They haven't found them. They say the rats are particularly fond of--"
Claire cleared her throat. She shot Carter a stabbing glance. "Would you like a cup of coffee, Jackson?"
"Yes, please."
"Milk, no sugar, right?"
"Yes."
Becker looked ashen. On a flickering silent screen, he would have been seconds away from driving the blade of a knife into his own breast. Once she'd poured Rippner's cup for him, Claire turned to the professor and gently laid a hand on his forearm. "Coffee, Professor?"
She guided him back to the sofa. Becker re-seated himself. "Bitte." His voice was as small as the word.
"What we know," Rippner said, "is this: There is an unidentified body on the tracks east of St. Paul's station. Lisa is missing. The nanites are also missing." He took a sip of his coffee. "Have you seen Miss Hobart since last night, Professor?"
"No."
"Do you know her cell number?"
"Yes."
Rippner passed him the handset from the suite's phone. "Would you call her, please?"
Becker dialed, put the handset to his ear. Listened, frowned. He terminated the call and handed the set back to Rippner. "Her provider says that her phone is out of service."
"That's her on the tracks, then," Rippner said. "Not Lisa."
"I mistrusted her." Becker's eyes were haunted, perplexed. "I did not wish her dead."
"Are you missing anything else, Professor?" Rippner asked.
"Am I--"
"The second part of the freeze-tech compound. Where is it?"
"Imperial College, Jackson," Carter said. "It's safe. It's being stored there in a high-security--"
Rippner and Claire turned to him with matched looks of equal and scathing skepticism.
"Call security over there, John," Rippner said. "Tell them Professor Becker is coming over to check on his compound."
*****
The compound was gone. Of course it was. In the security office at Imperial College, Rippner stood and watched with increasingly weary eyes as the video feed from yesterday afternoon showed Professor Becker and his assistant enter the lab, open the safe, and walk off with the second part of the freeze-tech. The stamp in the corner of the recording showed the time as sixteen forty-four.
"That is not me," Becker said. Rippner didn't mind the man stating the obvious. "And that is not Miss Hobart." That was obvious as well: at a quarter to five yesterday evening, Rippner had been watching Robert Grant refresh Miss Hobart's glass at Gordon's Wine Bar. "This woman is more slender."
Rippner focused his tired eyes more closely on the screen. The woman and her companion, a man as tall and nearly as gaunt as Becker, were almost to the glass doors leading out of the science complex. Something about him seemed familiar, but Rippner found his attention focusing itself on the woman--
"That-- that could be Rosemary Wheeler," he heard himself say. "She specializes in disguise. She can do incredible likenesses in thin-molded latex. And see-- there--" He pressed the back arrow on the recording, let the false Becker and Hobart again walk away from them on the black-and-white screen. "She favors her right leg." The slightest hesitation in the woman's right-hand stride. Nearly imperceptible. "She has a limp--"
Carter and Becker were both looking at him now.
"I gave it to her," Rippner told them.
*****
The rain had stopped. A chill pre-dawn mist had settled in its place. As Professor Becker climbed into the cab for the ride back to the Savoy, Carter took Rippner aside.
"I'm out a manager, Jackson," he said. "You said it yourself."
He met Rippner's eyes as he spoke. Rippner respected him for that.
"You'll owe me for this one, John. Unless Lisa doesn't turn up safely. Then you won't owe me anything at all."
Dead men owed no debts. Carter said: "Promise me you wouldn't hurt Claire."
Rippner looked back at him levelly. "Claire or your daughters: you know you don't have to ask me that. I know the code."
And you never sought revenge or retribution against a man's family or loved ones. Rippner got into the taxi.
*****
By the time they get back to the Savoy, Burton had returned. He was seated before one of the laptops Jane and Terry had set up earlier that morning, his eyes scanning the screen, his broad face grim. Claire was on the phone, making early and elaborate demands of room service.
Burton looked up from his screen. He reached to his right and held up a clear plastic zip-topped bag. Inside was something flat and brown, about the size of a very thin paperback. The interior of the bag was smudged with sticky red.
"We'll keep this out of the hands of the American consulate for as long as we can," Burton said to Rippner. He tossed him the bag. "Miss Reisert's passport."
Rippner turned the bag slowly in his hands. He recognized Lisa's passport wallet. The red material was blood; he recognized that as well. He felt his hands start to shake.
"Ironically, now," Burton continued, "even if enough time had passed to file a missing-persons-- we're still over half a day short, unless they've changed the regs-- the police would likely throw it back in our face, since Miss Reisert's last known location was in a Tube station."
Rippner closed his eyes. Just for a moment. "Then we'll go looking--"
"Where, Mr. Rippner? There are over three hundred miles of tunnel, and the system is live now. We can't shut it down for--"
"Do you want me to contact her family, Jackson?" Carter asked, before the weariness and frustration in the room came to a head.
"No. If the time comes, I'll talk to them." Rippner opened his eyes. Maybe Reisert would aim for my head this time. He looked at Burton, as tired as Rippner was, the horrors of what he'd seen on the tracks outside St. Paul's still fresh in his thoughts, and asked the older man, more reasonably: "What might someone be looking for in British Museum station, Mr. Burton?"
Burton looked surprised. He relaxed slightly in his chair. "Besides rats and derelicts...?"
"Mm hm."
The tension eased from the room. Rippner sat down on the sofa. Becker did, too. Carter took a chair across the way.
"British Museum was one of the Tube stations used for the storage of artwork and antiquities during both World Wars," Burton said to his audience. "Not just from the British Museum-- obvious, that-- but from the Tate and the National Gallery as well."
"Things went down," Carter said. He focused his dark eyes pointedly on Burton. "Did everything come back up, Stan?"
Burton's eyes sparked wryly in their gristly sockets. "We're going from missing persons to treasure-hunting now, John...?"
"Someone is," Rippner said. "Do you have any idea what might have been left behind-- forgotten--"
"Say 'hidden' or 'concealed,' Jackson," Claire said. "That's what we're all thinking."
"-- concealed in the station after the wars?" Rippner finished.
A knock at the door. Claire went to answer it. She signed for a cart laden with plates and glasses and steel-covered serving dishes, and when the door closed behind the well-tipped young man who'd brought the feast, Burton got up to investigate.
"Not with any great degree of precision, Mr. Rippner," he said, crossing to the cart and lifting first one metal lid, then another. "But I know someone who might." He bit the corner off a piece of toast, smiled as he reached for the jam. "And I promise you won't like him."
*****
*****
Is anything the matter, Mr. Mason? the buyer asked.
He always sounded so patient and kind. Now he seemed honestly, not just personally, concerned, as though Roland were a sixteen-year-old on a learner permit calling to say that he'd crashed the car. We went in the ditch, Dad, but we're fine. No one was hurt--
Except for Morgan.
"We've had a setback," Roland said. "Nothing insurmountable. One of my men had a change of heart."
Some times more than others Roland was glad he and the buyer never met face to face. He knew what he needed to know of the man-- Makis Kazandzoglou, aged fifty-three, a Greek national, political connections, extremely wealthy. Fortune derived from ownership in several EU energy conglomerates and, more locally, from shrewd dealings in the labyrinths of the olive-oil trade. Offshore bank accounts with legitimate numbers. And a passion for his Greek heritage, the rightful place of Greek antiquities.
Ah, that's too bad. I hope you paid him fairly for his time.
"He won't be complaining."
Have you replaced him?
Ken Warwick. God bless his freshly minted psychotic heart. The problem with mounting a clandestine, illegal operation in a major metropolis was that if something went wrong, you couldn't simply call the police and a crime-scene cleaning crew. When Jackson Rippner effectively disemboweled one of your men in the bookstore you were using as a front to access an abandoned Tube station, you were the one left holding the paper towels and the bottle of bleach. Or your prime lifter and electrician was, and she wasn't happy about it.
"I'm not doing this on my own," Amy Kendrick had said. Rosemary looked legitimately sick, and maybe Amy enjoyed that. Seth, who'd refused to set foot back in the shop until Morgan's earthly remains were gone, would be no help. Amy called Ken Warwick, harmless Ken, her soft-bellied, balding, badly dressed contact at Transport for London. Try stopping me, her eyes dared Mason and Rosemary, as she faced them with her phone to her ear. I've had enough of this shit. "Something awful has happened, Ken," she told her phone. "Something truly horrible. Can you help me?" Not "us." Not simply "Can you help?" That plaintive "me" closed the deal. He was at the bookstore in under fifteen minutes. Mason saw the straighter set in his shoulders as he walked in. Warwick might not know exactly what Amy wanted of him, but he knew enough to leave his life as a stammering cube-dweller flunky at the ankle-level door-chime. Without a word, Amy walked him back to the area just outside the storeroom and showed him the body. Warwick went pale. Roland saw his eyes go dead.
"We can put him in a rubbish tip tonight," Warwick said. "Three or four streets over."
Amy smiled. The next morning, what remained of Morgan would be on a garbage barge, on his plastic-wrapped, weighted way out to sea. For now, he was neatly packaged, and the back of the bookstore smelled like bleach. Spring-floral scented. Nice touch, that, Mason had to admit. Warwick had gone to the grocer's three blocks down Holborn. Scented made it seem as though they had laundry to do, not a murder-scene cleanup.
"Yes, we've found a capable replacement," Roland told the buyer.
And the work is proceeding?
They could replace the scanner Rippner had smashed. They had a spare. "Yes. We'll have your goods to you in three days."
Wonderful. Stay in touch, Mr. Mason.
Mason set the handset back in its charging stand. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts still themselves behind his lids.
The job had never been simple, but it had been exhilarating. A conjunction, a confluence, of events. A summit of nations to discuss the freeze-and-mold technology invented by Wenzell Becker. A nation, or nations, Greece among them, angry at not being invited. Greece. A coming exhibit at the British Museum, Hidden Elgin: Lost Treasures of the Parthenon. Pieces once considered too politically controversial for general exhibition, the museum wanting to emphasize its role in the stewardship of Greece's past, now that Greece herself was opening a Parthenon museum on Greek soil. And a current exhibit at the Imperial War Museum, London, Traitors through the ages. As part of the exhibit there, the journal of a former junior curator at the British Museum; within the journal, descriptions of pieces the museum had stored, for reasons of safety, in the Underground during the Second World War. Pieces that may-- or may not-- have been returned to the museum after the Luftwaffe's bombs stopped falling on London.
On impulse, Roland had stolen the journal. In its pages he found, as described in cribbed and fading ballpoint, the perfect piece. Light enough for two people to carry by hand, striking in that it was sculpted from black marble, a statue the journal-keeper regarded as "a breathtaking tribute to pride and folly."
The Elgin Icarus.
A month ago in his apartment in New York, Mason had rallied his troops for a new undertaking, a fresh and lucrative scam.
It was to be a two-part sale, with an appeal to pride and nationalism. The heritage angle: always good for more money. Mason had gotten word of the freeze-tech summit. He had the list of invitees. Greece, perpetually furious over Britain's possession of the Elgin Marbles, "acquired" by Lord Elgin from Athens in the nineteenth century, was not on said list.
So, very simply (or not), Roland and his people would obtain one of the "hidden Elgins" and the freeze tech and sell both to a Greek buyer. Greece would become a major player in the freeze-tech market, and Britain would be humiliated-- without even knowing it.
Mason sat forward on his leather sofa as he spoke to Bill Morgan, Rosemary Wheeler, and Amy Kendrick, the last perpetually slouched in a matching leather overstuffed chair. "We'll tell the buyer that it's a demonstration of the tech. That we've left the British with a fake Icarus. Again, it'll be an appeal to his or her pride. The satisfaction of knowing something that the British don't."
"I see one obvious problem," Rosemary Wheeler said.
"Only one?" Amy Kendrick countered sarcastically.
Rosemary ignored her. "We might be able to steal components of Becker's technology, but the whole thing, Roland--? The machine itself? Not likely."
"That's correct," Mason said.
"So we're going to sell them enough of the freeze-tech to make them think it works."
"Mm hm."
Rosemary continued, half frowning: "By providing them with a demonstration. By stealing the Icarus and leaving a freeze-tech-molded replica in its place. In the British Museum."
"Not quite. The museum won't be formally issuing a catalogue for the exhibit. There will be no need for a replica."
"Roland, what are you saying--?"
"The Elgin Icarus has been lost for over sixty years. We have the means of finding it. We're going to offer the Greeks the statue and enough of Becker's freeze technology to make them think we're worth a hell of a lot of money."
"Then, like the Icarus sixty years ago, we'll disappear," Amy Kendrick said. "Before the Greeks realize the technology is incomplete and the British have not been humiliated. Right, Roland?"
"Right."
*****
In the here and now, near the till at the front of the bookstore in Bloomsbury Court, Rosemary Wheeler touched Mason's elbow. "Ken wants to know what else he can do to help."
Mason opened his eyes. "It's 'Ken' now?"
"He is shaping up nicely."
"You sound impressed."
Rosemary smiled slyly. "Give a mouse a taste of blood...."
*****
*****
She wasn't certain how long she'd slept, but when Lisa woke, she saw the light. Round and bright as the sun. The ground rumbled against her side and shoulder and hip as it approached.
"Jim--?"
Jim said nothing. He wasn't with her. Lisa sat up, slipped as she tried to stand. She'd been dreaming, and not quite, her mind filled with darkness as soft as dust. She'd felt his hand on her hair, Jackson's hand--
-- Jim's hand--
-- reassuring and gentle. "Sleep all you want, miss. I'll be right here."---
-- and now he was gone, and the tunnel was filling with roaring and glare. Lisa was up, on her feet, shaking. She took a backing step away, then turned and--
"Stop--!"
Over the rumbling, a man's voice. Lisa froze, though she could tell: she was doing so of her own volition. Whatever had been in her head earlier was weakening. The whispering seemed distant now, just wisps of sound.
Before her, the rumbling eased to a long, low metallic squeal. Maybe thirty feet away, the light seemed to lower slightly away from the top of the tunnel, as though it were perched on the skull of a heavy animal settling itself for the night. Twenty feet away, the light stopped moving completely. Lisa shielded her eyes with her hand and looked through the glare at the windshields and red flat snout of a locomotive. A man looked out at her from the windshield on the right. He leaned from a window at his shoulder and called again: "Stay where you are, please, miss."
Below the light at the front of the train was a door; it opened, and the man stepped down onto the tracks. He was stocky, middle-aged, broad through the gut and shoulders and chest. The glare struck off his red hair, and he looked like a bear in uniform. Dark blue jacket and trousers, white button-down shirt, tie striped diagonally in red and navy.
He came toward Lisa slowly. "Would you do something for me, miss? Would you step to your left, please? You're nearly on the hot rail."
Lisa looked, saw the bar slightly higher than the paired rails of the line less than a foot from her right boot. She moved to the left. The man smiled. His eyes were light hazel. In his broad face, they twinkled in relief.
"That's better. Are you with the film crew?"
"I beg your pardon?" Lisa's voice came out as a whisper. Her larynx and tongue seemed not to know one another.
"Are you homeless?" he asked. She heard through the tact in his voice other suggestions: an addict, a trespasser (which, truth to tell, she was), insane.
"I'm lost," Lisa said.
*****
His name was Harry. Harry McKay. "Technically," he said, as he helped Lisa up into the driver's cab of the locomotive, "I'm not supposed to do this. You're meant to ride in the cars with the rest of the ghosts." She started at that; he winked. "Don't worry; I won't tell if you won't."
He shut the forward door, and Lisa pressed herself back, away from the levers and switches Harry needed to make the train move, as they started to back slowly down the tracks. He picked up and spoke into the black fist-sized puck of an old radio transmitter anchored on a spiraling cord: "Martin?"
From a speaker above his head spoke a younger man's voice. A blend of boredom and irritation: Martin here. What?
"You missed something on your walk. South of the far platform, on the tracks."
I missed nothing on my walk, you fat--
"See you when we get there, old son."
'We'--? Who 'we'? Harry, wha--
Chuckling, Harry clicked off the radio.
*****
Harry opened the side door of the engineer's compartment for her when they came to a halt, and as Lisa stepped onto the platform, he said: "Welcome to Aldwych station."
She stood on the twin of the platform she'd left with Jim. Only this one was alive and lit, in repair. The cream-and-green tiling was moderately clean; no posters flaked on the walls. There was a ticketing office to the right, a window caged with iron bars, its frame and the frame of the door next to it weathered but richly shining oak. A young man burst from the door and crossed the platform toward them.
"That's what you found, Harry?"
He was dressed, as Harry was, in a blue suit-uniform, only he was roughly half Harry's width. He bristled with energy, from his brushy black hair to his black bushy brows to his whipcord frame. He glared at Lisa, and then at Harry, with black-brown eyes.
"You're picking junkies off the tracks now--? You're letting them ride in the--"
"She's not a junkie, Mart," Harry said.
"She's not--?"
Only one way to prove it. Lisa pushed up her sleeves, showed Martin her forearms, the smooth untracked crooks of her elbows. "I'm not a junkie."
Martin lost a bit of his bristle. "Is she with the film crew, Harry?"
"No."
"How did you get in here?" Martin directed the question at Lisa, and he spoke more calmly.
"I'm not even sure where this is," Lisa replied. "What is this place?"
*****
In 1994, Aldwych station, on a spur of the Piccadilly Line running south of Holborn, closed for passenger service. Since then, the station had been maintained for use in films. To that end, Transport for London staffed the station with a skeleton crew who checked the tracks and kept the rolling stock in working order. Normally the trains were a 1970s vintage; the locomotive in which Harry had stopped for Lisa was special, a classic from 1938.
"They've trotted her out for--" Harry paused. He called over his shoulder to Martin. "That last lot, what were they making again--?"
"Atonement, I think," Martin replied. He was hovering over a hissing electric kettle and three chipped white mugs behind the steel-topped table where Lisa and Harry were sitting, in the former ticketing office that now served as the keepers' office in Aldwych. They were waiting for the police to call down from the surface. Not the metros, but a London Transport squad, and Lisa wasn't to be arrested for trespass, but she would need to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot and a test for something called Weil's disease. Just procedure.
And then they, the security people from London Transport, could figure out where she belonged. She had no phone; she had no passport (and, strangely, she didn't find that disturbing). Harry found in the leather bag she carried a wallet with money, credit cards, and a driver's license: per the cards and the license, she was Lisa Henrietta Reisert of Miami, Florida.
(When he reached into her bag, she nearly shouted "Stop--!" Why--?)
Beyond that, she found herself comfortably blank, and, more oddly still, strangely at home. She felt secure within the station's curved walls, here under the earth. The voices in her ears were a seashell whisper; they told her she was safe. She belonged.
Martin opened a green Tetley's box and lowered by its white tagged string a tea bag into each mug. Three bags, Lisa realized. Three mugs. When Jim came, he'd want tea, too, wouldn't he? "We're supposed to be standing in for Balham in that one." He snorted. "No one'll believe it. The angles are all wrong."
"It's been a busy few weeks," Harry said. "First them, and now there's this new one, this Maybury picture--"
"Best Years of Our Lives, they're calling it."
"We'd go mad without your head for titles, Mart, and that's a fact."
"Then there's IMDB right there on the computer, old man."
"That's the crew I thought you were with." Harry looked at Lisa. "They've been in and out with their permits for the past month."
The kettle whistled. Martin poured. Lisa said, to both men: "I met your other co-worker."
"Who's that, then, miss?" Harry asked.
"Jim."
Water splashed past the rim of a mug. Lisa looked: Martin was hoisting his brushy eyebrows at the spill and the tea.
"You saw Jim?" Harry prompted.
"Yes. Why?" Lisa tried a smile. "Is he usually invisible?"
"You spoke to him? He spoke to you--?"
Martin brought the mugs over on a tray. From the corner of her eye, Lisa saw him mouth at Harry a word: Junkie.
"Yes." A shiver like a tracing of cold light fingertips passed between her shoulder blades. "He seemed shy. Is he dangerous--?"
Martin laid out spoons and paper napkins and a handful of packets. Sugar, Sweet-n-Low. He looked at Harry. Insane junkie.
"Not exactly," Harry said, carefully.
"He's been dead for sixty years," Martin said.
Lisa stared at him, stunned. "He--"
"Oh, well done, Mart."
"Can't you see, Harry? She's having us on."
Lisa's eyes blurred with tears. She tried to push back from the table, but she was dizzy, suddenly, and she knew if she tried to stand her legs wouldn't hold her. Harry caught her hand, there on the cold metal tabletop. He squeezed her fingers.
"Miss--?" He looked at her, patiently, until Lisa looked back at him.
"Who was he?" she asked.
"He fought in the war." Harry's voice was gentle. "He was wounded in the head. My dad and granddad worked the Piccadilly Line; they used to tell us about him. Honorable discharge, came to work as a track walker in the Tube. He liked being in the tunnels. Said he felt safe there. Sweet, kind fella. Good worker. Only that injury to his skull made him pass out sometimes. Go comatose, almost. One night, he must have fallen on the tracks. First train out of Holborn caught him, just west of the station. Twenty-three years old he was, miss. He died."
"He died in nineteen forty-three." Martin sat down, reached for a packet of sugar. He stirred that packet's worth, and two more after it, into his tea. "So, you have a fella?" he asked Lisa.
Lisa started. She frowned at him. "Do I what--?"
Harry looked at Martin incredulously. "First you call her mad, and now you're chatting her up--?"
"I'm asking who might be missing her. And--" He leaned to the side, closer to Harry, farther from Lisa. "-- get past the fact that she is crazy, and she is having us on, she's not bad looking. I mean, look at her. Bit of a clean-up, and she'd be--"
"Martin--"
"I mean, how am I supposed to meet girls-- I mean, anyone--working here? Get a job in the Tube, my mum said. Proper job, proper hours, she said. And here I am stuck in a phantom station with you, you fat bastard, and a toy train on a track going from nowhere to nowhere, and crazy junkies talking to ghosts--"
"Drink your tea, Martin."
Martin sat back and drank his tea. On the wall near the door, the phone rang. Harry answered it.
"The transit police are here, miss," he told Lisa.
He walked her to the surface, moving surprisingly lightly, given his bear-like build, up a long, spiraled flight of stairs lit at intervals along their dingy gold walls by bare bulbs in wire cages. He took her up, not Martin, no doubt wanting to keep his young co-keeper from asking of their guest, the confused young woman who had talked to a ghost, a phone number she couldn't quite remember.
*****
*****
Since Lisa had disappeared, Carter had been phoning contacts, people he knew with eyes on the street. Now Rippner called his own. No one had seen a woman, twenty-eight, one hundred and sixty-seven centimeters tall, slim, American, with auburn hair and gray-blue eyes. He couldn't bring himself to call the hospitals. Or the morgues. Claire did that, while Rippner went back to the video feeds from the Underground. Burton's new contact, the man who might tell them about the treasures hidden in British Museum station, one Simon Dermott, wouldn't see them before noon. It wasn't civilized on a Sunday. "Some people still go to church, Mr. Rippner," Burton said. Rippner didn't reply. Claire watched him until he ate an omelet and a dry piece of toast. From feeding the photo Rippner had taken of the terrified young man on the Soho roof into the company's world-set of passport and police databases, she had expanded her search to include Rosemary Wheeler's potential recent doings. She had yet to conjure up anything on either front.
Finally, his vision blurring from staring at the video feeds, Rippner drank a glass of orange juice and tried to get some sleep. He lay back on the sofa. His eyes ticked nervously behind his closed lids. He could hear Burton, Becker, and Carter talking quietly in the next room.
From the edge of sleep, he felt Claire drape a blanket over his chest and legs. He heard her breathing as she leaned over him, felt the steady lightness of her touch as she tucked the edges around him. Kind, motherly Claire. He dozed off.
Then he dreamed.
*****
In his dream, he was back in the station beneath the bookstore, only now the platform was still in place, and Rippner stepped out of the access tunnel onto it. Awake, he'd been in British Museum station; now, he didn't know where he was. There was a roundel on the wall to his left, but he couldn't bring his eyes to focus on it, couldn't read what it said.
Behind him, a breeze whispered to life. He turned to face it: the air in motion was cold, and it smelled of metal shavings and dust.
And ahead of him on the platform, he saw Lisa, walking away. She was dressed as she'd been for the theatre, in jeans and a gray sweater; her leather bag hung by its strap from her shoulder. She was nearly to the platform's far end. Before her, the tunnel opened into blackness--
"Lisa--"
Rippner's voice made no sound. He walked after her, but the platform lengthened as he did. The faster he walked, the farther away she was. The macadam, the curved tiled wall, stretched away before him. Lisa reached the far end of the platform and climbed down onto the tracks and stepped into the tunnel--
Someone was waiting for her. Compact, slender frame, gray coveralls, short dark hair. He looked from the shadow inside the tunnel's mouth straight back at Rippner--
-- and then Rippner was in the tunnel looking back at himself running now along the platform. Running without drawing nearer. Lisa smiled at him, and he smiled back at her and took her hand, and together they turned and walked away on the tracks leading into darkness, the breeze building to a wind against their faces. Rippner heard a rumbling ahead, crescendoing to a roar. He saw a pinprick glow that grew larger and brighter as he watched. And then he and Lisa were going toward a great and encompassing light--
*****
On the sofa in the Carters' suite, Rippner started and sat up. Adrenaline sent shockwaves through his chest. Thoughts crowded his brain--
British Museum station. The Central Line east of St. Paul's. Lisa wasn't on the surface. She was in the Underground. The bookstore off Holborn. British Museum station. Holborn station--
"Stan?" he said.
Across the way, Burton's head jerked up. He'd fallen into a doze in front of one of the laptops. He blinked, looked Rippner's way. "Yes, Jackson?"
"Are there any other abandoned stations in the vicinity of Holborn?"
"There's Aldwych, to the south. Not quite abandoned, though. Film crews use it for--"
"Can it be reached via the tunnel out of Holborn?"
"Not ordinarily. Not from the main branch. The end of the line is walled off. There's a door through, but it's kept padlocked. Half rusted shut in the bargain. Why do you ask--?"
"I was dreaming. I thought I saw--"
On the coffee table, his phone buzzed. Rippner picked it up. "Yes?"
Jackson--?
Lisa's voice.
Rippner's spine jerked straight. "Lisa--?" He had to speak around his heart caught suddenly in his throat. He never imagined he could feel anything as intensely as the relief he felt at that moment. "Baby, are you okay? Where are you?"
The hospital. St. Thomas's, I think-- Yeah-- -- as a voice in the background, a male voice, provided sounds of confirmation.
I'm okay, Jackson, she said. She sounded a little uncertain, slightly unfocused. But not in pain, and very much alive. I'm alright. Can you come and get me--?
*****