The Lazarus Vault Part 20

Perhaps there's a reason they're called trap doors.

Painfully conscious of time, she got up. She'd seen two tall iron candlesticks lurking in the corners of the vault: she fetched one, dragging it over the stone floor, and wedged it across the mouth of the hole. She remembered the head-torch and turned it on. The white beam searched the pit.

Was it all for this?

In spite of her terror, she found herself strangely disappointed. There was nothing that she had imagined: no treasures like the ones in the antechamber; no ancient books of magic or wisdom; no h.o.a.rd of gold. It looked more like what you'd leave behind after cleaning out an attic. A battered leather tube that might have held a telescope, and a square cardboard box sitting on a low plinth.

She dropped down to the pit floor. The tube was lighter than she'd expected. She shook it gently, but nothing moved inside. Was it empty? She put it in her backpack.

She put her hands on the box. It was cold to the touch, even through the cardboard. She could tell it would be heavy. She edged her fingertips underneath it and lifted it off its pedestal.

She'd never know what she'd done wrong only that, for all her precautions and preparations, somewhere, somehow, she'd missed something. The trap doors sprang together: if not for the candlestick wedging them apart, their sharp teeth would have bitten Ellie in two. The iron s.h.i.+vered; for a terrifying moment she thought the candlestick might snap. A second later the lights went out.

Barely aware of what she was doing, Ellie shoved the box into her backpack and threw it out of the pit. She hauled herself out, slung the backpack over her shoulder and ran for the door. Behind her, the chamber echoed with a noise like a gunshot as the candlestick holding the trap doors fell loose.

She reached the end of the aisle and stopped dead. The torch played over the door, casting a ghostly orb on the ironbound wood. It must have closed automatically.

She was trapped.

'Knock the f.u.c.king door down if you have to.'

Destrier gunned the car down Cable Street. Ahead, he could see the crenellated outlines of the Tower of London and the real towers of London, the towers of banking and finance, rising beyond.

'I've been trying to reach him all night and he's not answering his phone,' he told the Claridge's concierge. 'I'm worried there might be an emergency.'

There's an emergency all right, he thought grimly. The latest update had come a minute earlier 01:44 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 32 : THEFT ALARM.

He still couldn't believe she'd got that far. With any luck, the trap doors would have ripped her in two by now. If not, he'd do it himself.

The phone rang again. A foreign number, not Claridge's, and an accented voice.

'Mr Saint-Lazare wants to know what is happening at the bank.'

This side of the door had neither handle nor keyhole. Ellie scanned the walls for anything that might open it, a monster's head like the one in the chamber or a thin slit for a card. There was nothing.

Panic rose in her throat. She kicked the door; she hammered her fists against it until her skin was raw. It didn't move. She cursed herself for being there, for listening to Harry. She cursed Blanchard, her father Nye Stanton died trying to break into the vaults. He was. .h.i.t by a train in an Underground tunnel.

There must be a way out.

Not that it did Dad any good.

She stepped back from the door and took a series of long breaths, forcing herself calm. She didn't know what commotion the alarm might have unleashed in the rest of the bank, but the underground chamber was silent as the grave. She looked at the row of vaults in the wall, the iron doors where monks' bones had been dragged from their rest to make way for worldly treasures. She imagined the rattling of the bones as they tumbled out of the alcoves to be hauled away in sacks. The screams of their ghosts. She listened to the darkness.

The grave wasn't silent. The air throbbed; a low rumble pulsed through the chamber. At first she thought it was only the blood in her ears, but the longer she listened the more distinct it became.

She looked at her watch. The first Tube wouldn't pa.s.s for hours yet. And it didn't sound like the train that had shaken the vault when she was down with Blanchard. It was less intense, more constant.

As Mr Saint-Lazare likes to say, the present always intrudes on the past. And vice versa.

It was hard to pinpoint the sound: the whole vault was an echo chamber, and that far underground she'd lost all sense of direction. But if the crypt was built to the plan of a church, then the far end, where the Saint-Lazare vault lay, must be east. The door would be west, and the right side of the aisle looking towards the door would be north.

Ellie was pretty sure the Central Line ran to the north of the Monsalvat building.

She ran to the crossing where the four arms of the church came together and listened, turning slowly, testing. The noise was definitely loudest from the north transept. She walked along it to the far end. There were three vaults here, each with a coat of arms painted on its door and a steel keypad embedded in the wall beside it.

Choosing at random, she examined the crest on the centre vault. A blue s.h.i.+eld divided by a wavy line, with silver crosses above and below.

Azure a fess engrailed Or between four crosslets Argent.

She consulted her paper again, matching the colours with their numbers, then punched them into the keypad. A bolt clicked; the door loosed. Ellie pulled it open and shone the torch inside. She saw a narrow room about six feet deep, ironbound boxes piled on the floor. The throbbing noise was louder in here but the walls remained strong, unyielding.

She tried the door to the right. Ermine two chevrons Argent. The code didn't work the first time: you needed to count the two chevrons separately, she realised. She tried again, and this time the door opened to her tug.

She knew at once it was the right room. The noise was louder, carrying through the bricked-up hole in the rear wall. A skein of red light played over it from a sensor screwed to the ceiling. An alarm, she thought. But she wasn't worried about alarms now. She wondered if her father had got this far, if it was he who'd smashed the original hole.

She found the pair of the candlestick she'd used in the trap doors and used it as a battering ram, swinging it against the wall until her arms ached. The bricks were strong, but not impenetrable and she was desperate. Whoever had sealed the hole had obviously trusted more to the alarm than the barrier or perhaps they'd meant it as a trap, another snare to tempt the unwary. The wall cracked; the bricks crumbled. A dark tunnel loomed beyond. She squeezed through, crawling on her stomach and pus.h.i.+ng the bag in front of her.

After a few metres, the pa.s.sage ended in a slitted grille, alternating bars of greater and lesser darkness. Ellie wriggled herself around and kicked at it until it came loose. She pushed off, slithered through the mouth of the hole and landed on her feet.

She looked around. By the light of her head-torch, she could see twin rails curving into the darkness, with a third rail gleaming silver between them. She stepped back, pressing herself against the wall. Somewhere nearby, the throb of a jackhammer filled the tunnel.

The tracks hissed and began to glow. A white light appeared from around the bend, bearing down on her.

By the time Destrier reached the bank, he was as close to panic as he'd ever been in his life. He left his car in the alley, behind the two Range Rovers that had already arrived, and went straight to the fifth floor. He'd no sooner reached his office than he had the Claridge's concierge on the line, wringing his hands down the phone as he described finding Mr Blanchard pa.s.sed out on his bed. 'He is breathing normally,' he a.s.sured Destrier. 'We have summoned the doctor as a precaution and he will be here very soon.'

'Any signs of violence? A burglary?'

The concierge sounded shocked. 'Of course not.'

Destrier rang off and despatched two of his men to Claridge's to get a better picture. 'If he can open his eyes, bring him here at once.'

He was about to check the security log, when the phone rang again. He almost ignored it, but the sixth sense that had kept him ahead of trouble so long warned him to check the number. The moment he saw it, he knew it couldn't wait.

A mechanical voice, inhuman. 'Do you know who this is?'

Destrier swallowed. 'Yes.'

'Tell me what has happened.'

Destrier told him as much as he had guessed. 'I can't be sure until we speak to Blanchard. And get hold of Ellie Stanton.'

At the other end of the line, there was a sucking sound like a valve opening and closing. 'There are only two keys to that vault, and one of them is around my neck. Presumably the other is in Miss Stanton's hands. Inside the vault.'

'Can you ?'

'I will be on my plane within half an hour. Stay there.'

Even deadened by the electronics, the threat in his words was evident. Destrier felt a sudden, urgent need to justify himself.

'If Blanchard hadn't '

'Blanchard knew what he was doing. You were supposed to protect us.'

The line went dead. Destrier was still staring at the phone when one of his men walked in.

'We can't get into the vault until the old man gets here,' Destrier told him.

'Don't we have a plan for if someone gets in?'

'The plan is anyone who actually reaches the sixth floor doesn't make it past the f.u.c.king b.o.o.by prize. There isn't a plan for this.'

'At least she won't be going anywhere.'

Destrier turned back to his computer and opened the security log. In the monitor's pale glow, his face was blue as a corpse.

'Oh my Christ.'

02:01 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 26 : OPENED.

02:02 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 27 : OPENED.

02:04 >> FLOOR 6 : VAULT 27 : INTRUSION DETECTED.

'Another intrusion?'

'It isn't an intrusion, you stupid f.u.c.k. She's broken out.'

Steel hissed on steel. The white light brightened, rus.h.i.+ng forward along the tangle of dust and cables that ribbed the tunnel walls. Ellie knew she should move, but there was nowhere to go. The shaft she'd crawled out of was too high to get back in; the deep tunnel too narrow to get out of the way. She stood on the track and let the light blind her with its brilliance. It seemed to be taking a long time. Was this the last thing her father had seen?

She closed her eyes. The light drummed through her eyelids. She heard a screech and the heavy protest of metal the driver must have seen her, but she knew it would be too late.

The noise faded away, echoing down the tunnel. Was this what dying was like? She hadn't felt the impact but then, she supposed at that speed she wouldn't.

She opened her eyes and winced. A few metres away, an angelic radiance shone straight at her face. Was this her judgement? What should she say?

A shadow moved in front of the light, blocking it out.

'What the h.e.l.l are you doing? You almost got yourself killed.'

Ellie s.h.i.+elded her eyes with her hand. A black man in yellow overalls and a white helmet was standing in front of a flat-bedded dolly. He sounded angry, though there was a softness in his voice that evoked warm places far away. He looked her up and down.

'Where's your vest and helmet?'

'I '

'b.l.o.o.d.y contract staff.' He turned away. 'You can explain this to the Bank manager.'

The Bank manager was a grizzled man with a sharp face and a badly fitted suit. Ellie had prepared a story while she waited outside his office, but he wasn't interested. He just pointed to a shelf above his head, sagging under a collection of vinyl-bound booklets.

'Do you know what that is?'

She shook her head.

'That's the contract for this job. It tells me everything: how long the screws have to be, how many rats I have to kill, how many sheets of bog roll I'm allowed to wipe my a.r.s.e.'

He pressed his fingertips together and stared at her.

'It also tells me how many staff members I'm supposed to get killed. You want to guess how many?'

Ellie stayed silent.

'Goose-egg. Zero.' He sipped a plastic mug of coffee. 'You got lost and almost ran into a train. That's a safety incident, and the contract says we can't have those. They want me to report it but if I do, that's three days I'll spend up to my t.i.ts in paperwork. We'll get behind on the job except the contract says we can't do that either. So I'll spend another three days writing a report to explain why that's happened. Then we'll be a week behind. The contract says we have to pay compensation if we get a week behind. I'll get a b.o.l.l.o.c.king from my boss, and I'll have to write another report. Two million commuters will be cursing my name, and all because some silly cow took a wrong turn down a tunnel. You read me?'

She did.

'What's your name?'

Ellie was too tired to invent something. She stared at the map on the wall behind him.

'Hainault.'

'Hah. Born to do this job, were you?' He didn't want an answer. 'What did they hire you for?'

'Cleaning.'

'It's always the b.l.o.o.d.y cleaners,' he observed, to no one in particular.

Above ground, a new day would be beginning. All the chorus of Ellie's old life would be there the streetsweeper on the corner of Gresham Street, the delivery driver, the newsagent lifting the shutter on his shop but they would find other people to wave to, honk at, ignore. The old day hadn't finished for Ellie: she was trapped in the night that would never end. She wandered through the darkness with the cleaning crew and the rats, sc.r.a.ping away the human residues that accreted on the station walls, fluff and hair, cloth and paper. It felt like stripping a corpse.

Her s.h.i.+ft ended at five. She took off the overalls and took her bag from the locker they'd given her. A foreman led the crew up the silent escalators to the gates, but Ellie hung back. She'd spent all night in the tunnels, and ended up no more than a few hundred yards away from Monsalvat. They must have worked out how she'd escaped by now surely they'd check the Central Line stations when they opened.

She waited until the others had left, then summoned her courage and stuck her head around the Bank manager's door.

'How do I get home?'

For a moment she thought he'd bite her head off. But something in her face, desperation or exhaustion, seemed to spark a rare flash of pity in him.

'Where do you need to go?'

As far away as she could the end of the world if possible. She looked at the map on the wall again.

'Ealing.'

'There's a ballast train coming through in five minutes. It can take you as far as Acton.' He scowled, though she thought he meant it kindly. 'Otherwise, you'll probably try and walk it and I'll end up with another incident on my hands.'

Ellie rode with the ballast to West Acton. In the cold predawn mist, she found a payphone on the platform and dialled the number she'd been given. Harry answered at once.