‘Oh, it has. There’s a team of experts here, combing the tunnels in radiation suits, trying to track down the source of it. A full investigation. But it’s all hush-hush. Kept under wraps for reasons of “national security”.’ The sarcasm with which he imbued the words national security was not lost on Brodie.
And Brodie said, ‘National security being another way of saying political convenience.’
Jackson sighed heavily. ‘I don’t want to get into the politics of it, Mr Brodie. But, well, call me a cynic. I figure that the whole fiasco will be cloaked in national security at least until after the election.’
Brodie said, ‘How bad is it down there?’
‘It’s bad. A large section of the tunnel network has been sealed off to try to contain it.’ He buried his face in his hands as if he could hide behind them. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, his voice muffled by them. And when he took them away again, Brodie saw tears in his green eyes. ‘It’s starting to leak out into the environment. This whole area shows readings way above safe levels.’
Brodie immediately thought of Addie and Cameron and felt sick. His investigation had turned into the worst kind of nightmare. Like a dream that haunts you during dark, troubled nights, then lingers long after the sun has risen. ‘How was Younger going to prove all this?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know how he managed it,’ Jackson said, ‘but he’d got hold of a copy of the disappeared report. Signed off by Mack herself. And he wanted to take readings. God help me, but he persuaded me to let him down into the tunnels. I told him radiation levels were probably fatal, but he was determined to go down anyway. He said he wouldn’t be exposed for long. He needed the proof.’
And suddenly it dawned on Brodie what Younger was doing on Binnein Mòr. He remembered the radiation sensor just a little further along the ridge from Addie’s weather station. Younger had wanted to take a reading from it. Crossing every ‘t’ of his story. And if he had been fatally exposed to high levels of radiation himself, that would explain why he didn’t want to waste half a day or more taking the long way up to the summit. Every minute counted.
‘His piece in the paper and on the internet, Mr Brodie, was going to blow this government clean out of the water.’
The words had barely left Jackson’s mouth when Brodie saw his head almost dissolve in an explosion of blood and bone and brain matter, throwing his body back against the far wall. The roar of gunfire in the confined space was enough to burst eardrums, and Brodie could hear only a loud, insistent ringing in his ears as he saw Jackson slide down the wall, leaving a bloody trail on the concrete. He turned as a shadow loomed in the doorway and caught only the briefest glimpse of a ski mask. Pain and light filled his head, then, consciousness sucked like matter into a black hole, and nothing remained but darkness.
The first thing he became aware of was a sensation of slowly sinking. Then came the return of pain filling his head, and when finally he opened his eyes, it was to be blinded by light. He could not immediately identify the source of the light. It seemed hidden by the square of ceiling above his head, and leaked out on all four sides. He was lying on a rubberised floor, half propped up against a stainless steel wall. He seemed surrounded, in fact, by reflective stainless steel. On the wall opposite, at roughly chest height, two illuminated buttons were mounted on a steel panel. The numeral ‘one’ above the numeral ‘zero’. A ring of green light surrounded the ‘zero’ button.
Through the cloud of confusion that accompanied the pain in his head, it very slowly dawned on him that he was in the escape elevator, descending into the storage tunnels from the pillbox where he had met with Jackson. The sinking sensation was the slow downward motion of the lift. And all he could hear above the ringing in his ears was Jackson’s voice saying I told him radiation levels were probably fatal.
Slowly, he got first to his knees, and then, with an effort, to his feet. He leaned a hand against one of the elevator walls to support himself. Lead-lined, Jackson had told him. The lift shaft was lead-lined. So for the moment he was protected from the radiation below. He staggered to the illuminated buttons on the far wall and jabbed his thumb at the ‘one’ button. The elevator continued on its slow but relentless descent. He jabbed it again, several times. Then, just for good measure, tried the ‘zero’ button. Neither had any effect. Panic started rising in his chest, and he pressed himself against the back wall, willing the elevator to stop. And still it persisted in its unrelenting downward passage. He closed his eyes. The doctor had given him six to nine months, which had seemed like nothing at all. And now they seemed like an eternity, and felt like life itself. Precious.
He could hear his own breathing in the confined space. Almost imagined he could hear the rapid beat of his heart, but really it was just the pulsing of it in his neck.
And when the lift came to a softly juddering halt, he held his breath, aware of the silence. It felt as though an eternity passed before a deep clunk preceded the opening of the doors.
He was not sure what he had expected. But death did not rush in to greet him. At least, not that he could see. Just warmth and light. Beyond the doors a cavernous cathedral rough-hewn out of the bedrock opened up before him, walls lined with pipes and trunking. It was well lit, bright lights reflecting off a polished concrete floor. The air was suffused with a soft electric hum, the source of which was not immediately apparent.
Brodie stood without moving for several minutes, imagining that his invisible enemy was killing him, even as he breathed it in, even as it was absorbed by his skin, and entered his body through every cut and graze. And yet he felt nothing. Smelled nothing but the acrid dust of drilled rock. And he wondered if the odd inflammation that Sita had found in Younger’s lungs, and the sloughing of mucus in his intestine, was the result of radiation sickness. The samples she took would have revealed the truth back in the lab, but he figured they were gone now, along with the pathologist herself.
An unexpected calm descended on him. He was going to die anyway. And maybe those precious months would only have been an endless cycle of chemo and radiotherapy. A living nightmare. Better, perhaps, to die sooner. But not before he got out of here to settle the score. To get his daughter and grandson as far away from this place as possible. To bring the people responsible to book. To drop them to their fucking knees.
He pushed away from the back wall of the elevator and stepped out into the vast arc of this underground cathedral.
The main entrance into it was closed off by a large black door, perhaps five metres square, delineated by red light strips that cast a faint pink glow around the whole cavernous space. Brodie’s footsteps echoed in the softly humming silence as he walked across the floor to examine it. There seemed no way of opening it from the inside, and he thought that the door itself was probably made of lead, immovable by anything other than some very heavy industrial mechanism. Huge tunnels fed away from the main space like spokes in a wheel and disappeared into darkness. A number of them were sealed. Rubber tyre tracks on the floor led off into others.
Brodie fumbled in his pocket for Younger’s Geiger counter. He found a switch on the side of it and turned it on. The grey screen flickered to life, and immediately the device began to issue a piercingly high rate of audible clicks that fired through him like the pellets of a shotgun. Brodie had no idea exactly what level of radiation was being registered, but he had sat through enough movies to know that this sound was not good. The reading on the screen meant little to him either, and he quickly turned it off. The relief from the crackling was instant. Better not to know, he thought, and pushed it back into his pocket.