‘Maybe he was paid.’
‘And after all that, Hanna’s just smiles and sunshine. The perfect travelling companion for Julian Orley.’
‘And nobody double-checked?’
‘Norrington’s not just a line manager, Owen. He’s deputy head of security. If somebody like him recommends Hanna, then Hanna flies. Orley must have trusted him – after all he pays him a lot of money for his expertise.’
‘All right, I’ll talk to Shaw. Enough hide-and-seek.’
She hesitated. ‘Are you sure that you can trust her?’
‘Sure enough to take the risk. If the whole thing turns out to be flim-flam, she’ll throw us out on our ear, but we’ll chance it.’
‘Good. I’ll spend some more time going through Norrington’s sock drawers.’
The door to the conference room opened. Norrington hurried over to his office. Shaw, Merrick and the others got ready to go their separate ways.
‘Jennifer.’ Jericho moved to intercept her. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’
She looked at him, her face expressionless.
Peary Base, North Pole, The Moon
In the end DeLucas had given up caring and had marched Lynn up to the top floor by main force, then along to Igloo 2, where she threw her a spacesuit, backpack and helmet, and threatened to beat her up if she didn’t pull herself together. She’d run out of patience, whether or not this was Julian Orley’s beloved daughter. The woman was clearly two sandwiches short of a picnic. Sometimes she seemed to be perfectly lucid, then at the next moment DeLucas wouldn’t have been surprised to see her crawling around on all fours, or stepping gaily into the airlock without putting her helmet on. She turfed the Ögis out of bed, who were mercifully cooperative and quick to understand the situation, but by the time she had got the whole crowd of them into one of the robot buses and over to the landing field, Palmer and his crew had already arrived and begun to search the caves. They turned the laboratories upside down as though carrying out a drugs raid, tore the mattresses from the bunks in all the bedrooms, looked into all the lockers and behind the wall panels, in the aquaria and the vegetable patches. Finally DeLucas, already in her spacesuit, her helmet under her arm, went into the Great Hall to join them. She hadn’t the first idea what a mini-nuke looked like. All she knew was that it was small, and could be anywhere.
Where would she hide something like that? In the jungle of the greenhouses? In among the trout and the salmon?
In the ceiling?
She looked up at the Great Hall’s basalt dome. She felt a feverish desire to get out of there, to go with the guests. What they were doing here was crazy! The fact that Hanna had showed up in the control room didn’t remotely mean that the bomb had to be here in the underground. It could be anywhere in the whole vast complex.
She peered indecisively into the corridors.
What would make sense?
What did people do when nuclear attack threatened? They built bunkers, underground bases for protection. That was because an atom bomb exploding up on the surface would destroy everything for miles around, but there was some chance of survival if you were in a reinforced bunker. Did that mean that the underground would survive at Peary Base?
Hardly.
She looked at her watch. Twenty to five.
Think, Minnie! An atom bomb was an inferno, devouring everything in its path, but even a doomsday device could be deployed more or less optimally. Towns and cities were built on the surface, never mind all the tunnels, cellars and sewers below ground. If you wanted to destroy New York with an atom bomb, your best bet was to drop it from above, but life on the Moon demanded a mole’s-eye perspective once you’d lived there for a few months. If you wanted to destroy the base, really destroy it, it had to be done from inside. The bomb would have to tear apart the bowels of the plateau, and only then blaze up over the crater.
It had to be down in the catacombs. Between the aquaria, the greenhouses, the residential quarters and the laboratories.
She glanced across at the airlock.
Hmm. She didn’t need to search beyond the airlock. There was nothing there.
Wrong! That was where the unused part of the labyrinth began, and some of the passages led into the canyon.
How had Hanna even managed to get into the igloo? Through the surface-level airlocks? It was possible. But if he had, wouldn’t Wachowski have seen him on the screens? Well, maybe he had. Maybe Hanna had just strolled in, all above board and official, but if so, why hadn’t he gone from the ground floor to the control room on foot? It was only a couple of metres. Why had he taken the lift?
Because he had come from underground.
‘Nothing here,’ said a tense voice over her helmet link.
‘Here neither,’ Palmer answered.
And how had he got into the catacombs unnoticed?
She walked towards the airlock. Hardly anybody ever went into the caves beyond. From here, the labyrinth burrowed endlessly into the massif and the crater wall beyond. It would have taken a whole army of astronauts weeks or months to search the labyrinth’s full extent, but DeLucas knew that the only logical place to look for the bomb was nearby, somewhere central, below the habs, and that meant the Great Hall and its immediate surroundings.
She went into the airlock, put on her helmet and pushed the button that would pump the air out. When the airlock door on the further side opened, she switched on her helmet lamp and stepped out into the forgotten corridor beyond.
Almost immediately, she stumbled across Tommy Wachowski’s corpse.
‘Tommy,’ she gasped. ‘Oh my God!’
Her knees trembling, she squatted down and played the cone of light over the body. His limbs were twisted as he lay there, his face deformed.
‘Leland!’ she called out. ‘Leland, Tommy’s here, and—’
Then she realised that the interior radio network didn’t work this side of the bulkheads. She was in no man’s land, cut off from the world.
She felt sick.
Gasping, she fell to all fours. Cold sweat broke out all over her body. It was only by a mighty effort of will that she succeeded in not throwing up inside her helmet. She crawled away from the dead man on all fours like an animal, into the corridor, where she closed her eyes and quickly took in a few deep breaths. Once she dared open her eyes again, she saw a shadow in the light from her helmet. It was just a few paces away.
For a second, her heart skipped a beat.
Then she realised that there was nobody standing there, that this was just a narrow gap in the cave wall. She squinted, her eyes still watering from retching, then pulled herself together and stamped on her fear. She climbed to her feet like a puppet, walked across to the gap and looked inside. She saw that it was more like a crack than a corridor. Not very inviting. Nowhere you would choose to go of your own accord.
And that, she thought, is exactly why you’ll go in.
She drew in her shoulders and pushed her way in until the roof dipped sharply down and she had to crawl. Her breath caught and choked in her throat as the fear fought back. Then there wasn’t even room to crawl. She had to lie flat on her belly, feeling her heart hammering against the rock below her like a jackhammer. She considered turning back. This was going nowhere. Dead end. She would go one more metre. Gasping, she pushed herself on, following the scurrying disc of light, imagining what it would be like to be buried alive here, and then all of a sudden the passage opened wide and her fingers were scrabbling in a heap of rubble.