The Einstein Code (16 page)

‘Sounds like you’ve done this before,’ Lou observed.

‘A few times. It is a necessary evil, and again, I apologize.’

They heard Max tap a set of metal keys and the slither of the card through the reader, then came the sound of him tugging on what must have been a large handle followed by the creak of a door
opening away from them. They felt a draught of warmer air hitting them in the face.

Lou was ahead of Kate and behind Fleming. He felt the rope go slack ahead of him, then heard the sound of someone stumbling around.

‘What’s happening?’ he yelled.

‘Lou?’ Kate shouted.

‘Lou? Kate?’ Fleming’s voice boomed around the confined space. ‘Stay still, or we’ll . . .’

Lou spun round and almost lost his balance as he bumped into something or someone. ‘Adam?’

‘Ow!’

‘Kate?’

They both stood still, listening. Nothing.

‘Fleming?’ Lou called. ‘Max?’

No reply.

He tried again, louder. Kate joined in. ‘Adam . . . Max . . .’ then panicking, ‘Shit . . . Shit!’

‘Kate, keep calm. Where are you?’

‘I’m here. Don’t move away.’

Lou followed her voice, shuffling slowly to his left. They bumped together again.

‘OK,’ Lou said. ‘Bend forward. I’ll move my head down – you feel for the blindfold.’

He felt her knock against him and leaned forward.

‘Move your fingers until you find my face.’

Kate touched his shoulder and shifted position, bending down and across. She grabbed the blindfold and lifted it up and over Lou’s head. He then stepped round and did the same for
Kate.

They looked around. They were in a dimly lit corridor with rough stone walls and floor. To their left water ran down the hewn rock in a narrow rivulet. Lou tried to loosen the ropes about his
wrist. After a moment of struggle, he managed it and then untied Kate.

‘Where are the others?’ she said. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Lou could see the fear in his wife’s eyes. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘What now?’ Kate said.

Lou put his fingers to his forehead. ‘God knows. We could be anywhere.’ He pulled out his mobile and glanced at the screen, expecting very little. Kate gave him a questioning look
and tried hers.

‘Absolutely nothing. I reckon I lost the signal before we even entered Metro 2.’

‘Me too.’

‘We could backtrack and try every alternative turning. That way we could maybe get back to the entrance door off the subway passenger tunnel.’

‘Yeah but that doesn’t help us find Adam, or Sergei.’

‘No. We have to move on, keep track of every step, draw some sort of map.’

‘You got a pen? Some paper?’ Lou asked, rifling through his coat and jacket pockets.

Kate produced a couple of pieces of paper, letters she had kept in her bag for days. Lou found a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘OK, which way?’

‘Take your pick. Fifty–fifty chance, I guess.’

They headed off along the corridor. It continued for at least a hundred yards, featureless, curved stone walls to each side, wet with damp. The corridor swung left and they reached a junction.
Kate drew the path they had taken on the back of one of the letters, keeping it small – they had no idea how far they had to go.

‘Right,’ Lou said. ‘The only thing we can do is make random guesses, try a route for maybe ten minutes, see what we find. Then we have to make a decision to either backtrack to
here and set off in the opposite direction, or keep going.’

The next ten minutes offered a succession of bland passageways, each pretty much the same as the other. They made random choices, turning left or right. Twice they came to a junction with three
options and just had to make an unscientific guess. At the end of a long, winding corridor they emerged into a large open space, the floor made of brick. The light was brighter here and they could
see thick metal pipes running along the walls. Two closed doors stood at the far end of the room.

‘Well, this is a good sign,’ Kate said. ‘It certainly beats plain corridors anyway.’

‘The pipes indicate we’re near machinery. They look heavy-duty, maybe the water supply for Sergei’s community?’

‘Possibly,’ Kate agreed. ‘This place Max was talking about. It would need water, electricity, air. There must be a ducting system, from the surface. These services would be
guarded and there must be many independent redundant systems or the whole thing could be easily sabotaged. If Sergei and his people have been down here for the best part of a quarter of a century
they would have built in safeguards and defence systems.’

The pipes disappeared into the far wall between the doors. They paced over. To the left stood a solid-steel fire door. Lou tried the handle. The door was locked. ‘Nope,’ he said.

Kate tested the handle of the other door and eased it towards them. It opened into a low-ceilinged room, racks of shelves just visible. Kate ran her hand along the inside wall and found a
switch, a single low-voltage bulb snapped on and lit up the room to reveal floor-to-ceiling metal shelves to the left and across the far wall. To the right, the pipe from the large room jutted from
the wall close to the ceiling and stretched away, curving under an archway.

They walked across the room ignoring the empty shelves and took a right under the arch and into another anonymous corridor. The pipes ran above head-height along the wall. Kate noted it all
down.

The corridor ended with an archway that led into a vestibule. Directly ahead stood a closed door. It opened inwards to reveal a room lying in darkness. It took a moment to find the light switch,
an old Bakelite affair on the wall. Lou flicked down the round-ended switch and a row of fluorescent tubes began to flicker into life, splashing bursts of garish light into the room and clicking
loudly in the silent confined space.

More metal shelves. These were packed with boxes, papers spilling from them. More papers and files lay stacked next to these boxes. There was a strong smell in the room, the unmistakable odour
of old, damp paper.

‘It would be fascinating to take a look at some of these papers,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe another time.’

‘Where have the pipes gone?’ Lou asked.

Then they saw them disappearing from the room through a rough-hewn hole above an open doorway. They passed through into a passage that sloped steeply downwards, curving to the left. Immediately
around the bend they were brought up sharply. The tunnel opened out onto an abandoned Metro platform.

The place had not been used in decades. The wall opposite the platform was covered with peeling posters, communist propaganda – faded pictures of healthy wholesome-looking children and
happy peasants; images from a place and time that had never really existed. There was a layer of dust underfoot and lines of lichen at the edge of the platform; green tendrils of slime hung from
the ceiling accompanied by an all-pervading stench of damp. The words
Stantsiya Nomer Odin
, written in Cyrillic and Latin script, were just visible on a corroded metal sign.

Kate pointed to two huge openings in the ceiling, one close to either end of the platform, left and right. ‘Must be air vents, do you think?’

‘Yeah. This whole network is amazingly ventilated.’

Kate wandered along the platform, the sound of her boots echoing in the silent cavernous space. Turning on her heel and walking slowly back towards him, she said: ‘When do you think this
was closed down?’

He was standing close to the entrance they had emerged from, gazing at the ruined ceiling and the stained walls.

He shrugged. ‘From the look of these posters’ – he nodded towards the wall – ‘I’d say mid-twentieth century, maybe early sixties.’

‘Certainly smells like it,’ Kate said and stopped abruptly.

‘What?’

Lou strode over.

‘An old emergency equipment post. Could be useful.’

‘Too right it could,’ Lou said, peering through the filthy glass to the inside of the box. Using the sleeve of his coat, he wiped the cover clean. Then, pulling off his boot, he held
the ankle leather and smashed the heel against the glass. It shattered into daggers that scattered across the concrete close to his feet. With gloved hands, he tugged away the remaining shards and
pulled out an axe, a coil of rope and a torch.

‘I don’t imagine for a minute this works,’ he said searching for the ‘on’ switch of the torch. He found a protuberance halfway along the metal tube and a pale light
burst from the end. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed and switched it off. ‘Fantastic!’

‘Look at this.’ Kate was pointing to a torn remnant of a Metro map in a shattered frame pinned to the wall close to the emergency kit box.

‘Not much of it left.’

‘No, but look here.’ She pointed to the lower left corner. ‘It’s the Sokolnicheskaya line; the one we were on with Adam and Max. See? There’s Universitet and
Prospekt Vernadskogo.’ She ran a finger down the paper. ‘The last stop on the line should be Yugo-Zapadnaya, but look, there are three more stations on this old map: Stantsiya Nomer
Odin, Stantsiya Nomer Dva, Stantsiya Nomer Tri: which must mean “Stations One, Two and Three”. This is Station One.’

‘How very Soviet.’

‘Yes, but don’t you see? It implies this is the first of three abandoned stations, the others, Station Two and Station Three must be further into Metro 2.’

‘OK. So we follow the track south-west?’

At the end of the platform they found a set of three concrete steps that led down onto the tracks. The opening to the tunnel stood a few yards away.

‘Feels creepy,’ Kate said.

‘The tracks won’t be live,’ Lou replied, nodding towards the rails. ‘Look how rusted they are for a start. They haven’t been used for years . . .
decades.’

‘Can we make sure?’

Lou searched around the tracks. It was littered with pieces of brick, plaster and metal; a few lengths of wood. Trudging back along the side of the track, he eventually found what he was looking
for, a metal rod about five feet in length and half an inch in diameter. It looked as though it had once been used as a piece of trim or maybe part of a light fixture.

Walking back to Kate, he stood at the very edge of the opening where the tracks lay.

‘What are you going to do?’ Kate looked worried.

‘Watch.’

He laid one end of the rod on the outer rail. ‘If this track was still operational, the middle rail would be live,’ he said. ‘Universal design. If I drop this metal across the
gap between what was the live rail and this outer rail’ – he nodded at the metal strip running left to right close to their feet – ‘it’ll short out – lots of
sparks and fuss.’

‘OK.’

He let go of the metal pole. It fell a couple of feet and landed on the central rail, the other end still lying on the outer rail. Nothing happened.

‘Stone dead,’ Lou said.

‘All right. Makes sense.’

‘Of course it does.’ Lou stepped forward, put his foot on the middle rail and started shaking frantically, emitting a horrible sound.

‘Lou!’

He stopped and grinned. ‘Got ya!’

Kate punched him hard on the shoulder. ‘Don’t ever . . .’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, Lou . . . Not funny.’

‘Shit . . . sorry.’ He shrugged.

They stepped into the space between the outer and middle rail and started to walk towards the black hole of the tunnel entrance. Kate reached into her pocket and pulled out the map she had been
drawing. Lou waited for her to catch up. But then, as she thrust her hand back into her coat pocket to retrieve the pen, the paper flew out of her hand.

‘No!’ she exclaimed. The paper hovered in the air, rose a little. She grabbed for it. Lou did the same. It rose higher. He made another desperate leap for the paper as it caught the
updraught from the air duct directly overhead and disappeared upwards into the shaft.

‘Goddam it!’ Lou yelled.

Kate closed her eyes, her face drained of blood. She let out a sigh. ‘I thought we were getting too many breaks!’

The torch was weak, the beam dispersed and pallid, but it provided just about enough light to see a few yards ahead.

‘It’s weird,’ Kate said. ‘I’m not at all scared thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean, but this bothers me.’

‘It’s because you know that underwater no one can jump out on you.’

‘Oh great! Thanks, Lou.’

He laughed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that!’

‘At least we don’t have any decisions to make. It’s a straight track.’

‘But we could walk right past a door that leads us into the heart of Metro 2.’

‘Yes, but we can’t try every one of them, can we? This track must lead deep into the hidden Metro network. Why else would the stations have been shut down half a century
ago?’

‘Yep, and if it’s any consolation, if the schematic back there is in proportion, I don’t think the distances between Stations One, Two and Three are that great.’

He checked his watch, moving his wrist down to catch the torchlight. ‘It’s past midnight,’ he said and stifled a yawn. ‘Perhaps we ought to get some rest.’

They went to the side of the tunnel. Lou handed Kate the torch and bent down scooping away the track ballast, the sharp stones packed beside the rails. A few inches beneath the surface lay a
tarmac base.

‘You rest first,’ he said, pulling off his overcoat and rolling it up to produce a makeshift pillow. ‘Not quite the Grigovna Zempska I’m afraid.’

‘I’m exhausted,’ Kate said. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Of course. I’ll wake you in two hours.’ He cleared a patch of ballast and leaned back against the side of the tunnel. It was uncomfortable, impossible to find a patch of wall
that wasn’t either pure rock or covered with cabling and pipes. He kept the torch on, figuring there was little point in him being awake and on guard if he could see nothing.

It took only a few moments for Kate to drift off and she started to snore quietly. ‘Must be tired,’ Lou said to himself, his voice swallowed by the still air. He stared around the
barely lit tunnel. Their eyes had adjusted to the low light levels quite quickly but there was a limit to how well the human eye could see in such darkness. It was eerie, there was no denying that,
but just knowing Kate was there beside him was reassuring.