25
“Gone,” repeated Lucas insistently. “Guard in a heap on the floor, and he’s gone.”
It felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had just been chucked over me. I shoved back the sheets, grabbed the nonLee and swung my legs out of the bed. Bane snatched his holstered nonLee, then dived for my bedside table, where Eduardo had installed an extra phone after the assassination attempts, swiping the handset out of the cradle, tracing his way to the red hash button and pressing it.
Then he scrambled off the bed after me and began to hustle me across the room. “Into the bathroom, until the guards arrive, quickly.”
Lucas clearly approved of this plan, since he held the bathroom door open, followed us in and bolted it behind him. Only then did I notice the knife in his hand. Two nonLees and one knife. Theoretically ought to be enough, but let’s hope the guards got here quickly. Having a key in the possession of our door guard was deemed a greater security risk than not having one, so they’d have to wait for the Officer of the Watch or kick the door down.
“Is the guard okay?” I asked.
“Unconscious.” Lucas’s eyes stayed on the bathroom door. No windows, hence Bane’s choice. “Not bad, I think.”
“How the heck did he get loose?” hissed Bane. I took his free hand and pressed it tightly, seeing his terror. I—and Father Mark—were in terrible danger.
“Smarmy slug helped him,” said Lucas. “Simple, with help; without, no.”
Better if Lucas had raised the alarm at once, instead of rushing straight to me…well, maybe. If Father Mark had turned up here while we were asleep…
The sound of a key in the front door, the soft padding of quite a few feet. A very anxious voice calling, “Mrs. Verrall? Mr. Verrall!”
Not Father Mark’s voice. Or the smarmy slug’s.
“We’re in the bathroom,” I called, drawing back the bolt.
The door opened a moment later, and a Swiss Guard officer stared down the barrels of two nonLees and very happy he looked about it. “Mrs. Verrall! You’re all right!”
The guard who’d been outside when we went to bed peered anxiously past his superior. Saw Lucas and demanded, “How the heck did he get in here?”
“How did you?” I asked Lucas.
“Window.”
“Oh.”
The officer looked horrified. “Is the apartment insecure?”
“Not especially,” said Lucas.
“His other name’s Houdini, remember?” said Bane, very fast. “But Father Mark’s loose; worry about that!”
The guards paled. The officer began to give orders, and soon I was literally completely surrounded. A few more moments and a dressing-gown-clad Eduardo shoved his way into the tiny room. So he did sleep!
“What’s going on?” He raised his wristCell to his ear, listened for a few moments. “Caramba! He’s gone, it’s confirmed.”
“Is the guard all right?” I asked urgently.
“Choked senseless, but he’s come around, seems to be no permanent damage.” Almost unconsciously he turned to Lucas and demanded, “How?”
Most people would’ve recoiled and said, “How should I know?” but Lucas just looked thoughtful. “Simple. Doctor Reynar did some new programming. Then loosened one of the wrist straps—couldn’t undo, no keys for the cuff, but could loosen straps, like when they turn him. Made it long enough to get around guard’s neck. Middle of night, programming kicks in, Father Mark pretends some distress, guard rushes in…” He shrugged eloquently.
Father Mark’s guards had carried the cuff keys in case of emergency. Hadn’t occurred to anyone that someone might help him.
“Caramba!” muttered Eduardo. “Simple.” Then he frowned at Lucas. “You went up there?”
Oops, we were caught. “I’m sorry, I put him up to it,” I said quickly. “I just wanted to know if Father Mark was all right.”
“How did you plan to get past the guard?”
“Didn’t,” said Lucas. “Climbed up to window.”
“Ah.”
My stomach turned over. What a climb! Lucas clearly didn’t think anything of it, but I must be more careful. The things that man would do to please me.
“If he’s loose,” said Bane tensely, “and not in control of himself, then where the heck is he?”
Why isn’t Father Mark here yet, in other words.
“We’re checking all the cameras,” said Eduardo. “If he’s on the move, we’ll find him. That guard wasn’t unconscious for long.”
Another cold shudder ran down my spine. If Lucas had been a moment sooner…
“Sir!” Unicorn pushed his way into the room and handed Eduardo a networkAccessor. “Here, tunnel four. Camera feed from the last few minutes…look.”
Lucas and I craned over Eduardo’s shoulder as he ran the video. A dark figure slipped along a passage, found a spot on a large portrait, swung the portrait out, revealing a doorway in the wall. Scrambled up and through. The portrait swung back into place.
“He’s leaving the state?”
My astonishment was echoed on Eduardo’s face. “Jack, send a team down to tunnel four. To advance with extreme caution: check he’s really gone. Someone go over the footage between that moment and now and someone else keep their eyes glued on that portrait, in case he comes back. Off the top of my head, that was the only tunnel I’d given Father Mark the location of, so he can’t just slip back in along another one.”
“But he’s left?” I said again. “Are we sure he’s really programmed? Could he just be…trying to get away from me?”
“He had help to escape,” said Bane.
“Smarmy slug,” said Lucas emphatically. No, I didn’t trust the smarmy slug either. He’d done something.
“I think it’s time we had a little chat with Doctor Smarmy. I’m off to his room.” Eduardo stopped and shot me a conflicted look.
“We’re coming!” I said fiercely. “I want to know what he’s done to Father Mark!”
Eduardo pursed his lips for a moment, clearly concluded that at least it would keep me under his eye, nodded and led on.
By the time we reached Doctor Reynar’s room, Snail and Bee—no doubt called suddenly back onto duty—had appeared, with Jon following behind, all looking as though they’d pulled their clothes on in about thirty seconds flat.
Doctor Smarmy answered his door in his pajamas, though, putting on a good show of innocent bafflement. I’d half expected him to be gone too.
“Oh, be quiet,” Eduardo cut him off. “We know perfectly well that you loosened at least one of Father Mark’s restraining straps before you left the hospital last night.”
“What if I did?” said Doctor Reynar unexpectedly, with an unconcerned shrug.
“That piece of paper we gave you only covered past crimes,” said Eduardo grimly. “So if you did, you are looking at a lengthy prison sentence.”
Doctor Reynar laughed. “What, all two days of it?”
Yet another chill ran down my spine. He was so confident we were going to lose.
“A lot longer if we win,” said Eduardo calmly. “And a lot of polls seem to be in our favor, so I think your confidence is misplaced.”
Lucas was staring hard at the pompous doctor. He hadn’t liked the ‘two days’ crack either. Bane clasped my hand tighter, his nonLee safely holstered again.
“That’s true, I suppose.” Doctor Reynar didn’t sound as though he thought it was true. Didn’t sound worried at all.
Lucas began to hustle me towards the room’s balcony doors.
“Lucas…”
Hey!” protested Bane.
“You look pale, Margaret, you need some air.”
“I’m fine!”
“Better out here.”
I almost protested again, but bit my tongue suddenly. I wasn’t pale, I didn’t need air…and Lucas knew that.
Eduardo, with a glance to check that Unicorn was following me, continued his interrogation of the smug prisoner, as Lucas opened the doors and walked me out; stood me in a corner of the dark balcony. “Take a few deep breaths and you’ll feel better,” he said almost absent-mindedly and hurried back into the room, where Bane’s efforts to follow me had shifted the group most of the way to the doors. Unicorn shook his head to himself, clearly chalking this strange behavior up to over-protectiveness.
“Why don’t you tell Eduardo what he wants to know?” Lucas cut in harshly. My eyes flew to his hands—empty, thank God; the knife was in his pocket.
Doctor Reynar laughed in his face. “You lot are pathetic. You can’t make me tell you anything. Two days, and you’re all dead, and I’m a rich man.”
Lucas sprang, bearing the man straight through the doors and clean over the balcony rail. I leapt forward and grabbed Lucas’s belt to add my weight to his, because although he had a good two-handed grip on Doctor Reynar’s collar, Doctor Reynar clearly weighed quite a bit more than him, and Lucas’s knees braced under the stone balustrade were the only thing stopping him going over as well.
An eruption of oaths from the room behind us, barely audible over the doctor’s screaming: “You can’t do this! You can’t do this! You people don’t do this sort of thing!”
“Madman, remember?” panted Lucas.
“Help me!” shrieked the doctor, presumably to Eduardo and the others.
“What can they do? If they come near me, I’ll just let you go. So start talking. Something seems to have happened to my muscles in your masters’ tender care and I can’t hold you for long,” Lucas said.
“You’re bluffing.”
“How many stories up are we, Margaret?”
“Uh…six.”
“My grip is going, Doctor. You have about thirty seconds.”
Long moments of terrified gasping. Lucas wasn’t bluffing about not being able to hold on much longer. His face was tight with strain. Craning around him, I saw Doctor Reynar’s collar slip a little in his grip…
“The Chairman! He tries to assassinate the chairman, we win the vote!”
The blood drained from my face and I clung tighter to Lucas’s belt.
“Keep talking,” snapped Lucas.
“The pre-vote speech tomorrow evening in Brussels. Chairman walks past, Mark Tarrow drops from a first floor window and tries to kill him. Father Mark Tarrow. Live on TV. Bodyguards know which window, so he won’t succeed.”
Lucas’s fingers were white, every tendon standing out. The collar was slipping again… “Which window?”
“Hotel Champagne, room one-oh-eight, I swear, I swear, please, please don’t drop me, I was just following orders. You must understand that: following orders?”
“Wrong answer,” snarled Lucas—and let go.
The guards lurched forwards in dismay, but Unicorn and Eduardo didn’t move—they’d figured it out. The wail was almost instantly cut off by a thud, followed by a rising torrent of relieved sobbing, increasingly—and reassuringly—interspersed with a lot of swearwords. He’d figured out he’d been had, and he wouldn’t be swearing if he’d not told the truth.
Eduardo and Unicorn joined us, and we all peered over the balustrade, but it was too dark to see the next balcony down, the ornate curved front of which protruded further than the one on which we stood.
“You didn’t have to drop him, Lucas,” I said, being a dutiful Godmother.
“Did. Couldn’t pull him up again. Couldn’t hold on. Do him good.”
I hid a smile.
“Some of you get down there and secure the pompous toad,” said Eduardo, rather unprofessionally.
Several guards bounded off, and Eduardo shepherded me back inside, seeming distracted. I was rather distracted myself. Assassinate the chairman! Heaven help us, the toad was right, even an attempt by one of our people would lose us the vote. The vote was the day after tomorrow—no, tomorrow, now. No time to try and explain anything. As for that…we’d not told anyone about Father Mark’s programming. To try to explain now…even the only mildly suspicious would be skeptical.
“Mr. Everington,” Eduardo was saying sternly, “that is not how we get information from people in this State.”
“Do you get much information?”
Eduardo’s lip twisted rather cynically. I’d a feeling Eduardo actually got a lot of information from people, simply by listening to what they thought they weren’t telling him, but it wasn’t very quick. “I mean it, Mr. Everington. If you ever do anything like this again, I shall have to do more than smack your wrist.”
Lucas listened solemnly—held out his arm. Literal. Bane was right.
Eduardo looked startled, but obliged with a not-entirely-nominal smack. Miffed he’d had to stand by and let that happen, even if his more pragmatic side had stopped him intervening once the guy was hanging there. “Don’t do it again.”
“If you don’t stop him, there won’t be any again.”
Eduardo pulled a full grimace this time, then looked around as the guards frog-marched Doctor Reynar back into the room. “Ah, Doctor,” he said icily. “Feel like expanding on what you told us a moment ago?”
Doctor Reynar clamped his lips together and glowered. We weren’t getting any more out of him. We didn’t really need to. He’d spilled the beans, and he knew it.
“All right, take him to the cells. He’s unhurt, is he?”
“I imagine he has a few bruises; he seems to be walking okay.”
“Take him away, then. Make sure a doctor sees him—but in the cell.”
“Sir.”
Doctor Reynar was hustled out as Eduardo turned to Unicorn. “Keep the security high on the Verralls’ apartment, not that I think Father Mark’s coming back, and get a team ready to go after Father Mark. Briefing in fifteen minutes, followed by immediate departure.”
He strode out of the room, and Bane drew me after him. “Come on. We have to leave this to the experts. Where’s the door? You need some more sleep—lots of blogging tomorrow.”
“I’ve written everything already.” But I steered him towards the doorway, Lucas trailing behind like a grim-faced ghost and Unicorn going ahead like a suspicious guard dog, Snail and Bee and several other guards tagging along as well.
“Whoa,” said Unicorn suddenly, holding up a hand to halt us. “Sir? What is it?”
Eduardo was standing in the passage, speaking urgently into his wristCell: “Main gate, please respond.” He waited only a moment before snapping, “All wall posts, call in now.”
More silence.
The guards suddenly closed in around me, drawing their nonLees. Bane put an uncertain hand on his.
“All guard posts,” said Eduardo into the wristCell, “repeat, all guard posts, we have a situ—”
Something small and circular bounced around the corner and rolled to rest just in front of us—I caught only a glimpse before Bee had flung himself on top of it, curling into a ball. Unicorn changed an abortive move in that direction to a lunge at me and carried me to the ground, Eduardo and Snail landing on top of him split seconds later, followed by two more guards. Ouch!
Lucas hurtled towards me too…but at the last moment he swerved into Bane, carrying Jon to the ground as well in a jumble of sticks and long limbs. I wanted to scream their names but had no breath…then several well-muscled torsos were rammed completely over my head and I could see nothing. I could only wait for the bang…
The heap of protecting bodies twitched oddly; a strange sensation tickled my feet, swept up to my head, my ears rang and darkness closed in around me. Then…
I lay, panting, head aching. I’d heard no explosion. Had I actually passed out? No… But my human shields had become dead weights, limp and unresponsive. Oh Lord, please don’t let them be…
Wait a minute. No explosion. Round and…smooth. With some effort, I dragged myself far enough out to see. No blood. Not even on Bee, and I could see his chest moving up and down. NonLethal grenade? Why was I still conscious? I heaved myself free and sat up. Promptly regretted it as a sledgehammer attacked my brain and my insides tried to revolt.
“Margo?” came a weak voice from nearby, promptly followed by another familiar voice, also rather thin.
“Bane? Are you okay? Where’s Margo?”
“Sitting up, I think. I hope. Margo?”
“It’s me, Bane,” I gasped, as the nausea eased. I was about to crawl over to them when a foot scuffed just around the corner. I had time to hiss, “Play dead!” then draw my nonLee and throw myself flat just before two SpecialCorps soldiers appeared, nonLee rifles cautiously raised.
“Looks like we got them all,” said one, in Esperanto.
“I thought I heard something,” said the other, not lowering his rifle. “They look like security guys; let’s put a shot in them all, just to be sure.”
“Right.” The first one raised his rifle as well—the other guy was taking aim at Bee… I pushed myself up just enough to aim and fired twice.
Thud. Thud. Two heavy bodies hit the carpeted floor.
“Thank you, Lord,” I whispered, beginning to shake, though adrenalin was now pushing away the sickness and headache. I fired into them both again to keep them down for several hours, then scrambled over to Bane, Jon, and Lucas. The three of them had fallen behind the rest of us and must have been largely shielded, but not quite enough to save Lucas, who was unconscious as well.
“Were those assassins, Margo?” asked Bane, sitting up with a barely-smothered groan.
I stared at all the soldierly kit hanging from the very soldierly figures and remembered what Eduardo had been saying. There seemed to be a strange echoing in my head. “I think it’s worse than that. They’re soldiers. I think the EuroGov are annexing us.”
“What?” said Jon. “Not right now; not before the vote!”
“Yes,” said Bane, frowning. “It makes sense. If they take us over now, there’s no way we can stop Father Mark, so we’ll definitely lose the vote. And they can be sure none of us will escape afterwards. They can claim it’s to ensure neutrality, of course, and promise to withdraw if we win. But we won’t win. Not if…”
Not if Father Mark made it to Brussels. And…I glanced at Unicorn’s unconscious form.
“Oh no! U never had time to pass those orders on. No one is going after Father Mark!” Something rather like despair washed over me. The State was under attack, had perhaps fallen already, and the people who most needed to be awake were lying senseless on the floor. Fifty-percent lethal grenades, Eduardo had once dubbed them. Would he and the others even wake up?
I glanced at Bane and Jon. They were both now sitting up, looking as dizzy and sick as I felt. The State needed the head of security and his best men—instead…it had us three.
I was struggling to force my aching brain into gear when Jon’s head came up. “Quick!” he breathed. We staggered to our feet and slipped into a nearby room, leaving the door ajar. More footsteps approached along the passage.
The feet paused outside.
“Good grief,” said a scornful voice. “These idiots put themselves out with their own grenade.”
“Perhaps they had no choice. Lot of nonLees lying around here,” said another voice, more mildly. “We’d better collect them up. And keep your voice down, we’re not supposed to wake anyone.”
Clinking and rustling sounds as the two soldiers searched Eduardo and the others and gathered the fallen nonLees.
“We’ll have to take these idiots’ toy guns too,” said the first voice, more quietly this time. “Can’t leave them lying here.”
“Yep. Okay, let’s get on.”
The footsteps retreated.
“Curse it!” snarled Bane. “Why didn’t we pick the other guns up?”
“I don’t think any of us are at our best after that grenade,” I said. “At least we’ve still got ours.” I tried to bully my brain into action again, but the conclusion it kept reaching really did make me want to throw up. I thought it through twice more, with no change to the solution.
“We may be the only people still free and conscious who know about Father Mark,” I said at last. “What’s happening here is totally irrelevant in the long term, if he isn’t stopped. So one of us has to go after him. Obviously it will have to be me.”
Bane drew a deep, deep breath, then stopped. He bit his lip almost to the point of drawing blood. Jon just looked extremely grim. After some more deep breaths, Bane finally said, “You can get out of the State easily enough; we know the location of several passages. But how will you get to Brussels?”
“Train. I need the escape rucksack from the cupboard at home. Everything I need is in there. I could chance it without the wig, but I’ve got to have that money.”
“Let’s go, then.”
It was horrible leaving the others there like that, collapsed on the floor, but what choice had we? Speed was everything, now. Lord, I thought, fighting the despair, please be with us. We can’t do this by ourselves.
We made it down the stairwell without meeting any more soldiers, but a quick peep into our corridor showed no fewer than four members of SpecialCorps, standing around our door. The crumpled body of the Swiss Guard who’d been left on duty had been shoved to one side of the passage, but from the fact that they’d taken the time to bind and gag him, he was probably just unconscious.
I pressed Bane and Jon back. “Shhh,” I breathed. “Go upstairs again.”
Safely up on the landing, I murmured the bad news to them. “…and they’re armed with nonLees as well; the EuroGov are clearly trying to make this bloodless—for now—but I don’t understand why they’re just standing there,” I concluded.
“Because they think we’re in there, of course,” Bane murmured back, not looking puzzled at all. “You heard those others: they mean to completely take control while everyone’s asleep. Who knows, in the morning they may even plan to trot you and Pope Cornelius out to do your speeches just as planned, pretending they aren’t really occupying us. All those soldiers have to do is put on some Swiss Guard uniforms and hold a gun to my head off camera and I should think you’ll cooperate, seeing that you were planning on making the speech anyway.”
I shrank from that vision, then dragged my mind back to the more immediate problem. “I don’t think I can get all four of them before they get me.”
“Then I’ll take the nonLee,” said Jon. “When I give you the signal, switch off all the lights. You can do that without being seen, right?”
I glanced down the stairs to the bank of light switches on the landing below. “Yes. Could be a little illumination from the other landing, but you’ll be at the dark end so I doubt they’ll be able to see you. Not in the first few moments.”
“Good. Let’s have it, then.” Jon held out his hand for my gun, but Bane gave him his. “If they do see me, they’re only holding nonLees, right?” Four nonLees, though. Panicked soldiers, firing blindly… From Bane’s expression, he was making the same calculation. So was Jon, because he added briskly, “I’m expendable, anyway. Let’s move.”
No time to argue: right now, we were all expendable. “One moment. Have you got a hanky?” I was still in my dressing gown. Jon produced one from his trouser pocket and I bound it quickly around the nonLee. “Okay, here it is. Don’t let the hanky slip off; it’s covering the power gauge. The glow might give you away.”
“Right,” said Jon. “Once we get down there, kill the lights when I tap my finger on the barrel like this… Then pray.”
“Don’t forget to take the safety off,” said Bane. At Jon’s frosty silence, he added, “Seriously, mate, it’s easily done!”
“Come on!” I urged. “Every moment Father Mark is getting further away!”
We crept back down the stairs, trying not to let our feet scuff on the carpet. Positioning Jon just out of sight around the corner, I moved to the switches, took a deep breath—Lord, watch over Jon!—and clicked a nail against the wall to let him know I was ready.
I saw him take a deep breath too—just one—then his finger tapped the nonLee. Using both hands, I swiped all the switches off together, plunging us into darkness.
Startled oaths from around the corner.
No sound of Jon moving, but then…
Thud. Thud.
Thud.
Another oath, cut off…thud.
A moment’s utter silence. I waited. Jon must be listening, checking they were really unconscious.
“Okay.” Jon’s voice, coming softly from inside the corridor.
Relief rushing through me, I flicked the lights back on and hurried after Bane, who’d already joined Jon. There were the soldiers, crumpled in heaps just like the unfortunate Swiss Guard. I picked up the nearest nonLee and used it to put another shot into them. No point emptying the powerMag of the weapon I was used to.
“They all out?” asked Bane.
“Like the lights were,” I said. “Good job, Jon.”
Jon just shrugged. “All that swearing, how could I miss?” he said modestly. “Like shooting ducks in a barrel.”
“Come on,” said Bane. “Let’s get them inside before someone comes. Then they’ll assume this lot have just wandered off.”
“I only need to grab my bag—”
“It’s better if they don’t know we’re loose. At the moment they’re going for stealth. If they think you’re about to slip through their fingers, they’ll lock the whole place down.”
“Okay, you’re right. I’ll get the door.”
Door open, I made to help them, but Bane just said, “Get your bag, quickly; we can manage.”
It was the work of a moment to take the small bag of escape stuff from the little cupboard by the door. Actually…
“I’d better get dressed while you finish with them,” I said in a low voice. “I can’t go to the train station like this!” I slipped into the bedroom, dragging my dressing gown and nightie off with frantic fingers. Had the EuroArmy seized VSS HQ yet? Did they have access to all the cameras? We needed to be so, so quick.
I reached for my skirt, then grabbed my jeans from the drawer instead. I needed to blend in out there. I slipped into a clean top, yanked on my shoes and grabbed a jacket, only to drop it back on the bed and pull out my nonLee as the window swung silently open. I raised the gun, heart pounding, finger tightening on the trigger…
A glint of metal…a knife raised to throw…and a thin, familiar face. “Lucas!”
The knife was being lowered, he’d recognized me in the same moment. He eased through and dropped lightly to the ground, though his movements seemed rather stiffer than usual. “Margaret, are you all right?” He broke off, said, “Excuse me,” stuck his head back out the window and was violently sick.
Oh yes, post-nonLee symptoms. I could sympathize. I slipped my jacket on as I waited for him to recover himself.
“Are you all right?” he demanded again, as soon as he had.
“Fine, Lucas. I was so well shielded I didn’t get knocked out, same with Bane and Jon, thanks to you. Are the others awake?” I asked urgently. Please say they were—and not in EuroGov hands. Would the EuroGov try to wring security secrets from Eduardo?
Still, perhaps they wouldn’t realize immediately who they’d caught…because Lucas was shaking his head. “Unconscious. Sorry. Just me.”
Bane appeared at the door. “You woke up, huh? Good. Thanks for knocking me over, by the way.””
“Are you all right?” asked Lucas.
“Me?” said Bane, gripping his nonLee fiercely, “Oh, I’m fine. Young dogs pick up new tricks, y’know.”
“Old dogs too, sometimes.”
Bane looked startled for a moment, as he realized Lucas had made a joke. “So they do. Here…” He pulled a commandeered nonLee from his pocket and held it out. “You’d better have this. Let’s move.”
I grabbed the rucksack and we all headed for the door.
“How did you take out all these fellows?” Lucas looked from the unconscious soldiers to me.
“I didn’t. Jon did. I switched off the lights suddenly and he got them all before they knew what’d hit them.”
Lucas greeted this with a rather predatory smile of approval.
Fortunately the nearest secret passage wasn’t far away. We raced down the final flight of stairs, peeped around the corner, and hurried into the lower corridor. There was the cupboard. I found the first bit of woodwork to press—to engage the cupboard with the door behind, without which the cupboard would just move like any other cupboard, revealing an apparently innocent stretch of wall—then pressed the second and heaved…it swung away, leaving a rectangle of darkness.
We piled through the opening as fast as we could, pulling it closed behind us before anyone could come along.
It was one of the older, lesser-used passages, with no lighting. I reached into the bag, then stopped, my heart sinking. “Oh no, I put the torch out on the window ledge to charge—and I hadn’t brought it back in yet!” I said. “I take it no one else has one?”
Lucas muttered a no, since it was too dark to see a head shake.
“We don’t need one,” said Bane dismissively, taking hold of my arm. “Come on.” Stick presumably bumping against the wall, he strode off down the passage at his normal speed.
“Ur…this way,” said Jon awkwardly, clearly taking Lucas in tow.
For a while there was just the quick brush of our feet on the flagstones and the sound of our breathing, then after perhaps a kilometer, Bane jerked to a halt. “Whoa! It’s a corner or…” I could hear him feeling around. “No, it’s the end. Finally.”
He hauled the door open—still no light beyond, but when I stepped through and felt the walls, I found a light switch and flicked it. Light! We were in a cellar.
Lucas stepped through behind, squinting in the brightness. A slight pinch at his brows suggested his headache was ten times worse than mine, but he was soon looking around alertly. “How long have we got to get to the station?”
I paused in the middle of fishing hair clips from my bag, and looked at him. “We? You can’t come with me, Lucas. You’re far too recognizable.”
From the mulish look on his face, he wasn’t impressed by this argument. “Lucas, you don’t have an ID card; you might as well just slit your wrists. And you will get me caught, do you understand?”
The stubborn look slipped into one of pure misery.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “It’s just the truth.”
Fumbling in frantic haste, I began to fasten my hair up as carefully as I could.
“Cheer up, Lucas,” said Bane. “You could look as inconspicuous as anything—which you so don’t—and have a perfect ID and you’d still have to stay here with us.”
Jon turned his head towards Bane, frowning slightly. “Why?”
“Because we three have a job to do.”
“We do?”
“Yes. We have to retake the Vatican.”