North calculated Esme had thirty seconds on her pursuer, and Aquinas had thirty seconds on him, but as he emerged into the darkened corridor, there was no sign of either of them. He pushed through a fire door and the corridor immediately split three ways. It was a maze down here. Would he hear her scream? Or would Aquinas kill her silently? He had to find her and his first instinct was to rush headlong into the apparently endless hallways. But he had to get them out of this nightmare, or they were both dead. He took a breath. Reminded himself to focus.
What would Fang do? Call him a moron-person.
That wasn’t helpful.
What would she want him to do? She’d want him to find a way out, and quickly.
It took him longer than he wanted but he found it. The steel door was marked ‘Security. No Entry to Unauthorized Personnel.’ Judging by the slumped and bleeding figures at the monitoring desk facing two dozen blank and shattered screens, they were all dead long before they got the chance to call for backup. Even so, the Thinkers would have known that within minutes of the first reports of gunfire, police would be securing the area, tightening the cordon around the museum with every passing second.
He closed the door, letting it take his weight for a second, keeping his gaze soft to avoid the distraction of carnage. His anger was instinctive, but anger would get him nowhere. He needed to keep calm.
He looked at the shot-out monitors and computer system. Despite the tight time-frame for the job, the Thinkers had done their best to wipe the arrivals footage. The masks were an insurance.
That had to be because they had every intention of making it out.
They were in overalls and gloves to avoid leaving DNA.
Because, once out, they had no intention of getting traced and caught.
In his head, he ran through Einstein chaining the doors together, snapping down the padlocks. They’d barred the doors to deter forced entry by SCO19, the Met Police’s specialist firearms command. As far as command knew, the attackers had hostages; and the initial approach would be to negotiate, to minimize harm to those hostages. They weren’t to know the Thinkers had no interest in negotiations. Eventually the Met would get the message – blow the doors off, send squads in through other entrances; there would be smoke and flash bangs and abseiling from the roof through windows. But not yet.
It was clear that this was no suicide mission but the police would have every exit covered, and the attackers were professionals so they’d know that. The logical conclusion had to be that there was one exit which the police didn’t know about but the Thinkers did – all North had to do was find it. He’d killed two of them. There were three left – Nietzsche, Plato and Aquinas. And Aquinas was on Esme’s tail, so he was the priority.
Scanning the room, North breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the dog-eared floor plan sellotaped to the furthest wall. He studied it, running his finger from exit to exit from the top of the building to the bottom. Basement corridors snaked this way and that. Climate-controlled storage. Boilers. Computing equipment. Back offices.
Tapping his finger on how the Thinkers planned to escape. It made perfect sense – it was simple when you thought about it. If he had it right. But where was Esme on the map? Because he wasn’t going anywhere till he found her.
He pulled open the door and started running. He had to hope it wasn’t too late.