30: Explosives

Gracie led us along the corridor, keeping to the walls and stopping when we came to a junction. She peered round the corner before waving us on.

“They’re all in the village, celebrating the brave new world they think they’re about to create,” she whispered. “The lab is empty. But we need to dodge the CCTV, and the guards will be doing their rounds. Here.”

She stopped outside a door and started to key in a codeword.

“This isn’t the lab,” I said. “Where have you brought us?”

“It’s a storeroom.”

The door slid open with a hydraulic hiss. Would Pew’s men be there after all, waiting to carry out our execution and then make it look like an accident?

But as the lights flicked on I saw that she was telling the truth – a vast store, floor to ceiling racks of equipment, like giant bookshelves.

Gracie closed the door behind us and hurried to a safe at the far end. She started to spin the combination, pausing from time to time to check a set of numbers she had scrawled on the back of her hand.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Explosives.”

“What?”

“Well, how else are we going to disable the machine?”

“You mean we’re going to blow it up?”

“What are MEXA doing with a safe full of explosives?” Isaac asked.

Gracie gave a shrug as the locks clicked home. “God knows. Staging fake terrorist attacks for whatever political agendas they might have, or just left over from blasting out these underground labs. There’s all sorts of freaky stuff locked away down here.”

“And how come you’ve got access to this?”

“Dad gets me to run errands for him. I was down here earlier today fetching stuff for them. I had a bit of a nose around.”

She pulled out a box and handed it to me. “Here, Danni, you take the detonators.”

I stared at them and hardly dared move. How stable were these things?

“Robert, you take the gelignite, and you, what’s your name?”

“Isaac.”

“Isaac? Nice to meet you. You take this.” She handed him a box of wires and cutters and picked up the rest of the explosives, ammonium nitrate and diesel.

This was going to be some big bang. I prayed that Gracie knew what she was doing.

We followed her down empty corridors as fast as we could – as fast as I dared carrying a box of detonators. She steered us past cameras, slowly rotating. I looked up as we ran past. Mistime it slightly, and we would be seen. The thought of that, and what I was carrying, made my heart race.

But then Gracie stopped.

She lifted her finger to her lips and steered us backwards into an alcove. There were no doors off it, just a water dispenser and a bin.

I could hear footsteps.

“A guard?” I whispered and Gracie signalled quiet, with more insistence. A cold chill crept through me. The footsteps were getting closer.

We pressed ourselves into the shadows. Isaac was pushed up against me and Robert moved to the outside of our huddle, protective. This close, I could feel Isaac’s heartbeat and hear his breathing. The box of detonators wobbled in my hand.

The footsteps paused. I hardly dared breathe. And then they started to fade and I closed my eyes. All I could feel was Isaac, his breath soft against my neck.

We stayed like that for a few minutes, until at last Gracie spoke.

“He’s gone. It’s clear.” And she led us back out, creeping down corridors and dodging the cameras once more.

Another door, and this time one I recognised.

The lab was empty, as Gracie said it would be. And there was the machine, standing alone in the middle of the room. It was cordoned off, but I ducked under the tape and stared at it close up. One of the ceiling lights had started to flicker and the changing shadows made the strange writing come alive and seem to move. My skin prickled in its presence and my head started to spin, just like when we’d been in this room before.

The machine looked like it had never even been apart. There was just one thing, a small hole in the side at a point where the strange script was more deeply etched. A small hole about the same size as the key that Kris had pressed into my hands, what seemed an eternity ago.

The key was all that was needed to make this thing work.

Robert and Gracie set to work fixing the explosives around the base of the machine. They seemed to know what they were doing and I looked across at Isaac. He joined me, staring up at the structure.

“This is what you found in Greenland?”

I nodded. “It seems such a shame, though, to blow it up.”

Gracie stopped building her bomb for a second and looked round at me.

“I know,” she said. “But if what you said is true then we have no choice. It has to be destroyed.”

She turned back to her work and I watched her, setting explosives, fixing wires. It all looked pretty makeshift. I hoped it would work.

“Let’s have those detonators,” she said and I handed them over, watching nervously as she fixed them into place. If this lot went up while we were still here... I pushed the thought away.

She took a small remote control unit from the box, pulled out the aerial and pressed a switch. A red LED flashed.

“Armed and ready.” She looked round at us. “Come on, let’s get ourselves to a safe distance.”

We followed her out of the lab and started to run. But we had barely taken ten paces when a shadow moved and a tall figure stepped out of the shadows, to stand in front of us, blocking our way. I skidded to a halt beside Gracie and Isaac bumped into me from behind.

“Well, this is an unwelcome surprise,” snarled Pew.