12

The diver’s voice spoke from one of the walkie-talkies: “Job done. Coming back.”

“Yes,” Bennett said in response. He put that walkie-talkie down and grabbed the other one to say into it, “Jackie? Where are you?”

“Coming out,” Tian’s voice said. “We can only do ten in the elevator at a time.”

“There’s more shooting up here, Jackie,” Bennett said, and he knew his nervousness could be heard in his voice, and he envied the tough calm that Tian still showed.

“Hold them off,” Tian said, “we’re coming out as fast as we can. The diver isn’t back yet, either.”

“He’s on his way,” Bennett said, and the phone rang, which must be Curtis.

Yes. What was in Curtis’s voice was triumph: “We’ve done it, Colin!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you set the last timers?”

“Not yet, sir. Jackie’s crew and the diver are still coming out.”

“Well, set them, man. They still have thirty minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it now, Colin.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

“And, Colin?”

“Sir?”

“Leave the phone off the hook. I’ll be listening to what happens there, and you’ll be able to talk to me any time you have to.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And start those timers.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

When Jackie Tian rode the elevator from the level above the flooding up to the surface, traveling with the last of his work-crew, he found the rest of his men milling around inside the area swathed in the blue plastic tarps.

“Bulldozer’s gone,” one of them said.

Tian looked around an edge of plastic. He saw an armored personnel carrier, windshield shattered, slowly driving down the access road from the smashed-open gate. A couple of men sniped at the personnel carrier from behind parked trucks, but he could see it was all over.

“We go now,” he decided, and signaled to his men, and they trotted after him in a long line away from the battle, toward the passage to the alley leading to Partition Street.

* * *

“I have to leave here now, sir,” Bennett said into the phone, knowing how panicky he sounded but unable to stop it. “The police broke through, they’re coming this way.”

“Did you set the timers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave the phone off the hook.”

“But I have to go now, sir, I—”

“Leave it off the hook!”

“Yes, sir,” Bennett said, and dropped the phone onto the desk. Standing, he ran around the desk, and pulled open the door, and blue-uniformed policemen swarmed in.

* * *

Sharom swam through the flooded tunnels, his headlamp showing the way. At the end, there was a ladder, and he climbed it to the level above the water. He pushed the button there to summon the elevator, and while waiting for it he changed out of his flippers and back into the rubber thongs.

Then the elevator came, and he rode upward, flippers under his left arm. When he got to the surface level and stopped, the elevator cage was surrounded by uniformed policemen, most of them pointing pistols or rifles at him. When he raised his arms, the flippers fell to the floor of the cage.

* * *

In six places in the flooded tunnels, carefully positioned by Colin Bennett following Richard Curtis’s precise instructions, tucked against side walls in the pitch blackness, were rectangular metal boxes, each about the size of a child’s coffin. The boxes had hinged tops and padlocks, and inside, in waterproof plastic bags, were the timers, the radio receivers, the detonators and the slim tubes of TNT.

Water had already seeped into the boxes, but that didn’t matter. The timers chittered quietly to themselves, unreeling the seconds. When they judged the instant was right, one after the other, they would detonate.

No one explosion would be very severe, but every one of them would agitate the water in these confined tunnels, every additional one increasing the agitation, until the sixth explosion would be like attaining free-fall. The energy would now renew itself, the water shoulder more space for itself, pressing outward, crumbling the concrete, eating the landfill, turning all the island below the clustered tall buildings into porridge.

* * *

Curtis sat at the table in the main cabin of Granjya, telephone to his ear, his eye on the radio and sonar that controlled the submarine. Granjya plowed steadily through the night, south and west, and the submarine obediently followed.

Through the phone, he could hear a confusion of people milling around in his office at the construction site. Voices spoke, too far away from the receiver for him to make out what they were saying, but from the sound of it he believed they’d captured Colin.

What would he tell them? Would he implicate Curtis? Not that it mattered. Nothing that anyone in that room could say would matter, before long.

All those lights, he thought, looking out at Hong Kong Island as it receded in the night, all those lights will soon switch off. Forever. I won’t see it, he thought, but I’ll hear it, the beginning of it. In just…twenty-seven minutes.