'The charges in each borehole are all wired to individual relay detonators. I've got a remote transmitter up there connected to a cellular. Can't trust radio signals with all this rock. When the time comes, you just dial the number. It picks up on the third ring, so you can test it as long as you stop before that.'

'Let's test it now. What's the number?'

'Mother of Christ.'

'What?'

Simon turned around to face what May was suddenly staring at. It took a lot to provoke an expression like that on someone so tediously poker-faced, and even more to distract him when he was talking about his toys. This would do it though, every time. Matlock was staggering towards them from the door leading to the Transformer Chambers. He was soaked in blood from his neck to his thighs, and what looked like an arrow protruded downwards from his neck.

'Fuck. Somebody help him.'

465.

Matlock collapsed before anyone could reach him, dropping to his knees and then on to his side, an arm supporting his head so that no pressure was brought upon the arrow. May and Simon got there first, Deacon and Cook at their backs.

Simon knelt down next to his kebabed comrade. He was still breathing, but only just.

'Can you speak? What happened?'

Matlock barely managed a whisper, struggling to channel enough breath even for that. He sounded like a fish gasping its last, the smack of his lips louder than his words. However, audibility and intelligibility were not proportionately linked. They might not be hearing him too well, but they were all soon reading him loud and clear.

'Ash,' he breathed. For half a second it might have sounded to the others like merely another choking noise, but Simon immediately felt his blood freeze. 'A ... cop. Girl. Vensha . . . ven . . . sha.'

'Where's Taylor?' May asked anxiously.

Matlock shook his head, as perceptibly as he could manage. 'Girl.'

'The girl? She killed him?'

Matlock nodded.

'She's a cop?' asked Simon.

More nodding.

'Where did they go?'

Matlock swallowed, seemingly readying himself for the effort of telling them, but instead, when he opened his mouth, all that issued was a splutter of thickened arterial blood, followed by a pitiful final exhale.

Simon's head was buzzing, trying to work out the ramifications, but it was like doing a mathematical equation where the numbers and variables kept changing. What 466.

didn't help was that his men were articulating the same questions as were in his mind, adding to the number of voices simultaneously demanding answers.

'How could Ash be here?'

'How could he know?'

'How did he get in?'

'What happened to the decoy plan?'

'If the cops didn't buy it, why is there just one of them, as opposed to one hundred?'

'Did he say Ash is a cop?'

'No, the girl's a cop. What did he say she was called? Vensha?'

'I thought he said vengeance.'

Throughout this maelstrom, May said nothing. Instead he just fixed Simon with a look that not so much accused as tried, judged, sentenced and executed. Then he finally made his own, single and piercingly salient query.

'If he knew we were here, what else does he know?'

The question translated Matlock's whisper.

'Vent shaft,' Simon said, the implications sinking deep even as he formed the words. 'He came from the transformer room. That's where the cable shaft is.'

'Where does it go?'

'The fucking topside,' spat May. 'They're headed for the dam.'

Looks were exchanged: suspicions, insecurities, the first signs of panic.

'All right, listen up,' Simon said firmly, keeping his voice barely below a shout. He had to show he was in control, otherwise he wouldn't be much longer. 'Deacon and Cook, you take the lift and check it out. Headon, you stay at the bottom of the aqueduct so we get a relay on these fucking radios. May, control room, right now.'

467.

'Yes sir,' May acknowledged, with a sneering sarcasm that was only just the right side of mutiny.Angelique was wiping the sweat from her eyes as they came through the door at the centre. The skies had cleared overhead and it was turning into a beautiful late-summer's day; beautiful, that was, other than the terrorists, the corpses, the explosives, the intended mass murder and the imminent threat of being vaporised. She'd caught glimpses of the view as she hurled the charges from the platform: Loch Fada shimmering silver-blue beneath the mountains, windsurfers dancing on the surface. It was the kind of spot you'd happily lug a picnic basket up a three-hour climb to reach, just for the pleasure of sipping a beer and dodging the wasps as you sat on the grass, sun kissing your shoulders and maybe some obliging chap doing the same to your neck.

This had some of those elements, she'd have to concede, but not really enough to be truly relaxing. She ought to be thankful for small mercies, though: she did have the obliging chap, rendering services far more welcome than a snog even if he had been her type. Angelique had a lot to be grateful to him for, in fact, but prized above the information and initiative he'd supplied was simply that he'd kept the heid. He was probably just giving a passable impression of calm to mask an unprecedented level of personal terror, but if so that made two of them, and she knew all it would take was for him to lose the place and her 'experienced professional' front would collapse too.

They had started from the centre and were working their way to the sides, reckoning that if they suddenly ran out of time, the dam might better survive two diffuse blasts than a big one in its middle. The charges in each borehole were threaded together like a string of pearls, with a trigger 468.

mechanism at the end nearest the opening. It crossed her mind that under these circumstances, the bomb designer might not have implemented the standard safeguards against interference, but she wasn't about to play the odds by disconnecting the detonator. Besides, if the bad guys pressed their button and nothing happened, they'd have the option to repair the damage and have another go.

They had cleared just over half the boreholes when she heard the door open. Angelique had a loop of charges in her hand, and was wiping her eyes in readiness for another two-handed fling. She turned around and drew her pistol, dropping the explosives, but the first guy through the door had a start on her and opened fire with his machine gun before she could even aim. Instead of a rapid stutter of bangs, however, there was only one as the gun exploded in his hands, the left of which was blown off by the blast. He dropped to his knees, doubling over his truncated limb as a second gunman emerged behind. This time Angelique had time to aim, but her target ducked behind his injured comrade just before she fired. She got off two shots, both of them ripping into the torso of the impromptu human shield as his less than selfless companion retreated inside the wall of the dam.

'Ray, we've got to get the fuck off this thing,' she called out. 'Get into the aqueduct. It's the only chance.'

Ash took the time to hurl one more chain of explosives from the platform, then ran for the entrance door at the opposite end. Angelique picked up the string of charges at her feet and was about to do likewise when another idea occurred to her. She ran for the door the gunmen had come through, her pistol drawn, the explosives slung round her shoulder. It opened to a short stairwell inside the wall, leading to the aqueduct's airtight access port.

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Angelique bounded down the flight and hauled open the door. Below her, the escaping gunman was descending on an automated platform, speaking frantically into his radio. She took hold of the explosives in both hands and lobbed them down into the tunnel, where they whizzed past the gunman's head, causing him to look up. Angelique ducked out of sight, anticipating a volley of shots that never came, then charged back out on to the platform, heart and lungs totting up a double-time invoice as she made for the next aqueduct.'This is Deacon. They're ditching the charges, chucking them over the edge. Cook's down. His fucking gun blew up. Those fucking kids, it must have been.'

Those fucking kids, yes. Those pesky fucking kids.

'Everybody get that?' Simon relayed. 'Ditch any weapons you took from the truck. Right away.'

He turned to May. 'Blow it. Now.'

'Deacon's not clear yet.'

'Fuck Deacon. Blow the dam.'

'Why don't we just kill these fuckers and put back the charges?'

'Who's gonna do that? They're up top, an' they know we're comin' now. They could pick us off one by one.'

'There's only two of them. We could . . .'

Simon drew his pistol and held it tightly in both hands, pointing the barrel between May's eyes. 'Blow the fucking dam.'

May shook his head, staring with a defiance that had gone well beyond insolence and into the mockingly smug.

'You're forgetting about that question you asked me, back at the bridge. You can't do this without me.'

'All I have to do is dial a number.'

470.

'Yeah, but what number, Freddie?'

Simon shot him twice in the head, then unclipped the mobile phone from May's belt. Like the predictable idiot wouldn't have tested the receiver while he was topside.

'The one on your last-number redial, Brian.'Lexy could feel himself starting to cry again. He wanted to hold it back and yet at the same time he wanted to let it out. The result was a choked snuffle and a tight closing of his eyes, which squeezed out tears from both.

'Whit's wrang, Lexy?'

'Sorry, Murph. That guy. I just cannae get ower it. I kill't somebody, Murph.'

'Don't be stupit, man. You were a fuckin' hero. D'ye 'hink he'd be sittin' there feelin' bad aboot it if he'd kill't us? Aye, that will be chocolate.'

'I know, but it was just so horrible.'

'He'd probly have died anyway, even afore you shot him. Did you see what his ain gun did tae him? An' it coulda been me that jammed that wan, couldn't it? So it was a joint effort. But you were the man on the spot. You finished him off afore he could dae anythin' else. That took some guts, man.'

'Dunno how. I was pure paralysed. I thought that was us when he fired. I mean, we'd nae way o' knowin' if it was wan o' the guns we'd knackered, or whit effect it would have.'

'Well it wasnae gaunny have an optimisin' effect, was it? I mean, in the manual, it's no' gauuny say: to get the most from your weapon, be sure to jam a big daud of metal down the barrel.' Murph put on a posh English accent, forcing Lexy to laugh.

'Thanks, Murph,' he said.

471.

'Whit fur?'

'Gettin' us through this.'

The gettin' us through it? You're the brainy wan.'

'Am I fuck.' Lexy felt his hackles rise. Even after everything they had faced over the past few days, there was still nothing scarier than being accused of being brainy. If they survived to go back to school, he might be wishing Gap Man had finished him off.

'Aye you are. It's awright. I'll no' let on.'

They had taken refuge in yet another tunnel, a dry one this time. After hiding the body, they had crawled back into the drain themselves and headed in the opposite direction, beneath the turbine access decks. The drain ended - or rather began - at Turbine One, the furthest along, and hearing no activity on their radios, they decided to chance coming up. There on the lowest access deck, they had found a knee-high hatch, and opened it to reveal a short crawl- space and the top of a ladder. The crawlspace had to be negotiated backwards, even by them, in order to get on to the ladder, which led a couple of metres down into a tunnel flanked by huge cables on either wall.

'What's the time?' Lexy asked.

Murph's torch lit up. 'It's just comin' up for . . .'

Suddenly the whole tunnel shook, cable brackets pinging from the walls like they were drawing pins, amid a rumbling, crashing sound they could feel as well as hear.

'Whit the fuck was that?' they asked in unison.

The shaking continued for a few seconds, both of them crouching into balls on the floor of the tunnel as more brackets dropped and the sagging cables swung and thumped against the walls.

'Earthquake,' Wee Murph ventured.

'Bomb mair like. Those explosives.'

472.

'Oh fuck, aye.'

The shaking and rumbling finally ceased, though there seemed to be another sound in the air, like a continuous presence. Maybe it was just the after-effect in his ears, like when he had his headphones up too loud. They stayed still and quiet for a while, anticipating another shake, not daring to believe it was all over. None came, but the other sound got stronger, and it definitely wasn't just in his head.

'I think we should make a move,' Murph said.

'But the bad guys-'

'Think aboot it, Lexy. That was a bomb, as you says. So whatever they were here tae dae, I 'hink they've done it. They're gaunny be off their marks, in't they? Probly away awready.'

'Just a wee while longer. To be sure there's nae mair blasts.'

'Two minutes, then, awright?'

'Awright.'

Lexy was counting by elephants in his head so that Murph couldn't cheat. He'd reached thirty-three when they both felt water running around their feet.

'Oh fuck.'

'I don't know much aboot hydro-electric stations, Lexy, but I know there's no' meant tae be water in a tunnel full o' cables.'

'It's awright. They're insulated.'

'Aye, so we're aboot a quarter ay an inch o' rubber away fae gettin' deep fried. Let's get tae fuck oota here.'