Adrift 2: Sundown (13 page)

When Conny reached Euston Station’s main hall, her jaw dropped.

The hall was filling up with police officers: a dizzying vortex of uniforms representing a myriad of units and boroughs. She couldn’t guess at exactly how many of her colleagues there were gathering below the departure boards, but it had to be north of two hundred.

This is a lot bigger than some guy going nuts with a length of rebar.

Yet it wasn’t just the sheer number of police present that made her skin prickle: the atmosphere in the room itself was rotten with tension. As she moved away from the escalators, toward the bulk of the gathering force, Conny caught the eye of several officers and shot them a quizzical glance. Each time she received only an abrupt head shake in return. By the look of the confused expressions on the faces Conny saw, no one had much more of a clue about why they were there than she did.

Remy’s chain hung slackly in her left hand. The dog should have been alert in the presence of so many police officers—curious at the very least—but Remy simply hovered at Conny’s side, staring back at the escalator that led down toward the distant crime scene. His behaviour was unnatural, almost like he had been struck by some sudden illness. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the dog so subdued.

Conny began to move toward the crowd and scanned the room, hoping to spot either somebody that she knew, or the Chief Superintendent that the Inspector heading to the platform had mentioned, but it was her ears that grabbed her attention, not her eyes.

A nearby constable, who looked like he’d only been on the job a year at most, muttered ominously that his brother worked out of Scotland Yard, and had told him that the army had been called in.

Someone else said they had heard of incidents in other cities.

“It started in Morden,” Conny heard another voice whispering quietly. “The guy with the knife, you heard about that?”

Conny frowned. The spree killing at the South London supermarket a couple of hours earlier was a big deal, of course, and she was certain that the tragedy would dominate the national headlines for days to come, but she wasn’t sure why that incident would prompt the Metropolitan Police to send such a large group of officers to the London Underground. Morden was the very last stop on the Northern Line, way out in zone six. Far away from Euston.

“He was the start. I heard there have been
other
incidents. And the news is talking about a cruise ship being attacked. Blown up. It’s terrorists...”

A cruise ship? Conny hadn’t heard anything over the radio about it.

She glanced up. Above the departure boards, a large television screen displayed the latest news. There was no volume, but there was indeed a stone-faced newscaster sitting in front of a picture of a huge cruise ship. Along the bottom of the screen, a headline read
Tragedy in the Atlantic
.

What the hell would
that
have to do with
this?

A murmur rippled through a group of officers standing to her left, catching her attention, and when she tore her gaze away from the TV screen, she finally spotted some senior uniforms in the distance. Before she could move toward them, Conny saw the group exchanging troubled glances and quickly exiting the hall. They stood outside in the rain, talking animatedly in hushed tones. Lots of gesticulating.

The tension in the hall jacked up a notch.

Far to her right, Conny heard a loud bark and searched through the bodies, finally catching sight of the dog. His name was Jackson, and Conny knew his handler, Robert Nelson. Several weeks earlier, Nelson had asked Conny if she would like to go to dinner, and she had rejected him more bluntly than she had intended. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had terrible timing.

A conversation between them would be awkward. Conny sighed. Dogs were so much
easier
than people. She made a mental note to keep it brief, and she pushed through the crowd with Remy trotting along behind her, apparently happy to be on the move once more.

Robert looked like he was having trouble keeping Jackson calm. The dog was a German Shepherd, just like Remy, but noticeably smaller. Jackson’s specialty was his nose: he was one of the best sniffers on the Force.

Robert looked up as Conny approached, and his face crumbled into a weak grin.

“Uh, hi, Cornelia. How are you?”

“Robert,” she nodded. “Do you know what’s going on?”

His smile faded. “Probably no more than you, but whatever it is, it’s big. And this isn’t the only station involved.
All available officers
, right?”

Conny stared at him, baffled, and he frowned.

“You didn’t hear it on the radio?”

“I was…busy.”

“Well, you didn’t miss much. All I know is that people have been going missing on the—”

A loud murmur passed through the crowd, cutting him off, and Conny turned to see the senior officers striding back into the room wearing stricken expressions. A man with a beard, who was wearing what Conny thought was a Chief Superintendent’s uniform, gestured to somebody that she couldn’t see.

A moment later, the murmuring of the crowd became a loud chatter.

Someone was handing out firearms, pulling them from a secure crate and distributing them to men and women who looked equal-parts horrified and excited at the prospect of arming themselves.

And all Conny could do was stare.

Heckler and Koch G36. Assault rifle. Thirty-round magazines. Five-point-Five-Six Calibre. Able to switch between semi- and full-automatic. A work of art.

MP5SF. Submachine gun. Capable of firing seven-fucking-hundred silenced nine-mil rounds per minute. Single, burst or continuous fire.
The MP5 was a stubby, hissing snake of a weapon, and Conny thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Some of the firearms were held casually, with the easy grip of familiarity. Others were clutched in hands that shook, just a little. Guns were not routine for British police, not even in the country’s capital city. There would be plenty of anxious men and women there, Conny thought, facing the prospect of their first firefight.

Including me.

Many of the more senior police officers in the main hall took an assault rifle, and being surrounded by all that firepower made her feel dizzy with longing.

She blinked in surprise when a man wearing a Lieutenant’s uniform stepped directly in front of her and pressed a
Glock 17
into her palm.

She stared at it, open-mouthed.

Moulded polymer casing. Seventeen nine-millimetre parabolic rounds. Under-barrel tac-light.

It was heavy; solid.

So beautiful
.

The gun fit into Conny’s palm like it had been custom-made for her.

“Have you been trained with automatic weapons?”

Conny shook her head slowly, her eyes distant; focused only on the Glock. She had developed a parent-troubling love of guns and weaponry at around the time that girls were
supposed
to be dreaming of owning ponies, and had fired automatic weapons on ranges on several occasions, but had never carried a firearm in the line of duty. Once, carrying that sort of firepower regularly had been her ultimate goal, but that was before she had been partnered with Remy, and had seen what a thinking weapon was capable of.

And now, here she was, being handed a pistol in the middle of a real-life situation that she had no grasp of whatsoever.

Damn, though, the gun did feel powerful.
Intoxicating
.

“Constable. Constable?”

Conny blinked and looked at the Lieutenant.

“You stay at the rear, you understand? The ideal scenario here is you handing that weapon back to me fully loaded.”

She nodded.

The Lieutenant dropped his gaze to Remy.

“He a sniffer?”

“Crowd control, Sir.”

“Hmm. Well, that might prove just as useful.”

He began to move away.

“Sir,” Conny said, blurting out the word before she had even realised she was about to speak. “What’s happening?”

The Lieutenant arched an eyebrow and glanced back at her. She saw impatience in his eyes, and something else, too. Uncertainty, maybe.

“You didn’t hear on the radio?”

Conny shook her head.

“We were dealing with a violent—”

The Lieutenant interrupted her with an irritated gesture. He nodded toward the front of the hall, and the group of senior officers gathering beneath the departure boards.

“Eyes front,” he said. “Briefing any second, now.”

He turned away before Conny nodded, and slipped into the crowd, searching for any other unarmed officers.

Moments later, a voice called out.

“Quiet!”

The excited chatter which had filled the hall as the weapons were being handed out died away immediately.

Conny moved forward and lifted to her tiptoes, peering over the heads of those in front of her. A bearded man of around forty-five with a grave expression held his left hand aloft. It was the man she had seen moments earlier giving the order to pass out the guns.

“Chief Superintendent Porter,” the bearded man said. “Some of you know me. For the rest of you, I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances.” He took a deep breath. “In the last hour, deaths have been reported at a number of Underground stations. Maintenance staff, working in the tunnels, have not returned from their shifts. At present, there are at least sixteen people unaccounted for. Three of the missing members of staff
did
return, and none of them have lived longer than a couple of minutes. All have committed suicide, usually after attempting—and in a couple of cases succeeding—to take the lives of others first.”

Just like Adam Trent
, Conny thought.

Porter finally dropped his hand, apparently concluding that he had everybody’s complete attention. He lowered his voice a little.

“You’ve all heard about what happened in Morden earlier today. It looks like it was not an isolated incident.”

There was an audible intake of breath around the hall.

“Most of the outer parts of the rail network have already been closed and evacuated. We have started moving toward the centre of London, shutting stations as we go. At this moment, there are more than twenty Underground stations out there full of officers just like yourselves, hearing this exact same information.”

Porter drew in a breath and scanned the hall from left to right.

“In the past ten minutes, several trains have gone dark.”

He paused for a moment, as if to give that information a chance to settle on everyone’s mind.

Trains lost in the tunnels
, Conny thought.
Civilians
. Dear God, the Chief Superintendent was telling them that virtually the entire London police force had been called out. Even himself. Was the Commissioner of the entire bloody
Met
out there somewhere, standing in an Underground station, delivering an identical speech and handing out guns?

“At this moment, we have to assume the worst.”

Porter lifted his chin, staring around the faces that were fixed upon him.

“There is something in the tunnels; we don’t know what. According to the powers that be, we had no prior intelligence suggesting that a terrorist attack on the transport system was imminent, but we must assume that we are dealing with a large, multi-cellular threat, here. Quite possibly, a citywide attack. I’m not going to lie to you, we’re going into this blind, and our numbers are stretched across half of London. Our primary focus here is to find those trains and all civilians, and to secure these tunnels. To ensure that the stations are safe, and that whatever is happening down there does not spill out onto the streets. Engaging with any threat is strictly secondary until we know more about what we are dealing with, is that understood?”

A ripple of agreement passed through the crowd.

“We have a lot of ground to cover,” the Chief Superintendent continued, and Conny thought she heard in his voice an echo of the sentiment she had detected in the eyes of the Lieutenant who had armed her. A wavering uncertainty. “You will divide equally between the Northern Line and the Victoria Line, and you’ll split further to cover the northbound and southbound tunnels. There are already armed response teams waiting on each platform, and they are the tip of the spear, understand?”

The gathered crowd mumbled its acknowledgment of the order. Porter sucked in a lungful of air and continued.

“When the tunnels split, you will divide into groups of
no fewer
than seven. If you see anything that looks like a device—
anything—
you are to inform either your immediate CO or myself, and we all fall back and wait for the bomb squad. Your radios won’t work once we’re inside the tunnels, but these,”—he held up an oddly cheerful-looking walkie-talkie—”will give us limited range. We don’t have enough for every one of you, but I want each group to be carrying at least three. I expect constant radio contact, and I mean
constant
. I can’t stress this enough: if any of you deviate from these orders in any way, I’ll have your arse in front of an inquiry before you can say
sacked
. I expect you all to come back here without a scratch on you, now do I make myself fucking clear?”