Читать книгу Jimmy Coates: Power - Joe Craig - Страница 10

The metal shutter slammed down on to the concrete, cutting off the last sliver of daylight and sealing Jimmy in the car park. Strip lights cast soft shadows around the rows of cars, lined up between huge supporting pillars. Jimmy stood up and dusted himself off, but the first thing he saw made him feel like his knees would give way.

Next to the entrance was the security attendant’s booth. A cup of tea was perched on the ledge inside, still steaming. But the only thing left of the attendant was an explosion of blood and brains on the back wall.

Jimmy staggered back from the booth, clutching at his mouth and nose, as if he could block out the stench of fresh blood. After a second his insides swirled with the force of his programming. It gushed up through his body, blasting away the shock, but it was too late to stop Jimmy retching up the measly contents of his stomach.

Suddenly, the curiosity that had brought him here took on a fierce urgency. While a part of him wanted to curl up in the corner and catch his breath, he knew that wasn’t an option. Instead, Jimmy found the guard’s phone and walkie-talkie. Both had been smashed—presumably by the same man who had blasted the attendant’s head off.

He drove past me on that moped, Jimmy realised, the sickness rising up inside him again. I could have stopped him. He felt dizzy, but his programming seemed to crank up a gear. It was like a belt fastening a notch tighter inside his skin, pulling his thoughts into calm, emotionless order.

First he found the van. That wasn’t hard—it was parked in the central row, right next to one of the pillars. The rear doors were locked, but Jimmy jabbed his elbow into the catch. There was nothing he could do to help the attendant now, but if he was right about the van containing explosives he had to warn somebody.

He pulled the van doors open and saw that the vehicle was completely full of crates, stacked up three high and covered in a thick grey blanket. When he pulled back the corner of the blanket, he nearly threw up again at what he saw. There were dozens of crates and every single one was packed with slim glass tubes of a clear, jelly-like substance, all connected by a network of black wires. The whole van was one giant bomb.

Jimmy wanted to warn people. He thought of all the residents in the tower above him, of the children in the playground alongside the building. They all had to evacuate. But Jimmy’s feet wouldn’t run. Instead he remained rooted to the spot while his eyes darted around the contraption in front of him. He traced the lines of wire like he was following the map of a labyrinth, examining the piles, counting precious seconds. How long did he have before it blew up?

Come on, Jimmy told himself, feeling the sweat crawling down his neck. There’s no way you can defuse a bomb. There was no ticking clock, no red digits showing him a countdown. There certainly wasn’t anything that looked like an off switch, and all the wires were the same colour—black. Then he noticed the condensation on the glass tubes.

Of course, he thought. Nitro freezes at thirteen degrees. The chemical was usually a liquid, but Jimmy realised it had been cooled into a solid to make it easier to transport. At the same time, he knew that as nitroglycerin thawed, it became even more unstable.

The piles of crates in front of him seemed to change shape. In Jimmy’s imagination, some of them even became transparent. He could see exactly how this bomb was supposed to work.

To his horror, he felt a rush of pleasure. Something inside him was impressed by the artful construction of the bomb—thrilled even. It was built in such a way that it required only a single detonator. That would shoot a charge through the wires, setting off a chain reaction as it raised the temperature of each tube of nitroglycerin to melt them in a specific order. That delicately arranged chain reaction would multiply the size of the explosion a hundred times.

The beauty of it was that the bomb was virtually sabotage-proof. The detonator was nowhere to be seen —presumably hidden at the very centre of the pile of crates. Jimmy noticed tiny gold rings round the connections between the wires and the glass tubes. A second trigger mechanism, he realised. Any attempt to disconnect the wires or get to the detonator would set off the chain reaction early. That left no way of stopping it, and no way of predicting when it would explode, even with the expertise of an assassin inside him. Jimmy knew this bomb could blow up at any moment.

He ran back and heaved on the metal shutter at the entrance, gritting his teeth and straining every muscle from his neck to his calves. It wouldn’t budge. Jimmy fell back, panting. He didn’t understand it. In the past, he’d busted through reinforced walls at embassies and Secret Service facilities—why did a residential tower block need protection that was even stronger? He went to the attendant’s booth to find the controls. The desk was dripping with blood. Jimmy forced himself to wipe it away. Thick chunks of hot, quivering flesh came with it. But it was useless; the controls did nothing.

With a wild grunt of horror, Jimmy threw himself at the metal shutter once more. He kicked at it and wiped his hands all over it, clawing madly until the grey was smeared with dark red, and shouting out for help. None came. When Jimmy finally stepped away, his chest was heaving and his mind was frantic. There had to be another way out.

He ran to the other side of the car park, to the door that led on to the stairwell that served the flats. Jimmy opened it with an impatient tug, but then had to stop dead. The doorway was blocked, floor to ceiling, by construction rubble.

Jimmy stared at the huge rocks and metal rods that barred his exit and kicked out. He managed to knock the corner off one of the rocks, but it only revealed another layer of rubble behind it. Jimmy knew he didn’t have enough time to claw his way out, even if that was possible. As a final attempt to attract the attention of the outside world, he punched his palm into the fire alarm. There were no bells, no sirens.

Jimmy’s rising anger mixed with a cold fear. His hands wanted to tremble, but his inner strength held them rigid. Who were the men who’d assembled the bomb and brought it here? Who were they working for? What was it about this particular tower block?

Jimmy closed his eyes for a second to settle himself, then strode back across the concrete towards the white van. As soon as he stood in front of the open van doors again, he sensed a change. The condensation on the glass tubes was disappearing. When Jimmy held his palms up towards the crates he could feel they were slightly warmer than before. That’s the detonating mechanism, Jimmy realised. He didn’t know whether he’d worked it out himself or if it was his programming. The line between the two was constantly blurring.

Now when he looked across the crates, he imagined he could see right to the heart, where he knew there must be a simple heating system. There was no need for a timer or remote signal because as soon as the heater reached a certain temperature, the explosives at the core would become unstable, setting off the chain reaction through the wires and blowing the entire tower block out of existence.

He desperately looked around him, thinking that perhaps if he could find enough water, dousing the crates would dampen the explosion. But in truth he had no idea whether water would have any effect, and there wasn’t any to be seen anyway.

The only liquid around was petrol—lots of it. Could Jimmy possibly use that to lessen the force of the explosion? It seemed crazy, but if he was right about how the bomb was designed…

Jimmy dashed back to the attendant’s booth and picked up the man’s blood-soaked newspaper. He took it to the van and held it against the driver’s window, then jabbed his elbow into it hard. He leaned in through the shattered glass to release the hand brake, then he walked to the front of the vehicle and, as carefully as he possibly could, he heaved on the bumper to pull it out of its bay. If this bomb was going to explode, Jimmy thought, he may as well use it to blast through the metal shutter.

It was difficult to move the van at first, and Jimmy didn’t want to pull too hard in case he rocked the thawing nitro, but he reasoned that if it had been stable enough to drive through the streets of London, tugging it a few more metres was worth the risk. He took the strain in his back and thighs, then jumped back to the driver’s door to push and steer at the same time. Eventually the van was right up against the metal shutter.

Jimmy wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. The van was giving off more heat now. He could feel it a metre away. It won’t hold much longer, Jimmy thought. Now came the harder part. Jimmy grabbed the mug of tea from the attendant’s booth. It was still steaming and spattered with blood. Jimmy smashed it against the wall and used the handle to prise open the van’s fuel cap.

By now, even the outside of the van was warm to the touch. Jimmy could feel it matched by the rising heat of his own fear. Even if his plan worked, he would only be able to reduce the power of the blast, not prevent it completely. That left a worrying question: Jimmy might stop the whole building collapsing, but how was he going to survive himself?

He went back to the front of the van and tore into the cushion of the driver’s seat, pulling out a whole spring and great fistfuls of wadding. He twisted the wadding tight around the spring, leaving a length of metal at the end for him to hold. When he finished he admired his creation: a huge, mouldy candyfloss stick that smelled of damp. Then he pushed the padding into the van’s fuel tank, feeding it down as far as he could, and held it there to soak up some diesel.

When he pulled it out a waft of fumes smacked him in the face. It combined with the scent of nitroglycerin already lining his nostrils and set off alarm bells in his head. Was this really a good idea? He gulped, gathered his courage and returned to the bomb.

Using his twist of seat-padding like a paintbrush, Jimmy carefully dabbed the wires with diesel. Despite his nerves, his hand was rock steady. When he leaned in to get to the wires towards the back, his cheek was millimetres from the glass tubes. The heat was much stronger now, making Jimmy sweat harder. Any second, the nitro could reach flashpoint—but Jimmy planned to give it a helping hand.

He dashed back to the attendant’s booth and quickly saw what he needed: hooked on to the security guard’s belt was a torch. Jimmy wiped the blood from the handle and unscrewed the plastic cap on the front of the flashlight as he ran across the car park.

Now he was a few metres away from the back of the van staring at the enormous bomb in front of him. What am I doing? he thought to himself desperately. I’ve covered a giant bomb in diesel. At the same time, his thumb clicked the torch on and off, itching to connect the bare filament with the diesel fumes. Jimmy could feel the battle raging inside him. His familiar, rational terror was obliterated by a wash of something else—something close to joy. His programming was thriving on the heat and the danger, relishing the chance to set off a massive explosion. Not just set it off, Jimmy reassured himself. Control it.

He knew that lighting the diesel would raise the temperature of the bomb by the critical few degrees needed to set off the blast. But in the seconds before that happened, the flames would burn through the wires, eliminating the delicately designed chain reaction. The crates of nitroglycerin would go up separately and randomly—not as one huge, coordinated eruption.

Finally, Jimmy brought the torch up to the seat stuffing soaked in diesel. He carefully clicked the torch and a spark lit a couple of strands of cotton at the very tip. Immediately, the fumes ignited and the whole twist of material became a flaming beacon.

He stared into the back of the van again. This time the flickering of his flame made the glass tubes seem to dance, as if they were excited about what Jimmy was about to do. This could be the biggest mistake of my life, Jimmy thought.

Just do it, he ordered himself. With that, he hurled the flame towards the bomb, twisted on his heels, and ran.