Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,93

Understand?’

Lin nodded.

‘Then go.’

Lin and the other four agents raced away down the stairs. Choi turned on his heels and went the other way. He ran about a hundred metres, and then he, too, headed down into the depths of the earth.

72

* * *

THERE WAS A small landing at the bottom of the stairs, with a single, duck-egg blue door, which had a round glass porthole. Carver took a look through it, then pushed it open with his shoulder, glancing back up the stairwell as he did. The sound of scurrying footsteps was clearly audible, coming from above them. The Chinese were on their way.

Carver raised his gun to cover the stairs as he gestured for Alix to go through the door. He followed her into one of Wimbledon’s underground service tunnels. The door was positioned close to a right-angled bend, so that the tunnel ran away straight ahead of them and to the right. The concrete floor was shiny and slick from the constant passage of feet and wheels. The walls were made of bare breeze blocks. A couple of doors, painted in the same duck-egg blue, were set into the right-hand wall. The nearest one had a sign next to it that read, ‘Ball Boys and Girls’. The one beyond it displayed one word: ‘Pilates’.

On the left, two massive black pipes ran all along the bottom of the wall, with metal racks above them that were used to carry countless, loosely hung strands of multicoloured wire. A number of smaller red-painted pipes were suspended from the ceiling, along with yet more wires. They were all held in place by metal frames like horizontal ladders, from which hung a line of harsh white neon strip lights that ran as far as the eye could see.

‘Let’s go,’ said Carver, running down the tunnel up ahead.

Alix followed him, her heels clattering against the concrete floor. As they rounded a left-hand corner Carver gestured at her to stop and get to the side of the tunnel, just behind him. He took up a position by one of the pipes, wishing that Schultz were down in the tunnel with him, instead of sitting on a bench by Wimbledon Common. Give the two of them a couple of sub-machine guns and a bunch of grenades, and they’d have the Chinese sorted in no time. Doing it solo was a little more complicated.

Carver was as close as he could get to the angle of the corner, leaning slightly out into the tunnel to get a view of the door from the stairs. It opened and one of the Chinese stepped through it, holding his gun out in front of him. He stopped for a moment, saw no one else in the tunnel, and lowered his gun as he relaxed a fraction, and that was when Carver stepped out and fired the two shots that killed him.

Carver put another two rounds through the porthole to discourage the men waiting the other side, then immediately turned – and almost ran right into a squat, white, open buggy that was coming down the tunnel towards them. Thanks to its electric motor the buggy was virtually noiseless. In fact the loudest sound coming from it was the music seeping from the earphones of the skinny, acne-faced lad at the wheel. He seemed lost in what he was hearing, his attention long since dulled by the constant repetition of trips up and down the same stretch of tunnel. He barely registered Carver’s presence until he was two metres away, and then his dull working day suddenly got a whole lot more exciting. He slammed on the brakes and came to a halt within a few centimetres of Carver, who simply put a foot in front of the buggy, leaned forward, and used one hand to shove his gun in the young driver’s face, while the other ripped the earphones from his head.

‘Get out, now,’ said Carver. ‘That way.’

The driver nodded frantic agreement, then scrambled across the seat towards the wall where Alix was standing.

‘Now hold out your hands in front of you,’ Carver told him.

From round the corner came the sound of the door to the stairs being kicked open.

Carver pulled a pair of the yellow plastic handcuffs from his trouser pocket and gave them to Alix.

Now a voice could be heard barking out orders in Chinese.

Carver nodded at the wall and said, ‘Tie him to those racks.’

There were distant footsteps, getting fainter – men running down the tunnel in the