the contented gurgles of Mia as she lies on sofa cushions, her little sounds muffled by my hood. I count off another sixty seconds in my head, my whole body shaking with adrenaline and fear, closing my eyes and straining every sense to hear another step, an echo, any noise to suggest he is still close by. Every instinct screaming the same thing: Go. Get out.
My hands are taped tightly behind me, low against the back of the chair so it is agonizingly painful to raise myself up to a standing position. Painful, but not impossible. My thighs burning, my shoulders feeling like they might pop out of their sockets, I raise myself up inch by inch until I can roll my body forward and slip my hands over the top of the chair to stand up properly. Breathing hard with exertion inside the hood, the dizziness comes on quickly. Don’t pass out. I bend at the waist, shaking my head from side to side until the hood comes off and falls to the floor. I pull in a deep lungful of breath, then another, while my eyes find Mia. The baby is cooing to herself contentedly on the sofa, the corner of a muslin cloth clamped in her mouth. I run to her, look her over. She seems OK.
A memory pulses through me. An image as familiar as my own face: the scorching heat of a silent day, drifting smoke, the acrid stink of burning diesel, vultures circling on thermals high above. Broken bodies lying in the desert sand.
Get her out of here.
There is a connecting door through to a small kitchen at the far end of the room. I rush over to it, my shoeless feet almost silent on the rough industrial carpet, and begin awkwardly pulling open drawers with my hands still taped behind me. Old plastic cutlery, brown-stained teaspoons, plastic straws. Nothing with a blade. But there is a row of old glass jars lined up behind the sink, lidless and clouded with age. In the other corner is a broomstick, cobwebbed to the wall. I back up to it and reach for it blindly, grasping it awkwardly in both hands. Holding it up behind me I swing it against the glass jars and in one quick motion sweep them all off the worktop, a succession of smashes – pop pop pop – as they shatter on the tiled floor around my feet. The sound is horribly loud in the silence and I freeze for a second, leaning towards the hallway, straining to hear any noise in response. Nothing. I kneel, feeling behind me for the biggest, sharpest piece of broken glass, holding it up and sawing against the duct tape that binds my wrists together.
My arms and wrists burn with the effort. Come on, come on. This is taking too long. I shift position, a shard of broken glass stabbing into the sole of my stockinged foot. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I keep sawing at the tape until I feel the first strand start to give, then the next and the next, until finally I can pull my wrists apart, the black tape still clinging to my skin. I kick more shards of glass into the corner as I go back into the conference room. I hop over to the nearest chair, stabbing pains arcing up my leg, and pull out a piece of broken glass embedded in the ball of my left foot, wiping a smear of blood against my sleeve.
One entire wall of the conference room is taken up with a series of floor to ceiling windows, with a sliding glass door in the centre that leads out onto a balcony overlooking the empty car park. The latch on the metal-framed glass door is broken, the lever snapped off. I haul on the door and feel a fresh surge of urgency as it slides noisily open on its rusted track. Just a few inches. I lean into it and haul again with a grunt of effort, pulling the door open a full foot. It’s enough. Outside the air is cleaner, sharp and cold, the light fading fast. The balcony is functional, rust and dirt and drifts of rotting leaves, a waist-high metal barrier around the edge. We’re on the second floor, twenty feet above the car park and there’s no fire escape – but there is a drainpipe, with supporting brackets holding it to the wall every few feet. I test