Whispers Under Ground

I’ve kayaked down a mountain stream – it was a school trip and I spent a lot of time underwater. As the guy at the front I was doing that again now – only the water wasn’t as clean. In the absolute black, Kumar’s glowstick didn’t do much more than texture the darkness and add to the sensation that we were hurtling out of control.
    ‘Oh great,’ I screamed. ‘Now we’re a bobsleigh team.’
    ‘It’s the luge,’ yelled Kumar. ‘It’s only a bobsleigh if you’ve got a bobsleigh.’
    ‘You two are insane,’ shouted Reynolds. ‘There’s no such thing as a triple luge.’
    Between duckings I glimpsed a patch of grey. I opened my mouth to yell ‘Daylight’ and then really wished I hadn’t when I got a mouthful of diluted sewage.
    It was another intersection. I saw an alcove with a ladder and lunged – only to be swept past, with my fingers centimetres from the metal. My foot hit something underwater hard enough to pitch me over and the world’s first-ever Anglo-American Olympic sewer luge team broke up.
    I slammed into another thing that was at least vertical and made of metal, and then something else caught hold of my ankle.
    ‘Are you holding onto me?’ I shouted.
    ‘Yes,’ gasped Reynolds. ‘And Kumar’s holding onto me.’
    ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because I think I’ve found a ladder.’

20
    Holland Park
    T he thing about absolute darkness is that you end up doing things very carefully, especially after the first time you nearly brain yourself on a concrete cross-beam. So when I reached the top of the ladder I felt around myself slowly – I had come up through another floor hatch, I thought. There were no lights visible in any direction.
    I made a werelight, which revealed a rectangular concrete room with a high ceiling and a shadowy doorway at the far end.
    ‘I can see a light,’ said Reynolds from below.
    ‘Just a moment,’ I said.
    I fixed the werelight to the ceiling with scindare in the hope that Reynolds would mistake it for a light fixture, and climbed out of the hatchway onto the gritty cement floor, freeing it up for her.
    ‘About time,’ said Reynolds.
    I reached down to help her up. She was shivering and her hands were freezing. She crawled clear of the hatchway and flopped over onto her back breathing heavily. Kumar followed her up, staggered a few steps, and sat down heavily.
    ‘A light,’ said Reynolds, staring at the ceiling. ‘Thank God.’
    We could still hear the water rushing away below us.
    I gingerly undid my coverall and felt my chest. The Metvest was still intact but there were three holes in the nylon covering. They were ragged with blackened edges – like cigarette burns. Something dropped from my chest and pinged off the cement floor. I picked it up – it was a pistol-calibre bullet.
    ‘That’s odd,’ said Reynolds, who’d sat up to take a look. She held out her hand and I dropped the bullet into it so she could examine it more closely. ‘Nine millimetre. It’s barely deformed at all. Are you sure this hit you?’
    I winced as I felt the bruises under the vest. ‘Pretty certain,’ I said.
    ‘This one must have gone through the water first,’ she said.
    I found it remarkably easy not to tell her that it was more likely that the bullet had been slowed by the magical force field I’d conjured up.
    ‘I don’t know what happened to the lamps,’ said Kumar. He’d detached his helmet lamp from its bracket and was prising off its back.
    ‘Maybe they’re not as waterproof as we thought they were,’ I said.
    Kumar frowned down at the lamp, but LEDs, like most solid-state technology, look the same whether they’re broken or not. ‘Never happened before,’ he said and gave me a suspicious look.
    I looked away and noticed that Reynolds was still shivering.
    ‘Are you cold?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m freezing,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you?’
    I explained that we were wearing wetsuits.
    ‘They didn’t have those at the embassy thrift store,’ she said. ‘I had to make do with Marine hand-me-downs.’
    I’d like to have asked what had brought her into the sewers in the first place, but her face had gone very pale. I’m not privy to the media policy directives of the Metropolitan Police, but I suspected that from a public relations standpoint a dead FBI agent would be way more embarrassing than a live one.
    ‘We need to find somewhere for you to dry off.’ I said. ‘Where’s your backup?
    ‘My what?’ she asked.
    ‘You’re an