Dominic's POV
"Seven forty-one," says Serena, in my ear.
Her voice is perfectly flat. It's the voice of a woman reading a number off a gauge. It goes through me like a wire.
"Seven forty."
"Serena..."
"Seven thirty-nine. Dom, don't come in by the door. It's wired."
"I know."
"The shutter's down. I can't reach the cooler from the slip side. It's on the bench, and Tessa's next to it, and the trapdoor's right under..." She breaks off. "Dom. The trapdoor."
I look at Caleb.
He's already staring at me, wide-eyed, with the water streaming off his beard.
"The workbench," he whispers. "The cold store. The bolts are on our side."
"Marcus."
"I heard." Marcus doesn't look up from the little iron door. He's got a roll of copper tape in his teeth, a pair of crocodile clips in one hand, and the flat grey box in the other. "I need ninety seconds."
"You've got sixty."
"Then I'll be quick."
I've seen him fight. I've seen him take a man's knife off him in a Hong Kong elevator. I have never, in eleven years, seen anything so beautiful as Marcus Bell with his tongue between his teeth, bent over a bomb in the dark.
He was Secret Service for fifteen years. Counter-sabotage. It's a thing he never talks about, except once, at four in the morning, in a hospital corridor, when he said: You learn to be calm. It's all you can do. Be the calmest thing in the room.
He's calm now.
"Seven minutes," says Serena. "Dom, I can see it. I can see the wires. There's a blue one and a red one and a yellow. The display is..."
"Don't touch it."
"I'm not touching it."
"Stay by the shutter."
"I'm sitting on the floor with my hands flat." A short, cracked laugh. "I'm being extremely good."
"Six forty-five," says Torres, in the other ear. Her voice is rough. "We can't move. Every unit's pinned. He's got thermal on the whole ridge."
"Understood."
"Hale, I want you to know..."
"Not now, Torres."
"Right."
Marcus lets out a breath.
"Clip," he says.
I hand it over.
He fits it, with the delicacy of a man threading a needle, across two points on the little circuit board. There's a faint spit of blue. The green LED flickers, once, and holds.
"I've bridged it," he says. "It thinks the door's still closed. We've got a hole of about four minutes before the voltage drops and it notices."
"Four."
"Open it."
Caleb and I take the iron pin.
It's rusted solid. We heave, together, with our shoulders against the stone, and it shrieks, a long iron groan, and the door swings out.
A smell comes out of the dark. Salt and old wine, and lobster pots, and cold. The Smugglers' Hole.
I go in first.
It's a low black cave, hardly high enough to stand in, half full of seawater. My boots find the stone shelf. I wade forward on my hands and knees, with a flashlight in my teeth, and the rock scrapes my shoulders. Behind me I hear Caleb gasping, swearing, steadying himself.
"Five forty," says Serena.
"Coming."
"Dom, I can hear you."
"Good."
"You're under the floor."
"I know."
"Just hurry."
There's the ladder. Rusted, iron, six rungs, set into the wall of the vault. I go up it in four jumps, with my ribs shrieking, and put my shoulder against the trapdoor.
It doesn't move.
"The bolt!" yells Caleb. "Left side! It slides!"
I find it.
I wrench.
It gives.
The trapdoor flies up, and light blazes down, yellow and warm, and I come up through the floor of the boathouse like a man surfacing from deep water.
She's there.
She's sitting on the boards a yard away, with her back against the shutter and her knees drawn up and her hair in wet strings round her face. She looks at me.
She doesn't say anything.
Her eyes go over me, once, from head to foot, like a woman counting.
Then she smiles.
"You're soaking," says my wife.
"It's a little damp."
"Four fifteen."
"I know."
"Marcus!" bellows Caleb, from below.
"Coming!"
He comes up through the hole like a seal, streaming, with his bag over his shoulder, and goes straight to the workbench. I don't see what happens next. I'm cutting Tessa's tape with my pocketknife. Her wrist, inside it, is bleeding where the plastic's bitten. I slit the ties on her ankles. She comes up out of the chair like a spring and grabs me round the neck and bursts into tears.
"Sorry," she sobs. "Sorry. Sorry."
"It's all right."
"Sorry."
"Tessa. Go."
"Rena..."
"Go," says Serena. "Down the hole. Now."
"Three forty," says Marcus.
His voice is quite unchanged. He's bent over the cooler, a foot from the foam, with a pencil flashlight in his mouth and a pair of tiny snips in his fingers. His lips move as he talks, very quietly, almost to himself.
"Blue. Red. Yellow. It's Mercer's pattern. Red is the trigger, blue is the ground. Yellow's the decoy. He put it in so a man would cut the wrong one." A pause. "Except there's a fourth."
"A fourth?"
"A green. Under the foam. Wrapped round the base." He swallows. "It's an anti-tamper. If the box is tilted or lifted, it goes."
"Can you cut it?"
"I can't see it."
"Marcus..."
"I'd have to take out the foam."
"Then take it out!"
"If I move the foam, I might move the box."
"Two minutes thirty."
Vance has made a sound.
I'd forgotten him. He's still tied to his chair, slumped sideways, with his grey hair plastered to his forehead. He lifts his head.
"Cut me loose," he whispers.
I stare.
"For God's sake. Please. I'll tell you where..."
"Shut up."
"There's a key..."
Caleb's up through the trapdoor. He doesn't speak. He just crosses the floor in three strides, kneels beside Edmund Vance, and cuts the tape from his wrists with a single slash of a fishing knife.
"Cal," I say.
"He's a witness." Caleb's face is grey. "He's a witness, and I want him alive."
"One fifty," says Marcus.
I turn.
I see the display. Red digits in the dimness, glowing, flicking. 01:48.
"Everybody out," says Marcus quietly.
"Marcus."
"Get everyone out."
"I'm not leaving you."
"That's an order."
"I don't take orders from you. I pay you."
"Boss." He doesn't look up. A bead of sweat rolls down his nose and drops onto the foam. "I've got one go. If I'm right, we all live. If I'm wrong, only one of us dies. That's good odds."
"No."
"Dom."
"No."
Serena has come up beside me.
She kneels at the bench, close to the cooler, and without a word she lays her palm flat on the top of the foam. Her fingers spread, wide and steady, over the thin white stuff.
"Hold it down," she says.
"What?"
"The foam." Her voice is level. "I restore paintings, Marcus. I spend my life holding fragile things so that they don't move. I'll hold it. You find the wire."
He looks up.
I watch the two of them look at each other, across a silver box, in a warm gold room with a minute and thirty seconds left to live.
"Ma'am..."
"I've got very steady hands."
He nods.
He lowers his snips.
His eyes close. His breath goes out. He slides the point, a millimetre at a time, along the edge of the foam, into the dark.
"Fifty seconds," says Torres.
"Dom," says Serena, without turning. "If this doesn't work."
"It will."
"If it doesn't..."
"It will."
"Whatever the water does."
"We'll still be here."
"Thirty."
"I've got it," says Marcus.
"Twenty."
"Snip."
There's a tiny, bright, plastic sound.
Silence.
I stare at the display.
00:09.
It doesn't change.
00:09.
00:09.
Nobody breathes.
Somewhere in the walls, the sea sighs. A lamp swings. A drop of water falls from my hair onto the boards, with a small clear sound like a coin.
00:09.
Serena lets out a long, shuddering breath.
"Nine seconds," she says, in a tiny voice. "Marcus. You cut it fine."
"It's what I do."
She starts to laugh.
She laughs and laughs, with her palm still pressed against the foam and her head down, laughing and crying together, until Tessa's arm is round her, and Caleb's, and mine. And Marcus Bell, who has never in his life shown a feeling in public, sits back on his heels, wipes his face with the back of his wrist, and says in a perfectly steady voice: "Somebody ought to tell Torres."
"I've got it," says Torres, in all our ears, cracked and dry and shaken. "Brandt's boat has cleared the point. He's heading east. He's got a sailboat waiting at the Isle au Haut mooring. If he makes it..."
Serena has already stood up.
"Abel," she says. "Start the engine."