The Overlooker (26 page)

‘And, God forgive me, I didn't believe him,' the Baptist minister cried. ‘I thought he was delusional. Well, he is, in one way. As if God needed any of us to bring about Armageddon and the end of the world!' He rounded on Dominic. ‘I keep trying to tell you. God
loves
this world. You, me, the smallest seahorse in the ocean, Al-Qaeda, and . . . the Lord protect her . . . poor Suzie Fewings. God wants to hold his creation in the hollow of his hand. But
you
want to annihilate us. If you imagine that you're a servant of God, you couldn't be more wrong.'

‘Read your Bible, padre!
They called to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of the Lord.”
'

‘A dream of the end time. Glorious symbolism. Not a scientific blueprint. First-century Christians didn't think in those terms. You're a million miles away from their mindset.'

‘Listen to him!' Dominic's brown eyes flared behind his glasses. ‘He doesn't even believe the Bible he's supposed to preach. But it's
you
I'm getting impatient with.' He glared at Nick. ‘
Where are the police
?'

The question had been nagging at the back of Nick's mind. The moment he realized where Suzie must be, he had leaped into his car to find her. Tom's reading of the notes jotted on that piece of paper had scared him into believing he must get to her and release her before the madman could set off his bomb. A saner part of his mind had always known that, even if the police didn't manage to stop him, they would come racing after him. He had hardly expected to get inside the mill before the sound of police sirens came blaring in his wake. He had left Millie outside, believing she would be safe with them.

But the dusk outside was silent.

Tom spoke quietly behind him. ‘I gave them that piece of paper. Did you know you'd dropped it?' He directed the question at Dominic. ‘When you found Dad's business card on the floor? You'd jotted down a whole list of things. Caesium-137, TNT, and a load of other stuff. You don't need to have a Nobel Prize in chemistry to work out what it was for. So the police aren't taking any chances, are they? They won't put their guys in danger until they come equipped to deal with a radioactive bomb. Which reminds me. If you're making it in that room behind you, you don't seem to be taking any precautions yourself.'

Dominic's lips stretched in a mirthless smile. ‘I'm a Servant of Armageddon. Do you think I care what happens to me on this wicked earth? Or to any of you despicable little people? When the great day comes, the Lord will transport his own to heavenly glory and leave the rest of you in this stupid world to fight yourselves to death. When I press the switch, I'm going to take as many of you with me as I can. But
you'll
be going to eternal fire.'

‘Just tell me first,' Tom said quietly, ‘where's my mother?'

‘Over here, you morons,' came a distant voice from the far end of the weaving shed. ‘Did neither of you think to bring the torch from the car?'

‘Millie!' cried Nick. He sprang towards the far-off circle of light throwing gigantic shadows among the looms.

N
ick raced across the floor towards his wife and daughter. He sensed as much as glimpsed the gaps between the machines. Two or three rows over he could see Suzie now, caught in the small circle of torchlight. His heart constricted with fear.

She was lying prostrate under one of the looms. Even before he reached her, he was almost sure she was bound and gagged.

He remembered keenly what it had felt like to crawl under a loom. The sense of claustrophobia. The weight of all that machinery so close above his head. It had been all too easy to imagine it springing into terrible life. The darting shuttles. The spinning leather belts. The pounding metalwork. Horrible to think of a piece of his clothing or a strand of his hair becoming entangled with that relentless dance, leaving him maimed or scalped.

This was the fear that generations of Fewings and Bootles had felt before him, when they entered the mill as children. A fear they masked by their quick tongues and ready humour.

He could understand why Millie had refused to crawl under the machine.

The weaving machinery was disused and silent now. It would stay like that, wouldn't it? There was no real danger to Suzie.

Then he remembered the footprints in the dust. The evidence that one, at least, of the looms had been cleaned and greased, the leather belt connected, ready to operate.

Was it that one?

He cast a desperate look over his shoulder. Tom was racing after him. He had lost sight of the larger figure of the Reverend Redfern. Dominic was hidden from him by the rows of looms. Nick only knew where he was by the rectangle of light coming from the room he used as his workshop.

‘Stay where you are!' the curiously hoarse voice thundered down the echoing room.

Nick paused. There was authority in that voice, young as it was.

‘Nobody move until our friends from the constabulary arrive. The City of London this may not be, but since you've forced me to show my hand before I was ready, I'm going to take as many of you with me as I can. And that includes our much-vaunted forces of law and order. The principalities and powers of the Devil.'

‘Dominic!' pleaded Harry Redfern's voice. ‘You don't have to do this.'

‘Oh, yes I do.
From his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword.
Terrorist! That's what they'll call me, isn't it? Well, I'll show them terror.'

He's going to detonate that bomb
. The full impact of that realization struck Nick. How much TNT was on that bench? How big an explosion in this confined space? How much radioactive caesium would it release? He had to get the others out.

He flung himself towards Millie's guiding light.

‘I said STOP!' the voice from the other end of the weaving shed roared. ‘One step further and I set these looms going. Think what will happen to your pretty wife then.'

Nick froze.

He heard Millie's desperate cry. ‘Lie still, Mum! It's all right as long you don't move.'

Behind him, Nick heard a sudden commotion. He whirled round. Tom was no longer behind him. From the sounds, Nick knew that he was hurling himself back towards the bomb maker. He thought Harry Redfern might be doing the same. Dominic let out a cry of rage.

Fear raced through Nick's mind. There would be no antique steam boiler here needing to get up pressure, like the one in Thorncliffe Mill. No waterwheel to set turning, like Belldale. This mill had long ago been converted to electricity. And Dominic had somehow managed to reconnect the supply. Where was the switch that would set this whole weaving shed in motion?

He heard Tom's wail of failure.

Instantly, the world around him sprang into hideous life. The noise was shattering. The leather belts that connected each loom began their macabre dance above him. Heddles lifted and crashed. Empty shuttles clattered across the space where the warp threads should have been, too fast to follow. Metal parts ground up and down.

And Suzie was underneath one of them.

Nothing could stop him now from flying forward to where that circle of light shone. He was almost on them before he caught a glimpse of Millie's pale face, dimly visible above the brighter light of the torch she held.

She was directing it steadily on the bound and helpless figure of Suzie. Dominic's prisoner was half obscured by the flying mechanism of the loom that trapped her. Her mouth was taped shut. Her hands were bound beneath her back. Her hazel eyes were wide and terrified.

Nick threw himself on to his knees beside her.

‘Hold still. We'll get you out.'

He did not know whether she could hear him over the thunder of the loom above her head.

The torchlight was beginning to waver in Millie's hand. Nick reached up and grasped her wrist. The girl was trembling now.

‘You've done a great job,' he shouted above the clacking of the looms. ‘We'll get her free.'

He fervently prayed it was true. Above the din he could no longer hear what was happening at the other end of the room.

There was a report like a pistol shot. Something whipped through the air, just missing Millie's head. She screamed and ducked down to where Nick was kneeling beside the imprisoned Suzie.

‘Has he got a gun?' she yelled.

The loom next to them had fallen silent. Suddenly Nick knew what had happened. One of the leather belts that criss-crossed the space above the looms had snapped. The leather must be old and dry. The whiplash of a belt breaking under power could kill anyone standing in its way.

There were other ominous sounds. A grinding of metal parts. A screeching, and then another loom silenced. Mad Dominic had not just been using the old mill to construct his bomb. In the intervals as he assembled its deadly ingredients, he must have been using his technological skills to get at least some of the looms working. But there must be over a hundred of them. He could not have serviced them all. Nick remembered the dust thick around most of them. And any one of them could fail suddenly, resulting in a flying belt or sheared-off metal.

‘Keep down!' he shouted to Millie. ‘It's not a gun, but it could be lethal.'

He tried to reassure Suzie, above the clatter of the heddle overhead. ‘Lie absolutely still. I'm going to try to slide you out.'

It was far more terrifying than lying under the machine himself. Millie was trying to keep the torch steady. But Nick himself felt confused by the constant coming and going of the flying machinery. He knew it was possible to get under a working loom and out again. Children in his family had done it every day.

But Suzie was an adult. That much bigger. Bound and unable to help herself. It was his responsibility.

He took hold of her ankles. They seemed to be strapped together with insulating tape. Slowly, steadily, his heart in his mouth, he began to pull.

Suddenly, the deafening racket ceased. The wild dance of machinery just above Suzie's head clattered to a stop. Nick's head shot up.

Away from the torchlight, it was hard to see anything in the gloom. But something was different. The memory of sound echoed in his mind. A door banging.

Then he knew what it was. The rectangle of light from Dominic's laboratory had vanished. He had slammed the door.

Tom's voice rang anxiously down the weaving shed. ‘Dad! Is Mum all right?'

‘I think so.' It was hard to find the strength to shout, even though the looms had fallen silent.

The light of Millie's torch was fading. ‘Oh, sugar! The battery's going,' she wailed.

‘I need a knife to cut her free.' Nick had drawn Suzie's helpless body half out from under the loom. Her wrists were taped too.

‘If you'd told me I'd need my handbag, I'd have had a pair of scissors,' Millie retorted. ‘Hang on. There was some broken glass under the windows.'

He saw the ghost of her blonde hair in the twilight that still lingered in front of the tall windows on the canal side.

She was quickly back. Carefully, he took the broken shard she held out.

Running footsteps were coming towards them. Nick tensed. Tom swore as he bumped into a machine in his efforts to find them.

‘Where are you?'

‘Here!' called Millie.

The torch sputtered into life and died again.

Then two darker shadows were standing over them. Tom and Harry Redfern. Both were panting, from more than the exertion of running across the crowded floor.

‘We tried to tackle him,' Tom gasped. ‘But he broke away from us. He's locked himself into his lab.'

The Reverend Redfern's deeper voice cut in. ‘I'm terribly afraid that can only mean one thing. The boy's obsessed with bringing about the final battle. He claims to belong to a group that call themselves the Servants of Armageddon. They're trying to precipitate the end of the world.'

‘And he's at least halfway to making his dirty bomb . . . Is she OK? Can she run?' Tom's question this time was urgent.

There was a little scream as Nick tore off the tape that had closed Suzie's lips.

‘I can now.'

She started to scramble to her feet, and cried out as limbs immobilized for hours began to take her weight. Nick leaped to support her tottering figure.

She gasped a shaky laugh. ‘I'll be OK. Just let me get everything working.'

‘No time to wait,' Tom ordered breathlessly. ‘If this guy's right, Dominic's going to set off his bomb any second now.'

‘Except,' Harry Redfern said, ‘he seems remarkably keen to wait for the police.'

‘He wants a captive audience,' Suzie sighed. ‘That's what he's been saying. To take as many of us with him as he can. The police. Television cameras. He wants to make national headlines.'

As if on cue, there was the distant sound of sirens, approaching fast. Lights swept past the windows on the side away from the canal. Seconds later, more illuminated the other wall of windows. The Fewings and Harry Redfern were caught in the middle. A group of shadowy figures on the weaving floor where the lights could not yet reach.

A voice with a loudspeaker echoed from outside.

‘Dominic! This is the police. Let Mrs Fewings go. Then come out quietly, with your hands above your head.'

Thinly, they heard a voice cry from the window of the room at the end of the mill.

‘
The beast that ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies shall lie in the street.
'

‘We've got to get out!' Tom exclaimed. ‘Now!'

T
om ran past the others to one of the windows overlooking the canal. His tall figure was caught in the glare of the floodlights. Nick heard the crash as his son shoulder-charged the window. He could only hope that the covering grille had given way.