The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(45)
Dr. Basu stared at him and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She’d found that this tactic made men, in particular, uncomfortable. Sure enough, he started to fidget, and Dr. Basu decided to speak. “Is not the whole point of your having an earthquake warning system so that you can be warned if there are earthquakes? And is it not correct that you would like this system to be working properly?”
“That’s correct, but—”
She cut him off again. She took great pleasure in doing that to men like this who didn’t want to take her seriously. “Then we need to get down to the sensor to see if we can understand why we are getting these readings.” Dr. Basu brushed past him. The man started to speak but then decided to just keep pace with her. She smiled to herself.
She was sweating too much to be comfortable, and they might not get an answer, but at least this area seemed to be where the activity was the highest. She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped her forehead. She stopped in front of a large iron door.
“Open it,” she said.
The man hesitated. “I can open this one, but I don’t have the codes for the next two.”
“But you brought our associate down there yesterday.”
“Yes. Well, no, not exactly. Not me personally. I am the supervisor, after all. I sent one of the maintenance men down with your man.”
Faiz leaned against the wall. “What’s with all the doors?”
The man punched a series of numbers into the electronic keypad. “Water protection. For flooding. The doors are watertight, and they are set up in a series like on a boat or submarine. If one is breached, the next is designed to hold everything out. And if we know the water is coming, we can shut everything down, close the doors, and wait. Once the worst is over, we pump it out and are back up and running in just a few days. You only open one at a time, pass through, close it behind you, and then open the next. Like an air lock.”
He opened the door and ushered them through. He had to push hard to get the door to open. It was maintained well, but the tolerances had to be tight, Dr. Basu thought, if they were meant to hold out water. The man closed the door behind them. The bolts shot home with a loud clank. The light in the hallway was fluorescent and shaky. Dr. Basu pulled a bottle of water from her purse. She unscrewed the cap and was about to take a sip when the ground shook and she stumbled a little. She spilled water on her blouse.
“Did you . . . ?” Faiz let his voice trail off.
“Yes,” Dr. Basu said. “That was a big one.” Ahead of them was another door that looked exactly like the one behind them.
She looked at the Delhi Metro man. “Get the codes. We’re going to need to open all the doors.”
Stornoway, Isle of Lewis,
Outer Hebrides, Scotland
The plane was late. It was bad enough that Aonghas Càidh saw his girlfriend only every two weeks, but usually he was the one flying to her. Somehow it felt harder to have to wait for her plane from Edinburgh than it did to wait when his own plane was delayed.
It could have been worse, he supposed. He wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to end up dating somebody like Thuy in the first place. He wasn’t a bad bloke. He was smart enough to make a decent living—he’d taken over the writing of his grandfather’s potboiler detective novels, a very successful series that had been in print for more than fifty years and seemed like it still had steam as long as Aonghas didn’t make a bollocks of it—and he was generally considered good company. He was funny and had a lot of stories to tell, most of them involving being raised by his grandfather in the old castle on Càidh Island, their family castle and family island with their family name, an otherwise unpopulated rock in Loch Ròg, on the west side of the isle in the remote Outer Hebrides. His stories of being six and motoring from Càidh Island across storm-whipped waters so he could get to the Carloway Primary School—he was one of fewer than forty students on the rolls—or the time his grandfather knocked himself unconscious in the cellar and Aonghas had to wait two hours for him to come around, made him seem like an exotic creature to his friends.
Aonghas was in his early thirties, and until he met Thuy, he’d been the only one of his friends who wasn’t in a stable, committed relationship, despite their repeated attempts to set him up. Sure, he was a little plush around the belly, but he had the kind of big frame that carried it well; if he’d been a little less lazy, he would have done well out on the fishing boats. He had an easy way of talking, and women seemed to like him. But he really couldn’t believe Thuy was his girlfriend. She was athletic, gorgeous, and smart as hell: she’d just missed qualifying for the Olympics in the two hundred-meter freestyle, and had worked for a couple of years as a model before deciding to go to medical school. She was also unbelievably nice and thoughtful, the kind of woman who spent her free time volunteering at animal shelters and never passed a homeless person without dropping some money in their cup. All that, and she liked to cook. He was pretty sure it was a miracle she was his girlfriend. He knew the truth, which was that not being a bad bloke wasn’t really enough to justify having a woman like Thuy fall in love with him. Still, who was he to question the vagaries of the human heart? Or, as his grandfather had put it: “Don’t be such an ass. If the lass loves you, she loves you. Take what little gifts this life has to offer.”