Taylor immediately reached for it.

‘Which one,’ she asked urgently, holding up the bunch of keys.

Lucien leaned forward and squinted at them for a second. ‘The sixth one starting from your left.’

Taylor selected the key and reached for the padlock.

Hunter and Lucien waited, and as they did, Hunter’s awkward sensation that something wasn’t quite right came back to him. He looked around him for an instant.

‘What’s at the back of the house?’ he asked.

Lucien studied him for a moment, and then let his gaze move toward the far end of the house.

‘A very badly treated backyard,’ he replied. ‘There’s a large pond as well, which now looks more like a deep pool of mud. Would you like me to give you a tour? I have all the time in the world.’

Click. The padlock came undone. Taylor unhooked it from the doors and threw it away before grabbing one of the handles and pulling it toward her. The door barely moved.

‘Heavy, aren’t they?’ Lucien commented with a smirk. ‘As I’ve said, this isn’t a regular cellar, Agent Taylor. It’s a fallout shelter.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Hunter said.

Taylor stepped back while Hunter first pulled the right door open, then the left one.

They were immediately hit by a breath of warm, stale air. The doors revealed a concrete staircase that took them down a lot deeper than one would’ve imagined. There were at least thirty to forty steps.

‘Deep, isn’t it?’ Lucien said. ‘It’s a well-built shelter.’

Hunter went down first, and they all moved down in a hurry.

At the bottom, they were greeted by another heavy metal door with a very sturdy lock.

‘The seventh key,’ Lucien announced, ‘the one to the right of the one you used on the padlock.’

Taylor moved forward and unlocked the door before pushing it open.

The air inside the dark room beyond it was leaden with dust, and felt even staler, but there was something else in the air, something that both Hunter and Taylor could easily recognize because they’d been around it too many times.

The smell of death.

Ninety-Five

Sometimes sour, sometimes putrid, sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes nauseating, and most of the time a combination of everything. No one can tell you what death really smells like. Most would say that there’s no specific smell to it, but anyone who’s been around it as many times as Hunter and Taylor had been would recognize in just a fraction of a second, because as soon as you smell it, it chokes your heart and saddens your soul in a way that nothing else does.

As they sensed death, Hunter and Taylor were filled with a disquieting fear, and the same thought exploded inside both of their heads.

We’ve wasted too much time. We’re too late.

Hunter shone the beam of his flashlight into the room and moved it around the place almost frantically.

It was empty.

There was no one there.

Lucien took a healthy deep breath, like a hungry man taking in the aroma of freshly cooked food.

‘Wow, I’ve missed this smell.’

‘Madeleine?’ Taylor called into the room, her gaze chasing after the beam of the flashlight. ‘Madeleine?’

‘It would’ve been very stupid of me if I had left Madeleine locked inside the very first room one comes to in the shelter, wouldn’t it?’ A cryptic smile graced Lucien’s lips.

‘Where is she?’ Taylor asked.

‘There’s a light switch on the wall to the right of the door,’ Lucien told them.

Hunter reached for it.

A feeble yellowish bulb at the center of the ceiling flickered a couple of times, as if in doubt whether it would come on or not. It finally did, and it brought with it an electronic hiss that echoed annoyingly around the room.

They found themselves in a semi-bare room, twenty feet square. Two of the thick, solid concrete walls were adorned by a few handmade bookshelves, all of them loaded with books that were covered by a thick layer of dust. The wall to the left of where they stood had a single steel door set right in the center of it. The door had a dappled gunmetal look to its surface, as though it were meant to draw the eye. Against the wall directly in front of them was a console desk that must’ve been at least fifty or sixty years old, where a multitude of buttons, switches, levers and old-fashioned dial gauges could be found. A switched-off computer monitor hung on the wall just above the console desk. This was definitely the shelter’s main control room.

The floor was simple polished concrete. A plethora of metal and PVC pipes of different diameters crisscrossed the ceiling in all directions, disappearing through the walls. A couple of medium-sized square cardboard and wooden boxes were piled up one on top of the other in one corner of the room. They looked to be supplies.

Hunter’s eyes began searching the room.

How many victims has Lucien tortured and killed locked away in this hellhole, he thought.

‘Madeleine is through that door,’ Lucien said. ‘I suggest you hurry.’

‘Which key?’ Taylor asked, holding the keychain up to Lucien once again.

‘Second to last key on your right.’

Taylor holstered her weapon and moved purposefully toward the gunmetal door. Lucien and Hunter followed and the formation inverted: Hunter took the rear, three steps behind Lucien.

Taylor slotted the key into the door lock and twisted it left. With two loud clicks, the lock chamber rotated 360 degrees once, then twice.

Taylor’s heart picked up speed inside her chest as she turned the handle and began pushing the door open.

Police instincts, hyper-sensitivity, training and experience, psychic ability, whatever it is that one has in these situations, Hunter and Taylor both sensed it at the same moment – a new life, a new presence, as if unlocking the door had given the cue for their cop’s intuition to kick in.

Once again, an identical thought crossed both of their minds: Maybe we’re not too late. There’s still hope.

But that hope vanished fast, because that new life, that presence they’d sensed, wasn’t past the door ahead of them. It was behind them.

Ninety-Six

Click.

They felt the new presence, but before Hunter or Taylor had a chance turn around, they heard the sound of a bullet being chambered into a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

‘If any of you two fuckheads move, I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Is that clear?’ The voice that came from the opposite end of the room was sharp, firm and young. ‘Now get your goddamn hands up above your heads.’

Hunter tried to identify the specific direction where the voice was coming from. He was positive that the bullet chambering sound, together with the first few spoken words, had come from the general direction where the piled-up boxes were – probably the perpetrator’s hiding place, but there was barely enough space behind them for a midget to hide. His next sentence, though, had come from a different direction all together, which meant he was moving, but the reverberation inside the room coupled with the incessant light-bulb hiss made pinpointing the perpetrator’s exact location an almost impossible task.

Hunter was pretty sure that he could spin around and squeeze out a shot before the perpetrator realized what was happening, but that would only work if he knew exactly where to place the shot. Guessing wouldn’t cut it – if he missed, he’d be a dead man. He decided not to risk it.

‘Did you all fucking hear me or what?’ the young voice said again, but this time with a much more disturbed edge to it. ‘Hands above your heads.’