Hunter had also turned to see what lay beyond the door.

The corridor was long and narrow. The walls were made of solid concrete, just like the shelter’s control room. There were several doors on both sides of the hallway and one directly at the end of it. All of them in the same dappled gunmetal color as the one Taylor had just opened. They were all shut, with the exception of the one at the far end.

The light that propagated from the fluorescent tubes wasn’t strong enough to properly reach the last room, so all they got was a sort of hazy silhouette, but even so, Hunter and Taylor had no problem identifying the shape of a naked woman’s body. She was sitting on a chair. Her head was slumped forward awkwardly. Her hands looked to be tied behind her back, and she didn’t seem to be moving.

Taylor felt a nauseating shiver start right at the pit of her stomach.

‘Ghost,’ Lucien said, ‘the lights.’ He nodded at the control desk.

Still with his attention locked on Hunter and Taylor, Ghost took a couple of steps to his right and flicked a switch on the old-fashioned control console.

Inside the room at the far end of the corridor, another weak light bulb struggled to come to life for a few seconds before finally engaging. It bathed the room in a pale yellowish glow, and right then every muscle in Hunter’s body tensed.

Madeleine Reed wasn’t dead. On the contrary, she was pretty much alive, but compared to the picture they’d seen of her inside Director Kennedy’s office just hours before, she wasn’t even a shadow of the woman she used to be. Her weight had drastically plummeted. Her smooth skin looked like it had aged forty years in just a few months, and it now clung to her bones as if she were a terminal cancer patient. The dark circles under her eyes were so intense they looked like surgical bruises. The eyes themselves seemed to have sunk into her skull just a little, but enough to give her a cadaver’s appearance. Her lips were dry and chipped, and her body looked weak and extremely fragile.

As the light inside the room came on, Madeleine blinked desperately several times, her sad and confused eyes struggling with the brightness after who knows how many hours of darkness. Focus took a while, but when it finally came, her drained brain had to battle to understand the images in front of her. She slowly lifted her head, and the look on her face went from puzzled, to hopeful, and then to pleading, before at last settling on desperate. Her lips moved, but if any words did come out, their sound wasn’t strong enough to reach anyone at the other end of the hallway.

With the room now under its own light, Hunter and Taylor could finally see the entire picture.

Madeleine was indeed naked, her hands were surely tied to each other behind the chair’s backrest. Her feet were tied to the chair’s legs.

As her eyes at last registered people at the other end of the corridor, she started shaking. Her breathing came in little gasps, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room.

‘Madeleine,’ Hunter said, reading the first signs of acute panic on her. He knew she’d been conditioned. She’d been tortured and scared for so long that her immediate psychological response to seeing anyone down in that hellhole was to flood her body with terrifying fear. Right now, to her, everyone was a threat, because everyone she’d ever met down there had tortured her.

‘Listen to me, honey.’ Hunter’s voice was as calm and as warm as he could make it sound. ‘My name is Robert Hunter, and I’m with the FBI. We’re here to help you. Stay calm and we’ll get you out of here, OK?’

Hunter felt so useless saying those words. He wanted to go to Madeleine, free her hands and feet, get her out of that fallout shelter, and reassure her that she was safe, that the nightmare was now over, that no one would hurt her anymore. But he couldn’t do any of that. All he could do was throw empty words traveling down that corridor, and hope that was enough to keep Madeleine from losing control.

Madeleine’s lips moved again; again, the sound of her words weren’t strong enough to reach anyone’s ears in the control room. But Hunter had no problem reading her lips.

‘Please help me . . .’

Hunter quickly peeked at Ghost. He was standing by the control console, his weapon firmly in his grip, his stare burning a hole in the back of Taylor’s head. Lucien was standing just a step to his left, but his attention seemed to be everywhere – nothing would escape him. If Hunter tried anything, he’d be dead.

Lucien nodded at Ghost, who flicked a different switch on the control console. The door to the room Madeleine was in slammed shut, no doubt sending even more fear snowballing into every molecule in her body.

Reflexively, Taylor turned to face Lucien and Ghost. ‘No. Please, no.’

The suddenness of her movement caught Ghost by surprise, almost tipping him over the edge, his arm tensing even further and his finger half-squeezing the trigger on his gun.

‘You better stay where you are, bitch.’

‘Please,’ Taylor said, her hands up in a surrender gesture. ‘Shutting the door on her will make her panic even more.’

Lucien nodded in a carefree way. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anger radiated from Taylor. ‘You sonofabitch.’

‘Let her go, Lucien,’ Hunter said. ‘Let Madeleine go. You don’t need her anymore. You don’t need to take her life. She means nothing to you. Take me and let her go. Let Courtney take Madeleine out of here, and take me.’

‘You dumb fuck,’ Ghost said. His gun was still aimed at Taylor. ‘Reality check, big guy – we already have you, and the whore inside the room, and the pretty FBI bitch with the pretty toes here.’ He blew Taylor a kiss while rubbing his groin. ‘Soon you’ll be all mine, bitch. And I’ll make you scream. You can bet on that.’

Taylor’s self-control completely escaped her.

‘Fuck you, you tiny pencil-dick ugly fuck.’

Maybe it was Taylor’s words, or maybe Ghost had just had enough of this game, but the overload switch in his head flicked.

‘No,’ he said, with so much anger it almost drooled out of his mouth. ‘Fuck you, you stupid whore.’ He squeezed the trigger on his gun.

Ninety-Eight

FBI Academy – Quantico, Virginia.

Forty-five minutes earlier.

It didn’t take the FBI long to get in contact with Joshua Foster, the air traffic controller at Berlin’s municipal airport. The call was immediately transferred to Director Kennedy in the Operations Room.

‘Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said, switching the call to speakerphone. ‘My name is Adrian Kennedy. I’m the director of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I believe that you were in contact with one of our agents. His name is Robert Hunter. You handed him the keys to your Jeep.’

‘Ummm, that’s correct.’ Understandably, there was a nervous edge to Joshua Foster’s voice.

‘OK, Mr Foster, please listen carefully,’ Kennedy said. ‘This is very important. I understand your car was brand new.’

‘Yeah, well, I got it about two months ago.’

‘That’s great. Now did the car come equipped with a location transponder, a GPS locator, in case of theft?’

‘Actually, yes, it did.’

Kennedy’s face lit up.

‘But I don’t have the transponder tracking code with me,’ Foster said, anticipating Kennedy’s next question. ‘It’s back at my house.’

‘We don’t need it.’ The agent at the radar station took over. ‘All we need is the car’s license plate and I can find the transponder tracking code from here.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Foster gave them his Jeep’s license plate number.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’