Page 175 of King’s Ransom

But it’s not that bad.

You won’t starve.

You won’t even die of thirst.

You’ll run out of oxygen before either of those things happen.

You’ll suffocate.

At length the sound of pouring concrete stopped.

Silence.

Had they stayed? Had the Unperson left one of his hench-­people to watch the concrete-filled pit to make sure I didn’t emerge?

I didn’t know.

I couldn’t know.

I regathered my wits and there in my pitch-black tomb, the first thing I did was some math.

I needed to calculate how much air was in my box and thus how long I had to live.

My concrete ‘coffin’ was about seven feet long, four or five feet wide and maybe three feet high.

That was approximately 1,520 litres of space.

Now, I myself was taking up some of that space, as were the bodies of Roman and Dmitri Oberov, say 200 litres.

So I had, best guess, 1,320 litres of breathable air.

Recalling the book I’d read, the average person breathes roughly half a litre of oxygen per minute, so that gave me about twenty-two hours before I suffocated.

Twenty-two hours to live.

If I could slow my breathing rate a little, I could eke out maybe an hour more.

Then I tried to think about how I could get out.

The most efficient way, of course, would be to call someone, but I didn’t have a phone.

The absolute dark pressed in around me.

It was disconcerting.

And the concrete tub’s floor was rough and uncomfortable, covered in little raised spikes of raw concrete.

My hands were still flex-cuffed in front of my body. Before I did anything else, I had to take care of them.

I pressed the ‘light’ button on my Casio watch and my little contained environment was suddenly, if dimly, illuminated.

(I was amazed at how much comfort even this small amount of light gave me. Sight is a very powerful sense.)

Using the dim light of my digital watch, I found a particularly sharp concrete spike in the floor.

Then I rubbed the plastic cuffs back and forth against it until, snap, they broke and my hands sprang apart, free.

Excellent.