It was a fairly basic research technique, but Googling the day of Spider Webb’s mini-summit was the first port of call. This revealed an International Symposium on Advanced Metallurgical Processes at the LSE, and a conference on Asiatic Studies at SOAS. Tickets went on sale for an ABBA reunion gig, and were expected to sell out inside two minutes, while Central London would be more of a lunatics’ day out than usual, because there was a Stop the City rally marching down Oxford Street: a quarter million demonstrators were expected. Traffic, tube and normal life would doubtless come to a halt.
None of which had any obvious connection with the Russian visit. It was background, but background was important, and after the last time the slow horses had become embroiled in Regent’s Park business, she wasn’t relying on info supplied by Webb. But it was hard to concentrate. Louisa kept remembering that huge floorspace in the Needle. She’d rarely been anywhere so roomy without being outside, a thought that inevitably dragged her home, a rented studio flat on the wrong side of the river.
And now two, sometimes three nights a week, Min was here too, and while this was still a good thing, it wasn’t without its downside. Min wasn’t messy, but he took up room. He liked to be clean and fresh when he came to her bed, which meant yielding precious inches of her bathroom shelf; he needed a clean shirt in the morning, so required wardrobe space too. DVDs had appeared, and books and CDs, which meant more physical objects in a space that was getting no larger. And then there was Min himself, of course. Who didn’t lumber about, but didn’t have to: the mere fact of his presence brought the walls nearer. It was nice to be close to him, but it would have been nicer to be close somewhere spacious enough to be further apart.
Elsewhere in the building a door slammed shut. The resulting draught whistled along the hallways and whispered under doors until, with a noise like snow sliding off a roof, a blouse fell from its hanger to the floor. Louisa studied it a moment or two, as if the situation might rectify itself without her intervention, and when this didn’t happen she closed her eyes and willed herself elsewhere, and when she opened them again that hadn’t happened either.
A draughty rented studio flat. With one extra terrible characteristic: that for all its faults, it was several steps up from Min’s bedsit.
If they wanted to find somewhere nice together, they were going to need money.
Eleven thirty. Six and a half hours to go.
Frigging hell!
If he’d been asked to draw a picture of what he’d expected from private security work, Cal Fenton would have drawn it big. There’d have been manual combat training; utility belts, Kevlar vests, Tasers. And driving, too: rubber-shredding take-offs and sharp cornering. He’d have had one of those earpieces with a hands-free mic attached, a necessity in the adrenalin-rich world of the security consultant, where you never knew what the next second might bring. That was what Cal Fenton had had in mind. Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence.
Instead, he had a uniform that was too small, because the last guy in the job had been a midget, plus a rubber torch with a fading battery. And instead of riding shotgun in an armoured limo, he had a nightly trudge up and down half a dozen corridors, calling in every hour on the hour; less to reassure management that the facility was still standing than to prove he was awake and earning his pay. Which was so slightly above minimum wage that if you split the difference, you’d have change from a quid. A job was a job, his mum never left off saying, but flush with the wisdom of nineteen years on the planet, Cal Fenton had found the flaw in this argument: sometimes a job was a pain in the arse. Especially when it was eleven thirty-one, and there were six hours twenty-nine minutes to go before you were out the door.
Speaking of which …
Cal was on ground-level, pacing the facility’s east-side corridor, and the door at its far end was open. Not hanging wide, but not firmly closed … Either someone had opened it since Cal’s last circuit, or Cal hadn’t closed it after his cigarette.
Cal and only Cal, because night shift was a one-man job.
Reaching the door, he pushed it gently. It opened with a creak. Outside was an empty car park bordered by a mesh fence, beyond which a pot-holed road disappeared into the shadow of the West-way. The building opposite used to be a pub, and maybe hoped to be a pub again one day, but for the time being was making do with being an eyesore. Posters for local DJs peeled from its boarded-up windows. After watching for a moment, Cal pulled the door shut. He stood in silence, aware of his heartbeat. But there’d been nobody outside, and there was nobody inside either, himself excepted. Eleven thirty-four. He stepped away from the door and checked the office.
Office. Facility. You could get away with words like that, if you weren’t exposed to the reality.
Because the office was a glorified broom cupboard, and “facility” an up-itself name for a warehouse: windowless brick on ground level, then wood for the second storey, like they’d run out of bricks halfway. It was newer than whatever had stood in the same place previously, but after that, you ran out of compliments. Like the once and future pub across the road, the whole place was basically counting out time until the area hit an upward swing, but that figured. DataLok was a cut-price operation, and what you got was less than what you saw. Especially if what you’d been looking at was the company catalogue.
Cal swung the torch in big, forgiving loops. There was nobody in the office. Least of all a guard dog, which a sign on the main gate warned patrolled the premises 24/7, but the sign came in at $4.99, which was a lot less than a 24-hour guard-dog presence cost.
And then he heard something along the north corridor. A scuffing noise, as if a heel had kicked against the tiles.
Cal’s heart phoned in loud and clear. Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub. Exactly as normal, only twice as loud and four times as fast.
Twenty-four minutes until his check-in call. Which he could make early, of course, on account of being totally spooked.
And here’s how that conversation would go:
“I think I heard a noise.”
“You think you heard a noise.”
“Yeah, along the corridor. Like there might be someone there. But I haven’t looked to see. Oh, and the door was open, but I might have left it open earlier when I nipped out for a smoke. Do you wanna send reinforcements?”
(With combat training, utility belts and Kevlar vests.)
But even a pain-in-the-arse job was better than none, and Cal really didn’t want to lose out on paid employment because a squirrel had wandered in. He weighed his torch in the palm of his hand. It felt solid enough, baton-like, and suitably reassured, he stepped out of the office and into the north corridor, at the end of which was the staircase.
The corridors were on the building’s outer edges. The downstairs office was where the security shifts—himself and an edging-seventy ex-copper called Brian—kept their stuff; upstairs there was a techs’ room, where incoming was processed. And the rest of the facility was a labyrinth of storage rooms: apart from the number pasted above each doorway, the bastards all looked the same. Sounded the same, too: a constant humming. This was the noise information made when it was waiting to be used.