‘And does that mean this is safe?’ asked Costain.
‘How should I know?’
‘Could you find Losley with those?’
‘I think it’s kind of short range. So. . only if she’s right in front of me. And then I think I’d know.’
‘All right,’ said Quill, chucking away the mop, ‘who’s up for doing this? Oh, right, no time to draw lots, so that’d be me.’ And, before anyone could say anything, he’d taken a few steps back and then run at it.
Quill had jumped while hoping that, if they were wrong about this, then at least it’d be quick. He was thinking of Jessica. Of how little he knew of Jessica. Of wanting to get to know her.
And then suddenly he was somewhere else.
He hit a wall. He swore. . fell. . landed. And looked around him, scrambled to his feet, exulting.
They came through one by one: Ross then Costain then Sefton. They took standing leaps.
‘Don’t take a run up at it!’ Quill had shouted back to them.
They all landed against the wall and steadied themselves with their outstretched palms.
Quill stood there watching them, holding his bruised nose. They found themselves in a lock-up, what looked like the inside of a unit in a storage compound somewhere. The only light was from under the door. He found a switch and suddenly he could see properly. They’d come out of a vortex that looked just like the one they’d jumped in to, except that it seemed to revolve just the concrete floor here, rather than any boxes. It kept going, now they’d exited. It operated in a space that looked specifically cleared for it, because every inch of the rest of the unit was full of other cardboard boxes, metal chests and shelves packed with books.
‘Aladdin’s cave,’ said Quill. ‘There you go, Harry.’ He saw Ross looking around with that expression on her face which said she was inside yet another part of what she’d grown up among, and yet of which she’d been unaware.
‘This is where Toshack vanished to all those times, when he wanted to consult his “advisers”,’ said Costain.
‘Meaning,’ said Sefton, ‘he had a way of finding Losley from here.’
Quill looked to Costain, who checked the locator bug monitor, and shook his head. ‘Let’s get to it,’ he said.
As they began to search at high speed, with Ross taking the lead, Quill found himself working beside Sefton. ‘What about your expedition?’ he asked. ‘Did you find anything?’ The young DC had come in earlier, gone up to the Ops Board, stared at it for a while, and then just ended up doodling surreal swirls around the outside of it. Quill was still wondering if he’d gone a bit mental.
Sefton turned to him, still with that bloody Obi-Wan Kenobi expression of his. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m still working it out.’
The GPS on Costain’s phone indicated they were in a trading estate near Heathrow. The contents of the lock-up turned out to be frustratingly mundane, which wasn’t how Costain would have seen it just a few weeks ago. Back then they’d have thought of this place as the mother lode of all evidence. There were records of bank accounts that they’d never dreamed of, a full set of accounts books, too. There were bundles of cash, in Euros and Canadian dollars. It was the most thoroughly equipped bolt-hole, containing what a boss put aside for his last rainy day.
‘Look at this,’ said Quill, having heaved open a metal chest with a crowbar. He lifted out boxes of ammunition, an entire stack of them.
‘All different calibres,’ said Costain, taking one from him, ‘for all sorts of different types of guns. Not like him to bother, since the soldiers tended to keep their weapons at home.’
Sefton pointed to a note on the boxes — the manufacturer’s address. ‘Made in London,’ he observed. ‘Like at the New Age market. It’s the London stuff that works.’
‘Bloody hell, Rob had obviously worked out enough about Losley to get himself a bit of an insurance policy, ammo for whatever he was packing at the time that might actually give him the drop on her. Only we nicked him and he couldn’t use it.’
‘Objective seven on the board,’ said Ross, stepping over. ‘Maybe we could have her with those.’
‘If,’ said Quill, ‘we could ever persuade an Armed Response Unit to shoot an unarmed granny. And maybe shoot her many times.’ He looked between them. ‘What. . any of you lot got guns at home? Thought not.’
They went back to their work. Costain found himself feeling desperately conflicted. There was currently something he had to do urgently, as a way out of everything that loomed above him, but what they were in the middle of was just as urgent. As he searched along the shelves of one of the metal units, suddenly Sefton was beside him, working the other way.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ said Costain.
‘I kept trying to. . write off what you experienced. And I’ve just discovered that. . some of this stuff presents itself in different ways to different people, yeah? I still think there’s only science. I still don’t think there’s a God — at least not like people think there is. I’m going to keep on being proud to say that. I have to. I think I’ve started to. . know something about that now: what Rabbi Shulman called a “deep understanding of the natural world”. Only I’m just starting, at that. I’ve got a lot to sort out and that might take me forever. But. . when you saw Hell. . I think it might be one of many things that aren’t hanging over just you, but over all of us. I know what’d be in my own version. I’m saying. . I think you saw something real.’
Costain stopped, not wanting to reveal how he was feeling. ‘Mate,’ he said, raising a hand.
‘Skip.’ Sefton clasped it.
They looked round at the sound of Quill’s sudden exclamation. They went over to see, along with Ross. He’d just found a cluster of five much smaller cardboard boxes, the kind you’d keep business cards in. He’d put them together in an X, as with the larger boxes, and, as they watched, this also began rotating. And from the air above it fell a steady stream of white powder.
Costain took a pinch of it between his fingers. ‘Heroin,’ he said. ‘Rob’s supply.’
‘And I don’t think it’s being made out of thin air,’ said Ross. ‘Losley must have set that up for him — and the one that got us here too. On the other end of that’ll be somewhere in Burma or Thailand-’
There was a sudden noise from the smaller boxes. It was an outburst of foreign voices. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘they heard us!’ He reached out suddenly, as if to grab whoever was on the other side-
Costain pulled him aside at the last moment, as the boxes flew apart and the heroin puffed up into the air with a sudden release of pressure.
Quill looked furiously at where the boxes had been, rubbing his hand as if his fingers had been nipped. ‘Ta,’ he said, ‘could have been nasty.’
They tried to put the same boxes back together, but they wouldn’t shunt into place. Presumably, whatever was on the other end had been pulled apart. This sudden resumption of interest after such a big gap in communication, Ross thought, would have made the suppliers immediately suspicious. Bloody shame, though. If they’d known that was going to happen, at the very least they could have thrown a locator bug through.
Aware of the clock ticking down towards the start of the match, they got back to work.
Ross was making her way along a row of books, mostly ledgers, when she felt it. It was a feeling born of the Sight. It involved a gravity about this one particular nondescript volume resting beside her hand. But it was more than the familiar feeling that there was something unusual about this book. She called the others over. ‘Do you feel it too?’