by Jack Heath
It’s possible that he thinks I’m out of action, Peachey thought. Either unconscious in his office or splattered in the alley outside, depending on whether or not he knows that I broke his window. But I can’t count on it.
Peachey pulled on his gloves, which looked like black imitation leather. But they had a Kevlar memory skeleton that hardened at the joints around his middle and ring-finger knuckles if he flicked a switch near the wrist. The force of a punch is the weight of the blow divided by the surface area of the fist. These gloves meant Peachey could hit people with just two knuckles without injuring his hand, thereby trebling the force of the impact.
He hadn’t expected to need these gloves today. But he’d been forced to abandon his gun in Buckland’s office. For now, he would have to do all his work with his hands – but at least they wouldn’t be bare.
There was no point standing outside the door to the dark room. Peachey walked inside, and closed the door behind him.
His breathing echoed in the darkness. He opened his mouth wider to lessen the hissing. He listened carefully, but heard nothing. There was no indication that anyone else was in the room.
The floor was tiled rather than carpeted. Peachey walked slowly and carefully, short steps, heels first.
His knee bumped against a chair, and he froze. He’d made a noise. Had anyone heard it?
Click. A noise came from somewhere in front of him. It wasn’t a safety catch on a gun. He knew what that sounded like. This could be anything from a door handle turning to a sticky-soled shoe lifting off the tiles. Or it could be nothing at all.
Peachey crept forward slowly. He hit the switch on his left glove, and it silently moulded into its deadly shape.
There was a wall up ahead. Peachey could sense it – his breaths bounced off it and came back to him. He reached out and touched it with his right hand – it was rough, like sandpaper. He felt his way across it to the right, looking for the door.
Here it was. Cold, hard, strong. Metal. Peachey turned the handle slowly and carefully. It wasn’t locked.
Light! Peachey stepped quickly backwards out of the sudden glare. The door to the office at the left end of the corridor was open, and a light was on inside.
Peachey eased his head back through the doorway. There was a dimly lit office, but the map had failed him. It was at the end of a long stretch of darkness, interrupted by two small light bulbs. The corridor must connect this room to the adjacent one. Peachey redrew the schematic in his head to match the facts – it should look like this:
The walls of the office were clothed in shelves and binders, the floor was carpeted in a gloomy grey. Peachey could just make out a man sitting at a desk, typing on a computer.
It looked like Buckland. But Peachey wasn’t close enough to be sure.
He crept towards the office, his back against the wall of the corridor. He was slowly nearing the light, and he didn’t want Buckland to turn around and see him too early. He wanted to be able to sneak up behind him, put a gloved hand over his mouth, see the terror in his eyes as he realized that his life was about to end—
Peachey jumped back. There was another man in the corridor, creeping steadily towards him! He could see the silhouette; broad shoulders, hunched neck.
The man was standing in the middle of the corridor now, apparently aware that he’d been spotted. Buckland hadn’t turned from his computer. If Peachey killed the intruder quickly and silently, he might still catch Buckland unawares.
Peachey charged forwards. The man ran towards him, fist raised. Peachey saw this, and at the last second tried to duck under the blow—
Bang! Peachey fell back against the floor, and scrambled immediately back up. It was like the guy was made of steel. All hope of stealth was lost now, so he ran forward again, hoping to duck around his opponent and reach Buckland before he did another vanishing act.
Peachey skidded to a halt as he saw his opponent up close. The man had his face. Peachey’s face. He had been running towards a mirror.
So, the office…
Peachey whirled around in time to see Buckland wave from the cupboard. It had been done up to look like an office; Buckland had been behind him all along. Peachey’s view was suddenly obscured as a barrier slid shut, separating him from the door he’d entered through.
The whole thing had been a trap. And Peachey had walked right into it.
A light clicked on above him, dashing all Peachey’s hopes of escape. The walls and ceiling were concrete. The barrier that had sealed him in was steel, thick and solid.
There was a window in the barrier, about 20 centimetres square. Buckland’s face appeared at it.
“I tried to deal with you reasonably, Peachey,” he said. His voice came from speakers in the ceiling. “I offered you the most peaceful way out, under the circumstances.”
Peachey clicked his right glove into shape and hurled his fist at the window. The glass was so thick it didn’t even crack. Peachey’s knuckles were undamaged, but the shock shuddered right up his arm.
“I’m not feeling so generous any more,” Buckland continued, as if Peachey hadn’t moved. “Not after you broke the window in my office.”
“I’ll break a lot more than that,” Peachey shouted. “You think this room can hold me?”
“Yes. Indefinitely if I wanted. But I need you out of the way. So, in thirty seconds, the floor will open, dropping you into the building’s backup water storage tank. You’ll drown.”
“I can swim,” Peachey growled.
“I think not – you’ll be wrapped in a net.” Buckland shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about this. You’re smart, dedicated, presentable – in other circumstances you would have made a model employee.” He sighed. “Is there anyone you’d like me to pass your goodbyes on to?”
“Don’t waste your time,” Peachey said. “Say your own goodbyes. I’ll find you again.”
Buckland didn’t say anything else. His face receded from the window.
Peachey punched the glass again, but still it didn’t break. He raced towards the mirror and hit it with a flying kick. The mirror shattered, tumbling to the floor in sparkling shards. There was a concrete wall behind it.
He had only ten or fifteen seconds left before the floor opened up, if Buckland was to be believed. Peachey’s options seemed non-existent. Every surface was unbreakable, there was no one he could call for help and there was nothing to grab onto to avoid falling into a net, if there was one.
Tick tock. Ten seconds, if that. Peachey shrugged his coat off his left arm, but left his right in the sleeve. He jumped into the air, slammed his left hand against one concrete wall and pushed both his feet against the opposite one. His right shoe slipped, skipping down the concrete before catching half a metre lower. He adjusted his left foot and left hand to match, relieving some of the stretching of his joints. He hovered there, propped between the two walls, until the floor slid out from underneath the corridor, as smoothly as a sword drawn from its scabbard. Shards of the broken mirror tumbled down into the darkness.
Peachey had expected the roar of rushing water, and the foamy crests of waves below him. But as he watched the floor glide aside, he couldn’t even see the water through the widening chasm. It was still and silent, an indeterminable distance below him. But he could see the net – it spanned the width and breadth of the corridor, about a metre below where the floor had been.
Buckland was right. If he fell into it, he would become hopelessly tangled in moments, and then, when he hit the water, he would drown. And his left arm was becoming sore.
Peachey swung his coat up to rest on his torso with his free arm. He pulled his cigarette lighter from his pocket, and clicked it a few times. A flame appeared near the nozzle.
Peachey rested the lighter on top of the coat. Come on, he thought. His legs were quivering with the strain of supporting him. His left elbow creaked. His palm was getting sweaty.
The coat caught alight. Flames licked up across the lining, sprea
ding to the extremities of the coat. Peachey pushed it off his right arm and it fell into the net.
The fire squirmed outwards from the sleeves and tails of Peachey’s coat as it landed in the centre of the net. The ropes and knots unwound as the heat fried them. Moments later, the net disintegrated into trails of burning string.
Peachey couldn’t hold his position any longer. He released the pressure on the walls, and fell into the blackness.
He seemed to fall for a long time. Suddenly he thought that Buckland might have tricked him again – that he was actually falling towards granite or steel and that the net would have saved his life.
But then, with a splash, he was in water, freezing cold, like millions of needles forcing themselves through his skin. He fought the urge to gasp.
He kicked and pushed, and his head breached the surface. He sucked in air until his lungs felt like they would burst, then pushed it all out again. His breaths boomed around the dark cavern.
With a powerful freestyle stroke, Peachey headed for the edge of the tank. If he couldn’t climb out there, he would swim the perimeter, looking for a ladder. If he had no luck with that, he would swim to the bottom and open a valve to empty the pool.
Buckland’s voice echoed through the corridors of his mind. I’m sorry about this.
“You will be,” Peachey grunted, and he slipped back under the water.
The water tank turned out to be quite large – bigger than the building probably required. It took maybe two minutes to swim around the perimeter and find the ladder. Peachey clambered up, tumbled over the edge and landed back-first on the floor with a splat. He lay there for a moment, panting.
The girder-ribbed ceiling hung a long way above his head, almost invisible in the darkness. The room seemed to Peachey to be like a miniature aircraft hangar, with a water storage tank instead of a plane. He wondered if the room was normally used as storage space. Why else would Buckland have a room this big inside the building with nothing but a water tank inside it?
He flicked open his phone. It was dead. He needed to find a new one. Much as he disliked his employers, he still needed them to be able to contact him. He needed their help to find Buckland. Plus, he wanted to get paid when all this was over.
He stood up and held his arms by his sides, letting the water drizzle out of his sleeves onto the floor. When the flow had slimmed to a trickle, he swept his hands back across his hair, slicking it flat across his head.
He didn’t have Walker’s number, of course. But the SIM card in his mobile might still work. If I could steal another phone, he thought, as he prised out the SIM from the back, I could switch the SIMs and Walker could call me on the same number.
He stumbled slowly through the blackness, hands stretched out in front of him like the living dead in an old movie. Pretty soon he reached a wall, gritty and cold. He wondered what floor he was on – it had been a long fall before he landed in the tank. He could have descended as many as three floors by now.
He felt his way across the wall until he found a door. He pressed his ear against the wood and listened. Satisfied that no one was on the other side, he opened it and stepped through.
The fluorescent lights of the corridor were garish after the darkness. Peachey squinted and looked down – then grimaced as he saw the state of his clothes. So much for not looking conspicuous.
And my coat, he thought. That was a good coat. Buckland will pay.
There was a woman walking towards him, talking on her phone – a Nokia 7250, he realized. The same model as his broken one.
The woman covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “Are you okay?” she asked, staring at Peachey’s wet clothes.
“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s a long story. Excuse me.”
He pushed past her, bumping into her shoulder. She gasped and dropped the phone.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Peachey exclaimed. He bent down quickly, picked up her phone, and handed over his.
The woman smiled weakly and put it back to her ear. “Hello? Kate, are you still there?”
Peachey rounded the next corner quickly, before she could realize that the phone he’d given her was useless. As he jogged down the corridor he clipped the old SIM into the new phone. He should have killed the woman – she might be able to ID him.
But he knew these corridors had cameras, and she’d been part-way through a conversation. If he’d killed her, someone would have come looking very quickly. It was one of those situations where covering his tracks would only make more tracks.
The lift doors were just up ahead. Following Buckland around wasn’t working, Peachey thought. There was the possibility that Buckland thought Peachey was really dead this time, but Peachey wasn’t taking any chances. Instead, it was time to set a trap of his own. Go somewhere he knew Buckland would go, and wait for him.
The foyer? No – too public, and the building had too many other exits. He couldn’t be sure which way Buckland would go.
Okay. How about the lifts? Buckland would need them to change floors – he couldn’t have hidden passages everywhere. If Peachey just rode them up and down, waiting for Buckland to turn up…he’d have to sabotage all but one, so Buckland wouldn’t slip past him…
Peachey frowned. He wasn’t sure how best to sabotage a lift. He could push the emergency stop after a floor and then climb out the ceiling hatch. But he’d have to do it on every lift, and it was only a temporary fix – someone would take notice immediately and start them up again when they realized there was no emergency. And anything more permanent would either require more engineering expertise than he had, or be even more obvious. He was trained to shoot people, not cut wires and fuse cables.
What about Buckland’s office?
Peachey bounced the idea between the hemispheres of his brain, seeing if it would break. When he was in there, he’d seen Buckland’s keys, wallet and briefcase, so it was likely that he planned to return. He wouldn’t expect Peachey to be in there – he thinks I’m either floating face down in the water tank, Peachey thought, or following his trail like a bloodhound. And the office is nice and private, with plenty of places for me to hide, and an entrance to the fire stairs just a few doors down for easy escape.
Peachey smiled. Buckland’s office even had his gun in it. Perfect. He could still turn the tables. He pushed the button for the lift and waited.
Detective Damien Wright got out of his car and closed the door. He hadn’t needed a map. He’d lived in this city for nine years. And the HBS building was easy to find. You only needed to glance up to see it. It was like a golden egg at the top of the hill.
People pushed past him on all sides. The street was patterned with so many pedestrian crossings that cars tended to avoid it. The few that ventured in and didn’t park against the kerb were forced to move in a straight slow line, one chunk of road at a time, whenever they spotted a gap in the flood of people.
Walking to the KFC side of the building, Wright saw that there was at least some truth to the reports he’d heard. There was a broken window on the top level of the tower. Looking down, Wright saw that there were shards of glass scattered on the ground all around him, sparse but far reaching. Even if he found nothing else suspicious, he should contact City Services and get them to send someone to clean up the mess.
Chances were that the answers lay inside HBS. Someone had got fired, maybe, and broken the window in a tantrum. But if the glass was outside, something had probably been thrown through the window, and he could at least find it before going in to ask questions. The first law of policing was to be observant. Work backwards from the evidence.
Also, he wanted to postpone going back to the station for as long as possible. The government had raised the terror-alert status, which meant that Terrorism Risk Assessment had operational control over all other law-enforcement factions. And they were insisting, as usual, that 30 per cent of the force stay on-call at their stations, in case an attack took place and they were needed on the scene.
He walked into the alley between HBS and KFC. The walls were scrawled with graffiti, the pavement was stained with years of grime.
The chunks of glass were clustered more thickly where he was standing. He looked up and saw that he was more or less beneath the broken window. He stared back down at the sparkling ground, wondering what had caused the window to break. There was no indication of—
Wright bent down to stare at an object on the ground. For a split second his brain couldn’t process it. The context wasn’t right. Then recognition came, sudden and cold.
There was a human hand on the ground beside the dumpster.
Wright whirled around, staring down one end of the alley, then the other. People walked to and fro in the distance, oblivious to his gaze.
How the hell did a severed hand end up here? he wondered. And where’s the rest of the body?
The bones in the wrist were broken rather than sawn, and the skin was purple with burst blood vessels. The fingers were curled, like the hand had been frozen in the act of trying to grab something. Like it might claw his eyes out if he got too close. He shuddered.
You couldn’t throw a severed hand hard enough to shatter a whole window. Could you?
Wright’s eyes were drawn to a red spatter on the rim of the dumpster. He looked up at the broken window. Then down at the hand.
No. No way.
He stood up on the tips of his toes and peered into the dumpster. The smell of old batter and rotten meat hit him instantly, the way heat engulfs you when an oven door is opened. He peered down.
A corpse in a window washer’s uniform lay amid the rotten waste in the dumpster. The man’s eyes were wide with terror, and his teeth were exposed in a hideous grimace. His right hand was missing.
Wright tried to picture the events. The window washer falls from his platform and lands in the dumpster, hitting his wrist on the rim and severing it. That was possible.