Pete looked shocked. Mike elbowed the younger agent in the ribs to get his attention. ‘Go get us all respirators,’ he said. Smith nodded at him. ‘You really going to do it, sir?’
Smith nodded again. ‘We need to test the security system, anyway.’
‘Ri-ight.’ The desk guard was watching nervously, as if the colonel had sprouted a second head. Mike grimaced. ‘I love the smell of nerve gas in the morning.’ Pete reappeared and handed over a sealed polythene pack containing a respirator mask and a preloaded antidote syringe.
‘It’s not nerve gas, it’s fentanyl,’ Smith corrected him. ‘Where’s the PA mike on this level?’ he asked the desk guard.
‘Fentanyl is a controlled substance,’ said Pete, a conditioned reflex kicking in.
Mike looked round edgily. BLUEBEARD was a last-ditch antiterrorist defense; on command, compressed gas cylinders plugged into the air-conditioning on each floor would pump a narcotic mist throughout the building. Sure, there was an antidote, and the ventilator masks ought to stop it dead, but the only time it had ever been used for this purpose – in Russia, when a bunch of Chechen terrorists had taken a theater crowd hostage – more than a fifth of the bystanders had been killed. Gas and confined spaces did not mix well.
‘Relax, boys.’ Smith looked bored, if anything. ‘If you’re thinking about that Russian thing, forget it – they didn’t have respirator masks there. You’re perfectly safe.’ He pulled the gooseneck PA mike toward his mouth and hit the red button. ‘Is this thing – yes, it’s live.’ His voice rumbled through the corridors and floor, amplified through hidden speakers. ‘Matt, I know you’re in here. You’ve got five minutes to surrender. If you want to live, come out from wherever you’re hiding, and go to the nearest elevator bank. Hit the button for the tenth floor, then lie down on the floor of the elevator car with your hands on your head. This is your only warning.’
He killed the PA and turned to the walkie-talkie: ‘Okay, you heard me, Sergeant. Fifteen minutes from my mark, I want you to execute BLUEBEARD on all floors above ten. You’ve got ten minutes from right now to do a cross-check on all personnel and make sure they’re ready. Antidote kits out, boys. Over.’
Smith unsealed his respirator kit. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘The broken window on the twenty-third,’ Mike said slowly. ‘Has it been repaired? And has anyone secured the window-cleaning system?’ He opened the packaging around his respirator as he spoke, peeling the polythene wrapper away and yanking the red seal tab to activate the filter cartridge.
‘The –’ Pete’s eyes narrowed.
‘We’ve agreed Matt’s not stupid. He probably guessed we’d have something like BLUEBEARD. Maybe he broke the window because he wanted fresh air to breathe?’ Mike pointed toward the nearest outside wall. ‘That got me thinking. Someone’s got to clean the windows, haven’t they? That means a motorized basket, right? Maybe he figured he could ride it down past the security zone while we’re busy trying not to choke ourselves?’
‘Point.’ Smith began to reach for the walkie-talkie again.
‘How about Pete and I check out floor twenty-three?’ Mike asked, pulling the mask over his head. ‘We’ve got respirators, we’re armed, we can take a walkie-talkie. More to the point, maybe we can talk him down. Is that okay by you?’
Smith thought for a moment. Finally he nodded. ‘Okay, you have my approval. Stick together, don’t take any risks, and remember – I’m not going to cancel BLUEBEARD if he gets the drop on you. Especially not if he takes one of you hostage. Understood?’
‘Yes.’ Mike glanced at Pete, who nodded.
Smith gestured at the charging station by the security desk: ‘Take one of these, they’re fully charged.’ He picked up his own walkie-talkie. ‘Sergeant, I want you to check out the janitorial facilities, find out how they clean the windows above the tenth floor. If there’s an outside winch, I want it secured.’
Mike headed for the central service core, opening his holster. ‘Come on,’ he told Pete, his voice muffled by the mask.
‘What’s the plan?’
‘I want to check out the floor tiles where he smashed the window. Where is it?’
‘Twenty-third floor. You turn left at the checkpoint, then take the first transverse corridor past the service core. You want to follow me?’
‘He’s not armed, is he?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Pete sounded uncertain.
‘Well, then.’ Mike held his gun at his side and gestured at the door onto the fire stairs with his free hand. ‘Let’s go.’
They took the steps fast. Mike rapidly discovered that breathing through a gas mask was hard work. He paused, gasping for air, on the twenty-second-floor landing, leaning against a brace of drab green pipes running up and down. Pete seemed to be doing fine: There’s no justice, he thought. ‘I can’t run in this thing.’ I’m too old for this SWAT-team game. I’m not thirty-six yet, and I can’t run up flights of stairs in a gas mask anymore. What’s wrong with me? He pulled his mask off and shoved it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘You sure it’s safe to do that?’ asked Pete. Mike noticed that he wasn’t wearing his mask, either.
‘I’ll hear when Smith trips the gas tanks,’ he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘Anyway, make sure you’ve got yours, right? Okay, here’s how we’ll do it when we come out of the stairwell. I’ll go first, covering the floor. You follow me, covering the ceiling and my back. We head for the window, and if he’s not there, we head for the security station and the PA mike for this floor and I try talking to him. What’s wrong with this picture?’
Pete shook his head. ‘Nothing obvious to me.’
‘Okay, let’s go.’ Mike shoved himself back onto the stairs and took the last two flights, paused to catch his breath just inside the door, then pushed through.
*
The twenty-third floor was eerily deserted, a high-altitude Mary Celeste. Beige carpet tiles, slightly scuffed and in need of cleaning, floored corridors where doors stood open on unfurnished office suites. The black bubbles of surveillance cameras sprouted from ceiling tiles, some of them discolored by water seepage. One of the reasons floor twenty-three had been left vacant was that it had needed more refitting than the rest of the building, thanks to a burst pipe the previous winter. Some of the lighting panels flickered erratically. Mike headed up the corridor, cautiously checking side doors opening off it for any sign of human presence. Just because we don’t think he’s armed doesn’t mean he isn’t, he told himself, whenever he felt self-conscious.
He turned the corner onto the last stretch of passageway. There was no door at the end, just a wide open-plan office space, almost a thousand square feet of it, walled in windows. Abandoned desks and shelving units clustered in forlorn huddles around the floor. He could hear something now, the whistle of wind blowing past an empty gap in the glass side of the building. It was slightly chilly, even though it was a hot day down below. Mike paused just outside the door and glanced over his shoulder at Pete, who was staring tensely at the ceiling behind them. ‘Going in.’
‘Okay.’
Mike ducked through the entrance and spun round. Anticlimax: nobody was lurking in the corners behind him. But what about the desks – he crouched, casting his gaze around at ankle level. No, there were no giveaway legs visible under the furniture. Nothing, no sign that anybody had visited the place.
‘He’s not here?’
‘Hush.’ Mike backed toward the wall beside the door. ‘Keep me covered from right there.’ He slid along the wall, around the edge of the room. Three minutes left, he thought. What if –
There was nobody behind any of the furniture. None of the ceiling or floor tiles had been disturbed. The room looked abandoned, except for the missing window unit. Those double-glazed cells didn’t break easily; they were toughened glass, held in place by plastic gaskets and screws. Someone had removed the thing, probably unscrewed it, and then shoved it right out of the frame. T
he breeze was rustling playfully around him, tugging at his jacket, pinching his trouser cuffs. Mike crouched down below the level of the windows and looked up, and out, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the bright daylight above him.
There. Outside the glass, barely visible – it ran behind one of the concrete pillars framing the stretch of glazing – a vertical wire. It was quite a thick wire, but it was almost invisible against the bright daylight. Only a slight vibration gave it away. Mike looked back at Pete, raised a finger to his lips, then beckoned urgently. He cast his gaze along the wall. Another wire stood out on the far side of the missing window pane. Gotcha.
Pete hunkered down next to him. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘There’s a window-cleaning car somewhere below us, right outside the open cell. I figure he’s waiting while we run BLUEBEARD. Then he’s going to try to break back in while everyone’s expecting him to be down and out.’
‘You say that as if you think there are other options.’
‘I can think of several, but Matt’s not stupid – he knows the more elaborate the scheme, the more likely it is to go wrong. I mean, he might have just done this as a distraction, but then what if we didn’t notice it at all? Whatever, I think he’s down there, below us.’
‘In which case, all we have to do is get him to come back in.’
‘Yeah. But he obviously wants out, and – listen, these cars are self-propelled. He’s probably as low as he can go, waiting for everyone to clear out before he breaks another window.’
‘Right.’ Pete straightened up, holding his pistol. ‘I’ll reel him in.’ And before Mike could move to stop him he leaned out of the window, shoulders set, aiming straight down. ‘Hey – ’
A gray shadow dropped across the window, accompanied by a grating of metal on metal. Pete vanished beneath it, tumbling out of the window.
‘Fuck!’ Mike jumped up in time to register two more wires and the basketwork cage of a window-cleaning lift wobbling behind the glass with someone inside it: then Matt swung the improvised club he was holding at the window cell Mike was standing next to, and to Mike’s enormous surprise it leapt out of its frame and fell on him. He stumbled backward, away from the wall, his arm going numb. How did he get above us? he thought, dazed and confused. Then he registered that he’d dropped his pistol. That’s bad, he thought, his stomach heaving.
Someone kicked it away from him. Not fair. He felt dizzy and sick. Things grayed out for a moment. When they came back into focus he was sitting down, his back to a desk. There was something wrong with his face – it was hard to breathe. The mask. He looked up.
Matthias squatted on his heels opposite him, holding the gun, looking bored. ‘Ah, you’re with me again. I was beginning to worry.’
Those window cells had to weigh thirty or forty pounds each – thick slabs of double-glazed laminate clamped between aluminum frames. Matt must have unscrewed it first, then dropped decoy lines below the window-cleaning car before retreating up top to wait like a spider above his trap. The damn thing had hit his head when Matt shoved it at him. A flash of anger: ‘Like you worried about Pete when you pulled that stunt? We could have worked something out – ’
‘I doubt it.’ Something about Matt’s tone sent a chill down Mike’s spine.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Because your organization has failed to protect me. It was worth a try – if you’d gone after the Clan as a police operation, that would have given the thin white duke something more urgent to worry about than a missing secretary, no? But the military – that was a bad idea. I’m not going to Camp X-ray, Michael.’
‘Nobody said you were.’ Mike tried to push himself up against the desk, but a growing sensation of nausea stopped him.
‘And now I will leave. Get up.’
Mike took a deep breath, trying to ignore his butterfly diaphragm. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to take me downstairs. And then we will get into a car and drive somewhere where I will contrive to make you lose me.’
‘You know that’s not possible.’
Matt shrugged. ‘I don’t care whether it is possible or not, it is what will happen. Seeking your government’s help was a mistake. I’m going underground.’
Mike took another deep breath. His stomach clenched; he waited the spasm out, trying to will the blurring in his vision and the pounding at his temples away. ‘No. I mean. Why? What do you hope to achieve?’
‘Revenge. Against the bitch.’
‘Who?’
Mike must have looked puzzled, because Matt threw back his head and laughed, a rich belly-chuckle that would have given Mike an opening if he’d been in any condition to move. ‘The queen in shadow.’ Matt stopped laughing. ‘Anyway, we’re leaving.’
‘They won’t let you,’ Mike said tiredly.
‘Want to bet? Remember the sample of metal I gave you, from the duke’s private stockpile?’
The plutonium ingot. Mike could see it coming, like a driver stalled on a level crossing at night staring into the lights of an oncoming freight train. He blinked tiredly, trying to focus his double vision. ‘What, the, the – ’
‘There are several of them,’ Matthias explained. ‘Bombs made with this magic metal of yours. The current duke’s father arranged to take possession of several of them three decades ago . . . anyway. I have the keys to the stockpile. They are held in storage areas across the United States. It is the Clan’s ultimate deterrent, if you like: they were much more paranoid during the, the seventies when the civil war was being fought. I arranged to deploy one before I defected. It is on a timer, a very long timer, but if the battery runs down, it will explode. The battery is good for a year. I thought, when I came to you months ago, you would let me out in time and I would reset it and that would be all, an insurance policy against your good intentions, nothing more. But now’ – he looked irritated – ‘you leave me no alternative.’
‘Oh Jesus.’ Mike stared at him. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’ ‘I did. Or at least, you cannot prove that I didn’t. So, you see, as soon as you are ready to stand, we will go down and talk to your boss, yes? And you will explain that you have to drive me somewhere. And you and I, we will go and I will get lost. But before I go, I will take you to the lockup and you will wait with the device, of course, until it can be defused, and we will all be happy and nobody will be hurt. Yes?’
‘You’ll tell me where it is?’ Mike demanded.
‘Of course. I know where the others are, too. They aren’t active yet – if you do not follow me, I will not need them, no?’
Three images of a smirking Matt hovered in front of Mike’s nose; the back of his neck prickled in a cold sweat. I’m going to be sick, he realized. I’m probably concussed. The idea that the Clan had planted atomic bombs in storage lockers across the United States was like something out of a bad thriller – like the idea Islamic terrorists would crash hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, before 9/11. I’ve got to tell someone! ‘I feel sick.’
‘I know.’ Matt peered at him. ‘Your eyes, the pupils are different sizes. Stand up now. It is very important you do not go to sleep.’ Matt straightened up and took a step back. Mike pushed against the panel behind him and shoved himself upright, wobbling drunkenly. ‘To the elevators,’ said Matt, gesturing with Mike’s own stolen gun.
What have I forgotten? Mike wondered dizzily. He stumbled and lurched toward the doorway. Feel sick . . .
‘Elevator first. There is a telephone there, no?’
‘Mmph.’ His stomach heaved: he tried desperately not to throw up.
‘Go on.’
Mike stumbled on down the corridor. He was certain he’d forgotten something, something important that had been on his mind before he got distracted, before the slab of window landed on him and Matt made his outrageous claim about the nuclear time bomb. Matt closed the door on the room with the damaged windows behind him, an unconscious slave to habit. Mike leaned against the wall, head down.
‘What is it?’ Matt demanded, pausing.
‘I don’t feel so well –’ What’s going to happen? Mike had a nagging sense that it was right on the tip of his tongue. Then his stomach gave a lurch. ‘Ugh.’
Matt took a step back, standing between Mike and the elevator core. He blinked, disgustedly. ‘Get it over with.’
‘Going to be –’ Mike never finished the sentence. A giant’s fist grabbed him under the ribs and twisted, turning his throat into a fire hose. He doubled over, emptying his guts across the carpet and halfway up the wall opposite.
Matt’s face twisted in disgust. ‘You’re no use to me like that. Wait here.’ The next door along was a restroom. ‘I’ll get you some towels – ’
There was a ringing in Mike’s ears, and a hissing. His guts stopped heaving, but he felt unaccountably tired. What have I forgotten? he asked himself, as he sat down and leaned against the wall. He felt his eyes closing. Something hard-edged was digging into his ribs. Oh, that. Must be time, then. He could put the mask on again in a few minutes, couldn’t he? Just a quick nap . . . Almost without willing it he felt his hand fumbling for the respirator, dragging it out of his inside pocket. His hands felt incredibly hot, but not in a painful way – it was like the best, most wonderful warm bath he’d ever had, all the heat concentrated in his extremities. He wanted it to never stop. But that was all right: he managed to raise the mask to his face, doubling over to get his head low enough to reach, and inhaled through the filter. I wonder if Matt heard Eric’s announcement? he thought dizzily. If he was outside the building, at the time . . .
He was still breathing through the respirator when they found him twenty minutes later, put him on a stretcher, and hauled him off to hospital in an ambulance with blaring siren and flashing lights. But it took them another ten minutes to find Matthias – and by then it was five minutes too late to ask him whether he’d been bluffing.
ULTIMATUM
The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) Page 26