Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  "An' have they had cause to? Ah mean, wha' kind o' buildings make up this place?"

  "The kind least likely to attract attention, actually," Verse returned. "The Albion Quarter was constructed in the late eighteenth century by a philanthropist who had made his fortune in slaving, found God, then ploughed what he considered to be his ill-gotten gains into helping the dispossessed. Many called it an idealistic folly, but nevertheless he established a number of charitable foundations on the site, including an orphanage, school, hospice, and naturally, a chapel."

  "Nae pub?"

  "No pub."

  "Like Verse said, it's unique," Hannah chipped in. Then she frowned at Brand. "Except... Jeezus, you're going to tell us it ain't there anymore, right?"

  Brand nodded. "It's now the Capek Construction site."

  Verse thumped the table. "I should have known that. But in the dark I didn't recognise..."

  "But how could they?" Mary Henderson asked. "If it's as legally protected as you say?"

  "The sixty-four thousand dollar question," Brand replied. "It's taken me weeks to find a link between the bunker homunculi," he said to the others, "mainly because the one we could identify - Richard Brown - kept leading me down blind alleys. But it was their counterparts that I saw in a recent report who finally pointed the way. Four people who between them can overturn any or all of the protective legislation. The Albion Quarter trustees."

  "The dead homunculi were the trustees back in the 1940s?"

  Brand nodded. "AH/2 - Arnold Hall, JS/1 - Jezz Singleton, LPH/0 - Leonora Pankhurst-Hague, and, of course, the good Mister Brown himself."

  "Wait. You're saying that Sonderkommando Thule wanted to replace the trustees during the war so they could demolish the place?"

  Brand shook his head. "I think they wanted to replace them so that they could gain access to whatever the MoD and Department Q were up to. If you think about it, the trustees would have to have been taken into their confidence."

  "Maybe they were then granted their special immunities in gratitude for keeping it."

  "In gratitude and possibly more," Brand said. For the moment he didn't elaborate.

  "Okay," Ness said. "Wi' you so far. Bu' why the hell would anyone be interested in a chapel, hospice, orphanage and school?"

  "I don't think they are interested in them," Brand said. "I don't think they are interested in anything on the surface at all."

  "Something in the basement?"

  "Deeper."

  "The sub-basement?"

  Brand shook his head.

  "So we're down to the bedrock," Ness said. "Och bollocks, dinnae tell me there's another angel in a cave doon there."

  "No angel," Brand said, "but you're right about the bedrock. Or at least what would be bedrock were London not built on a foundation that is actually seventy per cent clay."

  "Clay?" Verse asked.

  Brand nodded. "There was a project name on the folder you recovered. Lehmverkund. It isn't a direct translation, but the name of the Ministry of Defence project echoes it pretty closely. The Clay Resource."

  "So the MoD excavated under the Albion Quarter during the war, and now Capek wants whatever's there? Why now?"

  "Maybe he just needed to find the right person to help," Hannah said. "Like Emmanuel Konterman, perhaps?"

  "Bu' why there, particularly?" Ness asked. "Ah mean if they wanted ter start a pottery there musta bin other clay they could use?"

  "It's a question of how much they needed, and why. Back at Exham I managed to access an old geological survey and the interesting thing is that while the rest of London's subterrain is thoroughly honeycombed with tube lines, water mains, telephone and cable - just about anything you can name, in fact - the area under the Albion Quarter is free of such intrusions. It's a complete blind spot... virgin earth."

  Verse contemplated for a second. "Tell me if I'm going out on a limb here, but the protective dispensations that were granted to the quarter wouldn't have extended to development beneath it, would they?"

  "You're not going out on a limb," Brand said, smiling. "Despite repeated and potentially highly lucrative requests from communications companies to maximise their networks - and even one from the Department of Transport itself for an underground branch line to service the Olympics - it too became a complete exclusion zone." Brand paused. "I don't think the special immunities were granted to the Albion Quarter just in gratitude, I think they were designed to protect whatever is down there."

  "So what do you think we're dealing with?" Hannah queried. "A lost occult treasure? Some kind of artefact?"

  "Must be some serious shit for them to go to all this trouble, then and now," Verse observed.

  Brand sighed. "I really have no idea. The only clue we have to go on is that, whatever it is, it seems to need Emmanuel Konterman's expertise."

  Marcus Farrow spoke up for the first time. "Actually, doctor, there is someone who might be able to help there. Not about this... Konterman, but with what lies beneath the Albion Quarter. At first I dismissed what she told me as imagination - it is easy to see things in these dark tunnels - or maybe just the nightmares of a child, but after what you've said, I'm no longer so certain."

  "A child?" Brand asked. "May I speak with her?"

  Farrow hesitated. "Don't take this personally, but it might be better if the woman of your group spoke to her instead of you." He nodded towards Hannah. "For reasons I need not go into, Rose is... somewhat wary of men."

  Hannah looked a little startled, but shrugged her agreement anyway. "Hey, just so you know, I'm no Mary Poppins, but if it'll help..."

  Farrow nodded. Leaving the others behind, he led Hannah across to the far side of the main chamber, where a small room lined with thick pipes - possibly once some kind of valve room - annexed the larger area. It was the only private space Hannah had seen here, and had apparently been set aside for the child. Where the others slept outside on makeshift cots, it had been furnished with an old but serviceable single bed, which she presumed Farrow or one of the others had found for her. There was even a bedraggled and obviously long since discarded Alf cuddly toy perched on its headboard.

  Rose sat ignoring it on the bed with her arms encircling hunched up knees, her chin resting on them. Six, maybe seven years old, the little girl haltingly and quietly hummed some old nursery tune to herself while staring down at an empty floor. Hannah didn't recognise the tune and with a slight tremor realised it was probably before her time.

  Farrow stopped Hannah briefly at the door. "Mary and I found her two weeks ago," he said. "She'd been living alone in the deeper tunnels for God knows how long, and we had a devil of a job convincing her to come with us. I don't know who the bastard was who brought her back, who it was she'd escaped from, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a grieving parent who missed their child."

  "It's all right," Hannah said. "I think I can probably fill in the rest."

  Farrow nodded. "Go slow with her."

  "As I said, I'm no Mary Poppins."

  Goddammit, she thought as she stepped into the room, Rose's eyes raising slightly to greet her. As if this goddamned practice of half resurrection wasn't sick enough, some sicker pervert has to get his kicks by dragging a little girl out of her grave. She could only guess as to the horrors young Rose had had to endure - and for how long - but the memory of them was indelibly stamped in her sunken features, haunted eyes, and in the still present rope burns around her wrists - rope burns that Hannah suspected might never fade.

  Hannah felt her eyes burning and swallowed hard, having to remind herself that Rose's past was not the reason she was here. For the moment at least she needed to discover what was going on now.

  "Hello, Rose," she said, kneeling. "My name is Hannah."

  Rose studied her for a second, no doubt gauging the newcomer with whatever mental litmus test she had developed down here for her own safety, and then replied, "Hello, Hannah." The girl sounded livelier than she'd expected, but also strange, her accent old, of
another century. "You have a funny voice," Rose added.

  Hannah laughed. "Funny, here was I thinking just the same thing about yours." After a second, she frowned. "Funny how, exactly?"

  "I'm not sure... whiney."

  Hannah coughed. "Yeah... well... you ain't the first bra... er, the first little girl to notice that. Tell you what - seeing as how we both have funny voices - why don't we be friends?"

  "Maybe." Rose said hesitantly.

  "Good girl. Because friends tell each other things. For instance, Mr. Farrow tells me that you might have had a bad dream, about something you saw in the tunnels?"

  Rose looked directly at her, and Hannah felt a resurgence of the anger she'd felt when first walking in. Rose's gaze, even accounting for the era from which she imagined she came, was much older than it had any right to be, so sad and so... soiled. "I have bad dreams all the time," she said.

  "And you're saying this wasn't a dream?"

  Rose shook her head slowly. "And it wasn't in the tunnels, either. Not really."

  Hannah shuffled her position. "Then where?" she urged.

  "There are places in the dark where you can't go any further," Rose explained. She hesitated. "What I mean is grown-ups can't go any further because they're grown ups... but I can."

  "Why is that? Because you're small enough?"

  Rose nodded. "You can't go any further because there are big walls that someone put there recently, but there are holes in the bottom of them, like fireplaces."

  "And what - you crawled through one of these fireplaces?"

  "Mmm. I was too scared to go down at first because something at the end kept banging and banging, like a big cage door."

  "But eventually you did? You were brave enough to go?"

  Rose nodded again and stared at her. "You won't tell anyone what I saw? They'll all think I'm just being silly."

  Hannah laughed. "No, Rose, I won't tell. What did you see, darling? What did you see?"

  The little girl leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially in Hannah's ear.

  "There are giants in the earth."

  Chapter Thirteen

  There are giants in the earth.

  It was a helluva revelation, and a mite worrying if true. Hannah saw no reason to doubt that it was. With the cards that her life - and death - had dealt her, Rose did not strike her as a child prone to flights of fancy.

  Giants, Jeezus. As if they didn't have enough on their plates already.

  Hannah had reported what she had learned back to Brand and the others, and much as she'd expected, the general consensus had been that one or two of them had better take a look at what Capek Construction was up to on its site PDQ. This, though, was easier said than done. Ness and the others, during their earlier helicopter trip, had risked a flyby of the massive operation, and from what they'd told her of the security technology they'd observed through their binoculars, anyone attempting to infiltrate the site was going to need, not only convincing Trojan identities, but security level clearance cards that included a goddamned DNA fingerprint. It was pretty heavy stuff for a builder's yard, and even if she'd had the chance and foresight - which, bugger me, she couldn't think why, she hadn't - to grab her laptop and Hacman software on her way out of Exham, there would only have been a limited amount she could have done inside the Capek mainframe from her new and dubious accommodation in the sewers. Uploaded the Trojan IDs, sure, amended personnel files, maybe even changed the guards' patrol rotation to give their people a better chance to slip through. But the DNA fingerprint? No chance.

  No, for that she knew she had to go straight to the source. The Capek Construction headquarters in Knightsbridge.

  So here she was. Bright lights, big city.

  Hanging from a rope halfway down a lift shaft in the middle of the night.

  But that was only after she'd dropped from the chopper onto the roof.

  She had to admit, she was really quite enjoying herself. She felt like she was doing that first infiltration into the bad guy's lair in a Bond movie. Oh, yeah...

  Dum-daddadum-dum-dum, dum-dum dadda-dum dum...

  Good evening, Mish-? The name'sh Chapter... Hannah Chapter.

  Mmmm. A pleasure to meet you, Mizz Chapter. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld's personal pussy stroker, Nikkie Bocker-Glory.

  But my dear lady, of courshe you are. Tell me, Nikkie, do you come with or without the cherry?

  "Ah ken that grin," a voice broke in, echoing in the metal-lined shaft. "If yer thinking' o' shaggin' some bint agin, ye'd best stop now 'cause yer harness is gettin' as twisted as you are."

  Ah yes, Hannah thought. Here was the one thing she wasn't enjoying. When she'd outlined her plan to the others, she'd ended up with Ness as her backup. Of the others available, Brand wasn't trained for this kind of shit, the demoness had decided she'd best mount a guard to supplement the traps, and Verse - who, of course, she would have chosen every time - passed on her company in favour of Ravne's. The priest had decided that the missing Ravne might be in need of some help coping with the rite of passage on which Farrow had despatched him. This turned out to be a suggestion to which Farrow had objected quite vehemently - Hannah still wasn't sure what was going on between him and Ravne - until Verse had convinced him that the potentially gathering storm might require all hands on deck.

  Apart from all this, there was, of course, the matter of the chopper. The security cameras on the roof meant that their drop had to be a quick in and out - no landing - and as Ness obviously couldn't fly and drop at the same time, he did have a mate - yup, she'd fallen off her chair at that one - who had served with him before his enforced departure from Iraq. He was willing to undertake the stealth op for them no questions asked. But he did have one condition: that his old shooting partner had to come along for the ride.

  Scots bastard along for the ride or not, it was still a much better idea than risking a potential firefight going in through the front entrance. She still remembered the kit that the hunters had been packing down under.

  "Ah'm telling ya, yer gonna get twisted," Ness reiterated.

  "Play with your own dangly bits, Boy Wonder... I know how to rappel." She did, too, even if she'd had to learn quickly during a rather fraught visit she'd made to Area 51. Aware of the problem that Ness was nagging her about, she twitched in her harness to shift its position and the two of them descended through the remaining floors without speaking, the only sound in the shaft the zizzzz-zizzzz of carbon fibre ropes.

  They grounded at last on the top of an elevator that had been locked down for the night on the building's basement level, which was standard security procedure. Silently and efficiently Ness thumped the release on his harness, lifted the elevator's access hatch, and, despite his bulk, dropped inside with the grace of a cat. As Hannah followed his lead, she begrudgingly had to admit to herself that the man was good. They'd agreed while they were here that they would leave as minimal a footprint as possible - not to use firearms unless absolutely necessary - and so when the guy who'd pulled the short straw and was guarding the roof had come at them ready to fire first and ask questions later, Ness had rushed him, nutted him, and thrown him off the edge. Nothing special about that, perhaps, but clandestine being the watchword of the night, the Glaswegian had obviously done his calculations, too. The guard dropped thirty-two storeys, straight down, into a builder's skip half-filled with sharp, pointy things, killing the trigger-happy prick and hiding his body simultaneously. Barring some homeless guy so harassed by the cops he'd kip on wood and glass, or one of said cops being bored and overly zealous on patrol, the body would remain undiscovered until well after dawn, by which time - she hoped - her soon to be provided security bypasses would have done their job elsewhere.

  During this feat of high-rise prestidigitation Ness had, unfortunately, taken two bullets in the shoulder, which he had now field-dressed. Hannah hoped it hurt like hell and looked forward to rubbing salt into the wound later. Whether Ness was good or not, she hadn't for one moment forgotte
n what he had done - or far more importantly, not done - back at Exham. She still hadn't decided what she was going to do about that, yet, but it would be something, that you could guarantee. It was just a case of waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.

  Ness slipped his combat knife into the contact niche between the two elevator doors, and twisted the blade to open it wide enough for him to get his hands in. That done, he gripped the knife handle in his teeth while he prised the doors apart. The two of them slipped from the elevator into a half-lit corridor.

  Just as a guard came around a corner and walked right into them.

  He immediately raised his gun.

  "I wouldn't," Hannah advised him. "No, really, I wou-"

  But trigger-happy seemed to be the security guard's watchword of the night.

  This time it was her turn. Ness had already snatched his knife from his mouth, but before he even had a chance to launch the blade, she quickly slapped the base of her palm into the front of the guard's chin, snapping his head back so sharply that his neck broke instantly. Efficiently, she plucked the gun from his glazed-eyed and still falling body then grabbed and dragged the flopping corpse into a nearby closet, dumping it behind a file tower. Unlike Ness would have done, she'd taken no pleasure from the unnecessary death, and inwardly prayed that this would be the last body the two of them would have to hide. She closed the door behind her.

  "Doin' what comes natural, eh?" Ness asked. He licked his lips with a stained, fat tongue. "Ah jus' knew you an ah'd mek a great partnership. So how boot a quickie agin that wall? Ah know how death can make yer hot."

  "Case you hadn't noticed I'm out of the closet, dipstick," Hannah said coldly. "Besides, I'd rather stick pins in your eyes."

  Ness cackled and spat a great green gob on the corridor floor. So much for not leaving a fingerprint, Hannah thought. The Scot, his thoughts engaged elsewhere, no longer seemed to care about that, and did nothing to clear the evidence of his passing. There were many things she had never liked about Ness, but this was what disturbed her the most - how easily he could slip from professional field operative to psychotic sociopath. "Bin sharin' putdowns in the ladies lavvies, 'ave we?" he said, suddenly threatening. "So go on, girlie, ah dare ye ta tell me what's wrong wi' the old Nessy monster."