Never Back Down

by Solomon Carter

  Eva and Jess were in the mini hallway adjacent to the wide lift shaft. The harsh electric light illuminated names and symbols on each of the doors, each one on a plastic door badge with capital letter print. DANGER - ELECTRICITY said one door. Another was labelled CLEANER, and another was marked STORAGE. It was this last one which gave Eva hope. There was some noise coming from the storage room, something like the dragging of boxes along a concrete floor and a heavy scraping across the walls. Jess nodded at the door, supporting Eva’s choice. They waited just seconds, yet it felt all too long, and then they pushed the door abruptly to shock whoever was inside. A man in orange overalls turned rapidly, looking over his shoulder. He was holding a buffing machine, dragging it across the floor while kicking what was blocking his route out of the way. He looked at them once, and then again, and Eva saw he sensed something wasn’t right. He didn’t recognise them. And what the hell were they doing here where most staff would never be allowed? His face was old and pinched, etched with worry lines. He grew a few more lines and his eyes narrowed. He let go of the buffer machine and put his hands on his hips.

  “Excuse us. We were just looking for Nathan,” said Eva, wondering why she had used such a random name as Nathan. Who the hell was called Nathan these days?

  “Eh? There won’t ever be anybody back here, will there? Who are you?”

  “It’s not my fault. It happens to working mums all the time, and it’s impossible. Nathan was supposed to stay with me the whole time I was here. I couldn’t get anybody to baby-sit him. I was supposed to have a meeting with Carl Davies this morning, but Nathan fell ill and on the worst possible day, when I have to report to Carl. What else could I do? You tell me? There was no way round it, no way at all.”

  “What? What are you on about? Am I to understand you’re talking about your son?! You’ve lost your son- in the warehouse? Are you sure?”

  There was an odd mixture of disbelief, amusement and sudden outrage on the man’s face. He was confused, and seemed ready to berate Eva for terrible parenting, except he probably didn’t want to risk it in case the directors took offence on the woman’s behalf. Instead he shook his head and leaned harder on the buffer machine.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, dear, dear. You better get this called out over the Tannoy. The boy could be in serious danger in here.”

  “Wait a second,” said Eva, like an idea had just sparked in her mind. “We’ll check the rooms in here, and then we’ll go straight to the reception. Then the receptionist can do the Tannoy announcement.”

  “Your boy won’t be back there. The doors are all locked one hundred percent of the time.”

  Eva batted her eyelids and tried to produce tears. She couldn’t manage it, but the anxious look on her face prompted something from the cleaner.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he complained with his voice, his face, his manner, and yet he was moving and rattling the keys theatrically in his overall pockets like he intended to use them. Jess made a face at the tall story Eva had told. Eva shrugged, then immediately fell back into character. “Do you work here? I don’t recognise you two?”

  “I’m on a sort of an internship. It’s a buyer’s market at the moment for jobs. But I don’t suppose it matters anymore, if that Tannoy announcement happens, that’ll be me finished before I’ve even started.”

  “I hope you don’t work in Payroll, because if you can’t look after your own boy, I don’t want you anywhere near my pay packet.”

  “How very funny,” said Jess. “Missing children and sarcasm, that’s the first time I’ve heard that combination. You must be great at parties.”

  The man’s face screwed up tighter.

  “The Electricity Room contains the lift works for the engineers, and some of the fuse boxes and generators for the warehouse. Nobody goes in there at all. Not ever. I don’t even have to open it, but I will, for your peace of mind.”

  He opened the door and flicked on the light. It was a room full of ugly mechanical lumps and boxed units built into the walls and corners, and at the back there were racks of switches and some dials. “Happy?”

  “Getting happier,” said Eva.

  The cleaning room came next. This was a larger room, holding boxed stacks of cleaning solutions, racks of mops, a cleaning machine as big as one of the golf buggies, and some photocopied health and safety sheets pasted all over the walls.

  “You’d better get on that Tannoy now. Your boy isn’t in here… if he’s out there… well, you best think about your boy before you worry about your job, Miss, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Just one more question.”

  The man sighed and shook his head again, disapproval all over his face.

  “Is there any place upstairs or downstairs in this building you know someone could feasibly hide?”

  “Nope. Not really.”

  “How well do you know this building?” asked Jess, covering the remaining bases.

  “I know it as well as any man here, better in fact. I clean and inspect every room and facility here. If I don’t ensure standards are met in every room, I lose my job. White Star are strict, and you should know that. They don’t tolerate nonsense and foolishness, they expect their pound of flesh and from me they bloody well get it served up well on a silver platter cleaned by yours truly.”

  “For my boy – please think hard – is there any place he could hide, any place at all?”

  “No. I told you and I mean it. Every space up there is used or locked away morning and night, and I check them all – or my team checks them all each day. The storage cupboards are locked before shifts start to prevent theft. The offices are open. There are no in-betweens. Your boy is either here in this warehouse hiding behind some dangerous machinery, or he is not in this building at all. Now please, don’t waste any more time. Go and make that announcement. Do it now.”

  Eva nodded. “You’re right. I’ll do that.” Then she turned away and took off her hat immediately.

  “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you again,” said the man with a patronising tone. “But I hope you get your boy back soon.”

  “Oh, I’ll find my boy all right,” said Eva, striding away into the noise beyond.

  “Back into your hole, Mr Toad,” said Jess, abruptly leaving the cleaner with more deep furrows on his forehead than in a pack of McCoy’s.

  By the time Jess caught up with Eva, the officious floor manager, who had lectured them about their uniform before, arrived with a finger raised and mouth open to admonish them. Eva walked past him, dropping her coat on the way.

  “Just who do you think you are?” yelled the man, loud and incredulous.

  “I am not a number, I am a free man,” said Jess, quoting the line from a show she had never seen. She’d seen it on a commercial.

  “I’m going to report you. You’ll face serious consequences.”

  “You’re frightening me,” said Jess without looking back. They left the man alone, flailing in anger. “What’s the story now, Eva?”

  “I’m so angry. Arrrrgh! We’ve wasted hours coming here and we don’t have hours to play with.”

  “What do you mean? Dan could be upstairs. The cleaner could be involved, he could be lying.”

  “But he isn’t. Did you look at any of these people? I get nothing from them that suggests they are lying. These people are just normal folk working for the evil empire, completely oblivious about it. They are innocent. This place may be chock full of criminal goods, but none of these employees seem wise to it. Some of the management will know what’s really going on here and maybe a couple of blue collar workers on their team too. But we’re not interested in illegal goods, drug trafficking, whatever. That isn’t our case. Our mission is simple.”

  “Save Dan.”

  “Yep. And Dan isn’t here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “One hundred percent… well near enough. And near enough will have to be good enough, since we don’t have time for any fine-toothed combs.”r />
  “And Nathan! Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Yes, that was embarrassingly bad. But I’m living by my wits here, Jess. Another day, he would have seen straight through that.”

  “But it worked.”

  The warehouse noise cloaked their conversation. Workers in orange jackets crossed their paths in busy single mindedness; one was even riding one of those two wheeled contraptions which George W. Bush had once been filmed on, a stupid buggy made even more ridiculous by his use of it. White Star Gazette had technology coming out of its ears. This business was lucrative. Eva’s mind processed everything, checking against the things she had dismissed. No… it had to be Shad Thames. Already, her mind was painting a picture of the building – an imagined one – a newspaper headquarters. Where would you keep someone hostage in a plush central London office building? Come on, think.

  But she was grasping at the wind, burning out on stress, and she needed to stay calm if they were even going to survive. As these thoughts were racing through her head, her eyes noticed a couple of workers. The first two she saw were innocuous and busy. Then her eyes passed over the third man and something in her nervous system went off the charts, a sensory seismograph showing significant tremors. She looked again, but the figure was simply moving stock from a shelf into a cart behind him, his broad back to Eva and Jess.

  “The big man, just there. See him?”

  “Ummmm… Yeah.”

  “Look away now and keep walking.”

  They walked on.

  “Another bloody stupid mistake. We’ve been followed, and now I’ve taken off my bloody disguise to prove a point. I’m losing it, Jess, and I’m putting you at risk. Perhaps it’s time you went home.”

  “What, just when they let the giants loose on us? I think I’m safer here, Eva.”

  Eva smiled. The girl was wise beyond her years and had the street smarts down already. They moved through the double doors into the corridor. Eva took a look back through the porthole windows on the doors. The images beyond were a blurry haze, but she thought she could see the big man’s face looking her way.

  “Let’s go now!”

  “Sadie? What are you doing here?”

  Kevin Walsh looked confused, embarrassed, and a little pissed off. He had his arm up and folded behind his head, scratching an imaginary itch. “You were supposed to be leaving.”

  Eva shook her head, stalled and then blurted. “We just couldn’t help ourselves. I thought if we took a look at your systems, we’d know what pitch to bring back next time. A girl’s got to use every advantage she’s got, right? Sales is such a dog eat dog world.”

  “Yeah, right. I just had a call from management telling me to look out for two women causing trouble. Sadie, you are full of shit.”

  A tall man with a stern expression came out of a side door. He was wearing black motorcycle leathers. Not the cool kind, but the functional biker gear. The man stared at them both and allowed himself a thin smile of victory. It wasn’t friendly, and the seismograph in Eva’s nerve centre went haywire once again.

  “Kevin. If I told you who I was, or why I was here, you’d still think I was full of shit. But just so there is no confusion, the people you work for, including the courier guy standing right there – they are the lying deceitful, evil ones. You need to get out of the way, Kevin and let us go. You have no idea what is going on here, no matter what this man told you.”

  “This man didn’t tell me anything. I call a got from HQ.”

  “Kevin - Just before we came into this building a man on a motorbike tried to run us down. A courier motorbike, as a matter of fact.”

  The courier sneered. “You are full of shit.” Eva noted a hint of an Eastern European accent which could have been anything from ex-Soviet or even Balkan, which was close enough for her to be worried.

  “That’s for sure,” said Kevin Walsh, his male ego spurned, and he was bitter as hell about it.

  Eva weighed up her options, which were pretty limited. All she could do was guess their next move and plot one of her own based on it.

  “I could call the police. What you’ve done is trespass and lie through your teeth.”

  “Go on. Do it. We haven’t done anything wrong,” said Jess, oozing petulance. Eva shook her head, just once.

  Walsh rubbed his spiky hair until it wasn’t spiky anymore. He was one-hundred percent frustrated and hacked off.

  “Trespassing is a crime. And you’re trespassing.”

  “That’s right, trespassing is a crime. Are you a policeman?” said Jess.

  The man’s face flushed a deeper shade of scarlet.

  “What has any of this got to do with a courier?” asked Eva.

  Walsh looked at the man at his side.

  “Bogdanis works for us.”

  “You take instructions from a courier?”

  “He’s a messenger – assuming you understand the concept – he relays messages, and besides, HQ called about you. You’d better be grateful to them. If it was up to me, I’d call the police every time. Industrial espionage, is that what this is? I should have known you were too sharp.”

  “As if.” She looked at Bogdanis. There was menace in his eyes which came free with his acid smile. If Walsh planned to let them go, whatever happened next was going to happen outside, and to save on the mess for White Star Gazette and its boss.

  “Go and don’t come back,” said Walsh.

  “I suppose you’ll be leaving now as well.”

  Bogdanis smiled. “You want my company?” It was sarcasm of course. But Eva knew she was right. The man was some kind of mercenary as well as a messenger. The outsourcing firm -maybe they dressed it up as a messenger service. It was a messenger service, after a fashion – a lethal one.

  “I want to know where your HQ is.”

  Bogdanis momentarily stopped smiling as Kevin Walsh answered quickly.

  “Shad Thames, London. You didn’t need to trespass here to get that information. So, who is the stupid one now, Sadie?”

  “You’ll never guess, Kevin,” said Jess.

  “You know what, I think he might,” said Eva. “See you round, Bogdanis.” Eva passed them demonstrating as much brass as she could. Jess followed, turning to blow a tiny kiss at Kevin Walsh and Bogdanis. When the women were out of earshot, Kevin Walsh turned to the courier.

  “Is it industrial espionage?”

  “Who knows?”

  “If HQ sent you here, there must be a problem.”

  “Not anymore,” said Bogdanis, already walking away towards the double doors Eva and Jess had used a minute before. On his way into the daylight, Bogdanis stopped by the empty desk of the security guard of the back door. He went to the lectern and looked at the names written in the folder. He picked up the telephone and dialled reception.

  “Bogdanis is here. The side entrance. Please ensure the security guard is fired.”

  He slammed the receiver down and walked out into the bright wash of the day. His bike had been parked up in a small bay by the road leading to the derelict sofa warehouse. He stood stock still for another moment, staring at his bike. It was upturned. He’d left it standing at an angle, looking sleek and sporty as a big Suzuki should (with the exception of the ugly courier boxes at the back). Now the bike lay prostrate, like it had been mugged. He moved towards it and found the tyres intact, in fact everything was fine apart from the fact it had been clattered to the ground with a violent shove, the paintwork scratched. The girl with the big mouth must have done it, he was certain. He planned to hurt her, and then he suddenly caught the distinct growl of their car engine starting. Across the road, now busy with traffic, the red Alfa reversed and turned quickly out of its space. Bogdanis grabbed his bike handles and hauled the heavy machine onto its wheels. He watched the gleaming red car sprint towards the exit –they would have to come back this way to leave the old retail park, unless they wanted to risk driving the wrong way down the one way system. Bogdanis smiled. They were women, so they w
ould be risk averse. He had every chance of fixing them within the next ten minutes. As he happily thought about this, two things occurred. Firstly, the red car turned left out of the front of the car park, dodging oncoming, horn-howling cars before leaping up a slip road back towards the A13 to London. He could only watch. Then the second unexpected thing occurred: a shocking thud connected with the back of his head, sending him sprawling to the ground. He rolled onto his hands and feet, hunched like a predatory wild cat ready to leap. He looked up and saw a man with a neck as thick as an elephant’s leg, and a head like a breeze block. The attacker wore a neon orange jacket with a White Star Gazette badge. The man had fists like boulder, and in one boulder he held a broken broomstick with the splintered sharp end facing up like a short spear. The situation had changed, and so the odds had changed dramatically too; so had Bogdanis’ confidence. But Bogdanis had trained hard and never been beaten since his time in the Soviet National Service. He pushed up onto his feet, standing up, face to face with his enemy. This would have to be done quickly. His quarry was on the move. Victor Marka would not be a happy man.

  The big man with the brick head and the elephant neck snorted and wiped his mouth with the back of his spare hand. The stocky man spoke with an accent Bogdanis had never heard before. “Come on then, you shit-speck. Let’s see what you got.”