by Paul Adam
He paused. Would the door have an alarm on it? Probably, but he’d just have to deal with it. He grasped the handle and pushed the door open. Inside was a vast, cavernous space, with a concrete floor and a ceiling so high that, in the darkness, Max couldn’t see exactly where it began. What he could see, however, was the alarm keypad on the wall beside the door. He knew he had only a few seconds before the alarm went off. He didn’t waste time punching random buttons, trying to guess the code for disabling the system. Instead, he glanced quickly around the area, light trickling in through the door. He took in the raised concrete platform for loading and unloading lorries, the stacks of cardboard boxes and crates on the floor and, in the wall to one side, a door and wide glass window that looked like an office.
He closed the external door behind him. The loading bay was immediately plunged into blackness. Max crouched down and relocked the door. As he finished, he saw that the indicator light on the keypad had changed from green to flashing red. No bells started ringing, which surprised him, but he guessed that somewhere in the building – maybe on the desk in the lobby – another light was also flashing red and a security guard would soon be coming to investigate.
He walked across the bay as quickly as he dared in the pitch-darkness, his hands outstretched in front of him. His fingers touched a large wooden crate and he felt his way round it, going deeper into the bay until he found a collection of small cardboard boxes grouped together in stacks a couple of metres high. He slid one of the stacks aside and squeezed through the gap, rearranging the boxes to create a space in the middle big enough to conceal him.
He was only just in time. The loading-bay lights clicked on. Max blinked, shielding his face from the glare for a few seconds to let his eyes adjust. He heard footsteps – a lone man walking across the bay towards the external door. The footsteps stopped. The door handle rattled. The man was trying it, finding it still locked. What would he do now? Just reset the alarm, assuming there’d been some malfunction in the system, and go away – that was what Max hoped. He held his breath, listening hard and detecting the faint tap of a finger on the keypad. Then the man came back across the bay and into the stacks of containers. He passed only a metre away from where Max was hiding, but didn’t stop. A walkie-talkie crackled and the man spoke into it, talking to a colleague somewhere.
‘Looks OK,’ he said. ‘The door’s secure. Must have been a glitch in the power supply. Put it in the log and we’ll get the engineer to look at it in the morning.’
The footsteps grew fainter. The lights went out. Max stayed where he was for a few minutes, then crept out and felt his way across to the office door he’d noticed earlier. It wasn’t locked. Going inside, he fumbled around and located a switch on the wall. A bare bulb in the ceiling came on, flooding the room with harsh light.
It wasn’t a big office, maybe four metres wide and three deep, containing a desk and chair, a computer terminal and two filing cabinets. The outer wall was taken up almost entirely by the window overlooking the loading bay and on the inner wall was a huge calendar showing every day of the year, the date squares marked with coloured stickers and neat felt-tip pen writing. A sign on the door read, DISPATCH OFFICE.
Max sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. Access to the files required a password. He knew he’d never be able to guess it in a million years, so he hunted around the desk for a few minutes, just in case someone had been careless enough to write it down somewhere. They hadn’t.
Never mind, he said to himself. It was always going to be a long shot. He switched off the computer and turned his attention to the in-tray on the desk, which was overflowing with paper. He sifted through the documents. Most of them related to cargo shipments – machine parts, engineering accessories, foodstuffs and other goods that were being sent to a place called Zaliv Myertvetsa.
Max had heard that name before. It took him a moment to realize where: in the London News Chronicle offices when Dan Kingston had shown him the locations of Rescomin’s operations around the world. Zaliv Myertvetsa had been in Kamchatka, on the east coast of Russia. Rescomin had a platinum mine there, if he remembered correctly.
The cargo was being shipped to Kamchatka on a vessel named the Reunion Star which, according to the paperwork, was berthed at Pier 80, Cesar Chavez Street, in San Francisco Bay. Max twisted round to look at the wall calendar. On the date square for Monday 27 July, only two days away, were written the words, Reunion Star sails, 9 a.m.
Max went carefully through the pile of documents, but found nothing that really interested him, in particular no mention of Episuderon, so he moved on to the filing cabinets. They were both locked. He could have picked the locks, but he didn’t need to bother since the keys were in a tray on the desk.
He opened the first cabinet and looked in the files beginning with the letter ‘E’. There was no mention of Episuderon there either. Disappointed, he sat back down and stared out through the window at the towers of boxes in the loading bay. He knew from the files at Woodford Down that three hundred ampoules of the drug had been sent to this building only two weeks ago. Had the ampoules already been dispatched to some other location? Or were they still here, awaiting dispatch. Are they out there in one of those boxes in the loading bay? he wondered. He thought about checking them all, then realized what an unrealistic idea it was. There must have been a thousand or more boxes and many of them were out of reach – high up in the stacks or buried beneath other containers. Examining them all was out of the question.
So what now? Were there more files somewhere else, maybe upstairs in the main offices? That was possible, but finding them was not going to be easy. Where did he begin? Rescomin Tower was thirty-five storeys high, with dozens of offices on each floor. There was no way he could search such a huge building, especially in the dark.
Then he thought suddenly of that night he had gone through the files at Woodford Down. The Episuderon sales hadn’t been filed under the name of the drug itself, they’d been filed under the name of the company buying it – Rescomin. So the reverse should apply here: the purchases would be filed under the name of the company selling the Episuderon – Phobos Pharmaceuticals.
Max went back to the cabinet and rummaged through the ‘P’ file. There it was: Phobos Pharmaceuticals. He took out the wad of documents and spread them out on the desk. Some were ‘Goods In’ papers – the invoices and notes that had accompanied the Episuderon to San Francisco. They told him nothing he didn’t already know. But others were ‘Goods Out’ papers. Now that was what he wanted. He put them all in a pile and sorted through them. The earlier invoices showed that Episuderon had been flown from San Francisco to Santo Domingo, presumably for use on Shadow Island. But for the past few weeks every cargo of Episuderon that had arrived from the UK had been sent on by air freight to a Rescomin office in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, and from there to Zaliv Myertvetsa.
Max put the documents back in the cabinet and locked it. He’d answered one of the questions that had been nagging away at him. Now for the other question: had his father been brought here to Rescomin headquarters? There was only one way to find out – go upstairs and look.
Leaving the light on in the dispatch office so he could see what he was doing, he went out into the loading bay and explored its furthest reaches, discovering two service lifts and a door to the emergency stairs at the rear. He decided against taking the lift – the security guards might possibly use them – and took the stairs instead. They were in a well on the north side of the tower, enclosed by glass windows that gave a clear view of the surrounding area.
Max ran up to the first floor, pushed open the door from the stairwell and found himself in a large, open-plan office space that was divided up into cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. There were no lights on anywhere. It was the small hours of the morning now, so he didn’t think that anyone would be working at this time – even the cleaners would have come and gone. Therefore any light burning in an office would be easy to spot, and almost c
ertainly suspicious.
He went back to the stairs and headed up to the second floor. That was similar to the first – another huge open-plan office in complete darkness. The third and fourth floors were the same, but the fifth had corridors with smaller individual offices opening off them. Max checked every corridor, looking for light seeping out under the doors, but saw no sign that there was anyone there.
Slowly, he worked his way up the building. Too slowly. After an hour, he’d only reached the fifteenth floor. That left another twenty storeys to go. It would be daylight before he’d finished. He decided to speed things up by using one of the service lifts. He’d just have to take the risk of encountering a guard. Was his father in the building? Max was beginning to wonder. But by the thirtieth floor, he’d seen no sign of anybody, let alone his dad. The place appeared to be deserted.
On the thirty-first floor, he discovered how wrong he was.
The lift doors opened and Max was startled to see Jimmy Abbott waiting just outside. Jimmy was taken by surprise too. He gaped at Max and yelled out, then stepped forward, but Max was too quick for him. He jabbed the button on the control panel and the doors started to slide shut. Jimmy thrust his arm and a leg into the closing gap, trying to hold the doors open. Max shoved him back and kicked him hard on the leg. Jimmy cried out in pain and Max kicked him again, pushing Jimmy’s shoulder back with all his strength, then withdrawing his hands just before the doors snapped shut.
Max hammered on the nearest button – for the thirty-fifth floor – and felt the lift surge upwards. Moments later, the doors slid open and he darted out. Glancing up and to the side, he saw that the floor indicator panel above the second lift was illuminated, reading thirty-three, then thirty-four. They were coming up after him.
Max stared around desperately, trying not to panic. He ran across to the stairwell door and hurled himself through. He was about to race down the stairs when he heard rapid footsteps echoing up from below. He peered over the handrail. Two men were running up from the thirty-fourth floor – his escape route was cut off. He had no choice; he had to go up. Spinning round, he sprinted up the stairs and burst out onto the roof of the tower.
The first thing he saw were other skyscrapers surrounding the building and the tall, slim Transamerica Pyramid lit up in the distance like the spire of a cathedral, a red light winking on its top to warn away low-flying aircraft. Then he turned his gaze to the roof itself. It was flat and broad, with a waist-high concrete parapet around the edges. In the centre was a two-storey high block housing the lift shafts and the services for the building – water tanks and air conditioning units. Max ran around to the other side of the block and paused, panting for breath.
He was trapped. There was only one way off the roof – the stairs he’d just come up – and his pursuers were on them. They might even be emerging from the stairwell right now. Max knew he couldn’t evade them. There was nowhere to hide up here, and nowhere to run. He would just have to give himself up.
But everything in his nature rebelled at the thought. Giving up wasn’t something that he did, especially as he knew that giving up wasn’t just defeat – it was death. They would kill him for certain. They’d tried and failed on Shrader Street and then again in Golden Gate Park, but they’d finish him off this time. Max had no doubt about that. But what alternative did he have? Could he fight them? They were grown men, and they had guns. What chance did he stand against them? They wouldn’t even give him the opportunity to fight. They would shoot him down the moment they saw him.
But Max wasn’t going to go quietly. And he wasn’t going to wait meekly for them to come for him. If he was going to die, he was going to do it on the move, resisting to the very last.
The stairs were blocked, but maybe there was another way off the roof. Maybe he could attempt to climb down the outside of the building. Tower blocks like this had window frames and ledges that could provide hand- and footholds. It was crazy, but it was the only option he had.
He sprinted across the roof and looked over the parapet. It was a long way to the ground. He felt his stomach lurch at the prospect of trying to climb down a thirty-five-storey skyscraper. One slip and … he didn’t let himself finish the thought.
He looked to his right and something caught his eye. What was that? Suspended on wires just below roof level was a small platform with a metal fence around its edges. His heart leaped, stirred by a sudden burst of hope. It was a window-cleaning gondola that could go up and down the sides of the building, with enough space inside it for a couple of people to wash the glass panes. Maybe he didn’t have to climb down, after all.
He raced along by the parapet, noticing the thick steel girder embedded into its surface. He should have spotted it earlier. It was the track that the hoist supporting the gondola used for moving sideways across the tower.
Bang! A gunshot reverberated around the roof and a bullet ricocheted off the top of the parapet only inches in front of Max. He twisted his head and saw a man training a pistol on him, lining up for a second shot. Max threw himself to the ground and heard another bullet thudding into the concrete wall. He scrambled to his feet and kept running, calculating the position of the gondola by the framework of the hoist that protruded out from the edge of the roof.
He glanced sideways and saw the man heading towards him, wanting to get in closer for another shot. The man raised his pistol. He was only twenty metres away. From that range he couldn’t miss. His finger tightened on the trigger. And at that moment, Max hurled himself over the parapet.
He did it blind, just hoping and praying that he’d calculated correctly. He felt himself falling through space and braced himself. His shoulder, then his hip hit something hard. There was a clang of metal, a vibration as the platform swung out a little from the building. He’d done it! He was on the gondola.
He had to move fast. The gunman would be closing in, readying himself for a shot over the parapet. Max was a sitting duck. He scanned the inside of the gondola, taking only a fraction of a second to register and identify its features: a solid metal base, metre-high mesh sides with a metal guard rail around the top, reels of thin steel cable at each end connected to the overhanging hoist, a control panel and a long lever beneath it that looked like a brake.
Max grabbed hold of the lever and released it. The reels of cable immediately began to spin, unwinding so rapidly that Max was thrown to the floor. He flung out his arms and hooked them around one of the metal stanchions, clinging on for dear life as the gondola plummeted down the side of the tower. He looked up, saw the gunman leaning over the parapet, aiming his pistol, but the gondola was already out of range, the gunman blurring, receding into the blackness around the roof.
The windows flashed past, too fast for Max to register the floors. He was pinned to the base of the gondola by the force of the descent, the wind howling past his ears, the drums of cable rattling, making the gondola shudder and sway – it wasn’t built for this kind of punishment. The cables were screaming and the gondola was out of control. If it hit the ground at this speed, it would shatter into pieces and Max would be pulped like a ripe tomato.
How far had it dropped? It must be halfway down by now. Max twisted his head round and squinted through the wire mesh, saw the ground racing up to meet them. He tried to get to his feet, but the force was too great. It was like a rock pressing down on his head. He made it to his knees and stretched out his arm. The brake lever was just out of reach.
The gondola was juddering violently, the vibrations throbbing through Max’s body, making him grimace in pain. The ground was getting nearer and nearer. He crawled forwards, every centimetre a struggle, and reached out with his arm again. His fingers closed around the lever. He hauled back on it. He felt, and heard, the brake engage and the steel cable screech in response. The lever started to jump and jerk. Max hung on tight, gritting his teeth, his muscles knotting under the strain. The gondola was slowing, the cables emitting a high-pitched shriek. Max prayed they wouldn’t snap. His
arms felt as if they were breaking, while the noise pierced his eardrums like a skewer – but he refused to let go.
The ground was looming up beneath him, only fifteen metres away. From somewhere, he found a morsel of extra strength and threw it all onto the lever. The gondola shuddered to a stop, swinging to and fro a mere two or three metres above the pavement. Max let go of the brake, gasping for air, his whole body trembling. Then he clambered over the side of the gondola and dropped to the ground.
He looked around. The descent from roof to street had taken only a few seconds. His pursuers, even using the lift, would take much longer. That gave him time. He stumbled away across the street and into the labyrinth of skyscrapers.
An hour before dawn, when most of the city was still sleeping, a sleek black saloon pulled into the car park by the toll plaza on the southern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. A man in a dark sweat top and running shoes got out. He looked like a keen, early-morning jogger about to set off on a training run down to the shore of the bay. He glanced around cautiously. The car park was deserted, no other people, no other vehicles. On the freeway and bridge, the traffic was light. A damp, grey mist was blowing in from the ocean, creeping over the water and reaching out onto the land in cold, hazy tendrils. The man shivered and zipped his sweat top up to the neck. Then he jogged easily away across the car park.
On the far side, in the shadow of some trees, stood an orange metal storage container. The man took a thin steel implement out of his pocket and used it to pick the lock on the container door. He glanced around once more, to check he was unobserved, then pulled open the door and stepped inside the container.