The Demon Code (27 page)
The wordes of the psalmist (114:4) shall be proved correct. No less so the words of John (1:12 and 5:6). And also, be mindful and listen, as John likewise saide: he that hath ears to heare, God has enjoined him to heare. It matters not a whit whether he wish it or noe.
Kennedy looked ahead. The last sheet in the stack was number 86. It was going to be a sod of a long night.
Tillman made his approach along a route that took him between the lines of sight of the security cameras. There might be nobody watching the monitor in any case, or the monitor might be set to flick cyclically through the camera feeds, but he took as few chances as he could.
He went to a place he’d already chosen from a long way out – the angle of a wall, where a dead zone for the cameras corresponded with a thick patch of shadow between two arc lights. He pressed himself in against the wall, partially shielded to his left by a downpipe, and waited.
The next time the guard made his rounds, Tillman was ready. He let the man walk right past him.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Got the time?’
He wasn’t being a smart-ass. Rotational force increased your chances of a clean knock-out, because when you turn quickly, your brain, in its bubble of protective fluid, floats relatively stationary inside your turning skull. As the guard swung round to face him, Tillman smacked him across the side of the head with a sap. The man’s knees buckled. Tillman caught him as he folded and lowered him carefully to the ground.
He quickly took the guard’s jacket and cap. Keys were in the jacket pocket, ready to hand: good. There was no time to take the trousers. If anyone
was
watching the camera feed, the gap before he emerged again had to be short enough not to arouse suspicions. He tied the guard’s hands and feet with plasticated wire and gagged him with duct tape. Rough and ready, but it would hold for a while.
Then he stepped out into the light, head turned slightly away from the watching cameras, and ambled around the back of the building towards the door.
He was putting his money on there being a straightforward lock that one of the guard’s keys would fit, and even then he knew he needed to get it right on the first or second try. Otherwise, he’d have to shoot the lock-plate off and take his chances with whoever was inside. He had his gun, a Mateba Unica, unholstered in his hand as he stepped up to the door.
But his luck was in. The guard hadn’t just left the door unlocked, he’d placed a wooden chock on the ground to wedge it open. That level of sloppiness and stupidity was a gift from God, and Tillman took it. He didn’t even break stride as he pushed the door wide and stepped in.
On the other side of the door, there was a narrow vestibule, completely empty apart from a time clock on the wall and a rack of punch-cards. The time clock showed six o’clock, and had presumably done so for quite a while. The cards had a patina of dust, some had fallen out of their pigeonholes onto the floor, and there were bootmarks laid across them. Whoever was staffing this place now, they didn’t bother with clocking in and clocking out.
There was a double swing-door ahead of Tillman, light spilling out from the crack between the two doors. He pushed it open and walked right through.
Into a much larger space, flood-lit. Huge wood-and-steel-framed shelf units towered past the floodlights into the darkness of a ceiling void that had to be forty feet above him. On the shelves, crates and drums and bulky objects swathed in plastic fibre-wrap.
Closer to hand, another guard turned as the door slammed against the wall.
‘What took—’ he said.
Then he registered Tillman’s camouflage trousers, or maybe just Tillman’s cold, stern face. His eyes widened.
Tillman hit him across the jaw with the butt of the Unica, knocking him backward into the nearest rack of shelves. It was very solidly built and didn’t even shake. The guard managed to stay on his feet, but he made the mistake of scrambling for the gun at his side. Tillman kicked his legs out from under him.
There was no need for another punch. Tillman got the guard in a throat-lock, his free left hand holding the guy’s arm against his side so he couldn’t bring the gun up, and applied steady pressure.
After thirty seconds, the guard wasn’t moving any more. After forty, Tillman set him down, tied him up and gagged him like the other one, and put him out of the way on one of the floor-level shelves.
No way were these guys
Elohim
: they were local hire, and not very good at that.
Now, belatedly, Tillman did the reconnaissance that in a perfect world he would have done before going in. First of all, he checked for interior CCTV hook-ups, or wiring for pressure or contact alarms. There were none, which didn’t surprise him now that he’d seen the standard of the security staff. Next, he found the other doors out of this massive, hangar-like room – there were seven, in all – locked the ones that would lock with the guard’s keys, and marked the locations of the others. One led through to an inner office whose floor-to-ceiling window was designed to allow whoever sat there to oversee everything that went on in the warehouse. It was dark, now, and empty.
Tillman checked the rolling door of the freight bay, too. It wasn’t a separate space but an area within the bigger room, with a built-up platform beside it and an unloading ramp for big items. An overhead crane hoist hung above it. In silhouette, it looked like the bowed head of a sleeping tyrannosaur.
So why would our girl spend her nights here?
he wondered.
And why isn’t she here right now?
But maybe a bigger question was: where
is
here?
He went to the nearest shelves and took a look at their contents. The bulky, wrapped items looked to be machine parts, but it wasn’t easy to guess what the machines might be. He slashed some of the boxes open with the German paratrooper’s gravity knife that he wore in a boot-sheath. They contained metal mouldings, screws and gaskets – the lowest common denominator of garages and workshops the world over.
But in a garage or a workshop, some of these boxes would be open and in use. Even in a wholesale warehouse, you’d expect some of them to have been broken out from under plastic seals to fulfil part-orders. Tillman ran his spread fingers over box after box. The dust was thick enough to ruck under his touch, and apart from the places where his hand fell, it was pristine.
So whatever was going on here, the stuff on these shelves was a front. For what, though?
Tillman thought of one place he could go to for an answer: the truck. If it was being loaded, it wasn’t with this stuff. He went over to the freight bay and tried the truck’s rear doors. Padlocked. But it didn’t take long to find a crowbar, and the hasp of the padlock broke open on the third tug. He threw the doors open.
The dark interior of the truck was piled high with boxes. He took a torch from his pack, flicked it on and played the beam over the labels on the nearer boxes.
C(CH2OH) 4 PENT
B-HMX 95% HANDLE WITH CARE
1,3 BUTADIENE BULK ELAST
AMM NITR. CONC CAKE
He sucked in his breath. Not nice at all. Some of this stuff – like the ammonium nitrate, which made up a large percentage of most commercial fertilisers – might have looked reasonably innocent by itself. But there was only one context in which all of these substances would ever crop up together, and that was bomb-manufacture.
The truck was a bespoke bomb factory on wheels.
But it wasn’t only that, Tillman discovered as he widened his search. There were wooden longboxes, too, of a type he immediately recognised from his mercenary days. They were the crates in which guns and rifles were sometimes transported, wrapped in grease and plastic to keep them rust-proof for long-term storage. He broke one open, opened up the inner seal and pulled out a shining FN Mark 16 assault rifle. He counted six in the box. Another, smaller box in the adjacent stack contained forty-millimetre grenade launchers. They looked like a good fit for the FNs. And moving that box brought him face to face with another box, whose sides bore military stencils: CBU-94/B TMD SOFT. The TMD in that mouthful of acronyms stood for Tactical Munitions Dispenser. Cluster bombs, in other words, with launchers.
Bombs. Guns. Portable munitions. Everything you needed to start your own war. Tillman backtracked. The busy little beavers who’d been filling this truck with high-tech death for most of the afternoon probably hadn’t been carrying the crates and boxes far. With some of this stuff, you minimised human contact as far as you could, on the grounds that if someone’s hand slipped you suddenly didn’t have humans any more – just runny chuck steak. So somewhere close by, and probably in this room, there was a cache.
Once he knew that, it was absurdly easy to find. At one end of the room, separate from the fixed shelving, he found a set of moving racks of the kind used for library storage. These were packed as tight as sardines, with no aisles between them. But each unit ran on tracks and had a wheel fitted so it could be moved to left or right, creating an aisle wherever it was needed.
Wheeling the racks into all their various permutations, Tillman found what he had expected to find: a trapdoor set flush with the floor, with three keyholes evenly spaced along one of its edges.
Risking the noise, Tillman shot out the locks one by one. Then he lifted the trap part-way. Striplights flickered on automatically down below, illuminating a lower chamber as big – but not nearly as high – as the one he stood in. Quarry tiles on the floor, some of them cracked, white-limed walls. Broad, sturdy wooden steps led down to it, and alongside them there was a mechanical chain-hoist. A smell compounded of mildew, packing grease and bleach rose to greet Tillman, strong and dank and insinuating.
He thought for a moment or two. He wanted to go on down and find out the worst. But this place – not just the hidden basement, but the building as a whole – could easily turn into a trap. He had to take a few minimal precautions, at least, his own version of a tripwire tied to a few tin cans. The instinct was too deeply ingrained in him to ignore.
Tillman let the trapdoor fall all the way open. It hit the wall, where a wooden stay-bar had been bolted into place for it to rest on. He walked back across to the freight bay looking for something he could use.
Seven miles away, a red light winked on a board, to the accelerating pulse of an electronic alarm.
Diema muttered an oath. It wasn’t much of an oath, since the People viewed profanity as a wound to the soul of the utterer, but there was a lot of feeling behind it.
The warehouse’s alarm was silent, but the red light flashing on the tell-tale unit just over the loading bay doors showed that Tillman had tripped it – probably by forcing a lock or stepping in front of a motion sensor. It was only a matter of time, now. He could still get out of there before they came, but only if he knew what he’d done, moved now and moved fast.
The girl waited, edgily, for the inevitable consequences to play out. It took eleven minutes before a black van, high-sided and windowless, pulled off the A312 onto the deserted industrial estate, drove halfway down the approach road to the warehouse and stopped, effectively blocking it. The only other way out was across open ground to the south or east.
A minute later, a Volvo S60, also black, rolled up behind the van. Whereupon the van drove over the lip of the kerb and into the wasteground, trundling slowly around to the other side of the building.
Diema watched this disaster unfolding with a mixture of exasperation and fatalism. She still needed more from Tillman, so his death right now would be a major stumbling block. On the other hand, it would show perhaps how flawed he was – how much less than she’d been told. There was a great deal of report and speculation in Kuutma’s files about Tillman’s unique talents – his combat skills, his intuition, his dogged courage, his endless, insane resourcefulness. Now it seemed he was falling at the first hurdle, and in such an obvious way! Couldn’t he have checked for alarms? Couldn’t he have taken the time to do proper recon?
Men – only men, no women – were stepping out of the van and the car now, and walking towards the warehouse. Most were the same men who’d been working there earlier in the day, but among them Diema saw two who were of a different order. The skeletally thin man with the ash-white hair was Hifela, the Face of the Skull, and the muscular man beside him, who looked like an oaf or a butcher, was Elias Shud. They were hand-trained executioners, answerable only to Ber Lusim himself.
So it was over. Unless she risked everything to go in and rescue Tillman from the mess he’d made. And even then …
She counted ten. Ten
Elohim –
two of them among the best the People had ever raised.
It was over, whether she went or stayed.
What Tillman found in the lower room came as no surprise, but only because he’d already had the big surprise when he opened up the truck. Along with more explosives and raw materials for explosives, there were RPG-Komar shoulder-mounted missiles, self-igniting phosphorus grenades, Belgian army issue Tatang combat knives, M2 backpack flamethrowers and – looking almost ashamed of the shabby company it was keeping – a box of digital alarm clocks ready to be filleted for timing mechanisms. It was an arsenal of enormous extent and terrifying variety, assembled by someone who knew what they wanted to cook up (presumably Armageddon) and exactly what the recipe called for.
Tillman wasn’t given to letting his imagination run wild, but found himself playing out in his mind the scenarios that would arise if this Pandora’s Box were opened and a tenth of its contents saw the light of day.
But this was an ongoing operation. It didn’t look like a survivalist stockpile assembled against a future apocalypse. Quite the opposite. Two trucks had rolled in, one had rolled out again. The other had been stacked to the roof with instruments of death and mayhem and was in the freight bay ready to roll.