Silver ota-1 Page 16

  Frost holstered his pistol.

  He reached up for one of the rafters, caught a hold of the beam with both hands, and lifted himself silently to his feet. He stood, one foot either side of the loft hatch. He couldn’t stand fully upright because of the confined space. He bent down all the way, working his fingers beneath the wooden board, then very carefully lifted it out of the way. The alarm chorus hid the occasional scrape and scuff of wood on wood as he put the loft door down. He could see the landing lit up beneath him. Frost lowered himself back down to his stomach, then leaned ever so slightly down through the opening to see exactly what he’d be lowering himself into.

  The last uniform still stood in the bedroom doorway, unable to pull his gaze away from the mutilation on the bed. The odds were the poor guy had never seen a corpse before. That his first looked like one of Andrei Chikatilo’s victims spread out there on her bed didn’t help his brain process the horror of the room. But it did help Frost. He breathed deeply, once, twice, steadying himself, before he lowered himself slowly, and soundlessly, down. Frost took all of his weight on his forearms like a gymnast on the parallel bars. As his shoulders came level with his elbows every muscle in his arms began to tremble violently. He expected the police officer to cry out, but he didn’t. Frost twisted slightly, allowing his body weight to lower him further, until it felt as though the muscles in his shoulders and upper back were going to tear, then he dropped down the last few inches to the floor silently behind the uniform.

  He reached around to the holster at the base of his spine and drew his gun.

  He took two steps across the deep pile carpet, quickly bringing himself up to no more than a few inches behind the policeman. He saw himself over the uniform’s shoulder, in the mirror on the wall behind the bed. The uniform’s eyes widened and he started to turn. Frost didn’t hesitate. He pistol whipped the uniform across the side of the head, dropping him like a stone. It was that or putting a bullet in his temple. He caught the man as his legs buckled and lowered him gently to the floor.

  Frost took the stairs two and three at a time, then froze at the bottom, caught by a moment’s indecision. “This is such a bollocks job. That guy saw my face, and my prints are all over this place,” he said, looking at where his left hand still rested on the ornamental acorn-carved knob at the bottom of the balustrade.

  “Three choices,” Lethe said in his ear, without missing a beat. “Get the feather duster out, play chemist and burn the place down-it’s easy enough, trust me. There’s a gas main, and there’s enough explosive stuff in the average kitchen to take out a tank. That kills two birds with one stone: no eye witness, no prints to worry about. It’s surprisingly easy. All you need is some lard, the crystallized oven cleaner and the gas hose. Couple of minutes and the blaze will be out of control. Or I can make it look like you never existed. No fingerprints, no military records, nothing. You’ll become a non-person in about twenty seconds flat. Your call.”

  Frost saw faces moving in the broken square where the small window had been inset in the front door. They couldn’t see him, but they would in about five seconds. “You’re a scary bastard,” he said. He had no doubt the kid could wipe every trace of him from the face of the world as easily as he claimed.

  “Obi Wan taught me well, but you are my Lord and Master, Frosty. And as your faithful servant I feel obliged to remind you it’s time to make like a shepherd and get the flock out of there.”

  Ronan Frost knew the kid was right. He turned and started to run. He heard the front door opening behind him. He didn’t risk a backward glance, knowing it could be the difference between making it out of the house and not. He hit the backdoor running. Outside was chaos. Alarms blared, people were shouting, confused, worried. Frost didn’t break his stride as he ran straight across the tiny backyard and launched himself at the painted fence. He hit the Grim Reaper’s grinning wooden teeth right foot first, caught the top with his hands, and boosted himself up over the fence in one fluid motion. He dropped down onto the other side and stood there for a second, back pressed up against the fence, looking left and right.

  The Monster was parked streets away.

  “All available cars have just been sent your way, boss. In a few minutes the entire area is going to be teaming with the law.”

  It didn’t have to be a problem. They had no idea they were even meant to be looking for him. As far as they knew there was a dead body and a lot of alarms ringing. He didn’t have any blood on him, and other than being in the wrong place at the absolutely wrong time, he’d done nothing wrong. Still, there was nothing to be gained from sticking around.

  He started to walk toward the far end of the alleyway that ran between the narrow terraces. People had begun to congregate around the alley’s mouth and on the street corners. No one had a clue what was going on. There was a chill to the night that had them permanently moving as they tried to keep themselves warm. Some of them had dressed hastily, pulling coats on over their pajamas. Others were in jeans and jackets and whatever else made up their normal daywear. In less than twenty feet he passed all body types, from the anorexic to the bloated belly hanging out over the waistband of straining pajama bottoms. Lurch tall to Cousin It short. There were more than their fair share of Uncle Festers out there as well. And of course, there was the one staggeringly beautiful Morticia with her died-black hair, piercings and Gothed-up eyeliner, who had no right to be living among this freak show of inner-city life. Frost smiled at her, risking the wrath of her very own Gomez. Charles Addams would have been proud of how his old cartoons captured this slice of dystopian, happy families so well even all these years later. They were all out there on the streets, and none of them loked very happy with their life right then.

  “One last trick,” Lethe said in his ear.

  Frost had no idea what he meant until the first streetlight exploded in a shower of glass. Each bulb detonated in quick succession, sounding like a series of shotgun blasts. Shards of glass fell like jagged rain. Frost walked down the center of the street, feeling like some dark avenger who had stepped out of a B-movie. Lethe laughed in his ear. Darkness chased down the street, passed him and raced on. In thirty seconds the stars in the sky were suddenly so much brighter because there wasn’t a single streetlight burning in the entire city.

  “I don’t want to know how you just did that,” Frost said.

  “Liar,” Lethe said. “But don’t worry, I’ll let you in on the secret. All I did was redirect some electricity. It’s amazing what you can do with a computer. I overloaded the transformers and something had to give. The bulbs are built to blow. It’s cheaper than replacing the entire wiring. Looked good though, didn’t it? Give me that much, at least.”

  “It looked good,” Ronan Frost agreed.

  He saw two policemen getting out of a squad car. He walked across to them, pretending to be a curious resident. “Hey fellas,” Frost called out, “what’s going on?”

  “Nothing to concern yourself about, sir,” the shortest of the two uniforms said, slamming the car door. He locked it. Trust in their fellow man, it seemed, had yet to reach the local police force.

  “It’s a bit hard, sounds like all hell is breaking loose,” Frost spread his arms wide, taking in the whole cacophony.

  “Yeah, some sort of outage in the power grid shorted all the alarm circuits. I don’t pretend to understand, mate. I just do what the gaffer tells me,” the taller uniform said, smiling almost conspiratorially.

  “Ahh,” Frost said, as though that made perfect sense. “Well you have a good night, guys.”

  “You too.”

  “You know the deal, no rest for the wicked.”

  He went in search of the Monster.

  Finding the warehouse wasn’t difficult. Neither was getting close to it. Getting in was a different matter.

  The Canning Docks were one of several along the river. Once upon a time, the river had been the heart of the city. While the river thrived, the city thrived. It was a symbiotic rela
tionship. Every import and every export came in somewhere along the waterfront. Huge cranes still towered over the riverbanks, relics of a bygone age when the men in this country had worked with their hands and industry had been dominated by shipbuilding, coal mining and the old trades. But there wasn’t enough trade coming up the river to keep all eleven of the river’s docks working. The flour mill didn’t grind flour anymore; the side of the building advertised itself as The Oxo Gallery. When Frost was growing up Oxo had made gravy granules. It seemed odd to him that now that it was being rebranded as an arbiter of beauty.

  It had been decades since the last ship had been built on the river. Likewise it had been decades since the men of the city walked with their heads up, filled with pride and accomplishment. Now their football teams gave them their identity and sense of self-worth. With the collapse of the traditional industries, too many men, in their forties at the time, had never worked again and had finally died, stripped of dignity, beaten by life. Other industries had risen up, of course, ones where these men needed to be able to answer phones and use computers and do the kinds of things the girls in the office used to do. They weren’t making things. They weren’t creating. And because of that, they weren’t happy.

  To the left of the access road the iron gates of the steel mill had closed for the last time fifteen years ago. Now the huge shell of the building was in the process of being converted into luxury apartments for kids with too much money and not enough sense. The bonded warehouses that had been the heart of the import trade were boarded up, windows blinded. Inside, no doubt, the floorboards had been torn up and the lead and copper piping stripped and sold on the black market.

  Frost slowed the Ducati to a gentle 15 mph, crawling through the labyrinth of alleys around the docklands. It was as though he had driven into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. None of the buildings had survived intact. Walls had crumbled. Bricks wept dust. The cranes might have been the towering exoskeletons of Martian war machines. The tarmac petered out into hard-packed dirt in places. Weeds had started to grow up through the cracks, nature reclaiming this part of the city for itself. He could hear the crash and retreat of the tidal river. He could see the silhouette of th Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse ahead of him. It must have been an impressive building back in the day. Now there was something tragic about the figure it cut in the night. For all its size, for all of its glorious red brick symmetry and its history, it was every bit as redundant as the men who had worked so hard building the ships, hauling the containers, beating out the sheet metal, and grinding the flour. It was a remnant of another time. So perhaps it was good that it was going to find another life, Frost thought, pulling up alongside the gates.

  An ostentatious padlock secured the chains that secured the gate. He found it wryly amusing. The chain links of the fence could be bent apart with bare hands and a bit of determination, but the padlock would surrender to no man.

  For a building that was supposedly abandoned, there were an awful lot of tire tracks leading to and from the gates. Frost drove on. He had a bad feeling about the place and wasn’t about to go walking in through the front door.

  He found a dark, secluded spot out of sight of the warehouse’s windows and dropped the kickstand. He took off his helmet and hung it on the handlebars. He called Lethe.

  “So what can you tell me about this place?”

  “Not much, to be honest. Like I said, it’s scheduled for redevelopment. The officer of record for the development is one Miles Devere. Yep, the same Miles Devere who was the last number to call James’ wife’s cell phone. So we’ve got a nice little coincidence there.”

  “No such thing as coincidence, my little ray of sunshine. What we’ve got is a link. We may not have both sides of the puzzle, but we’ve got the bit in the middle. Tell me more.”

  “Devere Holdings has its fingers in a dozen pies all across the city. The man’s something of a property magnet. He’s bought up a handful of the old warehouses and mill buildings along the docks, and not just Canning Dock. He’s got plans in with the planning department for the development of an entire Docklands Village. We’re talking multi-million investment in urban regeneration and land renewal here. He’s claiming huge subsidies from the authorities too. He bought the Nicholls building for a one pound consideration and the promise that he would invest in local labor to rebuild it. That one pound has already brought him in over thirty-three million in government aid, and he’s not had to lift a finger.”

  “Got to love big business,” Frost said. “So what, if anything, does Miles Devere have to do with this?”

  “Maybe nothing. Like I said, it could just be a coincidence. I’m still looking for the link between Tristan James and Devere. There has to be one. But as of now, I’ve got nothing.”

  “Maybe Devere hired him to excavate something?” Frost mused, thinking aloud. What other use would a property developer have for an archeologist?

  “Looking for a pirate ship run aground on the muddy riverbank?” Lethe said, chuckling.

  “Maybe not.” In the distance, Frost heard a dog bark. A moment later he saw the dark shape of one man and his dog walking through the debris-strewn yard of the Nicholls building. The man’s flashlight roved across the darkness erratically. He hadn’t seen the Monster approaching, but the dog had picked up Frost’s scent. It knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Frost crept away from the bike, crouching low to make his silhouette as small as possible. The dog’s bark grew more aggressive the closer it came toward the chain-link fence. He had two choices, get on the bike and get out of there, or shut the dog up. Frost braced himself against a concrete pillar. He watched the beam of light skip across the rough ground. The dog, a sharp-snouted Doberman, strained on its leash, pawing at the ground. Frost eased his way around the pillar, making sure there was as much concrete as possible between him and the devil dog.

  The guard said something into his radio. Frost couldn’t hear what. He didn’t need to. The man knew someone was out there. He’d be assuming it was kids playing in the grounds of the disused buildings. Frost closed his eyes and listened. He kept his breathing regular: deep and slow. Gravel and broken stones scuffed, too close for comfort. He didn’t dare move.

  What did a disused warehouse need with this kind of security? He hadn’t seen any sign of building materials having been moved onto the site, so there was nothing worth stealing. The dog barked again, deep in its throat. It was the aggressive sound of a hunter that knew its quarry was near. The flashlight beam played across the ground less than five feet from his hiding place.

  Frost pressed back harder against the concrete pillar as if it might somehow make him smaller.

  The pitch of the growl shifted.

  And then the night exploded in a flurry of noise. The guard slipped the dog’s leash and the Doberman sprang forward, claws scuffing up the hard scrabble in a desperate attempt to gain purchase as it launched itself toward his hiding place. Frost didn’t move so much as a muscle. With the chain-link fence between them the dog couldn’t get at him There were several ways this could play out: eventually either the handler would re-attach the leash and move on with his rounds, in which case he would see Frost’s Monster and realize he wasn’t dealing with kids-which would mean Frost would be forced to take care of both man and beast before things got out of hand; Frost could make a dash for the Ducati and get the hell out of there, but then, if they were up to something in the old warehouse, any element of surprise he might have had would be gone for good; he could try to slip away and come at the place from the other side; or he could just slip out from behind the pillar and pull the trigger twice. Frost was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. There was nothing to suggest the night watchman was anything more than that, a retired policeman paid minimum wage to walk around the deserted warehouse and stop vandals from getting inside. In that case two bullets was not just overkill, it was murder.

  He took a deep breath and began to move away from the pilla
r when Lethe’s voice crackled in his ear. “Well now, isn’t that just fascinating?” Frost couldn’t risk making a sound, he just had to hope Jude Lethe would elaborate. He settled back against the concrete, waiting for Lethe to speak again. “In the last three years Miles Devere’s various concerns have opened offices in Berlin, Rome, Prague, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Vienna… need me to go on and list all thirteen? Devere’s started operations in every city where our archeologists burned themselves alive. They’re all shell companies, and the paper chase is a mile long and whisper thin. Someone doesn’t want these links found.

  “And the best part? My very favorite discovery so far today: in 2001 Miles Devere volunteered as a relief worker in Israel. He was part of a United Nations program to improve the camps. He was in Gaza for almost a year before moving across to Jenin. That means he was in Jenin when Orla was there, but we’ll come back to that later. Here’s the interesting stuff: he left Israel in July 2004, having worked on a reconstruction project that ran in tandem with an archeological dig in Megiddo overseen by-you know who I am going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway, I’m just pausing for dramatic effect-Akim Caspi. And there, my oh so quiet friend, is our smoking gun. Aren’t you going to say something?”

  Frost didn’t say a word. He could hear the dog prowling along the line of the fence.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll just have to do the talking for both of us. Now, Megiddo is an interesting spot all of its own. According to the Book of Revelation, Megiddo is where it all goes down at the end. We’re talking big ass battle, the amassing of forces, the children of light fighting the minions of the Antichrist. Armageddon. The word literally means the hill or mountain of Megiddo. You can’t tell me this isn’t just a little bit cool.”

  Frost made a decision then. He was going to count to ten in his head, slowly, and then he was going to step out from behind the pillar and shoot the damned dog. He’d take his chances with the guard.