Die Twice (15 page)

Sleep came to me quickly, but it was snatched away again just as fast. The peace was shattered by compressed air blasting out of a truck’s braking system, somewhere very close to my head. I woke with a start and checked my watch. It was dead on noon. I’d been asleep for two and a half hours. Not long by anyone’s standards. I was tempted to shut my eyes again, but I knew there was no point. I only had a quarter of an hour before I’d need to wake up anyway, to get back in time to relieve Fothergill. I dozed uneasily for another five minutes, then forced myself to sit up and take stock. The thought of another cappuccino was very appealing. I was starting to get hungry, too. But in the end I decided against dodging back into the diner. The smarter option was just to get on the road right away. Arriving anywhere at a round half hour always seems contrived and suspicious to me.

I tried to get hold of Fothergill to let him know I’d be there early, but each time I called I was diverted to his voice mail. He was still on the phone when I pulled up opposite him, at twelve seventeen. The moment he saw me he dropped his other conversation and called me straight back. He spoke very slowly and made a real point of telling me just how little had happened, describing every mundane and irrelevant aspect in exaggerated detail. And while he didn’t say it in words, his tone made it clear he thought we were wasting our time. I was starting to worry he was right. Then movement caught my eye. From across the street. The left-hand roll-up door was beginning to open.

“Quick,” I said. “The grabber. Get the frequency.”

“I’m on it,” Fothergill said. “Wait a minute. There’s no reading. Nothing’s showing. We’ll have to wait till it closes again.”

The door slowly cranked its way up to the top of the frame. Nothing else happened for a moment, then a car rolled through the opening. A dark blue Cadillac. It would be too much to swallow for that to be a coincidence, but I checked the license plate anyway. Then there was no doubt. It was the one Fothergill had been following after it left the Commissariat, yesterday. Which was a relief. It meant we were on the right track, after all.

“I’m trying again,” Fothergill said, as the door reversed its direction. “No. There’s no signal. I’m not picking up a thing.”

I got a better look at the Cadillac as it turned and passed in front of me. There were three people inside it. The guy who’d done all the talking at the club was driving. The woman who’d strip-searched me was sitting in the front, next to him. And a guy I’d never seen before was lounging lazily around in the back.

“They can’t have been using a remote, after all,” Fothergill said. “It must have been a regular switch. Someone must have opened it from the inside. And closed it again.”

I didn’t reply.

“Problem is, what do we do now?” Fothergill said.

I stayed silent.

“Maybe it’s time for a change of plan,” Fothergill said. “I think we should head back to Chicago after all. There’s still plenty of time.”

“For what?” I said.

“Taking them at the Commissariat. Your rendezvous isn’t until four fifteen.”

“I told you. I don’t want to take them, anywhere. Not yet, anyway. There’ll be time for that, later.”

“But if we could catch one of them, think of the leverage it would give us over London. They’d have to send a team, then. Quick results are good news, remember, and that’s just what you need right now.”

I didn’t respond.

“David, we need to rethink,” he said. “To adapt. To view this as an advantage, not a setback. ’Cause now, we know for sure where the key players are going to be. And when. Surprise would be on our side. And the environment there is favorable to us. It’s a far more viable option than staying here and banging our heads against the wall.”

“No,” I said, after a moment’s thought. “I’m going to find a way into the place. I need to see inside.”

“But how?” he said. “You were right. Those roll-ups were the best option. Maybe if we at least wait, those guys will use a remote on their way back in. We could trying grabbing the frequency again then.”

“No. That would be too late. I need time to look around. Properly. Without them being there.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible, David. We’re out of options. Face it. This was a good idea, but it just hasn’t panned out. We should head back to the city.”

“Rubbish,” I said, slipping the car back into gear. “There are always options. And I’m going to put one into play right now.”

“Whoa, wait,” he said. “What is it? What are you going to do?”

“Something you suggested yourself,” I said. “Or a version of it, anyway.”

The high-tech solution had failed, but I wasn’t too concerned. I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find something to replace it with. In the end, it took less than four minutes. One minute to drive to the warehouses. One second to open my door. Another second to scoop up a brick from the dozens that lay abandoned in the gutter. And two minutes to retrace my steps, call Fothergill, and tell him to keep his eyes peeled. I figured that if he was still there, he might as well be useful and watch my back.

I pulled the car up onto the sidewalk and parked nice and close in front of the green door. Then I tried the handle, just in case, but predictably the place was locked. I looked across at the factories. Fothergill was there, behind the wheel of the Ford, fiddling with his phone as usual. He saw me and nodded. No one else was watching. So I took out my Beretta with my right hand. Gripped the brick with my left. And swung it into the wooden surface. Hard. Two inches above the lock. End-on, to concentrate the force. The frame gave way, splitting all the way from top to bottom. The loose piece fell back into the corridor, bounced off the wall, and I dived clean through the gap before it had time to hit the floor.

The corridor ran the full width of the building. Four doors led off the stretch to the right. All were closed, and the passage ended with a blank, whitewashed brick wall. The stretch to the left was identical, except it ended with a double door. It was gray metal. A flight of stone steps stretched up straight ahead of me. A single light flickered at the top. I went up, two at a time. Turned left at the top.
And stopped in front of a double doorway. I listened. There was no sound from inside, so I smashed my foot into the join between the two doors. I tossed the brick through the gap they left and dodged to the side. I heard a crash as it landed, but there was no other reaction. I waited another moment, then stepped into the room, gun raised. The space was large. Twenty feet by forty. And it was deserted. There was no furniture, but five sleeping bags were lying on the floor. Four were lined up together at the left-hand side of the room, parallel with the wall. The other was on its own on the right, facing the opposite way. Each had a black leather carryall sitting tidily at its foot. I unzipped the nearest one but it was just full of clothes—two pairs of jeans, a hoodie, and some underwear—so I closed it, picked up my brick, and moved on.

The other upstairs room was the same size. It was also vacant. There was no furniture here, either, but one item standing in the far corner told me what the place was used for. It was a chemical toilet. It looked ridiculous on its own in such a wide, empty space, but I don’t suppose the guys from the Cadillac would mind too much. I’d seen plenty of temporary billets with much more spartan facilities over the years.

The derelict theme continued downstairs. I checked all eight rooms carefully, one at a time, and there was no sign of any of them having been used recently. Not by humans, anyway. Rodents and spiders were a different story. I avoided the worst of the webs and the droppings and finished my sweep at the far end of the left-hand corridor, next to the metal doors. Which told me that if there was anything to find, it had to be on the other side. I tested the handle. It was locked, so I lifted the brick and brought it down just hard enough to break the mechanism. Even with a minimum of force the sound still echoed alarmingly, so I crouched down low, grabbed the handle and eased the door open four inches. Thirty seconds passed without any
unwelcome attention. I waited another thirty, then opened the door wider and darted through to the other side.

The space I entered stank of oil and burned carbon, and was much colder and brighter than I’d expected. The polluted air was being stirred up by giant fans and the whole place was flooded with harsh, artificial light. It was coming from a forest of heavy-duty lanterns. They were hanging on chains from metal beams near the high, corrugated ceiling. There were four rows of maybe twenty-five. All of them were switched on, and their efficiency was boosted by polished steel reflectors. Their main purpose would be to illuminate the dozens of industrial machines that were bolted in place all across the floor. I could see hydraulic presses. Radial drills. Bench grinders. All sorts of equipment I’d noticed in the machine shops on battleships, and plenty of other kinds I didn’t recognize. The larger machines seemed to be concentrated at the far side, near a concrete loading dock. I moved across to take a closer look and spotted the entrance to a narrow office at the back of the raised area. I also saw the front fender of a vehicle, half concealed behind a turret lathe. It was another Cadillac, dark blue, just like the one I’d seen leave through the corresponding roll-up door. Wooden crates were lined up at the edge of the platform behind it. They were five-foot cubes, and there were five of them. At first I thought they were identical.

Then I saw one of them move.

Don’t mock the afflicted, my parents always used to say.

That’s kind advice. I’ve always tried my best to follow it. But there have been occasions when that’s been pretty hard to do. I remember one of them very clearly. It was in my third week of training. A group of us had completed an exercise early, so we’d stopped at a café on the way back to base. We were sitting, drinking coffee, minding our own business, when a twenty-something businessman came bustling into the place. He had a shiny Armani suit, a mop of curly blond hair, and a walk that told you he had a more than healthy regard for himself. He picked a large round table in the nearest corner and plonked himself down with a newspaper. At first we assumed he was waiting for some colleagues, but after a few minutes it became clear he was there on his own.

I couldn’t help watching him out of the corner of my eye, and soon saw he was fiddling with something underneath the table. It was a cell phone. A huge one, since this was back when even the
most modern kind were the size of bricks. He poked at the buttons for a few moments, then went back to reading the paper. Until the peace was disturbed a minute or so later by a raucous electronic squeaking. The guy made a show of sighing, throwing down the paper, and whipping a radio pager out of a cradle on his belt. He studied its little screen, then produced the phone and embarked on a suspiciously one-sided conversation.

Ten minutes later, the whole cycle repeated itself.

The woman to my right nudged me with her elbow.

“He’s doing that himself,” she said. “He’s calling his own pager, then pretending to talk to someone.”

She was right. And faced with that degree of idiocy, it was hard not to be unkind about the guy. The jokes about him were still going strong a quarter of an hour later, when two policemen arrived. They walked straight up to him. Picked him up under the arms. And carried him outside, kicking, screaming, and showering electronic gadgets in his wake.

Back at base that evening we found out what had happened. Later in the program, pagers were due to be issued to everyone on our course. Officially they were to send urgent updates about changes to our briefs or exercises. In reality, though, they served two other purposes.

To give us practice in using gadgets discreetly, at a time when such things were a novelty. That’s where the guy in the café fell down. A tout for the instructors in the town had mistaken him for one of us, and the police had been dispatched to make an example of him.

And to teach us that with access to up-to-date information, any given situation can be flipped on its head at a moment’s notice.

For better. Or for worse.

The crate had been secured with a padlock, but that didn’t concern me. I still had my brick. One sharp blow was all it took to remove the whole assembly. I kicked the pieces of wood and broken metal away, eased the side panel back a couple of inches, and peered through the gap. There was enough light for me to make out the outline of a person. A man. He looked about my age. And he was naked. A ball gag had been shoved in his mouth. His wrists were bound with rope and attached to a hook at the center of the crate’s roof. His forearms were caked with dried blood. I couldn’t see his ankles. He was kneeling awkwardly and seemed to be slumping over to one side. That would partly be due to the confined space, I guessed. And partly to relieve the pressure on the grimy bandage that covered the right-hand side of his abdomen.

I leaned inside and went to work again with the brick. It was hard to get the angle, but after a couple of minutes the hook was sufficiently bent for me to release the rope. The guy slumped farther into the corner, suddenly missing the support it had given him. He sprawled there for a moment, looking at me suspiciously. Then he pitched himself forward and with a little help managed to struggle to his feet.