‘That’s more like it,’ he said to himself.
Already, he could hear raised voices and racing footsteps echoing through the corridors and getting rapidly closer. It was time to get moving.
As Ben broke into a run, four more guards appeared in the bend of the corridor behind him. Their shouts were drowned in gunfire. Bullets raked the wall inches from him. He reached another bend ahead and kept running.
He crashed through what he thought was another set of fire doors, and skidded to a halt, cursing. Too late to turn back, he realised he was trapped inside a room with no other exits. The guards were close behind.
He glanced about him. The room was huge and white, looking and smelling like a chemistry lab. Long tables stretched across the middle of the tiled floor, and its edges were lined with benches and racks covered with equipment. Wires and tubes, blinking lights, dials and readouts, screens, jars and beakers and trays of implements. Mounted around the walls above were glass cabinets filled with rows of large specimen jars containing what appeared to be chunks of some kind of matter floating in a clear, viscous liquid. It looked like pickled cauliflower.
Footsteps outside. The doors crashed open and the four guards burst into the lab firing their weapons on full automatic and spraying bullets everywhere. Ben barely had time to return fire before he had to dive under cover of one of the long tables. Splinters flew from the tabletop; plaster dust exploded from the walls and showers of sparks from the electrical equipment as dials and readouts shattered. The cabinets on the wall burst into cascading fragments of glass, the jars inside them blown apart, liquid pouring over the benches and the floor.
Crouching under the table, Ben glimpsed the slippery white specimens that had been inside the jars, now sliding over the floor in puddles of strong-smelling surgical preservative — and he realised with a jolt of horror what they were. Not chunks of picked cauliflower, but dissected pieces of human brain.
And in that brief moment, he knew.
Knew he was looking at all that remained of those unaccounted-for eight children.
Knew that this was what the architects of the Indigo Project would ultimately do to Carl, and to all the others, if nobody stopped them.
More sparks spat and fizzed from the damaged electrical equipment; an instant later, there was a whoosh as the spilled preservative burst alight. A sheet of fire covered the bench along its whole length, quickly spreading to the floor. Flames shot up, suddenly filling half the room, hot, aggressive, leaping high. Ben had to scramble away as they licked the underside of the table. Spotting him, one of the guards shouldered his weapon with a cry and let off a string of bullets. Ben dived and rolled for cover under another table. From the floor, he saw the running feet of two of the guards moving round to flank him. He fired. A cry of pain. One of the men went down, writhing. Another burst into the man’s body, and the cries of pain were silenced. Ben rolled again, emerging from under the table.
The fire was spreading alarmingly fast, gaining a purchase on the whole room now and threatening to block the only exit. Firing blind into the thick, black smoke that filled the lab, Ben ran for the door and burst out into the corridor, coughing. A glance through the billowing smoke told him that more guards were coming. Too damn many. This place was even better protected than he’d feared.
Smoke and flame were spreading out of the lab door now. He could hear the screams of the men still trapped inside, but he had little sympathy for them. He ran, keeping low. There was a shout; he’d been spotted again. More shots rang out.
No time to stop and shoot back. He sprinted hard up the corridor, skidded around a corner and came to a junction. He went left. Bounded down a short flight of steps. He was totally without bearings now, just trying to lose his pursuers in the labyrinth.
The fire in the lab could only spread to other rooms, and it would. Fast. He needed to make his way to the isolation block on the upper floor before the whole building started to burn.
Ben ran on. Another set of doors, another upward flight of stairs. Now he really was lost, in a part of the building that looked different from the clinical hospital environment of bright neons, sparkling white corridors and gleaming tiles. Here the floor was bare concrete, the lights dim, the walls unpainted. Where the hell was he going?
He was about to turn back and try another way when he saw the door. It was iron. Heavy deadlocks locks top and bottom. It looked like the door to a dungeon.
There’s no time for this. You’ve got to find Carl.
But he couldn’t leave without knowing what was on the other side of that door. He stepped closer to it and saw with amazement that the locks were undone.
Ben pushed open the door. Stepped through, and stopped in his tracks.
In front of him was another door with tall steel bars, like the entrance to a giant cage. Beyond it was what looked like a high-security prison cell, only much larger. Bunk beds lined the bare block walls, three high.
It was a dormitory.
And it was full of children.
23
There were six of them in there, aged between about seven to early teens, all barefoot and wearing plain white garments resembling pyjamas. Three girls, three boys. Their hair was cropped. They looked like prisoners — which, Ben realized, was exactly what they were. The youngest was the little boy lying curled on one of the bottom bunks with his eyes closed. He was either in a dead sleep, or else he’d been drugged. The eldest was a Japanese girl of fourteen or less, who was sitting on a wooden chair watching Ben. There was no trace of fear in her eyes. One by one except for the sleeping boy, the children all turned to gaze at him.
They weren’t alone. Two medical personnel in white coats, one male in his late thirties and one female about ten years younger, were in the cell with them. Neither adult had noticed Ben’s presence. The man held a ring of keys. The woman was clutching the handle of a wheelchair: Ben sensed that they’d just brought the little boy back to the cell. That was why he’d been drugged.
‘What were you doing with him?’ Ben demanded.
The two doctors wheeled around in alarm at the sound of his voice. ‘Wha—?’ the man began, then fell silent as he saw the gun in Ben’s hands.
Ben kicked against the cage door. ‘Open it,’ he said savagely. ‘Open it, or I’ll shoot you through the bars.’
The man hesitated, but not long. He hurried to the door, unlocked it, and it creaked open. He retreated anxiously as Ben strode inside the cell.
For a few seconds, nobody spoke. Ben looked at the doctors in furious disgust. He ran his eye over the barefoot children, and at the little boy lying half-comatose on the bed. He thought of what he’d seen in the lab. Then glared back at the man and woman in the white coats, and his finger twitched against the M4’s trigger.
‘I ought to gun you down where you stand,’ he said to them.
The woman just went on gaping at him in terror. The man fell to his knees. ‘Do not shoot,’ he pleaded in a German accent.
‘Where’s Carl Hunter?’ Ben demanded. ‘Isolation room four. Is he there? Answer me!’
‘He’s there,’ the Japanese girl said quietly.
Ben turned to her. She was gazing at him with the same calm, unfrightened expression. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. ‘You’ve seen him there?’
‘I’ve never seen him,’ she replied. ‘But I know he’s there. We all do.’
Ben could see she was being completely earnest. He nodded, then turned back to the cringing doctors. They were too pathetic to kill. ‘Out,’ he commanded them, jerking his thumb in the direction of the door. ‘Go, move it. Before I change my mind.’