One of the men said something and some of the others laughed. Placebo guy raised cuffed hands to his face and hushed them.
Lock brought up the rear as they walked towards the open gate. As he passed through it, the gate closed behind him. The men at the rear started as it clanked shut. At the far end of the corridor the door clicked open. They pushed through it and out into the darkness.
All twelve of them were still cuffed, and made for a surreal sight as they shuffled forward in the moonlight, a chain gang on evening manoeuvres. Placebo guy seemed to be assuming some kind of leadership role. He hissed at them to spread out, directing them to back into the shadows.
Lock picked his moment and filtered away from the group. He had as much idea about what was going on as they did — none. But he knew that with the amount of firepower in the vicinity, being out in open ground was about the worst idea possible.
Placebo guy waved at two of the men to go ahead on point. They did so, creeping forward to the edge of the building. Then they stopped, suddenly.
Lock could hear the guard coming round the corner, not because of footfall, but because he was on his radio letting the control room know that he’d cleared one sector and was about to move into the next. Standard procedure for non-static security. Clear and confirm. Clear and confirm. Repeat till dead. Almost certainly literally in the case of this poor chump.
‘Base from Leech. Yellow clear, moving to red.’
There was a pause.
‘Base? Can you acknowledge?’
It made sense that the guard wasn’t getting a reply. The cells had been remotely opened, and the only way to do that was from the control room.
There were twelve of them here. Which left only one person unaccounted for.
Sixty-eight
The room was empty when Lock got there. There were some books, some of the boy’s clothes, but no Josh. The thought that the escapees had already reached him first flitted briefly through his mind, although there was no blood or sign of a struggle.
He picked up one of the boy’s sweaters and stood there for a second. Then he walked back out, and straight down the barrel of an M-16 wielded by a white-faced Hizzard.
‘Get down on your hands and knees.’
‘Hizzard, we don’t have time for this bullshit.’
Fear seemed to have defaulted Hizzard to auto-pilot. ‘How did you escape the accom block?’
‘I teleported.’
Hizzard jabbed the gun at him. ‘Get down on the ground.’
Lock waved a hand in front of his face. ‘Hizzard, it’s me, Lock. Remember?’
‘You’re a detainee. I’m tasked with apprehending and returning all detainees to the accom block.’
‘Well, good luck with that. You’ve got twelve pissed-off Chechens, or Iraqis, or Pakistanis, or whatever the hell they are, on the loose right now, and we don’t have much time to contain them.’
A burst of small-arms fire neatly punctuated Lock’s condensed rundown.
‘How do I know you ain’t lying?’
‘Who gives a damn if I’m lying or not? Didn’t you understand what I just said? This is a level four bio-research facility which is in the process of being taken over by terrorists. We act now or we all die.’
Hizzard reached for his radio.
‘That’s not going to do you much good either. I’m guessing the ops room’s been breached. You won’t get any sense from anyone up there.’
Doubt flickered in Hizzard’s eyes. ‘Base from Hizzard.’
The response was the empty crackle of static, then a voice, female, with an accent. ‘Hizzard from Base. Go outside and lay your weapon on the ground.’
Under other circumstances, Lock might have allowed himself a smile as he watched the oh shit expression seep across Hizzard’s face. Instead he grabbed the M-16 from him.
‘You have a sidearm?’
Hizzard lifted the flap of his jacket. ‘Glock.’
‘Better than nothing, I guess,’ Lock said, setting the M-16 to single shot and heading back outside, Hizzard trailing reluctantly in his wake. ‘How many guards you guys have on duty?’
‘Round about a dozen.’
‘Round about?’
‘I think.’
A classic Brand-run operation, thought Lock. ‘And what about weapons? M-16s and Glocks?’
‘There’s other stuff in the armoury.’
‘Whoa there, soldier, what armoury?’ Lock asked, looking around for the door back to his own universe.
‘That building over there.’
Hizzard pointed through the gloom to a small squat building about four hundred yards away placed between two other blocks. Lock had assumed it was some kind of boiler room or back-up generator facility.
‘You have access to it?’
Hizzard reached down to his belt. ‘Sure, got the key right here.’
‘Terrific.’
‘What?’
‘Well, if you have the key I’m assuming the other “dozen or so” guards have one as well.’
‘I dunno.’
‘Come on then, Einstein, let’s go take a look.’
The main door was wide open when they got there, reinforced steel rendered useless by a profusion of keys. Amateur didn’t even begin to describe the place. Lock let Hizzard step through first, then followed him inside.
A few boxes of assorted shells lay scattered on the ground, but judging by the empty shelves and gun racks, the place looked to have been pretty much picked clean.
The distorted lid of a large grey metal chest stuck up at forty-five degrees. Hizzard yanked it open and peered inside. ‘Oh shit.’
‘What was in there? Rocket launchers?’ Lock asked.
‘No, that was where Brand kept the plastic explosives.’
Sixty-nine
Lock and Hizzard inched their way out of the armoury. Bursts of small-arms fire punctuated the silence.
They rounded a corner, Lock wheeling wide in case the escapees were right there, Hizzard providing cover, the Glock extending from his right hand.
‘Clear,’ whispered Lock, a second before one of the detainees shuffled into view.
Lock started to raise his requisitioned M-16. But too late. The detainee already had Lock sighted. Time slowed for Lock. Hizzard spun round, but he was going to be too late.
Then, as the detainee offered a broken-toothed smile and his finger began the millimetre-by-millimetre journey on the trigger, a round smacked into the middle of his forehead. He slumped forward, his round catching dirt rather than Lock, as Ty stepped from cover to their left. ‘One down, eleven to go,’ he said, moving towards the detainee.
Lock stared across at his second-in-command. ‘You were standing there the whole time, weren’t you?’
Ty grinned. ‘Yup.’
‘You’re a big-timing asshole sometimes, Tyrone, you know that?’
‘What can I tell you, man? I learned from the best.’ He turned towards Hizzard, who still had his Glock trained on the dead detainee. ‘How you holding up there, Hizzard?’
Lock answered for him. ‘Bottle of Jack, tube of Anusol, and homeboy’ll be good to go.’
Ty turned the detainee over with his boot. ‘Yup. Very dead.’ He let the man slump back, face down, and gave Hizzard a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘In’t this fun?’
In the distance they could hear distant sirens, and some more small-arms fire from contact near the perimeter. They continued towards their goal, the control room, the entrance to which lay five hundred feet ahead of them.
The final approach to the doorway was over open ground. Lock couldn’t see any escapees, or guards for that matter. Presumably the escapees were at the edge of the complex engaged in contact, while Brand’s guards were hunkered down somewhere trying to figure out just what had gone so badly wrong, so fast.