“I can’t see any,” I told Mo-bot. “Why would he go to all this trouble and then let the trail run cold?” I stamped my feet and rubbed my sides. “I’m going to keep heading in the same direction. See if I can find anything.”
I was very close to the Expressway now. The abandoned store on the ground floor of the two-story apartment on the corner of Jackson was covered in graffiti. I studied the tags, looking for some clue, but there was nothing, so I moved up the street. I could see a few cars parked beneath the overpass, and drifts of snow blown by the swirling winds had piled beside them. The building next to the apartment block was a single-story redbrick warehouse that stood on the corner of Meeker Avenue, directly below the Expressway. It was accessed by a steel roll shutter, which was closed. I walked to the corner and looked left and right. A tiny garage protruded from the side of the warehouse, covered by another shutter. I scanned for clues.
And then I saw it. Hidden in plain sight, amidst all the graffiti near the top of the roll shutter. A series of seemingly random shapes scored into the brickwork. Light pink etched dots and lines. Anyone familiar with Morse code would have recognized they formed the word “inside.”
Chapter 23
“I think I’ve found it,” I told Mo-bot, and I used my phone’s camera to show her the message.
“I’ll be there in five,” she said, before hanging up.
I glanced around, and then, seeing there was no one watching, I took a running jump, kicked off the warehouse wall, grabbed the garage roof and hauled myself up. I ran across the roof and jumped into a yard that was full of high drifts. I could see lengths of scaffolding and metal protruding from the mounds of snow. It looked like some kind of junkyard. A narrow snow-free gully had been created on the leeward side of a graffiti-covered fence and I hurried down it, past the piles of metal to the back of the warehouse, where I saw a steel door that stood beside a tiny, barred window.
I grabbed a length of rusting iron rail that had a flat, razor-sharp end, and trudged through thick snow to get to the steel door. The yard was overlooked by a windowless warehouse and an apartment building that was undergoing refurbishment, and it couldn’t be seen from the Expressway overpass, so I had no eyes on me when I forced the jagged end of the makeshift crowbar into the gap between the doorplate and the frame. Even through my gloves, I could feel the freezing chill of the metal, but I ignored it and applied as much pressure as I could. The plate bent, the lock snapped and the door swung open.
I stepped into a gloomy corridor that smelled of decay. An ancient toilet lay to my left and a space that might once have been an office opened up on my right. The walls were marred by damp and the floor tiles were rotten. I walked along the corridor, checking the place for tripwires and booby traps. Karl might have wanted me to find this place, but there was no guarantee it wasn’t hostile, so I moved with caution.
The corridor took me to the main workshop, a thirty-by-fifty-feet space that would have suited a mechanic or body shop, but which was now empty. A steel balcony hung at the rear of the space and I climbed the rickety stairs that led up to it, but found nothing significant. Just a bare brick wall and a tiny, barred circular window that overlooked the yard. I peered down at the gloomy workshop space, wondering why Karl had brought me to a derelict, empty building. Then I noticed something on the floor below. I hurried down the steps and approached a dust-covered indentation in the concrete. I crouched and brushed away the dust to reveal a carved pair of naval aviator wings. I stood, puzzling over their significance, and as I moved around them, I felt the tone of my footsteps change. I looked down, scuffed my shoe through the thick dust and noticed a regular indentation. I bent down and traced the outline of a two-by-two-foot panel. I got my fingers beneath one of the edges and lifted the heavy square. Someone had covered a thick steel plate with concrete to conceal a manhole. A short, steep run of steps led to a basement. I pulled a flashlight from my jacket, switched it on and went down.
The steps led to a small antechamber and there was another steel door, this one controlled by a numeric keypad. There was a note stuck to the wall beside the keypad. I shone the light on it and saw it read, “Happy Birthday.”
I punched the month, day and year of my birth into the keypad and a green light flashed and the lock disengaged. I pulled the door open and pointed my flashlight into the room beyond. I was shocked by what I saw.
Arranged on shelves around the room were surveillance cameras, directional microphones, location transmitters, audio and video bugs. A desk in the center of the room was covered with passports from different countries and beside them were stacks of foreign banknotes. Lying next to the passports and money was a large black diary. Lining the back wall was a gun rack that was covered by a steel mesh. The rack held assault rifles, grenades, pistols, knives and stacks of ammunition.
I approached the desk and opened one of the passports. Looking every inch an authentic document issued by the French Republic, the photo that stared up at me was Karl Parker’s but the name beside the image was Claude Morel. I checked the other passports and found they all contained Karl’s photo and that each was issued in a different name. These weren’t the possessions of a successful CEO. This was the lair of a criminal, terrorist or spy. Who the hell was my friend?
I opened the diary and leafed through the pages. They were all blank, not a single entry anywhere. What was it for?
I pulled open the top drawer of the desk and found a laptop. There was a note stuck to the lid that read, “I did what I had to.” I recognized the writing from the UPS package. It was Karl’s.
I was about to open the laptop when I heard footsteps in the workshop. I kicked myself for not closing the trap door behind me, but without brushing the dust over it, the outline would still have been visible anyway. I switched off my torch, hurried to the steel door and positioned myself behind it.
I tensed as someone came down the stairs and crept toward the open doorway.
“You’d better not be hiding behind that door, Jack Morgan,” Mo-bot said, and I stepped out, relieved to hear a friendly voice. “You could have given me a heart attack,” she added. “I told you I’d be here in five. Took me a little longer than I expected to pick the lock on the shutter.”
She shone her torch around Karl Parker’s lair, and whistled loudly. “What the heck is this place?”
Chapter 24
“Luxury communism,” Leonid sneered as he and Dinara climbed the chipped concrete steps that wound up the dingy staircase. The place reeked of failure and as they headed up to the fourth floor they heard the sounds of a quarrel echo off the walls.
“We don’t want to know about your money problems,” Leonid yelled up the stairs, and the argument stopped for a moment before resuming, except instead of fighting about their finances, the unseen couple were now rowing over who was to blame for starting disputes the neighbors could overhear.
Leonid sighed. “You’re too young for communism, but I caught the end of it. Hard to believe there was a time” — he gestured at their surroundings — “when this was considered the height of luxury.”
“My parents remember the Gorbachev years fondly,” Dinara replied.
“Were they Party members?” Leonid asked as they reached the fourth-floor landing.
Dinara nodded. “Loyal. They truly believed in equality.”
“Equality?” Leonid scoffed. “I don’t remember Gorbachev or his cabal living somewhere like this.”