The lifts were separated from the rest of the lobby by a glass wall. Booths embedded in the glass allowed people in and out via rotating glass doors, but only if they placed some kind of identity card in a slot. Gwen was standing in front of the glass, trying to make out the company listing on a big board by the lifts.
‘Tolladay Holdings,’ she read. ‘Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray R amp;D, Rouse and Patrick Financial… ah! The Scotus Clinic. Floor Twelve. Looks like it occupies the entire floor.’ She glanced at the booths, then at Jack. ‘How the hell are we going to get in? Have you got some alien device that will override the security on these doors?’
‘Even better,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got money.’
He strode across to the rose marble desk that sat in the centre of the lobby. A man in security guard’s uniform sat behind the desk. His name tag read ‘Martin’. He watched Jack approach with professional distrust.
‘Hi,’ Jack said. ‘Look, I could spin you some kind of story about a snap health and safety inspection, or something equally implausible, but we’re both busy men and we haven’t got time to dance around. Let’s cut to the chase. How much money will it take for you to let us through to the lifts?’
The man’s face folded up into a scowl. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘That entirely depends on whether you find the concept of hard cash inherently funny.’
Martin shook his head. ‘You ain’t getting in there.’
‘Five hundred of your quaint British pounds.’
‘No way.’
‘Six hundred.’
‘It’s more than my job’s worth, mate.’
‘Sitting in a lobby being ignored by everyone who walks past isn’t a job, it’s just a way of watching your life slip away. Did you grow up wanting to be a security guard in an office block? Did you lie awake at night dreaming about handing visitor’s passes out to stressed people turning up late for meetings? Seven hundred.’
‘Look — who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Come on, I’m on a tight budget here. Seven hundred and fifty pounds, and that’s my final offer. Take an evening class. Follow your dream.’
Martin looked around. Nobody else was paying any attention to them. Catching Jack’s eye, he glanced meaningfully down at something just below the level of the desk, then back again. ‘I ain’t got time for this,’ he said loudly, and turned away. Jack leaned over and felt around with his fingers. There was a box down there, on a shelf hidden by the desk’s surface, and there were four or five things like credit cards in the box. He scooped two of the cards out, replacing them with a thick envelope he’d taken from a pocket in his coat. ‘Nice doing business with you,’ he said. ‘Hope the rest of your life works out OK. Drop me a line, OK?’
Gwen watched him return with an expression of disbelief on her face. ‘Firstly, that was bribery. Secondly, did that envelope really have seven hundred and fifty pounds in it? Thirdly, if it did then how did you know that’s how much it would take?’
‘Funny thing,’ Jack said; ‘it always ends up at seven hundred and fifty pounds with security guards, no matter where we start off. Must be a union thing.’
He tossed a card to Gwen. Choosing a moment when the lift area was momentarily unoccupied, they went through their booths together.
The lift doors opened on the twelfth floor to reveal a hall area with a deep carpet in neutral brown, hessian weave wallpaper and some unthreatening abstract paintings. A door to the left identified the Scotus Clinic in large sans serif letters.
Gwen pushed the door open.
The lobby of the clinic was empty, apart from several comfy chairs in a waiting area, three doors, the right-hand one labelled ‘Doctor Scotus’, and a vacant receptionist’s desk. Jack knew straight away that the place was deserted. There was a feeling, or rather, a lack of feeling to places that weren’t being used. They were missing something: an energy, a vibration, a background hum. It was like the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse; they looked the same, at first glance, but you could always tell them apart.
Sleeping corpses were a problem, of course, but Jack had worked out different methods of identifying them. And they didn’t turn up that often.
‘I think we were expected,’ he said, looking around. ‘This place has been abandoned. And pretty recently.’
Gwen moved across to the right-hand door. ‘Rhys said he talked to Doctor Scotus himself. We ought to start in there.’ She knocked twice on the door. ‘Just in case,’ she murmured.
‘Politeness costs nothing,’ Jack agreed. ‘Unlike security passes, which are quite pricey. I need to start cutting back on the bribes. I’ve almost blown this month’s budget.’
‘No answer,’ Gwen said. She pushed the door. It swung open, revealing a shadowy office. If there were windows in there then they were covered by curtains or blinds. She stepped inside, quickly being swallowed up by the darkness.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Jack said, still looking around the lobby.
‘Mmmm?’
‘Why is it there’s a Scottish pound note, but there’s no Welsh pound note?’
‘Mmmm!’
Gwen came staggering back through the door into the lobby, hands clawing at her neck. Something was wrapped around her throat, something about as thick as Jack’s thumb but with a wildly thrashing tail. Something coloured black, with vivid blue stripes encircling its body.
And it was throttling the life out of Gwen.
FIFTEEN
Toshiko rubbed her eyes for what felt like the thousandth time. They were gritty and hot, and rubbing them just made them feel worse, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like scratching an itch, or sneezing: a reflex action that couldn’t be suppressed.
‘The problem with this place,’ she muttered, ‘is that I never know whether it’s day or night outside. The world could end, and I’d be completely unaware.’ In fact, she added silently, with Jack out there, the chances that the world could end in the next few hours were probably a lot higher. Things tended to happen when he was on the loose.
Her computer screen was still, infuriatingly, showing patterns of numbers as the processor crunched away at integrating the continuous readings from the hand-held scanner into a single coherent picture. It had been working for several days now, and gave every indication that it might churn away until the end of the world. Whenever that turned out to be.
Bored, she leaned back in her chair and gazed around the Hub. She still remembered the crazy mixture of feelings she had experienced when Jack had brought her in for the first time: terror at the huge responsibility that she had been given; pride that she had been chosen; excitement at the prospect of examining technology that no human had ever seen before; and, bizarrely, distaste at the place she would be spending her working life. The Hub was buried beneath Cardiff’s Millennium Centre area, built in and around the crumbling remains of an old water pumping station, and remnants of the old Victorian architecture were everywhere to be seen. The walls were perpetually damp, and the very lowest level of the central area was several inches deep in water that, in summer, usually hosted a colony of mosquitoes. At least, she hoped they were mosquitoes. Jack had once told her the water was actually home to the last survivors of a civil war on a planet of very small insectoid aliens. She hadn’t believed him, of course, but come the summer she did stop swatting them. Just in case. No point in provoking an interstellar incident by accident.