“I’ll hear when Smith trips the gas tanks,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Anyway, make sure you’ve got yours, right? Okay, here’s how we’ll do it when we come out of the stairwell. I’ll go first, covering the floor. You follow me, covering the ceiling and my back. We head for the window, and if he’s not there, we head for the security station and the PA mike for this floor and I try talking to him. What’s wrong with this picture?”
Pete shook his head. “Nothing obvious to me.”
“Okay, let’s go.” Mike shoved himself back onto the stairs and took the last two flights, paused to catch his breath just inside the door, then pushed through.
The twenty-third floor was eerily deserted, a high-altitude Mary Celeste. Beige carpet tiles, slightly scuffed and in need of cleaning, floored corridors where doors stood open on unfurnished office suites. The black bubbles of surveillance cameras sprouted from ceiling tiles, some of them discolored by water seepage. One of the reasons floor twenty-three had been left vacant was that it had needed more refitting than the rest of the building, thanks to a burst pipe the previous winter. Some of the lighting panels flickered erratically. Mike headed up the corridor, cautiously checking side doors opening off it for any sign of human presence. Just because we don’t think he’s armed doesn’t mean he isn’t, he told himself, whenever he felt self-conscious.
He turned the corner onto the last stretch of passageway. There was no door at the end, just a wide open-plan office space, almost a thousand square feet of it, walled in windows. Abandoned desks and shelving units clustered in forlorn huddles around the floor. He could hear something now, the whistle of wind blowing past an empty gap in the glass side of the building. It was slightly chilly, even though it was a hot day down below. Mike paused just outside the door and glanced over his shoulder at Pete, who was staring tensely at the ceiling behind them. “Going in.”
“Okay.”
Mike ducked through the entrance and spun round. Anti-climax: nobody was lurking in the corners behind him. But what about the desks—he crouched, casting his gaze around at ankle level. No, there were no giveaway legs visible under the furniture. Nothing, no sign that anybody had visited the place.
“He’s not here?”
“Hush.” Mike backed toward the wall beside the door. “Keep me covered from right there.” He slid along the wall, around the edge of the room. Three minutes left, he thought. What if—
There was nobody behind any of the furniture. None of the ceiling or floor tiles had been disturbed. The room looked abandoned, except for the missing window unit. Those double-glazed cells didn’t break easily; they were toughened glass, held in place by plastic gaskets and screws. Someone had removed the thing, probably unscrewed it, and then shoved it right out of the frame. The breeze was rustling playfully around him, tugging at his jacket, pinching his trouser cuffs. Mike crouched down below the level of the windows and looked up, and out, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the bright daylight above him.
There. Outside the glass, barely visible—it ran behind one of the concrete pillars framing the stretch of glazing—a wire. It was quite a thick wire, but it was almost invisible against the bright daylight. Only a slight vibration gave it away. Mike looked back at Pete, raised a finger to his lips, then beckoned urgently. He cast his gaze along the wall. Another wire stood out on the far side of the missing window pane. Gotcha.
Pete hunkered down next to him. “What is it?” he whispered.
“There’s a window-cleaning car somewhere below us, right outside the open cell. I figure he’s waiting while we run BLUEBEARD. Then he’s going to try to break back in while everyone’s expecting him to be down and out.”
“You say that as if you think there are other options.”
“I can think of several, but Matt’s not stupid—he knows the more elaborate the scheme, the more likely it is to go wrong. I mean, he might have just done this as a distraction, but then what if we didn’t notice it at all? Whatever, I think he’s down there, below us.”
“In which case, all we have to do is get him to come back in.”
“Yeah. But he obviously wants out, and—listen, these cars are self-propelled. He’s probably as low as he can go, waiting for everyone to clear out before he breaks another window.”
“Right.” Pete straightened up, holding his pistol. “I’ll reel him in.” And before Mike could move to stop him he leaned out of the window, shoulders set, aiming straight down. “Hey—”
A gray shadow dropped across the window, accompanied by a grating of metal on metal. Pete vanished beneath it, tumbling out of the window.
“Fuck!” Mike jumped up in time to register two more wires and the basketwork cage of a window-cleaning lift wobbling behind the glass with someone inside it: then Matt swung the improvised club he was holding at the window cell Mike was standing next to, and to Mike’s enormous surprise it leapt out of its frame and fell on him. He stumbled backward, away from the wall, his arm going numb. How did he get above us? he thought, dazed and confused. Then he registered that he’d dropped his pistol. That’s bad, he thought, his stomach heaving.
Someone kicked it away from him. Not fair. He felt dizzy and sick. Things grayed out for a moment. When they came back into focus he was sitting down, his back to a desk. There was something wrong with his face—it was hard to breathe. The mask. He looked up.
Matthias squatted on his heels opposite him, holding the gun, looking bored. “Ah, you’re with me again. I was beginning to worry.”
Those window cells had to weigh thirty or forty pounds each—thick slabs of double-glazed laminate clamped between aluminum frames. Matt must have unscrewed it first, then dropped decoy lines below the window-cleaning car before retreating up top to wait like a spider above his trap. The damn thing had hit his head when Matt shoved it at him. A flash of anger: “Like you worried about Pete when you pulled that stunt? We could have worked something out—”
“I doubt it.” Something about Matt’s tone sent a chill down Mike’s spine.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because your organization has failed to protect me. It was worth a try—if you’d gone after the Clan as a police operation, that would have given the thin white duke something more urgent to worry about than a missing secretary, no? But the military—that was a bad idea. I’m not going to Camp X-ray, Michael.”
“Nobody said you were.” Mike tried to push himself up against the desk, but a growing sensation of nausea stopped him.
“And now I will leave. On your feet.”
Mike took a deep breath, trying to ignore his butterfly diaphragm. “What do you want from me?”
Matt smiled humorlessly. “I want you to take me downstairs. And then we will get into a car and drive somewhere where I will contrive to make you lose me.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t care whether it is possible or not, it is what will happen. Seeking your government’s help was a mistake. I’m going underground.”
Mike took another deep breath. His stomach clenched: he waited the spasm out, trying to will the blurring in his vision and the pounding at his temples away. “No. I mean. Why? What do you hope to achieve?”
“Revenge. Against the bitch.”
“Who?”
Mike must have looked puzzled, because Matt threw back his head and laughed, a rich belly-chuckle that would have given Mike an opening if he’d been in any condition to move. “The queen in shadow.” Matt stopped laughing. “Anyway, we’re leaving.”