Tillman checked the rolling door of the freight bay, too. It wasn’t a separate space but an area within the bigger room, with a built-up platform beside it and an unloading ramp for big items. An overhead crane hoist hung above it. In silhouette, it looked like the bowed head of a sleeping tyrannosaur.
So why would our girl spend her nights here? he wondered. And why isn’t she here right now?
But maybe a bigger question was: where is here?
He went to the nearest shelves and took a look at their contents. The bulky, wrapped items looked to be machine parts, but it wasn’t easy to guess what the machines might be. He slashed some of the boxes open with the German paratrooper’s gravity knife that he wore in a boot-sheath. They contained metal mouldings, screws and gaskets — the lowest common denominator of garages and workshops the world over.
But in a garage or a workshop, some of these boxes would be open and in use. Even in a wholesale warehouse, you’d expect some of them to have been broken out from under plastic seals to fulfil part-orders. Tillman ran his spread fingers over box after box. The dust was thick enough to ruck under his touch, and apart from the places where his hand fell, it was pristine.
So whatever was going on here, the stuff on these shelves was a front. For what, though?
Tillman thought of one place he could go to for an answer: the truck. If it was being loaded, it wasn’t with this stuff. He went over to the freight bay and tried the truck’s rear doors. Padlocked. But it didn’t take long to find a crowbar, and the hasp of the padlock broke open on the third tug. He threw the doors open.
The dark interior of the truck was piled high with boxes. He took a torch from his pack, flicked it on and played the beam over the labels on the nearer boxes.
C(CH2OH) 4 PENT
B-HMX 95 % HANDLE WITH CARE
1,3 BUTADIENE BULK ELAST
AMM NITR. CONC CAKE
He sucked in his breath. Not nice at all. Some of this stuff — like the ammonium nitrate, which made up a large percentage of most commercial fertilisers — might have looked reasonably innocent by itself. But there was only one context in which all of these substances would ever crop up together, and that was bomb-manufacture.
The truck was a bespoke bomb factory on wheels.
But it wasn’t only that, Tillman discovered as he widened his search. There were wooden longboxes, too, of a type he immediately recognised from his mercenary days. They were the crates in which guns and rifles were sometimes transported, wrapped in grease and plastic to keep them rust-proof for long-term storage. He broke one open, opened up the inner seal and pulled out a shining FN Mark 16 assault rifle. He counted six in the box. Another, smaller box in the adjacent stack contained forty-millimetre grenade launchers. They looked like a good fit for the FNs. And moving that box brought him face to face with another box, whose sides bore military stencils: CBU-94/B TMD SOFT. The TMD in that mouthful of acronyms stood for Tactical Munitions Dispenser. Cluster bombs, in other words, with launchers.
Bombs. Guns. Portable munitions. Everything you needed to start your own war. Tillman backtracked. The busy little beavers who’d been filling this truck with high-tech death for most of the afternoon probably hadn’t been carrying the crates and boxes far. With some of this stuff, you minimised human contact as far as you could, on the grounds that if someone’s hand slipped you suddenly didn’t have humans any more — just runny chuck steak. So somewhere close by, and probably in this room, there was a cache.
Once he knew that, it was absurdly easy to find. At one end of the room, separate from the fixed shelving, he found a set of moving racks of the kind used for library storage. These were packed as tight as sardines, with no aisles between them. But each unit ran on tracks and had a wheel fitted so it could be moved to left or right, creating an aisle wherever it was needed.
Wheeling the racks into all their various permutations, Tillman found what he had expected to find: a trapdoor set flush with the floor, with three keyholes evenly spaced along one of its edges.
Risking the noise, Tillman shot out the locks one by one. Then he lifted the trap part-way. Striplights flickered on automatically down below, illuminating a lower chamber as big — but not nearly as high — as the one he stood in. Quarry tiles on the floor, some of them cracked, white-limed walls. Broad, sturdy wooden steps led down to it, and alongside them there was a mechanical chain-hoist. A smell compounded of mildew, packing grease and bleach rose to greet Tillman, strong and dank and insinuating.
He thought for a moment or two. He wanted to go on down and find out the worst. But this place — not just the hidden basement, but the building as a whole — could easily turn into a trap. He had to take a few minimal precautions, at least, his own version of a tripwire tied to a few tin cans. The instinct was too deeply ingrained in him to ignore.
Tillman let the trapdoor fall all the way open. It hit the wall, where a wooden stay-bar had been bolted into place for it to rest on. He walked back across to the freight bay looking for something he could use.
Seven miles away, a red light winked on a board, to the accelerating pulse of an electronic alarm.
32
Diema muttered an oath. It wasn’t much of an oath, since the People viewed profanity as a wound to the soul of the utterer, but there was a lot of feeling behind it.
The warehouse’s alarm was silent, but the red light flashing on the tell-tale unit just over the loading bay doors showed that Tillman had tripped it — probably by forcing a lock or stepping in front of a motion sensor. It was only a matter of time, now. He could still get out of there before they came, but only if he knew what he’d done, moved now and moved fast.
The girl waited, edgily, for the inevitable consequences to play out. It took eleven minutes before a black van, high-sided and windowless, pulled off the A312 onto the deserted industrial estate, drove halfway down the approach road to the warehouse and stopped, effectively blocking it. The only other way out was across open ground to the south or east.
A minute later, a Volvo S60, also black, rolled up behind the van. Whereupon the van drove over the lip of the kerb and into the wasteground, trundling slowly around to the other side of the building.
Diema watched this disaster unfolding with a mixture of exasperation and fatalism. She still needed more from Tillman, so his death right now would be a major stumbling block. On the other hand, it would show perhaps how flawed he was — how much less than she’d been told. There was a great deal of report and speculation in Kuutma’s files about Tillman’s unique talents — his combat skills, his intuition, his dogged courage, his endless, insane resourcefulness. Now it seemed he was falling at the first hurdle, and in such an obvious way! Couldn’t he have checked for alarms? Couldn’t he have taken the time to do proper recon?
Men — only men, no women — were stepping out of the van and the car now, and walking towards the warehouse. Most were the same men who’d been working there earlier in the day, but among them Diema saw two who were of a different order. The skeletally thin man with the ash-white hair was Hifela, the Face of the Skull, and the muscular man beside him, who looked like an oaf or a butcher, was Elias Shud. They were hand-trained executioners, answerable only to Ber Lusim himself.
So it was over. Unless she risked everything to go in and rescue Tillman from the mess he’d made. And even then …