Our luck seemed to be holding though – at least for now. The guard on the front desk, standing in for Mr Dicks, left his post and came to the door, where Gil pressed his ID against the glass for his inspection. There was a rattle and a click as the door was unlocked from inside, and Gil walked on past the guy. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which the security guard didn’t bother to inspect.
I came out of hiding and jammed the door open with my foot as he swung it to again. He stared at me in amazement, too surprised even to be alarmed. He was just starting to reach for his baton when Gil clocked him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle, the only thing his carrier bag contained. We hadn’t ordered the Moët, but the nice young stockbrokers at the next table hadn’t objected to us taking away the empty.
The bottle turned out to be a one-shot weapon, snapping clean at the neck, but it did the job. The guard staggered and fell forward into my arms. I dragged him out through the door, dumped him up against the wall, then went back inside and locked him out.
So far so good.
The inner door was locked against us too, but the security window, now unguarded, was our way in. Gil clambered across the counter and buzzed me through, then joined me on the other side.
He hooked a thumb back towards the guard post. ‘There’s a weapons locker in there,’ he said.
‘Guns?’ I gave him a pained stare.
‘Sidewinders. Tasers, maybe. Doesn’t hurt to take a look.’
‘Does if the locker’s fitted with an alarm,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve got something better in mind, but I’ll need a minute or two to set it up. Come on.’
He hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and followed me. I led the way around to the right, towards the steel door and Jenna-Jane’s basement Gulag. But I stopped before we got there, at the door with the keypad lock. Rosie Crucis’s door.
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ I told Gil, and I tapped in the code that Nathan had given me: 1086. I tried the door, but it didn’t give.
‘What the fuck?’ I growled.
‘Let me try,’ Gil said. He tapped in the same code, then a few more with less and less conviction. ‘No good,’ he muttered. ‘They’ve done a security reset. It was probably when they kitted out the lab for your succubus this morning. If you want to go to ground, I can get the new code from Nathan.’
‘No time,’ I said. ‘And the longer we hang around here, the more likely I am to be spotted. Looks like that weapons locker may be the lesser of two evils.’
We jog-trotted back to the security post, and I was looking around for something to prise open the door of the locker when I spotted something even better: a fire axe in a glass-fronted cabinet high up on the wall next to the door.
I looked at Gil. ‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Go for it,’ he said.
I smashed the front of the cabinet with my elbow, and the shrieking jangle of the fire alarm broke the silence like an auditory smack in the face.
We ran with that clamour in our ears. Halfway down the corridor, Gil stopped dead and held out his hand for the axe. I handed it over before I even saw what he was looking at. There was a fuse box on the wall. It was locked, but only with a piddling little Ajax padlock. The first blow of the axe snapped the hasp clean off, and it was the work of a moment to flick the main switch off, plunging the corridor into darkness. Maybe this was over-finessing slightly, but when I took the axe back I used the blunt end to hammer the switch flat. Anyone trying to turn the lights back on was going to have a mountain to climb.
The darkness wasn’t absolute. Dull red emergency lights low down on the walls had come on when we triggered the fire alarm, but had only become visible now that the main lights had been extinguished. With their help we found our way back to Rosie’s door.
I hefted the axe and swung it at the lock again and again, smashing the jamb around it into jagged splinters until the door finally sagged open.
Rosie was already on her feet as I went in, and backing away from the door, but she seemed to know me even in the dark. She relaxed and came towards me, then just as suddenly tensed again and stopped dead as Gil entered behind me. She was wearing a female body today – blonde and petite and barely out of her teens – so there must have been at least one changing of the guard since I’d last seen her.
‘It’s all right, Rosie,’ I said, half-shouting to be heard over the siren. ‘He’s with me.’
‘Felix!’ she exclaimed, ‘What’s happening?’
‘We are, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘Listen, how would you like to see the back of this place?’
Her eyes widened. ‘More than anything,’ she said. ‘More than anything I’ve wanted since I died.’
‘How tired are you feeling?’
Rosie smiled wickedly. ‘Less than you’d ever imagine, my sweeting. And a lot less than I’ve been seeming.’
I nodded. I’d always half-suspected that she was piling on the agony for her own nefarious reasons, but I’d never asked because any answer she gave would be bound to be picked up by Jenna-Jane’s ubiquitous spy-mikes. ‘I’m going to set you free, but I need you to stick around and watch my back for a few minutes,’ I told her. ‘Just until this racket dies down. Deal?’
Rosie gave a single, forceful nod. I turned to Gil. ‘Take out the wards,’ I said. ‘You know where they are.’
They were everywhere, of course, just as they had been in Rosie’s old quarters. Jenna-Jane had wanted to make absolutely certain that the errant spirit stayed in this room, no matter how many of her flesh-and-blood vehicles came and went through the door. The frame of the door itself was stiff with pass-nots of every shape, size and variety, but there were more of them painted on the walls, mixed into the plaster, set into the tiles of the false ceiling, and probably set in the cement floor. The aim of the exercise was to block every exit.
Gil didn’t waste time with niceties. The sound of the fire alarm covered all sins, so he just took the top hinge off the door with a few more strokes of the axe, dodging it as its own weight tore it free from the bottom hinge and it toppled sideways into the room. Then he started in on the wood of the jamb.
‘There’s a demon in the building,’ I said. ‘A succubus. I’m going to find her and set her free. Be my angel, Rosie. Ride shotgun for me.’
‘Thank you, Felix,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m yours until you’re done, I promise. And I won’t leave without saying goodbye.’
She leaned forward suddenly, the tips of her fingers caressing my cheeks, and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then she went limp, slumping against me. I lowered the insensate body gently to the ground. Rosie had left the room, though not, I fervently hoped, the building.
‘Good enough?’ McClennan demanded, standing back from his work and lowering the axe. I just pointed to the unconscious student on the floor: she was all the answer that was necessary. Gil frowned. ‘Is she going to be all right in here? She’s an innocent bystander.’
‘There isn’t really a fire, McClennan,’ I reminded him. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘Then let’s go get them.’
In the dark, with the shrilling of the alarm in our ears, the MOU had turned into a daunting assault course. It was almost like meeting the fear-beast again. As we threaded the maze of corridors, I had to fight down a sense of urgency that was threatening to ramp its way all the way up to pure panic. The dim floor-level lighting meant that the only thing I could see clearly were my own feet. At head height, slabs and wedges and sheets of shadow slid over each other, disguising intersections and turning blank walls into doorways.
Gil knew his way better than I did, and I let him take the lead. It felt like we were heading in the right direction, and then I knew we were, because my death-sense woke and stirred at the prickly feel of the things ahead of us and below us. For me it was a noise that rode under and over and through the alarm’s cacophony, untouched by it, the sound of an orchestra tuning up in a key that didn’t have a name. It was good news, in a way. The massive steel door had to be open, otherwise the wards imprinted onto it would have acted like psychic soundproofing, and I wouldn’t be getting such a clear fix.