One Word Kill

‘Sorry.’ I got up after Mia, swaying with the motion of the carriage and reaching for the hanging supports to keep my feet.

We pushed out onto the platform, then up the escalators until the station regurgitated us back into the cold.

‘Come on, it’s this way.’ John glanced at his A to Z and led off.

‘You sure you been here before?’ Elton asked.

‘Once. Months ago. And I really wasn’t paying much attention.’

John took us away from the late-night bustle of pubs and wine bars around the station down darker and lonelier streets. If we were in the suburbs, they would have called the area he navigated us into an industrial estate, but inner London has too much history and too little space for such contrivance. I guessed that the looming structures around us had once been Victorian factories where children dodged in and out of steam-driven engines while trying to keep all their fingers attached. Now most of them were probably fashion houses or design studios. We passed a grim doorway to a building that looked as if it might have once been an abattoir. The sign said ‘Dance Studio 44’.

‘Here.’ John stopped where the wall of the previous building gave way to a high wire fence with a thick hedge behind it. Ahead of us a driveway led in, sealed by a drop bar. A darkened reception hut stood a few yards back.

‘Doesn’t look like a laboratory to me,’ Elton said as we walked past.

‘What are laboratories supposed to look like?’ Mia asked.

‘The sign says Motorola.’ Simon pointed.

‘It looks like an office building,’ Elton said.

‘That’s pretty much what labs are,’ I said. ‘It’s not all boiling cauldrons and Frankenstein machines. Besides, did you notice the chimneys?’ A number of long thin pipes led up into the air from the top of the rear wall. ‘That’s a lab. The chimneys vent the fumes from fabrication with semi-conductors.’

‘What he said.’ John nodded. ‘It rings a bell now Nick mentions it.’

John turned around and led us back up the deserted street, toward the main entrance. A lone man walked by on the other side of the road, head down, focused on his own business.

John paused at the entry. ‘The primary defence seems to be a metal bar across the access road, approximately . . . hmmm . . . three feet off the ground. Elton, as our all-star athlete, do you think you can get past it?’

‘Come on.’ Elton ignored John and led us all in along the narrow path between the gate and the admissions block. We came into a car park before the main building, an empty expanse of tarmac lit by sporadic lampposts.

We gathered in a dark corner out of sight from the street. Elton shouldered the sports bag he’d brought with him. The contents clanked and appeared to be heavy. ‘This place will be alarmed. Our best bet is for me to check out the fire escapes and see if any of the doors can be opened from the outside. If that doesn’t work, I can go up on the roof and see if there’s a way in through the access door or a skylight. Often they don’t bother to alarm inaccessible entrances.’ He looked around. ‘If the police come, or a security guard shows up, then leg it through those bushes at the back, get clear, then start walking. Deny everything.’

We stood shivering with anticipation, but mainly with the cold, while Elton headed off to the fire escapes. His only real qualification for the job was a healthy body. If it came to scrambling from the top of the fire escape to the roof Elton was a hundred times better situated to doing it than Simon, fifty times better than me in my current condition, and at least ten times as able as John or Mia.

After five or ten minutes fiddling about with the fire doors on the first and second floor, Elton shimmied up onto the railing, grabbed hold of the edge of the roof and vanished over. We caught a last glimpse of his legs waving and he was gone.

‘He won’t get in,’ Simon said.

‘Not without a hammer at least.’ John nodded. ‘And surely the alarms will go off whatever he does? I mean, at our house the alarm goes off if you sneeze after midnight. And this place has to have more to protect it than something my father had installed at home?’

‘Just be ready to run,’ Mia said. ‘It takes ages for police to answer an alarm. If we hear one and leave immediately then we should be fine.’

‘What if it’s a silent alarm?’ Simon muttered.

‘Silent alarms are for when you want to catch someone.’ I was making it up as I spoke, but it sounded right. ‘In a place like this, you want whoever it is to leave as soon as possible. The quicker they’re out, the less damage they do. Vandals could do thousands of pounds worth of damage in a place like this, and some random teens aren’t going to be able to pay it back. Best to have a noisy alarm and scare them off. I think.’ Despite my argument, none of them looked convinced. I tried a different tack. ‘Look, the fact is that Demus remembers “waking up” in a park a few days from now, missing any memory of the last two weeks. To me, that says we get in and get the chip. So whether it’s blind luck or skill, or mixture of the two, I think this is going to work. How else—’

‘Maybe I cause the memory loss by hitting you over the head with a hammer?’ Mia suggested.

A flash of a light at the top landing of the fire escape caught my eye. ‘Is that . . . ?’

‘It’s Elton with a torch.’ Mia started forward.

Against all the odds Elton was leaning out from the fire door, beckoning us.

I took a moment to hide the bag with Demus’s headbands in the bushes to collect later, then set off after Mia, with John and Simon at my heels. ‘If I built a lab I’d wire it so that the alarm went off if the fire doors were opened after office hours.’

‘Perhaps he disabled it,’ John said.

‘This is Elton we’re talking about, not a cat burglar. I don’t think he’s ever swiped as much as a chocolate bar from a corner shop.’

We climbed up, our shoes startlingly loud on the cold metal steps. ‘You got in, then.’ I stated the obvious.

‘Catch on a skylight was gone. No alarms up there. Dropped down on to a posh desk. Probably John’s dad’s.’ Elton shrugged. ‘You sure they’re keeping this super seekret chip here? It all seems a bit easy.’

‘Let’s find out.’ Mia squeezed past him and the rest of us followed.

Nobody had thought to bring a torch except for Elton. Fortunately, he’d thought to bring five. Though two of them were the front lights off his brothers’ bikes.

‘Take us to the mainframe,’ I hissed.

‘Why are you talking like that?’ John asked in a normal voice.

‘Uh . . . security guards?’

‘Fair point,’ he hissed back. ‘Though if they have any, we’re fucked.’

‘Place this size might have one or two,’ Elton said. ‘None, if we’re really lucky. Anyway, let’s hope they’re in their room watching TV and having a cup of tea. Keep your torch use to a minimum, though. If they do a patrol, they’ll have torches of their own and you’ll see them coming.’

‘Mainframe,’ I prompted.

‘Well, Dad did show me a room full of computers . . . or computer. On the middle floor, I think.’ John reached a crossing of corridors and turned slowly. ‘Let me get my bearings. It’s a pretty big place.’

Simon kept very close behind me, breathing heavily, far more heavily than the climb up the fire escape should merit.

‘You OK, Si?’

‘Great.’ He shone his light both ways down the intersecting corridor. ‘Just waiting for the guard dogs.’

‘This way.’ John led us off again.

Right up to the very last minute, John gave a great impression of being lost. I was about to helpfully berate him as he stood halfway down a nondescript corridor on the first floor, staring at his fingers, but he beat me to it.

‘Here.’ He turned and patted the door behind him.

‘You’re sure?’ Unlike the hospital, Motorola seemed dead set against signs of any kind other than the names of the office occupants, set in tiny letters on plastic cards slid into holders on various doors.

‘It’s in there.’ John stood back.

Elton tried the door. ‘Locked.’ He took a crowbar from his bag. ‘So far, we’ve just been trespassing. Now, we’re breaking and entering. That’s what the charge will be. And if we come out with something that’s not ours, that’s burglary. Just so we’re clear.’

We all nodded, the torchlight managing to make us look like proper criminals. Elton shrugged and set to work. The frame splintered and the door opened without further protest. He reached in and flicked on the lights. We were in the middle of the building with no windows, so no worry about being seen from the outside.