Black Widow (47 page)

He had tried phoning Miller earlier that evening, but when he got no reply he hadn't made establishing contact a priority. His reasoning was that Jager wouldn't have got her lawyer to supply Miller's number if she wasn't telling the truth, because one call would have blown it all apart. But how did he even know it was Miller's number? According to the cops, Jager had already used a disposable mobile as part of her previous deception.

He caught his breath, reined in his flight instinct, told himself not to panic. His first thought was to get out of the building and run for his car, but that might be the worst thing he could do. The sign at the estate entrance mentioned patrolling. That meant that the Cautela guards might be mobile, in which case they could be outside this place in two minutes: less if they happened to be around the corner when they got the call.

He ran to the front of the building and looked through the windows. The car park was still empty and there was no traffic on the road.

Okay.

He ran back to the fire door and made his way swiftly but carefully down the stairs. Pushing down on the bar to open the emergency exit door, he thought ruefully of how difficult it had been from the other side.

He had just walked through it when he heard the sound of an engine and glimpsed a vehicle pull into the car park, two figures inside.

Parlabane flattened himself against the wall, out of sight. He knew the first thing these guys would do was split up and perform a perimeter check. There was no way to sneak past them.

He was fucked.

He looked back towards the emergency exit, where the door was inches from swinging closed again. Parlabane lunged for the gap and jammed his lock-picking kit between the door and the frame before it could click shut. Wedging it open as much as he dared lest it squeak, he slipped inside again and pulled it closed. With any luck the guards would complete their circuit, see that the place was secure and then call HQ to get the alarm turned off remotely.

He climbed the stairs and made his way towards the front, crouching near to the floor. With the lights off it was easier to see out than to see in, so he would be able to watch for them making their exit. He only had to hold his position, keep his nerve and stay patient.

Then a pulse of fright shook him as he heard a sudden rumble from outside. He looked up in aghast disbelief to see the lorry he had parked behind switch on its headlights and then begin to slowly roll out of the courier depot parking lot, leaving his car guiltily isolated in view of Sunflight House.

As the lorry turned on to the dual carriageway he saw the two Cautela guards meet in front of the main entrance, and heard the squelch of a two-way radio.

All clear
, he willed them to say, but he knew it wasn't going to be that kind of night.

‘Control says the alarm was tripped inside the building,' one of them relayed to his partner. ‘Need to do a full sweep.'

‘You got the code?'

‘Oh, aye, right enough. Control, you got the entry code? Five nine eight seven? Okay, cheers.'

Fuck.

Parlabane heard the buzz from directly below him as the entry system unlocked the door. The alarm ceased sounding, making his breathing and movement seem all the more audible.

Fool, he told himself. Vainglorious, incorrigible, weak, desperate fool.

This was what he lived for, he had just admitted that to himself, and Diana Jager knew it.

If I'm lying, what would it cost you?

She said Austin had warned her about him, and she must have done her research once she suspected that Parlabane was a threat. She must have known what had happened to him, where his career had once taken him, and how low he had fallen since. His exclusive on Diana Jager had got him back in the game at long last, but her revenge would be to make it the shortest journalistic comeback of all time. He would be back on the scrapheap, back in jail and professionally fucked for ever if he got busted for burglary again.

Parlabane looked into the gloom of the corridor, probing the darkness with his penlight for somewhere he could hide. He saw four locked doors along either wall, noting with growing despair that they all boasted sturdy-looking strike plates indicative of five-lever mortise locks.

‘Right, a quick once-over,' he heard one of the guards say from below, the clarity of his voice a warning about how close they were and how easily the sound would carry. ‘We'll check everything's secure down here first, then up the emergency stairs and back along. Probably an electrical fault, but we'll stick together in case some bastard comes flying out from nowhere.'

Parlabane wouldn't have time to pick even the flimsiest of locks, and as an art rather than a science it wasn't something that was ever easy to do under pressure. As always when he was in trouble like this, trained instinct told him to look up, to think in three dimensions. This time, however, there was no window to climb out of, no outside wall to scale: only a low ceiling of crappy polystyrene tiles.

A low, suspended ceiling, he would bet, and it was the only bet he could make.

In a second he was on top of one of the filing cabinets that were littering the corridor, wincing at the hollow sound it made due to being empty. He gave one of the tiles a gentle push. It wouldn't lift. He pushed a little harder. Still nothing, and he noticed the frame move with it. It might be glued. It would be easy enough to punch through but he couldn't afford to leave a hole, or the resultant pile of crumbled polystyrene beneath, advertising his escape route.

He nudged the tiles either side. Neither moved.

He took a breath, cautioned himself not to panic. He gave one of them a harder push, driving the heel of his palm firmly against the corner. It popped up and almost tumbled through his startled grasp as it fell.

He slid it out of the way and hauled himself into the gap, his fingers finding a vertical suspension spar either side, supporting a lattice of aluminium. It took his weight, though there was a worrying creak as his midriff cleared the gap and his balance shifted forward.

He was sure he heard a door close below: most likely the fire door on the ground-floor access to the emergency stairs. They would be in this corridor in seconds.

He executed a limb-wrenching turn in the cramped and awkward space, manoeuvring himself one hundred and eighty degrees among the pipes and spars in order to be able to achieve a position from which he could replace the ceiling tile.

He slotted it into place just as the top fire door opened and a click of a switch later he found himself bathed in light.

He held his position, sinews straining, aware that the tiniest adjustment and resulting shift of balance might cause a tell-tale groan from the metal structure. It seemed impossible that they wouldn't see him anyway, a human shape silhouetted against the white tiles. The light was from beneath him, though, projecting downwards.

‘All looks clear,' one of the guards said, in such a bored tone as to suggest he had long since passed the night when he last expected anything interesting to happen on his shift.

‘Aye, probably an electrical fault right enough,' his partner agreed.

‘Or maybe a moth. They can set off the sensors. Actually, I mind there was a bird one night over at Plumbcentre. Set off every sensor in the place fluttering aboot.'

‘Must have been the first overnight excitement involving a bird you ever had anyway.'

‘Fuck you.'

Despite his protesting limbs, Parlabane held his position until he was sure they had gone down the main stairs. As he waited, he looked around. This moth that had tripped the sensors was right up among the lights, and his position was giving him a very different perspective on the building's integrity.

Despite all those heavy-duty locks on the doors, the security was only two-dimensional. The developer had done a cheap and superficial conversion job in subdividing the units, the gypsum partition walls only going as high as the suspended ceiling. From where Parlabane hung, up above the tiles, he had a clear path to drop down into any office on this floor.

Given that he was going to have to wait a while after the guards buggered off before risking an exit, he reckoned he might as well have a snoop around MTE while he was here.

Parlabane landed in a crouch in the centre of a sparsely furnished unit. He had imagined that with eight on each floor these offices would be cramped cells, thoroughly claustrophobic places to work, but Elphinstone's was so under-utilised it looked like it could offer accommodation to half the homeless furniture out in the hallway.

There was an integrated worktop, a wall press with butterfly doors, and a small filing cabinet; this last item shorter than the mini-fridge that was buzzing next to it.

All of it looked like a collection of afterthoughts, or peripheral satellites in service of the centrepiece: a two-metre desk supporting a dual widescreen 4K monitor set-up, connected to a towering PC.

He saw three older machines tucked away side-by-side next to a surge-protector, cables trailing from their rears. Parlabane couldn't decide if they were functioning as an improvised server farm or they were waiting to be cannibalised for parts.

There was a Razer keyboard and programmable mouse in front of the dual monitors, a boom-mic headset resting on what Parlabane recognised as a force-feedback chair. This was Elphinstone's workstation, but to Parlabane's eyes, it looked principally like a high-end gaming rig.

He knew the guy's laptop was always password protected, and in keeping with the NDA stipulations referred to by both Jager and Lucy, there seemed little chance his office PC would be left unlocked. However, there might be a way to bypass that, which was why he had Buzzkill on standby.

Buzzkill was a hacker who had insinuated his way into Parlabane's activities with the same ease as he had penetrated the networks of corporations, media outlets and even political parties. Parlabane had decided early on that, despite the temptations the hacker's rarefied skillset offered, Buzzkill was not someone to whom he wanted to end up owing favours. Nonetheless, in the short time since he first made contact, Parlabane had found himself running up a bigger and bigger tab.

Buzzkill claimed not to see it that way, claiming they were kindred spirits and often reiterating the mantra that ‘friends don't keep score'. Parlabane was never comfortably convinced of the sincerity of this sentiment, reckoning loan sharks probably said much the same thing. Friends' relationships tended to be more reciprocal. Buzzkill seemed to know everything about Parlabane, having introduced himself by way of hacking into his files. Parlabane, by contrast, knew almost nothing about Buzzkill, to the extent that he hadn't even heard his real voice, all their communication being text-based or electronically ventriloquised via a speech synthesiser.

He switched on the PC and had a poke around the office while he waited for the machine to boot up, the backlit keyboard glowing green as the system's fans hummed into life.. Behind the doors of the wall press he found six shelves, four of which were empty. Of the exceptions, one bore a rudimentary selection of stationery and office supplies, including a short stack of headed notepaper bearing the MTE logo and the Sunflight House address. The other was stocked entirely with bags of crisps.

He opened the fridge, which contained two six-packs of Pepsi, four cans of high-caffeine energy drink and two family-size slabs of chocolate.

The small filing cabinet provided the only further indication that a business was being run from here. It comprised two deep drawers, each housing an alphabetised divider system. Parlabane trained his penlight inside and saw that there were official-looking documents tucked away in several of the pockets. He pulled a few out at random: Articles of Incorporation from Companies House; a supplier invoice from a graphic designer; a VAT return showing no income but reclaiming the tax on the purchase of computer equipment.

Parlabane glanced towards the monitors, which were now fairly lighting up the room. To his astonishment, they were showing a normal desktop configuration, rather than the log-in screen he was expecting. The system appeared to have come out of hibernation mode, rather than a cold boot, which was perhaps why there was no password prompt.

It was as sparse as the room itself, a default wallpaper showing a swirl of blue in varying shades to provide a high-contrast background. There were icons for the browser, mail client, Skype and a freeware office suite, as well as a shortcut to the hard drive and two shortcuts to folders stored there: one named MTE and one marked Games.

He clicked on the MTE folder, expecting the password request to pop up now. It didn't. Instead it opened a window containing two further directories: MTE Project and MTE Admin. He opened the former and tried launching a file called Build_3.1.

A narrow vertical window opened on the left-hand monitor: indecipherable lines of code scrolling up the screen in white on black. He waited for a corresponding graphic user interface to appear on the right-hand screen, but it remained blank.

Parlabane hovered the mouse over another file, but held off launching it. He didn't know where to begin with any of this stuff, and he could end up hanging the system. A full restart would surely invoke a security prompt, and he would lose this unexpected access.

Instead he sent a copy of everything in the MTE Project folder to Buzzkill for his expert analysis. Meantime Parlabane would have a look around for the kind of thing he might better understand.

Waiting for the files to transfer, he looked again at all the state-of-the-art kit, little of which seemed justified by simple programming needs. He went back to the desktop and clicked on Games, then opened the first of several directories inside, one name SR4. It opened a busy window full of programs, text documents and multiple sub-folders with arcanely technical names, a messy contrast to the sparse neatness of the MTE Project directory.