Better the Devil Page 15

  "Wouldn't know. I'm a cryptozoologist not a clinical psychiatrist. So keep what passes for your mind on the job, asshole."

  Ness flashed teeth in her face. "Ah jus' love it when yer turn nasty."

  "Really?" Hannah jabbed a finger into the hole in Ness's shoulder and slowly pushed, smiling coldly as the Glaswegian tried unsuccessfully to turn a groan of pain into one of pleasure. Her next words were coldly measured. "You and I have outstanding business, but until I'm ready to set out my stall, just piss off."

  Hannah turned and moved on, leaving Ness growling behind her. Under normal circumstances she wouldn't have pushed the psycho so far - especially when alone with him - but after the dressing-down he'd had from Kostabi over Verse, she knew Ness wouldn't dare endanger another operation by doing anything stupid.

  The two found the stairs up to ground level and moved cautiously up. Another guard moved across the far side of the huge reception and turned off into a corridor. Quietly, Hannah moved to a desk and found what she expected would be there.

  Electronic building guide. The security office was second on the left.

  They slipped into the room and Hannah studied its contents. ID card production equipment, DNA sampler. Everything she'd hoped for and all that she needed.

  She studied the small DNA extractor - designed to extract a pinprick of blood for scanning - and smiled. She doubted Ness would know that was how it worked.

  She just couldn't resist.

  "While we're here we should get our own DNA on the database, it might come in handy later. You go first."

  Ness sighed. "Aye, fine. Whadda ah do?"

  Hannah pointed to a couple of plastic dishes on a desk. They were probably for paper clips, but empty. "Gimme a number one in that one and a number two in the other."

  The Scotsman gaped. "Ya expect me to have a wazz an' a kack?"

  "Of course. Deoxyribonucleic acid is complex stuff. The system needs both for comparison."

  "Ah'm not droppin' ma keks in front o' you!"

  Hannah paused, letting him suffer.

  "Funny. Here was I thinking that was what you've been after all these months."

  Ness's eyes darkened. "Oh, ah ge' it. That were a wind-up, reet?"

  "Yes, thank God. The image it conjured has already replaced something nice in my brain."

  "There's nothing nice in your brain, ya sick bitch," Ness snapped. "So whadda ah really do? Ah mean, ye still want a sample, right?"

  She didn't, but she nodded at the extractor, anyway. "Just stick your index finger in that hole. The machine'll do the rest."

  "Thas more like it. Stickin' ma finger in a hole ah don't mind at - ow! ya wee fooker."

  "Diddums. Did that hurt?"

  Hannah smiled in satisfaction as Ness wandered off sucking his finger, then processed Brand and Jenny Simmons's DNA. It was these two, it had been decided, who were to infiltrate the Capek Construction site, and they had provided small samples of blood that Hannah worked into the machine. There was a moment of concern when the system at first refused to recognise the she-demon's sample but, as the body she wore was still essentially human, it soon got over the glitch. Two new biometric records had been added to the Capek Construction database, and what she needed to do now was imprint the strand data onto the cards. For this, Hannah used the other machine.

  All that remained to do was create the Trojan identities and employment histories to match the already present data. But for that she would need to access a PC, the higher the clearance the better.

  Hannah unlocked the elevators and she and Ness took the one to the penthouse office, pausing only to silently despatch a guard alerted by the ting. They emerged into Conrad Capek's domain and Ness busied himself examining various executive toys while Hannah breached the password on his machine.

  It wasn't difficult to do. The password was "Lehmverkund".

  Hannah rapidly tapped keys and created Brand and Simmons's legends in the personnel files. The only time she paused was when it came to naming her fictional creations. She had already decided who Brainiac was to be - and she thought he'd like it - but when it came to the name of the demoness she had to admit she had struggled since the plan was first mooted.

  But suddenly, she smiled.

  Tappity-tap-tap-TAP.

  "It's done," she said to Ness. "Let's get the hell out of here."

  The Scotsman frowned. "You ain't gonna try an' find out more aboot wass goin' on while you're in that thing?" he asked with surprise.

  Hannah shook her head. "Could do, but that's not why we came. The main priority is getting Brand and Simmons onto that site without anyone knowing they're coming. And the fact is, if I tried it without Hacman I'd risk leaving a footprint in every file I entered."

  "Then I would hope," said a voice, "that I have trodden carefully."

  Hannah and Ness spun.

  "Going my way?" asked Solomon Ravne.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "I am going to kill her," Jenny Simmons said slowly. "But before I kill her I am going to slice her open and make her watch her innards slither out and steam upon the floor. Then I am going to snap her spine in two, twist her like a pretzel, and fuse her lips to her rectum. She is then going to thank me as best she can while I make her eat her own sh-"

  "Quiet!" Jonathan Brand said, interrupting her. His sudden demand had absolutely nothing to do with what followed but his finger stung from a DNA sample just taken and he'd already had enough of this particular mood. "The guard's coming back."

  The front gate guard of the construction site returned from his booth, where he had just run their newly minted ID cards through his terminal, checking the details against the Capek mainframe. Nice work, Miss Chapter, Brand thought. Because the IDs appeared to have checked out.

  "You like to make an early start, Professor Quinterman?" the guard queried. He squinted at the glow of the still orange dawn, a fluttering of birds on their first flight of the new day. "And you, too, Miss-" he added, his eyebrows rising, "-Bocker-Glory."

  "Then AFTER she has choked to de-"

  "FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, WOMAN, IT'S ONLY A NAME..."

  "I'm sorry?" the guard said.

  "It's all in the game," Brand said hurriedly. "You know, early start, impress the boss... it's, er, all part of the game."

  The guard frowned, and, turning cold, Brand realised his question about the early start could have been a last, subtle security check, designed to catch him out. Dammit, this was obviously a twenty-four hour operation.

  "Actually, Conrad - Mister Capek - keeps me on call all the time," he said in what he hoped was a superior curveball. "It comes with the title."

  "Yes, of course, professor," the guard agreed. He turned to Jenny. "You are from Germany, Miss Bocker-Glory?"

  Jenny smiled, then said forcefully, "I'm from lots of different places." She put her hands on her hips, impatient. "Can we go in now?"

  "In just a moment. But first there is one more th-"

  Jenny tutted and transformed in a flash. The remainder of the guard's sentence was rudely interrupted by the presence of one of her talons curving up through his throat and into his brain.

  "Jesus!" Brand said, jumping back. "He might just have been going to ask you for a date!"

  [Fine. He has one. With the morgue.]

  "God, I thought I was being paranoid."

  Baarish-Shammon returned to human form. "Not being paranoid, just observant." She pointed to the dead man's finger, which was a centimetre away from his alarm button. "Can we get on with this or not?"

  Brand stared at her and realised that, now, they had very little choice. Hiding the body, he followed the already advancing demoness onto the site proper.

  My God, he thought as it opened up before them. Just look what they've done. Only weeks before, this had been an area unlike any in the world - absolutely irreplaceable - and now it was nothing more than a hole in the ground. The MoD and Department Q might have excavated under this site more than half a century ago - a
nd their counterparts in Germany might have planned to infiltrate it with their doppelgangers - but in both cases the plans had been physically uninvasive, causing as little disruption to the Albion Quarter as possible. There was nothing uninvasive about Conrad Capek's methods. This was no excavation - this was strip-mining.

  He and Simmons made their way down ladders to the bottom of the hole, some fifteen metres down. It was strangely quiet, but Brand kept an eye on the few figures there who were employed in various tasks, wary of suspicious glances their way. It had been safe to assume that the general workers would not recognise them as strangers, but it might be a different matter if they came across Capek or any of his present day trustees.

  Brand sighed. The news about those four poor people that Ravne had brought back from Capek HQ had not been good. Lawrence Verse had been adamant since the academic had first revealed his theory that at least one of them would never have agreed to waive the Albion Quarter's uniquely protected status - the friend he had once visited there with Hannah Chapter. And as the friend in question was one Dolores Whitbread, the priest in the Quarter's chapel, Brand tended to agree. The fact indicated, of course, that the new trustees were actually homunculi doppelgangers themselves, but if that was the case it indicated also that the originals were at best missing, and at worst dead. It was a fate that Verse had refused to contemplate until Ravne told him he had found her and the others' bodies in one of the HQ's labs, their brains torn apart to provide memory engrams for their twins. Damn Ravne, Brand thought - the man had spoken almost admiringly about how the method was so much better than having to educate homunculi in the old days.

  The consultant had been no more sympathetic in informing Farrow of the fates of his reanimated friends. While everyone else had been repulsed by what he told them - horrific and inexplicable as it was - Ravne had spared no detail as he gave his account in a state of morbid fascination.

  Oh yes, he had been a bearer of bad news, had Mister Ravne - and not least in the last thing he told them all. Taken initially through tunnels to a cell at Capek headquarters - apparently not needed or the wrong type to be one of the kebabs - he had witnessed hunters transporting what appeared to be small explosive charges into the underground labyrinth. Worse, after escaping from his cell and trying to access files - before being interrupted by Hannah and Ness - he had discovered plans to deploy the charges throughout the tunnels. Marcus Farrow and Ness had people searching for them now, because it appeared that the hunters had ceased hunting and were instead simply going to wipe them out.

  Brand, of course, hoped that the search was going well, but it was not something that he could worry about now. For the moment there were other things demanding his attention.

  Not least that the bottom of the hole where he and Simmons were was not, in fact, the bottom of the hole at all.

  They appeared to be standing on some kind of a platform, constructed at some intermediate level between the surface and the true depths, a point at which there had been a pause in the massive excavation. The platform was old, probably part of the original dig, but for what purpose had it been placed here? Brand looked around. The hill-like spoils of the Capek dig were shored away to the sides of the hole, and resting against the shoring were four tarpaulin covered squares the size of garage doors. Ensuring that no one was watching, Brand moved to one of them and pulled the tarpaulin back. With a sudden urgency, he then did the same with the other three.

  Each of them was a huge marble slab inscribed all over with a complex pattern of occult symbols and glyphs. They emitted a warmth that should not have been present in the stone, and a deep resonance that Brand could actually feel as a vibration in his teeth. There was power here. A lot of power.

  "Somebody wanted to keep the lid on something very, very badly," Jenny Simmons said. "Those are Mesopotamian binding glyphs, powerful enough to keep even me subdued."

  Don't flatter yourself, Brand thought. He had seen similar symbols in various ancient texts, and just a small chip of a slab with one of these glyphs would have been sufficient to keep the demoness down. But here there were four whole slabs with hundreds of glyphs between them.

  These things were seals. Seals intended to bury forever something very dangerous indeed.

  And they had been removed.

  Dear God, he thought. What the hell is beneath us?

  There was only one way to find out. Towards the corner of the platform, an elevator cage had just been opened by a couple of workers, and Brand shouted for them to hold it while he and Jenny slipped in. Perhaps unnecessarily he flipped his ID at the men, causing brief, suspicious glances - and what followed was an awkward pause.

  Brand hated elevators anyway, but he especially hated the kind you found on building sites. They were elevators stripped to their bare essentials - rid of the finery of panels, chrome or mirrors, the dubious pleasures of muzak - the misleading veneer that hid what, to his mind, they actually were when it came - no pun intended - down to it... boxes that hung on strings over bloody big holes. Hannah Chapter had told him how she had infiltrated the Capek headquarters, and the fact was he could still see the vertiginous shaft that must have loomed beneath her.

  Nevertheless, he had to maintain his composure. As he was meant to be someone who, however peripherally, was involved in the construction industry, it wouldn't do to baulk at possibly its most common form of transport in the presence of those whose suspicions he was trying to avoid. To compensate, he took his mind off the shaky descent by trying to make small talk with Jenny Simmons.

  "Long way down."

  There was a second's pause.

  "Known longer, lover boy," his dead ex-fiancée said. Brand knew what the demoness was actually talking about: home. But she had made it sound as provocative as she possibly could.

  "Hoh... yes?" Brand coughed, caught out.

  Jenny lowered her eyes to his fly and licked her lips. "Mmmm. You know. All the way down."

  One of the workers smirked and gave Brand a wink. Givin' the old PA a good shaftin', eh? Good on yer, prof.

  Brand did the only thing he could and winked back manfully. But by Christ, he thought, if this guy only knew.

  "So?" he said to him. "Are you courting? I mean... do you have a sweetheart? That is, you're getting some, righ..."

  Thankfully, the lift reached the bottom a second later.

  It was with some alacrity that Brand exited the cage, followed by Simmons, and the two of them let the workers go on ahead. But Brand's relief at being back on terra firma did not last long. Because while the top level of the site - the area he supposed was no longer important - had been quiet, where they were now was a hive of activity.

  Brand could hardly believe what he was seeing around him, and he stood and gaped. The two of them had emerged into a corridor that must have been part of the original MoD and Department Q project, a wood-panelled slice of yesterday still adorned with posters warning careless talk costs lives and the walls have ears. Racks of unused gas masks hung at various strategic points, there was a portrait of the king in a frame, and most evocatively of all office doors were still marked with the names of their occupants of decades ago. One of these read Emmanuel Konterman, while another carried a title only: Prime Minister.

  If Winston Churchill had spent time down here, whatever the project codenamed The Clay Resource had been must have been big.

  Surely, then, Brand thought, this corridor is not all that there is? And as he walked with Jenny Simmons through the busy throng of Capek's incongruously dressed workers, he realised that all the corridor's anterooms - the offices - were to one side. The other consisted of a series of time-stained windows that looked out on...

  Brand bundled Jenny Simmons through a door between windows. The two of them were standing on a metal walkway that ran along all four sides of a vast cavern that had been carved out of London's underbelly. It was cold and it was damp, and it was deep.

  Spotlights positioned at various points on the walkway shone down to
the floor of the cavern, though as yet Brand and Simmons were not close enough to the edge to see what they illuminated.

  The scale of this place!

  "Is everybody ready on the dark side of the moon?" Brand asked idly.

  "Excuse me?"

  "A film that Jenny and I went to see once," the academic answered. "I don't suppose you get to see that many?"

  The demoness smiled. "Au contraire, loverboy. Watch 'em on the DVD while you're busy doing whatever it is you waste your life doing. I like comedies. You know, The Devil Rides Out, The Exorcist, Hellraiser II: Hell On Earth. The last one I found to be a vicious cross-breed of The X-Files and the The Da Vinci Code."

  "It had nothing to do with either."

  "No," Jenny said, frowning. "It didn't, did it?"

  Brand stepped forward and peered over the edge of the walkway.

  Oh Dear Lord.

  As the little girl, Rose, had said, there were giants in the earth. Because he was looking down on what he could only consider to be the western equivalent of the terracotta army, rank upon rank of sculpted, fearsome soldiers arranged in rows and columns, and simply standing here beneath the earth. But they were not the western equivalent of the terracotta army... not really. For one thing, that army consisted of men in armour and masks, and these things wore no armour or masks, and were not men. For another, each of the figures he looked upon was twice the size and more of any normal human being. Most of all - though like the army they appeared as if their destiny was to stand here forever waiting - he could sense that each and every one of them was alive.

  They were golems.

  It was an army of golems.

  "Oh... crap," Jenny Simmons said.

  "I need to get down there," Brand responded. He spotted a gantry that obviously lowered onto the floor of the cavern and began to head towards it. "My God, I need to get down there."