Hunted (21 page)

Nico hesitated, frowning.

‘Come on, Nico,’ I said fiercely. ‘We’ve already been here far too long. We have to move.’

‘I’ll look after her.’ Ed touched Nico’s arm, then met his gaze.

Nico glazed over as the two boys communicated telepathically.

I don’t know what Ed said in that private chat, but when he broke the connection, Nico had clearly made the decision to let Ketty go.

‘Go on, then.’ Nico gave Ketty a fierce hug, then teleported her over the fence and across the field beyond. I could just make out the edge of the road where Laura had dropped us. As Ketty sailed through the air towards that point, Ed ran through the gates after her.

‘Keep checking in with us, yeah?’ Nico yelled. ‘Let me know how she is.’

‘I will,’ Ed yelled back. ‘Don’t forget you’ve only got about twenty-five minutes before that guard comes out of his hypnosis.’

That wasn’t a lot of time.

Heart thumping, I gazed across the field beyond the building, watching Ketty travel through the air to the edge of road. Nico set her down. A second later, Ed ran up to her. He took out his phone, presumably to dial for a cab to take them to hospital.

‘You don’t think those dogs will come back, do you?’ Nico said, looking worried.

‘No. We’d have seen them if they’d come out of the woods.’ I paused. ‘I guess they brought in the dogs because of the staff cutbacks we read about . . . a replacement for the second guard.’

Nico nodded. ‘We better get inside.’

Side by side, the two of us ventured through the open door. The building was cold and dark and echoey, a bleak length of corridor with a long stretch of bare wall on either side.

‘We need to find stairs down to the basement,’ I whispered.

Nico nodded. ‘Over there.’ He pointed to a set of concrete steps at the end of the corridor.

The basement was even colder and darker than the ground floor. Our flashlights revealed four large rooms, jammed with cupboards and storage shelving.

‘How on earth do we know where to begin looking?’ Nico said, staring round in bewilderment. ‘The records on your dad’s final meetings with Bookman could be anywhere.’

I marched across to the first shelf and picked up a piece of paper. It was a requisition – an order form – for a load of stationery.

My heart sank. ‘There must be a key to the storage system somewhere . . . some way of working out where files are kept by date or name.’

‘How about on that computer?’ Nico pointed to a terminal in the corner.

‘Great, except we’ve no electricity to power it.’ I shivered.

Jeez.
We had about twenty minutes until the guard outside came out of his hypnosis and what felt like a million miles of archive material to search.

And then footsteps ran towards us . . . a lean, male figure stood in the doorway, his flashlight weaving shadows across the wall opposite.

I froze. Before either Nico or I could act, the guy reached round and flicked a light switch. Three overhead fluorescent tubes hummed into instant action, flooding the room with light.

Harry stood in the doorway.

I stared at him, open-mouthed.

‘I found a generator outside,’ he said with a grin. ‘See, Red? I told you I’d be useful.’

23: Clusterchaos

I stared at Harry, totally lost for words. Nico stood beside me, open-mouthed.

Harry’s grin deepened. ‘Hey, Red, we must stop meeting like this. Empty office buildings are not my idea of a party environment.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I snapped.

‘Mum refused to leave before. She wanted to be sure you got out okay, so we were still there when Ed and Ketty came out. Mum’s taken them to the hospital. I thought, seeing as you were two guys down, I might be able to fill in.’

‘For Pete’s sake, Harry.’ My irritation mounted. ‘This isn’t a freakin’ game. You weren’t supposed to hang around. You could get hurt.’

‘Nice to know you care, Red.’ Harry winked at me.

In spite of my annoyance, my heart gave a little lurch at that wink.

‘I don’t care,’ I said, trying to sound as withering as possible. ‘What I’m trying to say is that you can’t be any use to us and if it comes to a fight, then Nico and I will have to protect you.’

‘I can handle myself,’ Harry said, an irritated edge now creeping into his voice. ‘I got some power back into the building for you, didn’t I?
And I
disabled the alarm. Plus, you know I’ve got other, shall we say specialist, IT skills.’ He turned to Nico. ‘I can get you inside the intranet here . . . through any terminal . . .’

‘Really?’ Nico sounded impressed. This just added to my annoyance.

‘A bit of amateur hacking doesn’t make you able to crack an MoD security system,’ I said.

Harry pulled a CD from his pocket. ‘This isn’t amateur hacking,’ he said. ‘It’s a proper program I downloaded off the net . . . brought it with me in case we needed it. It’s called Clusterchaos . . . works like a cluster bomb, like lots of sub-bombs exploding all at once to break down a firewall in several places at a time
and
—’

‘We don’t want to destroy their security system, we just want to find the information about my dad.’

‘Clusterchaos can do that. Once it’s disarmed the firewall, you can find anything you want – across the whole intranet . . .’

‘I don’t—’

‘Do it.’ Nico spoke over me, to Harry, pointing to the terminal we’d spotted before.

‘What are you
doing?’
I turned on Nico, furious.

‘Harry sounds like he knows what he’s talking about,’ Nico said. ‘He managed to find and start the building’s generator so we’ve got proper lights and power. We should give him a chance to do this.’

‘But—’

‘Get over yourself,
Red
. . .’ Nico shot me a look – part irritation, part amusement. ‘There’s no way we can get through all the material in this archive doing a manual search, is there? Not in the twenty minutes we’ve got till the guard comes round. This is our best chance.’

The fact that this was true didn’t make me any happier about letting Harry help us.

Seething, I followed Nico over to the computer. Harry had already switched on the hard drive and inserted his CD. Seconds later the screen started flashing with page after page of computer-program information.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Clusterchaos is reading the security protocols,’ Harry said. He leaned back in his chair. ‘It’ll take a few minutes.’

‘It better not take any longer,’ I muttered.

Nico was peering at the screen. ‘Man, that is
cool
.’ He turned to Harry, his eyes full of respect. ‘How does it work?’

Harry explained, using terminology I didn’t understand – and that I was sure Nico wouldn’t be able to follow either. But Nico just nodded.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Impressive.’

As Harry had predicted, after a couple of minutes the screen grew still. A single line of text flashed up:
Please enter your search terms.

With a triumphant grin, Harry typed in my dad’s name:
William Hamish Fox.

A long list flashed up. Over one hundred entries.

‘Too many,’ I said. ‘You need to narrow it down.’

‘Okay, how about a date?’ Harry said. ‘Or a range of dates?’

I gave him the dates that covered the time from ten days before my dad’s death to three days after.

This time the list was five items long.

Heart pounding, I scanned the information. The dates corresponded to the days in Mom’s diary where she’d written
W to Hub.
Those were obviously the times when my dad had meetings with Bookman.

‘Can you open those files?’ I said.

‘Sure.’ Harry started tapping at the keyboard. ‘It’ll just take a couple of minutes.’

Nico was across the room, examining a folder of papers. I walked towards him, scanning the labels on the front of the filing cabinets as I passed.

Each cabinet had a number. I went around the room, taking in the cabinet labels 501-542.

The number Bookman had scratched in the ash at his feet leaped into my head.

343.

In all the rush to get here, I hadn’t made the connection. If Bookman knew whoever killed him was on their way here, maybe the number was some sort of clue to what the killer was after.

I darted into the next room. The cabinets were all numbers in the low two hundreds. Higher numbers in the next room . . . up to 326.

I reached the next room. Filing cabinet 343 was the sixth cabinet along from the door. I yanked open the drawers. What was in here?

I pulled out a couple of files. A tally of MoD postal costs from 1982-1984 . . . some computer hardware instruction manuals . . . a bunch of spreadsheets . . .

I stood back, bewildered.

Harry appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ve tried to open the five bits of data you want, but they’re encrypted. They’re small files, but it’ll still take the best part of an hour to work out the decryption so I’m downloading them. We can look at them later.’

‘Awesome,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ve found something else.’

I explained quickly about the number Bookman had written in the ash.

‘I was certain it corresponded to this filing cabinet, but I can’t find anything in here connected to my dad’s meetings with Bookman.’

‘Maybe the information is hidden,’ Harry suggested. He reached past me and pulled a bundle of papers out of the cabinet. ‘We should take everything. Examine it later.’

I went to help him, when another thought struck me. Surely it would have been real risky for Bookman to leave an important document in an open filing cabinet like this? ‘Maybe the records Bookman hid here aren’t
inside
the cabinet at all,’ I said.

Harry stared at me. ‘You mean . . .?’

‘Let’s pull it away from the wall.’

Heart in my mouth, I tugged at the cabinet. It was too heavy to move. Even with Harry’s help I couldn’t budge it.

‘Nico!’ I yelled.

He came running. ‘Ed just contacted me remotely to say they’re at the hospital. Ketty’s okay,’ he said breathlessly.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s really great. Could you teleport this filing cabinet please?’

Nico shrugged. ‘Okay, but we’ve only got twelve minutes until that guard comes out of the trance Ed put him into.’

Jeez
, we were going to have to move fast.

With a flick of his wrist, Nico slid the cabinet away from the wall.

‘What’s this about?’ he said.

I raced around to the back of the cabinet. Scanned it fast.

There, taped to the bottom corner, was a tiny disk.

My heart skipped a beat as I ripped the disk away from the metal. ‘Look!’ I held it up.

‘We can play it on the computer in the other room while the encrypted files are downloading, see if it’s relevant,’ Harry said.

‘It
must
be relevant,’ I said.

The three of us raced back to the computer in the other room.

A red light was flashing over the door.

As Harry inserted the disk into the computer’s drive, I turned uneasily to Nico.

‘That light wasn’t on before, was it? D’you think it’s an alarm?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nico shuddered. ‘How much longer are the encrypted files going to take to download?’

‘Two minutes max,’ Harry said.

‘We can easily see what’s on this disk in two minutes,’ I said. ‘How long tile the guard wakes up?’

Nico checked his watch again. ‘Seven minutes.’

My mouth was dry as the computer screen fizzled, then settled into a black and white CCTV picture of a hallway. It looked vaguely familiar.

‘That’s the Hub,’ Harry said. ‘I recognise it from the night I met you.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, it looks familiar to me, too.’

A man walked into view. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He paced to the door, then turned.

I recognised him right away. A tall, middle-aged man with a long, straight nose and a slightly haughty expression.

‘That’s my dad,’ I gasped.

‘Ssh.’ Nico put his hand on my arm. ‘Listen.’

‘
I can’t let you do it,’
Dad was saying.
‘I’m going to the police.
’

Another person spoke, but too quietly to make out what they said, or even if the low mumble belonged to a man or a woman.

‘Turn up the volume,’ I said desperately.

‘It
is
up,’ Harry hissed.
‘Shh.’

‘Then you’ll have to kill me
,’ Dad said. He spread his arms wide and smiled.
‘Kill me and leave a wife distraught and a daughter without a father.
’ He paused. ‘
You’re not going to do that. I know you’re not.
’

He stood, still standing and smiling. Still utterly confident that he was not going to be hurt. And, without a shadow of a doubt, I knew that I was about to see him die.

24: Showdown