Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) (43 page)

indicating that whoever had been asking the questions had taken their
job very seriously indeed. Jack placed a hand on the neck of the man
next to him. The skin felt warm. It hadn’t been long since the man had
been executed. Jack jumped as the door to the office closed. With the
unexpected and settling sound past him he continued to examine the
bodies. Both men were well dressed. They wore tailor made suits and
the ties around their necks remained impeccably in place—from the
right
angle
they
could
have
been
waiting
silently
for
a
highpowered
business meeting to begin.

Jack searched through the
men’s jackets. He found nothing.
As he
scanned the desk in front
of them he was
more successful. He found
several receipts from one of the better hotels in town, and more revealingly, he found two passports. Both documents were suspiciously new
looking.
Both were issued
by the Canadian government,
or
so they
purported. Canadian passports were a favourite amongst forgers for a
number of reasons. Canada was a nation of emigrants so the ethnicity
of the bearer was no grounds for suspicion at
passport control. The
same was true of
America, but
America was so unpopular around the
world, even with her allies, that passport
officials sometimes gave US
passport holders special attention just for the hell of it.

Satisfied that he had learned all that there was to learn from the
scene, Jack left the office.
As he stood outside the door
of the office he
quickly
reflected
on
what
he
had
gleamed
from
his
short
investigation—whoever the dead
men were was not as important as the
fact they had been tortured and murdered—whoever was running this
gathering, and in spite of the obvious lack of security, they were clearly
serious and clearly not to be underestimated.

As Jack had no idea where he was going he adopted a standard
search pattern—he maintained a course along the outer corridors before moving into the inner corridors, with the ever-decreasing circle
taking him towards the centre of the building. That search pattern gave
him the greatest possible chance for success as it started by
eliminating the most
obvious locations where a
meeting would take place—
namely in
one
of the
offices
or conference rooms that were found in
the
outer
portion
of the building. The problem with the search was
that it took time, and with time there were
more
opportunities for
him being
discovered.
As he got closer to the middle
of the building
the

warren of rooms and labs in that inner space got larger and larger. At
the very
heart
of the building Jack came across the largest
of all the
rooms. Deduction through elimination told him that the people who he
sought
would
be
found
inside
that
room.
The
double
doors that
opened into the large room had glass panels in them, and through the
frosted glass Jack could see the dark outlines
of two large men—they
were obviously standing guard; though Jack was slightly puzzled as to
why the guards were standing
on the inside of the room and not
out
in the corridor to make certain that those meeting inside were not disturbed. The only reason that he could think of,
other than the guards
being highly ineffective, as to why they would be on the wrong side of
the doors was that they were not there to keep people out; rather, they
were there to make sure that no one on the inside tried to leave. The
whole set-up inside the building left Jack feeling uneasy, and perhaps,
he thought, that was the point. If the circumstances had been normal,
had it been any
other mission, Jack, and any
other would-be infiltrator would have sensed that something was very wrong and they would
have left.

Jack
moved towards the door slowly. From the
other side
of the
door he could hear voices. Many voices. The sound was babbling and
unstructured and had he not known any better he could have sworn
that there was a
party
or some other kind of social gathering taking
place on the other side of those curiously guarded doors. The sound
of
glass clinking against glass and intermittent laughter
only served to
heighten that
impression. There was a
corridor
to the left
of the
doors. Cautiously Jack moved towards the corridor, hugging the wall
as he went. The corridor was short. It terminated at a toilet block. Jack
moved into the men’s toilets. The hairs on the back of Jack’s neck stood
on
end as he entered the toilet block as he ran into a man—literally.

“Sorry,” Jack said, with genuine repentance in his voice.
“That’s OK buddy,” said the man.
The man had a thick
American accent.
Although
not an expert on

Jack smiled warmly.
“When it’s free it would be rude to say no,” said Jack.
The American slapped Jack on the back and then he threw his head

back and he laughed.
“Ain’t that the truth,” said the American. “I’ll see you back inside.” “I
will be looking out for you,” Jack returned.
With the
American
gone from the toilet
block it
gave Jack the

space that he needed to act on the plan that he was still in the process
of forging.
He
quickly
scanned the ceiling in the
main
part
of the
toilet block. There was nothing. Jack then
opened each of the cubicle
doors and checked the ceiling from inside. When he opened the door to
the last cubicle, the one closest to the far wall, he found what he was
looking for. In the ceiling there was a small maintenance trapdoor. Jack
put the seat of the toilet down and he then stood on it, distributing his
weight
cautiously
for
fear that
the
cheap
plastic
might
give. The
trapdoor was firmly
jammed into
place,
swollen
by the unseasonal
damp of the leaky building and sealed with a poor distributed layer of
thick white paint. It took a couple
of hard pushes using both hands
to free the trapdoor and the sound its liberation caused alarmed Jack.
He jumped down from the toilet seat and dashed across to the main
door. After listening carefully for a few moments for any signs that the
trapdoor
opening
had alerted
someone, Jack
contentedly
concluded
that it had not.

He
moved back to the cubicle and hopped up
on the toilet seat.
Jack’s head disappeared into the dark unknown of the opening. It was
not going to be easy. He returned to the light. Jack looked around to fix
in his
mind a
mental
map before he pulled himself into the darkness
through the
located the
opening. Jack groped around in the
darkness
until
he

hatch which
he
quickly
put
back into
place.
Although
there wasn’t a lot
of light penetrating the darkness through the opening, Jack instantly
missed that light
once it was gone. In pitch darkness Jack knew just
how vulnerable he actually was. If he knocked
something
over,
or slipped and put a foot through the plasterboard
between the ceiling joists, then he would be instantly
discovered and
just as instantly executed—if he was lucky. There was also the great
danger, in spite
of the careful
mental
map that he had made, that
he would get lost in the darkness. He could hear the voices beneath
him—the voices were diffused and it was hard for Jack to pinpoint
the
exact
source. The various ventilation shafts which
opened into
the space that Jack
occupied, as well as water
pipes, with their unusual acoustic properties, caused him disorientation as voices came at
him from all around. His brain eventually identified the ghost sounds
coming from the infrastructure of the building, and he began to focus
on what he assumed was the true source of the voices. With that audio
landmark fixed he began to move once again.

At a snail’s pace and adopting the posture of the same, Jack crept
his way across the joists until he reached a wall. If Jack was correct in
his blind orientation then the wall would be part
of the room where
the group had congregated. With even
more care than before, as he
was now
merely yards from those who would have him killed, Jack
crawled along the un-plastered wall. The un-plastered surface was
festooned with sharp
edges formed from cement that
had not
been
cleaned
off
during construction. The webbing from an infestation of
spiders tickled his face and left him to guess just how large and nasty
the owners of those webs that he was so carelessly destroying actually
were. Eventually several small shafts of light cut across his path. Dust
particles danced momentarily in the illuminated stage before moving
on to be replaced by
others, moving in their
own particular way—it
was a hypnotic sight. The light that was slicing through the
darkness
entered through a small, metal, ventilation grill in the wall. Jack took
up position next to the grill. His view
of the large room below was far
from complete, but such as it was it gave him some sense
of what was
taking place. It was a canteen. Given the condition of the rest
of the
building that Jack
had so far viewed,
it was
clear that the
room
below him had been freshly
painted and cleaned. The practical
hard
wearing tables
round, wooden,
of a
normal workers’
eatery
had been replaced with

The
opening also allowed sound to pass through to Jack’s hiding
place,
even if only
the
busy
hum
of
speculation and the telling
of
nothing
more committal than old war tales told with competitive zeal,
which
made homing in
on any
one conversation for
more than the
briefest of

moments an impossible task. In that moment Jack was less interested
in listening in on a particular conversation, and more concerned to fix
his eyes on her; he needed to confirm that she was more than an apparition that his tired mind had conjured up to console him in his time
of
stress and dire emotional need. That was not such a farfetched idea as
he
often turned to her whenever things at work got tough, and she
would enter his dreams and give him comfort almost every time when
he had to take a life. Even in her absence she provided him with more
comfort than any professional head shrinker back in London. She was
nowhere to be seen. A mild panic punched him in the stomach as he
returned to the tortured men in the office—what if the building had
many such rooms, with the contorted dead in each of them? What if
she was
one of the victims?
An unseen critter scurrying
over his left
hand broke the run
of
pessimism that had gripped his
mind. In that
same moment his mood turned right around—he knew that she was
alive. He just knew it.

Suddenly calm quickly followed by hush fell across the crowd below him and all eyes in the room turned to face in Jack’s direction. Jack
took in a sharp breath of dusty air that almost caused him to sneeze.
Had he been spotted? Had some plaster come free from the wall
or
ceiling in the room because of his
movements above their heads? Relief punched him giddy as the unmistakable form of Deeley came into
view.
Although Deeley had his back to Jack it was not hard to identify
him, not least from the dark suit that he was wearing. Deeley held up
his hands to call for complete quiet—a redundant act as the crowd of
over fifty had already settled to hear what he had to say. The audience
may not have been bejewelled and in their socialising best,
but they
were
by
no
means typical
of the dusty
mercenaries who Jack
often
encountered. They were dressed for an informal barbeque rather than
for a dinner
party. The entire scene was somehow bastardised by the
scene
of torture and murder that had played
out
earlier a short
distance away.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Deeley began. “I cannot express just how
happy I am to see so
many
of you
here tonight.
For some
of you;
most
of you; just being here was a struggle. I hope that you will find
the struggle has been well worth the effort. While I am gratified that
so many of you have made it this far I am also mindful that there are