The Heist of Hollow London, page 21
For a couple of minutes Kline stood in the middle of the apartment and considered this development. It aligned with some other thoughts he’d been having. He made some decisions and then he left.
30
THE DEAD-WASTE YARD
This was working out unexpectedly well, Loren thought as they listened at the gate to the dead-waste yard, checking no one was in there already. Not the riot and the cops and stuff, that was all really bad, but this particular aspect of things was better than they could have hoped for. There didn’t seem to be anyone at the yard—anyone who wasn’t trapped inside the plant had already left its immediate vicinity—so Loren entered.
The dead-waste yard was a small, untidy, slightly sunken area surrounded by a high fence, with a protruding corner of the main building overhanging it. It contained a loop of track with three tall carts that passed under the outlet pipe that stuck out from the building: when a cart was full it moved along the track and tipped into the compactor. A cart stood under the outlet. It had a ladder built into one side. Loren climbed up and peered into the cart.
Drienne had told them the Coyne would be inside Arlo’s sunglasses case, and Loren had a moment of panic when it wasn’t on top of the pile of junk inside the cart—but they quickly spotted it had bounced to one side and lodged inside a web of larger chunks of uncyclable crap. They levered their body against the side of the cart and tipped themselves toward the case, reaching out with their fingers—
Loren heard a noise from outside the yard. Someone was walking around the fence—maybe someone who’d seen them enter? Could be cops checking if anyone was hanging around outside. At any moment they might enter the yard. Loren’s best chance of not being found was to hop inside the cart, and they did so as noiselessly as possible—but should they grab the Coyne as well, and stuff it in their rucksack? If it was the cops, they’d search Loren and find it and that was the entire operation sunk. They could leave the Coyne in the cart for now, in the sunglasses case—no one would look twice at it in among all this stuff. But Loren hated the thought of being so close to their objective and not claiming it—
The gate to the yard opened. Loren was unsure if any part of themself was visible above the top of the cart. Their right foot, perhaps, but to an onlooker it would hopefully appear someone had simply thrown a shoe out with the waste. They kept as still as they could and listened as whoever it was moved around the yard. Was it one person, or more? It sounded like one set of footsteps.
The footsteps came closer, then stopped next to the cart. Then the ladder creaked as someone stepped on it.
* * *
Drienne was doing very well, Arlo thought. Her opening gambit had stopped the cops from giving them an immediate kicking, though Arlo wasn’t yet confident the kicking hadn’t simply been deferred: kicked down the road, as it were. The cops visibly sized them up, trying to work out if they might get into trouble for committing violence against these people.
“We’re visitors on important business,” Drienne had told them in her most xeccy voice. Certainly Arlo and Drienne’s upmarket clothing gave them a different look from everyone else currently inside the plant, unlike poor Nadi, who’d dressed to blend in and had been immediately identified by the cops as fair game.
“What business?” said one of the cops as Drienne held up her backhand so they could id her. Arlo did the same, though he wasn’t confident their alt-ids would check out on a police database.
“We’re debranding this facility,” said Drienne. “We flew in from Boston a few days ago.”
Don’t tell them that, Arlo wanted to shout. There’s no need to tell them that, they didn’t ask and we didn’t actually fly in from Boston at all. He saw one of the other cops tap his backhand—was he running a check on their flight?
“What are you doing in here?” said the cop who was questioning Drienne.
“Debranding it, of course. Then that woman came in and started haranguing us.”
“The tall woman who just—”
“Yes, the tall woman. Have you arrested her?”
“She’s in custody now.”
“Good.”
“I mean,” Arlo put in, “she didn’t do anything to us.”
“It was quite alarming, though.”
“Yes, yes. But I don’t think she committed a crime.”
“She has now,” said the cop. “Assault on a police officer.”
“On several police officers,” added the one checking his backhand.
Arlo heard this with dismay. There was no getting Nadi back from that. Drienne’s instinct to distance them from Nadi didn’t sit well with him, but it was correct: there was no sense in them both going down with her.
“Please, can we leave now?” said Drienne. “We’ve been stuck down here for some time and it’s pretty scary, actually.”
“Yes,” Arlo added.
“We had no idea London was like this now.”
The cop did not say they could leave, nor did he say they couldn’t. He nodded to a colleague and together they searched Arlo and Drienne, who submitted with weary sighs, as if it was of no consequence to them but all rather tiresome. Arlo’s mind was frantically going over everything he was carrying on his person, assessing whether any of it was suspicious. Would they find it weird he had sunglasses with no case? And he had given Drienne the Coyne, hadn’t he? And she had put it into the pipe? He hadn’t just imagined it all in the panic?
The cops also took the cases that contained the drone squadrons, but didn’t find anything worth remarking on.
“So can we go?” Arlo asked.
“Not yet,” the main cop told him.
Arlo was willing to accept this response, for the time being at least, but Drienne remained fully in character. “When?” she demanded. “What are you waiting for?”
“For your own safety,” the cop said. “It’s chaos up there, you’re better off down here.” He directed them to an empty storage bay, then stayed by the door to guard them while his colleagues swept the rest of the underfloor. He did not give their cases back.
Arlo checked his backhand, and the cop on the door gave him a warning glare.
“I’m just checking my messages,” said Arlo.
“We cut the whole place off,” the cop told him. “You won’t get a signal.”
“Oh,” said Arlo lightly and let his hand fall to his side. When the cop wasn’t looking, he glanced at Drienne, looking for her reaction. She gave a slight shrug, and he got her meaning: It is what it is. They just had to hope Loren had the Coyne, and they’d head for the rendezvous and meet them and Kline there, and Nadi if she somehow got free of the cops.
The cops found several employees who’d been cowering on the underfloor, hoping to sit out the riot. Some of them were ushered to join Arlo and Drienne in the storage bay. Some of them, the cops beat up. Arlo didn’t speak out against what the cops were doing and he knew this made him a bad person, but he had to act like the only thing he was unhappy about was being kept here. Nadi had tried to intervene, and look how that had turned out. Maybe there was something they could do for her, further down the line: lodge a legal challenge perhaps, or at least keep her share of the loot safe until she got out of prison. Whatever it took, he’d make sure she wasn’t forgotten.
* * *
Nadi only realized they were dragging her out of the building when she felt the cool evening breeze on her face. A third wagon had joined the first two, this one a prisoner transport. It was already filling up. The cops carrying her opened up the rear doors and pushed her inside. She struggled to stay on her feet. The other prisoners were sitting on the bare floor in the back, and she landed on a couple of them when she fell. Some of the prisoners shouted at her for being careless, some of them shouted at the cops, some of them helped her up into a sitting position against the wall.
“You okay?” said a voice close to Nadi’s face.
Nadi managed to open her eyes a little, though it was difficult with all the cuts around them and the blood on the lids that was becoming sticky. She saw a face and recognized it.
“Gregg,” she said, her jaw moving painfully.
The guy who’d “helped” her catch that poor girl they’d found at the Korean restaurant. Nadi should have told Arlo or Loren or someone about that girl, because she wasn’t sure she was going to get out of here and no one else would save the girl now. She turned her hand to send a message—
But of course, she didn’t have her slate.
“She doesn’t look good,” said Gregg to the others. “She needs medical help.”
A couple of the others went to the back doors of the wagon and banged on it, trying to attract someone’s attention, saying they needed a medic. When there was no response, several more joined them. It was nice to know people cared, Nadi thought as she slid into unconsciousness.
31
LARGE GREEN ARROWS
The cop watching Arlo and Drienne and the others on the underfloor had stepped out of the storage bay for a moment to speak to a colleague. Arlo noticed Drienne was looking down at the floor and shaking her head.
“Everything okay?” Arlo said.
She looked up at him with resentment, and her expression worried him. This was just the kind of situation in which she was prone to disassociate. He went to put a hand on her shoulder, but she swatted it away.
“Look—I know,” he said.
“Fucking outrageous,” she muttered.
“We’re getting out of here soon.”
“Bullshit.” She was getting loud. Was she still acting up for the cops’ benefit? Or was this something else?
“Okay,” said the cop, returning to the room. “Let’s move, guys. Quickly. Single file.”
All the employees walked out of the storage bay under the cop’s watchful eye. Arlo and Drienne tried to pick up their cases, but the cop said he’d be taking those. Together they proceeded down the corridor to where the other cops waited impatiently for them, making clear it was a huge imposition to have to escort these idiots out of the building. The cops headed for the stairs first and the rest of them followed—
And then something up on the workfloor exploded, with enough force to make the walls shake down on the underfloor. Up ahead a door swung violently open, hitting two cops and sending both flying to the floor. One of them wasn’t moving, and his head seemed to be burned and bleeding. The other one, the one who’d guarded them in the room and still had their cases, was trapped under the door, which had blown off its hinges. Wild flickering light came from the open doorway, and the cop at the front of the line, who had just missed being hit by the door, shielded her face as a draft of hot air poured into the corridor. She dashed away toward the stairs and quickly became invisible behind a combination of heat haze and light from the fire. An alarm went off and didn’t stop.
Arlo knew the door led to one of the silos that the workfloor funnels fed directly into. Whatever material it contained was inflammable, and whether by accident or design, something had inflamed it. And the walls between the silo room and the corridor he stood in were not thick: in fact, they appeared to be fiber dividers inserted between concrete support posts. Flames were curling around the doorframe and spreading out from there. The remaining cops yelled at everyone to stay back, but it wasn’t as if anyone was likely to rush toward the source of the fire.
Flat black panels were fixed to the corridor walls at regular intervals, and these now lit up with a chunky green arrow pointing away from the fire, and the word EXIT in large letters above.
“The exits are open!” shouted one of the employees.
“Fucking finally,” shouted another.
Everyone turned and obeyed the arrows, which led them to a door halfway along the next corridor. One of the employees in their group pulled it aside, revealing a short narrow windowless corridor with dim red-orange lighting and another door at the end. They all dashed for this outer door, and the employee who’d opened the inner door complained the others were crushing her and needed to give her some space so she could open it. But when she had the space, it wouldn’t open. Someone else told her she was doing it wrong, barged her out of the way and tried to open it themselves, with no success. Perhaps something was blocking it on the outside, or its release systems had failed. A third person made their own desperate attempt before the group accepted the door was not going to open and jostled each other back down the corridor in search of another exit. But with the fire blocking their way, it seemed they were out of options on the underfloor. They headed up the rear stairwell to the workfloor, but the fire shutters blocked them from passing through the workfloor to the building’s rear exit. They could only go up.
“I say we go to the top floor,” Arlo said. “There are two exits there.”
“Fires spread upward,” said Drienne, “you do know that.”
“Yes, that’s why we have to go now before the fire reaches it.”
* * *
Arlo was right, the top floor wasn’t on fire—yet. But smoke was starting to rise through the carpet in the central corridor. The group arrived at the crossroads to find the exit that lay past the premium store was already open: they rushed toward it and one of the cops barked at them all to slow down and stop pushing. To be fair, it would be dumb for them to get this close to safety and then die by falling from the emergency exit due to excessive haste. The jittery group managed to file through the exit one by one. Drienne was second through the door: she’d ended up ahead of Arlo and was getting into increasingly tetchy exchanges with the cops. Arlo needed to get her somewhere quiet so she could cool off and stabilize.
Arlo ended up the penultimate member of the party to descend, followed by the cop who’d guarded them on the underfloor. The ladder was basic—rungs affixed to the side of the building, with a series of larger loops to catch you if you fell—and triggered lurching anxiety in Arlo. He could descend only by forcing himself to stare directly at the pale, sun-weathered wall, watching it scroll from the bottom of his vision to the top, from bottom to top, from bottom to top. Eventually one of his feet, expecting to find another rung, instead struck the ground (ouch) and he stumbled away. Once he’d checked his ankle wasn’t sprained, he turned to look for Drienne.
She wasn’t there.
They had come out in the alley that ran down the left-hand side of the plant, which also served as the emergency exit from the truck train platform. Arlo’s fellow escapees were dashing toward the street, and Arlo supposed Drienne had done the same—but when he reached the street he still couldn’t see her. He asked one of the other escapees where she went, but got no response. Surely Drienne couldn’t have got out of sight so quickly, if she was heading for the rendezvous? Did she go the other way, toward the platform? Why would she do that?
He heard a truck train pulling out from the platform.
Arlo ran back down the alley, but when he reached the steps leading down to the platform the truck train was vanishing from view. One of the cops lay on the ground, moaning in pain. Had Drienne taken the train? Surely she couldn’t have operated it herself—and why hadn’t she waited for him?
Arlo wanted to believe Drienne was still okay and sticking to the plan, because if she wasn’t, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. All he could do was head for the rendezvous and hope she was there.
32
LEAVE A LABEL OF AN OWL ON THE BENCH
Kline sat alone on a bench at the rendezvous point, reclining his feet on his suitcase, sipping from a bottle of M:Pyre. If M:Pyre didn’t get bought (and it might not, as the brand was so closely associated with Oakseed) these remaining bottles might become collector’s items, and Kline was struck by the thought he should have left it unopened, kept it and auctioned it in a couple of years. But then, how much would he make from that? A few thousand? With the money he was about to net from this job, and the plans he had for that money, in a couple of years he hoped to be the kind of person who spent thousands on frivolous shit at auctions, not the one trying to make thousands from it.
Anyway, he was thirsty right now.
Kline was wondering if he would be the only one to make it to the rendezvous. They hadn’t agreed how long they should wait for each other once they got here, because such things were contingent on the situation, and Kline intended to wait for the shortest possible time while making it appear he’d given the others a fair chance to turn up. He had no idea where the others were, but he had a sense of what was unfolding inside Kentish Cyc, and reasoned that since the others weren’t already at the rendezvous, they must have been caught in the chaos.
Kline checked his slate. He couldn’t update Mia on the situation either. It was unsettling being so thoroughly out of contact. They’d agreed that if any of them failed to make it to the rendezvous, the ones who did make it should leave a mark on the bench before leaving, so any latecomers would know they’d been and gone and there was no need to wait for them. It had been Kline’s idea they should carry labels for this purpose, with a different design for each member of the team: meaningless to anyone else but immediately recognizable to the others. Kline’s labels bore an image of an owl, and he was just searching through his pockets for them when Arlo turned up, frantic, his clothes drenched in sweat. He barely acknowledged Kline, and instead he walked all around the Doggy Dogg Jones statue to check if anyone, or anything, was behind it.
