Silver

Now

The first siren blared almost immediately.

The second and third came only a second later. In less than five seconds every alarm box in the street was wailing. Half of them might have only been for show, but the other half were doing the best to raise the dead. In thirty seconds they had joined into a single wall of noise.

“What the hell’s that racket?” one of the uniforms said.

“Not sure, Sarge. Sounds like burglar alarms.”

“You trying to tell me every bastard in this street just got robbed? I don’t like this. Go and check it out, Hollis.”

Ronan Frost listened to one set of booted footsteps clump down the stairs. That still left two uniforms upstairs. They were better numbers. He could take two, quickly, if he had to. Still, with a little bit of luck there would be no need.

“What the hell’s going on out there?” the uniform was talking into his radio, Frost realized. He couldn’t hear what the crackling voice said in reply. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe had the ability to mess with their frequencies if he wanted to. If the boy could trigger every damned burglar alarm in a square mile, he could sure as hell dampen a radio signal. “Say again?” the officer repeated, shouting to be heard over the caterwauling alarms.

Just go down there and check it out, Frost willed the man to do his job.

They had a corpse here, but the one indisputable thing everyone knew about the dead was that they didn’t get up and walk unless it was a Romero film. She wasn’t going anywhere. Outside, it could have been the first salvo of the Third World War if the racket was anything to go by. They were policemen. It was their duty to go out there and investigate.

Frost waited, counting the rhythmic dub-dub dub-dub of his heartbeats.

Street by street more alarms sounded until they formed their own grotesque dawn chorus across the city. It was pandemonium. Still he didn’t move. His skin prickled with anticipation. He felt the tension coiling up inside him, desperate to be released in a fury of action. Still he waited, lying on his back, listening to the cacophony. It was music to his ears. He’d asked for a distraction and Lethe had delivered. He could picture people beginning to stumble out of their houses in the pajamas, rubbing their sleepy eyes and wondering what the hell was going on.

With a bit of luck a few more minutes of this and he’d be able to slip downstairs and out of the backdoor unnoticed. He wouldn’t need to be Harry Houdini to disappear into the crowd of woken sleepers grumbling about the bloody noise.

He heard more footsteps on the stairs.

It was hard to tell if it was one man, or if both of them were going down.

Frost waited until he couldn’t hear them, then whispered, “Talk to me Lethe.”

“You can say thank you any time you like. No, no, seriously. Any time you like. I live to serve.”

“Yeah, yeah, just tell me what you see.”

“Five plod standing around, looking worse than useless. I think I confused them. That or all the noise is interfering with the neural relays and their brains are shutting down to protect themselves.”

“Meaning one’s still inside the house,” Frost mused, ignoring everything after the word five.

“No fooling you, boss.”

“Remind me again why we keep you around?”

“Because I’m brilliant, obviously, and because without my little bit of techno-magic you’d be spending a good chunk of the foreseeable at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Now, it’s good to talk and all that, but how about you get the hell out of there, Frosty.”

Frost holstered his pistol.

He reached up for one of the rafters, caught a hold of the beam with both hands, and lifted himself silently to his feet. He stood, one foot either side of the loft hatch. He couldn’t stand fully upright because of the confined space. He bent down all the way, working his fingers beneath the wooden board, then very carefully lifted it out of the way. The alarm chorus hid the occasional scrape and scuff of wood on wood as he put the loft door down. He could see the landing lit up beneath him. Frost lowered himself back down to his stomach, then leaned ever so slightly down through the opening to see exactly what he’d be lowering himself into.

The last uniform still stood in the bedroom doorway, unable to pull his gaze away from the mutilation on the bed. The odds were the poor guy had never seen a corpse before. That his first looked like one of Andrei Chikatilo’s victims spread out there on her bed didn’t help his brain process the horror of the room. But it did help Frost. He breathed deeply, once, twice, steadying himself, before he lowered himself slowly, and soundlessly, down. Frost took all of his weight on his forearms like a gymnast on the parallel bars. As his shoulders came level with his elbows every muscle in his arms began to tremble violently. He expected the police officer to cry out, but he didn’t. Frost twisted slightly, allowing his body weight to lower him further, until it felt as though the muscles in his shoulders and upper back were going to tear, then he dropped down the last few inches to the floor silently behind the uniform.

He reached around to the holster at the base of his spine and drew his gun.

He took two steps across the deep pile carpet, quickly bringing himself up to no more than a few inches behind the policeman. He saw himself over the uniform’s shoulder, in the mirror on the wall behind the bed. The uniform’s eyes widened and he started to turn. Frost didn’t hesitate. He pistol whipped the uniform across the side of the head, dropping him like a stone. It was that or putting a bullet in his temple. He caught the man as his legs buckled and lowered him gently to the floor.

Frost took the stairs two and three at a time, then froze at the bottom, caught by a moment’s indecision. “This is such a bollocks job. That guy saw my face, and my prints are all over this place,” he said, looking at where his left hand still rested on the ornamental acorn-carved knob at the bottom of the balustrade.

“Three choices,” Lethe said in his ear, without missing a beat. “Get the feather duster out, play chemist and burn the place down-it’s easy enough, trust me. There’s a gas main, and there’s enough explosive stuff in the average kitchen to take out a tank. That kills two birds with one stone: no eye witness, no prints to worry about. It’s surprisingly easy. All you need is some lard, the crystallized oven cleaner and the gas hose. Couple of minutes and the blaze will be out of control. Or I can make it look like you never existed. No fingerprints, no military records, nothing. You’ll become a non-person in about twenty seconds flat. Your call.”

Frost saw faces moving in the broken square where the small window had been inset in the front door. They couldn’t see him, but they would in about five seconds. “You’re a scary bastard,” he said. He had no doubt the kid could wipe every trace of him from the face of the world as easily as he claimed.

“Obi Wan taught me well, but you are my Lord and Master, Frosty. And as your faithful servant I feel obliged to remind you it’s time to make like a shepherd and get the flock out of there.”

Ronan Frost knew the kid was right. He turned and started to run. He heard the front door opening behind him. He didn’t risk a backward glance, knowing it could be the difference between making it out of the house and not. He hit the backdoor running. Outside was chaos. Alarms blared, people were shouting, confused, worried. Frost didn’t break his stride as he ran straight across the tiny backyard and launched himself at the painted fence. He hit the Grim Reaper’s grinning wooden teeth right foot first, caught the top with his hands, and boosted himself up over the fence in one fluid motion. He dropped down onto the other side and stood there for a second, back pressed up against the fence, looking left and right.

The Monster was parked streets away.

“All available cars have just been sent your way, boss. In a few minutes the entire area is going to be teaming with the law.”

It didn’t have to be a problem. They had no idea they were even meant to be looking for him. As far as they knew there was a dead body and a lot of alarms ringing. He didn’t have any blood on him, and other than being in the wrong place at the absolutely wrong time, he’d done nothing wrong. Still, there was nothing to be gained from sticking around.

He started to walk toward the far end of the alleyway that ran between the narrow terraces. People had begun to congregate around the alley’s mouth and on the street corners. No one had a clue what was going on. There was a chill to the night that had them permanently moving as they tried to keep themselves warm. Some of them had dressed hastily, pulling coats on over their pajamas. Others were in jeans and jackets and whatever else made up their normal daywear. In less than twenty feet he passed all body types, from the anorexic to the bloated belly hanging out over the waistband of straining pajama bottoms. Lurch tall to Cousin It short. There were more than their fair share of Uncle Festers out there as well. And of course, there was the one staggeringly beautiful Morticia with her died-black hair, piercings and Gothed-up eyeliner, who had no right to be living among this freak show of inner-city life. Frost smiled at her, risking the wrath of her very own Gomez. Charles Addams would have been proud of how his old cartoons captured this slice of dystopian, happy families so well even all these years later. They were all out there on the streets, and none of them loked very happy with their life right then.

“One last trick,” Lethe said in his ear.

Frost had no idea what he meant until the first streetlight exploded in a shower of glass. Each bulb detonated in quick succession, sounding like a series of shotgun blasts. Shards of glass fell like jagged rain. Frost walked down the center of the street, feeling like some dark avenger who had stepped out of a B-movie. Lethe laughed in his ear. Darkness chased down the street, passed him and raced on. In thirty seconds the stars in the sky were suddenly so much brighter because there wasn’t a single streetlight burning in the entire city.

“I don’t want to know how you just did that,” Frost said.

“Liar,” Lethe said. “But don’t worry, I’ll let you in on the secret. All I did was redirect some electricity. It’s amazing what you can do with a computer. I overloaded the transformers and something had to give. The bulbs are built to blow. It’s cheaper than replacing the entire wiring. Looked good though, didn’t it? Give me that much, at least.”

“It looked good,” Ronan Frost agreed.

He saw two policemen getting out of a squad car. He walked across to them, pretending to be a curious resident. “Hey fellas,” Frost called out, “what’s going on?”

“Nothing to concern yourself about, sir,” the shortest of the two uniforms said, slamming the car door. He locked it. Trust in their fellow man, it seemed, had yet to reach the local police force.

“It’s a bit hard, sounds like all hell is breaking loose,” Frost spread his arms wide, taking in the whole cacophony.

“Yeah, some sort of outage in the power grid shorted all the alarm circuits. I don’t pretend to understand, mate. I just do what the gaffer tells me,” the taller uniform said, smiling almost conspiratorially.

“Ahh,” Frost said, as though that made perfect sense. “Well you have a good night, guys.”

“You too.”

“You know the deal, no rest for the wicked.”

He went in search of the Monster.

Finding the warehouse wasn’t difficult. Neither was getting close to it. Getting in was a different matter.

The Canning Docks were one of several along the river. Once upon a time, the river had been the heart of the city. While the river thrived, the city thrived. It was a symbiotic relationship. Every import and every export came in somewhere along the waterfront. Huge cranes still towered over the riverbanks, relics of a bygone age when the men in this country had worked with their hands and industry had been dominated by shipbuilding, coal mining and the old trades. But there wasn’t enough trade coming up the river to keep all eleven of the river’s docks working. The flour mill didn’t grind flour anymore; the side of the building advertised itself as The Oxo Gallery. When Frost was growing up Oxo had made gravy granules. It seemed odd to him that now that it was being rebranded as an arbiter of beauty.

It had been decades since the last ship had been built on the river. Likewise it had been decades since the men of the city walked with their heads up, filled with pride and accomplishment. Now their football teams gave them their identity and sense of self-worth. With the collapse of the traditional industries, too many men, in their forties at the time, had never worked again and had finally died, stripped of dignity, beaten by life. Other industries had risen up, of course, ones where these men needed to be able to answer phones and use computers and do the kinds of things the girls in the office used to do. They weren’t making things. They weren’t creating. And because of that, they weren’t happy.

To the left of the access road the iron gates of the steel mill had closed for the last time fifteen years ago. Now the huge shell of the building was in the process of being converted into luxury apartments for kids with too much money and not enough sense. The bonded warehouses that had been the heart of the import trade were boarded up, windows blinded. Inside, no doubt, the floorboards had been torn up and the lead and copper piping stripped and sold on the black market.

Frost slowed the Ducati to a gentle 15 mph, crawling through the labyrinth of alleys around the docklands. It was as though he had driven into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. None of the buildings had survived intact. Walls had crumbled. Bricks wept dust. The cranes might have been the towering exoskeletons of Martian war machines. The tarmac petered out into hard-packed dirt in places. Weeds had started to grow up through the cracks, nature reclaiming this part of the city for itself. He could hear the crash and retreat of the tidal river. He could see the silhouette of th Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse ahead of him. It must have been an impressive building back in the day. Now there was something tragic about the figure it cut in the night. For all its size, for all of its glorious red brick symmetry and its history, it was every bit as redundant as the men who had worked so hard building the ships, hauling the containers, beating out the sheet metal, and grinding the flour. It was a remnant of another time. So perhaps it was good that it was going to find another life, Frost thought, pulling up alongside the gates.

An ostentatious padlock secured the chains that secured the gate. He found it wryly amusing. The chain links of the fence could be bent apart with bare hands and a bit of determination, but the padlock would surrender to no man.

For a building that was supposedly abandoned, there were an awful lot of tire tracks leading to and from the gates. Frost drove on. He had a bad feeling about the place and wasn’t about to go walking in through the front door.

He found a dark, secluded spot out of sight of the warehouse’s windows and dropped the kickstand. He took off his helmet and hung it on the handlebars. He called Lethe.

“So what can you tell me about this place?”

“Not much, to be honest. Like I said, it’s scheduled for redevelopment. The officer of record for the development is one Miles Devere. Yep, the same Miles Devere who was the last number to call James’ wife’s cell phone. So we’ve got a nice little coincidence there.”

“No such thing as coincidence, my little ray of sunshine. What we’ve got is a link. We may not have both sides of the puzzle, but we’ve got the bit in the middle. Tell me more.”

“Devere Holdings has its fingers in a dozen pies all across the city. The man’s something of a property magnet. He’s bought up a handful of the old warehouses and mill buildings along the docks, and not just Canning Dock. He’s got plans in with the planning department for the development of an entire Docklands Village. We’re talking multi-million investment in urban regeneration and land renewal here. He’s claiming huge subsidies from the authorities too. He bought the Nicholls building for a one pound consideration and the promise that he would invest in local labor to rebuild it. That one pound has already brought him in over thirty-three million in government aid, and he’s not had to lift a finger.”

“Got to love big business,” Frost said. “So what, if anything, does Miles Devere have to do with this?”

“Maybe nothing. Like I said, it could just be a coincidence. I’m still looking for the link between Tristan James and Devere. There has to be one. But as of now, I’ve got nothing.”

“Maybe Devere hired him to excavate something?” Frost mused, thinking aloud. What other use would a property developer have for an archeologist?

“Looking for a pirate ship run aground on the muddy riverbank?” Lethe said, chuckling.

“Maybe not.” In the distance, Frost heard a dog bark. A moment later he saw the dark shape of one man and his dog walking through the debris-strewn yard of the Nicholls building. The man’s flashlight roved across the darkness erratically. He hadn’t seen the Monster approaching, but the dog had picked up Frost’s scent. It knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.

Frost crept away from the bike, crouching low to make his silhouette as small as possible. The dog’s bark grew more aggressive the closer it came toward the chain-link fence. He had two choices, get on the bike and get out of there, or shut the dog up. Frost braced himself against a concrete pillar. He watched the beam of light skip across the rough ground. The dog, a sharp-snouted Doberman, strained on its leash, pawing at the ground. Frost eased his way around the pillar, making sure there was as much concrete as possible between him and the devil dog.

The guard said something into his radio. Frost couldn’t hear what. He didn’t need to. The man knew someone was out there. He’d be assuming it was kids playing in the grounds of the disused buildings. Frost closed his eyes and listened. He kept his breathing regular: deep and slow. Gravel and broken stones scuffed, too close for comfort. He didn’t dare move.

What did a disused warehouse need with this kind of security? He hadn’t seen any sign of building materials having been moved onto the site, so there was nothing worth stealing. The dog barked again, deep in its throat. It was the aggressive sound of a hunter that knew its quarry was near. The flashlight beam played across the ground less than five feet from his hiding place.

Frost pressed back harder against the concrete pillar as if it might somehow make him smaller.

The pitch of the growl shifted.

And then the night exploded in a flurry of noise. The guard slipped the dog’s leash and the Doberman sprang forward, claws scuffing up the hard scrabble in a desperate attempt to gain purchase as it launched itself toward his hiding place. Frost didn’t move so much as a muscle. With the chain-link fence between them the dog couldn’t get at him There were several ways this could play out: eventually either the handler would re-attach the leash and move on with his rounds, in which case he would see Frost’s Monster and realize he wasn’t dealing with kids-which would mean Frost would be forced to take care of both man and beast before things got out of hand; Frost could make a dash for the Ducati and get the hell out of there, but then, if they were up to something in the old warehouse, any element of surprise he might have had would be gone for good; he could try to slip away and come at the place from the other side; or he could just slip out from behind the pillar and pull the trigger twice. Frost was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. There was nothing to suggest the night watchman was anything more than that, a retired policeman paid minimum wage to walk around the deserted warehouse and stop vandals from getting inside. In that case two bullets was not just overkill, it was murder.

He took a deep breath and began to move away from the pillar when Lethe’s voice crackled in his ear. “Well now, isn’t that just fascinating?” Frost couldn’t risk making a sound, he just had to hope Jude Lethe would elaborate. He settled back against the concrete, waiting for Lethe to speak again. “In the last three years Miles Devere’s various concerns have opened offices in Berlin, Rome, Prague, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Vienna… need me to go on and list all thirteen? Devere’s started operations in every city where our archeologists burned themselves alive. They’re all shell companies, and the paper chase is a mile long and whisper thin. Someone doesn’t want these links found.

“And the best part? My very favorite discovery so far today: in 2001 Miles Devere volunteered as a relief worker in Israel. He was part of a United Nations program to improve the camps. He was in Gaza for almost a year before moving across to Jenin. That means he was in Jenin when Orla was there, but we’ll come back to that later. Here’s the interesting stuff: he left Israel in July 2004, having worked on a reconstruction project that ran in tandem with an archeological dig in Megiddo overseen by-you know who I am going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway, I’m just pausing for dramatic effect-Akim Caspi. And there, my oh so quiet friend, is our smoking gun. Aren’t you going to say something?”

Frost didn’t say a word. He could hear the dog prowling along the line of the fence.

“Suit yourself. I’ll just have to do the talking for both of us. Now, Megiddo is an interesting spot all of its own. According to the Book of Revelation, Megiddo is where it all goes down at the end. We’re talking big ass battle, the amassing of forces, the children of light fighting the minions of the Antichrist. Armageddon. The word literally means the hill or mountain of Megiddo. You can’t tell me this isn’t just a little bit cool.”

Frost made a decision then. He was going to count to ten in his head, slowly, and then he was going to step out from behind the pillar and shoot the damned dog. He’d take his chances with the guard.

One. He breathed deeply, tasting the river in his throat.

Two.

Three. The dog clawed at the chain-link fence, pushing back against it and barking.

Four. He drew the slide back then eased it forward, chambering the bullet. He let out the breath he had been holding.

Frost didn’t make it as far as five.

The night watchman’s voice carried to him easily. “You’re getting old, stupid bloody dog. There’s nothing out here but the ghosts of dead shipwrights. Come here.” Frost risked the briefest of glances around the edge of the pillar. The man was on his knees and had the Doberman by the scruff of the neck. He appeared to be playing with the animal. It always surprised him the way men bonded with the animals they used, ascribing all of these human qualities like understanding and aging minds to dumb animals. He watched the pair for a few more seconds, then the man clipped the leash back in place and dragged the huge dog toward the front gates.

Frost released the Browning’s slide and holstered the gun at the small of his back.

He waited for them to disappear from sight then spoke in a hushed whisper, “Good job, Jude.”

“Thought it’d make your day, boss,” Lethe said in his ear.

“I’m always happier chasing the money than I am worrying about some holy bloody relic. Fanatics give me the creeps, but money I understand. Greed I understand. These things make sense to me. So we can link Devere to every city that’s been threatened, and back to Caspi. I think we’ve found our man in the middle, so someone needs to pay our Mister Devere a visit.”

“One step ahead of you, boss. Devere chartered a private jet to Winningen airport, Koblenz, yesterday. He cleared customs eighteen hours ago.”

“Germany,” Frost mused, thinking about it for a minute. “Konstantin’s still in Berlin, right? Get him to take a detour. See if he can’t lean Devere. Find out what he knows.”

“I’m on it. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on on the other side of this fence. If I don’t check in within the hour, send in reinforcements.”

“Erm, boss, you do know we don’t have any reinforcements, right?” Lethe said.

“I know that, kiddo. It’s an expression, that’s all. It basically means if you don’t hear from me, start to worry.”

“Well that I can do,” Jude Lethe said with a nervous little laugh.

Frost killed the connection. He needed to concentrate, and Lethe babbling in his ear wasn’t exactly conducive to focus. He walked over to the chain-link fence. A coil of barbed wire topped it. These guys were pretty serious about keeping people out, which made Frost all the more eager to find a way inside.

He took off his leather bike jacket and threw it up, still holding onto the cuff of one sleeve, so that it fell over the wire. He took off his silver-gray suit jacket and lay it on the ground. Frost was no fool; there was nothing to identify him in either set of pockets. If he needed to run, the most they’d learn about their intruder was that he had impeccable taste and wasn’t afraid to spend money to look good.

Stepping back, he rocked on his heels, then took a short run up of four steps and launched himself at the fence. He grasped the top, the leather jacket saving his hands from being shredded by the teeth of the barbed wire, and boosted himself up over the fence. It wobbled violently beneath him as his weight shifted. He dropped down on the other side and crouched, listening. Mercifully, the dog didn’t bark.

Frost pushed himself up from the ground and started to run, hard, and kept low. He kept his eyes straight ahead, focusing on the warehouse. His stride ate up the ground. His feet scuffed across the hardstand. There was nothing he could do about the noise. Inside fifty feet he was breathing hard. The windows all along the ground floor were either boarded up or barred. He couldn’t see any doors. He forced himself to run faster, barely slowing before he hit the wall. He turned so that his back was pressed up against it and began to edge around the building, looking for a way in.

The moon was a silver slice above the rooftops of the city on the far side of the river. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. Somewhere in the distance a tin horn sounded its lonesome mating call. Frost jogged around the side of the warehouse. The skeletal limbs of scrub bushes swayed gently in the breeze. The first entrance he found was large enough for two trucks to drive in side-by-side. It was covered by roll-down doors. Like the main gate, it was secured by a thick padlock. He rattled the doors but the padlock didn’t budge, so he carried on around the side, looking for a more conventional door.

As he neared the far corner a flicker of movement caught his eye.

Frost dropped into a tight crouch, instinctively reaching around for the Browning.

It wasn’t that kind of movement, he realized a moment later. Something had flickered in his peripheral vision. He studied the boarded-up window just above him and found an inch-wide crack in the wooden planks. The faintest of lights danced erratically through the small crack. It took him another moment to realize that the reason the light was so erratic was because of the draft. There was no glass in the window. The candle burning on the other side of the boards was down to little more than a stub. In a couple of minutes it would be dead and the room dark. Frost pressed his eye up against the crack.

There were a dozen mattresses in the small room. Frightened people lay huddled up on each one. Most of them were sleeping. He had found the leverage. Whoever was behind the suicide burnings had taken these women and children as insurance to make sure the “suicides” went off according to plan. Frost felt sick to his stomach. This kind of trade in human life was vile, but he was beginning to understand the kind of people they were up against, or more importantly, the limits of the people they were up against.

On the far side of the room he saw a woman holding two young children close to her chest. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep, but he guessed not. Her body was tense; he could see it in the muscles of her arms as they draped protectively over the kids. Another young girl, this one no more than 9 or 10, was looking up at him. He had no idea if she could see him in the dim light. He whispered, “It’s all right, I’m here to help you.” His voice rippled through the sleepers, causing them to stir. A third girl, this one closer to 16, sat up on her mattress. She rubbed at her eyes and seemed to have trouble focusing.

“Who’s there?” she called out. Her voice spiraled on the last syllable, becoming dangerously loud. The young girl pointed toward the window. She had seen him.

“Shhh,” Frost cautioned with his finger to his lips, worried someone would hear her. It was a stupid gesture given that she could only see part of his cheek and his right eye. Others started to look toward the boarded-up window. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

It was as though he’d said the magic word. The older woman stood, coming toward the window with her two children clinging to her legs. “Oh, thank God. Are you with the police?”

“No,” he said, softly. “And not the Army, either,” he cut her off before she could ask too many questions. “But I am here to help you. I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell me how many people are in there with you. How many hostages and how many people are holding you. Can you do that?”

The woman nodded hesitantly. “I don’t know if there are any others-they don’t let us out of this room-but there are sixteen of us in here, four adults, three teenagers. The rest are under ten.”

“All girls?”

The woman swallowed and nodded. “There were boys, but they took them. We heard the gunshots. I think… I think… they executed my son.” She broke down then and started to cry. He gave her a few seconds to gather herself, but he couldn’t wait for her to cry herself out.

“I need you to hold it together, just a little while longer. What’s your name?”

“Annie.”

“All right, Annie, my name’s Ronan. Right now I am your new best friend, and as your new best friend I’m going to make you a promise. I am going to get all of you out of there. And I am going to make you a second promise now, just between the two of us, I am going to make them suffer for what they did to your boy. Okay?”

She nodded.

He looked at her through the narrow crack in the wooden boards. “Do you trust me, Annie?”

There was another short hesitation, then she nodded again.

“Good. I trust you as well. Now, try to remember if you can, how many guards have you seen?”

She thought about it for a moment, biting on her lower lip. “Six. Eight. I am not sure.” She wrapped her arms around herself. She was shivering. Frost wished he could reach through the window and hold her. There was nothing more reassuring than human contact, especially in a situation li this. Noah was good at the human stuff, he wasn’t. He had to make do with his voice.

“That’s great, Annie. Good girl. Now I want you to get everyone ready so when I come through that door you’ll all be ready to move. Can you do that for me?”

She nodded again.

“Are you going to kill them?” she asked.

This time it was Frost’s turn to nod.

“Good,” Annie said, emphatically. She looked down. When she looked up again he saw the shock in her eyes. Her need to be strong for her two girls was swimming up against a need to just collapse and mourn her son. She had already decided they were all dead and had been curled up in the corner with her girls, waiting for their killers to open the cell door again and take another one of her children out into the darkness. And then he had arrived, and suddenly she dared to hope. But now she was starting to come apart because of it. When there was nothing, it was easier for her to be strong. Those last hours, however many or few they might have been, were all about staying strong for her girls. Now there was hope and hope meant a life beyond their cell. If she started to believe they might escape, that they might have a life left together, losing it would hurt all the more. She had to trust her life to this stranger on the other side of the wall, and it was all she could do not to crumble. Frost had seen it before. He just prayed she could hold it together long enough for him to get them out.

As far as what happened next, six or eight didn’t matter. Even with the element of surprise the odds were stacked against him. As Orla was wont to say, that only made it more interesting. He double-checked the Browning for a chambered round.

“You’re going to be all right,” he promised her. He needed her to believe that. He needed hope to galvanize her, not paralyze her. “In a few minutes it will all be over.” He pushed away from the window before she could answer him, glanced over his shoulder to be sure the night watchman hadn’t doubled back, and then set off around the corner.

There was another wide, green steel overhead door and beyond that a small door. He crept up to it. He saw a small weather-worn fire exit sign and beneath it, the warning that the door was alarmed. He doubted the alarm was still functional, but given the fact they had a night watchman and a Doberman prowling the grounds, he wasn’t about to take any chances.

He looked around for another way in.

Then he looked up.

An old rusty fire escape stair dangled just out of reach.

He smiled. People were a lot laxer about security on the third, fourth and fifth stories than they were on the ground and first floor. He backed up a couple of steps, then took a running jump. Reaching up, Frost snagged the last rung of the ladder and hauled himself up hand over hand until he got his first foot up on the fire escape. The rusty metal made a god-awful racket as it groaned under his weight. He didn’t have time to worry about it.

He ran up the first set of stairs then along the wire-mesh platform to the second set of steps. He didn’t try the first, second or even third fire door. He went straight for the fifth-floor, not looking down as he ran across the wire platform. The door was locked, but the wood around the lock was so rotten it didn’t take a lot of persuading to open. He bumped his shoulder up against the door, once, twice, straining the woodworm-riddled frame, and on the third bump the frame splintered and the door swung open. It wasn’t quiet. All he could do was pray that it was quiet enough.

Frost stepped inside. The vaulted ceiling of the old warehouse was cathedral-like, panes of frosted glass with iron girders holding the whole thing together. The moonlight streamed in through the glass, casting shadows that stretched to every corner of the wide-open warehouse floor. The crane gib and winches were all still in place, though the mechanisms had almost certainly seized up with two decades of disuse. He wasn’t about to risk swinging down on the dangling chain like some sort of comic book hero.

He took a moment to scout out his immediate surroundings. He was on a gantry that ran all around the top floor of the warehouse. There were maybe half a dozen doors on each side of the building which, he surmised, led to the old offices. All of the windows along the gantry were dark. Down in the center of the concrete floor five stories beneath him, he could see two men sitting on packing crates. They appeared to be sharing a smoke.

The Browning was accurate enough over this kind of distance that they were a comfortable shot, but he had no intention of taking it. The next few minutes were all about silence. He ghosted along the gantry, looking for the stairs down to the next level. He found the stairwell in the far corner, meaning he had to cover the entire length of the warehouse floor. He kept looking down over the side. Neither man looked up.

Frost took the stairs, keeping his shoulder pressed against the wall as he half-ran down the ninety-degree turns of the stairwell. He didn’t go all the way to the bottom. He wanted to know as much about what he was up against as possible, so he crept out onto the second-floor gantry. Like the one much higher up, the gantry ran around the re circumference of the warehouse. He could see down through the floor all the way to the ground. Conversely, that meant anyone who happened to look up would be able to see him. As trades went, it was one he was happy to make. The pair he’d watched from the fifth floor told him all he needed to know about these guys and their operation. They’d been watching their hostages for over a week now without incident. They were complacent.

He moved out along the metal gantry. Two more men came out to join the others at the packing crates. They were big guys. One had a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 slung casually over his shoulder. Frost watched the way the man moved. There was an easy confidence about his posture as he sank down beside the others. He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up. Frost waited and watched. He tried to think through the numbers. If Annie had seen eight guards, the odds were they were running two shifts, four and four. He didn’t recognize any of them as the night watchman, which meant there was at least one more out there whose whereabouts was unaccounted for.

There was no way he could take them all at once. He was going to have to pick them off one at a time like the ten green bottles accidently falling. Not so accidentally, he amended silently. These would have bullet holes in the back of their heads. That made falling the only natural thing to do.

The MP5 guy stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette under his boot.

It would be easy to move along the gantry and squeeze off two quick shots, taking out a couple of the guards, then make his way down to the ground. They wouldn’t know what had hit them, and in the panic that followed he’d have time to clear up the loose ends. What he didn’t know was when they changed watches, when the relief would arrive, how many of them there actually were in the old warehouse, and if the sound of the gunshots would carry to the watchman outside. These were variables he couldn’t control. Adding more guns to the mix meant more room for things to go wrong. The situation became harder to control. All he needed was for one of the kidnappers to go through to the room they were using as a cell and start shooting.

His instinct was to dictate the scenario.

That meant striking hard, fast and, if possible, remaining unseen.

He crept along the gantry, conscious that the slightest movement could catch a kidnapper’s eye at any time. He kept as close to the wall as possible. It took him a full minute to get into position. Frost crouched down. He had a perfect view of the killing ground beneath him. The Browning felt heavy in his hand, hungry. He’d carried the gun for what felt like all of his adult life. He had a parasitical relationship with the thing. It had kept him alive more than once, but sometimes it felt as though it thirsted for blood. This was one of those times. He breathed deeply, forcing the rise and fall of his lungs to stay steady.

Frost raised the Browning, drawing a bead on the man with the MP5. The kidnapper turned away from him, as though challenging him to put the bullet in the back of his head. Frost didn’t care about cowardice or seeing the whites of his victim’s eyes. That was Hollywood bullshit. A dead goon was a dead goon. It didn’t matter how he got there. He wouldn’t score points in goon heaven for taking the bullet face first. Honor was for the Samurai. It had no place in saving the lives of these women and children.

He kept the gun steady, breathing in, breathing out. He wanted to time the shots with the exhale for accuracy.

Beneath him, the kidnapper threw up his arms and spun on his heel. The MP5 banged off his hip. He looked up, and seemed for a heartbeat to be looking straight at Frost. Frost squeezed down on the trigger, slowly increasing the pressure until it was a hair from firing.

And stopped himself.

At the last moment the gunman looked away, barking something at his compatriots. Frost expected an explosion of gunfire. It never came. Their voices carried, loud in the huge space of the empty warehouse. It took Frost a few seconds to realize what had them so agitated-they were waiting for instructions. They were arguing about whether they should go in there and kill the hostages. Their contact hadn’t called in and they were getting fractious. The joker with the MP5 seemed to be the one with the itchiest trigger finger.

Frost put him out of his misery.

The back of the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains.

Frost squeezed off a second shot, taking one of the men sitting on the crates high in the forehead. His body jerked back, a crack opening above his right eyebrow as his eyes widened in shock. It was a comical expression caught between surprise and fear, not the kind of look you’d want to carry into the afterlife. The dead man slumped sideways, falling from his perch on the crate. His leg kicked out as he fell and twitched uncontrollably for a full thirty seconds before the last vestiges of life convulsed out of his body.

Frost didn’t wait for that to happen.

While the other two reacted, diving for cover from this unseen threat, he made a run for the stairw His boots clattered loudly off the metal gantry, his footsteps echoing through the confines of the warehouse. The report of a gunshot cracked. He neither knew nor cared how close the shot came. The bullet didn’t hit him. That was all that mattered. Another shot sounded. Frost threw himself forward, hitting the gantry hard and rolling on his right shoulder. This time he saw the puff of concrete dust as the bullet buried itself into the wall six inches from his head. He came up running.

The staccato cackle of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse. Bullet wounds strafed the wall, ripping through the brickwork. Frost half-stumbled half-ran across the last few yards of the gantry to the stairwell. He felt the wind from the rush of bullets against his face and the sharp sting as one nicked his cheek.

He ignored the sudden flare of pain and dropped to his knees.

A second burst of gunfire ricocheted off the metal gantry, spitting sparks. Frost pulled away from them, slamming into the wall. He pushed away from it, throwing himself through the mouth of the stairwell. He was breathing hard. He was shaking as the adrenalin pounded through his system. Shouts chased where the bullets couldn’t follow. He realized the stupidity of what he’d just done as he charged around the first ninety-degree turn of the descent only to hear shouts from down below chasing up the stairs to meet him. He couldn’t exactly run back up the stairs, and there was only one place the stairs were going to emerge. He needed to mix things up.

They would be expecting him to come down shooting. In their place he would have placed shooters either side of the stairwell, covering left and right, with a good view all the way up to the first turn. There was no way he’d get down the last ten steps without being cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire, so there was no way he was going to go down those last ten steps.

As he reached the first-floor landing he stopped running. He leaned out, looking down through the mesh grill of the lowest gantry, then up at the glass ceiling. Each of the huge plate glass panels was more than twenty feet across by twice that long and slotted together with iron girders. He squeezed off three shots inside a second, each aimed at the weak point in the center of each sheet of glass. For a split second he didn’t think it was going to work, then the strain pulled the glass apart. The glass around each bullet hole spiderwebbed and splintered, each crack running deep. Then the first shard fell, and suddenly the hole it left undermined the fragile balance of the entire twenty-by-thirty sheet. And following a crack like brittle thunder a lethal shower of glass rained down. Amplified by the confines of the warehouse walls, the noise was incredible.

Frost didn’t wait to see what happened. Blowing out the glass would buy him a few seconds at best while the kidnappers took cover and shielded their faces. He charged down the final flight of stairs. One of the kidnappers lay sprawled out at the mouth of the stairwell, jagged splinters of glass buried in his chest and neck. A viscous black pool of blood spread on the concrete like some kind of mocking halo around his head. He appeared to be very dead. Frost didn’t take any chances. He put a slug in the middle of the man’s face and walked out onto the central floor of the warehouse, glass crunching under his feet.

He couldn’t see the final gunman.

He felt out the cut in his cheek. It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding freely. He’d been lucky.

He scanned the warehouse quickly, looking for any sign of movement, any out of place shadow. Something that would give the last man away. A section of the warehouse floor was given over to forty- and smaller twenty-foot metal shipping containers. They offered plenty of places to hide. It wasn’t an exact science, but nothing in the spread of glass across the concrete floor suggested anyone had run across it so he turned his back on the containers. If he could take the last guy alive, great. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t shed any tears. Frost licked his lips. He could taste his own blood on his tongue.

He heard a woman’s scream and realized the last gunman had gone for the hostages. He didn’t stop, he didn’t think, he ran. He wasn’t about to lose anyone-not now, not when he was this close.

The gunman stood in the doorway. “You!” he yelled, waving the muzzle of his machine gun around threateningly. “Here!”

Over his shoulder Frost could see the terrified face of the woman he had spoken to through the window. She stumbled toward the man, eyes wide with fear.

The man grabbed her and pulled her close, then started to turn. He was trying to use Annie as a human shield.

“Let her go,” Frost said, keeping his voice calm and reasonable.

The kidnapper shook his head wildly. His eyes bulged, filled to bursting with the blood pumping too fast through his body, driven by his racing heart. His fear was palpable. He started to bring the snub-nose of the MP5 up toward the side of the woman’s head. Frost took a step toward him, and another, even as the man shook his head. He didn’t look like evil incarnate. He looked like an everyday Joe. Unremarkable. Unmemorable.

“It doesn’t have to end like this,” Frost said.

Less than ten feet separated them. He could smell the man’s sweat. It was rancid, like he hadn’t washed in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there were no replacement guards. Maybe he and his dead friends had been the only ones involved after all. He stank every bit as badly as the hostages he had kept penned up in that tiny room for a week.

“Back! Stay back!” His voice broke on the last syllable.

Frost ignored him, taking another step toward him. Nine feet.

“I’m serious! Get back!”

Frost took another step. He made no pretense of offering peace.

“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill them all!”

“Then I’ll kill you,” Frost said, quite matter-of-factly.

Seven steps.

“Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

Six steps.

“I’m going to kill you for what you did to her son,” he nodded toward Annie. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to their fathers and their husbands. I’m going to kill you because you deserve to die. Make it easy for me, go on,” Frost urged. “Make a move. Pull the trigger.”

Frost raised the Browning. The muzzle rested less than five feet from the center of the man’s face. The madness of fanaticism blazed in his eyes.

“I’m not going to miss from here. And no matter how quick you are with that thing”-Frost’s eyes drifted toward the MP5-“I promise you, I am faster with this.”

He expected the man to beg for his life.

He was disappointed when he didn’t. The man stared at him belligerently.

“Tell me who’s giving the orders here,” Frost said.

“Go to hell!” the man snapped. He shook his head. He was wired. Every muscle trembled beneath his grimy skin.

“You’re not the man here,” Frost said. There were three steps between them now. He could taste the man’s halitosis and see every pore opening as the sweat came. “You’re the muscle. You’re a goon. You didn’t plan this. Who do you answer to? Who’s your boss?”

“Do you think I will tell you?” the man sneered. “Are you really so stupid?” He shook his head.

Without breaking eye contact Ronan Frost lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s greasy hair and pulling down hard. The move dragged him off balance. Frost pressed the gun into the center of his forehead. “Last chance. Talk.”

“I will never betray my people.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Frost said, pulling the trigger.

The man’s head jerked back and his body went limp. Frost’s grip on his hair stopped him from falling. A ring of powder burn circled the entry wound. There was surprisingly little blood and almost no damage. The back of his head was a different matter. The exit wound was a mess of bone fragment, brain tissue and blood. Frost pushed the dead man aside and holstered the Browning.

Behind Annie, the women and children were looking at him as though he were some kind of avenging angel-they needed him, they knew that, but he scared them. He smiled at one of the older girls. She sobbed, a great heaving breath that stuck in her throat, and then as the tide of relief swarmed over her, started to cry. Her entire body shuddered. One of the women walked over to her and just held her. The sense of relief in the room was palpable.

“Okay, folks, time to go home,” he said, holding out his hand. Annie took it. She looked at him with the most intense mix of grief, thankfulness and horror. Her two girls clung to her legs. Frost reached down and scooped one up and cradled her in his left arm. She clung with both arms around his neck. “What’s your name, sweetie?” he asked the girl.

She leaned in, pressing her lips up close to his ear and whispered, “Vicky.”

“Lovely to meet you, Vicky. In a few minutes I am going to tell you to close your eyes. You’ll do that for me won’t you?” The girl nodded. Frost smiled down at her. “You just screw your eyes up real tight and everything’ll be fine. I promise you.”

He drew the Browning and held it in his free hand. He wasn’t taking any chances.

He ushered the women and children out of their make-shift cell one by one. More than half of them had lost their shoes. “There’s a lot of broken glass out here; you might want to carry your kids,” he told them. They did what he said without a word. He led them through the ruined warehouse toward the huge green overhead door at the far side of the floor. He heard the devil dog barking before he saw it. “Close your eyes, sweetie,” Frost whispered in Vicky’s ear. He felt her scrunch up against his shoulder, burying her head in his collar. A moment later the Doberman came barreling around the shipping crates, claws scrabbling on the concrete as it ran. Its incredible gait devoured the distance between them in three seconds flat. Frost waited until the last moment, as it reared up to launch itself at his chest, jaws snapping, teeth ready to tear out his throat, and pulled the trigger three times. The bullets tore into the dog’s hide in a tight cluster, ripping through the muscle and bone to rupture the animal’s racing heart. The moment of its charge wasn’t stopped by death. Frost twisted sideways, trying to get out of the animal’s way. All he managed to achieve was presenting it with a smaller target.

The dead dog slammed into Frost hard enough to stagger him back three steps, and off balance, before he fell. The girl in his arms screamed. He realized she’d opened her eyes to see the wild glass-eyed stare of the dead Doberman inches away from her face. Frost covered her eyes with his hand and soothed, “It’s all right, it’s all right. It can’t hurt you now.”

He struggled to rise.

The fact that the dog had hit them here, inside the old warehouse, meant the night watchman couldn’t be far behind.

He had dropped his gun in the fall. Annie stood beside him holding it.

He saw movement in the periphery of his vision: the night watchman. The last man between them and their freedom.

“Give me the gun,” he said holding out his hand.

nnie didn’t seem to hear him. She only had eyes for the night watchman.

“You don’t want to do it,” Frost said, sensing what she was thinking. It wasn’t difficult. Here was a chance to strike back at one of the men who had ruined her life. Who wouldn’t want to kill him given the chance? The gun empowered her. Her arm trembled. Frost knew what was happening. It had happened to him the first time he had contemplated killing. Suddenly the gun weighed so much more than the sum of its parts, so much more than the metal and the polymer. It weighed a life. She wasn’t just pulling the trigger, she was pulling against the weight of all those unlived days, all of those unexperienced joys and sadnesses. “Let me,” Frost said, calmly. “This is what I do. You don’t want to live with his death inside your head.”

“I do,” Annie said. “I need to.”

She pulled the trigger and kept on pulling it until the man went down. The first two went wide, hitting the metal door and raising a shriek of echoes with their impact. The third hit him in the shoulder. The forth in the leg. Neither would kill him. The night watchman lay on the floor, screaming and begging.

Frost held out his hand for the gun.

This time Annie gave it to him.

He checked the chamber. There was a single round left.

It was all that he needed. He walked across the floor, his footsteps echoing, hollow in the funereal expanse of the huge old building. Frost stood over the bleeding man. “One chance,” he said. “Who do you work for?”

The man lay on his back, squirming in his own blood. Frost was wrong. He clutched at his thigh where Annie’s bullet had opened a major artery. That one would kill him.

“You’re already dead,” Frost said. “If I don’t kill you one of the Goon Squad will. And the only way I am not going to kill is if you give me a name. Now, who do you work for?”

The man gritted his teeth.

Frost raised his gun, aiming it squarely between the man’s rapidly glazing eyes.

Frost felt sure he was going to hold out on him aeft.

Frost put the bullet between his eyes.

He had a name. Mabus.

Frost holstered the Browning and walked across to the shutter. On the wall beside it was a large red button. He hit it. Gears groaned to life and the door began to rise slowly, the metal grinding as it was forced to turn.

Beams of light streamed into the warehouse beneath the metal shutter, throwing shadows across the concrete. The chill of the coming dawn raced in. Frost carried the girl out into the open air. The sun rose red over the city on the other side of the river. The lights were headlights. Six cars were pulled up outside the chain-link fence. He could hear voices shouting, but he couldn’t make out what they were shouting. He could barely make out the silhouettes of the men behind the headlights. One of them walked forward so that that he was back-lit by the cars as he reached the heavily padlocked gate.

Frost ushered the women forward.

They were hesitant at first, lost now that they were outside. The women seemed particularly wary, moving cautiously toward the light, like someone might suddenly snatch it away from them and force them back into that hellhole. When they realized the headlights were police cars they started to run toward the fence. Frost was less happy to see the boys in blue.

He thought about setting the girl down and trying to fade back into the shadows. There was a chance he’d find his coat and jacket and, in turn, the Ducati, but all he needed to do was look at the ground beneath his feet and the pool of light there to know that trying to make a break for it now was a dumb idea. Instead he walked slowly toward the gate, resigned to his fate.

By the time he reached it they’d cut through the padlock and were beginning to take care of the first women and children to reach them.

“I can take her, sir,” a WPC said, holding out her hands for the girl. She had a pretty smile but a harsh face. Frost handed Vicky over, ruffling her hair as she squirmed out of his grasp. Another officer walked over, and Frost thought he heard the gods laughing at him from on high. It was the short surly one of the pair he had talked to after getting out of the James house on Halsey Road.

The man made straight for him, and as Frost started to turnaway said, “Well, well, well, fancy seeing you here,” and shook his head slowly, as though to say pigs really had started to fly as far as he was concerned. “It’s quite some coincidence, don’t you think? I feel like I am seeing more of you than I do my own mother. First you’re outside a murder house while all hell’s breaking loose, which, let’s face it, is worthy of a raised eyebrow all by itself. And now here you are rescuing all these women and children like some sort of superhero. You know, all that’s missing is the burning building to make the whole thing complete. So why don’t you start by telling me who the hell you are, Mister Superhero?”

Frost looked at the detective. It took him all of two seconds to have the measure of the man. He had Little Man syndrome. He was bitter, angry, and looking for a scalp. “Frost,” he said. He didn’t bother lying. “Ronan Frost.”

“Should I have heard of you?”

“I don’t see why you would have.”

“Well then, Mister Frost, let’s go for two for two. Who are you? I mean, you’re not one of us-you’re not police-that much is bloody obvious. So who are you? Government? Intelligence? Five? Special Forces? Counterterrorism? Justice League? Who are you?”

“I’m just a Good Samaritan,” Frost said.

“Bullshit.”

Frost said nothing.

“I’m not an idiot, Mister Frost.”

Again Frost said nothing.

“Okay, let’s try again. How did you find out about this place? How did you know what was happening here when no one else had the slightest clue?” He shook his head. “We’re still not sure, and here you are saving the day.”

“I suggest you stop wasting time asking questions I am not going to answer,” Frost said, “and start thinking about what happens in the next hour or so.” He looked toward the rising sun. “There are five bodies in there. Six if you count the dog. I know because I killed them. And no, you aren’t going to arrest me for it, before you starting getting any ideas. You said it yourself, I’m a bloody hero. Now, what is it, almost five? Anytime soon their reief are going to turn up, expecting to take over babysitting duties. I suggest you get someone in there to clean up, fix the damned gate you just broke, and think about bringing in the rest of this mob. So we can either stand here measuring our dicks, or we can shut these people down. Me, I know how well I’m hung. How about you?”

That shut the little man up.

Frost turned his back on him and hit the dial-home on his earpiece.

“Don’t you walk away from me!” the policeman shouted at his back as he walked away.

Frost ignored him.

“I said don’t you dare walk away from me!”

Frost continued to walk away. He’d told the man all he was going to tell him.

When Lethe picked up all Frost said was, “The idea is to call in the cavalry if I am in trouble. I’ll be here all bloody night trying to explain this away.”

“And here I am, thinking you were going to say thank you,” Lethe said. “So? What happened? Tell me, tell me. Come on. The only excitement I get is living vicariously through you lot. I want all the gory details.”

“We got a name: Mabus. There’s not much else to say. A normal day at the office.”

“Ah, man, you take all the fun out of life, Frosty, you do know that, don’t you?”