((Chapter heading comes from the Within Temptation song The Promise.))
Chapter 16
And I Believed
'Tell me something,' Adam said. Marcus had given Francis the address of the warehouse he'd been in, and they had all agreed not to waste more time but go there tonight. Soutar would wait for a call informing him what they had found later in the evening. At this point, they all felt that pooling their knowledge could only help, and if they were fast enough, maybe they could prevent further abductions. So Adam had dropped Francis off at his home and driven on straight to Aberdeen. 'How does a guy go from criminal to physicist to PI?' he asked on the way there.
'The usual. Money. And he already was a physicist when he got arrested, but at it was tough for him to find a job.'
'Okay, I get the theft-part. But PI?'
'As far as I know, he pretty much sent job applications to all sorts of businesses. That one office got him the training he needed, and that was that.' Francis fell silent for a moment. 'It is also entirely possible that some hacker wiped his slate clean for anyone outside the US trying to get a character reference, as they would on a job that involves carrying a gun. I never asked beyond that. I was going through a tough spell at that time and pretty much secluded myself from most people.'
'What happened?'
'Not on infolink, Jensen. Are you there yet?'
'In a moment. I can see the place from here.' He parked at a nearby gas station and walked the rest. 'Anything I should know?'
'The place is abandoned. There shouldn't be anything by means of security.'
Adam found a switch for the gate. It wasn't even coded. The moment the gate slid up, he could hear a faint beeping. Lights, red and green, flashed in regular intervals along the walls. 'Great,' he said. 'The entire place is rigged with mines.'
'Well, you know the drill. Just be careful, I'd rather you come home in one piece.'
'Are you just eating, Pritchard?'
'Yes. Chocolate.'
'I'm risking my neck here, and you …'
'I'll leave some for you. Please, do try to focus. And tell me when you're done. If you don't, I'm sending an ambulance in five minutes.'
'If I get this wrong, I won't need an ambulance.' Adam smiled to himself as he stepped inside slowly. He had the necessary training for disarming explosives and Francis knew that. It didn't take him five minutes. 'All done, Pritchard. Not even my hair got singed.'
'Oh, goodie.' The intentional swagger in Francis's tone didn't quite hide his relief. 'Now all you need to do is find a bird costume and you're good to go.'
'I doubt I'll find anything of the sort.' Adam looked around. The walls were lined with rows of shelves around the wide empty space at the centre. All were empty. 'I doubt that Markus was operated on here. It's dirty, he'd be dead if they'd done that.' Adam sniffed. 'And it stinks of death. This isn't good.'
'There could be another room.'
'There's always another room, Pritchard.' Adam took the time to walk to all the corners of the place, making sure he didn't miss something, anything. There was indeed a door on one side and a small room behind it. It had two holographic display tables. Curious, Adam turned them on. One simply showed the warehouse. The hologram revealed a second floor, reached by an elevator on the outside. On the other display, drawn in faint blue lines, the three dimensional image of a human-avian hybrid flickered to life. 'Now would you look at that?'
'I see it. Interesting. It confirms Marcus's suspicion that someone messed with his memory.'
'About the bird for sure, maybe about this place, too.'
'Jensen, I need to cut the link for a moment. I'm getting a call from Soutar. I'll get back to you.'
'All right.' The material lift at the back of the warehouse was little more than a rickety platform. At least it was functional, carrying Adam up in a stuttering ascent. Inside, someone had made a great effort to modify the building.
The entire contraption, Adam suspected, had been added by whoever had used the warehouse after Tai Yong had abandoned it.
They had clearly added the second floor. Adam was pretty sure it hadn't been approved by a structural engineer and decided to tread carefully. The room the lift led up to was a long corridor. The rest of the building's outline was behind a wall with no visible door. Adam would take a closer look later. Also, the room upstairs was low, just high enough for Adam not to bump his head if he bounced. The not-quite-two-metre reduction of height wasn't too noticeable from below, what with the warehouse being tall enough to store stacked cargo containers.
Downstairs, the light from the setting sun had been almost too vague for a normal person to see. Up here, the sun was directly in front of one of the two windows placed at either end of the long room, casting the place in a ruddy glow. It could have been idyllic, in a wild, forsaken kind of way. There were scattered papers, a desk, a cupboard, and a lot of dust. Adam gave the rest of the hall a cursory glance before taking a closer look at the furnished corner.
If there had been a computer, someone had removed it. The papers were covered in small script. One of them struck Adam's eye. It had code on it. He couldn't tell what it did, but he knew the hand. 'Francis?' he asked into the infolink.
'Adam.' Francis sounded off.
Adam frowned at the paper in his hand. 'Are you all right?'
'No. Later. What is it?'
'Do you recognise this?'
'That's mine. What is it doing there?'
'I was going to ask you that.' Adam opened the cupboard. Inside it was a small handheld computer, an e-book with an exchange between Francis and David Sarif, various types of software Adam knew he'd seen in Francis's office.
'I do realise what this looks like,' the hacker said quietly.
Adam was about to reply when he heard a car brake hastily outside on the gravel. He made his decision within a split second. 'Someone's coming. I'm going to torch this place.'
'No!' Francis all but shouted. 'There may be something valuable. Get out.'
Adam had rushed to a window and looked down. 'Damn it. This is the police, they're going to be led straight to you.'
'Leave everything as it is and get out, Jensen. If you don't interfere, whoever your doer is will feel more confident if you let them take his bait. Just leave. I need to ask you to do something.'
Adam hesitated for a few seconds. He decided at least to hold on to the handheld device. 'All right. Hell, I hope you know what you're doing.' He took the direct path out of the far window, the Icarus Landing System bringing him to the ground safely and not within sight of the police. 'Francis, I'm out and on the way to the car. What do you need?'
'I … am sorry, but I need you to drive back to Skene.'
'Are you kidding me?'
'Jensen, Marcus has been killed and Soutar's got whacked on the head so hard he has a concussion. He won't talk except face to face, he's in full paranoia mode, and we need to speak to him.'
Adam almost tripped over his own feet. 'What? We were there only … what was that, less than an hour ago! How can Marcus have been killed?'
'Just go there, Jensen. Please.'
'Francis, be careful. Tell your MANES not to let anyone that isn't you guys near the house.'
'I'll be safe, Adam.' There was a brief pause. 'You don't think …'
'No.' He took a deep breath. 'I don't know what's going on here, but someone is trying to frame you, and since I left everything, they're going to succeed for the moment. But I don't believe for a second that you're involved in this.'
'Thanks, Jensen. That means a lot. Pritchard out.'
