7

Dressed in a cheap suit from Hong Kong, Eddie entered the Takashi building.

Scarber had provided the information he sought. Stikes was in the building right now, meeting the company’s boss on the fiftieth floor. The first obstacle he would have to overcome was getting up there. The penthouse – apparently the guy lived right above his headquarters, which Eddie supposed was one way to cut down on commuting – was only serviced by a single lift, which was permanently guarded. He could see two uniformed men standing at a set of doors away from the other elevators, and guessed they were backed up by electronic surveillance.

But that wasn’t the lift he would be taking. Scarber had also given him the name of a contact within the company, who could get him up to the thirtieth floor. That left another twenty, but one step at a time . . .

Feigning casualness, he strolled to the reception desk. ‘Hi, I’m here to see – whoa!’ He flinched as he realised he was talking to some sort of mechanical mannequin rather than a young woman, and looked round to see if he were being secretly filmed for some elaborate practical joke. ‘What’s this, Realdoll HQ?’

The robot’s response was to bow its head, then say, ‘My apologies, sir. I did not know you spoke English. May I take your name, please?’

‘Ed— er, Barney Phelps,’ he stuttered, thrown by the disconcerting encounter.

‘I’m sorry, I did not hear you correctly,’ said the robot apologetically. ‘Could you repeat that, please?’

‘Barney Phelps,’ he said again. ‘Look, no offence, but I’d rather talk to a real person. Wait,’ he added, ‘why am I apologising to a fembot?’

A lifeless smile spread across the robot’s face. ‘Thank you, you are expected. Mr Jiro is waiting for you. If you will please take your visitor’s pass, and wear it at all times while you are in the building?’ The machine indicated a slot in the desktop. Eddie hesitantly took the pass that slid out and attached it to his lapel. ‘Please go to elevator number twelve and exit on the thirtieth floor. Have a nice day.’

‘I might, if this wasn’t fucking Westworld,’ Eddie muttered as he headed for the lifts. ‘Okay, number twelve . . .’

He was the only person waiting; at this time of day, Takashi employees were just starting to leave for the evening. Once the elevator had disgorged its occupants, he entered and rose up through the building alone. The doors opened, and he stepped out into a small lobby area. Another of the unsettling robot receptionists was waiting at a little desk, but to his relief an actual human being came to meet him before it could speak. ‘Mr . . . Phelps?’ said the thin-haired Japanese man. Despite the air-conditioned cool, sweat was beading on his forehead.

‘That’s right,’ Eddie answered. ‘You’re Jiro?’

‘Yes, yes.’ He gave the Englishman a perfunctory bow, glancing about to check that nobody was watching. ‘Come with me, please.’

Eddie followed him down a corridor into a small office. Jiro quickly closed the door behind him, then pulled open a drawer and, hands shaking, took a holdall from it. ‘I will be fired if anyone learns of this,’ he said. ‘Or worse. Give me your pass.’

Eddie took it from his jacket. ‘What’re you going to do with it?’

‘I will log you out of the building. On the computer, it will look as though we left together. I don’t want to be connected with whatever you’re doing.’ He exchanged the holdall for the pass.

Eddie opened the bag. Inside was a gun, a Russian Makarov PMM automatic. Considering Japan’s extremely strict gun laws it must have taken some work to obtain. He eyed his contact. ‘Doesn’t sound like you’re too happy about helping me.’

‘I don’t want to. Scarber is making me. Busu ama!’ He almost spat the insult.

‘So how do I get up to the penthouse?’

‘You will have to get into the central core. Only two elevators go to the top of the building – Takashi-san’s private elevator, and one for maintenance. But the maintenance elevator is controlled by computer, so you will have to climb up.’

‘There are security cameras on the stairs, I take it.’ Jiro nodded. ‘So how do I get into this central core?’ Eddie asked as he checked the gun. It was fully loaded with twelve nine-millimetre rounds.

‘There is a door used by the cleaning robots. You will—’

‘Wait, the what? Jesus, is everything in this place robotic?’

‘You will have to be careful,’ Jiro continued impatiently. ‘The door only opens for the robots, and they stop if a person gets too close. For safety.’ He scribbled a rough map from the office to the service entrance. ‘When you are inside, there is an elevator that goes to the maintenance hub on the forty-fourth floor. From there . . . you are on your own.’

‘Looks like I already am,’ Eddie said scathingly as Jiro hurriedly prepared to leave. ‘What if I run into anybody on the way?’

‘There is a fake pass in the bag, so put it on. If you look as though you know where you are going, no one will be suspicious.’

Eddie took out the laminated pass. He couldn’t help noticing that its picture was not of him; the grinning youth with extravagantly styled hair seemed to have been clipped out of a magazine advert. ‘Only way this could’ve looked less like me would be if you’d used a photo of Pamela Anderson.’

‘All you gaijin look the same. I am going now.’ Jiro donned his coat and scurried out. ‘Be sure no one sees you leave my office.’

‘Not going to wish me luck?’ Eddie called after him. He examined the crude map and memorised the route, then affixed the bogus pass to his jacket. He opened the door a fraction. Nobody was in the corridor. He pocketed the gun and set out.

The stereotype of the long Japanese working day seemed to have some truth to it; even though it was clocking-off time, there was plenty of activity in the offices he passed. A moment of concern as a door opened ahead of him, but the woman who emerged, carrying a large bundle of documents, hurried past without even giving him a glance.

A couple of turns, and he saw the service door ahead. It was lower and wider than he had expected, less than four feet high – and had no handle. It bore a large ‘no entry’ logo. The system was fully automated. In that case, he needed a robot . . .

One presented itself as he reached the junction at the corridor’s end. He had half expected a mop-wielding android French maid, but this was merely a large rounded-off box, a simplistic ‘face’ – two dots for eyes and a smiling curve of a mouth – picked out by glowing lights on its front. Rotating brushes whirled under its dodgem-like skirt, leaving a damp trail on the floor in its wake. It slowly hummed towards him. When it was a metre away, it stopped. A voice came from the machine, speaking in Japanese with a subservient tone. He guessed that it was asking him to get out of its way.

Eddie stepped back. The robot set off again, heading for the service door. He followed. This would be easier than he’d expected—

The robot stopped once more. Its sensors apparently scanned in all directions. He retreated a step. It resumed, the hatch sliding open as it approached. There was barely an inch of clearance on all sides. He would have to wait for it to get all the way through before he could enter . . .

The door snapped shut the moment it was inside.

‘Buggeration and fuckery!’ Eddie growled. He poked at the hatch, but it was almost flush with the wall, giving him nothing to grip. And attempting to force it open would definitely attract attention. He would have to find another robot and try again. Trying to look purposeful, he headed down one of the corridors.

It didn’t take long for him to spot a tell-tale polished trail on the floor. He followed it, quickly catching up with another machine. It was heading away from the hatch, though; no telling how long it might take to do its rounds. If he delayed too long, Stikes might leave. How could he force it to speed things up?

The rear of the robot, he noticed, had a large flap on its top and a vertical row of little blue LEDs, the uppermost one of which was unlit. Above them was the symbol of a stylised wave. An indicator of how much water the automated cleaner had in its tank . . .

‘Domo arigato, Mr Roboto,’ he said as he strode up to the machine, which halted. He lifted the flap to find a dustbin-sized water tank, about three-quarters full. The robot spoke, but he ignored it, circling to look for controls. There was a small panel of touch-sensitive buttons on one side. One of them, he guessed from the symbol, was its main power switch.

A plan was forming, but he needed somewhere private to carry it out. He looked at the doors along the corridor. One was a restroom. Perfect.

He retreated, letting the robot continue along its route until it was level with the restroom door – then caught up and, as it asked him to move, jabbed at the power button. The machine fell silent, its lights going out. Glancing about to make sure nobody was coming, he grabbed it and, with considerable effort, pushed it to the door. ‘Can’t believe I’m mugging R2-D2,’ he muttered as he manhandled it into the room.

The bathroom was large and had a tiled floor, both of these facts being good; it would give him space to work, and the people on the level below wouldn’t be immediately alerted by gallons of water coming through the ceiling. He strained to tip the robot on its side. The flap burst open as it thumped down, water sluicing out. He pulled the now considerably lighter machine back upright and checked that the corridor was still clear before hauling it outside.

Eddie clambered into the empty tank. He leaned over the side and pushed the power button again, then curled himself into a ball in the confined space and lowered the lid.

Nothing happened for several seconds. He was starting to worry that he had damaged the machine when it completed its self-test routine and abruptly turned to head back the way it had come. As he’d hoped, the robot had registered that its water supply was drained – and was going for a refill.

He raised his head, pushing the lid up just enough to risk a peek. Someone walked past, but far enough away not to trip the machine’s sensors – the office workers were clearly so used to the robots that they ignored them.

A turn, and the machine rolled towards the service door. Eddie hunched down again and waited. He heard the hatch open. The robot started through it, hesitated as if belatedly becoming aware of the stowaway . . .

Then went through. The hatch closed. Eddie looked out again, but found only darkness. Robots didn’t need light to see. He had a small torch in one pocket, but there wasn’t enough room for him to fumble it out. All he could do was go along for the ride until he reached the forty-fourth floor’s maintenance hub – and hope he could climb out before the water tank was refilled.

He heard the rumble of other machinery over the robot’s electric whine. It made its way through the dark, then bumped over a threshold. A pause, then Eddie felt a different kind of movement. He was in an elevator, going up.

The ascent soon stopped and the robot reversed out of the elevator on a new floor. Eddie lifted the lid. This time there was light, even if it was only dim. Other robots trundled between various machines, having their supplies of cleaning fluids refreshed and wastes flushed away before returning to the elevator and being taken to a new floor to continue their endless drudgery.

He climbed out and made his way to an area bounded by yellow lines: a safe path through the hardware for maintenance workers. Once happy that he wasn’t about to be decapitated by some swinging mechanical arm, Eddie looked around. He was in the skyscraper’s central core, so couldn’t be far from the lift shafts. The metallic rumble of a high-speed elevator car came from nearby. He followed the path towards the sound and opened a door – to find himself at the edge of a man-made precipice.

‘Shafted,’ he said, peering at the vertiginous drop beyond the safety railing. A bank of eight elevator shafts descended into darkness, the saucer-sized maintenance lights between the doors across the rectilinear crevasse shrinking to pinpricks far below.

The hiss of fast-moving cables and a rising rush of displaced air prompted him to move back from the edge as a car rocketed up the shaft, stopping a few floors above. Eddie looked up. He was six levels from the fiftieth floor, but this block of elevators only went as high as the forty-ninth. He needed one that went all the way . . .

A short distance along the narrow walkway, he found a guide in the form of a floor diagram on an electrical switchbox. The text was Japanese, but the numbers were self-explanatory. There were two main banks of elevators, eight shafts in each – and another two shafts set apart from the rest. Number one, he assumed, was Takashi’s private lift, making the other the maintenance access to what he took to be a machine floor above the penthouse. He got his bearings and set out for the latter.

This shaft turned out to be narrower than the others. The car, out of sight somewhere below, would hold three or four people at most. The cables were stationary, which was a relief – he could use the girders forming the shaft’s framework to climb up the remaining six floors. Or, a thought striking him, seven floors. If he went to the machine level rather than the penthouse, there would be far less chance of being spotted by surveillance cameras or tripping an alarm, and there could be air vents or access hatches that would allow him to pick the best entry point.

Seven floors it was, then. He carefully clambered over the guardrail and edged across a girder until he reached one of the vertical struts, then started his ascent. It took less than half a minute to reach the next floor. Six to go. The next stage took the same amount of time, the third a little longer as his body began to feel the strain. It wasn’t the climb itself that was wearing, but the effort of maintaining a grip on the featureless steel. Only the pressure of his hands and feet kept him from a very long plunge.

Three floors to go, and he paused to let the aching in his muscles fade. He took out the torch and shone it upwards. There were the doors to the penthouse . . . which had extra wiring around them. Alarms. Going the extra floor to the machine level was the right decision.

He set off again. Grip the strut, push his feet against it for support, bring up his hands one at a time, hold tight, raise his feet, repeat. The cramp in his hands returned—

An echoing metallic clack from below, the grumble of machinery building up speed . . . and the cables started to move.

The elevator was rising.

Shit! He looked down, seeing the tiny pinprick lights going out one by one as the car blotted them out. It was maybe twenty floors below him – and picking up speed.

He was halfway between levels. There was no way he could climb up to the next before it reached him, but if he dropped back down, the slightest mistake would pitch him down the shaft.

No choice. He swung sideways, let go, fell—

The drop was about eight feet, on to unyielding, narrow steel. Even bending his legs to absorb the impact, Eddie still felt pain slam up through his feet into his knees and hips. He wobbled, grabbing at the strut as he pivoted to push himself back against the wall . . .

One foot slipped.

Fear shot through him. He clawed at the metal frame, fingertips desperately searching for purchase on the bare steel—

And finding a dent where it had been banged against a neighbour during construction. He rasped his nails against the imperfection, finding just enough grip to steady himself.

Both feet back on the girder, but now the car was only a couple of floors below, and still racing upwards . . .

Eddie straightened and flattened himself against the wall just as the elevator reached him. He sucked in his stomach and held his breath, head turned sideways as it passed. There was so little clearance that his shirt buttons rasped against its side. Then it was past, decelerating sharply to stop at the forty-ninth floor. The clattering cables fell still.

He let out a gasp of relief, tempered with frustration. The car now blocked his path. All he could do was wait and hope that whoever was using it wasn’t settling in for a long night shift.

Fortunately, it took only half a minute before another clack of brakes being released warned him that the elevator was about to move again. He squashed himself against the wall once more, wincing as the car scythed back past him – this time actually tearing off a button. It could have been worse, he decided: it might have lopped off a nipple, or an even more important protuberance lower down his body. Suppressing a shudder, he waited until the elevator was safely distant before gathering himself and resuming his ascent.

Fiftieth floor, a brief rest . . . then on to the top.

He climbed to the doors, shining his torch over them. No alarms that he could see. A closer look revealed a locking bar; he pulled it downwards. A clank, and the door shifted slightly. He worked his fingers into the gap between the two sliding sections and forced them apart.

Like the maintenance hub, the skyscraper’s uppermost storey was sparsely lit, but Eddie could see well enough. In common with many tall buildings, the topmost level was dedicated to mundane but vital functions such as supplying air conditioning and water to the floors below. He moved deeper into the maze of humming machinery, sweeping the torch beam from side to side. What he needed was an access panel, some way into the crawlspace between this and the penthouse . . .

A hatch was set into the floor beside an air conditioning unit. He opened it and shone his torch inside.

The space below was cramped and dusty, about two feet high and a nest for numerous snaking ventilation hoses serving the penthouse. A squeeze, but he had been in much tighter confines. He climbed down and crawled towards the nearest air vent.

He found on reaching it that it was too small for him to fit through, but a quick survey with his light revealed fatter hoses nearby – presumably serving larger vents. He followed one of the larger lines until it curved down to attach to a slatted grille set into the floor. That was more like it! Once he disconnected the hose, he could either unscrew or simply kick out the grille and drop down into the penthouse.

Voices reached him as he arrived at the vent. Someone was in the room below. This particular entrance wasn’t a good choice, then, but there would be others. He was about to move on when he realised the speakers were talking in English. Curiosity got the better of him, and he peered through the slats. He was above a rather spartan lounge, a young Japanese man in an expensive suit addressing someone out of sight. ‘That should not be an issue,’ said the man. ‘We are all working for the same goal, so there’s no need to be concerned about details of overall responsibility.’

‘Being concerned about details is how I stay alive,’ said another voice.

Eddie froze, a sudden surge of anger and adrenalin rushing through his body. Stikes! There was no mistaking the measured, arrogant tones of the former SAS officer.

Scarber had told him the truth: his enemy was here, right now. He felt the weight of the gun inside his jacket, and almost without conscious thought reached for it. One shot through the grille would see his enemy dead . . .

He forced himself to stay his hand. Yes, he could kill Stikes, but he didn’t yet have an escape route short of grovelling back through the crawlspace and climbing down fifty floors. Besides, he now had an obligation to Scarber. The ex-CIA agent had lived up to her side of the bargain by giving him Stikes’s location; he should do the same by trying to destroy the statues.

He shifted position to get a look at his target. Stikes sat nonchalantly in a leather armchair, a glass of whisky on a small table beside it. His haughty, smug expression as he spoke was just as Eddie remembered – though the Yorkshireman took a small amount of satisfaction from seeing that his aristocratic features were disfigured, the vivid scar of a grazing bullet wound running from his forehead up through his blond hairline.

Stikes had made himself comfortable, so Eddie guessed he would be here for a while. Good; that gave him time to locate the statues before settling old scores. He started to move away to find another vent—

‘Dr Wilde is with Takashi-san at this moment,’ said the Japanese man.

Eddie was so shocked that he almost yelped ‘What?’ out loud, managing to clamp his mouth shut before he gave himself away. Nina was here? The thought sent a thrill of longing through him – tempered by caution. Why would she be here with Stikes? He leaned closer to the grille, straining to hear every word.

‘She will soon put the statues together for us,’ the man continued. ‘Then we’ll finally see their power – and the plan can begin.’

‘It took you long enough,’ Stikes replied. ‘I gave them to the Group three months ago.’

‘We were exploring other options.’

‘But you already knew she could make them work, so you wasted time looking for someone else with the same ability. I told you she was the best choice, and that she wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to find out more about the statues. She’s an obsessive – it’s what drives her. Her work always comes first.’

The other man nodded. ‘She will be very valuable to the Group, then.’

Stikes sipped his drink. ‘If the statues do what they’re supposed to.’

‘We’ll soon know. Takashi-san will see you afterwards. In the meantime, I must get back to him.’ He bowed and left the room. Stikes took another sip, then with a look of sardonic amusement stood and walked out of sight.

Eddie remained still, mind racing. Nina was working with Stikes’s new paymasters? He couldn’t believe it. But much as he hated to admit it, Stikes was right about her being obsessive about her work. It was something that had prompted him to everything from teasing to outright anger in the past. Even so, he couldn’t accept that her lust for knowledge was so great that she would throw in her lot with Stikes to satisfy it. It wasn’t possible.

Was it?

Either way, he had to find her. He resumed his search for another way down.