One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (20 page)

‘What?’

‘I’m serious. He didn’t invite you.’

His feelings of confusion and disorientation were tempered to the point of irrelevance by the look of delicious disdain in Simone’s eyes.

‘This isn’t a party,’ she said, the twinkling scorn remaining, though her eyes were now trained somewhere in the crowd. ‘This is a contest. This is the night we count up the scores and see who did best in the game of life.’

He understood. He said nothing, but Simone looked at him again and it was obvious she knew that. They both laughed.

There was a squeal of feedback and a bassy clatter through the PA system. Every head turned to see the head waiter adjusting a mike stand at the far end of the ballroom, in front of where the as‐
yet‐
untouched buffet was impressively laid out. The head waiter asked for the room’s attention and began introducing their host, who stood a few feet away, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself.

‘And now’s the part when Gavin crowns himself champion,’ Simone concluded. The applause rang around their ears as Gavin took hold of the mike. In Simone’s eyes Matt could see the vivacious scorn fading, replaced by a weariness, a sadness and not a little hatred. He watched her take a determined step forward, as though she was about to march away from him, then she stopped and sighed. She turned to face Matt, everyone else staring towards the front.

‘I don’t think I want to witness this,’ she said. ‘I’m going outside for a walk. Care to join me?’

Matt nodded, struggling to restrain the size of his grin.

A walk. On a summer’s night. With Simone Draper. It might be fifteen years late, but what the hell, it was here now.

Jackson cut off the outboard and they coasted in silently over the last thirty or forty yards. It still wasn’t quite as dark as he’d have liked. None of them had ever operated this far north before, and the problem wasn’t just how late it got dark but how long it took for the night to descend. Down near the equator it was like ‘lights out, ten seconds’ zap. Here, the twilight seemed to hang around to the point of loitering. Still, nobody up top would be watching the water, and even if they were, what were they going to see? Three guys in a dinghy – so what. Connor was right about that much. This would be the least‐
defended place they’d ever gone into. Way out here, the revellers wouldn’t even be worried about gatecrashers.

The dinghy ran out of puff as it drifted beneath the titanic structure. The legs of the installation were like medieval towers, austere and formidable keeps, at each base a sub‐
aquatic oubliette. Jackson lifted the paddle from the fibreglass floor and with a few firm strokes, eased them towards the jetty at the centre. The scale of the thing was unsettling, making him feel like a gnat preparing to attack an elephant, but he had to stop thinking in military terms. It wasn’t a fortress, it was a holiday resort, and he wasn’t attacking the elephant, he was attacking other gnats who happened to be on its back. Unarmed and unsuspecting gnats, he didn’t have to remind himself, the thought spinning, spinning, spinning, ceaseless like the ringing in his ear.

The dinghy bumped against the buffered jetty. Gaghen clambered out first, crouching down and doing a quick 360, scanning the spider deck above before he tied the boat to an aluminium mooring. The landing platform ran in a wide square around the central of the installation’s five giant legs. The jetty was made up of five wooden sections per side, each linked to a coupling system that allowed it to move with the waves independently of its neighbour. A flexible mesh surrounded these sutures to prevent careless feet slipping through the gaps, where they might be ground between the segments. On two sides, further floor sections led right up to the central leg, cushioned by rolling buffers where they met bare wall. Ten or twelve feet above these buffers were two large rectangular panels: entrances to the elevators, but currently inoperable because the water was correspondingly deeper at the resort’s intended destination. The entire floating square was secured to the platform’s central leg by a hydraulic suspension system, steel arms absorbing all movement up or down. According to Connor, the hydraulics could also lift the thing right out of the drink as a precaution against storms, and for the purposes of moving the rig. It wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight, but there was definitely a storm on the way.

Connor pulled on his ski‐
mask and gestured them to follow suit. There would be cameras all over this place, and although they’d be removing the tapes, you might never be sure you’d got them all. One stray and you’d be banished to non‐
extraditionland for the rest of your naturals.

‘Safety all automatics,’ Connor said. ‘If we encounter any resistance at this stage, neutralisation must be clean and quiet. Pistolas only, gentlemen, and I want them wearing condoms. Do it now.’

Jackson slung the Ingram’s around his back, tightening the strap so that it was snug to his body. He unholstered his Nagan and screwed on the suppressor. They called them condoms because they were a pain in the arse to put on and it felt more natural without one, but sometimes it was better to be safe than sorry. With its short hand‐
stock, the Nag looked all the more disproportionate encumbered by the extra length of pipe. It reminded him of a plastic ray‐
gun he’d had as a kid, which in turn, depressingly, reminded him of a recurring dream. He was in a close‐
quarters firefight, stuck on his own, two marks bearing down on him, both changing clips and getting ready to finish him off. In his hand he had the plastic ray‐
gun. It was black, sleek, heavy, an evil‐
looking weapon. He pointed it at the marks and pulled the trigger furiously, but all it did was go click, click, click, click, click.

‘Right, let’s make ourselves useful,’ Connor said quietly, leading them off.

There were two steep temporary stairways leading from the jetty to the spider deck, where the elevators were accessible. The lifts ran all the way up the central leg, but since they emerged at the general resort reception area, Alpha Team wouldn’t be using them. The spider deck was a network of narrow gantries about forty feet up from the water, encirding and interconnecting all five giant legs. In common with everything else to do with this monstrosity, it was a sight more elaborate than on smaller rigs, where the spider level might consist more simply of four walkways forming a square.

They ran up the stairs, the metal underfoot ringing dully against the insulated contact of heavy soles. Having reached the spider deck, Connor nodded them in the direction of the north‐
western leg, above which they could access their point of entry: Hotel B, unfinished, unmanned and out of bounds for the evening’s guests. Gaghen put a hand on Connor’s shoulder, restraining him from proceeding.

‘Closed circuit,’ he said, pointing upwards. Neat, grey cameras were attached higher up the legs, trained directly on the spider deck. ‘Probably to make sure none of the punters jumps off rather than completes their sentence. Might not be turned on yet, but—’

‘No, you’re right,’ Connor ruled. ‘Acks, if you wouldn’t mind?’

‘Pleasure,’ Jackson replied curtly. Connor, no doubt still rattled by his and Gaghen’s abortive abort, was heaping on the camaraderie. He’d called him ‘Acks’, short for ‘Action’, a barrack‐
room nickname of old. Jackson couldn’t decide if it sounded cloying or just desperate. His real mates knew him as Smogmonster, after his Middlesbrough roots.

He took aim with the silenced Nag and shot out the nearest camera, then circled the gantry around the central leg, repeating the drill on all potentially prying eyes. In each case the only sound was the breaking glass of the camera lens, preceded by the smothered report of his handgun. The trigger, irritatingly, just went click, click, click.

Jackson’s withering sense of scale was not dissipated by the jog to the north‐
western leg. The gangway felt like it was extending the further down it he went, reminiscent of another, less frequent but nonetheless dick‐
shrivelling dream. The three of them were like fairground ducks running along there in a line, isolated and exposed. If this place had been militarised he’d have been shitting himself with every step.

They made it to the north‐
western leg, where they found the door to its interior stairway locked. Connor stepped aside wordlessly as Gaghen moved in, removing a compact power‐
drill from his pack and applying it to the lock. Jackson imagined the squealing and reverberation being carried all around the structure, but looking back across the spider deck, he estimated that you wouldn’t even hear it at the next leg along, never mind up‐
top. He studied the underside of the platform, its look of grim, ugly industrial functionality making him almost sceptical that the resort complex Connor described would turn out to be up there.

He felt a thump and looked down to see that Gaghen had removed the lock and dropped it deliberately on to his foot.

‘Wakey‐
wakey, Acks,’ he said, pulling open the door.

They followed Connor inside. The man was definitely in a take‐
charge kind of mood, but then he was the one with the most riding on this. They emerged into blackness, Gaghen reaching for a torch before Connor located a switch for the lights just inside the door.

The leg’s interior added to Jackson’s incredulity about what awaited at the top. The refurbishment programme either hadn’t reached this place yet or it simply wasn’t on the list because they weren t expecting the paying customers to have cause to check it out. A metal staircase spiralled up the circular wall, straightening out into a landing every time it came back around in line with the door. One storey below them, the wall jutted inwards like a ring, four feet wide and two deep, with a circular steel surface spanning the centre. Jackson wasn’t sure whether its purpose was as a floor or a lid. The stairs continued below spider‐
deck level, disappearing through an access gap in the ring. There was a chemical smell permeating the place, strong enough to catch the back of the throat.

‘The oil guys use these legs for storage,’ Connor said, indicating the ring and the floor/
lid below. ‘They pump all sorts of crap into them. The tanks go right down below sea‐
level. Delta have cleaned out the south‐
western leg for storing the resort’s fresh‐
water supply. I don’t know what they keep in this one, but I’m not planning to light up, I’ll tell you that.’

They followed the spiral around; the first landing skirted blank wall, but the second featured a door, beside which the words ‘Hotel B sub‐
level 4’ were handwritten in yellow paint. Beneath them a faded and rusty signplate alluded to the place’s history with the words ‘Cellar Deck’. Connor led them past the doorway and continued climbing until they reached Hotel B sub‐
level 1.

While not quite emulating the iceberg principle, the resort had utilised a great deal of space below the platform’s topside surface. According to the plans, there were three floors of accommodation below deck, in rooms abutting the outside walls, so that all of them boasted a sea view. The remaining floorspace of those three sub‐
levels housed leisure facilities not reliant on natural light, such as cinemas, night clubs, bars, shops and restaurants. It was like one of those hotels that has a swimming pool and gardens on the roof, except that on the roof of this place, as well as pools and gardens, there were actually more hotels, going up six or seven storeys, with balconies on the rooms facing the Lido. Officially, the sub‐
level rooms belonged to whichever hotel sat atop them. This, Jackson presumed, was so that the brochure could show you a picture of the sun‐
kissed and pool‐
fringed joint upstairs, but when you arrived, unless you were paying top whack, you’d end up in the dungeon.

He’d seen an item about the resort on TV, though he couldn’t remember whether it had been
Tomorrow’s World
,
Holiday
or
Eurotrash
. What he
could
remember was swearing he wouldn’t be seen dead in the place. With that cautionary thought, he slapped a new clip into his pistol.

Gaghen drilled the door and they slipped through, finding themselves in the darkness of a service corridor. Flicking on his torch and taking the lead, Gaghen scanned the walls for a light switch, but instead found another door. They emerged into a bright and freshly painted hallway.

‘Lights are on,’ Gaghen observed pointedly, probing Connor as to whether this was expected.

‘’Sokay, it doesn’t mean anyone’s around. The sub‐
level lights are always supposed to be on. Even if the main power goes down, there’s a temporary back‐
up supply.’

Connor got out one of his maps, unfolding it a couple of panels wide and placing it against the wall. He traced a finger along it and rotated it back and forth through ninety degrees until he had satisfactorily oriented himself.

‘Right. There’s a stairway ringing Hotel B’s two elevator shafts, but it goes up through the lobby on the ground floor and the lifts run directly behind the reception desks. You have to pass right in front of the desks to get from one flight to the next. We’ll be emerging into plain sight for approximately eight yards – that’s if anyone happens to be looking into Hotel B from the Lido area, which is open to the guests tonight.’

‘What about the emergency stairways?’ Jackson asked.

‘Alarmed. All of them. Officially for fire notification, but mainly to prevent pissed punters taking a short‐
cut down an exterior staircase and falling right off the fucking rig. We’ll cut all the alarms later when we take Hotel A – that’s where the controls are. Come on. Left at the end here, then the main stairwell should be directly ahead. Halt one flight before the ground floor.’

Connor led off again, Gaghen behind, Jackson at the rear. They took the left Connor had directed and found themselves in another telescopic hallway, this time flanked by card‐
operated doors on one side. Running along the wall opposite was a prefabricated tiled mural, depicting bronzed holidaymakers splashing in the sea; a curious choice given that the resort’s punters weren’t going to be getting anywhere near a beach themselves.