Shadow Creatures (20 page)

The useful thing was that he wasn’t in a hospital. If he had been, then there would have been nurses on duty all night. The fact that the sign behind his bed said
Bed 1
indicated
more than just the fact that he was their most important patient. It implied that he was their
only
patient, otherwise what were the odds that he would randomly have been given bed number
one?

So, if there weren’t any other patients, and there weren’t any nurses on duty all night, then the place probably went down to skeleton staffing overnight. He was, as far as Robledo
was concerned, locked in his room, and he couldn’t leave. There wasn’t even an emergency button – they were banking on the fact that, having been examined, he wasn’t going
to have any medical crisis before everyone came to work the next morning. At best there would be a security guard on patrol every couple of hours.

Calum decided to test out his reasoning. At midnight he settled down in bed and pulled the covers up to his chin, and waited.

At half past one in the morning, according to his watch, the door opened, spilling in light from the corridor. He glanced up, trying to look as if he had just been woken.

‘Wha–?’ he muttered.

A uniformed security guard stood in the doorway. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ he said, and moved back out into the corridor. The door hissed shut behind him. The last thing Calum saw
of him, he was turning right.

So, one guard, on patrol, and probably only checking the rooms every couple of hours.

Calum waited for ten minutes, then pulled the ladder-like sides out from his bed, swung himself round and moved across the floor to the door, using the sides as crutches.

He got the tips of his fingers into the crack between the door and the frame, and pulled. The door moved towards him, the tongue of the lock having been prevented from engaging with the hole in
the door frame by the sticky plastic strip he had placed there earlier.

He stuck his head out and glanced along the corridor in both directions. Most of the lights were dark, leaving only the emergency lighting.

Nobody in sight. More importantly – no security cameras that he could see.

Dr Kircher, Dr Laurence and the nurses had all exited his room and turned left. He did the same, using the crutches to move down to a corner where the corridor turned left again. He poked his
head round the corner.

About halfway along the next section of corridor was what looked like a lift lobby and stairwell. Just before it was a desk in a wider section of the corridor, opposite what looked like a little
kitchen area. The desk looked like a nurses’ station, but there didn’t seem to be anyone on duty.

Checking behind him, just in case the guard was coming back, Calum scuttled down the corridor, swinging the makeshift crutches back and forth and wincing every time they went
clunk
on the
carpet-tiled floor.

He felt exposed in the middle of the corridor, like a cockroach running from the safety of one set of shadows to another.

He got to the desk without being observed.

There was no paperwork scattered around – he suspected that the Robledo Mountains Technology management mandated a clean-desk policy – but there was a tower PC stashed beneath the
desk with its LCD screen blank, and more importantly there was a plastic rack filled with tablet PCs just like the one that Dr Laurence had been using to make notes on earlier.

Calum glanced yearningly at the lift lobby, just the other side of the desk. The lifts would lead down to the ground floor, and there would be a door leading out into the open. There would be
cars out there, and . . .

. . . And that’s where the dream of escape would end, of course. He couldn’t drive, for two very good reasons. Firstly, he had never learned and, secondly, his legs were paralysed.
He couldn’t operate the accelerator or the brakes.

He sighed, still feeling the pull of freedom emanating like a magnetic field from the lifts and the stairs. He could phone for help, he supposed – what was the emergency code in America?
911? – but even if the operator believed him and sent a police car to investigate, the security guards would have a cover story.

No, he had to be cleverer than that.

He took one of the tablet PCs from the plastic rack. He turned away, then turned back again and took another one. He might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

Tucking the tablets beneath his arms, he scuttled back along the corridor, round the corner and back to his room. He knew that turning the handle would make no difference, given his slight
modifications to the lock, so he just pushed the door open and slipped inside, then let it
hiss
closed as he moved towards the bed, dumped the tablets on the sheets, climbed in and put the
sides back.

He glanced around, slightly panicky, to make sure that everything was exactly the same as it had been when the guard had looked in earlier.

He was safe. He let his head sink back into the pillow in relief. His plan had worked – or, at least, the first phase of his plan. Now he just had to figure out a way to use the tablet PCs
to get some kind of message out.

He stashed one beneath his mattress, and held the other one in front of him. It seemed like a fairly standard design. He was pretty sure that, with the things that he had picked up from Tara
over the past couple of months, he could get past whatever security protocols it had and perhaps even connect up to the internet.

His fingers felt something on the other side – a sticky plastic label. Robledo did like their sticky plastic labels. It was probably just a security tag, or a serial number. He turned the
tablet over to take a look.

And felt his breath catch in his throat.

It was a white rectangular tag, stuck to the back of the tablet, and it read:

R
hino crouched in the shadow of the corner of a warehouse, just across the road from the back of Xi Lang’s emporium, and looked around. It
was night, and as dark as it ever got in Hong Kong, with the neon lights of the island reflecting from the low cloud in a chromatic glow.

Rhino was trying to match the things he could see from the ground with the view from above that he had memorized from Google Maps. Yes, that low cabin that had been fixed to the back of Xi
Lang’s place was exactly where the computer image had said it would be, and the gap between it and the building across the road wasn’t any wider than it had appeared while they were
planning this. Apparently, according to Gecko, the gap was narrow enough to jump, except that Rhino wouldn’t have done it on a bet. That, he reflected, was probably because he wasn’t as
young, as fit or as foolhardy as Gecko.

Xi Lang’s warehouse didn’t have any drainpipes leading down from the roof, which immediately cut off Gecko’s preferred route of access. The few doors in its walls were heavy
and locked – the only exception being the one at the front. Discreet visual and infra-red CCTV cameras were attached to the corners of the warehouse, scanning all the approaches. Rhino
assumed that they would be continually monitored.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

‘Ready,’ came a voice from behind him.

Rhino turned his head. Gecko was dressed all in black, in clothing that was loose enough not to restrict his movements but not so loose that it would get caught on anything. His gaze met
Rhino’s, he nodded once, and then he was gone, climbing up a drainpipe that was attached to the side of the warehouse in whose shadow they were sheltering. He climbed like a cockroach –
fast and scuttling, pressed close to the corrugated metal wall. As soon as he reached the top, he squirmed over and was gone. Rhino knew that if
he
had tried it, the drainpipe would have
peeled away from the wall under his weight, but Gecko was a lot lighter.

Rhino waited patiently, picturing Gecko running back across the warehouse roof, turning round, judging distance and wind direction, then running full-tilt back the way he had come. Just as Rhino
imagined that Gecko’s sprint had reached the edge, a black shape sailed silently across the gap between the warehouses. It was like watching an owl swooping between trees. A faint thud
reached Rhino’s ears as Gecko landed on top of Xi Lang’s warehouse. He imagined Gecko rolling forward on the roof and coming up running to absorb his momentum, then slowing, turning and
coming back to the edge.

A black shape appeared, hunched against the neon-coloured clouds. Rhino saw a hand wave briefly, and then a rope appeared, snaking down from the roof. Gecko had wound it round his waist before
climbing the drainpipe. Now he had apparently attached it to some fixed point on the roof.

The rope would be invisible to the infra-red cameras, but Rhino wouldn’t. He waited while Gecko moved to one corner, reached down to put black cardboard covers over the infra-red CCTV
lenses, then moved to the other corner and did the same thing. If they left the covers there for too long, then whoever was watching the screens would notice something, but a few minutes would
probably be OK.

Rhino reached down and picked up the bag that was by his side. It contained two items they were going to need inside the warehouse. He sprinted for where the rope hung down, then stopped and
quickly attached the bag to his belt. He grabbed the rope and scrambled up it to the roof: feet gaining purchase on the metal wall while he pulled himself up with his arms. He had already wrapped
torn strips of the bed sheet from his hotel room around his boots to make them quieter when hitting the metal of the walls. It was just like being back in training.

He pulled himself over the edge, hands burning at the roughness of the rope, and lay flat as Gecko removed the cardboard covers from first one and then the other IR camera. Rhino indicated the
expanse of fiat roof, punctuated with occasional skylights and labouring air-conditioning systems, with a quick wave of his hand. Gecko shook his head. There were no other cameras up there.

Rhino half stood and pulled the rope back up. No point leaving it for someone else to find and, besides, they were going to need it again in a moment. He coiled it up, and then followed Gecko
across to a skylight. The glass was grimy, and had metal wire wound into it in a grid, but a corner of it was broken. Rhino could smell a faint hint of the zoo-odour of the warehouse drifting up
through the hole. Gecko reached in through it and fished around, shoulder pressed hard against the glass. Rhino heard a
click
as Gecko disengaged a catch. The skylight moved inwards under
the pressure of Gecko’s shoulder. He quickly withdrew before he fell into the dark space beneath.

The two of them paused for a full minute, waiting to make sure that they hadn’t been heard. While they were waiting, Rhino detached the bag from his belt and took out the contents –
two sets of night-vision goggles that he had brought with him from England.

He handed Gecko one set of goggles and slipped the other set over his head and turned them on. Rather than seeing heat as the infra-red cameras around the warehouse did, they amplified low
levels of light into something much brighter. Suddenly the world was filled with a ghostly green glow – almost too bright, given the reflections of the neon advertising signs on Hong Kong
Island from the low clouds.

Gecko switched his goggles on, flinched slightly at the sudden brightness, then gave Rhino a ‘thumbs up’ sign.

Confident that they hadn’t been seen, Rhino tied one end of the rope round a ventilation duct and fed the other end through the open skylight. He was sweating now in the oppressive
heat.

They had already worked out the rough area of the warehouse that they wanted to enter, based on where they had been earlier in the day, and chosen a skylight close to that location. There was no
point getting in all the way across the warehouse, away from the coypu and hopefully the giant centipedes, if it meant increasing their chances of being spotted, even if the entry turned out to be
easier that way.

Rhino turned round and dangled his legs through the open skylight, holding on to the roof with his hands and making sure that he was on top of the rope. He squirmed backwards and clasped his
legs, vice-like, on the rope, then slid further inside the warehouse. When his shoulders reached the edge he reached down with one hand to find the rope, and then lowered himself fully down,
finally bringing his other hand inside the skylight. Now he had two hands and his legs clamped on the rope. He lowered himself slowly down.

The night-vision goggles allowed him to see all the way to the far side of the warehouse. Everything was flooded with green light. He couldn’t see any of Xi Lang’s guards – as
far as he could tell, the warehouse was empty, although he had to work on the assumption that there were people around somewhere.

The skylight they had used as their entry point was near to one of the columns holding the roof up – and he used the column as cover while he slid down the rope. The problem was that
directly underneath the skylight was a row of crates and cages, rather than one of the aisles, and Rhino’s feet touched down on a crate. The slack of the rope – the bit that would have
hung down to the ground had the skylight been above an aisle, was curled loosely on top of the cage. The zoo-smell was almost overpowering, overlaid with an acrid scent that stung Rhino’s
nose, like bleach.

Rhino glanced down, trying to make out through the narrow gaps between the bars what was inside the cage, but he could see only a shadowy mass curled up in a corner. Maybe it was just a pile of
hay, or something. Maybe the crate was currently empty.

Gecko landed beside Rhino. His foot caught the rope and pushed it sideways. The end fell between the bars, into the cage.

And it touched the dark mass that was curled up below.

The shadowy shape lunged explosively upward. A massive paw tipped with scalpel-sharp claws hit the bars. It was too large to go through, but the cage shook and two of the creature’s claws
managed to get through the gap and rake at Rhino and Gecko. Somewhere below them Rhino heard a growl so deep that it was only part sound. The rest of it was a deep vibration that he could feel
through his boots.