Jablonsky glanced back at the screens. Eddie was still at the desk. He turned in the direction of the reading area . . . then changed his mind, deciding to check the other side of the archives first. He could look in on the Englishman at the end of his patrol.
Which wouldn’t take long.
14
The object in the prototyper’s tank was now almost finished - and somewhat disturbing. Eddie could easily recognise it as Nina’s right hand, a small childhood scar visible at the base of her first finger . . . but it had no colour, a translucent, boneless mass like some primitive deep sea creature.
The fingers were complete, loops and whorls discernible in the lifeless flesh. The laser head whirred back and forth over the thickest part of the hand, the ball of the thumb, as it added the final layers. Eight minutes had gone, and it still wasn’t finished. Karima had warned him that one of the guards was patrolling, but there was no point worrying - there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
The scanner whined back to its rest position - and stopped. The prototyper bleeped three times. Done.
Eddie gingerly touched its end product. The ‘hand’ was soft, rubbery, almost but not quite like flesh. It was also hot. He dipped the digital thermometer into the liquid. Over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. He kept it in place, watching the display. The figure dropped by a tenth of a degree, then another.
He carefully lifted the hand out of the tank. It flopped grotesquely as it emerged from the thick liquid. He used a wipe to clean off the excess goo, then checked the temperature again. 99.1°F. Almost down to human body temperature. He didn’t know how far above or below the norm the temperature sensor in the handprint scanner would accept, but doubted it was more than a few tenths of a degree.
He typed in Nina’s security code. One, eight, six, zero, nine, two, four, six, zero, nine. The panel lit up: code accepted. Now the system was waiting to confirm her identity biometrically.
98.8°F. Almost normal. He laid the hand palm-down on the panel. The line of light moved beneath it. He glanced round at the locker, waiting for the LED to turn from red to green.
It didn’t.
The monitor flashed up a message, polite but chilling:
It hadn’t worked. The system had recognised the fake . . .
98.4°F. Below normal body temperature. And it would only keep falling.
What was wrong? He lifted the hand from the scanner, torch beam darting over it as he searched for any flaws—
There! Between the first and second fingers, bisecting the scar. A hairline split in the silicone. The two halves of the scar had slipped apart by a tiny amount . . . but enough for the computer to find something odd about the easily identifiable feature. He put the hand back on the scanner, nudging the gelatinous non-flesh into what he hoped was perfect alignment.
The scanning beam moved again. Eddie looked round—
A single point of green appeared amongst the grid of red lights. ‘Yes!’ he said, pumping a fist.
‘Eddie, did it work?’ Karima’s voice crackled in his ear.
‘Yeah, it’s open. What’s going on outside?’
‘That guard’s still on the far side of the archives, but he’s circling round - and the police are on their way back to us!’
‘I’ll have to get a shift on, then.’ He moved to the very edge of the desk, balancing on his toes - then let himself topple forward, one arm outstretched to arrest his fall on the lockers.
He reached out with his other hand and opened the large door. The case containing the Codex was inside. He slid it out - then, swinging the heavy container as a counterweight, shoved himself back upright. For one horrible moment he wavered, rubber-shod toes clawing at the edge, before arching his back and standing tall.
Eddie opened the case. A golden light filled the vault: his torch beam reflecting off the orichalcum cover of the Talonor Codex.
He had it.
Now . . . he had to get away with it.
Jablonsky had completed his rounds of one side of the labyrinth. Humming to himself, he started towards the vault to begin his circuit of the other.
Matt hurried back up to the deck. The police boat was about half a mile away - heading straight for him.
The desk was clear, almost all Eddie’s equipment shoved into the overhead vent. Aside from the case containing the Codex, the only thing left was the screwdriver.
He held it between his teeth as he hauled the hanging ventilator back up until it was at shoulder height. Supporting the weight of one end on his collarbone, he took the screwdriver in his free hand . . . and stabbed it into a fan.
The blades instantly jammed. The motor protested, whining angrily. He pushed the insulated handle down harder. With an electrical crack, the motor burned out.
He yanked out the screwdriver and did the same to another fan. This time, the motor sparked, an acrid burning smell hitting his nostrils as smoke coiled out of it.
Jablonsky crossed the central aisle in front of the vault door, and was heading for the reading area when his walkie-talkie squawked. ‘Hey, Lou,’ said his partner. ‘The computer’s showing something wrong in the vault.’
He went back to the curved steel door, looking down the main aisle to the security desk. ‘Has the alarm gone off?’
‘No, but there’s some problem with the ventilation system. I’ll open it up so you can check.’
Jablonsky inserted his card and waited while Vernio went through the procedure to open the door. After a minute, the heavy door hummed open.
He caught the sharp tang of smoke in the air as he entered. A crackle from above; he looked up at the grille to see a blue spark flicker behind it. ‘Yeah, something’s shorted out,’ he reported into his radio. ‘Better call it in.’
Leaving the vault door open to disperse the smoke, he headed back to the main desk as Vernio picked up the phone to summon an engineer.
Watching the laptop screen, Karima saw that the guard had his back to the vault - and the other was looking away as he made a phone call. ‘Eddie,
The locker swung open. Inside was the case containing the Talonor Codex - and Eddie Chase, squeezed into the space even more tightly than he had been in the duct.
He had used the cutter, retrieved from the vent, to sabotage the lock mechanism inside the door. Now, he hurriedly unfolded himself, using the handles of the lockers above to climb out. Standing with one foot on the edge of the locker’s floor, he recovered the case and jumped across to the central desk.
The guard was still walking away from him. He stretched out one leg to nudge the locker shut, then drew back - and made a flying leap through the open vault door.
He cleared the pressure-sensitive floor by less than the length of a toe. Pain shot through his ankle at the awkward landing, but he held in a grunt and flung himself sideways behind the nearest bank of storage lockers.
One rubber sole squeaked on the floor—
