The cell door was closed but not locked. She turned the handle and wrenched it open. Doing that set off three canisters of OPG that Jenna-Jane’s suspiciously experienced munitions team had set immediately inside the door, all of them more or less at head height. Juliet got a lungful of the stuff before she even knew what it was.
OPG is a leaner, meaner version of the Tabun nerve gas invented by Gerhard Schrader back in the 1930s – the first of the ever-popular cyanophosphides. There’s a UN resolution specifically outlawing its use, but only in a battlefield context. Used therapeutically, in minuscule doses, it reverses some of the effects of senile dementia. That loophole allows institutions like the Charles Stanger and the MOU to stock it in industrial quantities and call it medicine.
Juliet suddenly found that her arms and legs didn’t want to do what they were told. Spastic tremors tore through her when she tried to move, and the muscles of her throat constricted as suddenly as a door slamming closed.
Demons are built differently from people though, for all that we come from the same stock. Juliet was fighting to bring her limbs back under her conscious control when the cell door immediately behind her also opened, and three men wearing masks and full hazmat suits cut loose at her with specially adapted automatic rifles firing silver-plated hollow-point ammunition.
The white metal ripped through Juliet like fistfuls of oblivion. She was probably already finished at that point, but she leaned into the impacts and managed to fall forward rather than back, her arms thrown out in a blind, flailing sweep. She barely connected, but then again she barely had to. Two of Jenna-Jane’s three sharpshooters died suddenly and messily as Juliet’s razor-sharp fingernails punctured the wire-weave plastic of their decontamination suits and the airborne poison touched their skin.
But the silver had done its work, finishing what the gas had started. Juliet was down, and she wasn’t moving. A second squad – including Gil himself – came up the corridor, no doubt with huge reluctance given what they’d just seen happen to their comrades, but once they ascertained that Juliet was out for the count, they bound her hands and feet with steel and silver bands, lifted her onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled her out. By the time they got her into the unmarked MOU acquisitions vehicle – a Bedford van fitted with soundproofing and top-of-the-rage restraint gear – the air filters were already being turned on inside the Stanger, kick-starting the laborious process of putting the neurotoxic genie back in its bottle.
They took Juliet back to the MOU, and down into the basement. The door had closed in Gil’s face. He’d done his job, and Jenna-Jane was keen to oversee the rest of the operation by herself. This was, after all, where she excelled: at the porous interface between scientific inquiry and legalised torture. It seems to be a happening place these days.
I sat and digested these facts in silence after Gil had finished speaking. Something in his face told me there was still some bad shit to come, but this was bad enough to be going on with. And in the meantime it was probably a good idea to clear the air by asking the obvious question.
‘Why are you doing this, McClennan?’ I demanded. ‘You hate my guts. It doesn’t make sense that you’d come riding to my rescue – or that you’d stab Jenna-Jane in the back, which would put you way out of position for kissing her arse.’
Gil’s mouth set in a tight line. ‘You’re right, Castor,’ he said. ‘I do hate your guts. But you saved my people down in that swimming pool, and you probably saved me too. I felt like I owed you something. And I also felt like maybe I’d enlisted in the wrong war. We’ve got two women out there, in the hands of that thing, and we’re not doing one damn thing about it.’
‘Nothing we can do,’ I pointed out, ‘until he shows his hand.’
Gil shook his head grimly. ‘Well, that was kind of the clinching argument,’ he muttered. ‘He already has, Castor. He left a note.’
The words didn’t sink in for a second. When they did, I still thought I must have misunderstood. ‘He what?’ I echoed stupidly.
‘He left a note, at your landlady’s house. It was addressed to you, but Gentle found it. She gave it to the professor, and the professor opened it and read it. Then she put it back in the envelope and stuck it in her pocket. Nobody has any idea what it says, but we’ve been forbidden to talk to the police or anyone else outside the MOU until this is all resolved. By that time we could have two more corpses on our hands.’
I was staring down at my fists, which I suddenly realised were clenched – so tightly that the knuckles showed white.
‘Fuck,’ I said hollowly.
‘The place is a fortress,’ Gil warned me. ‘Dicks and DeJong haven’t reported back yet, but she’s called the agency she uses and ordered a top-up. The building is swarming with them.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to see that note. And I’ve got to get Juliet out of there.’
‘I’m not interested in saving the demon,’ Gil said, ‘but I’ll help you get your hands on the note if you feel like trusting me. At the very least, I can get you in through the door. And I still see bringing Asmodeus down as job number one, so if you’re aiming to do that, I’m in.’
I met his gaze. ‘I’d appreciate the help,’ I said. ‘McClennan, we got off on the wrong foot . . .’
‘Yeah, we did. Because you killed my uncle and ruined the lives of some people I really care about.’
‘Actually, I more or less stood out of the way and let him kill himself. If we both come out of this alive, maybe we should have another pint and I can tell you all about it.’
Gil thought about this. ‘I’d sooner you told me how you pulled that shit off at Super-Self.’
‘All yours. With diagrams.’
‘You’re on, Castor.’ He grinned faintly, but sobered again immediately. ‘It’s a fuck of a big if, though, isn’t it?’
At the MOU, the street doors had been locked. Gil pressed the buzzer and then hammered on the glass for attention, while I waited a few feet away, pressed flat against the wall in what I hoped was the security camera’s blind spot. If the lens was a fish-eye, whoever was on the front desk was looking straight at me now and wondering what the fuck I thought I was up to.
Our luck seemed to be holding though – at least for now. The guard on the front desk, standing in for Mr Dicks, left his post and came to the door, where Gil pressed his ID against the glass for his inspection. There was a rattle and a click as the door was unlocked from inside, and Gil walked on past the guy. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which the security guard didn’t bother to inspect.
I came out of hiding and jammed the door open with my foot as he swung it to again. He stared at me in amazement, too surprised even to be alarmed. He was just starting to reach for his baton when Gil clocked him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle, the only thing his carrier bag contained. We hadn’t ordered the Moët, but the nice young stockbrokers at the next table hadn’t objected to us taking away the empty.
The bottle turned out to be a one-shot weapon, snapping clean at the neck, but it did the job. The guard staggered and fell forward into my arms. I dragged him out through the door, dumped him up against the wall, then went back inside and locked him out.
So far so good.
The inner door was locked against us too, but the security window, now unguarded, was our way in. Gil clambered across the counter and buzzed me through, then joined me on the other side.
He hooked a thumb back towards the guard post. ‘There’s a weapons locker in there,’ he said.
‘Guns?’ I gave him a pained stare.
‘Sidewinders. Tasers, maybe. Doesn’t hurt to take a look.’
‘Does if the locker’s fitted with an alarm,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve got something better in mind, but I’ll need a minute or two to set it up. Come on.’
He hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and followed me. I led the way around to the right, towards the steel door and Jenna-Jane’s basement Gulag. But I stopped before we got there, at the door with the keypad lock. Rosie Crucis’s door.
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ I told Gil, and I tapped in the code that Nathan had given me: 1086. I tried the door, but it didn’t give.
‘What the fuck?’ I growled.
‘Let me try,’ Gil said. He tapped in the same code, then a few more with less and less conviction. ‘No good,’
