Stronghold Security was deserted. Nick checked the downstairs rooms, ran upstairs, looked in every office. The place was unlocked, wide open and empty, although a couple of the offices looked as if they had been hastily abandoned rather than tidied up for the day. The control room in particular worried him. Those headphones hanging from the desk. The radio, still turned on and crackling from time to time.
Where the hell was everyone?
He went back downstairs. Only the ringing of the phone at Reception broke the silence.
Should he answer it? Nick leaned on the desk for a moment, indecisive, and then the thoughts he’d been trying so hard to avoid for the last few minutes suddenly overwhelmed him.
Tayla had been involved with Rhythm Town.
That meant Tayla had been involved with Paul.
Nick remembered arriving back from work early on that dreadful morning after the robbery to find the security door broken and the front door forced, its lock splintered.
A guard from the neighbourhood watch was standing outside. Tayla was locked in her bedroom, alone and hysterical. She told him the robbers had broken in, but fled before they’d taken anything of value. She’d heard three shots, then two more, but didn’t know who had fired them or where.
Neighbours later confirmed the pattern of gunfire.
Tayla refused to get the police involved, and she was so adamant about it that at first Nick feared the worst – that the robbers had raped her before they fled.
He was consumed with guilt that he hadn’t been there to protect her when she’d needed him the most.
Then he discovered the cartridge casing, wedged deep between the mattress and the headboard. Its presence was inexplicable. He hadn’t dropped it, that was for sure. Somebody had, though, and for a long while after that Nick wondered with uneasy suspicion whether Tayla had been with another man that night, and whether it was her lover who’d fired the shots that scared the robbers away.
When Tayla wasn’t around, he examined the room from floor to ceiling, but found no bullet holes, no sign of any fresh plastering or repair jobs.
If the man in Tayla’s bed had been his brother Paul, it would explain the absence of bullet holes in the walls, because he knew every one of Paul’s shots would have found their target.
Had Tayla planted the tracking device in his car the day she called him round to check the alarm and change the light bulbs?
Had she put the explosives under the Jeep’s bonnet?
He always left his car unlocked at her house, with the windows open, and never thought twice about it. God, the one person he hadn’t suspected must have done it all. Not Rachel, not Laki, but Tayla.
Nick rested his elbows on the desk and buried his head in his hands.
A soft voice interrupted his thoughts.
‘Baba?’
Nick looked up and stared, surprised, at the slender young black man who was standing in the doorway.
‘Baba, you must help me now.’ The man pointed to the brick building across the parking lot. ‘These people and Mama Rachel, they are locked inside there.’
‘Rachel?’ Nick hurried to the door and followed the boy outside. ‘In that building there with the big steel door?’
As he ran across the tarmac, Nick realised he could hear a faint drumming noise coming from inside.
The sound grew louder as he neared the door, although not much. It sounded as if somebody was hammering on the door from the inside.
‘Hello!’ he called.
He could hear nothing. He shouted again, louder, banged on the door in reply, and listened again.
‘Hello!’
More nothing, just the muted drumming noise.
The boy caught up with him and tugged urgently at his sleeve.
‘Baba, this way. We must be quick.’
Nick followed the boy round the corner, noticing he was using the wall to help pull himself along. What had happened to him? Never mind that – who was he, and why did he look so familiar?
The boy pointed up at a narrow window set high in the wall.
‘Perhaps you can talk to them there. These people, they are afraid. They need to get out. The man who put them in there, maybe he is coming back.’ He stole an uneasy glance at Nick. ‘The bad man. At first I thought he was you. Now I see I made a mistake. I am sorry, Baba.’
He held up a piece of wire for Nick’s inspection.
‘He tied our hands behind us with wire, then he brought us here. But me, I managed to get my hands out of the wire. Then I used it to get the car open and I escaped. I hid from him, but I saw what happened.’ He pointed to the strongroom door. ‘I have tried to pick the lock already, but it is too difficult.’
Nick found a ladder and a hammer in a storeroom behind the building. The boy introduced himself as Sipho, and then Nick realised he was Khani’s brother. But he’d seen him somewhere else, too.
Looking more carefully at Sipho’s face, the memory flooded back. He’d noticed him on one of the occasions he’d visited his dad in Modderbee. He remembered the lad staring at Nick from behind the dirty glass of a prison visiting booth, those distinctive slanted eyes wide and terrified.
Sipho held the ladder while Nick climbed up.
The sky had clouded over, which made it easier for him to see through the thick, dusty glass and into the gloomy room.
He gripped the window sill tightly as he saw what was inside.
Tayla lay prone on the ground, her face in her cupped hands. Near her lay another man he didn’t know at all. Unconscious or dead, Nick couldn’t tell which.
Rachel and a dark-haired man in a black suit stood hammering on the door with their fists over and over again. Their movements looked frantic, desperate.
‘Hey! Over here,’ Nick yelled. He waved his arm, but nobody noticed.
He lifted the hammer and pounded it on the window, closing his eyes against the splinters he was sure would explode from the shattering glass.
The hammer bounced back, almost flying from his grasp, the force of its rebound numbing his fingers.
Safety glass, bulletproof glass, something special for sure. Great.
Nick called down to Sipho to hold the ladder securely.
Bracing himself against its flimsy rungs, he whacked the hammer down again with all his might. Safety glass wasn’t unbreakable. It was just more difficult to break. Bulletproof glass consisted of layers of glass with plastic laminate glued between them. Again, not impossible to hack through, just designed to stop a bullet.
He pounded the glass with the hammer and tore at it with his pocket knife until it gave and then broke. He wrestled it away from the frame. The window was double-glazed. Another layer, another challenge.
As he broke through the second layer, an alarm began to shriek. The noise was deafening.
Rachel and the dark-haired man turned away from the door and stared at him, shouting something. It didn’t help because he couldn’t hear them over the alarm’s clarion call.
Now Nick recognised the dark-haired man. He’d seen him earlier that day, driving out of Stronghold’s gates. He was Ramsamy, the Indian auditor who’d been the first to smell a rat at his father’s security business. Nick had met him at the trial. He remembered Ramsamy as a good guy, appreciative of Nick’s efforts and concerned about the fact he was testifying against his family.
Now he was locked inside the strongroom with the others.
He braced himself on the ladder and raised his hands high in a ‘What’s going on?’ gesture.
They waved at the door, made urgent signals. Then Rachel pointed to one of the cashboxes that stood against the wall. She mimed a countdown with her fingers – three, two, one. Then she whirled her hands around her head and made a throat-slitting gesture.
Nick got it. The boxes were filled with some kind of explosive, and it was going to blow soon.
He didn’t want to think about what damage that quantity of explosive would do in such a confined space. And the cashboxes themselves would disintegrate, their sturdy metal exteriors splintering into deadly shrapnel.
How much time did they have?
The alarm wailed in his ears. As Nick fumbled with the window sensors to see if there was any way of turning it off, the ladder wobbled scarily. When he looked down, he saw it was because Sipho was no longer holding its base steady. The slender boy had vanished.
Something whipped past Nick’s head and bounced on the paving. He ducked instinctively, almost losing his balance. The ladder swayed in a long, unsteady arc but righted itself again.
With his hand held protectively over his face, he looked round.
Sipho was leaning out of an office window, a bunch of keys in his hand. As Nick watched, the boy hurled another set towards him.
Good thinking. Perhaps they could unlock the room. Nick’s heart lifted as he scrambled down the unsteady ladder and picked up the keyrings. With shaking hands he sorted them into order and rammed key after key into the slim keyhole.
None of them opened the door.
By now, Sipho had littered the paving with keys, but they all looked the wrong shape and size. For a door like that, Nick guessed you’d need a special key with a long shaft. These ones were all normal door keys or padlock keys. He tried a few at random just to be sure, but none fitted.
Abruptly, the alarm stopped.
The silence made his ears ring just as loudly as the siren had done.
‘This isn’t working,’ he called over to Sipho. ‘Come back.’
His voice sounded hoarse and unsteady. What could he do? The damn boxes could blow any moment now. He was sure they must be on a timer. How long would Paul have set it for? Long enough to make a getaway. Ten minutes, perhaps?
Nick shook sweat off his forehead. A crash of thunder startled him and he flinched. Ten minutes had been and gone. They must be on borrowed time now.
Searching through the pile, Nick picked up a set that looked like car keys. Perhaps they would open one of the big armoured vehicles in the parking bays.
Looking across at the transit vans, he had a final, desperate idea.