Plug swept him with a small bug detector.
‘I’m getting the hang of your business, don’t you think?’ Plug said, grinning, as the beeping started.
Chin was keen to keep tabs on him. In the hem of his jeans, they found a wafer-thin bug the circumference of a pound coin. He unwound the window and dropped it into the storm drain – perhaps it would end up in the Fleet? He shivered at the memory of the cold underground river even as his eyes raked his surroundings for the human surveillance team. He didn’t believe for one second they would have thrown him out of the car and left him to it but that’s what they wanted him to think, that’s why they’d thrown him out instead of pulling up and letting him out. Chin had advised him to search St Bride’s and the Chinese agent wasn’t one for free advice, which meant if North found Syd, or indeed any sign of Syd, Chin intended taking it from them.
Buzzing up the side window, he shrugged himself into the clean grey tee, sweatshirt and black jeans Plug had brought along. He caught a momentary glance between his friends as they caught sight of the scrapes and bruises blossoming all over his torso. If he flipped down the overhead mirror it would show a couple of belting black eyes, he imagined, so best not. ‘Yan is dead,’ he said, strapping on the shoulder harness and sliding the semi-automatic into it. Fang let out a small murmur of pity. She looked shattered, he thought, but then it was past two in the morning and she was only a kid.
‘How?’ she said.
‘Badly. Chin doesn’t know where the tablet is, but he said that Tobias was hiding something at St Bride’s – something that our government wouldn’t want us to find.’
‘It can’t be Syd,’ Fang said. ‘Not if Tobias hid it, because he had Syd with him at the museum. Does Chin know what?’
North hesitated. There’d been something in Chin’s eyes, a particular kind of glee that made him think Chin knew that it was nothing good.
‘I think so – yes.’ He pulled on the same down jacket and high-vis vest the others were already wearing. He clipped a faked ID to the toggle of his zip.
‘What’s his game then?’ Plug asked.
North shrugged. ‘I’d say he’s in bad odour for letting Syd slip through his fingers. Maybe he’s trying to muddy the waters, or maybe…’ – his eyes snagged on several dark shapes in a 4x4 along the way from them – ‘… he’ll let us run with it and see what we turn up.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Fang said. ‘We shouldn’t be doing what he wants us to do.’
‘He threatened you.’ He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what Chin had threatened to do to her.
The girl snorted, then went quiet.
North had no intention of letting Chin or his mutant octopus anywhere near Fang, but the best way to keep her safe was to find Syd. He had no leverage without it. And they had to start somewhere. ‘The sewers Esme and I used to escape the museum took in the Fleet river – but there was no sign of Nietzsche when the police went down there. Maybe he surfaced around here?’ North turned to stare out of the rear window. ‘There has to be some connection between what went on at the museum and whatever’s hidden in there. If Chin’s right, the dearly departed Tobias Hawke was a man with a secret.’
He’d had plenty of time to recce St Bride’s, but they drove by the main entrance anyway. Breeze blocks filled the stone arched gateway of the avenue that led to the church, sandbags at the bottom. There was no way in or out without a tank to break through the freshly built wall. ‘Biohazards present. Removal under way. St Bride’s is closed until further notice’, a sign explained, alongside a list of nearby churches and their service times.
‘There’s a side entrance,’ North said.
Loops of barbed wire ran the length of the walls surrounding the churchyard, with its headstones, leafy trees and wooden benches. Behind the wire and more warnings of biohazards, St Bride’s steeple rose, tier after tier, into London’s night sky. They passed cast-iron railings and reached the side gates with their stone columns topped with carriage lanterns. And as they did, North glanced back down the lane for passers-by, but there was no one. He breathed a sigh of relief – even with lanyards and high-vis vests, clipping through the swirls of wire looked downright odd at this time of night.
An industrial chain held the gates fast; it was padlocked. The delicate tools of a locksmith – or burglar – were already in Plug’s hand. ‘They modelled wedding cakes on that spire,’ Plug told Fang as he took hold of the shackle, sliding a pick into the padlock’s core and moving it this way and that, feeling for what North knew were the retraction springs. There was a quiet ping. Unravelling the heavy linked chain, Plug stood back to let them pass before following. He reached out his arms to thread the chain back through the metal bars of the gates. This time, though, Plug rested the padlock on the side of the church rather than the street, its shackle only loosely closed together with the lock. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but it was good enough to persuade the casual observer. The three of them moved along the path as a group. Keeping it natural. Slow. Making an early start – very early – on official business.
‘You realize Granny Po will strangle the pair of us with razor wire if anything happens to Fang,’ Plug said under his breath.
‘Does she have any razor wire?’ North asked.
‘When the cheese cutter went missing, I checked her knitting bag. Three skeins of cream wool, a pattern for an Aran jumper, and a garotte.’
‘We’ll make sure nothing happens to Fang then,’ North said, and wished he felt as confident as he sounded.
At the church door, Fang held up her hand. She bent her head over her phone, her glasses gleaming with reflections of page after page, which she seemed to absorb at a glance, her fingers barely pausing as she zipped between one site and the next. North watched. For Fang, code was her first language; she knew the highways and byways of cyberspace as well as he knew London. How fast would a machine like Syd clear a path through it all? North shifted from foot to foot, glanced at his watch. By his reckoning, they had just over eight hours left before Syd took over the world.
‘Home Office bioscientists are worried…’ – she said, lifting her head – ‘… that an archaeologist turned up a live smallpox virus in the bones in the ossuary. They don’t want to risk a pandemic so they’ve imposed a quarantine, hence the barbed wire and shouty signs. How badly do we want to know what’s in here?’
The three of them stared at the sign nailed to the church door. The skull and crossbones stared back. The words ‘Risk of contagion and disease. Keep out.’
‘I’m asking because he couldn’t get any uglier,’ Fang said, nodding in Plug’s direction. ‘And nothing seems to kill you, not even a bullet in your head. But I’m cute and the world needs more not less of me, so I’m going to be right hacked off if I catch smallpox, get ugly and die.’
‘I don’t believe a word,’ North said, rattling the door. It was locked.
‘But you’re stupid. Smallpox is one of the most devastating diseases out there,’ she said. ‘And smallpox has an incubation period of between seven and seventeen days, so if we’re wrong about this, the three of us could walk out of here and carry a disease that has officially been eradicated straight into the heart of London. Maybe that’s exactly what Chin wants? Should we tell Hone that Chin claims there’s something here, and leave it to the spook brigade?’
North considered the idea. Hone had fired him – that meant the one-eyed man had no prior claim to any information North obtained as a private citizen. And Hone wouldn’t be grateful – he would be incensed that North was still involved. Hone might even lock the three of them up to make sure they didn’t get in his way. Telling Hone was not an option.
They read the answer in his face. Plug took out his lock-pick set again as Fang rolled her eyes and went back to her screen. ‘I’m researching a cure for smallpox,’ she said.
There was a quiet rub of metal against metal as Plug hunkered down to use his lock and pick on the church door. ‘My grandad was here during the Blitz when the Nazis flattened St Bride’s – even the bells melted with the heat.’ He extracted one pick and swapped it for another, as he moved his hand back and forth, freeing up the lock on the doors. He pushed it open and they stepped inside. Plug cursed as he caught sight of the internal doors – these ones of glass and wood. ‘Broke his heart.’ Plug eased a key from an enormous keyring into the keyhole. He put his shoulder against the door and leant his weight into it as he turned the key a few degrees clockwise, then anticlockwise. ‘He was a compositor, used to bang out the type when this street was all hot metal and newspapers.’
‘Newspapers?’ Fang said, not looking up from her screen. ‘Information written in ink and printed on pieces of folding paper. No moving pictures. Am I right?’
There was a thunderous crack as the door finally gave, which North thought was just as well as it drowned out Plug’s Anglo-Saxon reply.
They emerged into the back of the empty church. Moonlight poured through the immense leaded clear-glass windows and over the geometric black-and-white marble floor, which stretched to the altar and the crucified Christ. North’s immediate impression was one of the sacred. ‘Londoners have worshipped on this site for 1,500 years,’ Plug said, keeping his voice low.
‘Our Father who art in Heaven…’ – Fang pressed her hands together as if in prayer – ‘… I smuggle coke when business is slow. For lines is the Kingdom, the pills and the blow. Amen.’ North caught a glimpse of what looked like a floor plan on her phone as she moved away and started walking towards a stairway at the back of the church. ‘The crypt is this way. Let’s go catch smallpox, moron-people.’