Once through the doors, they split. Granny Po moved to take the heavier trolley, before she plodded down the ramp towards the basement and the mainframe. She was wearing sheepskin slippers, North noticed. Baggy socks wrinkled around skinny ankles under the oversized overalls, and she didn’t look backwards.
‘Do you think she can get him in?’ Plug asked. ‘Because if that bald coot can’t give you the access Tobias had, this is over.’
When Plug went to pick up his mate’s van, he’d found the old lady already sitting in the back, knitting. Since she had managed to chain herself to the row of cinema seats bolted to the floor, it seemed altogether simpler to let her come along for the ride.
They watched as a pair of bespectacled employees moved to one side to let the trolley past before Granny Po mowed them down with it.
‘Could you stop Granny Po doing whatever it is that Granny Po wants to do?’ North said. ‘Especially if that’s finding Fang.’
‘Fair point. She could totally take me,’ Plug said. ‘Let’s hustle.’
They parked one of their trolleys to block the door into the gleaming unisex bathroom and pushed the other inside. Plug flipped up ‘Cleaning in progress’ signs to make the point, and held up his hand to stop a skinny techie – his trousers still held tight to his ankles by his bike clips – talking into his Bluetooth. ‘You don’t want to go in there. I tell you, mate – we do not get paid enough.’ The cyclist looked Plug up and down and decided not to push the point. He backed away, one step at a time, his eyes wide and still fixed on Plug’s slab-like face.
Inside the stainless steel and glass bathroom, North drilled out the screws to a panel as Plug flipped open the tablet with the building plans.
As the last screw popped, Plug took hold of his arm. ‘Stay in contact. I don’t want to think of you crawling round the walls of this place next Christmas.’
Neither did he, North thought. ‘Okay, and once they’ve hacked the bio-rig on the mainframe, get Bald Paulie and Granny Po out of here. Right?’
Plug’s eyes said he hated the plan, but he punched North hard on the shoulder, which North took to be agreement.
North slid his head and torso through the hole he had opened and heaved himself upwards. The space went dark and the noise of an electric screwdriver buzzed behind him as Plug closed up the wall again.
It was pitch black and hot as hell. He winced as his forearm caught on an exposed section of the huge metal piping, and he heard the sizzle of his own scorching flesh. In his ear, Plug’s voice instructed him which way to go. Scrabbling for purchase on the wall, his fingers clawed at the breeze blocks, the toes of his boots knocking out fragments as he climbed. He didn’t look down. He was going upwards, towards Tobias’s office, when he should be going downwards towards the bunker, and the conviction took hold of him that he was getting further away from his goal rather than closer. That time was moving too fast, and that Fang was going to die if he didn’t hurry the hell up.
*
It took eight minutes to negotiate his route through the wall cavity. It should have taken five, but in the wall space of a meeting room, he slowed when he caught the sound of Esme’s voice. ‘… emergency system in place… what Tobias would have wanted… mindless violence… owe it to Tobias… can only hope that Syd’s found before it’s too late…’ He guessed she was talking to her management team. He considered knocking, telling her Syd was right beneath her feet, asking for help. But he was the man who’d dragged her away when she thought she should have stayed. The man her uncle had fired for incompetence. And he didn’t have the time. He kept climbing.