Together, they headed off through the swing doors, down the corridor.
The room was a long one, high too, and from the end Traynor entered seemed stacked nearly to the ceiling with crates, some of them in evidence cages, each neatly padlocked. But about halfway along, the crates gave way to rows of shelving, no more than two feet apart, with an aisle running down the centre as far as the next set of doors, in front of which a wide area had been left empty, though large metal filing units lined the walls either side. Sean Donovan was halfway along a shelf full of cardboard folders: he was plucking them one by one, checking the top sheet, then—like a dissatisfied library user—dropping them to his feet. The spillage ran right back to the aisle, so when Ben Traynor reached him, it looked like Donovan was wilfully sowing disorder; turning a neat expanse of ordered history into a snowstorm of confused event.
Without breaking off from this task, he said, “Problem?”
“We have company.”
“Who?”
Traynor was already past him, heading for the doors to E Corridor, slipping his belt off as he ran. Looping it through the door’s handles he pulled it tight, buckled it, then turned his attention to the filing cabinets.
Donovan emerged. “Who?” he said again.
“Monteith’s crew.”
Donovan thought for a moment, then shook his head. “They’re lightweights, Ben.”
“They don’t have to be good, they just have to be numerous,” Traynor said. “Give me a hand with this.”
Donovan helped him tip a cabinet onto its side, then slide it in front of the doors.
“That’s not going to hold them long,” Traynor said.
Donovan said, “I don’t know. Just opening a door is a stretch for some of them.” He was already heading back to the shelf he’d been working on.
Traynor peered through the fraction of porthole window unobscured by the cabinet and said, “They’re here already. We’d better go.”
“I’m not running from those clowns. Not till I get what we came for.”
“Sean, look around. This place is the size of a fucking church. You could spend all week and not find it.”
The older man shook his head: he was out of sight, between the shelves, but Traynor could tell that’s what he was doing. “The catalogue numbers tell you where to look.
“What if all this is a set-up?”
“What would be the point, Ben? I was just out of prison, I was drinking myself half to death. And Taverner approached me, remember? It’s not like I was on a crusade.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“She’s a spook. You’d be mad to trust her. But she’s a spook with an agenda, and she wants to destroy Tearney as much as we do. For Alison, Ben. Remember?”
“. . . I’m not likely to forget.”
“So how long are you prepared to give this?”
Traynor said, “Okay, okay. As long as it takes.”
Gun in hand, he went back to the doors, observing fractured slices of motion from the crew outside through his paring of window. They looked like they were getting ready to mount an assault . . . He had been here before, it occurred to him, by which he meant not here but in just this scenario: hostiles two breaths away, and defences no thicker than a brick and plaster wall.
The difference was, the quality of the enemy.
He checked his gun again, though didn’t need to, and settled to wait. When they made a serious attempt on the door, he’d give them something to think about. But it was important to remember that they weren’t all clowns—one or two of the Black Arrow squad had been boots on the ground: Iraq, Afghanistan. If they were out there, he didn’t want to be loosing bullets in their direction, but that was a soldier’s life: you couldn’t always choose your enemies. Besides, Ben Traynor was no longer marching under a flag. The nearest he had was a photograph, of Captain Alison Dunn, and with the thought he kissed a finger and tapped his breast pocket. He could hear Donovan leafing through folders—plucking, glancing, discarding—but he let that sound fade into the background and focused on the world behind the blocked doors: alert, on duty, and tense as a trigger.
