The Drone

by Adrian Magson

  ‘No. We get them in England. My dad’s always complaining about the mess they make of his car.’ She reflected on how odd it seemed, seeing the birds here in numbers, dancing to their own tune as if everything was quite normal and not threatening to go to hell at any moment. And about as different to the other flying objects they were searching for as it was possible to get. ‘What did Brasher mean,’ she asked, ‘when he said don’t go in cold?’

  Dave hesitated, his face set. ‘Let me show you.’ He went to the helicopter and reached into the back. He took out a small, flat alloy briefcase and flipped the catches.

  Inside were twin Sig Sauer 229 semi-automatic pistols. He handed one to Ruth and added a spare magazine, then did the same to Vaslik. Ruth checked the mechanism and load, set the safety and put the pistol and spare mag in her coat pocket. It felt intrusive and cumbersome, and she hoped she wouldn’t have cause to use it. But better safe than dead.

  Vaslik did the same with his while Dave handed Ruth an envelope. It contained some folded papers and a permit for a weapon, already showing her photo and thumbprint.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s for show in case we get stopped. Andy doesn’t need one – his licence to carry is still valid. If anything happens leave all the talking to me. The papers are indemnity forms in case you shoot anyone – especially me – and a non-disclosure agreement for any and all branches of law enforcement we might connect with.’ He smiled. ‘The government likes to think you won’t go off and make a million by spilling the beans about federal or state agencies and their methods of operation.’

  ‘So now I’m working for the US Government? How is that legal?’

  ‘It’s open to interpretation, I admit. But if we run into some bad guys I’d rather have you alive to argue the point afterwards than to have to ship you back in a box because we didn’t take the precaution of giving you the option to defend yourself.’

  ‘Fair point. And the photo and thumbprint? How did you get them?’

  ‘Tom Brasher said he fixed it once he figured which way things were going. Some guy named Aston sent them over from your London office. He figured you might need them. He said there was a possibility you two were being followed and it might be connected with this business. It’s better than nothing and only to be used in extremis.’

  She signed the permit and papers and put them away in her coat pocket. ‘Let’s hope we don’t need them.’

  ‘Amen to that. But anything’s possible. If Chadwick was lifted and is being held against his will to do this thing, I doubt the people holding him will let him go without a fight. I’d rather be ready for that.’ He flicked open his windcheater and they saw the button of a semi-automatic against his side.

  ‘This isn’t your fight,’ Vaslik pointed out. ‘And we might be chasing shadows.’

  ‘Go suck on it,’ Dave retorted good-naturedly. ‘If Tom thinks this is for real, then it’s for real, and I haven’t had fun like this is ages. Now, are we doing this or standing around wasting time?’

  Ruth and Vaslik set out along the access road, keeping several feet of space between them, while Dave hung back and off to one side, ready to support them. The likelihood of there being a threat was slim to zero, but none of them was ready to take that chance.

  The hangar was set back about a hundred yards from the runway, and still bore the remains of an ancient hoarding that must have once carried a name. Other than the faint outline of letters that might have spelled field, the wood had been scorched by the fire and was unreadable. The remains of the main doors stood open on their tracks, and as they approached they could see right through the building to a small rear door in a cinder-block wall surround standing open in one corner. A line of windows showed down one side of the hangar, the glass cracked and clouded with soot.

  They stopped thirty yards back, listening and tuning into the atmosphere. Other than the distant sound of a bird singing, the only other noises were the faint hum of a breeze through the open roof and a clack-clack of a loose strip of wood hanging down by the main doors.

  Ruth wondered if they were being watched from beyond the airfield boundary, but quickly dismissed it. She didn’t feel that itch that came from imminent danger. If ever a place seemed dead, this was it, especially now that fire had come to seal its fate for good.

  ‘I’ll take the back,’ she said, and fingered the Sig in her coat pocket. ‘You want to do the front?’

  Vaslik nodded. ‘I’ll give you time to get round there. Watch the windows down the side.’ He turned and signalled their intentions to Dave with hand movements, and got a nod in return.

  Ruth set off down the side of the building, walking steadily and relying on her peripheral vision to spot any movements. As she entered a patch of shadow cast by a section of cinder-block wall that still standing, she suppressed a shiver. It was just an old building, she knew that; but places like this carried their own aura, gathered by all the years of their existence and the people who had passed through it and left a trace of their time here. She didn’t feel in any danger, exactly, but the sheer size of the place now she was walking in its shadow, as damaged as it was, seemed to tower menacingly over her, dwarfing everything around it.

  She reached the first of the side windows and peered through a hole in one of the panes. She saw a room about fifty feet by twenty that might once have been an office or work area. The frame of a metal chair and trestle table stood in the centre, with a blackened, smouldering pile of what looked like sheets of board further along. But no people. Then she was past and heading for the rear of the building, skirting clumps of grass littered with abandoned sheet metal, concrete, tubing, wiring and other unnameable detritus, along with pieces of the roof and wall fabric that had fallen in the fire.

  The access door was still in one piece, held open by a wedge-shaped lump of metal Ruth recognised as a wheel block. It was rusted and pitted with age, and had probably been there since the last plane took off and vanished over the horizon. She peered round the edge of the door and saw Vaslik standing at the front of the building. He looked tiny in comparison to the size of the opening. He gave her the go-ahead and she stepped through the door, heading for the office.

  The flutter of birds darting about overhead made her stop and look up. It reminded her of some of the counter-terrorism training facilities she had been through in the Ministry of Defence Police. Abandoned warehouses and factories, most of them, used to simulate and perfect siege techniques, this wore the same air of desolation and decay, only with the added confusion of nature’s own decorations. Melted snakes of electrical wiring and lengths of chain that had once held strip lighting were hanging from the roof struts like jungle lianas, while an abundance of weeds and grasses below, now crinkled and discoloured with the heat of the fire, had once been growing up to meet them. What little remained of the solid lower walls bore a network of cracks and fissures, with daylight showing through where the mortar had burned out and the cinder blocks had split open.

  A thin mist hung above the floor where underlying pockets of moisture had been overheated by the flames, and the soot layer was spotted with the tiny craters where the incoming breeze was turning it back to droplets. Over on the far side of the hangar was a layer of wooden boards, and above it a rusted chain and pulley device. An inspection pit, she guessed. Her nose twitched at a different smell and she saw a small furry animal carcass lying in among the weeds, bloodied and ripped open, but showing no signs of fire damage. The predator must have been disturbed by their arrival and slunk away into the surrounding brush to await their departure. The carcass was now being feasted on by an army of flies that moaned and moved as they sensed her presence.

  She swallowed hard and kept moving. A carpet of grit underfoot crackled as she walked, echoing off the walls like tiny firecrackers. She stopped and pulled out the Sig, checking the open space above the office area. If anybody was waiting, that’s where they would be.

  A whistle from Vaslik. He was halfway
down the hangar, standing on an oil drum. He was checking out the same area, his gun held in both hands. He shook his head to give the all-clear and jumped down.

  Ruth stepped up to the office door and nudged it open with her foot. It swung back with a groan then stopped. She peered through the gap at the hinges; no bad person waiting to ambush her. Just a thin veil of smoke, trapped in the confined space.

  She moved inside.

  The room had been burned back to concrete and metal by the fire, with its ceiling gaping open and still smoking. A few of the windows had survived, along with some of the original braided electric wires hanging from the wall where plug sockets had once been fitted. The room was empty of furniture save for the framework of the chair and trestle table, and beyond it she could now see what were not sheets of board but flattened cardboard boxes. Close by the window was a dark bundle of blankets and wires, oddly untouched by the fire. Stepping forward, she checked the table, which had a heavy-duty iron frame and the remains of a battered and oil-stained Formica top. She touched the surface gingerly with her finger, expecting to pick up years of wind-blown grit beneath the soot, but coming away with just the faintest trace of blackness.

  She felt her breathing quicken. This was the place, she just knew it. A dust-free table, burned cardboard boxes – and the blankets that must have been used as blackouts. Whoever these men were, they had set fire to it but the damage hadn’t been anywhere near complete.

  She heard Vaslik enter the room behind her. Stepping past to the pile of burned cardboard, she nudged the sheets aside and saw the familiar label where the flames hadn’t reached. FedEx Express. She took out her cell phone and took photos of the shipping numbers; it was probably unnecessary but it would give Brasher more evidence that what they were following was real and not some figment of their imagination.

  ‘The table’s been used recently,’ she said, ‘and those blankets didn’t grow here out of nothing. They look like military surplus.’

  He nodded and turned away. ‘You’re right. There’s a mess of footprints out on the main floor, too.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell something?’

  ‘It’s a dead animal. A rabbit, I think.’ She was about to suggest going to look at the other building when her phone buzzed.

  It was Dave Proust. ‘Folks, I’m inside the old workshop. You really need to come see this.’

  36

  The cooked smell of fruit and food was the first thing to hit them, followed by the underlying sourness of unwashed bodies. But it was the result of heat, not direct fire. If the intention had been to burn this place down, it had failed. Where the outside skin of the workshop had been badly damaged, the inside stud walls were mostly untouched, although the ceiling was hanging down in places and the air inside the room was choking and still.

  After the vast space inside the hangar, it was quite a contrast. Dave Proust kicked the door wide open to disturb the air and let in more light, and handed them each a pair of rubber gloves.

  ‘Looks to me like a prison cell,’ Ruth said, and indicated handcuffs attached to the bed.

  Dave nodded. ‘I guess we know who was being held here. But the really interesting bit is over there.’ He was pointing to the other bed, and an area of browned blood splatter on the pale wall behind it, with a hole in the centre. ‘Somebody stopped a bullet.’ He indicated the blankets, which showed a scattering of brown spots of blood. ‘From the area of residue and the location of that hole, I’d say he was standing in front of the bed when he got hit. It was probably a slight wound; there’s no sign of heavy bleeding that I can see, even on the floor to the door, unless they wrapped him up in something first.’

  Ruth and Vaslik agreed. He was right. Unless the shooter had taken unusual care to staunch the flow of bleeding, the victim must have walked out of the shed under his own steam. Otherwise why bother if they were going to burn it down?

  Ruth turned back to the bed with the handcuffs and lifted the mattress and pillow. Both were stained and filthy, but there was nothing to see. Whoever had been cuffed to the bed – and she figured Dave was right and that it had been James Chadwick – he had not been in a position to conceal anything that might help them find him.

  Vaslik checked out the other bed and lifted the pillow. It revealed a large hunting knife in a scabbard, the leather stained by years of sweat and dirt. Using part of the sheet to prevent his fingerprints contaminating it, he pulled the scabbard away; the knife looked old but the blade itself was clean and shiny, and razor sharp. Whoever had owned this had looked after it.

  He looked at the bed. ‘No cuffs on this one, and he had a weapon. So he wasn’t a prisoner.’ He frowned. ‘Yet he got shot? That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Unless it was Chadwick,’ Dave reasoned. ‘Although I’m betting it was a low-level member of the crew posted to look after him. If Brasher gets prints and DNA off this we’ll soon know the answer.’

  Vaslik nodded at the boxes of water bottles and canned food in the corner. ‘It looks like they had provisions for a while.’ He stepped closer and pulled out a box containing bananas and apples, mostly blackened and rotting, the juices oozing through a hole in the cardboard. Some of the cans were bulging and looked ready to explode, and he left them alone. He turned back to the bed with the bloodstains, then inspected the lock on the door. ‘Why would they make somebody share this dump with a prisoner? He wasn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe it was someone with no choice.’

  ‘I guess.’ Vaslik toured the walls and stopped, looking down in the corner. He stooped and came up with a DVD player. The casing showed some impact damage and was missing some bits but the screen was intact. He pushed the casing together and pressed the PLAY button.

  Surprisingly, it worked.

  The three of them stood in absolute silence as the footage rolled by. The pictures on the screen were made all the more threatening by the complete absence of commentary.

  Within the first few seconds Ruth recognised what she was seeing. She felt the hairs stir on the back of her neck. ‘That’s where I met Elizabeth Chadwick. It’s in Chelsea.’

  The footage of Ben’s school spoke for itself, and nobody spoke until the DVD clicked off. The implications of the threat held over James Chadwick’s head were all-too clear: those closest to him had been under surveillance for a while, including the apartment block where Valerie DiPalma lived. It didn’t take much to image how vulnerable and powerless he must have felt being presented with this footage.

  ‘The team will bag this up,’ Dave concluded. ‘We’d better step out and leave the rest as it is. I’ll call it in.’

  Ruth felt relieved to be back on the outside and breathing in deep gasps of fresh air. It must have been bad enough for the guard in there, but intolerable on a shocking scale for James Chadwick, knowing all the time that there were men out in the world within reach of his son, wife and Valerie DiPalma, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. The sense of desperation must have been tearing at his insides.

  She shook her head. There was something bugging her and she couldn’t put her finger on it. But now she was out in the open, it was beginning to come to her. Whatever it was had been scratching away at the back of her mind ever since first stepping through the rear door of the hangar.

  Then she had it: the smell she and Vaslik had both noticed. It had been too strong to be from a small dead animal, especially in that vast space. She’d subconsciously dismissed it because the aroma was followed closely by seeing the carcass. Yet it had lingered on the air more than she would have thought normal.

  She said to Dave, ‘Wait. Before you do that there’s something I want to check. Give me a couple of minutes.’

  She jogged over to the hangar and walked through the main doors to the side where she had seen the boards over the inspection pit. It was probably nothing but since she was here, she might as well check.

  She ducked past the chain hanging from the overhead pulley and nudged one of the boards a
side with her foot. Was that a heavy layer of soot?

  The board moved with surprising ease. As it did so, what she’d thought was soot seemed to lift off and rise into the air. Then she realised what it was as a dense cloud of flies swirled around her head like a mini-storm, buzzing furiously. Her stomach heaved with revulsion as she felt hundreds of tiny bodies bouncing against her cheeks and getting tangled in her hair in their desperation to escape. But she was too stunned to react immediately by the sheer scale of what she glimpsed lying in the hole.

  ‘My God. Slik! Dave!’

  The two men came running and stopped dead when they saw what she was looking at.

  ‘Now we definitely call it in,’ Dave Proust said abruptly, and clamped a handkerchief over his face. ‘This place is a major crime scene. He’ll need to advise Homeland Security, too. No way is some pencil-head going to ignore this.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Vaslik paused to flick some of the flies out of Ruth’s hair, then took out his phone and called Brasher’s number. He was patched through immediately to Brasher’s cell phone, as he was on his way to Alva to interview Donny.

  He took a couple of minutes to describe what they had found at the airfield, then came to what lay in the inspection pit. ‘At least four males, possibly five, it hard to tell until they’re pulled out of there. They look to me like Latinos, and some are wearing working clothes as far as we can see, including boots and gloves. Like construction workers.’

  ‘Out there? Constructing what?’

  ‘I’m coming to that.’

  ‘Can you tell how they died?’

  ‘They were shot at close range with an automatic weapon. There are dozens of shell casings in the pit around them, as if the men were ordered down there, then hosed down.’

  ‘How long ago do you estimate?’

  ‘Could be a couple of days to a week or more. With the temperature down there and the fire and flies… I’m only guessing. The bodies are a mess.’