Shadow Creatures

by Andrew Lane

  It took Gecko a few seconds to process the words that Rhino had spoken.

  ‘You are going to do what?’ he asked, astounded.

  ‘I’m going to break into the warehouse, find the giant centipedes and take a sample of their DNA.’

  ‘You are going to break into a warehouse that is quite probably run by the Chinese Triads, and secretly take a DNA sample from a giant poisonous creature?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not without me,’ Gecko said.

  Rhino shook his head. ‘Not going to happen,’ he said firmly.

  Gecko pushed on. ‘Think about this logically,’ he said. ‘I am smaller and lighter than you, and probably faster. I am also used to high places. I can get up on to the roof of the warehouse and find a skylight that I can get through. There is bound to be one. No building that big is completely sealed, and it is old enough that there will be gaps between sheets of cladding, or broken windows, that I can use. Once I get in I can find a way for you to get in, and then I can keep watch for guards while you look for the centipedes. Alone you have a much smaller chance of success.’

  Rhino looked grim. ‘I still don’t think it’s a good idea,’ he muttered. ‘I’m meant to be responsible for the two of you. What if something happens to you while we’re out there?’

  ‘What happens to us back here if something happens to you alone out there?’ Gecko countered with remorseless logic. ‘By maximizing your chances, I am maximising all our chances.’ As Rhino continued to look grim, he added, ‘You know it makes sense.’

  Eventually Rhino nodded: once, briefly. ‘OK, then – you can come. But not you, Natalie.’

  The American girl held her hands up defensively. ‘Hey, I wasn’t even thinking of coming with you. Testosterone-fuelled gymnastics are your thing, not mine. But I really don’t think this is a good idea. These people are dangerous.’ She paused, looking from one to the other. ‘Look, what if,’ she said quietly, ‘we call in the police now? They could raid the warehouse, and in the confusion you could sneak in and get the DNA sample. Doesn’t that make sense?’

  Rhino shook his head. ‘Firstly, it’s likely that Xi Lang is paying protection money to the police, and they would either ignore anything we said or they would give him advance warning of a raid, and secondly, there’s a good chance that the animals we’re interested in would be impounded and might die while we were trying to get to them.’

  Natalie obviously wasn’t willing to give up. Gecko could tell that from the firm set of her jaw. ‘Let’s say the police are out of the picture,’ she said. ‘Isn’t there some other organization that we could contact to tell them about Xi Lang and what he’s doing? Anything that prevents you two having to go back in and that gets those animals out of there! I know you’ve got this boys’ machismo thing going, but these people are dangerous. I don’t want to be the one to explain to Calum that you’ve both been killed by Chinese criminals while searching for an insect.’

  ‘Arthropod,’ Gecko corrected.

  ‘I guess there’s the United Nations,’ Rhino said, shrugging, ‘but the chances of us just sneaking in on the back of any raid they make are slim, to say the least.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Look, Natalie, we’re not a law-enforcement agency. We’re an independent group of travellers who just happen to want some DNA. This isn’t our fight. I don’t particularly relish the thought of Gecko and me going in, but I can’t see any realistic alternative. We need to do what we need to do and get out. Someone else can deal with Xi Lang. It’s not our job.’

  Natalie was about to say something else, but changed her mind. Gecko saw her clench her jaw and stay quiet. It was obvious, however, that she was deeply unhappy. She glanced from Rhino to Gecko and back. ‘Actually, I’m not feeling too good. I think it might have been the smell of that warehouse. I’m going to go and lie down for a while.’

  Rhino nodded his agreement. ‘You go and get some rest.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s late afternoon now Gecko – we’ll get some rest as well, and meet back here at about eight o’clock. We’ll grab a quick bite to eat and then head out when the sun goes down. Best that we do this kind of thing in darkness, I think.’ As Natalie got up to leave, Rhino continued: ‘I’ll have a look on Google Maps to see what the warehouse looks like from above – maybe there’s a lower-level cabin at the back that would give you easier access to the roof. And I need to look for somewhere we can park where the car won’t be discovered, but where we can get to it quickly.’

  ‘Reassure me about one thing,’ Gecko said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Please tell me that we are just going to get a sample of the centipede’s DNA – not to retrieve an actual centipede.’

  Rhino laughed. ‘If I was going to pick up a pet,’ he said, ‘then it wouldn’t be a giant centipede, and I wouldn’t do it in Hong Kong. It’s just DNA – don’t worry.’

  Gecko smiled. ‘Later, then,’ he said.

  As he headed towards the lifts, he saw Natalie waiting.

  ‘You ready for your little expedition?’ she asked

  Gecko nodded. ‘There is only one thing that worries me,’ he said.

  ‘Only one? What’s that?’

  ‘I’m not sure that Rhino has thought through the difficulty of getting a DNA sample from a creature with a hard, thick exoskeleton . . .’

  Back in her room, Natalie stood by the window.

  Hong Kong was shrouded in mist. The office blocks and high-rise buildings materialized from it like geometric islands emerging from the cloudy waters of a lake. The hotel room was cooled by air-conditioning to a point where Natalie was shivering, but she only had to put a hand on the window to feel the heat pressing through from outside.

  She couldn’t pull her mind away from the warehouse, from the animals that she’d seen there pent up in cages too small or too dirty, and from that voice she thought she had heard calling out for help.

  A parrot. It had to have been a parrot.

  This was all wrong. Things like Xi Lang’s business, and the warehouse, shouldn’t be allowed in a civilized world. If people wanted to buy pets, then they ought to go to a well-lit, well-ventilated place where happy animals were cared for by trained assistants and there was a qualified vet on call, not something that looked and smelt as if it was one step up from a slaughterhouse. What was the mortality rate like among Xi Lang’s animals? she wondered. And if those animals had been ripped away from their natural habitats and their family – if they had families – only to end up as a trophy roaming around someone’s carefully manicured lawns, then maybe death was a preferable option for them.

  Her thoughts kept circling around in her head like lazy black flies, and somewhere in the background she could hear, like the tolling of some huge, cracked bell, the unspoken words ‘This is wrong! This is wrong!’ as a backdrop to her confusion.

  She held her iPhone in her hand, and her hand was by her side. As soon as she had got away from Gecko and back to her room, she had done an internet search on the words ‘United Nations’, ‘exotic animals’, ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘smuggling’. Within a few seconds she had the phone number for the local UN office dealing with animal smuggling. All she had to do was tap the screen and the phone would dial the number for her. It was that simple. She glanced at the slip of paper. This was a big step, but she had to do it. She had to. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself otherwise.

  Rhino would be furious, she knew, but she was doing it for him as well. He was dead set on going back to the warehouse and breaking in, despite the risks. He was so focused on completing the mission that he was blind to the dangers.

  Natalie had to stop him. She had to get the UN, or the police, or someone to raid that warehouse before Rhino and Gecko went back into danger.

  She walked across to the table where the hotel phone was located. She didn’t want to do this from her own mobile, just so she didn’t leave an obvious trail back to herself. The way hotel phones operated, the call could only be traced back to the ho
tel switchboard.

  She dialled the number.

  ‘Wei?’ a woman’s voice said.

  ‘Hello,’ Natalie said, ‘do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Can I help you?’

  ‘Could you put me through to whoever deals with the illegal import and export of exotic animals, please?’

  The request didn’t seem to faze the operator at all. ‘Please wait for a moment, and I will transfer you,’ she said.

  Natalie waited, still shivering but feeling a bit better about herself.

  Calum sat in bed, restlessly waiting, until the sun set behind the desert horizon outside his window and the sounds outside his room faded.

  His mind raced all the time, trying to work out his options. He was a prisoner, that much was certain, but the prison was comfortable and the bars were almost invisible beneath their padding. Nobody was threatening him – not directly, anyway – and he was being fed. The food was good as well – mainly TexMex specialities, where everything came with red or green chilli peppers. The problem was . . . well, one of the problems was . . . that he didn’t know what was wanted from him. He didn’t know why he was there, or what he had to do to get home again – if he ever could. At some stage, he presumed, someone would offer him a Faustian bargain, but he hated having to wait until they came to him. He wanted to be able to anticipate their offer so that he could think about his answer in advance.

  The useful thing was that he wasn’t in a hospital. If he had been, then there would have been nurses on duty all night. The fact that the sign behind his bed said Bed 1 indicated more than just the fact that he was their most important patient. It implied that he was their only patient, otherwise what were the odds that he would randomly have been given bed number one?

  So, if there weren’t any other patients, and there weren’t any nurses on duty all night, then the place probably went down to skeleton staffing overnight. He was, as far as Robledo was concerned, locked in his room, and he couldn’t leave. There wasn’t even an emergency button – they were banking on the fact that, having been examined, he wasn’t going to have any medical crisis before everyone came to work the next morning. At best there would be a security guard on patrol every couple of hours.

  Calum decided to test out his reasoning. At midnight he settled down in bed and pulled the covers up to his chin, and waited.

  At half past one in the morning, according to his watch, the door opened, spilling in light from the corridor. He glanced up, trying to look as if he had just been woken.

  ‘Wha–?’ he muttered.

  A uniformed security guard stood in the doorway. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ he said, and moved back out into the corridor. The door hissed shut behind him. The last thing Calum saw of him, he was turning right.

  So, one guard, on patrol, and probably only checking the rooms every couple of hours.

  Calum waited for ten minutes, then pulled the ladder-like sides out from his bed, swung himself round and moved across the floor to the door, using the sides as crutches.

  He got the tips of his fingers into the crack between the door and the frame, and pulled. The door moved towards him, the tongue of the lock having been prevented from engaging with the hole in the door frame by the sticky plastic strip he had placed there earlier.

  He stuck his head out and glanced along the corridor in both directions. Most of the lights were dark, leaving only the emergency lighting.

  Nobody in sight. More importantly – no security cameras that he could see.

  Dr Kircher, Dr Laurence and the nurses had all exited his room and turned left. He did the same, using the crutches to move down to a corner where the corridor turned left again. He poked his head round the corner.

  About halfway along the next section of corridor was what looked like a lift lobby and stairwell. Just before it was a desk in a wider section of the corridor, opposite what looked like a little kitchen area. The desk looked like a nurses’ station, but there didn’t seem to be anyone on duty.

  Checking behind him, just in case the guard was coming back, Calum scuttled down the corridor, swinging the makeshift crutches back and forth and wincing every time they went clunk on the carpet-tiled floor.

  He felt exposed in the middle of the corridor, like a cockroach running from the safety of one set of shadows to another.

  He got to the desk without being observed.

  There was no paperwork scattered around – he suspected that the Robledo Mountains Technology management mandated a clean-desk policy – but there was a tower PC stashed beneath the desk with its LCD screen blank, and more importantly there was a plastic rack filled with tablet PCs just like the one that Dr Laurence had been using to make notes on earlier.

  Calum glanced yearningly at the lift lobby, just the other side of the desk. The lifts would lead down to the ground floor, and there would be a door leading out into the open. There would be cars out there, and . . .

  . . . And that’s where the dream of escape would end, of course. He couldn’t drive, for two very good reasons. Firstly, he had never learned and, secondly, his legs were paralysed. He couldn’t operate the accelerator or the brakes.

  He sighed, still feeling the pull of freedom emanating like a magnetic field from the lifts and the stairs. He could phone for help, he supposed – what was the emergency code in America? 911? – but even if the operator believed him and sent a police car to investigate, the security guards would have a cover story.

  No, he had to be cleverer than that.

  He took one of the tablet PCs from the plastic rack. He turned away, then turned back again and took another one. He might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

  Tucking the tablets beneath his arms, he scuttled back along the corridor, round the corner and back to his room. He knew that turning the handle would make no difference, given his slight modifications to the lock, so he just pushed the door open and slipped inside, then let it hiss closed as he moved towards the bed, dumped the tablets on the sheets, climbed in and put the sides back.

  He glanced around, slightly panicky, to make sure that everything was exactly the same as it had been when the guard had looked in earlier.

  He was safe. He let his head sink back into the pillow in relief. His plan had worked – or, at least, the first phase of his plan. Now he just had to figure out a way to use the tablet PCs to get some kind of message out.

  He stashed one beneath his mattress, and held the other one in front of him. It seemed like a fairly standard design. He was pretty sure that, with the things that he had picked up from Tara over the past couple of months, he could get past whatever security protocols it had and perhaps even connect up to the internet.

  His fingers felt something on the other side – a sticky plastic label. Robledo did like their sticky plastic labels. It was probably just a security tag, or a serial number. He turned the tablet over to take a look.

  And felt his breath catch in his throat.

  It was a white rectangular tag, stuck to the back of the tablet, and it read:

  PROPERTY OF ROBLEDO MOUNTAINS TECHNOLOGY

  LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO

  A SUBSIDIARY OF NEMOR INCORPORATED

  CHAPTER eleven

  Rhino crouched in the shadow of the corner of a warehouse, just across the road from the back of Xi Lang’s emporium, and looked around. It was night, and as dark as it ever got in Hong Kong, with the neon lights of the island reflecting from the low cloud in a chromatic glow.

  Rhino was trying to match the things he could see from the ground with the view from above that he had memorized from Google Maps. Yes, that low cabin that had been fixed to the back of Xi Lang’s place was exactly where the computer image had said it would be, and the gap between it and the building across the road wasn’t any wider than it had appeared while they were planning this. Apparently, according to Gecko, the gap was narrow enough to jump, except that Rhino wouldn’t have done it on a bet. That, he reflected, was probably because
he wasn’t as young, as fit or as foolhardy as Gecko.

  Xi Lang’s warehouse didn’t have any drainpipes leading down from the roof, which immediately cut off Gecko’s preferred route of access. The few doors in its walls were heavy and locked – the only exception being the one at the front. Discreet visual and infra-red CCTV cameras were attached to the corners of the warehouse, scanning all the approaches. Rhino assumed that they would be continually monitored.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Ready,’ came a voice from behind him.

  Rhino turned his head. Gecko was dressed all in black, in clothing that was loose enough not to restrict his movements but not so loose that it would get caught on anything. His gaze met Rhino’s, he nodded once, and then he was gone, climbing up a drainpipe that was attached to the side of the warehouse in whose shadow they were sheltering. He climbed like a cockroach – fast and scuttling, pressed close to the corrugated metal wall. As soon as he reached the top, he squirmed over and was gone. Rhino knew that if he had tried it, the drainpipe would have peeled away from the wall under his weight, but Gecko was a lot lighter.

  Rhino waited patiently, picturing Gecko running back across the warehouse roof, turning round, judging distance and wind direction, then running full-tilt back the way he had come. Just as Rhino imagined that Gecko’s sprint had reached the edge, a black shape sailed silently across the gap between the warehouses. It was like watching an owl swooping between trees. A faint thud reached Rhino’s ears as Gecko landed on top of Xi Lang’s warehouse. He imagined Gecko rolling forward on the roof and coming up running to absorb his momentum, then slowing, turning and coming back to the edge.

  A black shape appeared, hunched against the neon-coloured clouds. Rhino saw a hand wave briefly, and then a rope appeared, snaking down from the roof. Gecko had wound it round his waist before climbing the drainpipe. Now he had apparently attached it to some fixed point on the roof.