Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  “One of the Ang …” she began, then stopped. Could Akita hear? If she betrayed Iroel he wouldn’t be able to help Mari. “There’s a secret tunnel leading outside from the wooden wall,” she whispered.

  Ishihara had to lean forward to hear.

  “You’ll have to go through there. I can’t think of a way to bluff you out past the main entry.”

  “Where on the outside wall?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shot her a disappointed look. “Could take a while. And aren’t you being watched?”

  She nodded.

  “Are there cameras in the corridors?”

  She thought of Iroel and how he’d made her kneel as though praying while he made his offer. “Yes.”

  Ishihara swore, using a couple of expressions she didn’t know existed in Japanese.

  “All we can do is hope everyone is praying too hard to watch the monitors,” she said wearily.

  He stared at her hand before asking slowly, “Can you stop him from inside the thing?”

  She shook her head, the despair of her failures heavy in her stomach. “He’s been using it much longer than I have. I can’t do things in there like he can.”

  Ishihara nodded. “We’d better get out of here, then.” He bent down stiffly and picked up the cuffs and short length of chain that had bound his ankles. He folded it around his fist.

  “What’s that for?” said Eleanor.

  “There’s a guard on the door, right?”

  “You can’t attack him before we find the tunnel, it’s too obvious.”

  “What, then?” he growled.

  “We’ll get him to help us look.”

  She hoped like hell that Samael or suspicious Gagiel wouldn’t come and ask them what they were doing.

  She’d told the novice, the same pasty-faced, pudgy boy of about eighteen, that Ishihara confessed to her how an informer told the police there was a secret tunnel out of the factory. She also managed to convince him that rather than disturbing Adam-sama and the Angels in an important meeting, it would do wonders for his standing if he discovered the tunnel first.

  They started with the rickety cupboards at the end of the corridor, opposite the torture room, meditation room one. There was no sound from meditation room two, next door. In rooms farther away Eleanor could hear a murmur of voices chanting.

  “You, try and shift it.” Eleanor poked Ishihara rudely, for the benefit of the novice, and pointed at the cupboard. The pudgy teenager shifted nervously. He smelled as though he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. Ishihara rolled his eyes at her and put his shoulder to the first cupboard. It didn’t budge.

  “Looks like it’s bolted to the wall,” said Ishihara.

  “Don’t you know where it is?” whined the novice.

  Eleanor knelt and opened the second cupboard. The door stuck, and when she pulled harder, it opened with a tremendous creak. She winced at the volume of the sound and peered inside. Dust tickled her nose. There were four shelves, the bottom ones covered with a jumble of old boxes, brooms, and plasbags of toilet paper. No sign of a false back.

  She pulled at the door of the last cupboard. The damn thing was locked. She rattled it once. A pity the interface didn’t give her superhuman strength as well.

  The novice peered over her shoulder. “I think we should call Gagiel-sama. It’s not here.”

  Ishihara pushed the boy aside and squatted next to her. He rattled both doors open a crack and inserted his fingers, then pulled one door, with his foot against the other for leverage.

  Half the door came away with a report that echoed down the corridor.

  “It’s here!” The novice jiggled his feet in excitement.

  Inside the cupboard they could see a gaping black hole, big enough for an adult to crawl in. A damp smell of earth and mold seeped from it.

  “Come on,” said Ishihara.

  “I can’t go with you,” hissed Eleanor. “I have to stay with Mari.”

  Ishihara half groaned, half cursed, then without giving any sign, kicked the novice’s legs from under him with a vicious scissors movement.

  “I’ll be back.” His legs disappeared into the tunnel.

  “Prisoner escaping!” yelled the novice, trying to grab Ishihara’s legs.

  “Let me help.” Eleanor bent down and deliberately got in the way. She sprawled with the novice’s legs tangled in hers. His elbow hit her ear, and she saw stars.

  “Hey!” Two green-clothed figures sprinted past them and wriggled after Ishihara.

  Eleanor drew her legs away from the novice and stood up against the wall. Her vision was still blurry, and her side ached where she’d knocked it on the corner of the cupboard. Please god he’ll get away.

  Several more novices rushed out of the training room beyond Meditation Room Two and four or five acolytes got in their way as they ran full tilt around the corner. Everyone cursed and yelled.

  “What have you done?” Samael pushed past the acolytes, grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him. He was as taut as a coiled spring.

  “N … nothing.” Her voice quavered convincingly. “Ask him.” She pointed at the pudgy-faced novice, sobbing around a bloody nose where Ishihara must have kicked him. “I tried to help stop the prisoner.”

  Samael cocked his head then laughed, a short, flat sound. “It doesn’t matter. They got him anyway.”

  He tugged her by the elbow up the corridor and made her wait until Gagiel and two green-clad novices pushed a dirty and staggering Ishihara down the alcove stairs.

  “Nobody’s going to help you,” sneered Samael. “You’re on your own.”

  They pushed Ishihara through a door marked TOILET, then through another door into a small room with partitions instead of walls, and open wooden boxes stacked at one end. Hot water pipes ran up the wall and it was warmer than in the corridor.

  He was thrust to the floor and his arms wrenched backward. One of the novices cursed, then looked around guiltily.

  “What’s wrong?” said the other.

  “I forgot to bring cuffs.”

  The other groaned. “We’re supposed to be praying. The main session starts any minute.”

  “We could just knock him out.”

  The other rummaged in one of the boxes. “No violence before a session. We’d have to wash and everything.” He held up a meter-long length of heavy cord. “This belt will do.”

  They tied Ishihara’s hands to the water pipe, leaving him sitting down.

  Two girls opened a door in the partition next to the boxes. They were naked and wrapped in towels, their hair damp. When they saw the men they shrieked and tried to stretch the towels to cover themselves further.

  “Shush,” said the first novice. “What are you doing?”

  “Purifying,” said the taller girl self-righteously. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re going to be late. They’ve already started praying.” The two men left.

  The girls squealed in horror and began to drag white clothes from one of the boxes.

  The novice poked his head around the door to add, “Don’t talk to him. He’s a filthy unbeliever.”

  The girls stared at Ishihara, then at their clothes in heaps on the floor. “We can’t get dressed in the shower, it’s wet,” said the shorter girl.

  “I’ll shut my eyes if you like,” he offered.

  “We can’t trust unbelievers.” The tall girl pursed her already-small mouth.

  “Oh, come on.” The other girl, round-faced and darker-skinned, bobbed her head at him. “Please.”

  Ishihara shut his eyes. He could hear the rustle of clothes and muffled whispers. One of these girls might be McGuire’s niece. He hadn’t paid much attention to her photo at HQ and anyway, without hair who could tell?

  “What do you believe in?” said the shorter girl’s voice right beside him.

  Ishihara opened his eyes. The girls were dressed in white trousers and tops. He wondered fleetingly if Junta’s group wore white. I
t seemed unlucky, dressing like a corpse.

  “When you die,” persisted the girl, her eyes serious, “do you think you get born again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So you’ve got to go through lives again and again. Adam says we won’t have to do that.”

  Ishihara shook his head. “I won’t know the difference. It’s not me Ishihara that’s reborn. Ishihara dies.”

  “For good?”

  “Well, I won’t remember anything.”

  They both stared at him. “How can you believe that?” she whispered

  “It gets easier as you grow older.” The thought of himself eventually dissolving like salt into the sea didn’t seem such a terrible thing anymore.

  The girls backed away. He cursed himself at losing the chance to talk them into helping him. He tried to smile. “The results of my actions don’t die, though. The same as if you help me …”

  But they were gone. They probably wouldn’t have helped him anyhow. And for some reason it had been important to answer the girl’s question honestly.

  He wriggled his hands and tried to run them up and down the pipe. He must get out and warn the police. Every government department depended on the information in the NDN. Thousands of companies paid to use the same information. Tens of thousands more probably used it illegally … He grinned at the empty room. At least people like Sakaki would be free of debt if all those records crashed.

  Not only would all those organizations be unable to function without the information; but if the Angels released a virus, it would spread to billions of users worldwide. He groaned inwardly. Even the great Net Crash of 2008 would seem tame in comparison.

  The pipe didn’t budge, even when he threw his weight against it. All he achieved was rope burns on his wrists. His head throbbed and he needed a drink.

  He tried all the methods that worked for detectives on TV, like hooking something useful with his feet, but the only things within reach were the girls’ wet towels. He knocked on the pipe in case someone above ground could hear. He didn’t have a penknife in his pocket, nor did the cubicle have any glass to break into rope-shearing shards.

  Finally, he sat still and listened. What he’d give for a smoke … He didn’t have the energy to be worried, not even about McGuire.

  He thought he could hear music, but couldn’t be sure. He wondered how Adam planned to do the sabotage—wire all his devotees into a kind of human network? He blinked away a bizarre image of them all sitting in a circle chanting, joined not by clasped hands but by wires from head to head. The most he could hope for was that Adam’s grand plan would backfire somehow—surely a group of paranoid airheads couldn’t bring a civilized nation to a standstill.

  The inner door opened slowly. It was the short, dark girl who’d been there before. She was dressed, but she still held a towel, which she wiped across her face.

  She held her finger up to her lips before he could say anything, then stretched and flipped the towel over the top of one of the partitions. It snagged on something high on the wall that he realized belatedly was a security camera.

  She began to untie the rope around his wrists. ‘Taka told me how Niniel poisoned them.” In response to his look of puzzlement she added, “My friends. And Adam doesn’t care.” She pulled angrily at the rope. “I hate him for that.”

  “The four students?”

  She nodded, grimacing at how tight Ishihara had pulled the knots in his efforts to escape. “I didn’t believe Aunt Eleanor, and now she’s in trouble because of me.”

  “You’re the niece.” Ishihara managed to wrench one hand free, then the other. “Your aunt is helping the police. You’d better come with me.”

  He stood up, then had to hang on to the pipe as his vision blurred for a moment.

  She shook her head. “I have to help Aunt Eleanor.”

  “If you’re not here, they can’t use you to blackmail her.”

  “If I’m not here, there’ll be nobody to watch out for her. I have other friends here, too.” Her jaw set stubbornly.

  Ishihara groaned inwardly. Like aunt, like niece. He didn’t have time for arguing. “How did you get away from the session?”

  “I told them my period started.” She rolled her eyes at his embarrassed silence. “They’re very strict about pollution.”

  She pushed him toward the door. “I think the tunnel will be unguarded, because Iroel told me to go there about four prayers into the session. He’s planning to get out. Good luck.” She turned and slipped through the inner door into the shower room.

  Ishihara opened the door into the corridor and peeped out. He couldn’t see any guard on the tunnel and the cupboard door was closed again.

  He took a deep breath, let it out, and strode along the corridor as if he belonged there. As he got closer, he could see that the broken half of the door was taped shut. He peeled off one end of the packing tape but the lower edge of the door had been nailed on. Fortunately not with … very strong … nails. Crack. He didn’t wait to see if the sound of the boards splintering brought any response from the rooms.

  He crawled into the tunnel, and pulled the door shut behind him. It sagged open immediately, but no more than a hand’s width. He waited in the dark for a moment, listening. A faint scraping noise came from the warehouse end. It sounded like a cardboard box being dragged across the floor. As his eyes got used to the dark he could see a light flick on and off beyond the end of the tunnel up in the warehouse.

  He crawled as soundlessly as he could, pausing between each movement. He couldn’t hear anyone breathing or moving at the entrance to the tunnel, although his own breath rasped so loudly in his ears he’d be lucky to hear anything.

  In the warehouse a figure moved across the shadowy maze of crates and boxes. Ishihara slid out of the tunnel and crouched flat against the wall beside it. He didn’t have time to play hide-and-seek. Adam could be wrecking the NDN that very moment.

  The side door of the warehouse that he’d kicked open before lay to his left, the main door farther along the wall.

  He waited until the torch flickered at the other end of the warehouse, then moved toward the side door. The distance was only about five paces, but he knocked his toe on a box, stumbled, held on to another to keep his balance, and pushed it onto the floor with a crash. The damn thing sounded like it was full of porcelain.

  He scrambled for the door and put his hand on it.

  A torch beam centered on his chest.

  “Stop there.” The figure behind the torch was tall but skinny, the voice an uneasy baritone. The man held out his hand, and Ishihara could see the glint of metal. He’d never hit Ishihara in the dark, holding a flashlight.

  Ishihara turned the door handle, ready to run, then rattled it with a curse. Locked. He paid more attention to the weapon, a handgun with a silencer. The man held the light beam squarely on Ishihara’s chest. Would he risk hitting the ammunition here?

  Ishihara dived sideways and felt something ping past his cheek. He hit his elbow painfully on the corner of a crate and wriggled desperately backward. Bloody hell.

  He heard the man curse, men the sound of a metal door squeaking. Yellow light from the street streamed onto the boxes.

  Ishihara bobbed upright. The main door hung open.

  Curses, scuffling, grunts of pain in the yard. Had the Angels put guards there as well?

  Ishihara poked his head out cautiously. A knot of men rolled on the cracked asphalt. One of them wore police blue, one of them a different uniform. Another seemed to be in pajamas. The man who had attacked Ishihara struggled underneath them all, his silver robe further hampering his efforts to escape.

  A fourth man clopped around them in excitement. He clutched the handgun in inexperienced hands and wore only a pair of boxer shorts and heeled slip-ons.

  Ishihara ran over. “Police.” He took the gun out of the man’s hand and checked that the safety catch was on.

  The scrum on the ground split up. The Angel lay facedown, with the
other two men on his legs, while the policeman clicked handcuffs onto his wrists.

  “Lend me your phone,” Ishihara said to the constable. “I’m Assistant Inspector Ishihara, West Station. I’ve been their prisoner in there.” He jerked his head at the warehouse. “I have to contact Prefectural HQ.”

  The constable straightened up, peered at Ishihara’s face, then held out his phone. “We’ve already called for backup. These gentlemen”—he pointed to the two civilians—“called us at 2:05 and said they heard a shout in the yard here.”

  Could have been me, thought Ishihara. I tried to make as much noise as I could before they caught me in the warehouse.

  The man in pajamas stood up, his face shining with sweat. “This is the fellow I saw hanging around earlier tonight,” he said, pointing at Ishihara. “Are you sure he’s a policeman?”

  Ishihara glared at him and tapped Beppu’s number.

  “The security company opened the gates.” The constable pointed to the uniformed man still sitting on the Angel’s legs, who nodded amiably at Ishihara.

  “We found ammunition in the warehouse,” continued the constable, “and called the station.”

  “Hello?” said Beppu’s voice suspiciously on the phone. “Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, Ishihara.”

  “Where the hell have you been? I got a stored message from you a few minutes ago but your phone’s off-line. We also had a call from the station near you to say they’d found a stash of…”

  “I’m there now,” interrupted Ishihara. “Let me talk to Funo.”

  Pause. The sky over the top of the building opposite was lightening. The time on the phone said 4:17.

  “Funo here.” Her voice shook and engines rumbled in the background. “We’re on our way over. What’s your situation?”

  “I’ve found the Silver Angels. They’re in an underground area, seven or more rooms, two exits into ground-level buildings. At least”— he thought for a moment—“twenty violent suspects, possibly more. Twenty or more nonviolent. I recommend gas but…”