Dead Lions by Mick Herron Page A

looked into his glass again. “I sometimes wonder how much I’ve forgotten. But I don’t suppose it matters now.”
    Admissions of weakness were not on their usual agenda.
    River put his glass down. “It’s getting late.”
    “I hope you’re not going to start humouring me.”
    “Not without a bulletproof vest.”
    “Be careful, River.”
    That gave him pause. “What makes you say that?”
    His grandfather said, “The streetlight at the end of the lane’s gone. There’s a dark stretch between there and the station.”
    Which was true enough, it turned out. Though River didn’t believe that was what had been uppermost in his grandfather’s mind.
    Cal Fenton was glad no one was around to hear him yelp like a girl in the dark:
    “Jesus Christ! ”
    Though mostly he was worried there might in fact be someone around.
    It wasn’t a generator blow-out. The towers were humming; all that information safe and snug in electronic cocoons. The lights were on a different circuit, and it might just be a power cut, but even as Cal’s mind reached for that possibility, his bowels wereacknowledging that if there ever was a power cut, it wasn’t going to happen two minutes after he’d noticed the door was open, or heard a scuffing noise.
    Ahead of him, the corridor was empty of everything but shadows, which were larger and more fluid than usual. The stairs ascended into bigger blackness. Gazing into it Cal’s breathing came faster, and his grip on the torch tightened. He couldn’t guess how long he stood there: fifteen seconds, two minutes. However long it was, it came to an end when he hiccuped; an unexpected, belly-deep hiccup which surfaced as a squeak—the last thing Cal wanted was to face an intruder who’d just heard that. He turned. The corridor behind him was empty too. Heading along it, he broke into a jog as unintentional as his recent paralysis; this, then, was how Cal reacted in an emergency—he did whatever his body told him to do. Stand still. Wave a torch. Run.
    Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence …
    Back in the office, he flipped the lightswitch, but nothing happened. The telephone hung on the wall opposite. Swapping the torch from his right hand to his left he reached for it, and the receiver moulded to his grip with the exact smooth plastic shape of a baby’s bottle. But the comfort only lasted a moment. In his ear, there was nothing; not even the distant-sea sound of a broken connection. He stood, torch pointing nowhere. The door, the possible noise, the lights; now the phone. Taken together, there was no chance he was still alone in the facility.
    He replaced the receiver carefully. His coat hung on the back of the door, and his mobile was in its pocket. Except it wasn’t.
    First thing Cal did was check his pockets once more, a little more quickly, and the second was to do it again, more slowly. All the while, his mind was racing on different levels. In one gear, he was re-picturing his movements on getting to work; checking his mental negatives, in case they revealed where he’dleft his phone. And in another, he was unfolding what he knew about the facility. Info-dump, the techies called it. Dumping, he’d learned, was what you did with a near-infinity of digital knowledge which nobody was going to want to consult again, barring remote circumstances involving lawyers. If not for that, the digital archives stored here would have long been erased—though erased wasn’t the word he’d heard used; that had been released , and when he’d heard it, the image was of information being uncooped like a flock of pigeons, bursting into the air to the sound of applause …
    The phone was nowhere. Someone had broken into the facility on Cal’s watch; had fixed the lights, killed the phone, stolen his mobile. It was unlikely that having done this, they’d quietly left.
    His torchbeam wavered, as if this would be the next thing to go. Cal’s throat was dry, and his heart