The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  THE FIFTH AND SIXTH FLOORS of the building were open-plan offices occupied by a diamond-trading firm. There were twelve desks on the sixth floor, each with a chair behind it. Each desk had a screen and a keyboard, and then the usual tangle of junk—photographs, pen holders, stacks of paper—that the employee who sat at the desk had collected. Milton had studied the floor plan for the building and knew the rough layout: there was a small kitchen over there, on the north side of the building, male and female toilets next to that, and two screened-off offices where management would sit. They had no interest in this floor save for the opportunity it would afford them to descend into the building.

  They paused to equip themselves from the bag that Vladimir was carrying. They each had a workman’s belt with a selection of clips and hooks attached around the circumference. Milton put his on. He took a shielded flashlight from the bag and secured it to his belt, then collected a headband that was fitted with a lamp. He put it on his head, leaving the torch unlit. The lamps were unshielded, and they would only use them once they were in the lift shaft.

  Marcus led the way, walking between the desks until he reached the lobby area. The others followed. There was a reception desk, an old sofa and a coffee table, and a sign on the wall that advertised the name of the business. Marcus summoned the lift while his brother located the breaker box. The lift arrived and Spencer shut off the power, stranding the elevator car at the top of the shaft.

  Milton opened the door to the stairs and led the way down to the fifth floor. He emerged into the lobby and, shining his flashlight carefully, checked the rest of the floor. It was similar to the one above it: desks, a break-out area, a separate conference room formed by glass partition walls. It was empty, too.

  It would have been much easier if they could have taken the stairs to the first floor, but, as Fabian had noted, the way down was blocked with sturdy doors on every floor, and so they had decided that it would be quicker and simpler to use the shaft.

  Marcus was already working on the elevator doors. There was a small hole in the metal, barely larger than a penny. Milton knew what it was. An elevator usually had two sets of doors. The first set was on each lobby and the second was in the car itself. Both opened to allow access to the interior. Marcus took out a small drop key, inserted it into the door, and turned it. The lobby doors parted, revealing the empty shaft below.

  It was pitch black. Tripping the breakers on the sixth floor had also killed the power to the emergency lights in the shaft, leaving it just an inky black hole that swallowed their torch light before it had shone down more than six metres. Vladimir dropped his bag on the floor and Milton collected the harness, ropes and other abseiling equipment that had been stored inside. He used a double fisherman’s knot to anchor the rope to the handle of a door, slipped into his harness and tested that everything was secure. He slid the empty bag beneath the ropes to protect them from friction against the sharp edge of the floor, reached up for the lamp fitted to his helmet, flicked it on and looked into the shaft. There were pipes and bundles of electrical cables, junction boxes and components that were necessary for the safe functioning of the lift.

  He leaned back into his cradle and kicked out, letting out enough rope to descend two metres beneath the lip of the fifth-floor door. Most of the stress on the anchor was exerted during the first few metres of descent, so Milton lowered himself carefully. He looked down, shining his headlamp on the wall beneath him to identify any hazards, and then kicked again. It was dark and dusty and he suddenly felt very vulnerable. Each floor was around three metres from floor to ceiling, and then there was the basement. He was halfway between the fourth and fifth floors; that meant there was a void that was at least fifteen metres deep beneath him. If the Fabians decided that they had second thoughts and wanted to get rid of him, it would have been a simple thing to untie or sever the rope and leave him to plummet to the bottom. The impact would either kill him outright or break his legs; either way, he would be finished.

  He drew a breath and kicked again.

  His boots landed on the exterior doors of the fourth floor.

  He kicked again and then again, and the doors to the third floor passed him by.

  Milton fed the rope through the karabiner with an easy, practiced motion. It was a difficult descent through the murk. He was unable to see all the potential snags and hazards until it was almost too late, but he had managed more challenging abseils than this. He was a little out of breath by the time he reached the bottom, but that was it.

  He looked straight up and flicked his headlamp on and off two times. He heard the sound of the next climber clipping himself to the rope, and then the sound of boots thudding against the wall as the man started down.

  Milton unclipped himself, removed his harness and shone his torch back up to just above the external elevator door. There was a roller in the mechanism atop it, and the roller locked the door from the inside. Milton pushed it up. The external doors opened a couple of inches and Milton was able to force them apart a little more.

  No light was admitted into the shaft through the forced doors; it was just as dark on the other side. Milton shone his headlamp inside and saw that there was a security door blocking the way out.

  He heard boots thud against the surface of the lift shaft as whoever had followed him down reached the bottom.

  Milton turned, his headlamp picking out Marcus, and watched as he opened his bag to take out a battery-powered builder’s work lamp. The battery pack had three hours of life, and they had several spares. Marcus set it down on the floor and switched it on. The shaft was illuminated with a flood of light bright enough to reach up to the second floor. The third man was negotiating the descent. It was Vladimir. He was struggling a little with his harness, and, as he finally reached the bottom, Milton helped to release him.

  “First time I’ve done that,” he said, his accent coming through a little more clearly now that he was out of breath.

  “Get a move on,” Marcus said.

  Vladimir shrugged his rucksack off his back, opened it and took out a hydraulic jack. The security door just outside the lift operated as a roller, pulled down and locked into place by mechanisms that had been set into the floor. Vladimir took out a jemmy and, inserting the tip between the bottom of the roller door and the floor, struggled with the lever for a minute until he had bent the metal just enough that it was possible to slide the toe of the jack between it and the floor. The jack was an expensive piece of industrial equipment, rated with a maximum lifting capacity of over twenty-five tons and more than powerful enough to handle the task at hand. Milton stood back as Vladimir switched it on. The metal groaned as the toe was pushed up, the sill creaking and then buckling as it was bent up and out of shape. Vladimir switched the jack off, repositioned it under the newly opened space, and activated it again. The jack forced its way up to full extension, buckling the door until there was a gap beneath it that was more than large enough for a man to slide through.

  There wasn’t enough space for Spencer at the bottom of the shaft, and he was waiting above for the signal that it was clear to descend. Vladimir removed the jack from beneath the door and placed it out of the way. Marcus slid beneath the door first, reaching back in to take his bag from Milton. Vladimir went through next. Milton gave a quick whistle to signal that Spencer could come down, and then followed the others beneath the door.

  He looked. It was familiar to him from the day before when he had been shown down here by Michael. There was a small space of around three square metres before it was curtailed by a second security door, this one barred and more substantial than the one they had just forced. The walls were bare, save for a fire extinguisher that was fixed to a bracket and a noticeboard to which was pinned health and safety information. The light from the work lamp in the lift shaft passed through the opening beneath the buckled roller door, but it was dim and Marcus augmented it by taking out and lighting a second lamp.

 
; Vladimir appraised the door. “That’s not going to be a problem,” he said.

  Milton went up to the door and looked through the bars. The basement corridor extended for ten metres, with a large metal vault door on the right-hand side.

  He heard Spencer as he descended the shaft and dropped down to the floor.

  Milton turned back to the door. Vladimir took out the cordless angle grinder that Milton had been carrying, got down on the floor and set to work. Just like the jack, they had not skimped on the equipment. The grinder was a high-quality DeWalt unit, and the blade sliced through the bars without difficulty. The operation created much more noise than when they had forced the first door, but Milton was content that they were deep enough below street level for most, if not all, of it to be muffled. Vladimir cut through the first bar, sparks flying out, and then moved onto the second, third and fourth. It took twenty minutes to cut through all of them and, when he was done, he put the grinder aside and turned to Milton.

  “You look like you can handle yourself. Give me a hand.”

  Milton made sure his gloves were on tight, wrapped both hands around the first bar, and pulled. It was strong and difficult to bend, but as Vladimir joined in they were able to yank it back until it was pointing at a forty-degree angle to the others. They repeated the feat for the other bars. Milton was sweating when they were finished, but the fruits of their labour were obvious: the bars had been rearranged so that there was plenty of space for them to slide through.

  Milton went first.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  THE DOOR BEYOND was a much more serious obstacle. The roller door and the barred security door had been simple enough to bypass, but the door to the vault was of another order entirely. Milton recalled it from his visit yesterday. It was a top-of-the-range Chubb vault door, eighteen inches thick, with two large wheels and armoured hinges. The steel cladding that protected the exposed sides of the door was a mould, with reinforced concrete poured directly into it. The door was square, easier to suspend than the iconic round doors in the images that banks used to use in order to demonstrate their security. It was secured with massive metal cylinders that protruded from the door into the surrounding frame. Holding those bolts in place was a combination lock. The lock had two dials that controlled two locking mechanisms. Both locks had to be dialled open at the same time for the door to be unlocked, and no single person had both combinations. Both key holders had to be in place before the door could be opened.

  It was an impressive obstacle. Milton guessed that it would have been possible to remove the door or to cut through it, but it would have taken hours—or possibly days—and they would have had to bring in a lot more equipment than they could have comfortably carried.

  The Fabians’ plan was to go around it instead.

  There was enough space for all of them in the corridor. Marcus, Spencer and Vladimir set up work lamps, laid their bags down and removed the equipment inside. They had a Hilti DD350 diamond core drilling system. The drill bit was a hollow tube, half as long as Milton’s arm, with clusters of diamond teeth fixed to its circumference with a strong resin. The bit was slotted onto the drill and secured in place. There was a power point on the wall, and the drill was plugged in. They had two tripods with a guidance rail suspended between them, and these were set up so that the drill bit was pressed flush against the wall. Vladimir wound the ratchet to position the bit against the surface.

  “Water,” Vladimir said.

  They had a portable two and half gallon water supply, and the unit was attached to the drill with an extension hose.

  Vladimir switched on the power and looked to Marcus for final approval. When he received it, he squeezed the trigger and started to drill. The operation made much less noise than Milton had anticipated. The diamond teeth bit through the concrete easily, and the motor did not need to work particularly hard to punch it through. Vladimir worked carefully, drilling a few inches into the wall and then withdrawing again. The hollow bit was full with a cylindrical cross section of the wall, much as an apple corer would remove a plug of apple. He removed the concrete core, cleaned out the bit, and then cut ahead again. The water from the supply unit sprayed directly onto the drill bit, damping down the dust that would otherwise have been thrown up.

  The first hole took twenty minutes, much less time than Milton had anticipated. The water pooled on the floor, a dirty slurry that washed over their shoes.

  Vladimir moved the rig, positioned the bit against the wall next to the freshly excavated hole, and started again.

  There was nothing for Milton to do except wait.

  The operation took just over three hours to complete. The aperture, when it had finally been finished, was small. Milton guessed it was no more than fifty-five centimetres across and forty centimetres from top to bottom. The wall was fifty centimetres thick. It was little more than a slot.

  Milton looked at the others.

  “I’ll go first,” Marcus said.

  He stepped up to the opening, put his head and shoulders inside—there was no obvious space on either side of him—and slithered ahead. “Push me,” he called back, and his brother and Vladimir helped, raising his legs and impelling him forward until his hips were halfway into the breach. Milton heard him grunt with effort, wriggling up and down until he managed to slide forward enough so that his widest point was safely through the gap. He slid ahead, dropping down to bear his weight on his hands and then clambering on so that his legs were all the way through. It had taken a minute. Milton wondered whether he would manage the same feat and, if he became stuck, what they would do. He was bigger than Marcus. The prospect of negotiating the opening was not appealing.

  Vladimir went through next. Milton and Spencer collected the bags with the rest of their equipment and passed them through the hole into the vault.

  “Your turn,” Spencer said to him.

  Milton knelt down next to the hole. He looked through and saw row upon row of boxes arrayed across the wall opposite. The opening was just higher than his waist, and he extended his arms and pushed ahead, sliding his shoulders through and then allowing Spencer to lift his legs and push him. The sensation of being so constricted was exquisitely unpleasant, and he was very aware of the concrete pressing at him on all sides. He wriggled ahead, quite sure that his hips would jam between the walls. They did not. He angled his pelvis and shoved forward, first sliding the right side of his body ahead and then following with the left. Spencer gripped his ankles and shoved, and, suddenly, Milton was far enough through the opening to put his palms on the floor and bring his legs through, too.

  “Fat bastard,” Marcus said derisively.

  Milton stayed on the cold concrete floor of the vault for a moment and gathered his breath. He was going to have to get out again, and without help. Spencer slithered through the hole, his brother tugging his arms to ease him into the vault.

  “Good work,” Marcus said, “but we’re just getting started. These boxes are going to be tough to open. We need to push on.”

  “You want to tell us what we’re looking for now?” Spencer said, looking at Milton.

  “Photographs.”

  “A bit more specific?”

  “No. If you find anything like that, show it to me. I’ll tell you when we’ve found it.”

  Vladimir rapped his knuckle against the nearest box. “What about the other stuff?”

  Marcus grinned. “Into the bags.”

  #

  THEY HAD four cordless metal drills, four chisels and four short-handled sledgehammers. Marcus distributed them and then went to the back of the vault to organise the bags that they would use to remove their loot.

  Milton took a position to the right of the vault. He made sure that he was facing the drawers numbered 200 through 250. He had no idea in which box the files had been stored—indeed, he had no proof that they were even here at all—but this was the side of the vault that he wanted to be near.

  “Come on, ladies,” Marcus ca
lled out. “What are we waiting for? Let’s open them up!”

  They all set to work.

  Milton took the sledgehammer and slammed it into the row of drawers until two of the metal fasciae were weak enough to dislodge, offering easier access to the locks behind. He took a marker and inscribed three Xs on the lock: two were over each keyhole and the other was on the far left of the lock, next to the edge of the box door on the side opposite the hinge. He took the drill and drilled the two keyholes for an inch until the bit pierced the lock. He stopped, removed the drill and looked into the hole. He could see the locking mechanism. He drilled into the third X, pushing it all the way through until the bit was spinning without resistance. The lock bracer that was holding the door shut was broken, and, without it, the door swung open. He made a show of taking out the tray and examining the contents: a collection of old war medals.

  The others had tried different tactics to open the drawers, but Milton’s method was the fastest and he was the first to get at the contents inside. He removed the drawer from the cabinet.