Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [103]
As soon as she was fully around the curve Mancuso twisted the control stick, turning the craft sideways in the tunnel.
The hovercraft hit the tunnel walls with a grinding of metal that stopped as its twisting motion brought the rubber skirts against the concrete. The G-8 gave a final shudder, trying to turn in the impossibly narrow space, then locked solid. The engine note spun into a high‐pitched squeal as the hovercraft hung there motionless, blocking the tunnel from wall to wall.
Mancuso switched the engines off before they could shake themselves to pieces. The roof of the craft was tilted at a steep angle and it was difficult climbing out of the hatch. Mancuso sealed the hatch cover behind her and hung for a moment from a grab bar. She dropped to the floor and jogged back up the ramp. Before she rounded the curve back into the loading bay she looked back over her shoulder and saw the luminous question mark glowing dead centre in the tunnel.
In the loading bay she paused to retrieve her gun before going back up the steps into the store.
* * *
Breen was crouching beneath shelves featuring a hundred different brands of shampoo, watching the secure area of the store. Mancuso knelt beside him. The secure area was thirty metres ahead and above them, on the mezzanine, with escalators running up to it on three sides.
Mancuso could see movement among the shelves. At least three people. There had been four motorcycles in the loading bay. Plus however many had crewed the hovercraft. The mezzanine overlooked quite a wide spread of the drugstore floor space.
It would be hard to get any closer without being visible to someone looking out over the railings. Actually getting up there unseen was going to be even harder. Breen put his head close to hers.
‘I’ve got it all figured,’ he said.
* * *
Mancuso rode up on the escalator lying down. Flat on her back on the grooved metal stairs, her gun held above her. She watched the egg‐crate fluorescent lights slide by on the slanted ceiling. On either side of her safety brushes edged the moving stairs. She saw small trapped bits of debris. Candy wrappers, coins, a child’s lost glove. She hit the mezzanine floor shoulders first, gathering her knees to her chest and rolling clear of the escalator to land in a combat stance. Hiding behind a pyramid display of Polish vodka she realized that she was wet. The floor all around was wet. There were fragments of broken glass everywhere; the necks and sharp semicircle bases of bottles. Mancuso remembered the crashing sound she’d heard, when she’d looked up and the little guy had made his move. She hunched lower behind the vodka display as a man came by.
He was carrying a packing carton on one shoulder. There was a silhouette of a bottle drawn on the side of the carton and ‘handle with care’ warnings in several languages. The man moved to the back of the mezzanine and disappeared among the shelves. Mancuso could hear voices back there, and a humming noise that was growing louder. The voices of three men and one woman, maybe two. There was a metallic thud and the humming stopped. The sound of metal doors sliding open. Freight elevator. More voices and the sound of packing cartons dragging as they were loaded into the elevator.
Mancuso checked the analogue sweep hand on her watch. Ninety seconds. She carefully refastened the velcro covers on her wristbands. McIlveen had once forgotten and left his wristbands open after sedating a suspect. He’d been changing his clothes in the station locker room, wearing just his boxer shorts. He’d leaned forward to clip his toenails or something and the wristband had come in contact with his knee. The guys coming on the next shift had found him like that, sitting there in his boxer shorts, deeply unconscious.
Sixty seconds. McIlveen’s leg had been