Lone Wolf - Robert Muchamore Page 0,61

way.’

Then in the background the other guy said, ‘Kiss my arse.’

Ning felt really nervous now. The two guards couldn’t have been more than ten paces from the door because she saw shadows moving on the blind almost immediately. After a couple more seconds the latch turned inside the door, followed by a click as the man pushed a button to release the electronic bolt.

‘Evening,’ the guy said, as the door came open. He was nearly six feet tall, and stocky rather than fat. The air coming from inside was humid and Ning caught a whiff of marijuana plants.

‘Free pizza’s the best kind,’ the man said, giving Ning a smile.

She held out the pizza box, but the man didn’t take it straight away. Instead he rummaged in the front pocket of his jeans until he found a two-pound coin.

‘Couple of pounds for your trouble,’ he said.

As he reached forward, Ning swung the pizza boxes to her left. This meant the guard inside didn’t see as she pulled a short-handled 75,000-volt cattle prod out of her jeans. The dangerous end made sharp cracking sounds as it hit the man’s thigh. Ning squealed in fake shock as he fell forward, knocking the pizzas out of her hand as he hit the ground, roaring in pain.

Ning’s rapid movement with the cattle prod meant that even the guy on the ground didn’t get what had happened.

‘Oh my god!’

The other guard’s voice came urgently through the intercom. ‘What was that?’

Ning made her voice all shrill. ‘He’s shaking. I think he’s having a heart attack, or something.’

Then she went for her mobile. ‘I’m calling an ambulance.’

The guard inside didn’t like the idea of an ambulance on his doorstep. ‘Hold off, I’m coming out.’

‘I just felt this massive spasm,’ the guy on the ground said, clutching a dead leg as the other guard reached the doorway.

This man was a proper giant. He went down on one knee, grabbed his colleague’s wrist and started feeling for a pulse. While he was focused on this, Ning sneaked out the cattle prod again and zapped the back of his neck, then his calf as he sprawled forward.

The guard who was already on the floor now understood what had happened, but he couldn’t react because his giant colleague had just landed on top of him. Still in a crash helmet, Fay started a sprint across the car park. By the time the gasping men had rolled away from each other, they had two girls aiming handguns at their chests from point-blank range.

‘Inside,’ Fay ordered.

The first man tried to stand up, but Ning yelled at him. ‘Down,’ she ordered. ‘Crawl.’

Ning got an intense blast of humidity and the pungent marijuana smell as she followed the crawling men down a short corridor. A room off to one side had the door ajar, and was dominated by a long desk lined with monitors showing CCTV images from both inside and outside of the building.

A thick black curtain had been hung across the end of the corridor, and Ning was almost blinded as she stepped into a growing area lit with huge banks of lights. The flooring comprised spongy green carpet which had once been used for bowling. Lines of cannabis plants grew in long plastic troughs.

The former bowling green had been divided with plywood partitions. Fay opened a door into another area and immediately realised that each room contained plants in a different stage of cultivation.

‘Where are you going?’ Ning asked. ‘We’ve got to tie these guys up.’

Fay kept her pistol on the two guards as Ning swiftly trussed their arms and legs, then used a pair of leather straps to tie each of them to a concrete post.

‘Keep the noise down or I’ll gag you as well,’ Ning warned.

As the tying up got finished, Warren arrived from the swing park. His gaze was drawn to what had once been the club’s lounge. Five PCs stood on a traditional mahogany bar, behind which lay a network of computer-controlled pumps and dozens of clear plastic tubes.

Warren sounded awed as he spoke through his balaclava. ‘This shit looks state of the art.’

‘Hydroponic cultivation,’ Fay explained. ‘Water and fertiliser are in direct contact with the roots, so plants grow much faster than in soil. It looks like each room has a crop in a different stage of cultivation, from seed germination, to plants in different growth phases and finally drying the end product. The computers control the amount of light, water and fertiliser that gets sent to each