The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,173

contained was humdrum, barely of interest even to the people who created it.

But one file had now become extremely important.

‘So how are we supposed to get in there?’ said Bianca. A high fence topped with razor wire surrounded the entire site. She put down a bag containing some of the items the pair had bought. ‘And what does Levon’s puzzle have to do with anything?’

‘You’ll see,’ Adam replied, making mental calculations. The gap between the two rooftops was about sixty feet over the Gorman Building’s parking lot, but he needed something secure on the far side . . .

There was a cluster of boxy air-conditioning units set back from the roof’s edge. He squinted, trying to make out more detail in the low spill of light from the street lamps. Lines of shadow became visible: a slatted grille covering an air inlet.

‘Pass me the duct tape,’ he said, picking up the yellow plastic pipe and propping it on his rooftop’s air-con ductwork. As Bianca opened the bag, he lined the pipe up with the distant grille. Harper had many years earlier served as a gunnery officer aboard a destroyer; Adam now used that experience to bolster his own military training. It was a straightforward matter of judging distance and angles of arc to hit the target – the complicating factor was the nature of his ‘gun’.

Bianca watched as he set to work, securing the pipe in position with the strong adhesive binding before starting to connect together the cylinder of compressed air, the deflated inner tube and the valve with lengths of hose and more tape. ‘Oh, I get it!’ she exclaimed as the purpose of the random assemblage suddenly became clear. ‘You’re making a sort of air cannon.’

‘That’s right. It fills the inner tube with compressed air from the tank, then when it reaches a certain pressure the relief valve,’ he tapped the brass device, ‘blows and lets it all out in one go.’

‘Firing the footballs?’

‘Yeah. I’ll put the lead shot in them to give them some weight, then use the pump to inflate them just enough to fill the pipe without sticking in it. Then I attach the rope and the grappling hook.’

‘The hideous grappling hook,’ said Bianca, eyeing the ornate three-armed chandelier. ‘Will it be strong enough?’

‘It’ll do what I need it to do,’ he assured her. ‘When the pressure valve opens, it’ll shoot the ball across to the other roof, and pull the rope with it.’

‘Then you climb across to the roof?’

‘I climb across, yeah.’ His oddly smug smile told her that there was more to his plan than he was going to tell her for now. ‘Go back to the car. We’ll need to move fast.’

‘Do you know what you’re looking for inside?’

‘More or less. There’s a WORM disk—’

‘A what?’

‘WORM – Write Once, Read Many. Like a bigger and more durable recordable CD. It’s got the logs that prove Harper switched the fake itinerary for the real one.’

Bianca looked across at the Gorman Building. ‘When you say “more or less” . . . does that mean you don’t know exactly where it is? How many disks do they have in there?’

‘A couple of million.’ Her face fell. ‘Don’t worry – Harper knows how to get it.’

‘I hope they haven’t changed the filing system,’ she said. ‘Okay, I’ll be in the car. How long will you be?’

‘I don’t know. Keep watch – you’ll know what to do when you see me.’ He turned back to his improvised cannon as Bianca reluctantly headed for the ladder.

Harper’s eyes suddenly flicked wide open. ‘An air cannon.’

‘Sir?’ said Baxter.

‘That’s what he’s making, it has to be! The pipe’s the barrel – and the football’s like the cork in a popgun.’ There was a laptop in the Cadillac’s rear; Harper opened it.

‘Why would he need to build an air cannon?’

‘To fire the rope he bought over the perimeter fence, would be my guess.’ He hurriedly tapped at the keyboard, logging on to the secure USIC network via the car’s wireless link and bringing up a global map of high-resolution satellite imagery. He typed in the address of the Gorman Building, then waited for the results to download. ‘Yeah,’ he said when the picture appeared. ‘If he got on to the roof of the next building, he could easily shoot a line over from there. How far out are your teams?’

‘Spence’s team are right behind us. Fallon’s is a few minutes away.’

‘Tell Spence’s unit to send someone up to check the neighbouring