The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,176

he already had a plan. He would return to his home, where a fire – some booby trap set by the intruders, or so it would seem – would destroy it. Again, there would be questions, but they would be much easier to handle. In this scenario, he was the victim, attacked by a paranoid and unbalanced rogue agent in his own home. The Persona Project would take the blame for the mental breakdown of its operative. A shame to lose a program that had proved its worth as an intelligence-gathering asset, but it was a price he was more than willing to pay.

Harper emerged into the night air and got into the Cadillac. He put the disk on the passenger seat, then started the engine.

A small, gloating smile curled his lips as he set off. He had the logs – and all Gray would find waiting for him when he emerged from the ducts were bullets.

‘It’s just down here,’ said the guard, leading the way as Baxter and his men hurried through the storage facility. The building was divided into blocks allocated to different agencies of the US government, grids of tall shelving racks holding countless disks and tapes. ‘On the right.’

Baxter took the lead, raising his MP5. Spence and the others followed suit. ‘Okay, we’ll handle this,’ he told the guard. ‘You stay back.’ The man obeyed, with evident relief. Baxter rounded the corner, seeing a door ahead marked with a small sign: K-6.

‘Cover me,’ he said. He pressed his back against the wall beside the door and took hold of the handle as his men aimed their weapons. ‘In three, two . . .’

He silently mouthed one, then threw open the door.

There was nobody beyond.

Baxter frowned, surveying the room with suspicion. Ranks of gunmetal-grey filing cabinets lined the walls, not enough space for anyone to hide behind them. Giving his men another non-verbal signal, he darted through the entrance and whipped round, finger on the trigger in case his target was lurking behind the door.

No one there.

That only left . . .

‘The vent,’ he whispered as his team entered, looking up at the ceiling. There was a large grille in its centre. One corner, he realised, was not quite flush, hanging down from the frame. Something was putting weight on it from above.

Gray. It had to be. If he had left the room, he would have been seen on the CCTV cameras.

He gestured to Spence: open it.

Spence clambered up on to the cabinets. He reached across and hooked his fingertips over the grille’s edge. All the guns were fixed on the vent.

Baxter nodded. Spence pulled—

The grille swung down. Something dropped from the opening and hit the floor with a muffled thud. Shock raced through Baxter: a grenade!

But it didn’t explode.

It wasn’t a grenade. It was . . .

‘A football?’ said Spence, bewildered.

Baxter signalled for his men to check the vent. They shone their tactical lights into the darkness above, seeing nothing but the bare metal sides of the duct. He crouched and picked up the football. It was only partially inflated, sagging limply in his hands, but was far heavier than he’d expected. He shook it, hearing something rattling dully about inside.

Lead shot, he remembered. Gray and Childs had bought lead shot. Now he knew what they had used it for: to add weight to the football. But why?

‘Morrow!’ he said into his headset. ‘Gray’s not here – are you sure he’s not on the roof?’

The two men atop the offices swept their powerful flashlight beams over the Gorman Building’s wide, flat rooftop. All they saw was machinery and ductwork. ‘No sight of him, sir,’ said Morrow.

The frustration in his commander’s voice was clear. ‘He’s not inside the building either. Tell me exactly what you see up there.’

Morrow gave the now swollen inner tube a brief glance before turning his attention to the rest of the apparatus. ‘Okay, there’s a rope tied to the air-con system on this side, and it goes all the way over to the building you’re in. The other end . . .’ He fixed his light on one particular spot, catching something in the beam. ‘There’s what looks like a football attached to the end of the rope, and a hook . . .’

His companion added his own light to the search. ‘That vent’s broken,’ he said, illuminating an opening in the ductwork on the far side of the gap. A slatted grille was bent back as if it had taken a