Free The Demon Code by Adam Blake Page B

gaze wandered across the page, Kennedy was struck by a mild sense of déjà vu. It was something recent, too. Dredging up the memory, she checked Silver’s file against one of the others she’d just been looking at. Not a perfect match, but close enough. In order of start date, Rush had said.
    Kennedy looked up at him. He was giving her a slightly puzzled stare, watching the expressions chasing each other across her face. ‘Those break-ins,’ she said.
    ‘Break-in, you mean. Singular.’
    ‘No. The other ones. The abortive attempts.’
    Rush frowned. ‘Oh, right. Those. That was a while ago now. We added some external cameras, up on the roof – you saw them yesterday. Whoever it was, they didn’t come back.’
    ‘Right.’
    She almost had it now. Had some of it, anyway. Change the perspective, and the impossible becomes banal. Was that Columbo again, or Sherlock Holmes?
    ‘Get your keys out,’ she told Rush. ‘I want to take another look at the room.’

7
     
    Eight parallel aisles of boxes. No empty spaces on the shelves, although Gassan had told her the room was only at one third of its capacity. That was the first thing.
    ‘So some of these boxes don’t have anything in them, right?’ Kennedy asked Rush.
    ‘All the ones from about the end of aisle C onwards,’ he confirmed. ‘The clericals normally fill the space up from the front. But there’s probably a few more empty boxes mixed in with the full ones – spaces that didn’t get filled or things that were moved to new locations and left a gap.’
    ‘So why bother to have boxes with nothing in them?’ Rush gave this question some thought. ‘I suppose it’s got some value as a smokescreen,’ he said at last.
    ‘You mean because it forces a burglar to open every box?’ ‘Yeah. But I think it was more about space, to be honest. The boxes are rigid, reinforced sides, high quality. They don’t come flat-packed. So where else would we stack them? It’d be stupid to have rooms set aside for empty boxes when we can just fill the shelves here and then have everything set up ready for new stuff as it comes in.’
    Kennedy nodded. ‘Yeah. That would be stupid.’
    She got Rush to show her the two fixed cameras, and with his help she paced out the areas of the room that would be visible to each of them. The negative space, where the cameras couldn’t see, was where she began.
    He watched her for a while, opening boxes and peering into them. He was perplexed. ‘Those ones are empty,’ he told her.
    ‘Yeah,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘And I bet nobody bothered to search them, right?’
    ‘I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much point, would there?’
    ‘Depends what you’re looking for.’
    Rush waited for more, but Kennedy didn’t have any more to say. If she was wrong, she might as well be wrong off the record. There were hundreds of empty boxes on the endless shelves. The full ones were all the same size, since they all had the same contents: books from the British Library overspill. The empty boxes had just been put wherever there was space to put them, so they came in a variety of sizes to reflect the infinite variety of items in the museum’s collection.
    Kennedy was only bothering to open the largest ones, and she struck gold before she’d gotten halfway along aisle D.
    She beckoned Rush over and pointed into the open box. He stared down and his eyes widened. The box contained a black sweater and a pair of black leggings. Black boots. A black balaclava designed to cover the entire face. And a large quantity of what looked like ash.
    ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘I don’t get it. Is that what the intruder was wearing?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘It is.’
    ‘Then why is it still here? We saw him leave the room.’
    ‘No. We didn’t. We saw him climb up into the ceiling space. But we both know there’s no way out from up there. So whatever we saw, it wasn’t the great escape. It was something else.’ Kennedy was still piecing it all