“It probably wouldn’t have happened with Hijo still in the building, either.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I bet he’s taken all the men with guns out onto the street to look for Sonja, who’s escaped all on her own. I’m sorry, gentlemen. I seem to have wasted your time.”

Marchenkho holstered his gun and put his hands on his hips. “No, tovarisch. I would have paid good money to see this. My only regret is that I did not bring a bomb big enough to demolish the whole building.”

“I might have drawn the line at that,” said Chain. “So are we sure this place is empty? On a normal day, there would have been a thousand nikkeijin here.”

Petrovitch shrugged. “They might still be struggling to work from wherever they live. Imagine their surprise when they finally get here.” He cocked his head, and listened.

“I hear it too,” said Marchenkho.

“It’s the lifts.” Petrovitch held his gun out in front of him and moved stealthily around the reception area. The row of blank lift doors behind it hummed with movement.

“Why are there no lights, but these have power?” Chain drew his own pistol and watched the floor indicators above each door flicker and change.

Marchenkho squashed the talk button on his walkie-talkie. “Grigori. Squad to the foyer. Now.”

“The thing is, are those numbers going up or down?” Petrovitch’s question was answered by chimes, one after another, as every lift reached the ground floor. “And why are we standing here, waiting to find out?”

The doors opened simultaneously and, at first, none of them could comprehend what they were looking at: in each lift, there was an uneven mass of cloth and pale flesh, like a jumbled pile of shop mannequins. Then the pooled blood started to seep out across the threshold and onto the pale stone floor. The dark red stain flowed outward, merging, growing.

“I think it’s time for us to go,” said Petrovitch in a whisper.

Grigori skidded to a halt behind them, the barrel of his Kalashnikov searching for a target.

“A tactical change of plan,” said Marchenkho. “Retreat.”

Petrovitch waited for a few seconds before joining them, spending that time imagining the final moments of those trapped as they fell the full height of the lift shaft, the instant that tangled freefall became killing impact.

“Petrovitch! Move!” shouted Chain.

But he didn’t. He was busy realizing that every lift would have had to collect people from every floor, then taken them back to the top to drop them to their deaths. It was a deliberate act. Someone had murdered them all.

“Oi!”

“Yeah. Coming.” The lake of blood had reached his toes, and as he backed away, he left sticky footprints behind him in a trail, all the way outside.

23