There was no Internet history at all.

I sat there for a second, staring at the screen, frustrated, panicked. Did Pierce erase his activity every time he used it? Or had he done it because he knew I was coming?

And then I happened to look down.

The carpet was the only part of the room I hadn’t paid attention to, but now, as I used the penlight, I saw that there was a small rug, laid at one end of the row of filing cabinets stationed behind Pierce’s desk. It looked weirdly out of place.

I got up and kicked at it with the toe of my boot, pushing it away from the cabinets, and – as soon as I did – I realized there was something underneath: two metal plates, snaking out from under the last of the five cabinets. They were thick and ridged. I crouched down, trying to get a better angle with the torch.

Runners.

Standing again, I went to the first of the filing cabinets and pressed two hands flat to its flank, pushing at it. It jolted, almost bucked against me, but then the whole thing – all five of the cabinets – began to slowly move along the tracks embedded in the floor, squealing softly as they did. I’d got the cabinets about three and a half feet when I finally hit a buffer.

Behind the cabinets was an entranceway.

It opened on to a set of ten steps, akin to a cellar staircase, that dropped down to a metal door. I moved inside, having to duck as I did, the ceiling low, the walls so thick around me that it instantly seemed to deaden all sound. When I got to the bottom, I looked at the lock.

The keyhole was minuscule – maybe only a couple of millimetres wide – and around the circumference of the lock plate, equally spaced in an upside-down triangle, were three LEDs. I reached into my pocket, fished out the key that Mills had left for me, and tried inserting it into the lock. It went all the way in.

The second I turned it, something buzzed.

The LEDs all lit up.

And then, with a click, the door opened.

40

I moved past the door, into the room beyond.

It was small, cramped, about ten feet across, even less from left to right, and like everywhere else in the building, its ceiling was low. Brown watermarks crawled above me like vertebrae, and – all along the walls – the plaster was punctured and broken. There was no window, just a tiny square of thick, opaque glass in the roof. I swept the torch from left to right, looking for a light switch, but there was no electricity either. There was no heating system. There was no other way into this place except through the coded door.

In front of me were two shelving units.