Chapter 38
The desk the guy had been using was at the side of a boiler room. It was a giant place. There were four huge furnaces in a line along one wall. Four huge water tanks opposite them. The ceiling was hidden by a tangle of massive pipes. Some were lagged. Some were painted. They snaked away in every direction. There was a door in the far corner. It was the only way out I could see, apart from the tunnel. I crossed the room and opened it.
The door led to a staircase. It was made of wood. It had originally been painted white but patches of bare timber were peeking out from the center of each tread. I guess Dendoncker’s operation generated more traffic than the architect originally anticipated. I climbed up. Slowly. I kept my feet near the sides to avoid creaking. There was another door at the top. I stopped. Listened. And heard nothing.
I tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. It swung open easily and let me out in the corner of a kitchen. It was a huge industrial-scale place, all stainless steel and white tile. There were stoves. Ovens. Microwaves. Preparation areas. A line of giant fridges along one sidewall. A line of cupboards along the other. I picked one at random. It was full of cans of baked beans. There were hundreds of them. They were tiny. Single servings, maybe, for children with no appetite. It seemed like a weird choice, given the scale of the equipment.
The kitchen was separated from the dining hall by a serving counter. It was low. A suitable height for kids, I guess. It ran the full width of the room. A section at the left was hinged. It was folded back, so I went through. The rest of the space was dim. It felt cavernous. The ceiling was high. Maybe twenty feet. Only one bulb was working, roughly in the center. I could barely make out my surroundings. The floor was made of rectangular wooden blocks. They were fitted together like herringbones. There was just one table. It was round. Made of white plastic. There were six plastic chairs in a scruffy circle around it. They seemed lost. The place looked like it was designed for long, solid refectory tables, lined up in neat parallel rows. Not cheap garden furniture. There was a set of double doors to the right. They were closed. And they were solid, so I couldn’t see where they led. The rest of the wall was glass. Narrow metal frames divided the panes. They stretched from floor to ceiling. Harsh white light was spilling out from somewhere nearby. I moved forward to see what was causing it. Then I stopped dead in my tracks.
It was the lack of light in the dining hall that saved my bacon. It prevented the two guys from spotting me. The guys in suits who had accompanied Dendoncker to the morgue. They were at the far end of the corridor that led away from the other side of the double doors. They were sitting on stools in front of another, identical set of doors. The corridor was eight feet wide. It was twenty feet long. It had glass walls and a glass ceiling. Three raised vents, evenly spaced. And a double line of fluorescent tubes. They ran the whole length. They were powerful. And bright. The human eye can’t see from a brightly lit area into a much dimmer one. Which was fortunate for me. Because the guys were each holding a gun. An Uzi. An interesting choice of weapon. Not the lightest. Not the fastest cyclic rate. Not the greatest amount of rifling inside the barrel. There are better options out there. Any of the Heckler & Koch MP5 derivatives, for example. That’s what I’d have picked, in their shoes. But in mine? Alone? Against two Uzis? I wouldn’t have liked my chances.
It looked like the glass corridor led to a mirror image of the part of the building I was in. On the outside, anyway. Inside it most likely had a different setup. I couldn’t see why a school would need two kitchens and two dining halls. Given the guards with the Uzis, it seemed like a safe bet this would be what the guy with the broken ankle had called Dendoncker’s half. It would be suicide to approach it along the corridor. I needed to find another entrance. I would have to loop around the exterior. Which meant finding a way out.
Ahead, at the end of the dining hall farthest from the kitchen, there were two doors. The one on the right had a sign that said El Maestro Principal. The one on the left, El Diputado Maestro Principal. I checked them both. They were both empty. There was no furniture. Nothing on the walls. No closets or storage areas. And neither had an external door.
There were three sets of doors in the wall opposite the windows. I tried the closest. It opened into another large space. It was equally badly lit. It was the same width, but longer because it had no kitchen. To the right, adjacent to the offices, there was a raised area like a stage. On the far side there was another expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a pair of doors in the center, leading outside. The other two walls were covered with climbing bars. Three ropes were suspended from a central ceiling joist. They were coiled up, ten feet from the ground. I guessed the place was a combined assembly hall/performance space/gymnasium. Originally. Now it was a storage area. For Dendoncker’s aluminum containers.