Book of Souls

As he turned the corner into the warehouse parking lot, Will held his breath. It was empty. Blessedly, no second shift. It was a half hour past sunset and the rapidly diminishing light gave him comfort though he would have preferred pitch blackness. He drove around the building twice to make sure he was going to be okay, then parked around the side and made for the front door. The purloined security badge turned the little red light on the magnetic pad green, and the door clicked open. He was in.

He steeled himself for a security guard, but the lobby and reception desk were empty, lit only by a single lamp. The card worked a second time, and he was inside the main warehouse.

It wasn’t completely dark. A handful of ceiling fluorescents were on, illuminating the vast space in a highly dilutive glow.

The first thing that caught his eyes were the robots, a row of them at the front of the room. They were like giant TV sets without screens. Each one had an open box-shaped compartment with a V-shaped wooden support designed to securely hold a book by elasticized cover straps.

At the machine closest to him, a robotic arm was frozen in action, shut down for the night, grasping a page in a delicate pincer grip. The optical wand was poised to begin scanning when the robot powered up, and the page was laid down flat.

Behind the robots was a large open warehouse floor that was the industrial doppelganger of a library, row after row of black-metal bookcases that were low enough for a person to reach the top shelves comfortably. The perimeter of the warehouse was lined by darkened staff offices.

Will sighed at the task before him. There were surely tens of thousands of books. While there had to be some kind of catalogue-and-location system around, he imagined he’d spend as much time rummaging through offices and files as taking a shoe-leather approach. So he picked a row at one end of the warehouse and just began to walk.

Half an hour later, his mind was numbed by the sea of book spines, with their pressed-on warehouse bar codes. He had to be meticulous. He couldn’t be sure all the L.A. Municipal Code books were grouped together. To his dismay, he noticed that some collections were scattered like bird-seed. At the end of one of the rows, at the rear of the building, he stopped to call Dane again but got voice mail once more. Something was definitely wrong.

His eyes leapt to a glowing image. Inside the office nearest to where he stood, there was a black-and-white monitor, a security-cam view of the dim lobby. The nameplate on the door said MARVIN HEMPEL, GENERAL MANAGER. He could imagine the weedy plant manager sitting at his desk, slurping soup, voyeuristically watching the receptionist for his lunchtime activity. He shook his head and started on the next row.

He picked up the pace and forced himself to concentrate. If he weren’t careful, he’d spend hours at it, complete the job empty-handed, and have to do it all over again. He began to touch each spine with his fingertip to make sure it registered before moving on, but stray thoughts kept entering his mind.

Where was Dane?

How was Nancy doing?

How was the endgame going to play out?

Frazier had the warehouse encircled, but he fretted that he was light on the ground for a building of this size. Only six men to cover the front, the rear loading dock, and an emergency exit on each of the long sides. He had DeCorso and two others at the front. Piper had gone in that way, he’d most likely exit that way. He dispersed his own team of three, sending one man to each side exit. He covered the loading dock himself and kept imagining Piper slowly opening the door and opening his mouth as Frazier fired a round into his body. Piper wouldn’t die, but hopefully there’d be pain.

DeCorso, of course, was taking his last breaths. Frazier mentally bade him farewell. The next time they met, he’d probably be a corpse. Something was going to kill him within the next few hours. Piper? Friendly fire? A heart attack? The night wasn’t going to end quietly.

Another hour passed, and Will marked his spot by pulling a book out halfway. He went to the men’s room to let Chinese tea out of his system and splash cold water on his face.

At the same time, Frazier and DeCorso were having an urgent debate over their radios. What was taking Piper so long? Was there an exit they could have missed? Was it possible there was a tunnel system connecting warehouses in the park?

Frazier decided to send DeCorso’s team into the lobby as an intermediate move. It was a good point of control if Piper came out that way, and it was closer to the mark if they opted to enter and take him down. One of DeCorso’s men had a piece of standard hardware that quickly hacked magnetic security card readers. They entered the lobby and took up defensive positions.

Will was approaching the rear of the building again and in the last bookcase of his current row he got a shock, as if he’d brushed against a live wire.