Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove Page A

black and strikingly magnificent after the pale uniformity of the rest, was the great ziggurat itself, home to the Thousand Eyes.
    Bremen
.
    Jake’s head went down. This was it. This was where his luck ran out. He had had too many narrow escapes, too many second chances. They had given him the chance to fit in – to conform to their new world – and he had spurned it. Now he would be punished.
    He felt sick at the thought. Not for himself – what did it matter, after all, whether
he
lived or died – but for those he’d left behind. For Peter and Mary and the girls. For what it would do to them.
    They touched down on the landing strip amidst three, maybe four dozen other craft of differing sizes and designs, all of them the same matt black.
    Just across from them was a massive glass door – glass, or was it ice? Only Jake barely noticed it, for he had looked up, awed by the sheer scale, the contrasting blackness of the building. There was something vaguely Egyptian about it all. Like its servants, it had a crisp anonymity.
    The architecture of the dead
, he thought, his fear given an edge by the sight of it.
    ‘Come,’ one of them said, forcing him onward. ‘You’re expected.’
    They ascended in a massive lift, the three of them alone inside it, dwarfed by its dimensions. At the top the doors slid open. They stepped out into a hallway, sparsely yet elegantly furnished, at one end of which was another lift, its dark interior smaller than the first. They walked across.
    There were no visible controls. No buttons to press, no notices to read. Even so, as it hissed open at its destination, Jake knew he was expected.
    This time, as Jake made to step out, the two agents stayed where they were.
    ‘There,’ one of them said, indicating the door just in front of Jake. ‘Just knock.’
    The door hissed shut. They were gone.
    Jake turned, looking about him. The hallway was like all the others in the building, the walls and ceiling a lacquered midnight black. Beside the door to the lift there was only the door that the agents had indicated. He walked across and knocked.
    A muffled voice answered from within. ‘Come in… it’s open.’
    Jake stepped through.
    Behind an oak-topped desk, filled with clutter, was a middle-aged man, a
Hung Mao
like himself. He wore a pale blue
pau
trimmed with lavender silk, his long black hair tied back.
    He was watering a tiny oak tree. A
bonsai
, as they used to be called – Jake didn’t know the Chinese term. Seeing Jake, he smiled.
    ‘Take a seat,
Shih
Reed. I’m Tobias Lahm. I won’t be a moment.’
    The room was dominated by a large picture window, which filled the wall to Jake’s right. Through it Jake could see the plaza far below. But it was the colourful blue and red silk tapestry that hung on the end wall, the plants and the shelves of books that occupied the wall nearest him that caught Jake’s attention. After the sombre black of the corridors outside, the room seemed filled with colour.
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    Lahm met his eyes. ‘You thought you were going to be punished, right?’ He gave the tree a puff of the tiny water spray he was holding. There were tiny plants everywhere, in ceramic pots of exquisite oriental design. Lahm smiled. ‘It’s okay… you don’t have to answer that.’
    Again it was unexpected. This friendly manner of his. It had to be a trick of some kind. A means of getting Jake to drop his guard.
    Jake sat, then looked about him again. On the desk, to one side, was an old-fashioned filing tray crammed full of hard-copy paper files. Just beside it were a couple of old-style photographs in silver frames; pictures of a European woman and two young boys. His family? It seemed likely. There was also a screen on the wall, set in among the shelves and, inset into the edge of Lahm’s desk, a keyboard, next to which was a pile of books, Szu Ma Kuang’s twelfth-century text,
The Mirror Of Government
most prominent. And finally, there in the top