Zafir was a scavenger, the hand that tried the doorknob, the black shape in the black night. He shifted uncomfortably, cramped from the fifteen minutes he’d crouched behind the old hospital waiting for the last vestiges of light to fade from the western sky. There didn’t seem to be a watchman. He slid over a low wall. A sour smell hung in the air and caught in his throat. He wondered, had someone been burning something here? The place had been abandoned for months and should be a safe bet; safer anyway than the next target on the list, a chrome plating plant. Zafir stopped behind an outbuilding, listening. He took out his pry bar, jammed it into a door and forced the lock. He slipped through, pulled the door closed, and sneaked along a short passage and through an unlocked metal door. He stowed the jemmy in its home-made leather sling and moved into a second corridor. This one seemed part of the main building, its age betrayed by the Victorian decor. Arsenic green tiles, suffused with a network of hairline cracks, came nearly halfway up the walls. Above the tiles, mildewed cream plaster, relieved by a thin green line painted one inch below the ceiling. Another twenty yards. A corridor branched off to the left. He paused at the junction, listening to the slight settling noises. His penlight showed a discoloured patch of wall where there had once been a sign. The shadows were deeper in the left corridor; he turned into it, padded quickly forwards. ‘Sluice’ . . . ‘Day Room’ . . . a broom cupboard . . . the corridor ended in a T. The short right-hand branch led to a double door: Theatre. He returned. Left, then right, a ten-yard dogleg. A biting smell hung in the air. Another door: ‘Pathology’. He looked around the room, hoping to find poisons. Formaldehyde, perhaps; but the cupboards hung open and empty. A little farther down the corridor, he found a dark shadow on the left. His torch revealed a stairwell going down in a clockwise spiral, next to a hospital-sized lift. The pierced metal steps tapered on the inside edge to less than the length of his foot. He was tempted to rest a hand on the corroded metal bannister—but no, the jagged surface might cut his latex gloves. He took the stairs carefully, keeping to the outside. At the bottom, the well opened into a small vestibule. Clouds of dust rose in the stagnant air as he shuffled forwards. His knee came into sharp contact with a solid object. Stumbling, Zafir uttered a muffled curse. Unseen in the murk, a low table had caught his knee. Recovering, he shone the light down, and noted with interest two mouldering magazines. He picked one up. Small flakes of decayed paper fell back onto the table. By torchlight, he made out the title: ‘Woman’s Own’. He tried to open the magazine but damp had stuck the pages together. There had been nobody here for a long time. He raised the light, saw a door in the opposite wall, and passed through. The torchlight glowed on bulks of machinery, festooned with heavy cables and hoses. He pulled at one; flakes of rubber broke off in his hand. A conduit came away easily; someone had severed the connections with a saw. It didn’t take him more than a minute to discover that the place had been stripped. No mercury or platinum, just scrap lead and copper. Not worth the risk of hauling it away. He took a final look around and discovered a storage cubicle let into the wall, its heavy metal panel secured with a Yale lock. In the centre of the door, faded yellow decals clung to flakes of rust. It was hard to make out what they might have meant. He tried the number three Yale skeleton in the lock, but it was seized solid, immovable. Zafir took out the pry bar again. The panel yielded reluctantly, a shriek of metal against metal echoing into the distant corridors as he forced it open on rusted hinges. Inside stood a squat cylinder eight inches in diameter and a foot high, dull grey in the beam of the pocket torch. It bore the same yellow decals as the panel, but these were bright and undimmed with age. Underneath the symbol: “Cobalt 60 nuclear source. Handle only with suitable protection.” Cobalt. He liked the sound of it. For a moment, he was a little boy again, playing with his chemistry set in his mother’s kitchen. He held up a beaker of violet-coloured solution to the light, waiting for the last crystals to dissolve. “What’s that?” asked his younger brother. “Cherryade,” he’d said, unable to stop himself. “Can I have some?” Not for the first time, he felt the presence of something dark, hovering just behind his left shoulder. “Here, try it.” Smiling to himself he remembered his brother vomiting in the sink. His father had beaten Zafir with a studded belt until blood ran down the back of his legs. He looked again at the squat cylinder with the bright yellow trefoil. It wasn’t platinum, or even mercury, but nuclear stuff. The Sheikh would be pleased.