i am still not sure which of the two came up with the idea of the underground archive it will have
appealed to black as away to provide security to his operation but a civil engineering project of
this scale doesnt seem like his sort of things oi think it must have been conceived by charles grey
the first tube line had been opened in and london was full of labourers and engineers with the
skills needed to build the shadow archive deep beneath new scotland yard getting access was not
going to be easy without harrys help but i still didnt have enough to give him the excuse he would
need to get openly involved my reconnaissance had helped me to find the archive but it didnt give me
any obvious way in the duct that had cost me the lidar was far too narrow for me to scale and access
through the frontdoor was too risky so i took a gamble and spent another miserable fortnight
exploring the labyrinth of sewers and tunnel systems around the neighbourhood gps was useless down
there and i could easily have got lost but i marked the tunnels and on occasions used these us trick
of a ball of twine to help me navigate back i moved quietly and kept an eye out for sensors i had no
idea whether the shadow archive was still operational or not but if it was then security would be
tight and i couldnt be sure if they were using infrared or seismometers for intrusion detection so i
layered up with insulation and moved slowly it was horrible i was hot damp and the air smelled of
sewage and mould i was just about to give up when i found a steel door marked with the initial svr i
victoria regina imper atrix it was incongruous in that dark and dank tunnel but more significantly
it carried the trademark tan non the lock john tann was one of the top safe makers in victorian
london and i had cracked one or two of his safes in my other life as a cat burglar this was big and
heavy and very rusty that told me two things no one had used it in a very longtime and no one had
upgraded it in just as long if the room behind it was still in use then someone would have been
maintaining the lock so all my precautions were probably unnecessary but no one had paid for at ann
safe without something important to hide so i decided to tackle the lock and after another eighteen
hours of grim work i was in i had found the shadow archive