Kitabı oku: «The Sons of Scarlatti»
To my children Rose, Huw and Conrad,
with love everlasting and a third share of all royalties*
* conditions apply
Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.
Exodus, 8:21
Consider yourself lucky. So far.
Six-Legged Soldiers – Using Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffrey A. Lockwood, OUP, 2008
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Footnotes
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
“This is exactly what happened to Liz and Lionel when Kismet went missing in her GAP year…”
Finn’s grandma stood in front of the Departures gate, and fussed.
“Grandma! He’s in the building. He’ll be here any minute,” said Finn.
They were waiting for Uncle Al to turn up. He was supposed to be providing cover for Grandma while she took a well-earned break – flying to Oslo for a ‘knitting cruise’ around Scandinavia with another hundred or so grey-haired needlecraft enthusiasts.
Al had promised to show up at Grandma’s the night before.
Then Al had promised to meet them at the airport, first thing.
Then Al had promised – just now, by phone – to meet them at the Departures gate.
But Al… well, Al was Al, and nothing was certain, and Grandma’s way of coping with the distress her son caused her, from babe in arms to now, thirty-two years later, was to fill the world with a breathless stream of anxious chatter.
“…Kismet their eldest with the tattoos they had to fly out to Kinshasa cost them five thousand pounds silly thing had lost her phone it was the not knowing if she was dead or alive you can’t imagine what that does to a parent – where is he? – I looked after their cat same bladder problems as Tiger…”
“Last call for passenger Violet Allenby, Oslo flight 103, proceed immediately to gate 15,” announced the voice over the loudspeaker.
“…John very helpfully ran me into Woking young vet from New Zealand lovely girl wet food and herbal treatment…”
“Grandma! Please!”
“I can always catch the next one…”
“Noooo, Grandma!” Finn gyrated in frustration.
“Infinity!” she snapped. “I am not moving an inch.”
(Infinity. All Finn knew about his father – all he needed to know – was in his name. Who would name a child after a mathematical concept? “Exactly the sort of man you’d imagine,” Finn’s mother would say wistfully, claiming it had been all she could do to prevent him being named E=mc2.)
“Al is here! I’ll be fine!”
“He is not! One thing you can rely on is that you can never rely on Al. He says he’s ‘in the building’, but that could mean anything. It could mean an imaginary building; it could mean a building on another continent, on another planet…”
“Grandma, get on the plane!”
“I have a duty of care. You are a child…”
“I’m almost a teenager.”
“…and if you really think, if he thinks, I’m going to abandon you to your fate in an airport full of germs, runaway trolleys and international terrorists…”
And then, thank goodness, from around the corner, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, walked Al.
Six foot two and thin as a whip, part muscle, part bone, part wire, suede jacket and ancient cords worn to the point of oblivion, dark hair, darker eyes, designer glasses held together by tape, arm raised in surprised greeting as if he’d just wandered in and spotted them by chance.
“Alan! Where on earth have you been?”
“Ah…? I was in the middle of something.” He thought this would do. “Why are you still here?”
Yap!
On a lead by Al’s side bounced a delighted, knee-high mongrel (a kind of spaniel/hyperactive kangaroo cross, Finn always thought).
“What are you doing with Yo-yo? You can’t bring dogs in here!”
“I saw him tied him up outside. He was crying.”
Officials across the concourse were already beginning to take notice.
“Marvellous! Now we’ll all be arrested…” said Grandma.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Finn to Al.
With that, Al scooped Grandma up like she was a toddler, gave her a kiss on the cheek and put her down again, pointing in the right direction.
“For goodness’ sake, I’m sixty-three!”
Finn wheeled her bag after her and together he and Al herded her through the Departures gate like a reluctant farm animal.
“Have you spoken to Mrs Jennings? She’s agreed to check Finn in and out of school.”
“Mrs Jennings and I speak all the time,” confirmed Al.
“Go, Grandma!”
“You’re lying!” she protested. “All the meals are in the freezer marked—”
“All the meals are in the freezer, all the knives and forks are in the drawers, there are doors and windows that allow access to the dwelling place…” interrupted Al.
“The keys!”
“…the keys to which are in Finn’s pocket, which is a cloth appendage sewn into his trousers about so high. Go on, Mother! I can reheat lasagne and hold a high moral line for a week!”
“That I doubt very much!”
She was being urged through now by a red-faced airline official.
“Love you, Grandma, have a great time!”
“You too, darling, but do be careful. Al? Alan?”
“I promise, he’ll be fine, go!”
As Grandma finally disappeared through passport control, Finn fell to his knees in relief, Yo-yo licking his face.
Al looked at Finn, puzzled, and said, “Did she say school?”
Fifteen minutes later, Grandma was in the air, and Finn and Al were gunning it out of Heathrow and on to the M25 in Al’s 1969 silver grey De Tomaso Mangusta, the most extraordinary car ever hand-built in Italy, loud and low, a monster V8 coupe with perfect styling capable of 221bhp. Yo-yo howled and loved it. Finn adored it. Grandma thought the car ridiculous and a prime example of Al’s financial irresponsibility.
“I’ve grown tired of pretty dresses and I can’t think of anything better to waste it on,” Al would tell her, something Finn knew was only partly true because more than once he’d found cheques from Al in Grandma’s handbag, and they seemed huge. For no matter how unconventionally Al behaved, people still seemed to want a piece of him – corporations in need of a technical fix, pharmaceutical companies looking to reconstitute molecules, governments stuck with insoluble nuclear waste. They all came to Al.
He ran a small lab in the heart of London and was a ‘sort of scientist’: an atomic chemist with a wandering mind who found it difficult to fit into any one category – in science or life.
He was the only person, or so he claimed, to have been fired from the staff of the Universities of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the same term (for challenging the Standard Model of particle physics via the Tau Neutrino Paradox and for striking a right-wing economist with a steamed halibut during a buffet, respectively).
Al saw it as proof of moral fibre. Grandma saw it as proof of insanity and prayed it didn’t run in the family. After bringing up two totally reckless children, she had resolved to wrap her only grandchild up in sixteen tonnes of cotton wool.
Finn already shared Al’s bony, clumsy physique, but had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (“your father’s”), and mad blue, deep-blue eyes (“your mother’s”) and now Grandma fretted that he’d inherited a tendency to have his “own views” about things too (rejecting all yellow food apart from custard, pointing out a teacher’s “confrontational attitude” at a recent parents’ evening and bringing up his “problems with religion” with a vicar, during a funeral).
Not that Finn wanted to upset anyone. He was just trying to stay one step ahead of boredom, which meant – as he pointed out on his Facebook profile – ‘not being on the same planet as school’. He loved Grandma and made every effort not to cause her unnecessary suffering – avoiding dangerous sports, playground conflict and potentially lethal pastimes (while retaining the right to self-defence, of course. And who could resist making home-made fireworks? Or skateboarding into a neighbour’s pool, or practising overhead kicks on concrete, or…).
When Finn was with Al though, there were no rules.
Other people’s uncles played golf. Other people’s uncles might give them ten pounds at Christmas. Al was happy to see every moment as an opportunity for discovery and entertainment and he never said no. Even Finn realised this might be crazy, but it made being with him a very exciting place to be.
“I’m training him up,” Al would say whenever Grandma complained.
“What for?!” she would demand, terrified (for she knew he sometimes operated out of a secret world). Life, Finn supposed, trusting Al’s training absolutely, for, if his uncle’s head was in the clouds, his heart was always in the right place. Yes, he was erratic and unreliable, yes, he might have “a difficult relationship with stuff” (which included parking, losing things and an inability to tidy up), but he bridged the gap between everyday life and the way life ought to be – impulsive and instructive and full of things that blew up.
He dropped in every couple of weekends, sometimes staying for a week during the holidays, and he’d stayed the whole summer after Mum had died.
“You pack a bag?” Al snapped at him.
“Yep!”
“Got your passport, checked the date?”
“Yep!”
Yap! added Yo-yo.
“Get all the gear ready?”
“In the garage, all lined up.”
“Weapons? You know they still have wolves?”
“M60 with grenade launch side-barrel.”
“Hah! This is not Xbox, this is life or death – sunblock?”
“Sunblock, shades, tent, clothing, waterproofs, Swiss Army knife, Mars bar, torch, lighter, hand-held GPS – I’ve even got a blow-up pillow.”
“Trust yourself,” had been one of his mother’s Big Three Rules. “You can’t always rely on other people.”
Finn’s stuff weighed 6.5 kilograms packed into a natty dry bag.
He was ready for anything.
“I bet you didn’t remember we were going till this morning! I bet you haven’t even taken a shower!” Finn teased Al.
Al pretended to be appalled.
“Hey! I’ve got credit cards, a restaurant guide and half a tube of Pringles. Now let’s load up and let rip.”
DAY ONE 07:33 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
A convoy of six cars pulled up silently outside Hook Hall.
They were expected. Little was said.
In one vehicle was Commander James Clayton-King (Harrow, Oxford, RN, MoD, SIS, G&T Chair.), known simply as King. Not the jolly King of nursery rhymes, but the cruel, commanding type. Pale skin, powerful jaw, bone-deep intelligence. He wasn’t as menacing as his hooded eyes suggested, but he liked it suggested.
Two Security Service officers hopped out, one held open the door. From the cars behind, more senior figures emerged in similar fashion, including General Mount of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, three aides accompanying him.
They were led through the complex until they reached the Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), a cathedral-sized, concrete-lined warehouse where researchers could recreate and control any climate or environment imaginable, from lunar desert to lush rainforest, and proceed to blow or blast or poison the jelly beans out of it simply to see what happened. In essence it was a giant test tube and one of only three such spaces in the world.1
They climbed a steel gantry to a reinforced glass and concrete control gallery that flanked the space. Others had already arrived: an eclectic mix of soldiers, scientists, engineers and thinkers.
A group of bespectacled experts from a research institute on Salisbury Plain clustered self-consciously. They looked like men who hadn’t slept.
There were handshakes and nods, but no high fives. Tea and coffee were offered and refused. A selection of biscuits lay untouched.
The Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (popularly reduced to ‘the G&T’) was formed in October 2002 to respond to extraordinary threats to global security and the fabric of Western civilisation. It had fourteen expert members and a decision-making core of five including Commander King as its chairman. They had only been forced to meet three times over the last decade2, and they knew whatever they were here for it would be serious.
Deadly serious.
A technician reported: “Ready when you are, sir.”
“Good. Seal the room,” said Commander King.
He waited as doors were locked and blinds whirred down.
“Now… You may be wondering why you’ve been called here.”
His voice was deep and used to command – controlled, no-nonsense and yet also theatrical.
“Well. One of our scientists is missing. And it seems he has released – this…”
The technician hit a key and up on the screen, in enormous scale, appeared an image…
DAY ONE 07:41 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire, UK
Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill…
TWO
“Lamp trap?” snapped Al.
“Check,” said Finn.
“Nets?”
“Check.”
“Traps?”
“Check.”
“Pins?”
“Check.”
“Jars?”
Yap!
“Idiot dog.”
They were back at Grandma’s rambling old house now, going through the gear Finn had got together for their trip.
“Ethyl acetate?”
“‘The Agent of Death?’” mugged Finn. “Check.”
“Cards and fixing spray?”
“Check! It’s all here, let’s go!”
Yap! agreed Yo-yo (particularly delighted as ‘go’ meant ‘run about outside with Yo-yo’), leaping at Finn with such excitement that he knocked a shoebox full of plastic soldiers off a shelf and sent the lot skittering across the garage floor.
“Oh great,” Finn said, having to pick them up one by one.
“There should be some fishing rods back here…” said Al, wading through a decade’s worth of accumulated junk at the back of the garage.
Finn had been on a similar junk hunt on his first summer at Grandma’s, which was how he’d discovered Al’s boyhood bug-collecting gear behind a defunct Mini. He and Al had set up the lamp trap, a glowing, tent-like apparatus, in the back garden, and stayed up half the night collecting and cataloguing the multitude of insects drawn towards the light.
Grandma hadn’t seen it as a proper way to mourn the passing of a mother, a sister, a daughter. But then they were male, and men were different when it came to emotions, especially powerful emotions, and if arranging dead insects helped them to cope then so be it. She also knew her daughter, wherever she was, would be looking down in approval at the two of them forming such an odd, unbreakable bond.
The second of Mum’s Big Three Rules for Finn was: “Be yourself.” Finn had never really figured out what that meant, but he’d ended up with 108 different species of native insects in various states of disrepair mounted on two A3 cards above the fireplace in his room.
Bombus lucorum, Bombus terrestris, Bombus lapidarius (bumblebees that sounded so good it made your mouth go funny); leafcutter, miner and carpenter bees; churchyard, mealworm and common oil beetles; big stags, small stags; seven-spot and eyed ladybirds; sawfly (you should see their wings), blowfly, housefly, horn fly; fantastic, impossible dragonflies and damsels (some in distress); moths upon moths – almost every type of hawk; and butterflies fit for an art gallery – tortoiseshell and fritillary, red admiral and Camberwell beauty, swallowtail and green-veined whites.
The writing on the labels was childish and some of the pins and mounts had been knocked off, but the samples themselves still looked fantastic. He knew everything about them; he’d read every book and article. He could recite all their names and characteristics.
Finn wondered if his interest was just natural or whether he was trying to force a connection back to his parents, both of whom had been scientists (he’d lost his father, Ethan, in a laboratory accident just after he was born, his mother more recently to cancer). Either way it felt right. And when Al asked him what he’d like to do on his ‘week off’ from Grandma, Finn immediately knew he wanted to add to the collection.
“Great idea. How about the blind insects of the Pyrenees?” said Al. “Freakish, eyeless Ungeheuer found in the deepest mountain caverns, evolved over twenty million years of total darkness!”
“The Pyrenees?”
“It’s a mountain range between France and Spain.”
“I know where it is, but Grandma…”
“Never tell Grandma anything; it only worries her and then you can’t shut her up.”
Before Finn knew it, the trip was on.
“Let’s hit the road,” said Al, reappearing from the back of the garage with two fishing rods and a jar of old tobacco pipes. “We’ve got to get to the ferry by three.”
Finn snapped his fingers and Yo-yo sprang into the tiny back of the Mangusta, delighted because everything delighted Yo-yo. Bathtime. Being locked outside in the rain. Being shouted at. And right now – being taken to certain incarceration in kennels.
En route, Al called the secretary at Finn’s school, Mrs Jennings, claiming, with a completely straight face, to be consultant dermatologist “Dr Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P-H—”, and that he was rushing Infinity Drake to his private clinic because of “an acute case of seborrhoeic dermatitis”.
“It is absolutely vital to initiate wire-brushing.” If everything went well, the boy would be discharged in a week, Al continued, though he might be totally bald, and if so what was the school policy on “the wearing of a headscarf and/or wig for medical reasons”? The secretary, alarmed, put him on hold to consult a higher authority, then came back on the line to ask if she could just take his name again. “Of course,” said Al, “Herr Doktor Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P—” and then pretended to be cut off by poor reception.
“That ought to do it.”
He screeched to a halt in front of the kennels.
“Ditch the mutt. Go.”
Finn took a deep breath. “Come on, Yo-yo.”
The dog sprang out of the back seat and followed Finn up to the kennels, excited by the other doggy noises and smells. Once shut inside his cage though, Yo-yo sat on his haunches and howled.
Mum had got him for Finn as soon as she realised she was ill. It was obvious therapy, but it had worked.
Finn touched his chest. Scratched the stone. Although he couldn’t get his head round the concept of his mum’s ‘soul’, he’d long ago decided that if there was such a thing then it lived in the stone that hung from a leather tie around his neck. It looked dull and ordinary, but in fact it was a rock called spharelite that his mum had always worn. When you scratched it – with your fingernail, with anything – it would literally glow. Triboluminescence it was called, but not even science could tell you quite how it worked, or why. Which was in part why Finn loved it. It was mysterious and it was scientific and it had been his mum’s and it had a great name. If he ever had children, one of them was going to be called Spharelite Triboluminescence.
Finn reached in and gave Yo-yo’s neck one last rub.
Yo-yo thought the cruel ‘lock-up-your-dog’ game was over and rolled on his back, offering his tummy to be tickled.
What an idiot.
It was at times like this that Finn remembered his mum’s third and final Big Rule, delivered in her last days alive when she hadn’t seemed like she was dying at all and had showered him with affection and practical instruction.
“If you’re ever in doubt, work out what feels right in your heart of hearts then, whatever happens… just keep going.”
Al watched, appalled, as a minute later Finn marched out of the kennels – followed by Yo-yo.
“What…?”
Yap!
Finn got in the front, Yo-yo hopped in the back.
“Mum…” Finn started to say – and Al knew what was coming: “Mum wouldn’t just leave him like this.”
“Why you little…”
It was an emotionally loaded, totally absurd unwritten rule between them that, if either Finn or Al invoked his mother, the other had to obey. The rule was stone crazy and wide open to abuse (“My sister would’ve loved you to make me another cup of tea…” “My mother would have loved FIFA 14 on PSP…”), but it was not one Finn ever felt he could revoke. It needed Al to be the grown-up and break the spell, to put an end to the madness, but that just wasn’t Al.
So, six minutes later, they found themselves outside the church.
Christabel Coles, vicar of the Church of St James and St John in the village of Langmere, Bucks, had been fond of Finn ever since – in the middle of his mother’s funeral, aged eleven – he held up his hand to bring the service to a halt and demanded to know exactly what a ‘soul’ was and if it did exist then exactly where was his mother right now? Christabel had paused, then said, “Good question,” and sat down in her vestments, ignoring the packed congregation, to discuss it with him. It had been interesting, illuminating and inconclusive, though it had helped both of them to get through the day and they’d become great friends and indulged in many such conversations since, often in the company of this… blessed dog, which Christabel didn’t have the heart to tell Finn she found among the most trying of all God’s creatures.
Finn argued that he could no more leave Yo-yo locked in kennels “than you could lead rich men through the eye of a camel or whatever it is. Y’know, Christabel? Will you look after him? I’ll come to church next week, honest…”
She caved in. “I’ll do my best.”
“Brilliant! Wet food in the morning, dry at night, and just give him a blanket to lie on. Oh and walk him when you can, but it’s just as easy to let him wander.”
“And don’t kill it,” added Al.
“But I will have to tell your grandmother about this!”
“Don’t worry, Al will do that. He’s in enough trouble as it is.”
She watched Finn jump back in beside his unreasonably handsome uncle and gave a little sigh.
Al put his foot down and the Mangusta razzed off, Yo-yo chasing them halfway down the lane.
Trust yourself.
Be yourself.
Just keep going.
It wasn’t much of a legacy, but it was all he had.
“Can we go on holiday now?” asked Finn.
“We can go on holiday now,” replied Al.
The sun was shining and they were roaring through the English countryside in an Italian sports car, headed for the continent on a school day in possession of various bits of scientific equipment, a tent, two fishing rods, half a tube of Pringles and not a care in the world.
Could things be more perfect…?
The beast whipped at the flank of the sow badger again and again and again.
It was an attack so frenzied, venom leaked from the beast’s abdomen, spattering the animal’s hide.
The effects of the cold store and anaesthesia had left it sluggish most of the morning, but the moment it had locked its barbed extendable jaw into the badger flesh, rich blood overwhelmed the beast’s senses and only one thing flashed through its crazed nervous system –
Kill kill kill kill kill kill…
Three Tyros 1 watched.
Two stood well back in Kevlar bodysuits. Fully masked.
The eldest, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, stood close by in just a hoody and jeans.
It was he who had positioned the badger, crippled but alive, on the north side of the wood. A farm animal would have served just as well, but in the remote chance a walker happened across the body, a dead cow might have given cause for concern and a phone call to a farmer, whereas a dead wild animal was just… nature.
He’d held the beast as it woke. He had touched it: him it would taste, but not attack.
He had released it carefully, directly on to the badger’s side. Now he watched as it drank its fill.
After eight minutes, the beast unhooked its jaws. The sow badger was unconscious. In a few minutes she would be dead.
The beast, fat and drowsy with blood, felt an instinctive urge as its abdomen strained and cells divided and extended in a race to become full, viable eggs.
The Tyros withdrew, as planned, and split up without a word.
Nothing remained of the release operation but an electronic eye concealed in a nearby tree.
THREE
“Help-me-Mrs-Murphy – come to my aid!
You’re gonna flip the pin on my love-grenade!
I-mean boom I-mean bust I-mean whom I-mean us!”
“I wrote that. I was in a band. Do you ‘dig’ that? No. Because you lack the life experience to appreciate the majesty of—”
“Do you see that helicopter?” interrupted Finn, looking back out of the window of the Mangusta.
“That what?”
Al believed in the to and fro of vigorous debate on long journeys and, as such, he and Finn had spent much of the morning arguing about wind turbines, football, whether Concorde could be revived and adapted to fly into space, whether snow was better than powered flight and, if the Nazis had taken over, which of Grandma’s friends would have turned collaborator.
They were just starting on Al’s assertion that “rock music is wasted on kids” when Finn first noticed the chopper.
He craned his neck to get a good look back up the road. Al tried to locate it in his mirrors.
The route was winding and the tree cover heavy, as they were on the edge of the New Forest, but unmistakably, less than a couple of hundred metres behind and above them, a helicopter was swinging back and forth, following the line of the road, getting lower and lower as it went.
“It’s getting really low,” said Finn. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“I hope it’s not your truant officer…” said Al, letting the joke trail off as he became more concerned.
The chopper was approaching fast now, almost skimming the tops of the trees. A couple of cars behind them had both slowed and pulled over.
Al carried on – the chopper didn’t have police markings after all – but as they came over a ridge into more open country it closed in, violently large and loud, bringing itself right up alongside the Mangusta.
“What are they doing?” said Al.
Then a voice echoed out of a loudhailer on the chopper’s belly.
“DR ALLENBY, PULL OVER.”
“They know you?” squealed Finn, impressed.
Al slowed to a halt. The chopper went to land in the road ahead.
“What is this? What’s going on?” said Finn.
Al paused for a moment. “I’m not sure, but at the very least it’s bad manners.”
He suddenly put his foot down. The car shot off. Then Al threw it into a screeching handbrake turn which spun them back the way they came. The V8 engine roared and Finn felt himself pushed back into the leather seat as the acceleration bit – there was no doubt about it, these cars were built to thrill.
“Why aren’t we stopping?” Finn shouted.
“Might be agents of a foreign state… Might be an old girlfriend trying to kill me… But don’t worry, we can lose them in the woods up here.”
Was he joking? He must be joking. Then Finn noticed that Al’s knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel. Finn hunkered down lower in his seat, heart hammering with excitement.
“Drive fast, Al.”
“Check.”
They were closing on the woods, but the chopper was almost upon them.
Again came the voice from the chopper’s loudhailer: “PULL OVER, DR ALLENBY, BY ORDER OF COMMANDER KING.”
Al cursed, slammed on the brakes and spun the Mangusta back to a halt at the side of the road, just short of the trees. The chopper descended gently on to the grass beside them.
Finn was transfixed. “Al…?” he started to ask, but his uncle, too furious to speak, just folded his arms and waited.
Further down the road two police 4 × 4s were approaching. Two men in Security Service suits leapt out of the chopper and made their way over as the engine powered down.
“Sir, you’ve got to come with—”
“Do thank the Commander,” Al interrupted, “but tell him we’re on holiday, tell him we’re ‘en route’, and he’ll have to get in touch next week, and tell him he doesn’t need to bother with all this either. I’m on email, Facebook or even the telephone. Oh, and don’t forget to tell him he’ll have to come crawling to me on his hands and knees while you’re at it…”
“Sir, I have been instructed to inform you the matter pertains to Project Boldklub.”
Project Boldklub? Finn laughed. What a bizarre name. “Who’s that? Some Viking?” He looked at Al.
Al’s face was suddenly still and serious.
DAY ONE 12:38 (BST). Siberia, Russia
The Arctic fox confused it with a lemming at first, but the scent soon became richer and sweeter.
The temperature was 2°C. Summer. Bog and meltwater pools characterised the surface at this time of year, the illusion of thaw. As the fox drew in towards the scent, the salt and sweet notes increased, grew irresistible, sending his nervous system wild.
And then he saw something he didn’t understand.
A man.
The man raised an arm. Fired. Then continued eating his hot dog.
The impact propelled the fox into a gully. As blood seeped through his crystal-white fur, a last survival instinct kicked in, and he curled and clamped his mouth round the wound.
A disc of congealed blood formed on the surface of the tundra. Insects and micro-organisms, adapted to the extreme environment, drew in to feed greedily upon it.
Fourteen metres beneath, in a vast insulated bunker and in simulated tropical luxury, David Anthony Pytor Kaparis lay in his iron lung 1 and waited.
The lung breathed in. The lung breathed out.
It encased him like a coffin, leaving only his head exposed, and that was all but enveloped by a cluster of automated mirrors and optical devices that allowed his gaze to roam free without troubling the muscles in his damaged neck. These mirrors and lenses swivelled and shifted constantly, bending and distorting reflections of his face so it appeared almost pixelated and an observer could never be sure where those eyes were going to pop up next. Eyes of black ice, sour and entombed.
Above him a panoramic screen array carried multiple data, news and intelligence feeds. Optical tracking meant he could manipulate it all at a glance – trawl the web, analyse data, model an idea, visit any place on earth, even (if looks could kill…) order a drone strike.
The meeting in the CFAC at Hook Hall had been relayed to him in real time through a concealed 816-micron digital video camera built into his agent’s spectacles. It was transmitting pictures first to a microprocessor sewn into the agent’s scalp via an induction loop, then via tiny data-burst relays between specially adapted low-energy light bulbs fitted throughout the Hook Hall complex, and thereafter via the Scimitar Intelcomms 8648 satellite to Siberia. Transmission lag to Kaparis – 0.44 seconds.
It was an ingenious system.
His serotonin levels should’ve been satisfactory. Instead Kaparis was intensely irritated. The pictures from the live feed kept jumping because the agent constantly flicked the spectacles up and down. Despite the eighteen months of effort and detailed planning that had gone into this most complicated operation, no one had thought to supply the correct ophthalmic prescription.
1 Was simply doing your job really so difficult?
2 Was it only him that cared about the details?
3 What must it be like to be ordinary?
“Heywood?” Kaparis said, summoning his butler in a cut-glass English accent.
“Sir?”
“Establish who supplied the incorrect lenses for the camera spectacles.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then have their eyes pulled out. And salted.”
“Yes, sir.”
Killing would be too much. It was important to keep a sense of proportion.
Onscreen, a helicopter hove into view. The image flicked again, taunting his leniency.
“And Heywood?”
“Sir?”
“Record the screams.”
FOUR
DAY ONE 12:51 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
Finn’s first view of Hook Hall was from above: a grand old country house with a formal garden, surrounded by a complex of ultra-modern buildings. Outside the largest of these buildings, as they came into land, Finn could see a clutch of officials and lab-coated scientists drawn towards the spot like ants to a dropped ice cream.
Al took off his helmet as they touched down and indicated Finn should do the same.
“We are still on holiday until I say so. OK?”
“If you say so!” Finn yelled back, still numb with exhilaration from the short flight and having already decided to just go with the bewildering flow. He stepped off the aircraft after Al and stumbled self-consciously through the rotor wash, half deaf, towards the small welcoming committee.
A shortish, fattish old man was first to greet them, overwhelmed apparently to be meeting –
“Dr Allenby! An honour! Professor Channing. I reviewed your paper on anti-concentric-kinesthesis.”
“Wonderful. This is Finn,” said Al.
“Hi!” said Finn.
“Is the resort this way?” Al asked.
“Ah…?” said the Professor, confused.
Huge road transporters packed with equipment were lined up outside the large building waiting to go through its hangar-sized doors.
“What an unusual hotel. Is there room service?” said Al.
“Er…”
“Finn likes chips, don’t you, Finn?”
“Or potato wedges,” Finn explained, unsure why this was relevant.
“We have a canteen…?” tried the Professor.
Al took in the line-up of trucks. “What’s all this for? Are you having a pageant?”
By now Professor Channing was completely confused.
“No, it’s… every centrifuge, laser and electromagnetic accelerator we can lay our hands on. This has just arrived from Harwell, part of the new Woolfson Accelerator, and…”
“Oh my goodness, I think I spot an old friend!” said Al, taking off down the line of transporters, Professor Channing trotting to keep up.
Finn’s strong instinct was to keep out of the way, but Al pulled him along front and centre, determined to make a spectacle, leading everyone a merry dance as he searched among the trucks like a weekend shopper in the aisles of Ikea.
As they entered the Central Field Analysis Chamber, Finn felt like they were entering a game, the ‘facility’ level of a first-person shooter – concrete industrial construction, glass control booths, steel gantries and outsize scientific equipment: an outlandish vision of a not too distant future. The big difference here was that real human security personnel carried real guns: large, heavy and scary.
“Aha!” Al cried. “It’s you, Fatty!”
Al seemed to be addressing a large vehicle. But, as they came round it, Finn saw what was inside. Huge quarter-sections of a giant metal doughnut, each the size of a cottage, were being manoeuvred off the transporter by an outsize forklift, a freak-show mirror of perfect polished steel on the inside, a mess of hydraulics and wiring on the outside, featuring domestic plumbing and gaffer tape – a dazzling piece of engineering that looked like it’d been knocked together in a shed: very Uncle Al.
Finn caught his distorted reflection on the perfect inner surface and remembered a night at home the year before when Al had appeared unexpectedly on the doorstep to demand Toad-in-the-Mustard-Hole from Grandma (the family comfort food). He had sworn and ranted at the table saying “they’ve mugged me” and “they have press-ganged Fatty”. There was little indication who ‘they’ or ‘Fatty’ were, but a general hatred and distrust of anyone In Charge had come across before he’d drunk too much and fallen asleep in front of Match of the Day.
“Ah yes, the Fat Doughnut Accelerator you developed at Cambridge!” said Professor Channing.
“Stolen from me a year ago in the dead of night!” said Al.
“Ah… it was?”
Commander King appeared on the gantry above them like a materialising vampire.
Al pretended not to notice.
“Ripped from my still beating breast and shipped to the military by that perfidious, superior, mendacious, warmongering…”
“Dr Allenby.”
“Ah… Lord Vader.”
King allowed himself a minuscule, dry smile (no one else dared) and descended slowly. Finn hid behind Professor Channing.
“As I recall, we commissioned a preliminary study into possible defensive potential only after you had withdrawn cooperation, concealed the sequencing codes and thrown what my nanny used to call ‘a wobbly’?”
“Because I said NO to weaponisation.”
“But you were already working with the military?”
“Only with my guys – and we were having ‘fun’. Didn’t Nanny ever teach you to ‘have fun’, Commander?”
“Certainly not. She taught us Cleanliness, Godliness and to Ignore Naughty Boys.”
“Then what are we doing here? Because I warn you, if you’re on holiday too, there’s no pool.”
“We need you, Dr Allenby. If not your terrific sense of humour.”
There was a cold connection between the two, the ghost of a mutual respect.
“So spill the beans,” said Al.
Without even looking at Finn, King said: “Not in front of the children.”
Uh-oh.
Finn shrank further behind Channing.
“They’re perfectly normal human beings, just smaller and largely odourless. Say hello, Finn, you’re frightening the King.”
Finn emerged from cover.
“Hi. Sir. Finn. I mean, I’m Finn. Not sir. Not you, you’re sir. I’m just…”
“Hello, Infinity, I am sorry we’ve interrupted your excursion. We have a canteen area. There’s a television, some magazines. Why don’t you go with Nigel and he’ll show you the—”
“I think I’ll stay and watch!”
(Canteen. Television. Nigel. Apart from an absurd facility for science and maths, Finn was average or hopeless at most other things, but he did have an Acute Sense of Dread – the one great advantage of being orphaned. Just keep going.)
King, not used to interruptions, raised an eyebrow.
“He thinks he’ll stay and watch,” confirmed Al, dragging Finn forward for a formal introduction.
“Meet my late sister’s child, my sole heir, my DNA. I promised him an adventure and my mother a week of respite care – and that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Wherever I go, he goes.”
Finn felt briefly at ease, proud even, till Al continued, “He may look like a scruffy, not particularly well-coordinated boy from a bog-standard comprehensive…”
“Hey! It’s an academy. It has academy status.”
“…but he’s in the top set for science and maths and has been schooled by me in the wilder side of theoretical physics, rocketry and blowing things up. What’s more, he has a soul a mile deep, a smile a mile wide and can be trusted absolutely.”
Finn thought this might be overselling him a little, but still couldn’t help tacking on, “And I’ve had two letters published in Amateur Entomologist. It’s a specialist magazine.”
“You surprise me,” said King drily and took a step forward so that he and Al were eyeball to eyeball.
“This is an extraordinary situation, an aggregate threat to human life that demands a global response through the G&T and the reconstitution of Boldklub…”
Al whispered back, “He already knows.”
Commander King turned a shade of white not known in nature.
A shade of murder.
Al slapped Finn on the back and drove him on up the gantry.
“What do I know?” Finn whispered.
“Shut up and go with it,” hissed Al.
Up in the control gallery, Finn no longer felt like he was in a video game. Up here it was more like the bridge of a spaceship in some movie. There were banks of computers and displays and an observation window that ran the length of the gallery and looked down across the vast CFAC below.
“Wow!”
Beyond the giant lorries that were depositing the accelerators and physics kit, Finn could see more trucks arriving, military green and brown. He could make out the tarpaulin-covered shapes of what he took to be vehicles, and maybe even a helicopter. Signs were appearing everywhere that warned ORDNANCE – EXTREME CARE – RESTRICTIONS APPLY.
Al headed straight for two soldiers – one huge, the other small and wizened – who had risen to greet him: the first like an old friend, the second with wary resignation.
“Kelly and Stubbs! My boys! The old team back together again!” laughed Al.
Captain Kelly wore an SAS badge and was a comic-book action hero: six foot six and one hundred kilos of scarred flesh and raw power. He poked Al’s chest in mock accusation (nearly breaking his sternum) – “They let you back in?” – before following up with a laugh and a bear hug.
“And Major Leonard Stubbs! Sir!” gasped Al once he was free.
Stubbs grimaced and Kelly ruffled his hair.
“He’s happy,” insisted Kelly. “He’s wagging his little tail.”
With the physique and charm of a defeated tortoise, Engineer Stubbs was technically retired and past pensionable age, but, as a minor genius with both mechanical and information systems who could fix anything, he’d been given an honorary commission at sixty and asked to stay on – which, considering he had never attracted a Mrs Stubbs, was a blessing all round. He clearly didn’t do hugs or emotion, which of course made Al kiss him on both cheeks like a Frenchman.
“For goodness’ sake…”
Al introduced Finn. “My nephew – Infinity Drake.”
“Please, just Finn.”
“I’m looking after him for a week. He’s a short version of me without the looks, brains or char—”
“He always says that.”
Stubbs sighed as if he knew exactly what Finn had to put up with.
“We can shoot him for you. Seriously,” said Kelly, crushing Finn’s fingers with his handshake.
“Ow!”
“Don’t listen to anything these men say,” said Al. “No one knows how they got in here.”
“Seats,” ordered Commander King.
Seats were duly taken. Technicians were setting up a series of digital projectors, fiddling with cables and tapping at keyboards.
As Al took his seat, Finn sat beside him and whispered, “By the way, Al?”
“Hmm?”
“What the hell is going on and why do all these people think you’re some kind of—”
“It’s just what I do. Sometimes.”
“Just what you do?”
“The secret side. There have to be secrets, Finn, to protect the innocent.”
“But how…? When…? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“When you were eleven? Come on. Who would tell an eleven-year-old something like that?”
This stumped Finn.
“Now go hide,” said Al, nodding to a gap between two banks of computers, out of sight.
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” said Al.
Screens came online.
World leaders started to appear.
FIVE
“Mr President.”
“Commander King.”
“Prime Minister.”
“King. Mr President.”
“Prime Minister.”
“Guten Tag, Frau Chancellor…”
King went through the introductory motions.
Finn thought, I’m supposed to be in double geography right now.
The President of the USA was in shirtsleeves – the Oval Office in the background familiar, if a little less tidy than in its TV incarnations. The British Prime Minister was in a large, book-lined room – not the smooth PM of news bulletins, but an alarmed posh little man. The German Chancellor settled herself into a reclaimed pine ‘ergonomische stuhl’ as the President of France came online from the gilt and ornate Élysée Palace.
“Is Allenby there?” said the US President.
Al leant into shot and waved so that the leaders of the free world could see him.
“Guys,” said Al.
Guys? Finn thought.
“So. What have we got, Commander King?” asked Al.
The room fell silent. The lights dimmed.
“Slide,” ordered King.
A digital projection lit up a wall-sized screen and showed… nothing.
Or at least nothing but a blank whiteness with a black dot in the middle.
King snapped, “Bring it up to scale.”
The lens zoomed in on the dot and suddenly the creature exploded across the screen.
Projected to the size of a man, a vile black, yellow and red-flecked monster, fresh and newborn-slick from its final moult. Its exoskeleton was extended, exaggerated; its thorax like a clutch of girders; its head a felt and fang atrocity; its silver-black wings still plastered against its abdomen which, cruelly coloured, scaled and distended, hung bulbous from its thorax like a great droplet of buzz-fresh poison. And, at its end, an ugly cluster of three barbed, glossy harpoon stings.
Finn froze and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. For a moment he tasted his own fear. The fear of death he sometimes got when he thought about his mother. A sense of something terrible, unstoppable and unknowable. He gulped it back.
A mouse click and the next image flashed up. A rear shot of the insect with a better view of the array of stings emerging from the bulbous abdomen.
Click. The underside, amour-plated and beetle-black. How does this thing fly? Finn thought.
Click. In the next image, the answer: silver-black wings fully extended, as long as a dragonfly’s, but broader.
Wow.
Click. The head and mouthparts, feelers and proboscis. Finn felt his stomach turn. He didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Click. The egg pouch and reproductive organ.
The six legs.
The black and yellow and red-tinged whole, like some vile bullet that in flight must look like… Who only knew what.
And the sound? thought Finn. What evil bass buzz would those wings make?
Al watched, face frozen, King pleasantly surprised to observe that even he was stilled by the sight.
“Meet Scarlatti,” said King. “Named after the eighteenth-century Italian composer noted for writing five hundred and fifty-five piano sonatas, because it registers a score of five hundred and fifty-five on the Porton Scale: that used to measure the lethal potential of weaponised organisms. A single Scarlatti could theoretically kill five hundred and fifty-five human beings.”
“Sacré bleu…” said the French President, without a hint of irony.
“During the Cold War, all sides developed and produced biological weapons. One of the main branches of study at our research institute at Porton Down was entomology, the study of insects, and how they could be adapted to carry and spread disease. In 1983 a geneticist accidentally developed a whole new genotype of insect by exposing the embryo of a highly engineered smallpox-carrying wasp – phenotype Vespula cruoris – to gamma radiation. The result was… Scarlatti.”
An old video recording came up onscreen of live Scarlattis being studied in a laboratory.
“Scarlatti is an asexual self-multiplier that, given a sufficient supply of simple protein – the body of a dead mammal say – can lay up to fifty eggs. It’s pesticide resistant, seventy-five millimetres long (the size of a hummingbird or a human thumb) and is all but physically indestructible. It nurtures supplies of a unique and fatal strain of smallpox in the poison sacs of its abdomen. Accelerated development means a single egg can become a viable flying insect in four days. Therefore a single insect can produce a fifty-strong swarm in four days. And swarm they do – given how much protein is required during their nymph, or rapid hemimetabolic, phase. Each swarm produces many new colonies, each swarming every four days, and so on ad infinitum. Or until the supply of protein dries up.”
Finn could taste something sickening.
He means people by ‘the supply of protein’. He means… us.
Onscreen, the video turned nasty. White mice were introduced to the test chamber and seized upon by frenzied Scarlattis. They seemed to relish the kill, whipping their stings into the poor creatures long after they were disabled or dead.
“This hideous project was immediately discontinued, the remaining nymphs first being frozen and then incinerated at the end of the Cold War under the Biological Weapons Convention.
“However, two specimens remained. One was sent to the United States under the Hixton-Fardale Shared Research Agreement, and has presumably been destroyed.. A second was secretly frozen and stored at Porton Down by the government of the day ‘just in case’ or, as we like to put it more formally, for ‘Reasons of National Security’.”
Commander King allowed his eyelids to close so as to avoid the righteous glares of the other committee members. Then he took a deep breath.
“One of our Porton Down research fellows, a Dr Cooper-Hastings, seems to have lost all reason, found a way to access the secure cold store and… has released the last remaining Scarlatti.”
There were gasps.
“He did what?” asked the US President.
King turned to his screen. “Dr Cooper-Hastings released the specimen into the atmosphere, sir.”
A staff-card mugshot of a middle-aged scientist flashed up. Thick glasses. Dull eyes.
“He stayed late at work, leaving at 10pm. A search was initiated six minutes later when an algorithm discovered an access control code override on his staff card. An empty cryogenic support cylinder was eventually found outside his abandoned car at 03:32 this morning near the village of Hazelbrook, thirty-six miles north of here.”
A map of Hazelbrook flashed up onscreen and a photo of the abandoned car.
“The area around the village has been declared a biohazard zone and evacuated. We’re conducting a full investigation and every available officer from every agency is involved in the manhunt for Cooper-Hastings.”
“Cut to the chase. What exactly are we talking about here – worst case?” asked the US President.
King and Professor Channing exchanged looks. The Professor stood up to deliver the bad news.
“Worst case: we estimate that with a first swarm in four days national contamination will be total within four to six weeks, continental within three months, global-temperate within six months.”
“Global-temperate?” repeated the US President.
“Nearly all of Western Europe, a good two-thirds of North America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, most of South America, Australia. Only cold air and altitude offer any protection. In total, two-thirds of the land mass of the earth.”
There was a pause.
“Nearly six billion people,” said King.
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