The Fourth Bear

happens, stay on.”

He kicked the engine into life, clonked the bike into gear and then accelerated rapidly along the underground garage, up the ramp and into the evening light outside. Jack hung on as Vinnie expertly weaved around the cordon and straight through a small crowd of onlookers, all of whom scattered as they saw him approach. In a second they had turned left and headed toward the motorway. The police helicopter was rapidly diverted and picked them up at the junction to the M4, where the bear and his passenger were easily seen heading westbound. The helicopter stuck to them like glue, and within thirty minutes a full rolling roadblock was converging on the motorcycle. At speeds at over a hundred miles an hour, Vinnie Craps kept the police at bay until his luck and gasoline ran out thirty-two minutes after they’d left the Bob Southey, and the Norton coasted onto the hard shoulder. The pillion passenger, much to the officers’ annoyance, wasn’t Jack at all—he was a friend of Vinnie’s called Lionel.

While the full force of the law was pursuing Vinnie up the motorway, Jack was walking swiftly back to the Allegro. They had made the switch soon after passing the cordon. Lionel had been waiting at the side of the road in identical clothes, and the swap had worked like a treat.

As Jack drove past Theale, the sky clouded over, and several drops of rain begun to speckle the windshield. By the time he pulled up outside the gates of the deserted and unfinished SommeWorld complex, a downpour had begun. Lightning crackled overhead as he got out of the car and ran to the visitors’ center, which looked empty, dark and abandoned. He pushed open the heavy glass door with its Lewis gun magazine door handles and stepped quietly in, shaking the rainwater from his jacket. The centerpiece of the large domed vestibule was a First World War tank, set in a circular diorama filled with earth especially imported from the Somme itself. The marble flooring in the main atrium was engraved with the names of all those who had lost their lives in the failed offensive. The atrium was large, but the writing was by necessity quite small.

The door swung shut behind him and locked with an audible clunk, followed by the sound of other locks being thrown, echoing around the building. He was trapped. Jack looked up at a security camera as he took a few steps forward, and it followed him. He was expected, and he was being watched. He moved to the ticket office and turnstiles, the chrome tubing still covered with a protective plastic coating. To his right was the shop where souvenirs of the Great War would one day be sold, and to his left were the half-completed museum and auditorium, where visitors would be able to watch a five-minute animated featurette describing the events in Europe that led up to the conflict.

He walked past the outfitters where people would one day change into uncomfortable British army uniforms before manning the trenches outside; then he moved to the main stairway that led up to the administrative offices above. In the upstairs corridor, Jack could see a light shining from a half-open door, and he moved closer.

“Why don’t you come in, Inspector?” said a deep voice when he was still three paces away. “There’s no sense in skulking around.”

Jack pushed open the door of the security office and stepped in.

Bisky-Batt turned from the console of CCTV monitors he had been watching. The VP of QuangTech smiled at Jack and offered him a seat. Jack said he’d prefer to stand, and Bisky-Batt nodded agreeably, took one look through the windows at the faux battlefield that was still just visible in the dusk, and sat behind the desk.

“I want answers,” said Jack, “and I want Demetrios. Hand him over and things might not look so bad for you.”

Bisky-Batt laughed. “I hardly think you are in a position to ask for anything, Inspector.” He paused and frowned. “Do I still call you ‘Inspector’? Now that you’re wanted for impersonation, stealing evidence, perverting the course of justice and murder?”

“Where’s Sergeant Mary?”

“I owe you our thanks for finding the Alpha-Pickle and McGuffin, by the way. He’s brilliant, of course, but highly unpredictable. He should never have contacted Goldilocks after the Obscurity blast.”

“It was just another test, like the Nullarbor, wasn’t it?”

“Of course. We’ve been monitoring these cucumbers very closely and move in as soon as they start to approach the magic fifty-kilo mark to take samples, then observe the blast. McGuffin’s work at QuangTech was never about turning grass cuttings into crude; it was always cucumbers.” He smiled. “Cucumbers that can extract the deuterium and tritium from the groundwater, store it all up and then self-ignite. Finally cucumbers have a reason for being.”

“If McGuffin won’t help, you’ve got nothing.”

“He might be a bit recalcitrant at present, but he’ll come across. We’ve got as long as we want with him, after all. No one’s going to miss a dead man.”

“I want to see the Quangle-Wangle.”

“No one sees the boss.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s been dead for over twelve years. He had odd ideas about his will—something about dismantling the company and giving the proceeds to Foss, his cat. We thought it better for all concerned—especially us—if we just placed the Quangle-Wangle into a sort of legal suspended animation and took over the running ourselves.”

Jack said nothing. It was time to start putting his plan into action. Then he remembered: He didn’t have one.

“I must say,” continued Bisky-Batt, “when Danvers asked you to come over here, we really didn’t think you’d come. It shows either a considerable misunderstanding of the whole situation or a sort of boundless optimism that, while mildly endearing, will be your undoing. There are journalists and cucumberistas lying dead who knew considerably less than you. The finer points of this little adventure will die with you.”

“I’ve told other people about it.”

“Let me guess,” said Bisky-Batt. “Bartholomew and that jumped-up teddy bear Craps. They won’t live to see a debrief. Believe me, Danvers is staggeringly loyal to Demetrios, and if he tells her it is in the national interest, she’ll do anything he asks. Your Sergeant Mary will enjoy a similar fate, only more imaginative—two accidents here at SommeWorld in less than a week should spell the end of the theme park, and about time. A bigger waste of money I have yet to see. And even if there were still people who might have a vague idea of what’s going on, will anyone believe them when they claim that it’s possible to extract sunbeams from cucumbers? No. And there is no concrete connection between anyone at QuangTech and this whole shady business—aside from you.”

“We know all about the Gingerbreadman.”

Bisky-Batt paused and stared at him. “You might think you do.”

“No,” said Jack, “we really do.”

He pulled out of his pocket the photomicrographs Parks had given him. The scanning electron microscope had revealed to the world that which is too small to be seen with the naked eye: Nestled around a tiny speck of ginger less than the width of a human hair was a serial number.

“This is from the Gingerbreadman’s thumb, Bisky-Batt. I’m no genius, but I’m willing to bet that the suffix ‘QTBioWD’ on this serial number stands for QuangTech BioWeapons Division—and I think most other people will, too.”

Bisky-Batt leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. Jack noticed for the first time that his shirt was damp with nervous sweat. Despite the outward calm and geniality, the VP was running scared.

“Who else knows about this?”

“Not many. Just those with an Internet connection.”

“Unwise, Jack, unwise. You would have been better keeping this to yourself. Disposing of you is beginning to look less like a chore and more like a pleasure.”

“Disposing of me won’t alter the fact that you were the VP when the Gingerbreadman was engineered. You knew what he was, and you did nothing. One hundred and twelve deaths, Horace—and you could have stopped them all. Now: Where’s Demetrios?”

“He’s behind you.”

Jack smiled and wagged a finger at Bisky-Batt. “Oh no. I don’t fall for the old ‘he’s behind you’ routine.”

“That’s a shame, because he really is behind you.”

Jack froze and then turned slowly around. Standing at the door was a bear barely three feet high. He was