I tried to fight the ball of terror in my core, but the disembodied voice was so calm and chilling as he talked about ending my life.
‘Please make no further attempts at escape. As you will see, your slumber room has been repaired but the plaster is still drying. If you get off the bed, I will have my acolytes beat you. I doubt you will enjoy the experience.’
Overcome by the horror of my situation, I screamed, ‘Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?!’
A slow chuckle echoed around my cell. ‘Because I need you alive for just a short while longer, my dear. Your friends from the detective agency are coming to try to save you. They are walking into a trap, of course, yet it feels prudent to have you available to halt them, should they achieve more than I believe they can. If you like, I will play their progress over the speaker. That way you can hear them die one by one.’
I was hyperventilating. Lying still on the bed, I couldn’t seem to get any oxygen into my lungs. I always knew Tempest and the others would be doing all they could to find me, but now I wished they weren’t.
Were they really walking into a trap? I’d seen Tempest achieve the unbelievable more than a few times. And his friend, Big Ben, well he might be little more than a walking penis, but he was a fighting machine. The pair of them were trained soldiers with a shadowy past. Would they really be suckered in and killed so easily?
If the Sandman’s confidence were any marker, they didn’t stand a chance against him and they were just two against a cohort of his robed helpers. He called them acolytes. It made it sound as if this were a cult or a religion.
The knife was still tucked under my hands, but any thoughts I had about using it to free myself had to go on hold for I held no doubt about his willingness to punish me if I tried to get free. A chance would come. The question was whether I would be able to use it to free myself, or if the option I would take would be to kill the Sandman.
Though it terrified me to even think it, I knew the only way to stop him, might be to sacrifice myself.
Tempest. Hidden Things. Saturday, December 24th 1428hrs
‘Does this look right?’ asked Jagjit.
I turned my head to look at his screen. He’d navigated to an Ordnance Survey map where the ten-figure grid reference could be translated into a position on the planet.
When I saw where it was, I did a double take.
‘I know this place!’ I blurted.
Amanda swivelled around to look at what had me excited and the others crowded around to see the screen.
Basic was still finishing off the now cold sausages in buns. Most of us had eaten a couple, all except Alice and Jagjit who had been at home all day and able to eat when they wanted to. Basic was on his fifth or sixth and I hoped they gave him energy because we were going to need it.
My claim to know the place we were looking at was doubly true. It was inside a country park where I occasionally walked my dogs, but I also saw it just a few hours ago. It was on a map on the desk inside Harry Hengist’s house. At the time, I spent a few seconds looking it over and wondering about its significance. I hadn’t recognised it though. Not at the time. Now I did.
‘That’s Cobham Country Park,’ said Alice, recognising it too.
‘Oh. So it is,’ agreed Big Ben.
With a finger, Alice traced the A2 dual carriageway as it passed the location on the map. A main artery bisecting Kent, it led directly from Dover to London. Anyone familiar with the county could recognise the towns and villages on the map before us.
I told them about the map in Harry Hengist’s house. ‘There’s something you probably don’t know about that park,’ I told them all.
Amanda asked, ‘What about it?’
I pointed to a small mark on the screen and had Jagjit zoom in. It appeared as a series of dashes that made a line. It indicated something buried beneath the ground. I only knew what it was because I had been there and stumbled across it once.
‘There is a second world war operations room beneath the ground.’
Jagjit’s jaw dropped open. ‘You have got to be kidding me.’
‘There’s nothing labelled on the map?’ questioned Alice.
I nodded. ‘That’s because secret stuff doesn’t get labelled. It’s there. There is a plaque erected to tell people what it is, but it is sealed up. At least, it has been whenever I have passed it. I walk the dogs there sometimes,’ I explained. ‘The only indication on the surface is a barrier to stop people falling into the hole where the stairs go down to a door. The surface is completely flush with trees and stuff growing on top.’
‘How many ways in are there?’ asked Big Ben, his business face was showing, and he was thinking tactically.
Six sets of eyes scoured the map.
‘There.’ Amanda jabbed a finger at the screen. We spent minutes looking for another set of dashed lines but could find none. There were two ways in. Both would be locked under normal circumstances, yet if the Sandman were using it as a lair and wanted to lure us in, I figured at least one door would be open. The grid reference took us to one of the doors, not the other.
Big Ben growled, ‘We need to tool up. Did the cops leave anything in the back?’
He referred to our chest of weapons,
