The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and his whole body began to shake as a second huge dose of adrenaline crashed through his system. He inched forward, took a deep breath, covered the last two feet to the corner of the bunker, and swung himself around the corner.
There was a figure standing in front of the door.
Everything moved in slow motion. Elliott stifled a scream, his eyes bulging in terror, and he began to pull his finger back against the feather-light trigger of the pistol. The figure was wearing a white T-shirt, and it was this detail that sank into Elliott’s brain just quickly enough to halt his finger. He took a second, closer look and then lowered the gun, panting, his breath coming in sharp hitches.
It wasn’t a person.
It was just a T-shirt, fastened to the door of the bunker. There was something dark sticking out of the middle of the chest, and there were words printed on the white material. He stepped forward to take a closer look, then a hand fell on his shoulder, and this time he did scream.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Elliott?” barked Commander Jackson, spinning the young flying officer around to face him. “Are you…”
He trailed off as he saw the T-shirt flapping gently in the night air.
The two men stepped forward, and Commander Jackson took the heavy torch from his belt and shone it on the bunker door.
The T-shirt was pinned by a heavy metal bolt, at least a foot long, that had been driven through the material and several inches into the steel bunker door.
How much force does it take to do that? Elliott wondered.
Printed on the T-shirt was a line drawing of an island with a single word below it in cheerful yellow type.
LINDISFARNE
Below that, across the stomach, in a dark red liquid that turned Elliott’s stomach, five words had been scrawled: TELL THE BOY TO COME
“Issue a proximity alert,” Commander Jackson said, in a low voice. “And wake the rest of the unit.”
Elliott pushed open the heavy door, noticing with slightly numb horror that a small pyramid of metal now emerged from the inside of it.
It almost went right through.
He sat at the communications desk and punched in the command to issue the proximity alert. This signal would be sent to every military base within a fifty-mile radius, ordering them to check their radars for any unexplained aerial phenomenon in the last thirty minutes. The radar operators in the bases would not know what they were looking for, or why, and would delete the record of their search as soon as the results had been transmitted back to the Northern Outpost, as the protocol dictated.
Elliott was about to key in the command to wake the rest of their unit, when something on one of the monitors caught his eye. It was a BBC News 24 feed, and the words Breaking News were scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
“Better let the Loop know about the message,” Jackson called through the open door.
Elliott didn’t take his eyes from the screen as he replied. “I think they already know, sir.”
40
Jamie shoved open the door to the Ops Room. Frankenstein and Thomas Morris were exactly where he had left them; the two men were not looking at each other, and Jamie doubted a word had been said in the time he had been underground. They looked up as he entered, and he sat in a chair in front of them.
“She didn’t do it,” he said.
Both men opened their mouths to protest, but he didn’t give them the chance.
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not. I know she didn’t do it. Which means you two, me, Admiral Seward, and the operator who moved the satellite are the only other people in the world who knew we had found Alexandru. The rest of the strike team were briefed in the air, and all radio traffic was monitored. So one of those has to be the person who tipped him off.”
He ran his hands through his hair, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms.
“To be honest,” he continued, “I don’t care who did it. All I care about is what we do next. As far as I can tell, we have no more leads, and Alexandru has more than likely killed a load of innocent people to punish me just for looking for him. So I want to know what happens now.”
With a whirring noise and bright flash of light, the screen that covered one entire wall of the Ops Room burst into life. The Department 19 crest appeared on the screen, six feet in diameter, as automated security protocols were implemented, then a window opened in the center of the Blacklight system desktop, and a BBC news report appeared in front of the three startled men.
“What’s happening?” asked Jamie.
“The monitoring system checks all civilian media for potential supernatural incidents,” answered Morris, staring up at the screen. “This is happening now, whatever it is.”
The words BREAKING NEWS were scrolling along the bottom in thick white text. The screen showed a reporter addressing the camera from a beach, his hair blowing in the wind, the sound crackling as the night air whistled across his microphone. Behind him a pair of portable spotlights were trained on the water’s edge, where a fishing boat appeared to have run aground. There were men and women wandering over the sand, dazed looks on their faces and blankets wrapped around their shoulders, while a number of policemen and paramedics moved among them.
The caption at the bottom of the screen informed the viewer that the report was coming live from Fenwick, Northumberland.
In the bottom-right corner of the screen, a man was standing still, a grimace of pain on his face as a paramedic applied a bandage to his neck. Two policemen were wrestling a screaming woman to the ground, and the reporter was trying desperately to find someone coherent enough to answer his questions.
A lightbulb suddenly blazed on in Jamie’s head.
“Tom!” he yelled, and the security officer jumped. “Can you rewind this report?”
Morris looked confused but said that he could.
“I need you to take it back thirty seconds and freeze it. Quickly!”
Morris opened a window and keyed a series of buttons. As he did so, Frankenstein lumbered to his feet and walked over to stand beside Jamie.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” replied the teenager, without taking his eyes away from the screen.
As Morris worked the controls, the news report stopped, then began to run backward.
“Freeze it there!” shouted Jamie after a couple of seconds, and Morris did so. “Zoom in on the man in the bottom right of the image.”
A grid of thin green lines appeared over the picture, dividing it into sixty-four squares. Morris highlighted the four at the bottom right and clicked on them. They expanded to fill the screen, a blurry image twelve feet high. He clicked a series of keys, and the image sharpened into perfect clarity.
The paramedic was about to place a bandage over the man’s neck. Blood was splattered over the pale skin, almost black in the silver light of the full moon that hung above him, now removed from view. Jamie drew in a deep breath sharply, and held it.
In the center of the matted blood were two round holes of pure black.
Jamie followed the blood down to the man’s shoulder, where it had spilled onto his upper arm and across onto his chest. He was wearing a white T-shirt, now stained a dark red.
“Where is this place?” demanded Jamie. “I need a map of the surrounding area. My mother is wherever this boat came from, I know it.”
