“He’s not?” Elliott replied, her confusion obvious.
“No, and if they had judo or aikido on Britain’s Got Talent, I’d win hands down. Come on, grumpy — try and hit me,” Stephanie urged. She waggled her fingers, beckoning Elliott toward her. “And do your worst this time.”
Elliott attacked in earnest. Her full-bodied punch was aimed directly at Stephanie’s chin. But Stephanie deflected the blow, caught Elliott’s wrist, and threw her onto her back in a single, fluid movement. It didn’t end there — as Stephanie dropped to the floor beside Elliott, she had one of her arms in a lock. Elliott was pinned to the ground and completely in the other girl’s power. “Got you!” Stephanie said.
“NO!” Chester cried from the doorway.
The boy’s sudden appearance distracted Stephanie sufficiently that Elliott managed to twist free. She swung her legs up and caught Stephanie around the neck in a scissor grip. Then Elliott heaved her to the floor, where the other girl was trying all she could to break free. But now Elliott had her in an iron grip.
Chester was reaching in to separate them. “Stop it! Stop it at once!”
Elliott relaxed her grip, and they both sat up.
“Nice move — wasn’t expecting that,” Stephanie complimented Elliott.
“What do you think you’re both doing?” Chester demanded, huffing with concern as the girls stared up at him.
“You sound like my dad.” Stephanie giggled.
“It wasn’t for real,” Elliott said.
“It looked real enough to me,” Chester came back. “Besides, you should watch out for your back,” he said to Elliott.
“My back’s completely — ” she started to reply but stopped as Stephanie failed to stifle another giggle.
“What’s so funny?” Chester demanded, becoming quite irate now.
“You didn’t think we were fighting over you, did you?” Stephanie said.
Blushing, Chester made an about-turn and fled from the room. Muttering to himself, he hunched his shoulders and stomped down the corridor.
As he was approaching the elevator area, Will rounded the corner, a piece of paper in his hand. “I was just on my way to find you,” Will said. “I went up to the Hub and they’re all busy with whatever they’re doing, but I did speak to Sergeant Finch and . . .” Clearly excited about whatever was on the piece of paper, Will was about to show it to his friend when he sensed that all wasn’t well with him. “You don’t look very happy. Are you all right?” Will inquired.
“Peachy . . . just peachy,” Chester spat, his face stiff with anger.
Will caught Elliott’s and Stephanie’s animated voices, then Stephanie’s shrill laughter. “Wow! Am I really hearing that?” he said. “I never thought those two would ever hit it off. What are they laughing about?”
Chester pulled a face. “I haven’t the faintest idea — they’re girls, aren’t they? What did you want me for, anyway?” he asked curtly.
“This,” Will said, flashing the sheet of paper in front of his friend. “Sergeant Finch told me there are some interesting rooms on Level 3. We should go and have a look.”
At Chester’s insistence, they took the stairs rather than the elevator. As they entered the new level, they immediately spotted a difference. There might still have been linoleum on the floor, but it was a rich blue, and the walls of the corridor were covered with a fine gold-and-green-patterned wallpaper.
“What’s this all about?” Chester asked, looking around. “I thought we’d been given the luxury floor?”
“You just wait,” Will replied, consulting his piece of paper as he walked ahead of Chester, checking what was on the doors. “Ah, here we are,” he announced, pushing one of them open and turning on the lights.
Inside, there was a suite of four interconnecting rooms, two with four-poster beds, their canopies swathed with red velvet, and on the walls tapestries depicting hunting scenes. The antique furniture was incredibly ornate and looked expensive — it was in a different league from anything in their own quarters.
“Was this for someone important?” Chester asked, running his eyes over the gilded chairs and a large divan.
“You’re getting warm. It was for someone really important. Go on — have a guess,” Will challenged his friend as they passed into a small side room, which was very basic and utilitarian compared to the bedrooms. With a butler’s sink in the corner, it had several small pens along the longest wall.
“Any ideas?” Will asked.
“Nope,” Chester said, his patience growing thin. “Come on, Will, stop messing around. Who were these rooms for? And why are we stopping in the kitchen?”
“It’s not a kitchen. If I told you these pens were specially built for corgis, would that help?” Will said, stepping into one of them.
“Corgis?” Chester repeated, then the penny dropped. “You’re joking! This was for the Queen!”
“You got it! And that’s not all!” Will exclaimed, leading him back through the rooms and out into the corridor again. He groped in his pocket for a key, which he slotted into the solid-looking door of the next room. As it ground open on its chunky hinges, the boys stepped inside. Will turned on the lights, and he and Chester were met by the sight of a whole room of glass display cases on pedestals. The cases were empty, but from the satin-covered stands in the bottom of each of them, it was clear that they’d been constructed to house something specific.
“This is where the crown jewels would have been brought if we’d been invaded,” Will informed his friend.
Chester was smiling and shaking his head. “That’s wild. So what else is on this level?”
“Sergeant Finch said that all these rooms were for the VIPs,” Will said. “And you’ve got to see this next one.”
Farther down the corridor, there was a door with pm painted on it. Chester was unimpressed because the room itself was rather cramped and completely unremarkable as he walked around it. On the desk was a blotter where someone had begun to draw a wall, brick by brick, underneath which the sentence Where are you, Mrs. Everest, when I need you the most? had been written. When he gave the desk drawers a quick check, Chester found nothing, so he took another look around the room, even going as far as investigating the bathroom. He came out brandishing a newspaper — an ancient, yellowed copy of the Times.
“This is old — fifteenth August 1952,” he said, then lobbed it onto the bed where Will was sitting. “I give up — whose room was this?” he asked.
The plastic dust sheet covering the bed crackled as Will leaned over and opened the bedside stand. He took out a bottle with a label that said HINE, and a box with AROMA DE CUBA emblazoned on it. “Brandy and cigars,” he said, holding both items up.
Chester could see that the bottle wasn’t full, and the seal on the cigar box had been broken. “That doesn’t help — you’ll have to tell me.”
“Winston Churchill was the last person to sleep in this bed,” Will announced.
Chester laughed. “Well, I hope they changed the sheets!”
Will was looking at the cigar box and the brandy with interest. “Sergeant Finch told me that these have been here since he was Prime Minister. He wanted to spend a night in the Complex to find out for himself what it was like. And he always had a gulp of brandy first thing in the morning to go with his first smoke,” Will said, bouncing up and down on the mattress several times. Then he held the brandy bottle up to study the label. “Why don’t we drink this?”
“Why?” Chester asked, nonplussed.
“Because I’ve never been really drunk. I suppose I had that beer Tam gave me in the Colony, but it tasted foul.” Will was now staring at the thick brown liquid in the bottle as he swilled it around. “Maybe it’s something we should do. Just in case . . .”
“In case what?” Chester said, flopping down on th
e bed beside his friend. “In case we don’t make it through all this?”
Will nodded somberly.
“That’s a happy thought,” Chester whispered. He took the cigar box from Will and hinged the lid open, sniffing inside. “These things must have been here for years. Don’t they go off?” he asked, as he picked out one of the stubby cigars and rolled it between his fingers.
Will shrugged. “Who cares — they’re still cigars, and I’ve never smoked one. I’ve never smoked anything yet.” He rooted around in the bedside cabinet until he found a box of matches. “Whitehall,” he said, reading what was printed on them. “That follows.”
“I had a couple of lager shandies once on holiday with Mum and Dad, but that’s it,” Chester admitted. “And I’ve never smoked, either.”
“Remember the Grays?” Will said, staring into the middle distance as he thought about the gang who had terrorized the smaller children at Highfield High School. “Speed and Bloggsy necked cider and smoked cigarettes all the time. They’d done the whole lot, hadn’t they, and that was more than a year ago!”
“They had girlfriends, too,” Chester said wistfully.
Will still had a faraway look in his eyes. “If you think about it, Churchill led the country through the Second World War, and right now you and I are stuck in the middle of this war with the Styx. We’re pretty important, too. Who knows — without us, the country might not have a chance of winning. So don’t you think we have a right to do what we want? Don’t we owe it to ourselves to polish off what’s left of his brandy?”
But Chester dropped the cigar back into the box and closed the lid. “Tell you what, Will, when we do win, let’s come straight back here and smoke our heads off and get really bladdered!” He stuck his hand out. “Deal?”
“Deal,” Will agreed, shaking his friend’s hand, then putting the brandy and cigars away again.
They were interrupted as the intercom system emitted a clear tone both in the room and outside in the corridor. “Everybody is to report to the Hub immediately. I say again — everybody is to report to the Hub immediately,” it ordered.
“That’s Danforth, isn’t it?” Chester said as he angled his head to listen to the voice.
Will nodded. “If she shows up, I hope Elliott’s forgiven him. She’s in a funny mood, and he got a little carried away with the scalpel when he was investigating her.” As they walked back toward the stairs, Will added, “In fact, I don’t like to think what would have happened if nobody else had been there to stop him.”
“Yes,” Chester agreed. “It’s odd really, because although he doesn’t look like much, when you get to know him better, he’s actually a really scary little man.”
Drake was laying out a variety of items on the desks as everyone converged on the Hub.
Will and Chester arrived first and were watching as Mrs. Burrows, Mr. and Mrs. Rawls, Colonel Bismarck, then Elliott and Stephanie turned up. The two girls were chatting enthusiastically to each other as though they were long-lost friends.
“Here they are,” Chester muttered to Will as he twisted away from Elliott and Stephanie. “Looks like they’re getting really matey.”
“And Danforth’s keeping well out of the way,” Will observed, watching the Professor, who had his eyes glued on the screen of one of his laptops. “I’m telling you, I really wouldn’t be surprised if Elliott has a pop at him when she gets the chance.” Will switched his attention to Parry and Sergeant Finch, who were both busy talking on satphones.
“Form a line, please,” Drake said. “The quicker we’re done here, the quicker we can move out.”
“Where are we going?” Chester asked, as he and Will found themselves at the front of the queue.
“London,” Drake answered, preoccupied with inserting a small glass cylinder into a stainless steel device, then rolling up his sleeve. “Just in case anyone has misgivings about the shot I’m giving all of you, I’ll go first.” Cocking the mechanism, he placed it against his upper arm, and when he pulled the trigger, it made a small click. “Didn’t feel a thing.” He smiled.
“But we’ve all had the vaccine for Dominion,” Chester pointed out. “So what’s this for?”
Drake cleaned the end of the device with an alcohol wipe, then cocked it again. “We haven’t seen any deployment of the Dominion virus yet, but the Styx have some other nasties they might unleash on the population,” he replied.
“How do you know?” Will said.
“Because I snitched a load of specimens before Chester and I totaled the Laboratories in the Colony. Some were locked away in a special vault, so naturally I had to have them. And I asked a contact to analyze the different pathogens I came back with. On the basis of his findings, he manufactured a vaccine cocktail against all of them.”
Will unbuttoned his cuff and pulled up his sleeve. “Come on, then. Better safe than sorry,” he said.
Drake hadn’t been lying — the shot wasn’t painful. After he’d administered it, he led Will to the next desk. “Special Forces radio with a throat mike,” he told the boy, handing him one of the units. “Chester’s used a similar model before, so he can show you how it works.” Drake then dipped his hand into a plastic container and fished out what appeared to be a pair of small earplugs, which he passed to Will.
Will examined them, then looked at Drake questioningly.
“Belt and suspenders,” Drake said. “Celia and I were KO’d by a Styx subaural bomb on Highfield Common. I lost Leatherman and too many men that day. I’m not going to let it happen again.” Drake looked down for a moment. “There’ve been a couple of reports that the Styx are using similar devices in London.”
He took a second pair of plugs from the container and inserted them into his ears. “So these are a little something I knocked up while I was at Eddie’s flat. They won’t interfere with normal frequencies, but the moment they detect a subaural bomb, they kick in. They replicate its wavelength, but out of phase. So they’ll counteract any audiosonics being used on you.”
“They’ll protect us?” Will asked.
“Well, you’ll still know you’ve been zapped — maybe you’ll feel some dizziness, and your vision might go a little funny — but at least you won’t black out. These plugs will protect you long enough either to skedaddle, or to neutralize the source . . . the bomb itself.”
“Cool,” Will said as he went to slip them into his pocket.
“No, you should get into the habit of wearing them. Put them in,” Drake said quickly. “And I’ve finished with you now, so you can lend Danforth a hand to crate up the mobile detectors over there. We need them outside, ready for pickup by our transport.”
Will was about to ask what the transport was when Drake turned and went back to the waiting queue. With a shrug, Will made his way over to Danforth. He slowed as he passed Parry, who was on a satphone. He seemed to be employing a pass code sequence similar to the one Sergeant Finch had used when they’d first arrived at the main entrance of the Complex — Parry was quoting lines of what sounded like poetry about waking slumbering dragons, then waiting for responses from whoever he was speaking to.
“Drake said I should help you,” Will began, announcing himself to Danforth. The Professor was so intent on the symbols scrolling down the screen, he took a few moments to look up.
“That’s a classified government program I’ve got translating the Book of Proliferation. And from what I’ve read so far, it’s quite an eye-opener,” he said, tipping his head toward the screen. “The document gives an insight into one of the oldest, most resilient, and arguably most highly evolved species the world has ever known.”
“Really,” Will said indifferently. He wanted to spend as little time in Danforth’s company as he possibly could. Chester was right — there was something incredibly unnerving about the man.
And Will was surprised
when Danforth stepped from behind the table and nearer to him, albeit making sure he wasn’t too close because of his phobia about human contact. “So you’re off to London on a wild frolic to hunt for Dark Light activity,” Danforth said, keeping his voice low. “How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know anything about it yet — Drake hasn’t briefed me,” Will admitted.
“Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die,” Danforth said, misquoting the poem by Tennyson. “How very admirable you’re willing to throw your life away for the cause.”
“Well . . . no . . . we’ve got to do everything we can to stop the Phase, haven’t we?” Will met the Professor’s intense pupils through his glasses, but the man didn’t answer.
For a moment the Professor and the boy locked eyes, as if trying to delve deeper, to understand each other. In Danforth, Will again sensed something akin to Dr. Burrows’s obsessive dedication to the pursuit of new knowledge. A cold shiver passed down the length of his spine; he could almost imagine he was back with his dead father. But there was a stark difference. The Professor’s eyes were completely devoid of any warmth or compassion — no one mattered to him. No one at all. And that frightened Will.
Danforth began to smile, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile.
“Why — what’s wrong with the plan?” Will asked, hoping to find out more about it.
“Well, it promises to be interesting,” Danforth said, his smile transforming into a sneer. “Look at what we’ve got here.” He indicated everyone in the Hub with a sweep of his hand. “A leftover from the Third Reich, a Styx turncoat, a man with a microwave oven in his head, and a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers like you. And to top it all off, there’s a commando old enough to claim his bus pass calling the shots. How can we possibly go wrong?”
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