“Christ.”
“Apparently Drake’s bolted to his castle near Glastonbury. Last stand, kind of thing.” Noble fell silent.
Wynne climbed to his feet, staring at his second-in-command.
Or rather, his ex-second-in-command.
“How many Paladins do we have up here, Noble?”
The Lieutenant blinked. “How many? Ah, thirty, sir. And another twenty up in Cumbria.”
“And,” Wynne said, calculating, “how would you assess their mood in light of recent losses, Lieutenant? Losses incurred when we followed the orders of a… might I say a madman?”
Noble looked uncertain. “They’re… You might say they’re a bit pissed off, sir.”
“‘A bit pissed off’,” Wynne smiled. “I’d say a lot pissed off myself, Noble. Now, how would you like to atone for your error, Lieutenant?”
“Atone, sir?”
“Drake’s gone far enough. He’s responsible for the decimation of the Paladins, and we’re on the edge of nuclear Armageddon. We’ve got to stop him, don’t you agree? Contact Captain Whiteley and Corporal Hall,” he went on. “We’re advancing on Glastonbury.”
DEREK DRAKE WAS also advancing on Glastonbury.
Ensconced in the back of the limousine purring along the M4 towards the West Country, with the Holy Grail in its walnut carrying case on the seat to his left, Harriet to his right, and the Nuclear Briefcase laid flat on his lap, Drake felt supremely confident.
He was, after all, the latter-day manifestation of King Arthur. Emrys had told him so, and it made sense. Even his name, apparently, pointed to that truth. “Derek” was a shortening of Theoderic, which meant gifted ruler, while “Drake” had its roots in the word dragon. Who, therefore, was better suited than Derek Drake to be the re-embodiment of the monarch known as Arthur Pendragon?
The revelation that he was a latter-day King Arthur filled Drake with a sense of righteousness and entitlement so all-encompassing that even the bad news from Manchester––the blithering duo of Major Wynne and Lieutenant Noble had managed to let Ajia Snell wriggle from their grasp––could not dent his mood of optimism. He had immediately demoted the pair and contacted Major Worthington-Price at Swindon, promoting him to commander of the Paladins with immediate effect. Now that Snell was back on the loose, and her band of terrorists somewhere out there, Drake had experienced a moment of apprehension before ordering Worthington-Price to select thirty good men from the barracks at Swindon to accompany him down to Fairleigh Castle. An armoured car was at the van of the cavalcade, with three heavily armed Humvees bringing up the rear. With a squad of Paladins already in situ at the castle, he would be well protected.
Meanwhile, news on the Russian front, so to speak, was encouraging. Drake’s pre-emptive release of the compromising footage had had the desired effect of wrong-footing Vasilyev. He’d not heard from the Russian Premier in two days. HMS Nautilus was ready and waiting in the Baltic, and Drake had despatched a SAS Commando unit, armed with mobile nuclear warheads, to the Estonian border with Russia. In the Channel, just west of the Dover Strait, Royal Navy battleships were shadowing the three encroaching Russian ships with orders to blow them from the water on Drake’s command.
Everything was set for the ultimate showdown.
Beside him, Harriet squeezed his thigh. “Derek?”
“Mmm, my darling?”
“Did Emrys tell you?” she purred.
Drake smiled. “He did indeed.”
Ahead, the tower of Fairleigh Castle hove into sight, rising above the massed greenery of the Somerset countryside with Glastonbury tor in the background.
Harriet snuggled closer and kissed him.
Chapter 33
NEVE WINTERON WOULD never forget that crisp January day, six months ago, when her life changed for ever. Two momentous events occurred that morning. The first was her own death, and the second––perhaps even more unbelievable––was the death of her father and what had happened afterwards.
At seven that morning she had left her cottage, as was customary, to drive three miles to the village of Watermead on the outskirts of Glastonbury and the headquarters of Cry-Org Inc., the research institute she had set up five years previously.
Her work as head of the institute had not been going well; her research had stalled. Her father had counselled patience––a virtue of which she was always in short supply––and said that the path of science was notoriously tortuous, and that world-changing discoveries were never made overnight. These clichés and truisms had proved little comfort and done nothing to change Neve’s dissatisfaction with her work.
For the past five years she had done some ground-breaking research into the freezing of subjects, but the difficulty, the insurmountable stumbling block, was not so much the actual freezing of corpses but the tricky process of resurrection––bringing those subjects back to life. She had managed to freeze hundreds of animals, but not one had survived the process of thawing.
As an impatient perfectionist, this drove Neve to distraction.
She blamed her preoccupation on the problem, that morning, for her inattention as she rounded a bend in the lane at speed.
She had seen the errant sheep, stationed moronically in the middle of the road, at the very last second. In swerving to avoid the animal she had skidded on the frosty road and lost control of the BMW.
A conveniently placed oak tree had impeded the car’s progress, buckled its bonnet into the shape of a concertina, and driven a low branch down through the windscreen and into Neve’s chest.
She had not the slightest doubt that she had died instantly.
And had regained consciousness, sometime later, to stare down in horrified fascination as a pair of hands––her own, she saw incredulously––pulled the javelin-like branch from the left side of her chest.
Where a hole the size of a saucer gaped, displaying a ladder of broken ribs, ripped flesh, and steadily pulsing blood.
Unbelievably, she felt no pain.
Unbelievably, as she stared, the blood ceased its pumping flow and her ribs––two curved sections, stark and white in the morning sunlight––came together like attracted magnets and knitted themselves whole within seconds. Then, subcutaneous tissue aggregated itself around the ribs, and purple musculature built up over the mound, and flesh on top of that. Within fifteen minutes, she calculated, the wound was healed and only the rip in her Burberry coat showed where the branch had impaled her.
Oh-kay, she thought. I’m hallucinating. I’ve suffered concussion and this is the consequence.
She raised a hand to her head. She felt neither a cut nor blood. Come to that, she felt no pain, not even a headache.
But I still must be hallucinating.
She checked her legs, but they seemed to have survived the crash intact.
Forcing the door open, she extricated herself from the wreckage and stared around.
She saw the cause of the accident, the sheep, lying in the middle of the lane.
Something made her approach the animal, kneel before it, and reach out. The sheep was still alive, breathing shallowly.
As her fingers touched the creature’s off-white fleece, something very strange happened.
She felt something flow from the core of her being, down her outstretched arm and into the sheep. Something elemental and… cold. Freezing. And as she watched, open-mouthed, the animal froze within seconds.
Which was, she told herself, impossible.
Just as impossible as my pulling a branch from my chest and surviving.
She stared at the sheep, frozen solid with its legs projecting at right angles from its body like table-legs, and laughed hysterically.
She pulled the frozen sheep to the side of the lane, so that it wouldn’t be hit by the next passing motorist, and made her way to the village of Stanton-on-the-Water where her father had his country retreat.
If anyone could talk sense into her, give a rational explanation for what had happened that morning, it was
her father.
She came to the garden gate, took a deep breath to compose herself, and rehearsed what she would tell him.
Dad, I’ve just survived a car crash which killed me… Oh, and I just happened to have deep-frozen a sheep…
In the event, she was spared the necessity of trying to explain herself.
Monday was the day of her father’s constituency surgery in Glastonbury, and he never left home before midday. He would probably be still in bed, knowing him, and as Neve had a key she let herself into the three-bedroom cottage and called out with a cheeriness she did not at all feel.
“Dad, it’s only me!”
She found her father sprawled on his back on the sitting room floor, glassy-eyed and manifestly dead. From the colour of his face––a pale puce, his lips a shade darker––she suspected he had succumbed to the heart attack his GP had been warning him about for years. Edward Winterton had been a big man with a big appetite for everything in life, and that included food and drink. By the look of him, he had been dead for a good twenty-four hours.
Neve wept, bereft, and found herself reaching out.
It was not a conscious gesture, she told herself later, but an instinctive response. She reached out and touched his cheek––and was astounded to feel that same elemental force flowing from her and into the corpse of her father. As ridiculous and inexplicable as it seemed, she knew that she was doing the right thing.
Whatever that might be.
What she did next she knew also to be right, and just as instinctive. With much difficulty, as her father weighed thirteen stone, she dragged his dead weight from the sitting room to the garage, through the door which connected the two. A greater feat of strength was called for when lifting him into the boot of his Range Rover. But an hour later, sweating profusely, she had her father’s frozen corpse safely stowed in the car and was driving from the cottage and down the same lane where, three hours earlier, she had met her own end.
And had come back to life.
She was often the first to arrive at the low-slung, ultra-modern headquarters of Cry-Org, and that morning had been no exception. Her plan was to drive into the garage next to the elevator entrance, fetch a gurney, and manoeuvre her father’s body onto it. The institute was often in receipt of the carcasses of animals large and small, with a garage and adjacent lift to transport the corpses to the freezing labs in the basement.
Thirty minutes later she had her father’s body locked securely in a mortuary drawer more suited to containing the corpses of farm animals.
Only a little later, sipping coffee in the staff canteen, did she question herself about the events of the day––and her motivations, perhaps subconscious, in doing what she had done.
The subsequent news of her father’s mysterious disappearance had been a Nine Day Wonder, taken up with lip-smacking relish by the likes of the Daily Mail which thought up all manner of far-fetched scenarios––from kidnap by foreign powers to suicide and the pre-planned disposal of his own body––though none as unlikely as the truth. Derek Drake had even weighed in with a few insincere words––the bastard!––telling the world that a statesman like Edward Winterton was the backbone of our great nation and would be sorely missed… When in fact her father had been one of Drake’s fiercest critics who considered Drake a crackpot Christian and a megalomaniac.
Somehow, over the course of the next few months, Neve had held her sanity together.
As if it were not sufficient that she had died and come back to life, and then flash-frozen a sheep and her father, what happened next drove her to the brink of hysteria.
Her work at Cry-Org underwent a significant step change.
She discovered, while monitoring an experiment to resurrect a frozen cow, that just as she had the ability to induce a cryogenic state in a subject, she could now bring it back to life without recourse to the complex cocktail of chemicals that she and her team had been experimenting with for years.
It was fortunate indeed that she had been alone when making this discovery; and in panic she had quickly reversed the process and refrozen the unfortunate creature.
She had left the institute that afternoon in a daze, and over the course of the next few days had experimented with a variety of animals, from mice to birds, freezing them and then bringing them back to life.
Her success rate was one hundred per cent.
Neve Winterton was a scientist, a rationalist, and her sudden and arbitrary––and wholly unscientific––ability did not sit easily with her world view.
But the upshot was obvious: if she could bring dead animals back to life, then what was to stop her from doing the same with her father?
The idea was so vast, and the consequences so great, that she had hesitated over making the next step.
Until now.
THE DREAMS HAD begun soon after the accident.
She was alone in a winter forest, a vast stretch of frozen woodland where she felt wholly at home. In the recurring dream she was one with the leafless trees, unified with the frozen lakes and glaciated waterfalls. And then on one occasion she had sensed intruders, invaders who always took the same form: dark, terrifying shapes which chased her through the forest. She had awoken in terror time after time, and rationalised the dark invaders as the Paladins that Derek Drake had formed as his own special protection force.
Lately those dreams had changed. She was alone within the icy woods, and the dark invaders did not appear. Instead, she was visited by a voice in her head, a soft, lilting, insistent male voice which urged her that now the time was right, that now she should act on her instincts and work her magic on her father.
She had awoken this morning with the urging still at the forefront of her mind, and she knew she would act on it.
Neve drove from her cottage, passed the bend where six months ago she had met her end, and proceeded to the headquarters of Cry-Org Inc.
It was early, and only one other colleague was at work––a technician busy at the far end of the laboratory. Neve sketched a brief wave and took the elevator to the basement.
She locked the vault door behind her and approached the mortuary drawer.
Now that the time had come to reanimate her father, she was nervous. She told herself that her apprehension was groundless. She had brought a dozen or more creatures back to life, so why might the process of resurrecting her father be any different?
Because he’s my father, she told herself, and if I screw up…
Then she could always reverse the process and re-freeze him.
She took a breath, tapped the code into the locking mechanism, and slid out the heavy drawer.
She pulled back the nylon sheet which shrouded Edward Winterton’s corpse and stared down at her father.
In her dream, she had objected that even if she reversed the process of freezing and attempted to bring her father back to life, then the heart attack which had killed him would keep him dead. But the voice in her head had said that this was not so, that miraculously upon awakening he would be cured of the thing which had killed him.
Impossible, she thought
But then so had been her own resurrection.
Neve reached out and touched her father’s chest.
The method of resurrecting the dead was similar to freezing a corpse, with one great difference. When imbuing the freezing process, Neve experienced a force leaving her body and investing the subject with glacial stasis. When reanimating a body, the force that flowed from her was life-giving, a positive warmth like channelled sunlight.
She had often tried to analyse the process, to break it down scientifically and come to some methodical understanding of what she was doing. But to her consternation she could only couch her action in vague and maddening metaphor.
The main thing, she told herself, was that it worked.
Understanding, perhaps, would come later.
She pressed her flattened palm to her father’s chest and felt a tingling heat pass down her arm.
Her father’s stone-cold corpse responded. He grew warm, and a minute later, startling her, he took a breath. Beneath her tremulous fingertips, his chest began to rise and fall.
Neve felt hot tears trickle down her cheeks.
Edward Winterton opened her eyes and smiled at her. He sat up slowly, swung his legs off the shelf. Neve embraced him, weeping.
“How…?” she managed, shaking her head.
He smiled again, the warm, confiding smile she remembered so well, and placed a fingertip on her lips.
“I will explain everything in time,” he said. “Everything––even who I am.”
She stared at him.
His voice…
His voice was subtly different, not the oratorical baritone that had rang out across the floor of parliament. This voice was lighter, lilting, more sing-song.
It was the voice that had spoken to her in her dreams.
“Who…?” she echoed.
“Your father will be fine, in time. I am… I am merely utilising your father’s body for the interim.”
“Who are you?” Her voice shook. “What are you?” She shook her head. “My… my ability? My death and… all this… You’re responsible!” Her fragmented speech perfectly matched her frantic thoughts.
He reached out and took her hand. “I am responsible, yes. I am using you, and others, to bring about change. Change for the better. You must trust me.”
“What do you want?”
His reply filled her with tremulous hope, and fear.
“The defeat of Derek Drake,” he said. “And you can help me, Neve. Or should I call you Jack Frost?”
Chapter 34
AJIA SAT BETWEEN Mr LeRoy and Reed Fletcher in the cab of the pantechnicon as they travelled south, and she felt as if she had never been parted from the people she considered her newfound family. Around the campfire yesterday evening she had recounted the events of her capture, her incarceration, and what the phouka had revealed to her. Mr LeRoy had found this last detail particularly interesting. “But he didn’t say who was controlling it, and what his––or her––motivations might be? Intriguing.”
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