“He was the start. I heard there have been other incidents. And the news is talking about a cruise ship being attacked. Blown up. It’s terrorists...”
A cruise ship? Conny hadn’t heard anything over the radio about it.
She glanced up. Above the departure boards, a large television screen displayed the latest news. There was no volume, but there was indeed a stone-faced newscaster sitting in front of a picture of a huge cruise ship. Along the bottom of the screen, a headline read Tragedy in the Atlantic.
What the hell would that have to do with this?
A murmur rippled through a group of officers standing to her left, catching her attention, and when she tore her gaze away from the TV screen, she finally spotted some senior uniforms in the distance. Before she could move toward them, Conny saw the group exchanging troubled glances and quickly exiting the hall. They stood outside in the rain, talking animatedly in hushed tones. Lots of gesticulating.
The tension in the hall jacked up a notch.
Far to her right, Conny heard a loud bark and searched through the bodies, finally catching sight of the dog. His name was Jackson, and Conny knew his handler, Robert Nelson. Several weeks earlier, Nelson had asked Conny if she would like to go to dinner, and she had rejected him more bluntly than she had intended. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had terrible timing.
A conversation between them would be awkward. Conny sighed. Dogs were so much easier than people. She made a mental note to keep it brief, and she pushed through the crowd with Remy trotting along behind her, apparently happy to be on the move once more.
Robert looked like he was having trouble keeping Jackson calm. The dog was a German Shepherd, just like Remy, but noticeably smaller. Jackson’s specialty was his nose: he was one of the best sniffers on the Force.
Robert looked up as Conny approached, and his face crumbled into a weak grin.
“Uh, hi, Cornelia. How are you?”
“Robert,” she nodded. “Do you know what’s going on?”
His smile faded. “Probably no more than you, but whatever it is, it’s big. And this isn’t the only station involved. All available officers, right?”
Conny stared at him, baffled, and he frowned.
“You didn’t hear it on the radio?”
“I was…busy.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much. All I know is that people have been going missing on the—”
A loud murmur passed through the crowd, cutting him off, and Conny turned to see the senior officers striding back into the room wearing stricken expressions. A man with a beard, who was wearing what Conny thought was a Chief Superintendent’s uniform, gestured to somebody that she couldn’t see.
A moment later, the murmuring of the crowd became a loud chatter.
Someone was handing out firearms, pulling them from a secure crate and distributing them to men and women who looked equal-parts horrified and excited at the prospect of arming themselves.
And all Conny could do was stare.
Heckler and Koch G36. Assault rifle. Thirty-round magazines. Five-point-Five-Six Calibre. Able to switch between semi- and full-automatic. A work of art.
MP5SF. Submachine gun. Capable of firing seven-fucking-hundred silenced nine-mil rounds per minute. Single, burst or continuous fire. The MP5 was a stubby, hissing snake of a weapon, and Conny thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Some of the firearms were held casually, with the easy grip of familiarity. Others were clutched in hands that shook, just a little. Guns were not routine for British police, not even in the country’s capital city. There would be plenty of anxious men and women there, Conny thought, facing the prospect of their first firefight.
Including me.
Many of the more senior police officers in the main hall took an assault rifle, and being surrounded by all that firepower made her feel dizzy with longing.
She blinked in surprise when a man wearing a Lieutenant’s uniform stepped directly in front of her and pressed a Glock 17 into her palm.
She stared at it, open-mouthed.
Moulded polymer casing. Seventeen nine-millimetre parabolic rounds. Under-barrel tac-light.
It was heavy; solid.
So beautiful.
The gun fit into Conny’s palm like it had been custom-made for her.
“Have you been trained with automatic weapons?”
Conny shook her head slowly, her eyes distant; focused only on the Glock. She had developed a parent-troubling love of guns and weaponry at around the time that girls were supposed to be dreaming of owning ponies, and had fired automatic weapons on ranges on several occasions, but had never carried a firearm in the line of duty. Once, carrying that sort of firepower regularly had been her ultimate goal, but that was before she had been partnered with Remy, and had seen what a thinking weapon was capable of.
And now, here she was, being handed a pistol in the middle of a real-life situation that she had no grasp of whatsoever.
Damn, though, the gun did feel powerful. Intoxicating.
“Constable. Constable?”
Conny blinked and looked at the Lieutenant.
“You stay at the rear, you understand? The ideal scenario here is you handing that weapon back to me fully loaded.”
She nodded.
The Lieutenant dropped his gaze to Remy.
“He a sniffer?”
“Crowd control, Sir.”
“Hmm. Well, that might prove just as useful.”
He began to move away.
“Sir,” Conny said, blurting out the word before she had even realised she was about to speak. “What’s happening?”
The Lieutenant arched an eyebrow and glanced back at her. She saw impatience in his eyes, and something else, too. Uncertainty, maybe.
“You didn’t hear on the radio?”
Conny shook her head.
“We were dealing with a violent—”
The Lieutenant interrupted her with an irritated gesture. He nodded toward the front of the hall, and the group of senior officers gathering beneath the departure boards.
“Eyes front,” he said. “Briefing any second, now.”
He turned away before Conny nodded, and slipped into the crowd, searching for any other unarmed officers.
Moments later, a voice called out.
“Quiet!”
The excited chatter which had filled the hall as the weapons were being handed out died away immediately.
Conny moved forward and lifted to her tiptoes, peering over the heads of those in front of her. A bearded man of around forty-five with a grave expression held his left hand aloft. It was the man she had seen moments earlier giving the order to pass out the guns.
“Chief Superintendent Porter,” the bearded man said. “Some of you know me. For the rest of you, I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances.” He took a deep breath. “In the last hour, deaths have been reported at a number of Underground stations. Maintenance staff, working in the tunnels, have not returned from their shifts. At present, there are at least sixteen people unaccounted for. Three of the missing members of staff did return, and none of them have lived longer than a couple of minutes. All have committed suicide, usually after attempting—and in a couple of cases succeeding—to take the lives of others first.”
Just like Adam Trent, Conny thought.
Porter finally dropped his hand, apparently concluding that he had everybody’s complete attention. He lowered his voice a little.
“You’ve all heard about what happened in Morden earlier today. It looks like it was not an isolated incident.”
There was an audible intake of breath around the hall.
“Most of the outer parts of the rail network have already been closed and evacuated. We have started moving toward the centre of London, shutting stations as we go. At this moment, there are more than twenty Underground stations out there full of officers just like yourselves, hearing this exact same information.”
Porter drew in a breath and scanned the hall from left to right.
“In the past ten minutes, several trains have gone dark.”
He paused for a moment, as if to give that information a chance to settle on everyone’s mind.
Trains lost in the tunnels, Conny thought. Civilians. Dear God, the Chief Superintendent was telling them that virtually the entire London police force had been called out. Even himself. Was the Commissioner of the entire bloody Met out there somewhere, standing in an Underground station, delivering an identical speech and handing out guns?
“At this moment, we have to assume the worst.”
Porter lifted his chin, staring around the faces that were fixed upon him.
“There is something in the tunnels; we don’t know what. According to the powers that be, we had no prior intelligence suggesting that a terrorist attack on the transport system was imminent, but we must assume that we are dealing with a large, multi-cellular threat, here. Quite possibly, a citywide attack. I’m not going to lie to you, we’re going into this blind, and our numbers are stretched across half of London. Our primary focus here is to find those trains and all civilians, and to secure these tunnels. To ensure that the stations are safe, and that whatever is happening down there does not spill out onto the streets. Engaging with any threat is strictly secondary until we know more about what we are dealing with, is that understood?”
A ripple of agreement passed through the crowd.
“We have a lot of ground to cover,” the Chief Superintendent continued, and Conny thought she heard in his voice an echo of the sentiment she had detected in the eyes of the Lieutenant who had armed her. A wavering uncertainty. “You will divide equally between the Northern Line and the Victoria Line, and you’ll split further to cover the northbound and southbound tunnels. There are already armed response teams waiting on each platform, and they are the tip of the spear, understand?”
The gathered crowd mumbled its acknowledgment of the order. Porter sucked in a lungful of air and continued.
“When the tunnels split, you will divide into groups of no fewer than seven. If you see anything that looks like a device—anything—you are to inform either your immediate CO or myself, and we all fall back and wait for the bomb squad. Your radios won’t work once we’re inside the tunnels, but these,”—he held up an oddly cheerful-looking walkie-talkie—”will give us limited range. We don’t have enough for every one of you, but I want each group to be carrying at least three. I expect constant radio contact, and I mean constant. I can’t stress this enough: if any of you deviate from these orders in any way, I’ll have your arse in front of an inquiry before you can say sacked. I expect you all to come back here without a scratch on you, now do I make myself fucking clear?”
This time, the agreement was louder, almost a cheer.
Jesus, Conny thought, this is all for show. Puffing up the troops before sending them into battle. What the fuck is this?
The Lieutenant who had handed out the guns began to wave officers toward the escalator leading down to the platforms. Conny fell into line behind the others, scanning the faces around her and seeing her own anxiety reflected in them.
And for the first time since Adam Trent had died, she felt tension on Remy’s leash.
She looked down at the German Shepherd, and frowned.
The fearless dog was dragging his weight, his eyes focused intently on the down escalator, as if he was reluctant to approach it.
Like he was afraid of what might be waiting for him down there.
19
Leon Mancini wasn’t a religious man, not like most of the freaks back at the ranch in Colorado. If Jennifer Craven had ever harboured ideas about changing that fact—about converting him—she had wisely decided not to follow through on them. There were some people that even she understood that you couldn’t just throw in a dark room and dose with acid and expect obedience.
Mancini was one of those people. He had been running operations in Force Recon when Craven was trying on her first training bra; there was no form of torture he hadn’t been trained to withstand.
So Craven made him love her.
As it turned out, the torture would have been preferable.
Craven was sharp and dangerous; a knife sheathed in an expensive dress suit. Mancini didn’t trust her an inch, and never would, but she had broken him in a way that military training could never have prepared him for.
For a long time, he told himself that he was working for the money the Craven family offered, and that was certainly true while Jennifer’s old man had been running the show. As soon as Jennifer took charge and began aggressively expanding the Order, he began to harbour doubts. The threat to his life if he chose to leave the ranch was obvious, but Mancini had no problem with that. He’d lived most of his life under threat of one sort or another, and he knew when he signed up that his predecessor had met an ‘untimely’ end.
That didn’t matter. If he left, and the Cravens came after him, they’d discover that he was pretty hard to kill, and they wouldn’t be the first.
Just as he was preparing to get out, Jennifer came to him, and found a way to make him stay.
That had been years ago, and he still couldn’t bring himself to leave, not even after she had rejected him so brutally.
Yeah, love was the worst torture of all.
Their affair lasted only a year. Not by his choosing.
When it was over, Mancini remained professional, and told himself that as long as Jennifer played it straight with him and paid well, things would go just fine between them, just like they had with her old man. The rest of the freaks at the ranch could carry on with their weird rituals and worship of their buried gods; Christ, they could dance naked under the moon waving severed cocks in the air for all he cared.
Old man Craven had told him the truth—or at least as much of it as Mancini cared to know—before Jennifer had taken over. The Cravens believed in vampires; that the monsters lived underground in hibernation, and occasionally a few popped up to the surface to eat some folks. They had turned their ranch into a twisted Disneyworld, and were slowly growing their cult by attracting vulnerable youngsters who didn’t know better and re-educating them.
As far as Mancini was concerned, the Craven family’s religion was no more bizarre than any of the others—and no less steeped in blood. And, much the same as every other religion out there, the people at the top rolled about in a seemingly endless pit of money, and were more than happy to spend some on having men like Mancini around to make them feel safe.
The rituals—the overtly, almost cartoonish devotion to a sort of Satanism—were mostly for show, but the show worked. A steady stream of miserable teenagers made their way to the ranch, either of their own volition or as a result of active recruitment, and numbers grew until the place more closely resembled a small town.
Mostly, Mancini’s twenty years as an employee of the Craven family had seen him keeping peace at the ranch, and keeping unwanted visitors out. At times, he had been required to kidnap and ultimately murder scientists across a multitude of disciplines, everything from astrophysicists to botanists, as Jennifer Craven focused on hunting down the truth about the grave she had ‘discovered’ sixteen years earlier and the creatures that she had been born to serve.
At other times, on occasions when new initiates escaped the ranch and ran, either losing their minds or finally coming to their senses, Mancini and his team hunted them down.
One way or another, nobody left the ranch.
Over recent years, informed, no doubt, by the internet, a surprising number of desperate parents had found their way to Colorado’s perfect middle-of-nowhere, searching for the children they believed they still had some claim to.
They didn’t get to leave either.
Only once had the secrecy of the ranch been truly compromised on Mancini’s watch; two years earlier, by a tiny documentary crew whose dream of headlines had blinded them to the fact that they weren
’t dealing with some two-bit religious wackos. Had the idiots in question restricted themselves to long-range surveillance, they might even had succeeded in making their little movie, but they just hadn’t been able to resist getting closer for the perfect shot.
When that incident was finally resolved, Mancini watched the recordings they had managed to get. It was a little like watching one of those tired found footage horror movies that seemed to be everywhere in recent years. Just like those movies, the filmmakers’ story ended in blood; in bones scattered across the plains.
It wasn’t noble or glorious, but it was a job, and for twenty years, it had been a good one. Better to Mancini than the military had ever been.
He couldn’t help but feel that England was going to change that.
Because it was almost dark already.
He wondered if he had an English counterpart. Maybe the Rennick family had their own Leon Mancini.
Maybe he, too, was scanning the countryside around the Rennick mansion through a rifle scope at that very moment, trying to spot some threatening movement in the last scraps of the afternoon light.
*
The Gulfstream which Jennifer had provided for Mancini and his team had touched down at a private airfield south of London almost an hour earlier. From there, they took a van southwest, driving for around thirty minutes to reach the land owned by the Rennick family.
There was a single overgrown road leading through thick woodland to the compound itself; there was no way they could take the van through there. If the Rennick compound was set up anything like the Craven Ranch—and based on what Craven had told him, Mancini was certain that it would be—the road would be under constant surveillance, and most likely rigged with automated defensive measures.
He parked a couple of miles back from the road, and led his team the rest of the way through the trees on foot, keeping a wary eye out for bear traps and tripwires.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 39