The Faceless Stratagem (Tombs Book 2)

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “I take it you’re OK sticking around then?” Payne asked.

  Nixon shrugged. “I guess. Not often we get something different like this.”

  “So what’s next, boss?” Carter asked.

  “You said you saw a bunch of Faceless people down in the Tombs. Department 5 sent a second team into the Tombs and there’s no sign of them under the lake. I’d like to know where they went and what they’ve been doing.”

  “I’ll start working on what cameras we have available,” Nixon said, still crunching a few crisps.

  “Has Alice Linwood given you any information that might help find them?” Carter asked, sidling up to Nixon’s desk but keeping her eyes on Payne.

  “No. She’s given me nothing.”

  Carter hesitated. “She knows we’re doing this, doesn’t she?”

  “Of course. Their people are all tied up at Jodrell Bank. This is a lower priority for them.”

  “Typical spooks. Getting us to do the donkey work for them.”

  Payne smiled at Carter’s attitude. This was a small town and as far as they’d been aware, they’d never had to deal with the security service until now. But, that had never been true had it? MI18 had been operating out of Southport for decades. Their fingers could have been over dozens of cases and he’d never have known.

  He left his colleagues to get stuck into their search whilst he proceeded to his office. His eyes were drawn to the filing cabinet where he hoped Nixon had returned his illicit firearm. He checked the bottom drawer, pulling it out all the way and groped around the loose papers that had been dumped there. His hand brushed against the heavy handle of his Glock and he grinned. It was the one thing he’d have appreciated going down into the Tombs with that morning. These Faceless were bastards to slow down, taking several shots to incapacitate them.

  He was about to sit when Nixon knocked and hovered in the doorway.

  “You got a minute?”

  “Sure, what’s bothering you?” Payne said, rolling his neck back and forth, loosening the knots that had been building all day. Nixon sat and looked anywhere but into Payne’s face. His left foot began idly tapping against his right. Something had changed about his friend. The Nixon that he’d worked with these last few years was still there he supposed, but a new layer had been painted on top, or perhaps it was the other way around. A layer of Nixons had been removed revealing the person now sat before him.

  “You’ve had a tough day, Stuart. Perhaps you should go home and get some sleep. This can wait until the morning.”

  “I think if I go home and have time alone, I might go nuts thinking about all this.” When he glanced up, it was only for the briefest of moments but his eyes were watery.

  Instead of acknowledging his colleague’s discomfort, Payne thought he’d skirt around the issue. “Thank you for taking care of Carter.”

  He nodded. “She’s a tough cookie.”

  “What happened in the Tombs?” Payne asked gently.

  “What’s to explain? We heard noises, saw those Faceless and ran for our lives.”

  “And you couldn’t get out?”

  “Our phone batteries died rapidly once we were beneath the ground. We were relying on our phone’s lights and they didn’t last long enough. Almost as soon as we reached the bottom of the entrance ladder, someone closed the main hatch on us. We couldn’t get back out.”

  “You saw who did it?”

  Nixon shook his head. “No.”

  “Are you sure there was someone there?”

  Again, with the shaking head. “No. I’m not sure at all. I thought I saw someone, but I was concentrating on what was at the bottom of the shaft, not what was at the top. I don’t see how that hatch would have closed on its own though. There had to have been someone there.”

  “The Tombs is proving to be a dangerous place to spend any time.” Payne wondered how much of Nixon’s story he believed. The man was stressed to the eyeballs, just having narrowly survived a traumatic experience. Who’s to say what really happened?

  “Your friend doesn’t seem to be too scared about the place,” Nixon said. “What’s the deal with her? How closely are we going to be working with her?”

  “Officially we’re not working with any other department.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “We will be sharing any intelligence with MI18 and Department 5.”

  “And what are they going to be sharing with us?” He gestured behind him to where Payne could see the almost empty operations room. “We’ve got basically no one. We could use some more people.”

  “Based on the people I’ve met, I’m not sure you’d want any of their people. No, we will have to knuckle down and work this case. How hard can it be to find a group of faceless people in this town? Everyone will be nervous. Someone will spot them.”

  Nixon nodded, but it was full of resignation not agreement. “I guess we’ll just have to get lucky.” And then he got up and left. With anyone else, Payne would have followed them and had words about proper respect for superiors, but Nixon wasn’t normally like this. A good night’s sleep was what he needed. If he was still off his game tomorrow, there would be more words.

  He knew where Nixon was coming from though. He’d felt like this whenever a superior asked him to work knowing some facts were being kept from him. Taylor had a habit of doing that, most recently he’d been colluding with Dominic Thadeus in the middle of the Heather Hudson investigation.

  Payne would not do that to his team, but there was precious little he could tell them to reassure them. Alice Linwood was an unknown quantity. Her motives were unclear. Department 5 and Jaq Petro had just been introduced to him. Another organisation he’d never heard of. How many more secrets were out there?

  Payne settled back into his chair and watched the world outside his window. Southport could be an ugly place but right now, there was nowhere else he wanted to be. There was a dangerous threat out there and he would protect his town.

  20

  7th May 2013

  In the time Max had been at TALOS, he’d learnt three things.

  The first was that the TALOS Institute believed something to be wrong with him. He had a strong idea what that something was and was amazed that TALOS hadn’t yet been able to detect the silver. The silver—a curious metallic substance that had been forced inside him by Dominic Thadeus—had worked to keep him alive during his experience at the Tombs and again at the top of the Lovell Telescope. He’d secretly been examining his flesh by pressing parts of his body through his clothes, searching for the telltale lumps that revealed its existence. When he’d first been infected, it had hurt like a bastard whenever he’d disturbed it. So far, at TALOS, he hadn’t found it. He’d like enough privacy to examine himself more fully, but his instinct was to stay quiet about what had happened. Max didn’t yet know what TALOS’s intentions towards him were. Sure, they said they needed to make sure he was well, but what the hell did that mean?

  The second thing was that TALOS was a very odd place. His room was part hospital room, part hotel suite with a bed, some contemporary furniture and a large TV and choice of movies to watch. There was a narrow window at one end of the room but it had no way of opening, and even if he managed to smash it, from what he could tell, he was at least two stories up and a fall from this height might be fatal.

  The staff had been pleasant enough but had danced around any question put to them, answering in clipped tones and fake smiles. They wore tunics like medical uniforms, different colours for different roles, but he didn’t know whether these were doctors who’d come to carry out checks on him, or something else.

  The third thing, and by far the most vexing thing, was that Max was a prisoner. Since arriving at TALOS, this suite was the only room he’d been allowed in. The door was locked and whenever it was opened, he caught a glimpse of an alert guard monitoring from the other side. He’d asked his escort why he was being detained and had been told that it was to keep him safe and comfortable whilst
undergoing a series of physicals and other tests. This would have been OK if he’d been kept in the suite for a few hours. But this had stretched out to over a day with no sign of ending anytime soon.

  Max should have made a run for it when he’d had the chance at Jodrell Bank. There’d been many people, and it had been dark. Would it really have been so difficult to get away? He could have sought shelter at his parents’ house or snuck back to his own home to retrieve his car and bank card, but in his heart, he knew he didn’t mean it. Being on the run was not an option he’d choose again if he could help it. He’d spent several days avoiding the police and had hated that existence. The rising level of paranoia whenever he walked past a stranger, or glanced up and saw a car with people sitting in it was crippling.

  On the wall opposite his tiny window came a faint whisper and a narrow segment of wall dropped away revealing an observation window. Max approached but kept a distance of several metres, his eyes fixated on the figure resting on a stool on the other side of the glass.

  It was a man he didn’t know, about ten pounds overweight, swelling out his tunic, making the collar look a little strained against his neck. His hair was thinning and grey but his face was alive with vitality. Max suddenly felt very exposed, wondering if this was what the apes felt like in the zoo.

  “I’m Trenton Winborn, Controller of the TALOS Institute,” the observer said. His tone was clipped and formal.

  “And you’re here to let me know when you’re releasing me,” Max replied, with a healthy shot of sarcasm.

  A smile flickered on Winborn’s face. “I’m afraid that I can’t release you at this time.”

  “You’re holding me against my will.”

  “You’re in quarantine. Your quarantine period isn’t up.”

  “And the others that were with me. DI Payne and Alice Linwood? You’re keeping them as well?”

  “Neither of those were in as close association with the entity.”

  The entity? Who talked like that? “You mean Irulal?”

  “In a sense, yes. But, I’m also referring to your wife.”

  “If this is going to be another session where you try to get me to confess to knowing something about Cindy’s condition, you can forget it. I told that lot back at Westminster everything I know about what happened to Cindy. If you want to know more, you need to speak to Linwood. She’s the only one who has any idea what the hell is going on.”

  “Alice Linwood is, of course, supporting us with our research. In fact, it was she who approved your quarantine.”

  Max felt like he’d just been struck. “What?”

  “Linwood was the one who gave us an account of your case and proposed that we treat you as contaminated.”

  Max vowed he’d be having words with Linwood the next time he saw her. Then an appalling thought crossed his mind. What if he never got that chance? She’d just palmed him off to another agency. There was no knowing what her objectives were at this point. The last he’d seen of her had been prior to the briefing and she’d been preoccupied and cold. Was that her way of washing her hands of him?

  “I’m not contaminated with anything. You’ve had me in here for hours. If I was sick, you’d have noticed some sign of it. I’ve got no symptoms. I’m not ill.”

  “This isn’t about keeping you alive and well, but protecting the rest of us. You’ve spent years living with a human with a special connection to an alien life form we’ve yet to establish. That has to have affected you.”

  “It’s affected me in no way. I’m healthy,” Max retorted, striving not to think about the silver he knew was caught inside his body somewhere. “You’ve got to let me go.”

  “No,” the man said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, you and I.”

  21

  7th May 2013

  Rain fell. The weather was mocking their plight, and Payne stretched out in his chair, gazing out into the grey sky and pondered. His mind was churning through detail at double time but it felt like the challenges were too great. Too much that he didn’t understand: too many details getting in the way. He rested his eyes, trying not to remember that it had been almost thirty hours since he’d had any sleep at all, and even that last quick nap had been fitful and filled with visions of the blank-faced creatures attacking him in his own home.

  A phone rang somewhere out in the operations room. Since the early morning briefing, his tiny team had been withdrawn and quiet. He didn’t like it. A good investigation unit should have people speaking, and calling each other out, and banter.

  An urgent rapping on the door drew him from his trance and he glanced up and saw Carter. “We’ve had a call. Someone’s got a Faceless trapped in their shed.”

  PAYNE PULLED HIS CAR to the curb—the front wheel clipped and made a terrible scuffing noise. He ignored it and straightened up, coasting to a stop behind the police car that had beaten them to the address.

  “This is it,” Carter said, as the three of them got out of the car. It was a large house in a good suburb of Victorian villas and expensive newer properties that filled whatever gaps remained. The kind of street where nothing interesting ever happened—until it did.

  Nixon led the way to the house’s driveway. “Mr Osmon heard somebody moving about in his garden this morning. The whole family had been awake since the event and hadn’t tried to go back to sleep again. They were making cocoa. He tried to call the police at the time but the phone lines were still down so he went outside with a cricket bat and found it hiding in his shed. He hadn’t troubled to lock the shed since a break-in last year—he keeps all his valuable stuff in his garage now.”

  As they passed along the side of the house towards the side gate, Payne spotted a small boy, no older than eight or nine, squinting out from a bedroom window. An arm appeared around the boy’s shoulder and guided him away.

  A police constable met them as they entered the back garden.

  “Hey, John. How’re things?”

  “It’s in there,” John said, pointing at the dull drab shed in the corner. Once, it had been stained green, but that was in the distant past. The colour was faded and timber batons at the gable end were crooked. The structure didn’t look strong enough to restrain a toddler having a tantrum, let alone one of these Faceless that had demonstrated inhuman strength.

  Payne’s team followed John into the garden. Another constable hung back at the kitchen door.

  “What are we planning to do with it?” Carter hissed.

  “Take it back with us, learn what makes them tick.”

  “And what if it doesn’t want to come back with us?”

  Nixon interrupted. “It’s not going to have any say in the matter.”

  As they drew near the shed, Payne shot a look back at the house. The whole family was watching through the back window, the woman, Payne presumed her to be Mrs Osman, had her phone held before her and was aiming in their direction.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Payne said without turning back. “We can do this.”

  A grubby pane of glass afforded them a view inside the shed. They peered in.

  And there it was. Payne thought of it as an ‘it’ rather than as a man or a woman precisely because it was difficult to tell. The creature was curled up in a half-ball shape in the corner of the shed, resting its head on the shiplap wall and looking fixedly at the floor. No. It looked to be staring but how could it stare when it had no eyes? How these things could see was one mystery they’d yet to establish.

  “Look at its leg,” Carter muttered, “it’s hurt.”

  She too had sunk to referring to this once person as an ‘it’, a thing. The Faceless wore light-coloured jeans and a t-shirt. Light fair hair could be seen on its arms. But the thing’s right leg was closer to them, and Payne could see clearly the stain he’d at first thought was mud, was dried blood.

  “Its blood?” Payne wondered, “How did anyone get close enough to do that?”

  “An accident perhaps? An animal?” Nixon suggested.
r />   “It knows we’re here,” Carter said.

  “Then we will need to tread carefully,” Payne replied.

  The shed door wasn’t padlocked but two tent pegs had been crammed into the bracket where the padlock would go, blocking the door for anyone inside. Payne gave the nod to John, then he took hold of the tent pegs in one hand and motioned that Nixon should stand clear of the door.

  “On the count of three,” Payne whispered, easing the tent pegs from the padlock bracket. His hand reached for the edge of the door. Nixon stepped back, Carter behind him. Nixon looked uneasy as he held a pair of handcuffs before him.

  “Three...”

  Payne checked his stance. He needed to rush in and grab the creature so they could cuff it.

  “Two...”

  John looked like he was ready to receive the ball in rugby.

  “One!” Payne flung wide the door, and a shadow slammed into him from the gloom, flattening him to the ground.

  “Grab it!” Carter yelled. Nixon had his arms around the creature and the constables hurried to help. Together, they manhandled the creature back into the shed. John stayed at the shed door, bracing himself against it, looking for the tent pegs that had kept it secure until now.

  “Shit,” Nixon said. “We should have been able to cuff it. Now we’ve got to go in there again.”

  Carter was gasping as she helped Payne to his feet. “If it was that determined, why didn’t it leave before now? It wouldn’t have taken much to knock down the shed door.”

  “Its injury,” Payne replied. “It must have known it couldn’t get far. It didn’t consider the family here to be a threat. Maybe it was content to wait until it healed.”

  Nixon was peering through the shed window. “It’s just standing there. Like it’s waiting for something.”

  Payne looked and noticed what Nixon had missed. Tendrils of smoke wisping out from the creature’s clothes, the sleeves, the bottom of the trousers, the collar. The creature’s skin was changing hue.