by John McNally
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Text copyright © John McNally 2017
Cover illustration © Paul Young
Cover design © HarperCollins Children’s Books 2017
John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007521692
Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007521685
Version: 2017-06-24
For my wife, Louise.
Thanks for winning me in that raffle
Epigraph
Then the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Take handfuls of soot from a furnace and have Moses toss it into the air in the presence of Pharaoh. It will become fine dust over the whole land of Egypt, and festering boils will break out on people and animals throughout the land.”
Exodus 9:8–9
It’s far more important to know what person the disease has, than what disease the person has.
Hippocrates
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Three
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Part Five
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Footnotes
Keep Reading …
Books by John McNally
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
FEBRUARY 19 10:54 (GMT+1). La première table de roulette, Casino de Monte-Carlo, French Riviera
“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs – faites vos jeux!” The croupier’s voice rang out.
The roulette wheel spun, numbers flashed past, and for a few moments all possibilities existed at once.
An agent of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (commonly known as the G&T) prepared to place a five-hundred-euro bet on number 35 black.
The agent, beneath a heavy disguise, was Dr Al Allenby, six foot two inches of angular, eccentric cool; a scientist trapped in the soul of an artist.
His nephew, Infinity Drake – aka Finn – thought him the best uncle in the world. Al thought himself the worst. It was all his fault Finn had been shrunk, all his fault he’d subsequently been captured, all his fault for creating the Boldklub reduction process in the first place, something the world’s greatest terrorist, David Anthony Pytor Kaparis, wanted so badly.
Twice Kaparis had tried to blackmail the world into handing over the Boldklub secret; once by releasing the apocalyptic Scarlatti Wasp, more recently by creating a swarm of deadly nano-bots in Shanghai. Twice he had been thwarted, by a 9mm high Infinity Drake.
Infinity Drake: missing, presumed dead.
Until now.
“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs …”
The silver ball began to lose momentum as it orbited the spinning wheel.
After months of silence – of endless searching, with no result – the G&T had at last received some grainy video footage of what appeared to be Finn, together with a message from Kaparis proposing a deal: a handover of the boy in exchange for the key Boldklub fractal equations1. To consent to the deal, a five-hundred-euro bet would be placed on 35 black at the casino in Monte Carlo at a specified time. An exchange would then take place in the smoking area on the street outside. The equations would be on a memory stick. The 9mm hostage, Infinity Drake, would be inside the aluminium tube of a Cohiba Espléndido fine cigar.
It was a fool’s gambit, but Al was desperate.
“Last chance, faites vos jeux! Place your bets, mesdames et messieurs …” called the croupier.
The rich, mainly elderly players placed safe bets.
Al placed a blue five-hundred-euro chip on number 35 black. The deal was on.
The ball cracked against the spinning wheel then bounced like Al’s heart around his chest.
“No more bets! Mesdames et messieurs – rien ne va plus!”
This was it. The culmination of five months of heartache and uncertainty. Al could not wait to see Finn, to bring him back to size at Hook Hall. He could not wait to hold him, to hang out with him, to eat junk food and play Xbox for nine hours straight. He could not wait to see his late sister, Finn’s mother, in his eyes, or for Al’s own mother – Finn’s epic grandma – to find peace again.
Al could not wait.
He was already on his way out, heading for the smokers of fat cigars on the street outside. As he burst through the swing doors to join them, precisely as planned, a motorbike drew up. A rider with a passenger on the back – both Tyros2.
The passenger, a girl of fifteen or so, withdrew a Cohiba Espléndido cigar cylinder from a bag round her waist.
Al took out a small blue memory stick. The equations it contained were fake. Booby traps. If you ran them through any Boldklub machine it would blow up.
The Tyro thrust out the cigar tube. Al handed over the stick.
Then everything happened in a blur.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
The motorbike roared straight off across the Place du Casino.
Al tried to twist the top off the cigar tube, hands shaking. It was stuck. One of the other smokers, another agent, ran to help. As they struggled, Al’s microphone picked up his desperate incantation, “Finn … Finn … Finn …”
Then the top finally twisted off and – POP! – the tube emitted a spray of confetti.
FEBRUARY 19 10:59 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
“Haaarrrurglurgl!” Kaparis gurgled in delight.
Heywood, his ever-faithful butler, leant over to suction excess saliva
from the back of his mouth.
Kaparis had loved the casino since he was a spoilt boy holidaying on Cap Ferrat. It was where he first acquired a taste for cheating. Now, all these years later, he lay paralysed in a steel sarcophagus, a great iron lung ensconced within the steel skin of a 30,000-tonne oil tanker. Around his head was a whizzing optical array that allowed him 360-degree vision, and above that, a domed screen array feeding him news, images and data from a vast criminal network, as well as real-time video of events 160 miles away in Monte Carlo.
He knew Allenby and the G&T would never willingly hand over the real Boldklub equations, so he had decided that he would taunt them instead, play games and bully them, wear them down until they got so mad that they did something stupid, or – better – got fired and replaced by someone who would cut a deal.
Over the course of the unfortunate Scarlatti episode, and the more recent disaster in China, Kaparis had managed to capture a great deal of video footage of Infinity Drake, and with it his engineers and animators had managed to construct a perfect hologram of the boy. And the G&T had fallen for it!
“FOOLS!” he roared.
Letting Allenby take on the mission himself showed how desperate they already were.
He had them in the palm of his hand.
RRRRRRRRRRRRR!
A second motorbike shot across the square in pursuit of the first. The rider was an athletic young woman, Delta Salazar. She was the finest pilot in the USAF and she jived her Ducati Multistrada through the traffic as the Tyro bike ahead of her took a sharp left up a side street.
Like Finn, Delta had been shrunk for Operation Scarlatti; but unlike Finn, she had not been captured in the Forbidden City. Her little sister had though. Carla. She was still missing and Delta was going to find her or die trying.
She rounded the corner. The Tyro bike was forty metres ahead, roaring up a narrow street of boutiques.
BANG! The passenger fired back. Delta felt a bullet rip past. In a whip’s beat she drew her own SIG Sauer P226 service pistol and returned fire – BANG!
The bullet punched through one Tyro’s shoulder and into the other’s neck. SMASH went the bike through a boutique window.
Delta powered up, but by the time she reached them, both Tyros had detonated suicide capsules.
Back at the casino, as the last of the confetti settled, a great stone of despair sank through Al’s chest and he fell to his knees.
His fellow agent kicked over a table in frustration.
“HAAAAAHAHA!” Kaparis laughed to see such fun – and then choked as he saw something that spoiled … everything—
“Huuu … hgaah!”
For as Al and his fellow agent tore off their false beards and prosthetic faces, Kaparis instantly recognised the second agent.
Captain Kelly of the SAS.
Missing, presumed dead … Or if not, presumed to be just 11mm tall.
It could mean only one thing.
“NNNMMMMARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!”
It was to be a day of highs – and lows.
ONE
FEBRUARY 19 15:11 (GMT+2). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border. Alt. 1,995m/6,545ft
He drank her blood.
They were, after all, in vampire country. Thick forest, thicker snow, a picture-book landscape of peaks and abandoned castles.
Finn was no vampire, of course, nor even a flea, but he had to eat to stay alive, and Carla’s scalp was pockmarked with tiny wounds where he had broken the skin to feed3, using a spike of metal he’d picked up in Shanghai as a sword. Carla’s once-luxuriant hair had been his sanctuary on the never-ending death march, a jungle thatch that had given him cover, warmth and sustenance.
For five months, mostly at night, Baptiste – their captor, and one of Kaparis’s worst Tyros – had dragged them across the ancient spine of the world: up through the Taklamakan Desert, through icebound mountain kingdoms, then across an endless frozen plain, until mountains rose once more, thick forests full of bears and wolves. The only clue to how far they’d come in the faces of the few peasants they saw; even at a distance and wrapped up against the cold, they had grown pale and round-eyed.
Baptiste, bearded and unholy, had no other function but to go on in dumb, endless flight, driven by an urge he could make no sense of. His brain had been so damaged as he escaped Shanghai with the girl that he could barely remember who or what he was. All he had left was a brute sense of purpose, a homing instinct, and a capacity for violence. He knew the girl was his prisoner, but little else. And he had no idea, nor could he conceive, that she carried a thirteen-year-old boy in her hair called Infinity Drake, who was just 9mm tall …
Finn finished his drop of blood and wiped his mouth. “It’s less sugary. You’re getting weaker.”
“Between you and the fleas, I’m surprised I haven’t run dry,” Carla complained, resisting the urge to scratch.
The thuggish form ahead of her grunted and yanked the cable that shackled them together and bound her wrists. She staggered on.
They were traversing the tree line below a steep ridge, Baptiste and Carla high-stepping through deep snow. Finn climbed through her hair to take him in.
How do you kill a giant?
How do you kill someone two hundred times your size? Finn had been trying to figure it out for three thousand miles. Even in this zombie state, Baptiste was still many times faster and stronger than them, many times the murderer.
Finn’s plan was always to attack, but Carla knew better – if they could just hold on long enough, they would eventually get close enough to civilisation to summon help.
Right from the start (when Carla had thought Finn was just a kid on an army base in England who hung out with her older sister), they had enjoyed seeing the world in entirely different ways – America versus Europe, art versus science, girl versus boy. Sometimes she thought it was only the pointless circular arguments that kept them alive, as she slogged on through the real world and Finn ran around her head, full of crazy ideas—
“Hit him with a rock!”
“Build a signal fire!”
“Steal his knife!”
It was a strategy that had lost ground since Yo-yo had gone missing – Finn’s faithful idiot of a dog, who’d trailed them every step of the way from Shanghai. If Carla attacked, Finn had assured her, Yo-yo would join in. Trouble was, since wolves had closed in a few nights before, Yo-yo had kept his distance.
Was he even still alive? The further they’d gone, the weaker they’d all become.
One thing was certain – the brutal trek might never end, but one of them surely would, unless something happened soon.
How do you kill a giant?
Finn, lulled by Baptiste’s pace through the snow, suddenly got a flash of inspiration.
“Hey! We could hypnotise him!”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” said Carla sarcastically.
“No, listen. We went to this show once,” said Finn, trying to remember the night in a theatre with Uncle Al and Grandma. “Next time we stop, stare at him, tell him he’s feeling sleepy, then – click your fingers!”
“Click. Right,” said Carla.
“Then loop the cable around his neck and pull like hel—”
“You know what I’m going to do if I ever get out of this?” Carla interrupted.
“What?” said Finn.
“Shave my head. I’m going for the totally bald look. That way no one will ever climb into my hair agai—”
“AAAAAAA!!!”
Baptiste stopped dead and his sudden cry echoed around the valley like a rifle shot.
“What is it?” said Finn.
Carla followed the thug’s gaze. There, peeping just over the top of the ridgeline ahead … was a cross of stone.
Saliva dripped from Baptiste’s open jaw and he fell to his knees, gasping, overcome. Whatever he was looking for, he’d found.
“UUUUH!!”
Carla couldn’t believe it. Finn couldn’t believe it. There he was
, a metre away, his neck exposed. Helpless in shock. For the first time. Helpless …
How do you kill a giant?
“NOW CARLA!!!” Finn screamed, but her instinct beat him to it.
Adrenalin surged and with her best softball hitter’s cry, Carla jabbed her bound wrists forward to loop her shackle round Baptiste’s exposed throat, then she yanked back – hard – with every ounce of her weight and being.
Baptiste gasped, reeled and rose.
“YES!” screamed Finn, nearly pulling a clump of Carla’s hair out in excitement as she rode the back of the raging, exploding form, clinging on like a rodeo champ as they fell back – SPLASH! – like a great whale in the snow, turning and careering down the slope in a snowball fury, Carla hanging on for dear life, Finn confused, crushed, the mad frozen world tumbling and … THUMP!
They hit something, stopped dead. A boulder?
“GAHH!” – with his free hand, Baptiste forced the shackle from his throat to take desperate rasping breaths – “GAHH! GAHH! GAHH!”
Carla pulled harder, every cell of muscle stretched to breaking point, every sinew hard as nails. “GAHH! GAHH!” cried Baptiste, as they lay locked in the snow, moments stretching to eternity … He was dying … he was dying …
Until the wolves came.
OWWOWWWOOWWW!
Finn saw them first, charging down the slope, leaving powder trails like missiles.
“INCOMING! CARLA!”
OWWOWWWOOWWW!
Carla looked up and in that split second – “GHAUH!” – Baptiste flipped like a salmon, slipped the noose and grabbed the back of her scrawny neck, and before she knew it she was thrown onto her back in the snow – SLAM – and Baptiste was above her, drawing back his fist—
RRRRAAW! The first wolf hit him all claws and teeth.
Baptiste, furious, beat it away as if it was a fly, then roared caveman-like at the rest of the incoming pack.
“AARRRRRRRRRGHGHGH!”
Fear ran through the wolves and they scrambled to avoid him, sudden cowards. From the snow, Carla saw high above the mayhem an eagle break its glide, disturbed, and at the same time … she felt the earth explode.
BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR …