Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  “Ah,” Garibaldi smiled, “you must not forget the French are our allies, at least for today. If you happen upon any Iberians along your route, licking their wounds from their encounter with King Henry, perhaps you could tell them that an old Italian gentleman could use their assistance.”

  “I’ll do that. I hope you win, Giuseppe. You deserve to win.”

  “We will try our best. Alas, it will be difficult to send a telegram to Earth informing you of the outcome but you may imagine our success if it comforts you.”

  “I will.”

  Simon, Antonio, and Caravaggio were standing by their horses. John went to them and began to say his goodbyes when Antonio stopped him.

  “Did you think we would leave you here?” he said.

  “You’ve got to help Giuseppe,” John said. “He needs you more than ever.”

  Garibaldi shook his head vigorously. “No, John, they want to see this through with you. I applaud them for their loyalty to a good man. You have a treacherous journey ahead and not much time. The steam car is waiting at our camp. Take it and drive with speed.”

  A shackled Woodbourne was taken from the back of an unmarked transit van at the loading dock of the MAAC facility. Trevor and Ben Wellington led the way accompanied by a phalanx of MI5 agents surrounding the prisoner.

  Stepping into the elevator, Woodbourne asked, “Is this where I was before?”

  “Home sweet home,” Trevor said. “Let me ask you something, mate. Why’d you kill all those people?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Says it all,” Trevor said with disgust.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Actually, we intend to get rid of you at our earliest convenience,” Ben said.

  “You can’t kill me you stupid tosser. I’m already dead.”

  “No intention of killing you. We’re going to send you back where you came from. One-way ticket.”

  On the dormitory level Woodbourne rattled and clanged down the hall on the way to the cell prepared for him. Just then, the lavatory door opened and an MI5 agent assigned to Duck emerged with the young man.

  Duck looked up the corridor and stopped, motionless, with a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression of shock. But it was Woodbourne who spoke first.

  “Is that Duck? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Duck could only manage one word through his dry mouth. “Woodbourne.”

  “Get him back to his room now,” Trevor said. “Hurry it up.”

  Delia poked her head out of Duck’s suite and saw the look of terror on the face of her young charge.

  Woodbourne called after him in glee, “Is your retarded brother, Dirk, here too?”

  Trevor unlocked a door and Woodbourne was ushered inside. “You’ll be staying here for now,” he told him.

  “Take the irons off then,” Woodbourne said.

  “Not likely, mate. You’ll have four of these gents with you at all times and they have my permission to kick the shit out of you if you try anything, all right?”

  “Well then, they’ll have to feed me with a spoon and wipe me arse, won’t they?”

  “We’ll treat you right if you behave,” Trevor said. “Otherwise, they have my permission to let you starve and shit yourself. You already smell like crap so it won’t much matter.”

  Delia sat beside Duck’s bed and watched him curl into a fetal position.

  “You weren’t meant to see him, Duck,” she said. “I should have been more careful.”

  “What’s ’e doing ‘ere?” he sobbed.

  “The truth is, he came here before you but he ran away. We’ve been looking for him and now we’ve found him.”

  “Are you going to try to send him back too?”

  “That’s our intention, yes.”

  “When?”

  “You know when. It’s Monday morning, same as the last three weeks.”

  “You’re not going to ‘ave me stand next to ’im, are you? ’E scares me legless.”

  “I don’t know the precise plan, I’m afraid.”

  “But you won’t let ’im come for walks with me, will you?”

  “I think I can promise you that he won’t be extended the same privileges that you enjoy. Now, cheer up, have some supper and I’ll pop Little Mermaid into the player.”

  There was something wildly incongruous about driving a noisy, belching steam car through the wild open countryside of Francia with Emily sitting beside him. Every time John glanced over she was looking back at him, brimming with thankfulness. In the rear, Antonio and Simon were being vigilant to the myriad threats of the oncoming night. There was the danger of running into units of the retreating English army. There were French thieves and brigands about. And there were always rovers. Caravaggio sat between them, intent on sketching on his pad before the light was completely gone.

  Once clear of the Paris environs and heading almost due north, John and Emily began talking to each other over the din of the chugging boiler. She pressed him for details on Matthew Coppens’s theories on what had happened at 30 TeV and he did his best to tell her what he remembered from the post-incident meetings. He told her about the four weekly MAAC restarts and the plan to shutter the facility after the fourth, win or lose. He told her about Woodbourne. But she went quiet for a while when he described to her what her parents and sister had been told about her disappearance.

  “They must think I’m dead,” she said, tearing up.

  “I only know what they were told,” John said. “I honestly don’t know what they think. The important thing is that you’re going home. They’ll see the truth for themselves.”

  “We’re not home yet,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about the physics. It sounds like Matthew and I agree that we’ve slipped through a graviton-strangelet passageway into a parallel universe. But we can’t know that simply reproducing the collision energies will produce the same result, time after time.”

  “It happened twice,” John said. “Hopefully it’ll happen again.”

  “Maybe. But there’s something else that concerns me.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve had to do the maths in my head but I’m worried about instabilities developing with repeated high-energy conditions.”

  “What do you mean by …”

  Simon called out, “To the right! Watch out!”

  John braked to a stop as two men ran from the dark bushes into the road. Antonio and Simon, who were on the outside, sprang out of the car with swords drawn.

  They were young, in their twenties, their English uniforms bloodied. They were unarmed.

  “Please, please help us,” one of them cried, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the bright headlights.

  “Do any of you speak English?” the other said, dropping to his knees.

  “We all do,” Antonio said, drawing closer, brandishing his pistol. “Of late it has been a most useful language. You are Henry’s men?”

  “We are,” one said.

  “We were,” said the other. “We were routed by demons with bombs in their hands and got separated from the others.”

  “Those demons were us, laddies,” Simon said, coming over.

  “But you’re English,” the first man said. “Yet you fight against us?”

  “Against the king,” Simon said. “Big difference.”

  The other man looked to his left and peered into the woods. “We’re being followed. Please.”

  “Who’s following you?” John asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Them!”

  The rovers swarmed onto the road. John didn’t have time to do a headcount but there were between ten to twenty of them.

  “Stay there!” he shouted to Emily as he leapt from the car. Caravaggio jumped out also, lustily waving his sword.

  The rovers were armed with clubs and long knives.

  John gritted his teeth and with the angry, mantra-like phrase, “not now, not now,” playing in his head, he slas
hed, stabbed and kicked at their foul-smelling bodies.

  He saw a rover leap onto Caravaggio’s back and was about to help when two more came at John. Antonio and Simon were too far away to assist the painter and he was fully occupied himself. Then he heard a scream and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Caravaggio’s attacker arch his back and fall off. Emily was standing behind him holding a long rover’s knife.

  Caravaggio tipped an imaginary hat and stayed with her protectively.

  Simon called over to the cowering English soldiers saying, “Do you think you chaps could do a bit of fighting? It would be helpful.”

  The soldiers, shamed into action, picked up some fallen weapons and joined in, and after another two or three minutes, every foul rover had been put down.

  “I told you to stay in the car,” John said to Emily in a scolding tone.

  “I am happy she did not,” Caravaggio said. “This woman of yours is not only beautiful, she is a warrior.”

  Emily was looking curiously at her bloody hand. “I seem to have discovered a rather strong survival instinct these past weeks.”

  While the others cleared the bleeding bodies from the road, Caravaggio went back to the car and tore a page from his sketchbook.

  “For you,” he said, handing it to Emily.

  It was a dark and dramatic rendering of her in charcoal, her hair flowing and her eyes blazing like a warrior princess.

  “My God,” she said. “It’s stunning. Could you sign it?”

  He took it back, wrote his name across the bottom and presented it again, waiting for the kiss that was quickly issued.

  Antonio tossed the English soldiers some bread and said, “We helped you, now you are on your own. We must go.”

  “You’re Italian, aren’t you?” one of them said.

  “I am. Italians are the best. Please remember this.”

  They reached the coast at Calais in the full blackness of night and when the noisy car boiler was switched off they could hear the waves crashing below them.

  “We will shelter here for the night,” Antonio said, laying his blanket on a patch of soft grass for Emily.

  Simon grinned at John. “We’ll just be over there sleeping in shifts to protect you two love birds.”

  “Much appreciated,” John said.

  He could tell she was exhausted and so was he. He wrapped her in the blanket and filled his empty grenade bag with grass to make a pillow for her.

  Her fatigue slurred her speech, as if she were drunk. “I can’t believe you’re actually here.”

  He lay beside her. “Did you really think I wouldn’t come for you?”

  “I was hoping you’d try but I didn’t know it was possible.”

  He wrapped his arms around her to warm her, body and soul.

  “You followed me to gates of Hell,” she said dreamily, her eyes fluttering.

  “I’m going to get you home,” he said.

  “I know you’ll try.”

  He held her tighter. “I’m sorry …”

  He wanted to apologize again for making a fool of himself with Darlene but she was asleep. He had a feeling it was ancient history anyway.

  John awoke to the smell of cooking. Caravaggio had awoken early and had made a foray to a nearby village before returning with provisions. Impressed, Simon had asked him whether he had stolen them by stealth or force. Neither, he had replied. He had traded a peasant the eggs and ham for a quick sketch of him and his hag of a woman.

  John let Emily sleep and looked out to sea but the morning mist was unhelpful.

  “We have breakfast,” Simon said happily.

  “I’ll wake her soon,” John said.

  “So, John, we are at the coast,” Antonio said. “What is your plan?”

  He’d hide his worry from Emily but he didn’t conceal it from Antonio. “I don’t have a plan beyond hoping that the Hellfire is anchored somewhere out there. I left them more than two weeks ago. Maybe they got my message, maybe they didn’t.” He checked the pocket watch. “We’ve only got four days to the minute to get to Dartford.”

  “And if the English ship is absent?”

  “Then we’ve got to find another boat.”

  Antonio slapped him on the shoulder. It was the first time they’d had physical contact and John was touched by the gesture. “I think your ship is there. When the fog lifts we shall see it.”

  “You’re full of hope,” John said. “I like that.”

  “Why not? It is in the air.”

  John gently nudged Emily out of her slumber and soon the five of them were huddled around the small fire enjoying the cooked breakfast and avoiding the question of what they would do when their meal was done.

  Caravaggio’s keen eye saw it first.

  Ghostly shapes in the evaporating mist.

  He stood and pointed. “There!”

  Three black lines. Three masts.

  Antonio said, “It was as I said.”

  John blinked at the sea, praying it wasn’t a mirage. No one had thought to bring a spyglass so there was nothing to do but wait for the mist to dissipate further.

  “Is it ours?” Emily asked.

  “It has to be,” John said. “It damned well has to be.”

  They had to wait an anxious half hour until it became abundantly clear that it was a galleon at anchor, about a half mile out.

  “I can’t make out a flag or any markings,” John said, squinting until his head ached. “We’ve got to signal it.”

  “If it’s not the Hellfire, we’ll be asking for trouble,” Simon said.

  “We’ve got no choice. Can you power up the car and drive it right up to the cliff?”

  It took several minutes to charge the boiler but Simon chugged it slowly to within ten feet of the edge.

  “All right,” John said. “Switch the headlights on for three seconds and off for three seconds and keep repeating that.”

  They desperately watched the ship for any signs of recognition but none was forthcoming.

  “Should I keep going?” Simon shouted over the boiler.

  “Just a little longer,” John said, putting his arm around Emily to soothe her disappointment.

  Then there was a flash followed by a boom that dwarfed the sound of the car.

  “They’re firing at us!” Simon said.

  “No, look,” John said. There was a splash in the ocean. “They deliberately fired into the sea. It’s them.”

  Soon they saw a longboat being lowered and as it got closer they found a safe path down to the shore and waited on the pebbly beach, weapons at the ready, just in case.

  Fifty yards out John saw a man standing in the boat, waving his arms over his head.

  It was Captain Hawes.

  John shouted at him and Hawes shouted back. Neither man could hear one another but that didn’t stop them from trying. When the boat was grounded and the oars were raised, Hawes bounded into the surf and splashed to shore.

  “John Camp! You have returned.”

  John walked into the water to take his hand. “And you stayed. Thank you.”

  “I received your message from a French rider. I see you have found your lady.”

  “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  They sloshed ashore while Hawes’s men landed the boat.

  Hawes bowed at the waist.

  “Emily, this is Captain Hawes—I’m sorry, I don’t know your first name.”

  “It is Charles.”

  Emily did her best to curtsy for the first time in her life. “Hello, Charles, I’m Emily Loughty.”

  “Charmed. A Scottish lass. I can see why John was so determined to find you.”

  Simon and Antonio came up and greeted the captain like old friends and John introduced Caravaggio.

  “Ha,” Hawes said, “You have the same name as a rather illustrious painter.”

  “Indeed, he is my favorite artist, a man of rare talents, I believe,” Caravaggio replied with a wink toward Emily.

  Hawes, una
ware of the joke on him, said, “I brought a small cask of wine in case you needed reviving.”

  “I’d love a drink,” John said.

  Emily laughed. “Some things haven’t changed.”

  Simon started a fire on the beach and they gathered around.

  After toasts were made, Hawes asked, “May I now know the identity of the man who you serve, this man who is no king but offers you bountiful hope?”

  John received nods of approval from his companions. “There’ve been a few developments,” he said. “He is a king now, the king of Italia. His name is Giuseppe Garibaldi.”

  Hawes listened with an obvious fascination as Antonio and Simon took the lead in describing Garibaldi’s philosophy.

  When they were done Hawes said, “I would offer my services to his noble and felicitous cause.”

  Antonio said, “Once you have delivered our friends to Britannia, we would have you make sail for Italia. Your skills, your ship, and your men will be of great assistance to our master.”

  “I would be honored to accept your offer, sir.” Then he chuckled, “After all, we have nowhere else to go. Come now, John and Emily. Let us return to the ship and set our sails. A storm is coming and the crossing will be arduous.”

  It was time for farewells.

  Emily delivered a hug and a kiss to each man, laughing at something Caravaggio whispered in her ear. Then she stood aside.

  John had been in this spot many times. This wasn’t the first band of brothers he’d had to bid farewell. But he knew, as he exchanged words and bear hugs with Caravaggio first, then Simon, and finally Antonio, that this time was the toughest.

  He choked up and had to dig deep to hold himself together as he said, “I’ve never fought shoulder-to-shoulder with three finer warriors or three finer men. A day will not go by when I don’t think about each of you. Go and win your war and change your world. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  He helped Emily into the longboat and climbed in beside her.

  As the boat was rowed offshore, they waved at the three men they left behind.

  “What did Caravaggio say to you?” John asked her.

  “He said that if I ever got tired of a live man, he knew a very handsome and talented dead one.”