The Faceless Stratagem

by Robert Scott-Norton

  Nixon looked at Carter, then across at Payne. “I was ready to leave Southport. I’d put in for a transfer to Stanley Road. This isn’t why I joined the police. It’s just not.”

  Payne nodded. “We don’t always get what we want.” He was thinking of his own plans to leave the force and how those plans had been shelved when his wife died in the car crash.

  Nixon took a swig from a can of coke then set it down. “I’m sorry, but I won’t carry on with this.” And he suddenly got up from his seat and headed for the exit. “I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”

  Payne could have gone after him. Probably should have done considering the tone his subordinate had taken with him. Nixon was frustrated. They were all frustrated. But he also had a point. If his abilities would be put to better use in Liverpool, then surely that’s where he should go.

  Carter stopped eating and slid her plate away from her. “Where did that come from?”

  “His heart,” Payne replied, dolefully. “He’s only saying what we’re all feeling.”

  Carter didn’t speak and looked away when Payne glanced at her. The woman’s expression was difficult to read but her body language gave her away. She was feeling the same way as Nixon but her loyalty to Payne made it difficult for her to speak her mind. Had he done this to his team? Trapped them with fear? How had he not noticed?

  “Do you want to move on as well?” he asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “But Taylor’s been clear.”

  She thought about this before speaking. “Taylor doesn’t know everything that goes on here. He doesn’t have to know either.”

  Payne grinned.

  The phone from Payne’s office started ringing. “I guess that will be him now. His ears are burning.”

  Payne hurried for the phone. “Hello.”

  He listened, his smile dropped and he spoke only to confirm the details. When he walked back to Carter, she responded to the serious expression he’d adopted. “What’s up?”

  “That was dispatch. They’ve got a man claiming he’s just seen a Faceless entering the leisure park in Ainsdale.”

  38

  3rd June 2013

  There was no point in trying to get to her own car to escape the facility—security teams would be all over that. Their best bet would be something slightly more unexpected. She’d spotted the selection of security company vehicles in a car park on the far side of the reception area, well away from the main visitors' site. It would be risky, but they no longer had the time to wait.

  Dean was rattled. He’d not spoken since they’d ran from the secure section, and Linwood guessed it was all down to the shock of seeing the silver attack a person like that. It was scary enough for her, but then she didn’t have the silver inside her like Dean did.

  Together, they bolted to a security van at the far end of the car park. A siren sounded from the complex. People were evacuating the buildings. This move did more to help them than TALOS could have realised. Dean still had on his security uniform and that would help him blend in.

  The van was locked, but Linwood used her mobile to unlock it and she flung herself behind the driver’s seat. Dean got in on the passenger side and they both closed their doors as quietly as they could. Her heart was racing. She used the mobile to start the van then checked the rear-view mirror and saw a group of security guards rounding the corner of the visitors’ block. One of them noticed her reversing and alerted the others.

  Shit. No time for delicacy.

  She rammed the van into reverse and sped backwards.

  “Get down,” she shouted at her passenger. Dean was looking out through the rear window and ducked as the guards lifted their weapons and fired. They were using a combination of ion blasters and traditional guns. Bolts of light hit the vehicle, but she knew they’d have limited effect on a nonbiological target. The gunfire, on the other hand, was terrifyingly effective. The rear window shattered and bullets ripped through the air, pummelling the van’s bodywork.

  Slamming the van in first gear, she cursed as she slipped the clutch and the gearbox screeched at the forced strain she was putting it under.

  For a horrifying moment, she thought she would have to mow down the guards running towards the van, but she gritted her teeth, put her foot to the floor and they dived as the van lurched towards them. In the time she took to switch to first gear, they were already at the doors, aiming ion blasters at her.

  Focus.

  She didn’t look, choosing to focus on evasion. With a gentle tug on the wheel, she pulled the van to the left and back to the right, knocking her pursuers aside. Then she quickly accelerated, shifting up the gears.

  She tore around the first bend, cursing the site builders for making such narrow roads. A back wheel rose and clipped a kerb and then she was on the main feeder road gunning for the exit.

  Guards were already waiting for her. The barriers were down. A secondary gate was inexorably drawing closed beyond the barriers. They weren’t taking any chances.

  But Linwood didn’t yet believe she’d run out of hers.

  “Hold on,” she shouted to her passenger, and pressed her hand to the horn, sounding it all the while she was careening towards the exit and the waiting men.

  Please move.

  Guns were being raised. They meant business. They would surely fire.

  Linwood ducked as a bullet punched the windscreen and shattered it. The glass held but now clouded in an impossible cloud of white and cracks, it had become an opaque barrier. She reached up as the wheels bounced and the van hurtled and she punched the glass in front of the driver’s position with her palm.

  It didn’t fall out, but enough glass fell back that she was afforded a letter-boxed view of their impending crash.

  Her mouth had gone dry. Lights spun around her head as the daylight caught the glass and reflected in kaleidoscopic patterns.

  The van rocked again as the wheels hit a speed bump, then they were closing in. Dozens of metres became a handful.

  She held her breath.

  The guards threw themselves to the sides.

  The van smashed into the barrier with a deafening crunch. Steel and plastic spun up as the van’s grill hit the barrier, and as the remains of the barrier spun up, she saw the pieces flipping in front of the windscreen missing her face by inches.

  A second crash as they hit the chain link fence beyond. The van struggled with that, and ungodly shrieks of metal sounded underneath them. Linwood lost the wheel momentarily at the impact but held her reserve enough to slam the brakes to reduce their speed for the sharp turn onto the main road.

  Turning the wheel, she looked in the rear-view mirror to see the guards standing around bemused by what had just happened. Then she reached forward and punched out the rest of the windscreen.

  “We can’t stay in this for long,” Dean said. “It will have tracking.”

  She nodded. Her heart thumping and her mouth so dry she didn’t think she’d be able to speak. “I know. We’ll ditch it the first chance we get.”

  “Call Kingston,” she said. “We need help.”

  But Dean hesitated.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What if he already knows?”

  “How can he already know?” Linwood said.

  “Department 5 are there because of Kingston. Jaq knew they’d gone in to clean up Carey.”

  “I’m not sure I like what you’re implying.”

  “Department 5 have been working there a long time. How do we know we can trust them?”

  “We have to trust them. I have to trust that Kingston doesn’t know what Winborn was doing. Jaq didn’t know all of it.”

  “Or she didn’t want you to think she knew much.”

  The doubt had already been sown but Dean’s words nurtured that doubt into enough confusion to make her want to hang fire on contacting the boss.

  “We need to regroup,” she said at last.

  “Agreed. But where? Back to the Tombs?”r />
  She shook her head. “Department 5 were all over that. Plus, it’s hardly in a usable state.”

  They reached a roundabout and Linwood took the first exit. She wanted to get to the motorway but not in this van. They needed to ditch it for something untraceable. Besides, she’d decided where they were headed. If Department 5 were doing research into the nanites, then Linwood needed to get together her own team of experts. Jaq had a head start on them, with TALOS behind her, who knew exactly how much? But Linwood knew where they could find a source of nanites. She glanced at Dean. How much of the material was inside him? If they could extract it, they could study it.

  Dean was staring out of his window. “Then where? We can’t go to the police.”

  “There’s one person in the police I trust.”

  Dean sighed. “No. Not Payne. We can’t trust anyone at Southport.”

  “I don’t see we have many options. Besides, it will take us close to the Tombs. Maybe I’m wrong and TALOS isn't all over the base. You can come with me or you can make your own way.”

  Dean didn’t need to think. “I’m coming with you. There’s too much craziness to deal with alone.”

  “Call him. His numbers in the mobile.”

  “You shouldn’t use this,” Dean said. “It’s a Department 5 issue. They could be tracking it just as easily as they might be the van.”

  A weight dropped in her stomach. He was right. They were targets now and keeping ahead of TALOS and Department 5 would be nigh on impossible.

  39

  3rd June 2013

  It took them half an hour to find a car park large and discrete enough that they could dump the van and appropriate a new vehicle. She left the phone under the back seat of the van and she let Dean choose a new vehicle for them. Soon they were back on the road in a battered Golf. It was pushing twenty years old, and the engine made strange noises every time Linwood changed gear. But, it had two things going for it. The Golf was fast, and it wasn’t being tracked.

  Once they’d driven out of the car park, Linwood was eager to get out of the area in case they were pulled over for driving the stolen car.

  Dean had taken off his uniform jacket and was sitting in the passenger seat in his grey tunic, top buttons undone like he’d just finished a shift.

  Linwood had been wondering about his condition since their visit to the restricted section.

  “How are you holding up?”

  He grunted a noise that could have meant anything.

  “The silver—I saw how it reacted to being that close to Carey’s remains. How is it now?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be doing anything. It’s like it’s gone to sleep. It does this. When Thadeus was alive, it would react whenever he wanted us to do something, and then go dormant for periods. It’s in a dormant phase now.”

  “Those remains acted more powerfully than I’ve seen before. It seemed almost...”

  “Alive?”

  She nodded. “Like a self-preservation protocol. Why isn’t yours doing the same?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand what the nanites in me are doing.”

  Linwood had ideas. It made some sense to her that these nanorobots were operating under different instructions. They may be alien but surely it was all to do with programming. What instructions Thadeus had given to the ones inside Dean differed from the ones inside the Faceless and presumably the rest of the public.

  “You and Carey were both infected by Thadeus. And Carey was destroyed by the nanites. Both colonies came from Thadeus and yet what’s left of Carey’s have become a different thing entirely. What they were doing was beyond self-preservation. They were adversarial.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have the answers you need.”

  “Talk to me then, help me understand.”

  At a set of traffic lights, Linwood took the chance to scrutinise Dean’s face. There was a lot about him she hated; his standoffish approach; his surly demeanour. But worst of all was his reluctance to tell the truth. He might not know the details of the nanites inside him, but he wasn’t being as forthcoming as he could be. She didn’t know why, other than he was pissed that she was back with him, calling the shots. He’d always hated the fact that she’d been promoted over him, rising through the ranks faster and with less friction than he seemed able. What he never seemed to appreciate was that it was that same arrogance that was holding him back.

  Linwood pulled away again, checking the mirrors more than normal, her uneasiness about being followed had heightened considerably since stealing the Golf. Ideally, they’d lose this car soon and get another, but they couldn’t keep on doing that. At the rate they were going, they’d get nowhere.

  “Tell me what happened when Thadeus infected you.”

  Dean didn’t speak. At first, she thought he hadn’t heard her properly, but she glanced at him and saw something in his face she recognised. Regret.

  “You’d already been gone for five years. This was in 2011. We were continuing with MI18 business as usual although even then we knew that our cases were being diverted to Department 5. It didn’t matter so much as we were still useful. We had time and enough resources at the Tombs to do good work. It changed when Thadeus withdrew that winter. He’d always been a cool customer, but we’d learnt to deal with him. Keep out of his way. Emma had suggested he was sick, but he never said anything. He’d go missing for hours in the middle of the day and then turn up at the end of a shift like nothing untoward had happened.

  “Carey liked to wind him up. See how far we could push him before he finally snapped. Childish but it kept us amused and some days that was what we needed. One day we dropped a tracer on him, sure it would take us to wherever he was going missing, but we didn’t expect him to be going deep into the Tombs. We’d sealed off red level for years. It had never been secure after Irulal escaped in ‘84 and with the reduced team size it didn’t seem worth putting the effort in to making it right. But, when we followed Thadeus, that was exactly where he was headed. And then we found him with that casket thing. He was furious that we’d had the audacity to follow him, saw it as a direct challenge to his authority. But we weren’t having any of that. By this time we were both more intrigued than we were scared of him.

  “Carey demanded to know from Thadeus what he was doing. Thadeus had found Irulal. The prototype weapon we’d used on her had dissembled her, but it hadn’t destroyed her. The crafty bitch had survived. The girl form she’d taken and remained in until that moment, wasn’t as important as we’d thought. She could survive dissembled. Thadeus admitted it then—there was no point denying it. We looked through the inspection hatch and saw the half-reformed Irulal lying in the casket. She could have been dead. Or asleep.

  “When she opened her eyes, I almost crapped myself. Thadeus said he’d been down on red level on a routine audit, when he’d found her remains on the floor in the room she’d escaped from. As he’d approached, the thing had moved. He knew then that he’d have to be extremely careful with it, and he was ready to call the rest of us down to assist when it struck him. Now that I’ve seen what the nanites did to Jaq back at TALOS, I can only imagine it was something like that. And from that point on, the two of them were joined. Irulal had a hold over Thadeus because she was in a part Thadeus. Any thought of Thadeus telling the rest of us vanished at that point. But Thadeus wasn’t quite ready to give up. He used one of the refined prototypes we had and shocked himself. It was enough to force Irulal out of his system and he gathered her and stored her in the casket.

  “Over the days and months, he watched her and monitored her and made sure that the casket was secure and would contain her. But he’d been arrogant to assume that he’d successfully purged all of her from his body. There was just enough left. The silver.”

  Linwood tried to imagine how terrified Thadeus must have been, dealing with this on his own.

  Their first experience with Irulal was when she’d infected a young girl called Laura Brody. That experience had been traum
atic enough. Irulal’s first escape less than a year later in 1984 had put that in the shade. They’d lost a lot of people in the Tombs that day and that had been the turning point for MI18. It stopped being the agency that went into these situations with an optimistic heart and courage and instead approached every case with cynicism and fear.

  “Thadeus had cancer,” Linwood said.

  “Did he? I didn’t know.”

  “He told me just before he died. Irulal promised him she was developing a cure. That was why she needed the bodies bringing to her. The bodies that would form the first wave of Faceless. He didn’t know she was planning to open the dimensional schism and bring her people through.”

  “The silver would have been enough to make him not question things too carefully.”

  “Mind control.”

  Dean shook his head. “No. Nothing so obvious. Minor nudges away from ideas that don’t serve the greater purpose. It’s like there’s something else in here with me. I can hear things.” He tapped the side of his head. “Thadeus would have felt it too. From the moment we’d seen what he was doing with the casket on red level, he knew he had to do something to stop us talking, so he locked us in and contaminated us with some of his own silver.” Dean looked haunted. “As soon as it infected me, I didn’t want to argue. It wasn’t mind control but he could send us suggestions and we’d have to go along with them. It was simpler and less painful if we did what he wanted.”

  “What stopped you reporting him?”

  “Fear. The silver gave us a connection to him. He knew, don’t ask me how, but he just did. If we were having any rebellious thoughts, he came down hard on us. So hard, and this stuff really hurts.” He gingerly touched his chest. “I want it out.”

  “Did you ever try?”

  “Once we’d been down there and discovered his secret, we were never given any leeway. We were never given missions that took us too far away from him. I suspect that distance played a part in how well he could monitor us.”