Down: Trilogy Box Set (109 page)

“Do as he says,” Henry cried. “Do not advance.”

“That’s good,” John said, squeezing his neck harder. “And you don’t move either. I don’t want to hurt you, I really don’t but I will.”

Emily clutched Sam back to her chest.

“What now?” Trevor asked.

“We wait and pray,” John said.

All eyes in the control room were on the countdown clock. Protons were hurtling around the great London oval at the speed of light and colliding with one another releasing tiny bursts of almost unimaginable energy.

Matthew saw his instruments climb past 29 TeV and he filled his lungs to shout, “Full power!”

As Ben was watching Bitterman’s tense face, he thought at first the power had failed to the cameras or the monitor.

Bitterman’s face was gone.

Everyone was gone.

The control room was empty.

All the chairs, all the terminals, everything was there, but no people.

An automated voice was blaring, “Power-down protocol initiated, power-down protocol complete.”

Ben was blinking in shock at the blank screen when motion on the transfer room screen caught his attention.

He jumped up and ran through the MAAC lobby toward the elevators, screaming at his agents there to follow him.

The elevator ride down to the transfer room level seemed to take forever and with every long second, Ben felt the pressure building inside his head.

He ran to the locked doors and ordered them opened.

There was hugging and there were tears and there were two restless children running about with abandon.

Trevor let go of Arabel and called to Ben, “Never any doubt, mate, never a moment’s doubt.”

In something akin to a trance, Ben hugged Delia, performed a headcount and said, “Not all of you made it.”

“We lost some people,” John said. “But we picked up one gentleman.”

Ben stared into the face of a large, regally dressed man looking around the room in befuddlement.

“Ben Wellington, I’d like you to meet King Henry the Eighth. Your Majesty, this man serves the queen of England, Elizabeth the Second.”

Ben couldn’t speak.

“Where are my men?” Henry mumbled. “Where is Cromwell? Where is Dartford?”

“We’ll explain everything,” John said. “I’m sorry I had to manhandle you.”

“Are we really home?” Tony asked, blinking through his tears. Martin put his arm around him.

“We are,” Emily assured him. “We’re really home. Ben, did they power-down all right? Were there any problems? I need to speak with Matthew and my team.”

“I think there was a problem,” Ben said weakly.

“What kind of problem, Ben?” she asked, her voice constricted with fear.

“They’re gone. They’re all gone.”

They rode the elevators up, Henry blanching at the feeling of acceleration.

Emily was pumping Ben for more information but he had none. As the elevator slowed she asked him, “Did our experts come up with a solution?”

“I was told they came up empty,” he said.

As soon as the elevator doors opened Ben’s mobile went off. The signal had been blocked below ground.

Henry’s mouth went slack as he looked around the glass and steel lobby.

John and Emily watched Ben’s face with alarm as he took his call. It was the face of someone being put through a wringer.

“Slow down,” Ben said. “For Christ’s sake, please slow down. All right. Yes, I know you can’t reach the DG or Trotter or Smithwick. I see. Where? Yes? Good lord. All right, listen up. Call Downing Street and call the MOD. I need to address the Cobra committee immediately. Get a helicopter over to Dartford to take us into London. And notify Buckingham Palace that they need to have the Queen on stand-by to meet someone important.”

He pocketed the phone.

“John, Emily, Trevor,” Ben said, pulling them aside. “I appreciate you must have gone through more than I’ll ever know, but I need you to come with me to London. Everyone else will be run through medical checks in the infirmary and we’ll have to keep them in quarantine until we get our stories straight. Our visitor, well, we’ll have to figure out what to do with him too.”

“What were you just told?” John asked.

“It’s chaos out there. There are a very large number of men, Hellers, by the sound of them, violently assaulting people in Leatherhead. An entire class of boys has disappeared from a boarding school near Sevenoaks, and there’s some kind of major disturbance ongoing at a shopping center in Upminster.”

John put his arm around Emily and the two of them sat down on a lobby sofa.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No, are you?”

“Not really,” he said. “Are you up for this?”

“What choice do we have?” she asked.

He tried to smile. “I’d say none. At least we got your sister and the kids back.”

“Thank God for that. But here’s the rub, John.” She tried to keep going but she began to weep. He comforted her as best he could and she was able to finish her awful thought. “I think the one person who knows how to fix this horrible mess is still in Hell. We’re going to have to go back and find Paul Loomis.”

Half the boys were standing ankle-deep in muddy pond water. The other five were a few feet away on boggy land. None of them said a word until Harry Shipley, the youngest by almost a year, a boy prone to panic attacks in the best of circumstances, began to blubber. He was the only thirteen-year-old, officially too young for the form, but academically too advanced to have been held back.

“Not now, Harry,” Angus ordered, searching the bleak landscape for anything familiar. “Not a good time.”

Angus Slaine was head boy of the Year Tens at Belmeade School. He was tall for his age, devilishly handsome with an angular face and longish blonde hair. Glynn Bond, his best friend, was the first to slosh out of the water. Angus followed and Glynn offered a hand.

“What the fuck?” Glynn said. He was a muscular boy with a solid wrestler’s body and a low center of gravity.

Angus removed his loafers and emptied them. “Is that a question or a statement?” he asked of Glynn.

“I want to know what’s happening,” Glynn said, emptying his own shoes.

Boris Magnusson’s mouth was stupidly open. “We all do,” he said.

Harry was pulling at his loose woolen trousers that had slipped halfway down his backside. Between sobs he announced that his belt buckle was missing.

“Shut up, Harry,” Angus snapped. “I won’t say it again. Would you three stop looking like wankers and get out of the water?”

The boys obeyed and joined the others on the soft grass. There, the lot of them tried to make sense of what had just occurred. They had gone back to their dormitory to change out of their PE kits into school uniforms for maths class. It was their first GCSE year and although exams were a year away the pressure was mounting, particularly for the weaker students. It was Belmeade practice and part of the mystique of the elite boarding school to push the boys to sit the exams at the end of Year Eleven. Boris and Nigel Mountjoy were struggling academically and it had fallen to Angus to try to sort them out. The answer had been staring at him in the form of Harry’s pimply, rodentine face. Annoying Harry. The maths whizz. The one they called Shitley, the boy every pupil wanted to punch. Angus made a tacit deal: Harry would tutor Nigel and Boris in exchange for his protection, and the arrangement had stuck. They were about to leave their dormitory with five minutes to spare, more than enough time to cross the green, run up the stairs, and find their desks in Mr. Van Ness’s classroom, when, in an instant, they were in a clearing surrounded by woods, half in and half out of a scummy pond.

Danny Leung asked the others if their uniforms were as messed up as his. He was the ultimate outsider who had worked himself into a position of respect by dint of his mad footballing skills. His father was the cultural attaché at the Chinese embassy. When Danny enrolled at Belmeade as a junior boy, Angus’s father had made the casual remark at the supper table that Mr. Leung was probably a spy and Angus had duly reported the gem to his mates. Danny was henceforward, Red Danny.

“It’s more than my belt buckle. My zipper’s gone, my buttons are gone, my tie’s gone missing.”

The other boys had the same wardrobe problems.

Craig Rotenberg asked if all of them had eaten porridge for breakfast.

“What kind of stupid question is that?” Glynn asked.

“It’s not stupid,” Craig said. “Maybe we were drugged. Maybe we were knocked out and taken out of school.”

“I didn’t have porridge,” Nigel said.

“Me neither,” Danny said. “I hate porridge.”

“It doesn’t mean we weren’t drugged,” Craig said.

“Natural materials.” They all looked at Harry who repeated it more emphatically. “Natural materials.”

“What are you going on about, you git?” Nate Blanchard asked angrily.

“Our shirts and socks and underwear are cotton,” Harry said, sniffing back his tears. “Our blazers and trousers are wool. Our shoes are leather. All the metal bits, the plastic buttons, the polyester ties, that’s what’s gone missing.”

“Who the hell cares about our clothes?” Boris yelled. “Our entire bloody school’s gone missing!”

“We’ll need to have a look-about,” Angus said, sweeping his arm at the encircling woods. “There’s bound to be someone around.”

“How’re we supposed to keep our trousers up?” Boris asked.

Kevin Pickles was a lad who had long compensated for his short stature with a rapier wit. Making other boys laugh was a damned sight better than being called gherkin. He had wandered away from the group and was now calling to them from tall grass halfway around the pond.

“How much will you give me to keep your willies from showing?”

“What did you find?” Danny called back.

Kevin held two fishing poles high over his head and ran back to join the others. Angus inspected them and declared them to be rubbish. They were hardly more than long, whittled branches with lengths of crude line tied to the ends. The barbed hooks, complete with writhing worms, were carved from bone.

“Let me see one,” Glynn said, taking a rod and inspecting the line. “What’s this made of? It’s not nylon.”

Stuart Cobham was the fisherman of the group. He snatched the rod from Glynn’s hand, passed the line through his pinched fingers and said, “I think it’s gut.”

“Gross.” That from Andrew Pender, a pale, willowy boy who counted on Harry to be the principal recipient of derision.

Stuart tested the strength of the line and declared it perfectly adequate for its proposed task.

“We don’t have anything to cut it,” Nigel said.

“Sure we do,” Stuart said, putting the line in his mouth. He bit down and used his lower teeth as a saw until it cut through. In several minutes they each had several inches of line to cinch up their belts and some of the boys secured flapping shirts too.

Angus was aware that everyone was waiting for him to choose a direction of travel. He looked around for inspiration. The sky was a featureless pale shade of gray. The woods surrounding them looked more black than green. There was a light breeze carrying a hint of a bad odor.

“That way,” Angus said.

No one asked him to justify his decision. They followed him through the meadow in a loose scrum. Glynn drew alongside him.

“There’s got to be an explanation,” Glynn said.

“Maybe we’re being punked,” Angus replied. “Maybe it’s a TV program.”

“I don’t see any cameras,” Glynn said.

Harry was crying again.

“Do you want me to shut him up?” Glynn asked.

Angus didn’t answer. He was pointing at something on the ground. “Look at that,” Angus said.

Stuart was employing one of the fishing rods as a walking stick. He used it to part the grass where Angus was pointing. “I think it’s blood,” he said.

“I think you’re right,” Angus agreed. “There’s more over there. There’s a trail of it. I think it goes into the woods.”

“We should be careful,” Glynn said. “We need weapons.”

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Boris asked in a mocking tone. “Are you scared a polar bear’s going to pop out like in
Lost
?”

“Try not to be a complete prick, Boris,” Angus said. “Everyone stay sharp. If we are being punked and filmed our reactions will be on YouTube until the day we die. You’ll never, ever get laid if every girl on the planet sees that you’re pathetic wankers.”

The meadow grasses gave way to a trampled-down path through a thicket of brambles. Just beyond lay a dense forest. Walking through the thicket along the path, Glynn’s jumper caught on thorns. He pulled away and left a small patch of Belmeade blue behind with a bit of gold embroidery, part of the S in School. Once inside the wood, the canopy blotted out much of the thin daylight. Tall pine trees creaked in the breeze. The forest floor was a carpet of needles, ferns, and large, flat mushrooms. Angus lost the blood trail but found it again with dots of crimson on a creamy expanse of fungus.

The boys were walking in silence. Even Harry was quiet but his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down with each wooly-mouthed swallow.

Angus stopped and turned to signal the boys to stop too.

They all heard it. A low moan.

Danny picked up a thick stick and some of the others followed suit. Ahead was a naturally fallen tree, its massive trunk and roots lying on the ground.

Here’s where the sixth-form boys are going to get us, Angus thought. They’ll be springing up, filming us with their mobile phones and having a good old laugh at our expense. Don’t let them make us look foolish.

He took a deep breath, walked up to the tree trunk and slowly leaned over it.

“Shit!”

The other boys recoiled at his cry but Glynn, suspecting a ruse, clapped Angus on the back and looked over himself.

“Jesus.”

A gaunt young man was looking up at them with pleading eyes. “Help me.”

“What is it?” Nigel called out from the rear.

“He’s hurt,” Glynn said. “He’s hurt bad.”

The other boys slowly came forward, almost too scared to look. They lined up on their side of the tree and forced themselves to look over. Kevin was too short and had to hike himself onto the log.