скачать книгу бесплатно
“Was it, by any chance … this dog?” asked Kaparis.
The Abbot gulped. It was a thousand times cleaner than the one they’d found, but it was the same dog.
“We thought he must have picked it up along the way …” the Abbot tried to explain.
“WHERE IS IT?”
The Abbot’s mind was blank. He dimly remembered someone kick it aside. He scrabbled around for some consolation. “Perhaps the Carrier children have it? They have value as rat catchers. We will have the whole complex searched! If there is a dog – if there is a girl – we shall slay them!”
The Siguri chief beside the Abbot was nodding vigorously, but Kaparis slammed on the brakes—
“NO! Don’t you see what this means?”
His mind was a spinning Catherine wheel. If the dog was there, then Drake was there. If so, where? If Baptiste had brought the girl with him then was Drake somewhere on the girl? But where was the girl? On the mountain? In a bear?
“Find the bears, slice them open. The Salazar girl has to be somewhere—”
“Or Santiago found her!” exclaimed the Abbot.
“Santiago?”
“The idiot boy. The trapper.”
“The hunchback?” said Kaparis, vaguely remembering the wretch.
“Sometimes he finds lost souls. He was out late on the mountain – we questioned him. But not about a girl …”
“Brilliant!” gasped Kaparis.
“Really?” said the Abbot.
Kaparis’s voice fell to a rasping conspiratorial whisper. “If Drake is hidden somewhere in the monastery, we’ve caught him, with or without the girl.”
No one was dumb enough to ask the obvious question: how? How do you catch someone 9mm tall in a complex the size of a cathedral? Nobody asked, because they knew the Master always came up with an answer more fiendish than they could ever conceive.
Nano-radar
, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.
“We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.
What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?
His father …
With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”
It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.
Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?
Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.
Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.
Here was the bait.
Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …
Then out of nowhere it finally happened.
Luck.
As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—
Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.
L = Place? became Time = Place?
Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …
Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.
It had been there all along. Yet only he, Kaparis, had finally seen it.
The Boldklub fractal equations that he had so long sought, for which he had spent years terrorising and blackmailing Al Allenby and the G&T, were now blindingly obvious.
And there was more, so much more … The implications …
It was as if he had climbed out of a propeller plane and strapped himself onto a rocket.
He was about to seize control of the future.
SIX (#ulink_0fd88822-7591-5d3c-a9e7-64b777ea1fdc)
FEBRUARY 20 08:53 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
SPLASH!
Six foot six and sixteen stone of pure military meat hit the muddy water at the foot of the five-metre wall, sending it in all directions at once.
Unstoppable, Captain Kelly of the SAS (seconded to the G&T’s informal military detachment) hammered every muscle in his body towards the next obstacle on the course that ran through the woodland surrounding Hook Hall, the stately home and laboratory complex in Surrey that served as the HQ of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee.
Thirty metres of monkey walk lay ahead. Kelly grabbed the first bar and began to swing beneath the frame, enjoying the pain, loving it, the complications of the abortive Monte Carlo mission forgotten for a few blissful moments.
And they had to forget. All who had experienced life at nano-scale had found it difficult to adjust to life back at normal size, but more than anything, life without Finn …
THUD!
A four-inch, six-ounce throwing knife, travelling at 130mph, split the surface of the target post, transmitting the concentrated intent of the young woman who threw it from the far end of the Zen-white martial arts studio in the Old Manor.
Flight Lieutenant Delta Salazar bent her body over and took up her second position. When she wasn’t on fire, chasing down Tyros on motorbikes, she was ice. Lukewarm tears were just not her thing. Except when it came to her little sister. About Carla – still missing, possibly captured, possibly dead … she was a complete mess.
Hence the yogic knife-throwing routine she indulged in every morning to try and clear her mind.
THUD!
Crinkle.
Engineer Stubbs unwrapped a boiled sweet, popped it into his mouth and began to suck. It was a twenty-two-calorie Werther’s Original, containing soya lecithin and flavouring, and it was the first solid to pass his lips in forty-eight hours.
He was in his chaotic workshop in the old stables at the back of Hook Hall. He had not taken an active role in the Monte Carlo mission as he didn’t “travel well” and just the thought of going to France caused him an upset tummy.
Also, he knew it would all go wrong. It was his default position.
He was a man not of action but of make do and mend. In his time at nano-scale he had improvised a jet-powered jeep and a hydrogen balloon on the hoof, as well as having designed the Ugly Bug experimental nano-vehicle.
Fat lot of good it had done poor Infinity though, he thought …
VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM!
The De Tomaso Mangusta had been designed to take the breath away, a beautiful piece of jet-age engineering built for speed and named Mangusta, or mongoose, to imply it would eat its 1960s rival, the AC Cobra, for breakfast. With Dr Al Allenby’s customisations, it was capable of lunch and dinner too. Al didn’t just drive it round the runway at Hook Hall – he tried to plough it into the earth, so brutal was his cornering, so crude his acceleration. The thrill ride used to take his mind off things.
Used to.
He passed the Start/Finish line for the ninth time at 145mph – VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM! – and saw the chequered flag.
The signal that the Monte Carlo post-mortem meeting was about to begin.
With a sigh, Al slowed, left the track, and drove down through the complex to the hangar-like building known as the CFAC (Central Field Analysis Chamber). The huge doors parted as he approached and he drove straight into the vast concrete space that was dominated by a ring of particle accelerators capable of whipping up an electromagnetic vortex that could shrink all matter.
His Boldklub machine. It had been used first during Operation Scarlatti, when Finn had first got caught up in the nano-world and where, somewhere, he remained. Now it stood idle, waiting for his return.
Al crushed the lump that rose in his throat and spun the Mangusta to a handbrake halt at the centre of the array.
Commander James Clayton King, the Hook Hall supremo, on his way up the steel gantry steps to the control gallery, didn’t look down, break step or in any way acknowledge him. The impeccable figure who had coordinated saving the world any number of times hated showing off of any sort.
In moments, the G&T Committee were assembled: engineers, scientists, thinkers, soldiers. There were no formalities. Commander King reviewed the Monte Carlo débâcle using video to illustrate the handover, the roar of the motorbike, the pop of the empty cigar tube, the chase and kill. When the recording finished, he concluded: “We‘re not the first to leave the casino having incurred a loss. We knew this could happen, which is why we took precautions. Kaparis duped us. We duped him.”
Pictures flashed up of the dead rider and the girl who’d made the exchange.
“Tyros, of course. Note that they’ve taken to wearing coloured contact lenses to disguise the scarring left by the brain programming.”
The last known picture of Kaparis flashed up, able-bodied and evil, standing with a group of super-rich investors in Zurich, Switzerland, sometime in the late 1990s.
Al had to look away.
“As ever, he is playing games, displaying his power.”
“What goes on in that pretty little head of yours …?” Delta wondered aloud as she imagined three separate ways she’d like to snap that pretty little head off.
“We go again,” said Kelly. “We have no choice. He knows we have no choice. We wait for him to make contact again and we start again.”
“And we look ridiculous, again,” said Stubbs gloomily.
“Shut up, Stubbs,” said Kelly automatically.
“We are prepared for every eventuality,” said King. “Except one.”
“What?” said Al.
“He may be stringing us along because he doesn’t have Infinity or Carla.”
“They are NOT dead!” cried Delta, who never welcomed this suggestion. “We have no evidence that they’re dead. I was the last to see her and at that time she was alive!”
It was true that Delta had lost consciousness shortly after, but (attached to Yo-yo’s collar and still at nano-scale) she had been the last person to see her sister alive. Infinity Drake was presumed to be secreted somewhere about her person.
King waited a moment.
“We have no evidence, apart from a few doubtful videos, that Kaparis is holding either Infinity or your sister.”
Delta took comfort in this and bit her lip not to show it.
Al looked at the Zurich picture again and felt his stomach twist. Whenever he thought of Kaparis, his body tensed to take a punch. Exactly what Kaparis would have wanted, Al thought. Maybe that was the problem. Al looked round at the experts at the table or on screen, perhaps the finest minds ever assembled. He had led them to disaster. All his life he had been the smartest guy in the room, the brain. He had surfed his intellect and got as far as Boldklub and nearly bust open the laws of physics, but now it seemed he was all washed up.
“Stubbs is right …” said Al (but Stubbs took no pleasure in it). “We should never have fallen for Monte Carlo. That was ridiculous. We’ve become too predictable. Too logical. We’re scientists. We want the world to be rational, but we know that most of the time it isn’t. Life is random, absurd. That scares and confuses us. That’s why most of us are so bad at personal relationships!”
Al looked around. He was right. The room was full of blinking, uncomfortable nerds.
“If we can’t logically figure a way through this, then we’ve got to embrace the irrational, the unconscious. Look for answers there. We – no, I – I’ve got to stop digging the hole we’re in, I’ve got to step back and feel it, you know?”
“May I be excused?” requested Stubbs at this point.
“It’s time to get Zen, get patient,” Al continued. “It’s time to look beneath. This is a game of chess, not noughts and crosses.” He got up and paced. “We’ve got to think forwards, think backwards, think laterally; find the gap, the clue.” He slapped the table – “Come on! Let’s think outside the box! Let’s burn the damn box! You’re the brightest and the best. The only thing that trumps facts, that trumps time, that trumps the inevitable – that breaks E=MC
– is the HUMAN IMAGINATION!”
Al climbed on to the desk and threw himself into a headstand. His legs flailed and split, but he held it, just.
He regarded them all, upside down. They looked ridiculous.
“It seems,” sighed Stubbs, “we’re back to square one.”
FEBRUARY 20 10:12 (GMT). Blue Valley Mall, Woking, Surrey, UK
There were too many variables, thought Li Jun.
There were six small children and approximately six thousand polyurethane spheres in the ball pool, featuring nine different colours with a predominance of red, blue, green and yellow. Four per cent of the spheres were misshapen or dented. Every movement caused a chaotic chain reaction through the surrounding balls that was predictable only to a low standard deviation. Too many differential calculations were required.
