To my children Rose, Huw and Conrad,

with love everlasting and a third share of all royalties*

* conditions apply

Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.

Exodus, 8:21

Consider yourself lucky. So far.

Six-Legged Soldiers – Using Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffrey A. Lockwood, OUP, 2008

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Footnotes

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

“This is exactly what happened to Liz and Lionel when Kismet went missing in her GAP year…”

Finn’s grandma stood in front of the Departures gate, and fussed.

“Grandma! He’s in the building. He’ll be here any minute,” said Finn.

They were waiting for Uncle Al to turn up. He was supposed to be providing cover for Grandma while she took a well-earned break – flying to Oslo for a ‘knitting cruise’ around Scandinavia with another hundred or so grey-haired needlecraft enthusiasts.

Al had promised to show up at Grandma’s the night before.

Then Al had promised to meet them at the airport, first thing.

Then Al had promised – just now, by phone – to meet them at the Departures gate.

But Al… well, Al was Al, and nothing was certain, and Grandma’s way of coping with the distress her son caused her, from babe in arms to now, thirty-two years later, was to fill the world with a breathless stream of anxious chatter.

“…Kismet their eldest with the tattoos they had to fly out to Kinshasa cost them five thousand pounds silly thing had lost her phone it was the not knowing if she was dead or alive you can’t imagine what that does to a parent – where is he? – I looked after their cat same bladder problems as Tiger…”

“Last call for passenger Violet Allenby, Oslo flight 103, proceed immediately to gate 15,” announced the voice over the loudspeaker.

“…John very helpfully ran me into Woking young vet from New Zealand lovely girl wet food and herbal treatment…”

“Grandma! Please!”

“I can always catch the next one…”

“Noooo, Grandma!” Finn gyrated in frustration.

“Infinity!” she snapped. “I am not moving an inch.”

(Infinity. All Finn knew about his father – all he needed to know – was in his name. Who would name a child after a mathematical concept? “Exactly the sort of man you’d imagine,” Finn’s mother would say wistfully, claiming it had been all she could do to prevent him being named E=mc².)

“Al is here! I’ll be fine!”

“He is not! One thing you can rely on is that you can never rely on Al. He says he’s ‘in the building’, but that could mean anything. It could mean an imaginary building; it could mean a building on another continent, on another planet…”

“Grandma, get on the plane!”

“I have a duty of care. You are a child…”

“I’m almost a teenager.”

“…and if you really think, if he thinks, I’m going to abandon you to your fate in an airport full of germs, runaway trolleys and international terrorists…”

And then, thank goodness, from around the corner, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, walked Al.

Six foot two and thin as a whip, part muscle, part bone, part wire, suede jacket and ancient cords worn to the point of oblivion, dark hair, darker eyes, designer glasses held together by tape, arm raised in surprised greeting as if he’d just wandered in and spotted them by chance.

“Alan! Where on earth have you been?”

“Ah…? I was in the middle of something.” He thought this would do. “Why are you still here?”

Yap!

On a lead by Al’s side bounced a delighted, knee-high mongrel (a kind of spaniel/hyperactive kangaroo cross, Finn always thought).

“What are you doing with Yo-yo? You can’t bring dogs in here!”

“I saw him tied him up outside. He was crying.”

Officials across the concourse were already beginning to take notice.

“Marvellous! Now we’ll all be arrested…” said Grandma.

“We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Finn to Al.

With that, Al scooped Grandma up like she was a toddler, gave her a kiss on the cheek and put her down again, pointing in the right direction.

“For goodness’ sake, I’m sixty-three!”

Finn wheeled her bag after her and together he and Al herded her through the Departures gate like a reluctant farm animal.

“Have you spoken to Mrs Jennings? She’s agreed to check Finn in and out of school.”

“Mrs Jennings and I speak all the time,” confirmed Al.

“Go, Grandma!”

“You’re lying!” she protested. “All the meals are in the freezer marked—”

“All the meals are in the freezer, all the knives and forks are in the drawers, there are doors and windows that allow access to the dwelling place…” interrupted Al.

“The keys!”

“…the keys to which are in Finn’s pocket, which is a cloth appendage sewn into his trousers about so high. Go on, Mother! I can reheat lasagne and hold a high moral line for a week!”

“That I doubt very much!”

She was being urged through now by a red-faced airline official.

“Love you, Grandma, have a great time!”

“You too, darling, but do be careful. Al? Alan?”

“I promise, he’ll be fine, go!”

As Grandma finally disappeared through passport control, Finn fell to his knees in relief, Yo-yo licking his face.

Al looked at Finn, puzzled, and said, “Did she say school?”

Fifteen minutes later, Grandma was in the air, and Finn and Al were gunning it out of Heathrow and on to the M25 in Al’s 1969 silver grey De Tomaso Mangusta, the most extraordinary car ever hand-built in Italy, loud and low, a monster V8 coupe with perfect styling capable of 221bhp. Yo-yo howled and loved it. Finn adored it. Grandma thought the car ridiculous and a prime example of Al’s financial irresponsibility.

“I’ve grown tired of pretty dresses and I can’t think of anything better to waste it on,” Al would tell her, something Finn knew was only partly true because more than once he’d found cheques from Al in Grandma’s handbag, and they seemed huge. For no matter how unconventionally Al behaved, people still seemed to want a piece of him – corporations in need of a technical fix, pharmaceutical companies looking to reconstitute molecules, governments stuck with insoluble nuclear waste. They all came to Al.

He ran a small lab in the heart of London and was a ‘sort of scientist’: an atomic chemist with a wandering mind who found it difficult to fit into any one category – in science or life.

He was the only person, or so he claimed, to have been fired from the staff of the Universities of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the same term (for challenging the Standard Model of particle physics via the Tau Neutrino Paradox and for striking a right-wing economist with a steamed halibut during a buffet, respectively).

Al saw it as proof of moral fibre. Grandma saw it as proof of insanity and prayed it didn’t run in the family. After bringing up two totally reckless children, she had resolved to wrap her only grandchild up in sixteen tonnes of cotton wool.

Finn already shared Al’s bony, clumsy physique, but had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (“your father’s”), and mad blue, deep-blue eyes (“your mother’s”) and now Grandma fretted that he’d inherited a tendency to have his “own views” about things too (rejecting all yellow food apart from custard, pointing out a teacher’s “confrontational attitude” at a recent parents’ evening and bringing up his “problems with religion” with a vicar, during a funeral).

Not that Finn wanted to upset anyone. He was just trying to stay one step ahead of boredom, which meant – as he pointed out on his Facebook profile – ‘not being on the same planet as school’. He loved Grandma and made every effort not to cause her unnecessary suffering – avoiding dangerous sports, playground conflict and potentially lethal pastimes (while retaining the right to self-defence, of course. And who could resist making home-made fireworks? Or skateboarding into a neighbour’s pool, or practising overhead kicks on concrete, or…).

When Finn was with Al though, there were no rules.

Other people’s uncles played golf. Other people’s uncles might give them ten pounds at Christmas. Al was happy to see every moment as an opportunity for discovery and entertainment and he never said no. Even Finn realised this might be crazy, but it made being with him a very exciting place to be.

“I’m training him up,” Al would say whenever Grandma complained.

“What for?!” she would demand, terrified (for she knew he sometimes operated out of a secret world). Life, Finn supposed, trusting Al’s training absolutely, for, if his uncle’s head was in the clouds, his heart was always in the right place. Yes, he was erratic and unreliable, yes, he might have “a difficult relationship with stuff” (which included parking, losing things and an inability to tidy up), but he bridged the gap between everyday life and the way life ought to be – impulsive and instructive and full of things that blew up.

He dropped in every couple of weekends, sometimes staying for a week during the holidays, and he’d stayed the whole summer after Mum had died.

“You pack a bag?” Al snapped at him.

“Yep!”

“Got your passport, checked the date?”

“Yep!”

Yap! added Yo-yo.

“Get all the gear ready?”

“In the garage, all lined up.”

“Weapons? You know they still have wolves?”

“M60 with grenade launch side-barrel.”

“Hah! This is not Xbox, this is life or death – sunblock?”

“Sunblock, shades, tent, clothing, waterproofs, Swiss Army knife, Mars bar, torch, lighter, hand-held GPS – I’ve even got a blow-up pillow.”

“Trust yourself,” had been one of his mother’s Big Three Rules. “You can’t always rely on other people.”

Finn’s stuff weighed 6.5 kilograms packed into a natty dry bag.

He was ready for anything.

“I bet you didn’t remember we were going till this morning! I bet you haven’t even taken a shower!” Finn teased Al.

Al pretended to be appalled.

“Hey! I’ve got credit cards, a restaurant guide and half a tube of Pringles. Now let’s load up and let rip.”

DAY ONE 07:33 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK

A convoy of six cars pulled up silently outside Hook Hall.

They were expected. Little was said.

In one vehicle was Commander James Clayton-King (Harrow, Oxford, RN, MoD, SIS, G&T Chair.), known simply as King. Not the jolly King of nursery rhymes, but the cruel, commanding type. Pale skin, powerful jaw, bone-deep intelligence. He wasn’t as menacing as his hooded eyes suggested, but he liked it suggested.

Two Security Service officers hopped out, one held open the door. From the cars behind, more senior figures emerged in similar fashion, including General Mount of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, three aides accompanying him.

They were led through the complex until they reached the Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), a cathedral-sized, concrete-lined warehouse where researchers could recreate and control any climate or environment imaginable, from lunar desert to lush rainforest, and proceed to blow or blast or poison the jelly beans out of it simply to see what happened. In essence it was a giant test tube and one of only three such spaces in the world.¹

They climbed a steel gantry to a reinforced glass and concrete control gallery that flanked the space. Others had already arrived: an eclectic mix of soldiers, scientists, engineers and thinkers.

A group of bespectacled experts from a research institute on Salisbury Plain clustered self-consciously. They looked like men who hadn’t slept.

There were handshakes and nods, but no high fives. Tea and coffee were offered and refused. A selection of biscuits lay untouched.

The Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (popularly reduced to ‘the G&T’) was formed in October 2002 to respond to extraordinary threats to global security and the fabric of Western civilisation. It had fourteen expert members and a decision-making core of five including Commander King as its chairman. They had only been forced to meet three times over the last decade², and they knew whatever they were here for it would be serious.

Deadly serious.

A technician reported: “Ready when you are, sir.”

“Good. Seal the room,” said Commander King.

He waited as doors were locked and blinds whirred down.

“Now… You may be wondering why you’ve been called here.”

His voice was deep and used to command – controlled, no-nonsense and yet also theatrical.

“Well. One of our scientists is missing. And it seems he has released – this…”

The technician hit a key and up on the screen, in enormous scale, appeared an image…

DAY ONE 07:41 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire, UK

Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill…

TWO

“Lamp trap?” snapped Al.

“Check,” said Finn.

“Nets?”

“Check.”

“Traps?”

“Check.”

“Pins?”

“Check.”

“Jars?”

Yap!

“Idiot dog.”

They were back at Grandma’s rambling old house now, going through the gear Finn had got together for their trip.

“Ethyl acetate?”

“‘The Agent of Death?’” mugged Finn. “Check.”

“Cards and fixing spray?”

“Check! It’s all here, let’s go!”

Yap! agreed Yo-yo (particularly delighted as ‘go’ meant ‘run about outside with Yo-yo’), leaping at Finn with such excitement that he knocked a shoebox full of plastic soldiers off a shelf and sent the lot skittering across the garage floor.

“Oh great,” Finn said, having to pick them up one by one.

“There should be some fishing rods back here…” said Al, wading through a decade’s worth of accumulated junk at the back of the garage.

Finn had been on a similar junk hunt on his first summer at Grandma’s, which was how he’d discovered Al’s boyhood bug-collecting gear behind a defunct Mini. He and Al had set up the lamp trap, a glowing, tent-like apparatus, in the back garden, and stayed up half the night collecting and cataloguing the multitude of insects drawn towards the light.

Grandma hadn’t seen it as a proper way to mourn the passing of a mother, a sister, a daughter. But then they were male, and men were different when it came to emotions, especially powerful emotions, and if arranging dead insects helped them to cope then so be it. She also knew her daughter, wherever she was, would be looking down in approval at the two of them forming such an odd, unbreakable bond.

The second of Mum’s Big Three Rules for Finn was: “Be yourself.” Finn had never really figured out what that meant, but he’d ended up with 108 different species of native insects in various states of disrepair mounted on two A3 cards above the fireplace in his room.

Bombus lucorum, Bombus terrestris, Bombus lapidarius (bumblebees that sounded so good it made your mouth go funny); leafcutter, miner and carpenter bees; churchyard, mealworm and common oil beetles; big stags, small stags; seven-spot and eyed ladybirds; sawfly (you should see their wings), blowfly, housefly, horn fly; fantastic, impossible dragonflies and damsels (some in distress); moths upon moths – almost every type of hawk; and butterflies fit for an art gallery – tortoiseshell and fritillary, red admiral and Camberwell beauty, swallowtail and green-veined whites.

The writing on the labels was childish and some of the pins and mounts had been knocked off, but the samples themselves still looked fantastic. He knew everything about them; he’d read every book and article. He could recite all their names and characteristics.

Finn wondered if his interest was just natural or whether he was trying to force a connection back to his parents, both of whom had been scientists (he’d lost his father, Ethan, in a laboratory accident just after he was born, his mother more recently to cancer). Either way it felt right. And when Al asked him what he’d like to do on his ‘week off’ from Grandma, Finn immediately knew he wanted to add to the collection.

“Great idea. How about the blind insects of the Pyrenees?” said Al. “Freakish, eyeless Ungeheuer found in the deepest mountain caverns, evolved over twenty million years of total darkness!”

“The Pyrenees?”

“It’s a mountain range between France and Spain.”

“I know where it is, but Grandma…”

“Never tell Grandma anything; it only worries her and then you can’t shut her up.”

Before Finn knew it, the trip was on.

“Let’s hit the road,” said Al, reappearing from the back of the garage with two fishing rods and a jar of old tobacco pipes. “We’ve got to get to the ferry by three.”

Finn snapped his fingers and Yo-yo sprang into the tiny back of the Mangusta, delighted because everything delighted Yo-yo. Bathtime. Being locked outside in the rain. Being shouted at. And right now – being taken to certain incarceration in kennels.

En route, Al called the secretary at Finn’s school, Mrs Jennings, claiming, with a completely straight face, to be consultant dermatologist “Dr Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P-H—”, and that he was rushing Infinity Drake to his private clinic because of “an acute case of seborrhoeic dermatitis”.

“It is absolutely vital to initiate wire-brushing.” If everything went well, the boy would be discharged in a week, Al continued, though he might be totally bald, and if so what was the school policy on “the wearing of a headscarf and/or wig for medical reasons”? The secretary, alarmed, put him on hold to consult a higher authority, then came back on the line to ask if she could just take his name again. “Of course,” said Al, “Herr Doktor Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P—” and then pretended to be cut off by poor reception.

“That ought to do it.”

He screeched to a halt in front of the kennels.

“Ditch the mutt. Go.”

Finn took a deep breath. “Come on, Yo-yo.”

The dog sprang out of the back seat and followed Finn up to the kennels, excited by the other doggy noises and smells. Once shut inside his cage though, Yo-yo sat on his haunches and howled.

Mum had got him for Finn as soon as she realised she was ill. It was obvious therapy, but it had worked.

Finn touched his chest. Scratched the stone. Although he couldn’t get his head round the concept of his mum’s ‘soul’, he’d long ago decided that if there was such a thing then it lived in the stone that hung from a leather tie around his neck. It looked dull and ordinary, but in fact it was a rock called spharelite that his mum had always worn. When you scratched it – with your fingernail, with anything – it would literally glow. Triboluminescence it was called, but not even science could tell you quite how it worked, or why. Which was in part why Finn loved it. It was mysterious and it was scientific and it had been his mum’s and it had a great name. If he ever had children, one of them was going to be called Spharelite Triboluminescence.

Finn reached in and gave Yo-yo’s neck one last rub.

Yo-yo thought the cruel ‘lock-up-your-dog’ game was over and rolled on his back, offering his tummy to be tickled.

What an idiot.

It was at times like this that Finn remembered his mum’s third and final Big Rule, delivered in her last days alive when she hadn’t seemed like she was dying at all and had showered him with affection and practical instruction.

“If you’re ever in doubt, work out what feels right in your heart of hearts then, whatever happens… just keep going.”

Al watched, appalled, as a minute later Finn marched out of the kennels – followed by Yo-yo.

“What…?”

Yap!

Finn got in the front, Yo-yo hopped in the back.

“Mum…” Finn started to say – and Al knew what was coming: “Mum wouldn’t just leave him like this.”

“Why you little…”

It was an emotionally loaded, totally absurd unwritten rule between them that, if either Finn or Al invoked his mother, the other had to obey. The rule was stone crazy and wide open to abuse (“My sister would’ve loved you to make me another cup of tea…” “My mother would have loved FIFA 14 on PSP…”), but it was not one Finn ever felt he could revoke. It needed Al to be the grown-up and break the spell, to put an end to the madness, but that just wasn’t Al.

So, six minutes later, they found themselves outside the church.

Christabel Coles, vicar of the Church of St James and St John in the village of Langmere, Bucks, had been fond of Finn ever since – in the middle of his mother’s funeral, aged eleven – he held up his hand to bring the service to a halt and demanded to know exactly what a ‘soul’ was and if it did exist then exactly where was his mother right now? Christabel had paused, then said, “Good question,” and sat down in her vestments, ignoring the packed congregation, to discuss it with him. It had been interesting, illuminating and inconclusive, though it had helped both of them to get through the day and they’d become great friends and indulged in many such conversations since, often in the company of this… blessed dog, which Christabel didn’t have the heart to tell Finn she found among the most trying of all God’s creatures.

Finn argued that he could no more leave Yo-yo locked in kennels “than you could lead rich men through the eye of a camel or whatever it is. Y’know, Christabel? Will you look after him? I’ll come to church next week, honest…”

She caved in. “I’ll do my best.”

“Brilliant! Wet food in the morning, dry at night, and just give him a blanket to lie on. Oh and walk him when you can, but it’s just as easy to let him wander.”

“And don’t kill it,” added Al.

“But I will have to tell your grandmother about this!”

“Don’t worry, Al will do that. He’s in enough trouble as it is.”

She watched Finn jump back in beside his unreasonably handsome uncle and gave a little sigh.

Al put his foot down and the Mangusta razzed off, Yo-yo chasing them halfway down the lane.

Trust yourself.

Be yourself.

Just keep going.

It wasn’t much of a legacy, but it was all he had.

“Can we go on holiday now?” asked Finn.

“We can go on holiday now,” replied Al.

The sun was shining and they were roaring through the English countryside in an Italian sports car, headed for the continent on a school day in possession of various bits of scientific equipment, a tent, two fishing rods, half a tube of Pringles and not a care in the world.

Could things be more perfect…?

The beast whipped at the flank of the sow badger again and again and again.

It was an attack so frenzied, venom leaked from the beast’s abdomen, spattering the animal’s hide.

The effects of the cold store and anaesthesia had left it sluggish most of the morning, but the moment it had locked its barbed extendable jaw into the badger flesh, rich blood overwhelmed the beast’s senses and only one thing flashed through its crazed nervous system –

Kill kill kill kill kill kill…

Three Tyros ¹ watched.

Two stood well back in Kevlar bodysuits. Fully masked.

The eldest, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, stood close by in just a hoody and jeans.

It was he who had positioned the badger, crippled but alive, on the north side of the wood. A farm animal would have served just as well, but in the remote chance a walker happened across the body, a dead cow might have given cause for concern and a phone call to a farmer, whereas a dead wild animal was just… nature.

He’d held the beast as it woke. He had touched it: him it would taste, but not attack.

He had released it carefully, directly on to the badger’s side. Now he watched as it drank its fill.

After eight minutes, the beast unhooked its jaws. The sow badger was unconscious. In a few minutes she would be dead.

The beast, fat and drowsy with blood, felt an instinctive urge as its abdomen strained and cells divided and extended in a race to become full, viable eggs.

The Tyros withdrew, as planned, and split up without a word.

Nothing remained of the release operation but an electronic eye concealed in a nearby tree.

THREE

“Help-me-Mrs-Murphy – come to my aid!

You’re gonna flip the pin on my love-grenade!

I-mean boom I-mean bust I-mean whom I-mean us!”

“I wrote that. I was in a band. Do you ‘dig’ that? No. Because you lack the life experience to appreciate the majesty of—”

“Do you see that helicopter?” interrupted Finn, looking back out of the window of the Mangusta.

“That what?”

Al believed in the to and fro of vigorous debate on long journeys and, as such, he and Finn had spent much of the morning arguing about wind turbines, football, whether Concorde could be revived and adapted to fly into space, whether snow was better than powered flight and, if the Nazis had taken over, which of Grandma’s friends would have turned collaborator.

They were just starting on Al’s assertion that “rock music is wasted on kids” when Finn first noticed the chopper.

He craned his neck to get a good look back up the road. Al tried to locate it in his mirrors.

The route was winding and the tree cover heavy, as they were on the edge of the New Forest, but unmistakably, less than a couple of hundred metres behind and above them, a helicopter was swinging back and forth, following the line of the road, getting lower and lower as it went.

“It’s getting really low,” said Finn. “What do you think they’re doing?”

“I hope it’s not your truant officer…” said Al, letting the joke trail off as he became more concerned.

The chopper was approaching fast now, almost skimming the tops of the trees. A couple of cars behind them had both slowed and pulled over.

Al carried on – the chopper didn’t have police markings after all – but as they came over a ridge into more open country it closed in, violently large and loud, bringing itself right up alongside the Mangusta.

“What are they doing?” said Al.

Then a voice echoed out of a loudhailer on the chopper’s belly.

“DR ALLENBY, PULL OVER.”

“They know you?” squealed Finn, impressed.

Al slowed to a halt. The chopper went to land in the road ahead.

“What is this? What’s going on?” said Finn.

Al paused for a moment. “I’m not sure, but at the very least it’s bad manners.”

He suddenly put his foot down. The car shot off. Then Al threw it into a screeching handbrake turn which spun them back the way they came. The V8 engine roared and Finn felt himself pushed back into the leather seat as the acceleration bit – there was no doubt about it, these cars were built to thrill.

“Why aren’t we stopping?” Finn shouted.

“Might be agents of a foreign state… Might be an old girlfriend trying to kill me… But don’t worry, we can lose them in the woods up here.”

Was he joking? He must be joking. Then Finn noticed that Al’s knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel. Finn hunkered down lower in his seat, heart hammering with excitement.

“Drive fast, Al.”

“Check.”

They were closing on the woods, but the chopper was almost upon them.

Again came the voice from the chopper’s loudhailer: “PULL OVER, DR ALLENBY, BY ORDER OF COMMANDER KING.”

Al cursed, slammed on the brakes and spun the Mangusta back to a halt at the side of the road, just short of the trees. The chopper descended gently on to the grass beside them.

Finn was transfixed. “Al…?” he started to ask, but his uncle, too furious to speak, just folded his arms and waited.

Further down the road two police 4 × 4s were approaching. Two men in Security Service suits leapt out of the chopper and made their way over as the engine powered down.

“Sir, you’ve got to come with—”

“Do thank the Commander,” Al interrupted, “but tell him we’re on holiday, tell him we’re ‘en route’, and he’ll have to get in touch next week, and tell him he doesn’t need to bother with all this either. I’m on email, Facebook or even the telephone. Oh, and don’t forget to tell him he’ll have to come crawling to me on his hands and knees while you’re at it…”

“Sir, I have been instructed to inform you the matter pertains to Project Boldklub.”

Project Boldklub? Finn laughed. What a bizarre name. “Who’s that? Some Viking?” He looked at Al.

Al’s face was suddenly still and serious.

DAY ONE 12:38 (BST). Siberia, Russia

The Arctic fox confused it with a lemming at first, but the scent soon became richer and sweeter.

The temperature was 2°C. Summer. Bog and meltwater pools characterised the surface at this time of year, the illusion of thaw. As the fox drew in towards the scent, the salt and sweet notes increased, grew irresistible, sending his nervous system wild.

And then he saw something he didn’t understand.

A man.

The man raised an arm. Fired. Then continued eating his hot dog.

The impact propelled the fox into a gully. As blood seeped through his crystal-white fur, a last survival instinct kicked in, and he curled and clamped his mouth round the wound.

A disc of congealed blood formed on the surface of the tundra. Insects and micro-organisms, adapted to the extreme environment, drew in to feed greedily upon it.

Fourteen metres beneath, in a vast insulated bunker and in simulated tropical luxury, David Anthony Pytor Kaparis lay in his iron lung ¹ and waited.

The lung breathed in. The lung breathed out.

It encased him like a coffin, leaving only his head exposed, and that was all but enveloped by a cluster of automated mirrors and optical devices that allowed his gaze to roam free without troubling the muscles in his damaged neck. These mirrors and lenses swivelled and shifted constantly, bending and distorting reflections of his face so it appeared almost pixelated and an observer could never be sure where those eyes were going to pop up next. Eyes of black ice, sour and entombed.

Above him a panoramic screen array carried multiple data, news and intelligence feeds. Optical tracking meant he could manipulate it all at a glance – trawl the web, analyse data, model an idea, visit any place on earth, even (if looks could kill…) order a drone strike.

The meeting in the CFAC at Hook Hall had been relayed to him in real time through a concealed 816-micron digital video camera built into his agent’s spectacles. It was transmitting pictures first to a microprocessor sewn into the agent’s scalp via an induction loop, then via tiny data-burst relays between specially adapted low-energy light bulbs fitted throughout the Hook Hall complex, and thereafter via the Scimitar Intelcomms 8648 satellite to Siberia. Transmission lag to Kaparis – 0.44 seconds.

It was an ingenious system.

His serotonin levels should’ve been satisfactory. Instead Kaparis was intensely irritated. The pictures from the live feed kept jumping because the agent constantly flicked the spectacles up and down. Despite the eighteen months of effort and detailed planning that had gone into this most complicated operation, no one had thought to supply the correct ophthalmic prescription.

1  Was simply doing your job really so difficult?

2  Was it only him that cared about the details?

3  What must it be like to be ordinary?

“Heywood?” Kaparis said, summoning his butler in a cut-glass English accent.

“Sir?”

“Establish who supplied the incorrect lenses for the camera spectacles.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then have their eyes pulled out. And salted.”

“Yes, sir.”

Killing would be too much. It was important to keep a sense of proportion.

Onscreen, a helicopter hove into view. The image flicked again, taunting his leniency.

“And Heywood?”

“Sir?”

“Record the screams.”

FOUR
DAY ONE 12:51 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

Finn’s first view of Hook Hall was from above: a grand old country house with a formal garden, surrounded by a complex of ultra-modern buildings. Outside the largest of these buildings, as they came into land, Finn could see a clutch of officials and lab-coated scientists drawn towards the spot like ants to a dropped ice cream.

Al took off his helmet as they touched down and indicated Finn should do the same.

“We are still on holiday until I say so. OK?”

“If you say so!” Finn yelled back, still numb with exhilaration from the short flight and having already decided to just go with the bewildering flow. He stepped off the aircraft after Al and stumbled self-consciously through the rotor wash, half deaf, towards the small welcoming committee.

A shortish, fattish old man was first to greet them, overwhelmed apparently to be meeting –

“Dr Allenby! An honour! Professor Channing. I reviewed your paper on anti-concentric-kinesthesis.”

“Wonderful. This is Finn,” said Al.

“Hi!” said Finn.

“Is the resort this way?” Al asked.

“Ah…?” said the Professor, confused.

Huge road transporters packed with equipment were lined up outside the large building waiting to go through its hangar-sized doors.

“What an unusual hotel. Is there room service?” said Al.

“Er…”

“Finn likes chips, don’t you, Finn?”

“Or potato wedges,” Finn explained, unsure why this was relevant.

“We have a canteen…?” tried the Professor.

Al took in the line-up of trucks. “What’s all this for? Are you having a pageant?”

By now Professor Channing was completely confused.

“No, it’s… every centrifuge, laser and electromagnetic accelerator we can lay our hands on. This has just arrived from Harwell, part of the new Woolfson Accelerator, and…”

“Oh my goodness, I think I spot an old friend!” said Al, taking off down the line of transporters, Professor Channing trotting to keep up.

Finn’s strong instinct was to keep out of the way, but Al pulled him along front and centre, determined to make a spectacle, leading everyone a merry dance as he searched among the trucks like a weekend shopper in the aisles of Ikea.

As they entered the Central Field Analysis Chamber, Finn felt like they were entering a game, the ‘facility’ level of a first-person shooter – concrete industrial construction, glass control booths, steel gantries and outsize scientific equipment: an outlandish vision of a not too distant future. The big difference here was that real human security personnel carried real guns: large, heavy and scary.

“Aha!” Al cried. “It’s you, Fatty!”

Al seemed to be addressing a large vehicle. But, as they came round it, Finn saw what was inside. Huge quarter-sections of a giant metal doughnut, each the size of a cottage, were being manoeuvred off the transporter by an outsize forklift, a freak-show mirror of perfect polished steel on the inside, a mess of hydraulics and wiring on the outside, featuring domestic plumbing and gaffer tape – a dazzling piece of engineering that looked like it’d been knocked together in a shed: very Uncle Al.

Finn caught his distorted reflection on the perfect inner surface and remembered a night at home the year before when Al had appeared unexpectedly on the doorstep to demand Toad-in-the-Mustard-Hole from Grandma (the family comfort food). He had sworn and ranted at the table saying “they’ve mugged me” and “they have press-ganged Fatty”. There was little indication who ‘they’ or ‘Fatty’ were, but a general hatred and distrust of anyone In Charge had come across before he’d drunk too much and fallen asleep in front of Match of the Day.

“Ah yes, the Fat Doughnut Accelerator you developed at Cambridge!” said Professor Channing.

“Stolen from me a year ago in the dead of night!” said Al.

“Ah… it was?”

Commander King appeared on the gantry above them like a materialising vampire.

Al pretended not to notice.

“Ripped from my still beating breast and shipped to the military by that perfidious, superior, mendacious, warmongering…”

“Dr Allenby.”

“Ah… Lord Vader.”

King allowed himself a minuscule, dry smile (no one else dared) and descended slowly. Finn hid behind Professor Channing.

“As I recall, we commissioned a preliminary study into possible defensive potential only after you had withdrawn cooperation, concealed the sequencing codes and thrown what my nanny used to call ‘a wobbly’?”

“Because I said NO to weaponisation.”

“But you were already working with the military?”

“Only with my guys – and we were having ‘fun’. Didn’t Nanny ever teach you to ‘have fun’, Commander?”

“Certainly not. She taught us Cleanliness, Godliness and to Ignore Naughty Boys.”

“Then what are we doing here? Because I warn you, if you’re on holiday too, there’s no pool.”

“We need you, Dr Allenby. If not your terrific sense of humour.”

There was a cold connection between the two, the ghost of a mutual respect.

“So spill the beans,” said Al.

Without even looking at Finn, King said: “Not in front of the children.”

Uh-oh.

Finn shrank further behind Channing.

“They’re perfectly normal human beings, just smaller and largely odourless. Say hello, Finn, you’re frightening the King.”

Finn emerged from cover.

“Hi. Sir. Finn. I mean, I’m Finn. Not sir. Not you, you’re sir. I’m just…”

“Hello, Infinity, I am sorry we’ve interrupted your excursion. We have a canteen area. There’s a television, some magazines. Why don’t you go with Nigel and he’ll show you the—”

“I think I’ll stay and watch!”

(Canteen. Television. Nigel. Apart from an absurd facility for science and maths, Finn was average or hopeless at most other things, but he did have an Acute Sense of Dread – the one great advantage of being orphaned. Just keep going.)

King, not used to interruptions, raised an eyebrow.

“He thinks he’ll stay and watch,” confirmed Al, dragging Finn forward for a formal introduction.

“Meet my late sister’s child, my sole heir, my DNA. I promised him an adventure and my mother a week of respite care – and that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Wherever I go, he goes.”

Finn felt briefly at ease, proud even, till Al continued, “He may look like a scruffy, not particularly well-coordinated boy from a bog-standard comprehensive…”

“Hey! It’s an academy. It has academy status.”

“…but he’s in the top set for science and maths and has been schooled by me in the wilder side of theoretical physics, rocketry and blowing things up. What’s more, he has a soul a mile deep, a smile a mile wide and can be trusted absolutely.”

Finn thought this might be overselling him a little, but still couldn’t help tacking on, “And I’ve had two letters published in Amateur Entomologist. It’s a specialist magazine.”

“You surprise me,” said King drily and took a step forward so that he and Al were eyeball to eyeball.

“This is an extraordinary situation, an aggregate threat to human life that demands a global response through the G&T and the reconstitution of Boldklub…”

Al whispered back, “He already knows.”

Commander King turned a shade of white not known in nature.

A shade of murder.

Al slapped Finn on the back and drove him on up the gantry.

“What do I know?” Finn whispered.

“Shut up and go with it,” hissed Al.

Up in the control gallery, Finn no longer felt like he was in a video game. Up here it was more like the bridge of a spaceship in some movie. There were banks of computers and displays and an observation window that ran the length of the gallery and looked down across the vast CFAC below.

“Wow!”

Beyond the giant lorries that were depositing the accelerators and physics kit, Finn could see more trucks arriving, military green and brown. He could make out the tarpaulin-covered shapes of what he took to be vehicles, and maybe even a helicopter. Signs were appearing everywhere that warned ORDNANCE – EXTREME CARE – RESTRICTIONS APPLY.

Al headed straight for two soldiers – one huge, the other small and wizened – who had risen to greet him: the first like an old friend, the second with wary resignation.

“Kelly and Stubbs! My boys! The old team back together again!” laughed Al.

Captain Kelly wore an SAS badge and was a comic-book action hero: six foot six and one hundred kilos of scarred flesh and raw power. He poked Al’s chest in mock accusation (nearly breaking his sternum) – “They let you back in?” – before following up with a laugh and a bear hug.

“And Major Leonard Stubbs! Sir!” gasped Al once he was free.

Stubbs grimaced and Kelly ruffled his hair.

“He’s happy,” insisted Kelly. “He’s wagging his little tail.”

With the physique and charm of a defeated tortoise, Engineer Stubbs was technically retired and past pensionable age, but, as a minor genius with both mechanical and information systems who could fix anything, he’d been given an honorary commission at sixty and asked to stay on – which, considering he had never attracted a Mrs Stubbs, was a blessing all round. He clearly didn’t do hugs or emotion, which of course made Al kiss him on both cheeks like a Frenchman.

“For goodness’ sake…”

Al introduced Finn. “My nephew – Infinity Drake.”

“Please, just Finn.”

“I’m looking after him for a week. He’s a short version of me without the looks, brains or char—”

“He always says that.”

Stubbs sighed as if he knew exactly what Finn had to put up with.

“We can shoot him for you. Seriously,” said Kelly, crushing Finn’s fingers with his handshake.

“Ow!”

“Don’t listen to anything these men say,” said Al. “No one knows how they got in here.”

“Seats,” ordered Commander King.

Seats were duly taken. Technicians were setting up a series of digital projectors, fiddling with cables and tapping at keyboards.

As Al took his seat, Finn sat beside him and whispered, “By the way, Al?”

“Hmm?”

“What the hell is going on and why do all these people think you’re some kind of—”

“It’s just what I do. Sometimes.”

“Just what you do?”

“The secret side. There have to be secrets, Finn, to protect the innocent.”

“But how…? When…? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“When you were eleven? Come on. Who would tell an eleven-year-old something like that?”

This stumped Finn.

“Now go hide,” said Al, nodding to a gap between two banks of computers, out of sight.

“Why?” Finn asked.

“Oh, you’ll see,” said Al.

Screens came online.

World leaders started to appear.

FIVE

“Mr President.”

“Commander King.”

“Prime Minister.”

“King. Mr President.”

“Prime Minister.”

“Guten Tag, Frau Chancellor…”

King went through the introductory motions.

Finn thought, I’m supposed to be in double geography right now.

The President of the USA was in shirtsleeves – the Oval Office in the background familiar, if a little less tidy than in its TV incarnations. The British Prime Minister was in a large, book-lined room – not the smooth PM of news bulletins, but an alarmed posh little man. The German Chancellor settled herself into a reclaimed pine ‘ergonomische stuhl’ as the President of France came online from the gilt and ornate Élysée Palace.

“Is Allenby there?” said the US President.

Al leant into shot and waved so that the leaders of the free world could see him.

“Guys,” said Al.

Guys? Finn thought.

“So. What have we got, Commander King?” asked Al.

The room fell silent. The lights dimmed.

“Slide,” ordered King.

A digital projection lit up a wall-sized screen and showed… nothing.

Or at least nothing but a blank whiteness with a black dot in the middle.

King snapped, “Bring it up to scale.”

The lens zoomed in on the dot and suddenly the creature exploded across the screen.

Projected to the size of a man, a vile black, yellow and red-flecked monster, fresh and newborn-slick from its final moult. Its exoskeleton was extended, exaggerated; its thorax like a clutch of girders; its head a felt and fang atrocity; its silver-black wings still plastered against its abdomen which, cruelly coloured, scaled and distended, hung bulbous from its thorax like a great droplet of buzz-fresh poison. And, at its end, an ugly cluster of three barbed, glossy harpoon stings.

Finn froze and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. For a moment he tasted his own fear. The fear of death he sometimes got when he thought about his mother. A sense of something terrible, unstoppable and unknowable. He gulped it back.

A mouse click and the next image flashed up. A rear shot of the insect with a better view of the array of stings emerging from the bulbous abdomen.

Click. The underside, amour-plated and beetle-black. How does this thing fly? Finn thought.

Click. In the next image, the answer: silver-black wings fully extended, as long as a dragonfly’s, but broader.

Wow.

Click. The head and mouthparts, feelers and proboscis. Finn felt his stomach turn. He didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Click. The egg pouch and reproductive organ.

The six legs.

The black and yellow and red-tinged whole, like some vile bullet that in flight must look like… Who only knew what.

And the sound? thought Finn. What evil bass buzz would those wings make?

Al watched, face frozen, King pleasantly surprised to observe that even he was stilled by the sight.

“Meet Scarlatti,” said King. “Named after the eighteenth-century Italian composer noted for writing five hundred and fifty-five piano sonatas, because it registers a score of five hundred and fifty-five on the Porton Scale: that used to measure the lethal potential of weaponised organisms. A single Scarlatti could theoretically kill five hundred and fifty-five human beings.”

“Sacré bleu…” said the French President, without a hint of irony.

“During the Cold War, all sides developed and produced biological weapons. One of the main branches of study at our research institute at Porton Down was entomology, the study of insects, and how they could be adapted to carry and spread disease. In 1983 a geneticist accidentally developed a whole new genotype of insect by exposing the embryo of a highly engineered smallpox-carrying wasp – phenotype Vespula cruoris – to gamma radiation. The result was… Scarlatti.”

An old video recording came up onscreen of live Scarlattis being studied in a laboratory.

“Scarlatti is an asexual self-multiplier that, given a sufficient supply of simple protein – the body of a dead mammal say – can lay up to fifty eggs. It’s pesticide resistant, seventy-five millimetres long (the size of a hummingbird or a human thumb) and is all but physically indestructible. It nurtures supplies of a unique and fatal strain of smallpox in the poison sacs of its abdomen. Accelerated development means a single egg can become a viable flying insect in four days. Therefore a single insect can produce a fifty-strong swarm in four days. And swarm they do – given how much protein is required during their nymph, or rapid hemimetabolic, phase. Each swarm produces many new colonies, each swarming every four days, and so on ad infinitum. Or until the supply of protein dries up.”

Finn could taste something sickening.

He means people by ‘the supply of protein’. He means… us.

Onscreen, the video turned nasty. White mice were introduced to the test chamber and seized upon by frenzied Scarlattis. They seemed to relish the kill, whipping their stings into the poor creatures long after they were disabled or dead.

“This hideous project was immediately discontinued, the remaining nymphs first being frozen and then incinerated at the end of the Cold War under the Biological Weapons Convention.

“However, two specimens remained. One was sent to the United States under the Hixton-Fardale Shared Research Agreement, and has presumably been destroyed.. A second was secretly frozen and stored at Porton Down by the government of the day ‘just in case’ or, as we like to put it more formally, for ‘Reasons of National Security’.”

Commander King allowed his eyelids to close so as to avoid the righteous glares of the other committee members. Then he took a deep breath.

“One of our Porton Down research fellows, a Dr Cooper-Hastings, seems to have lost all reason, found a way to access the secure cold store and… has released the last remaining Scarlatti.”

There were gasps.

“He did what?” asked the US President.

King turned to his screen. “Dr Cooper-Hastings released the specimen into the atmosphere, sir.”

A staff-card mugshot of a middle-aged scientist flashed up. Thick glasses. Dull eyes.

“He stayed late at work, leaving at 10pm. A search was initiated six minutes later when an algorithm discovered an access control code override on his staff card. An empty cryogenic support cylinder was eventually found outside his abandoned car at 03:32 this morning near the village of Hazelbrook, thirty-six miles north of here.”

A map of Hazelbrook flashed up onscreen and a photo of the abandoned car.

“The area around the village has been declared a biohazard zone and evacuated. We’re conducting a full investigation and every available officer from every agency is involved in the manhunt for Cooper-Hastings.”

“Cut to the chase. What exactly are we talking about here – worst case?” asked the US President.

King and Professor Channing exchanged looks. The Professor stood up to deliver the bad news.

“Worst case: we estimate that with a first swarm in four days national contamination will be total within four to six weeks, continental within three months, global-temperate within six months.”

“Global-temperate?” repeated the US President.

“Nearly all of Western Europe, a good two-thirds of North America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, most of South America, Australia. Only cold air and altitude offer any protection. In total, two-thirds of the land mass of the earth.”

There was a pause.

“Nearly six billion people,” said King.

DAY ONE 13:38 (BST). English Channel

Dr Miles Cooper-Hastings opened his eyes. They stung. Blackness and stars swam before him. His throat was so dry he half retched to bring forth some saliva. He could see nothing, but he could feel his head pressed up against something wooden. He was freezing. For a waking moment of pure terror, he wondered if he was buried alive. But, as his body repulsed and kicked out at these thoughts, the lid of the sea chest he had been locked in for eight hours or so leapt up as far as its lock and clasp would allow and for a split second let in a strip of daylight.

He kicked out again. He saw light flash again. And he realised he could taste the freezing sea.

“Where is it?” Cooper-Hastings yelled into the blackness, fear filling his lungs. “What have you done?”

SIX

“On day one the Scarlatti lays its eggs,” said King. “On day two the nymphs hatch and grow. On day three the nymphs develop distinct body sections and the wings separate – shedding their skin several times. By the start of day four – after their final moult – they can swarm.”

The danger was spelt out in a fan graph that showed a range of possible development outcomes if the Scarlatti had located a ‘host protein’ overnight. The blood-red line of development started tight on day one and by day four spread to cover the entire graph.

“Four days. We’re already halfway through day one and we daren’t risk day four,” said King.

He turned away from the graph and back to his guests.

“So far, so bad. What matters is what we do now,” he said.

There was an air of stunned disbelief in the control gallery and around the world.

Seated beside the US President, General Jackman – the grizzly bear Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the world’s most powerful soldier – punctured the silence:

“Create hell. Flood the area with chemicals. Go nuclear.”

“Thank you, General Jackman. The problem is – scale,” explained King.

On a projected map he drew a rough semicircle east of the village of Hazelbrook.

“Last night’s turbulent air could have taken it twenty miles north and east, which means an area that covers roughly a third of London.”

“Nuke London…?” said someone, appalled.

“Or,” King said before a hubbub could break out, “following on from discussions with the scientists this morning, there may be another way.”

With a quick glance at Al, King turned to the corner of the gallery.

“Entomologists, would you oblige us?”

Channing beckoned a pair of entomologists from Porton Down into camera view, part of the group that had been there since early morning. A grey, middle-aged man with a much younger, sharper colleague.

“Professor Lomax and Dr Spiro were colleagues of Dr Cooper-Hastings at Porton Down.”

Lomax wore a suit under his lab coat, Spiro a T-shirt and jeans.

“Professor Channing? The hypothesis, please.”

Finn remembered his mum explaining that hypothesis was a term scientists used to describe an idea so they didn’t sound common.

“Pheromones,” Channing began, pushing back his glasses as if addressing a learned symposium, “are tiny distinct chemical signals that all living things emit.”

“‘Phero’ from the Greek for ‘to carry’,” Professor Lomax helpfully explained, “‘mone’ from ‘hormone’ or—”

Dr Spiro cut across them with the urgency the occasion demanded.

“If we can trace the Scarlatti’s pheromones then we can catch it before its first swarm. We could locate it, find its nest and destroy a much, much smaller area.”

“Possibly,” interjected Lomax, glaring. But Spiro continued.

“The ’83 data is categorical. Scarlatti pheromones are very distinct – the result of atomic mutation almost certainly – and emitted in very large quantities, with receptor sensitivity heightened by a super-developed swarm instinct. These insects will do anything to be with their own kind. Anything.”

“Thank you, Dr Spiro, I did produce much of that data…” muttered Lomax.

But how? How would you trace the pheromones? Finn wanted to yell, wriggling in his hidey-hole and finding it difficult to keep his mouth shut. King sensed it and shot an eyebrow his way.

“How?” asked Al obligingly. “How would you begin to define and then detect the appropriate molecules, let alone—”

“With another member of the same species!” Professor Channing announced, striking a blow for the over-fifties by jumping in before young Dr Spiro.

Al looked across at Finn. He raised his eyebrows at him: “Plausible?”

Finn shrugged back a Why not?

“Non!” said the French Conseiller Scientifique. “You would have to replicate Scarlatti. If Scarlatti is a random atomic mutation, you could never replicate it exactement. Never. C’est impossible!”

“Unless, of course, there is still a second sample left in existence?” mused Commander King, letting the cynical words hang in the air.

“Ach, the American one?” said the German Chancellor. “Destroyed, nein?”

“Like we destroyed ours?” said the British Prime Minister.

All eyes turned to the US President.

“Retained for ‘Reasons of National Security’ you mean?” said Commander King, enjoying the moment. “Where would it be, I wonder? The Fort Detrick facility outside Washington? One might look in warehouse nine, aisle eight, section two S.”

“Find out,” the President snapped at someone off-screen, furious that King should so easily reel off a US state secret. General Jackman bristled.

“Forget it. Even if it is there,” said the US Chief Scientist, a silver-haired woman on the President’s other side, “you’d never be able to get a viable tracking device on to something that small.”

King smiled. Inside.

“Any thoughts? Dr Allenby?”

Al pushed himself out of his seat and walked over to the giant image of the Scarlatti, deep in thought. He turned back to Spiro. “You’re sure they’ll read each other’s pheromones over great distances?”

“Over miles, definitely,” said Spiro.

“More than ten?”

“Reasonable probability,” said Spiro.

“Really…” Lomax sighed. “More than ‘reasonable’ at ten, unlikely beyond twenty.”

“Can we anchor a tracking device on to that thorax?”

Spiro and Lomax looked puzzled.

Al changed tack.

“Theoretically, if we could drill into it, or glue it on to, say, this cross member here?” He pointed out a girder-like section of the armoured thorax that flattened at the centre.

“Theoretically? Yes,” said Spiro. “This is cellulose material without nerve endings.”

“You would have to ‘theoretically’ be extremely careful then,” said Lomax, attempting sarcasm. “The thorax plates move against each other to allow greater flexibility than in other wasp species. It’s a weak point so the joints between the plates are packed with nerve endings.”

Al checked his watch, a Rolex adapted to his own design to incorporate a Geiger counter, pressure gauge and half a dozen other tiny instruments (the secret gift from a grateful nation), and turned things over in his mind. Tick tick tick tick tick.

“Well, Allenby? Will you revisit Project Boldklub?” said the Prime Minister.

Most people in the meeting didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The name Boldklub was obscure, being short for Akademisk Boldklub, the football club that Niels Bohr, the father of subatomic physics, once played for.

Al looked at King, suspicious. King studied his nails.

“We’ve faced down one chemical and two nuclear Armageddons in the recent past. I don’t see why we can’t pull together as a team to deal with this.”

King looked back up at Al.

The world waited. Al looked over at Finn.

And from his hiding place Finn studied the Scarlatti. The colours, the grotesque armour, the clutch of stings, the distorted feelers and proboscis… everything about it gave off a sense of anger and suffering. In a perverse way Finn felt sorry for it. Yet within a few months this thing could wipe out six billion people. Everyone he knew, as well as the four he loved (Grandma, Al, Yo-yo and sometimes Christabel), plus everyone that filled his day, from everyone he watched on telly to everyone he travelled to school with. All gone. Like his mum.

Finn was fascinated, locked on.

“Oh… go on then,” said Al at last.

“What? Go on what?” barked General Jackman from the US.

Al seemed to snap awake. “We haven’t got much time. I suppose I’d better explain.”

He picked up an iPad linked to an interactive whiteboard and started to draw.

SEVEN

Al looked up, as if to a classroom of kids.

“Anyone know what this is?”

“It’s an atom,” said General Mount, irritated by Al’s playful tone.

“Is this a physics class?” asked the American President.

“Yep. Everyone needs to get a handle on this. It is indeed an atom,” said Al. “Which one?”

Hydrogen! Finn wanted to say, itching to put his hand up.

“Hydrogen,” muttered the US Chief Scientist.

“Good, a hydrogen atom, nice and simple: a nucleus in the centre and one electron spinning around, with a constant spatial relationship between the nucleus and the electron – this distance, this distance right here.” Al drew a dotted red line between the dot at the centre and the dot on the outside.

He then tapped the two spots again, the nucleus and the electron. “Now these two dots are something, matter, stuff,” he explained, “but this –” he waved around inside the circle all over the place – “is absolutely nothing.”

“Me, you, everything around us is more than 99.9 per cent nothing, because every single one of the atoms we’re constructed from is more than 99.9 per cent nothing, with only a tiny bit of actual atomic stuff. Everyone got that?”

Al looked up at the world leaders, then glanced across at Finn, to make sure they were all still with him; with furrowed brows and a big grin respectively, they were.

“I will never understand this,” said the British Prime Minister.

“There’s a whole quantum dark energy/dark matter thing we could go into, but it’s better to think of it as a beautiful mystery. Think of atoms as being balloons rather than building blocks, balloons filled with nothingness and a tiny nucleus.”

“Bravo,” said the French President. “But this not catch flies.”

“Not yet, no. But my Big Idea, known to a select few as Boldklub, was –” he pointed again to the red dotted line denoting the distance between the nucleus and the electron – “to see if we could create a magnetic field that could reduce this distance and—”

And before Al could say the next word a neural synapse fired at the speed of light in Finn’s brain and a conclusion so fantastic occurred it smashed any last compunction to stay quiet.

“You’re going to SHRINK stuff?”

Everyone turned. Finn’s eyes were as wide as wonder.

Lit from below by the iPad, and looking 99.9 per cent mad scientist, Al pointed straight at him. “Ta-da!”

“WHAT?”

“What did he say?”

“Shrink stuff?”

“C’est impossible!”

“Mein Gott, was that a child?”

Commander King let his eyelids drop in momentary exasperation. This really was all he needed.

“That’s my nephew,” said Al proudly.

“Young Infinity is here contingent upon Dr Allenby’s cooperation,” King declared. “We really must move on…”

Heads were shaking, voices rising, English, American, French, German – all demanding answers, all offended by such an absurd suggestion, at being caught out by a child.

Finn didn’t give a damn. He was staring at Al in open-mouthed wonder.

“Shrink? Is that really what the boy said?”

“This is flat out impossible,” the US Chief Scientist advised her President.

Al overheard. “No! Possible –” he insisted, adding a much smaller atom to his diagram – “by exploiting a chain reaction at the quantum level, you can create a new type of magnetic field, a ‘hot area’ within which all matter can be reduced, sucking the electron right up tight against the nucleus.”

“That is totally absurd!” the US Chief Scientist responded.

Voices immediately started to rise again.

The entomologists were stunned.

Finn’s mind was spinning. He wanted to ask a million questions. He wanted to understand every impossible detail. He wanted to know about the who and the why and the how. He wanted to know it all and yet somehow, right now, it was all so much to try and take in and he was just thinking: I Want A Go.

He walked straight up to his uncle through the babble, looked into his eyes and asked in wonder and for a second time, just to make sure, “You’re going to shrink stuff. You’re going to shrink some soldiers and get this thing?”

“Yes I am,” said Al, delighted with Finn, who then all but burst with questions.

“Won’t you still be the same weight when you’re tiny as when you’re full size?”

“No, because there’s a proportionate shrinking of dark matter…”

“Will you be really dense and super tough?”

“Theoretically, no, though of course power-to-mass ratios are different and gravity won’t break you so easily…”

“Will bacteria and diseases be able to eat you, like, really easily, like flesh-eating bugs chewing off your face and arms and ears and nose and— Hey! Will you be able to smell?”

“The rule of thumb for nano-to-normal interaction at the molecular level is that complex compounds don’t interact, though atoms and simple molecules do, so you can relax about contracting the Ebola virus…”

They were having to raise their voices as the meeting was all but out of control, until the chilling opening bars of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ emerged from Al’s jacket.

It was the ringtone he had assigned to one very special caller. For the first time, Al looked scared. He checked the time again – nearly two o’clock – and began to panic.

“Shush! Shut uuuuuup! SHUT UP!” he shouted at the room.

The room gradually fell silent as everyone looked at Al, frozen in terror. Once again Finn got there before everyone else.

“Grandma!”

“Is his Grossmutti there too?” the German Chancellor asked.

“Nobody say a word!” insisted Al.

The leaders of the free world, along with their best and brightest, followed orders and “shut up” as Al interrupted The Phantom and took the call.

“Hey! Mum! How’s Oslo? I know I promised, I’m sorry, I lost track of time… No, don’t call the police, we’re fine! That’s ridiculous… Have you transferred to the ship?”

With his outstretched arm, he indicated that everyone could relax a little; he had the situation under control.

“He’s fine, he’s right here, he can tell you himself… oh, school? School’s clo— canteen! No! School canteen’s closed, they were sent home for lunch – no food. Wasp infestation. Astonishing… No, he’s fine! Here…” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and handed it to Finn, whispering, “Speak! Just tell her everything’s fine.”

“I can’t lie to Grandma,” Finn tried to insist. “I promised Mum I’d…”

“I order you to lie to your grandmother!” snapped the Prime Minister in a loud whisper.

Al looked at the Prime Minister like he had no idea what he was getting into.

Finn took the phone and accidentally pressed the ‘speaker’ button on the touchscreen so that everybody got the benefit of – “Grandma?”

“Do you need me to come back? I’ve unpacked but we’re still in port…” came her voice.

“No, no, I’m fine, everything’s fine.”

“What a lot of nonsense about the canteen! Tell him to take you straight back right now!”

“We’re going! We’re just getting in the car.”

“He will starve you to death! Neglect… Did he do any vegetables?”

“What…? Yes.”

The watching experts and world leaders – who had grandmothers of their own – were nodding him along.

“Exactly which vegetables?”

Finn’s mind went blank. There was a terrible, panicked silence.

“Broccoli?” mouthed the US President.

“Broccoli! And… just broccoli. What’s your food like? What’s the ship like?”

“Food is tepid, the cabin is cramped and I have to share a bathroom, but there’s a lovely woman from Godalming on our corridor who, would you believe it, went to the same boarding school as Jennifer – second cousin Jennifer not Jennifer from the Hartford Pottery who I don’t think you know her grandson wants to be a solicitor it’s good to have ambitions but as I told her not a solicitor Jennifer not at twelve… anyway I—”

“Grandma, I think we’d better go or we’ll be late.”

“Oh… all right, dear. Please don’t trust Al, he’s already missed one call.”

“OK, Grandma, love you, bye!”

“And keep safe!”

Finn killed the call and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The Prime Minister gave an order to someone off-screen. “Get on to the Norwegians. Upgrade Mrs Allenby’s cabin and get her, and the woman from Godalming who knows Jennifer, on to the Captain’s table. Now.”

“Would someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?” said the US President.

DAY ONE 14:13 (BST). Siberia

Deep in the Siberian permafrost, 2,546 miles away, east by northeast, Kaparis watched the scene via his agent’s spectacles.

Everything was going according to plan. They were falling into his trap.

1  The beast was at large.

2  The ‘pheromone hypothesis’ had been successfully introduced by his agent at the meeting.

3  Boldklub had been established as the only viable response.

Kaparis was where he liked to be: in control. And yet… he was overwhelmed.

The boy.

Kaparis stared.

“My goodness, he looks like his father.”

The lung breathed in. The lung breathed out. And for a moment his heart swelled with nostalgia as he was transported back nearly twenty years to a Cambridge University of scarves and bicycles, lectures and tutorials, girls to fall in love with and limitless early promise… before, inevitably, his mind went to his moment of glory.

Why Does Grass Grow In Clumps?
A General Theory on the Development of Super-organisms
A lecture by D.A.P. Kaparis
St Stephen’s Hall, 10am, Wed 4th May 1993

And to how it was stolen from him.

In front of everybody.

In front of her.

And, as quickly as it had swollen, Kaparis’s heart emptied of blood and once more beat acid revenge.

“Our proposal,” said King, “is this – one: shrink a tracking device and fit it to the American Scarlatti and release it to find its missing clone.

“Two: shrink an attack helicopter and its crew…”

Eyes popped around the world.

“…all their equipment, including all tracking, transport, communications and weaponry…”

“Woah! Shrink people! Weapons?”

“…to the scale 150 to 1…” continued King.

“One hundred and fifty times!?”

“…and three…”

“Hang fire! Why not just shrink the tracking device and track the thing? Why shrink people?” asked General Jackman.

“Without going into too much classified detail,” said Al, “it’s to do with changes in waveform when you collapse the electromagnetic spectrum. A nano-transmitter produces a nano-signal that can only be picked up on a nano-receiver with a very limited range, perhaps 800 metres at the most. You can’t just amplify the signal in the normal sense. That’s why we’ll need a hunter crew at nano-level as well. Their transport can be fitted with a tiny ‘full-scale’ radio for communication, although again it will have a very limited range and we can’t bank on constant contact.”

The General looked like his brain ached.

King continued. “And three: the crew are to pursue the second Scarlatti to the first, then destroy both adults and any eggs or nymphs they find.”

“Whatever else it is, this whole scheme is crazy! At the very least untested. The risks to any participants must surely be suicidal,” said the American Chief Scientist, shaking her head.

“We have to measure the risks against what’s at stake, and against the only viable alternative,” said King.

“Which is?” asked the German Chancellor.

“Go nuclear. Displace a million people. Lay waste to part of London for generations to come.”

There was a long pause.

Finn suddenly realised something and looked back at the map that King had marked up earlier. The area of destruction included the village of Langmere.

“Grandma’s?” Finn said.

“I know,” said Al. “It’s personal.”

The US President was incredulous.

“And who’s going to take on this mission?”

“Given the unknown physiological risks, we propose just a three-man team led by Captain Kelly from our informal military cohort. Captain Kelly and Engineer Stubbs – both with nano-experience – plus a pilot.”

“Wait! Nano-experience? You’ve done this before?” asked Finn.

“Roll the film,” said Al.

Up on the screen appeared some scrappy, hand-held digital footage of a goat on a lead. At the other end of the lead was Al. Both looked like they’d been partying for three days straight. A time code ticked over along the bottom.

Captain Kelly walked into shot and spray-painted ‘Good luck’ on the goat’s hide.

The image cut to the Fat Doughnut Accelerator operating with a loud hum. Outside, Engineer Stubbs sat at a desk crammed with laptops. Al tethered the goat in the centre of the Fat Doughnut.

The time code jumped forward a few minutes to a more distant shot of the accelerator. The camera zoomed in on the goat as it became increasingly disturbed. Wheeling around its tether until… the screen went suddenly and completely white.

The camera pulled out to reveal the Fat Doughnut now contained a ball of perfect, intense white light. It seemed to ripple and spin for a few seconds before it faded, leaving behind a party of blinking observers and… no goat.

Al ran into the centre of the Fat Doughnut. On hands and knees he searched for something. Kelly and Stubbs crowded in.

Very carefully, Al picked something up. The camera zoomed in on his hand. Trying to focus. All blurry, unfocused skin tone. And then – finally, shakily – in the rivulets of Al’s skin, in the lifeline, stood a rather confused, silently-bleating, 4.5mm goat.

“Me next,” said Kelly off-camera. “I’m next!”

“Hey! Who did all the work?” protested Stubbs.

“Back away!”

The argument raged. The goat didn’t join in. It was all way over its head.

DAY ONE 14:19 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire

Lay lay lay lay…

Smallpox had laid waste to the badger and left its corpse a wretched thing, barely identifiable, pustulated and leaking the gall the Scarlatti found so conducive.

For fifteen hours more the Scarlatti would continue to produce fat white eggs from its abdomen, straining to evacuate them, planting each one carefully in the decaying flesh, its insides a furnace of reproduction.

In each egg a primitive nymph was forming. In less than six hours, such was the furious rate of growth, the first of them would begin to consume the remaining contents of its egg sac before bursting out to feast upon the corpse in turn.

Someone whispered something in the US President’s ear. He made his decision and nodded.

“You want our Scarlatti, you got it,” he said simply.

“And further accelerator capacity from CERN, Monsieur le Président? Frau Chancellor?”

“Oui.”

“Ja.”

Commander James Clayton-King loved it when a plan came together.

Then the American President raised a finger. “One condition. We supply the pilot. I want a man onboard.”

King raised an eyebrow in protest.

There was another whisper in the President’s ear.

“Make that a woman.”

DAY ONE 15:17 (BST). Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA

A Variant T Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor taxied out of the restricted M3 hangar.

Delta Salazar knew nothing yet of the mission she was being asked to undertake, only that it was priority number one: transit to RAF Northolt outside London at maximum speed, refuelling in mid-air twice over the Atlantic. With afterburners engaged and almost no payload, her cruising speed would be well in excess of Mach 2. Deep in the heart of the $150-million fifth-generation stealth fighter, in the empty weapons bay, wrapped in an ‘indestructible’ transport crate, was a single small frozen phial.

Control had cleared the skies.

Delta loved Aviator shades, beating men at anything and strafing ground targets with 44mm cannon. She also love love loved to fly.

In fact, the only thing she loved more was her little sister Carla, but that was not the sort of thing that she would say out loud in the (Classified) M3 Wing of the US Air Force.

“Clear for take-off,” said Control.

With an easy touch, Delta fully engaged the twin F119-PW-100 turbofan engines producing 35,000lbs of thrust that shot the aircraft off the runway and into a steep climb.

Her mother had been an alcoholic and she’d spent most of her childhood neglected, finding escape only in video games (starting with Splinter Cell back in 2002). In 2004 the USAF had started looking for recruits with exceptional hand-eye coordination in the online gaming community. They noticed the data spike around Delta’s tag and traced it to a state children’s home in Philadelphia where they found a fierce, scruffy, skinny thirteen-year-old who intensely distrusted authority, having been separated from her baby sister when taken into care. She tested off the scale.

The USAF put her into a top-secret training programme, arranged an appropriate adoption for Carla, with visitation rights, and gave Delta the chance to excel. She was triple-A rated on six different aircraft and had won two Air Force Distinguised Service Medals and a Medal of Honour. She was twenty-three years old – even if she looked an Indie rock nineteen.

At 20,000 feet she banked east off the American continent. She could never get used to how great this felt.

“Badass…” she sighed.

“I heard that, Salazar,” snapped Control.

She laughed and rocketed off across the Atlantic.

EIGHT
DAY TWO 02:46 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

Just over eleven hours later, at the climax of what must have been an astonishing briefing, and in the midst of the organised chaos of all that was going on in and around the CFAC, Finn witnessed the moment Flight Lieutenant Salazar finally stopped chewing her gum.

Her eyes were still hidden behind her Aviator shades (despite it being the middle of the night), her boots were still on the desk and she still carried an air of youthful insouciance, but… the chewing had stopped. This was the biggest reaction they’d had from her since her arrival.

“We need your decision in the next hour. Lieutenant? Do you understand the proposition?” Al said.

Nothing.

Finn looked at Al. He’s not handling this very well, he thought. The Lieutenant seemed to have unsettled Al somehow. He was trying to be clipped and cool, but was coming across as nervous and edgy. The silence crackled.

“They’re going to shrink you!” said Finn, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

Still nothing.

Using his thumb and forefinger to illustrate actual size, Kelly tried to translate into militarese.

“Listen up! You’re going to be shrunk to 12 millimetres, put in a 110-millimetre Apache chopper, then pursue and terminate an apocalyptic bug with extreme prejudice. You copy?”

“I copy… Just let me suck it up,” Delta responded.

(She could have been more specific and told them what it felt like: that the idea was so crazy it had caused a temporary gap in the game code of her reality and that she needed to download a patch,¹ but she had learned never to discuss her feelings with fellow soldiers. Besides which, where was she supposed to find the patch?)

Al blinked. Finn smiled. Kelly laughed.

“She’ll be fine,” said Kelly. “Move on.”

With the main briefings out of the way, Kelly, Stubbs and Salazar were handed over to a medical team itching to study the ‘before and after’ effects of ‘atomic collapse’ on the human body (they could smell a Nobel Prize).

Al expected them to be poked, prodded and drained of various fluids in the usual manner, but when he was recalled to the crew area, he was informed that the process had ground to a halt during a ‘psychiatric evaluation’.

Each crew member had been asked to construct a solid sphere out of a number of irregular-shaped blocks. Delta had just sat there (evidently still hanging with the concept). Stubbs had got started, but then fell asleep like a granddad doing a Christmas jigsaw, and Kelly got a member of the medical team in a headlock and forced him to eat one of the pieces.

“You have a voluntary mute, an old man suffering from depression and an idiot alpha male with the emotional sophistication of an earthworm,” said the lady chief psychologist.

Al said, “The young woman is just seriously cool, Stubbs just needs tea and biscuits and Kelly was at Cambridge with me – he’s only part Neanderthal. They’re all perfectly normal.”

“Dr Allenby, there’s no way I can pass any of these people fit for active service.”

“Fit for service?” laughed Al as he was dragged away to a crisis in Array Engineering. “They ride at dawn. Just make sure the pilot signs up – do whatever you have to do.”

By the time Al and Finn returned, the psychologist had the crew members sitting in a circle.

“If you could take one special personal item with you, what would that be?” the psychologist asked Delta. “Flight Lieutenant?”

Delta chewed her gum.

“OK. How about we move on to you, Leonard?” said the psychologist.

“I’ll need my tablets,” said Stubbs.

The psychologist gave him a hard stare.

“No, Leonard, we’re talking about a special personal item that…”

Finn, having spent a lot of time with grief counsellors, knew the drill and decided to be helpful to hurry things along.

“She means like a teddy bear or a wedding ring or something.”

“I never married,” Stubbs said glumly. “Who would want me? Married to the job. Not much of a looker. And I haven’t seen Teddy since the orphanage burnt down in 1962.”

There was a moment of silence as Captain Kelly fought to suppress a snigger, but failed, setting Al off. They were soon hysterical. Stubbs glared and shook his head. Not for the first time Finn wondered what the little old man was doing on such a mission.

“Ignore them,” Stubbs advised the psychologist. “Rise above it.”

“Captain Kelly!” the psychologist snapped in a tone of admonishment. “When you’ve quite finished… what item would you like to take?”

Kelly stopped himself laughing and gave Stubbs a playful squeeze on the knee to show there were no hard feelings.

“Ow!”

“Apologies. I just want my Minimi² and maybe a couple of M27s³,” the technicalities of which he then explained at length to the confused psychologist, the confusion added to by Stubbs explaining at the same time that he really had to take his mobile workshop with him (a Pinzgauer all-terrain truck adapted to his own specifications), otherwise, frankly, what was the point in him bothering to come at all?

In the meantime, behind her shades, Delta constructed her own patch:

0382*<this mission was about the craziest most suicidal thing she’d ever heard**<beyond combat***<beyond major league gaming****<beyond weird

0383*<awesome

0384*<but what about Carla*<<? **<She must be briefed before every combat mission

0385*<not possible. *<<operational security too tight **<concept too incredible

0386*<breach of Sisters’ Pact of Truth

0387*<bummer**<[Nil]*<<[Nil]*<<<[Nil]...

0388*<on the other hand*<<[Nil]*<<<[Nil] **<Carla was now twelve*<<?*<<?

0389*<they had less and less in common *<<she wasn’t a gamer *<<<she was no longer interested in mission briefings but only::***<> "Tell me a story"<>

0390*<all she wanted was <>"stories"<> *<<stories to read *<<< to watch *<<<< to believe

0391*<whatever else **<<this would be one hell of a story

0392*<breach pact**<accept mission***<QED

0393C*<Reboot>*C.)

Delta shot forward, lifted her shades, picked up the pieces of the sphere puzzle that had been abandoned earlier and snapped it together in two seconds flat. With a flick of her wrist, she then set it spinning like a planet, and they all watched as it described a perfect orbit of the tabletop.

“I think we’re done here, ma’am,” Delta told the psychologist.

Kelly started laughing again. The psychologist walked out of the room. Al just stared at Delta, entranced. Finn prodded him.

“Can… can we take it you accept the mission, Flight Lieutenant… Ms Salazar?” asked Al (in that upper-class Brit way, as if he might be asking someone to marry him, thought Delta).

“You point. I’ll shoot. Let’s roll,” she said, flipping down her shades and putting her feet up again.

Cool, thought Finn.

Al tripped over as he was led off to the next meeting and couldn’t help staring back at her.

Embarrassing, thought Finn.

NINE
DAY TWO 05:32 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

It was nearing dawn as King watched the fully armed Apache helicopter being lowered by crane into the centre of the accelerator.

In the time lapse of his memory, the chaos had peaked at around 4am and was ebbing fast. The lifting gear and forklifts had cleared, and the new Large Accelerator looked as if it had always been there.

The original pieces of Al’s Fat Doughnut had been repositioned and adapted to form four equidistant parts of a much bigger ring of particle accelerators. The nano-dimensional field – or ‘hot area’ – at the centre would be about the size of a classroom and demand so much power it would draw on the national grids of both the UK and France.

Allenby would be controlling it all from a specially constructed command pod – his cockpit – on the floor of the CFAC.

A formidable range of military hardware was lined up on a conveyor system that ran the length of the CFAC, with more supplies in the loading bay waiting to go on – all of which would have to be fed into the hot area in three minutes flat.

Speed was of the essence. As soon as reduction was complete, the nano-dimensional crew and their nano-equipment would be transported, along with the Beta Scarlatti (the new American Scarlatti being named this to distinguish it from the original Alpha Scarlatti), to the release site thirty-six miles north in a full-scale Merlin transport helicopter – which currently waited on the tarmac outside the CFAC.

Given that a minimum of twenty-four hours would be needed to evacuate the population at large should the mission fail, the team would have a mission window of less than twelve hours before the authorities had to go public and declare a state of emergency. As no one could say for certain if the Large Accelerator would be ready to rescale the crew immediately the mission was complete, a refrigerated container with a two-week supply of food and water also waited in the loading bay to be reduced as a precaution.¹

Worryingly little progress had been made in the search for Dr Cooper-Hastings. Every contact had been questioned and every possible lead followed up; every international security organisation was on alert. But they’d turned up nothing. Dr Cooper-Hastings was an unremarkable scientist who lived alone. The assumption had to be that he had gone quietly bananas and released the Scarlatti during some kind of breakdown. For King this was too simple. As zero hour approached, he had doubled the security presence onsite as well as tripled all electronic surveillance.

King looked down from the gantry and saw young Finn hurry to and fro, busy and integral, now joining the entomologists making their way to the reanimation suite.

It had become his opinion over the course of the night that Finn was the most important person on the project, not just as kin and comfort for Allenby, but as sounding board, test bed and “asker of bloody awkward questions” throughout – his tireless good humour and sense of adventure a tonic to all.

His plea to join the entomology team had been something of a classic. When Professor Lomax had pointed out his lack of correct qualifications, Finn had said, “Yeah, but there’s this friend of mine at school, Hudson, who can’t go on school trips over, say, twelve hours because he can’t go for a poo on any toilet but his own – he doesn’t say so, but there’s a note from his mum in the register – so he’s always left behind, and yet he’s the only kid really interested in glacial geology or the Horrible Histories show or stuff like that. Instead everyone else goes and all they do is mess about.”

Professor Lomax’s face had been a picture of confusion and distaste.

Young Dr Spiro had touched knuckles with Finn in a gesture that King believed was meant to denote ‘respect’.

The only glitch had been Finn’s scheduled 9pm ‘call to Grandma’ (her monitoring regime was admirably simple: she expected reports morning, noon and night) during which she had asked to say goodnight to the dog. Finn had claimed the animal was “out chasing bats” which was far from acceptable. A team had to be scrambled and despatched to the vicarage in Langmere where the dog was briefly kidnapped and secret recordings made of its barks, snuffles and other noises for the requested call back. The vicar, a Christabel Coles, remained glued to Celebrity Come Dine With Me throughout.

Upstairs in the control gallery, dignitaries and politicians were arriving from across the globe, in person or onscreen.

Downstairs the excitement was about to begin.

Shortly King would have to go up and make polite conversation, answer pointed questions.

He almost wished he was twelve years old.

DAY TWO 05:46 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

A dry, translucent husk. A sudden movement within. The husk cracks to reveal a wet, thousand-celled eye.

The fight for life had begun.

Through heavily gloved hands and behind the thick glass of an isolation tank, Dr Spiro worked on the nascent Beta Scarlatti, with Finn in support holding a heat lamp, and Al right on the shoulders of both. Using tweezers and other instruments, Spiro picked away the husk that had been the Scarlatti’s final skin at the nymph stage. Tiny 400mA electric shocks sent through instruments were bringing the Scarlatti back to life after thirty years in cold storage.

Professor Lomax glowered at them over his glasses from the sterile transfer trolley. The trolley was essentially a life-support system for the Scarlatti, one that would keep it isolated as well as subdued, allowing Lomax to glue the nano-scale tracking device on to exactly the right thorax plate following miniaturisation.

Beyond, other scientists and technicians fanned out. Those gathered in the control gallery watched onscreen.

Waiting for the newborn Scarlatti was a titanium harness – a sausage-shaped cage – that would muzzle the beast’s wings and stings to allow the attachment of the miniaturised tracking device to its thorax.

Once harnessed, the Beta would be transferred to the loading bay ready to receive the nano tracking device the moment it was available – all achieved via airlocks to prevent the Beta’s hypersensitive nervous system getting a hostile fix on any crew scent. They wanted it focused on the Alpha Scarlatti’s pheromones and nothing else.²

Slowly, the giant insect began to wake. Deceptively slowly.

Just below the nascent Scarlatti’s squirming head, Spiro used the tweezers to split open the rest of the husk…

SNAP!

“Ahhhh!” screamed Spiro.

The creature seemed to explode in his hand – whipping its huge tail clean through its dead outer layer. Bursting out. Vile and wet. A cluster of scales and stings – poisonous yellows and reds glistening through black. The clatter as it unstuck and buzzed its silver-black wings for the first time…

W​W​K​W​Z​Z​Z​W​Z​W​Z​W​W​K​Z​W​Z​W​K​Z

“Will someone please get a grip,” hissed Professor Lomax.

Dr Spiro was stunned. Finn dropped the heat lamp and grabbed the flipping, writhing Beta. He felt it struggle against his thick glove like a frenzied rat. Finn held on and waited for Spiro to jump back in. But Spiro seemed to need a moment to recover. Finn looked across at him. Up close, his eyes were strangely speckled, blinking sporadically behind his glasses. More like a computer trying to reboot than a person reacting in surprise.

Finn wondered if he should yell for Al to take over, but Spiro just as quickly snapped out of it, pinning down the Beta Scarlatti with the tweezers. Between them they manipulated the beast into the titanium harness, carefully closing the topside release mechanism so as not to nip the monster’s furious wings.

It was like a nightmare cigar – silver, live and absolutely lethal.

Spiro fed it through an airtight duct to the smaller tank on Professor Lomax’s sterile trolley. Finally, a small grey atomiser unit on the outside of the trolley was switched on to produce a mild anaesthetic steam that would keep the beast subdued until release.

When it was all over, Spiro was relieved but also angry with himself. Again Finn noticed he seemed to be blinking strangely. Maybe he was just nervous. Finn wanted to tell him it was OK, nobody would mind, but it was not the sort of thing a kid could say.

“Congratulations,” Professor Lomax said instead, with heavy sarcasm, “a triumph.”

What an odd couple, Finn thought as they walked off in opposite directions, Lomax pushing the trolley through to the loading bay.

“That’s what happens if you hang around entomologists too long,” Al warned Finn. “You develop…”

“Oversensitive antennae?” said Finn.

“No. A sting,” said Al.

The conversation was interrupted as the first countdown alarm sounded.

BEEEEEEEEEEEP. “T-MINUS TEN.”

Ten minutes to zero hour.

DAY TWO 05:50 (BST), Hook Hall, Surrey

Everyone moved at once – Al so quickly that Finn had to jog to keep up.

They made their way into the centre of the CFAC where they both climbed up to Al’s cockpit command pod. It was crammed with control computers and sat just in front of the Large Accelerator. Finn’s final job was to bring down the perspex dome of the pod and shut Al in.

“Are you going to watch from down here with the Bug Club, or up top with the Bigwigs?” Al asked.

The politicians and honoured guests would be watching the action in the control gallery with Commander King. Most of the scientists would be opposite in the laboratories along the north side of the CFAC. They were already jostling for position, noses pressed up against the glass, spectacles clashing.

“I’ll stick with the Bug Club.” There was a great view down into the Large Accelerator. “Think it’s going to work?” asked Finn.

“The chances of disaster are always between one in three and evens.”

That didn’t sound too promising, but Finn knew everyone had done all they could. All they needed now was… luck.

He touched the stone at his chest, then pulled the leather tie from round his neck.

“Take it, for luck,” said Finn, handing the lump of spharelite over to Al.

“Luck? I’m a man of reason.”

“My mother would insist,” said Finn.

Al grabbed his head and gave it an affectionate knuckling. “Oh, ye of little faith…” but took the stone all the same.

“You’re not going to sneak on the mission without me, are you?” asked Finn, the thought suddenly occurring to him.

“I’m the only one who knows how to drive this thing. And frankly, do you think me, you and your friend Hudson who can’t move his bowels would be a better choice than trained killers like Kelly and Ms Salazar?” He looked over to where Salazar and the crew were being laid out on trolleys ready to be anaesthetised.

“My name’s not Frankly,” said Finn, “and hers is not Ms Salazar, it’s Delta, and can you stop staring at her like that? It’s so embarrassing.”

“Hey!” said Al and knuckled him again a little harder. “I am not staring!”

The five-minute alarm sounded.

“Promise you’ll let me have a go at this one day?” said Finn.

“No, but I do promise we’ll get to the Pyrenees for a full week in the summer, and as guests of the President of France. Imagine the catering.”

Finn brought the lid down and secured it over Al, who grinned and gave him the thumbs up.

He was the picture of absolute happiness.

TEN
DAY TWO 05:56 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

Finn knew he should be excited as he walked back to the labs.

Instead he felt suddenly tired, really tired, and he could think of only one word. “Summer,” Al had said. “We’ll get to the Pyrenees for a full week in the summer.”

There was a concept in quantum physics that Al had tried to explain to Finn that he just couldn’t get his head around, and yet it seemed to be true, called the Uncertainty Principle. It meant the more you could know about the position of a particle, the less you know about its momentum, and vice versa; or, as Finn figured it, the more you knew what you wanted, the less you could have it.

The last eighteen hours or so had been extraordinary, brilliant, engaging, exciting and important: and in a few short minutes it would be over. It was ungrateful, he knew, but he had a gut full of that awful end-of-holidays feeling. Summer was an age away. He could see himself back at school and sense the empty weeks stretching ahead.

Who would ever believe this had happened? Would it remain a total secret? Almost certainly. Grown-ups had so many secrets.

If only he could keep something, thought Finn, some souvenir to remind him, proof to himself if no one else. That miniature goat would be neat. Or maybe he could add the Scarlatti itself to his collection? Imagine showing that off…

Then he thought of the next best thing.

DAY TWO 05:58 (BST). Siberia

After seventeen hours of effort and agony, the Arctic fox had finally managed to drag his broken body over the frozen tundra and back into his lair. He was exhausted, but he was home.

At last he could rest for however long the wound might take to heal. Or he could die.

Deep beneath, Kaparis watched Finn hurry back to the laboratories.

Deep beneath, Kaparis watched Allenby grinning in his pod.

Since 19:43 the previous evening, he’d had access to the entire CCTV and surveillance system of Hook Hall, the heart of which now lay, not in Surrey or anywhere in England, but with a fourteen-year-old girl, another one of his Tyros, Li Jun – half blind and hunched over her keyboards and screens in the communications wing of Kaparis’s bunker, less than fifty metres away.

She had emerged from his seminary aged just nine. She still barely spoke, but her work – Kaparis had to admit as he watched King making tense small talk with a member of the royal family in the control gallery – was perfection.

DAY TWO 05:59 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

Outside dawn had broken.

The labs that looked directly on to the CFAC were crowded with the exhausted scientists, engineers and technicians who had built the accelerator, who had designed and put together the whole extraordinary mission.

Politicians and scientists were gathered in the control gallery. The atmosphere was tense and expectant.

One by one the crew were given a short-duration anaesthetic. (Delta’s last thought as she passed out, looking up at Al in the cockpit, was a cross between I hope he knows what he’s doing and problematic boyfriend material.) Then, one by one, they were wheeled on to the conveyor. Already in place at the centre of the accelerator was the helicopter; on the conveyor waited Stubbs’s workshop truck, a fuel tanker and now the crew. The rest of the supplies to be shrunk waited in the loading bay, and just the other side of the loading-bay doors waited the trolley containing the imprisoned Beta Scarlatti.

Finn knew this was his last opportunity.

Leaving the crowd of technicians and scientists at the big Lab One windows, he slipped away and headed back through the now deserted corridors and laboratories to Lab Four where the entomology team had been based.

His plan was simple. To pocket the empty Beta Scarlatti husk.

He walked into the deserted lab and there was the husk in the corner of the chamber, just as he expected. Like an exploded purse, the shed skin sat there, just waiting to be taken home and mounted on a piece of A3 card, its Latin name printed on a slip beneath. It was the size of a small pine cone and was bound to provoke wonder. In his friend Hudson at least.

Finn was just looking around for something to put it in when he noticed a brand-new box containing sterile gloves that would be the perfect size, and remembered they’d thrown the old box away earlier. It was when he opened the bin to find the old box that he saw it.

The small grey atomiser unit.

The small grey atomiser unit that was supposed to be on the back of the trolley providing anaesthetising steam to the Scarlatti.

What was it still doing here? He’d better check the trolley and warn someone.

Finn didn’t quite know what conclusion to jump to. Had there been a change of plan? What was the atomiser unit doing in here? He had to tell someone. Half dreading he might get in trouble, he hit an alarm button beside the door.

But no alarms sounded. No lights flashed. He hit it again. Nothing.

Finn jogged back down the empty corridors towards the doors which faced the CFAC loading bay. There was the trolley. There was the Beta Scarlatti safely onboard.

There was young Dr Spiro.

Al’s speech from the cockpit was short.

“This is history, or we are. Let’s go.”

With that, he threw a switch and power dipped all over Europe.

With a surge in noise, the accelerator started up and began to find its va-va-voom.

Al started to manipulate the input interface and up the power. He wore earplugs and shades.

Upstairs, even through the control gallery’s thick safety glass, the noise was extraordinary.

In the accelerator great arcs of lightning spun themselves into a blur, like electric candyfloss.

“The atomiser! I found it back in the lab!” yelled Finn at Dr Spiro over the sound of the accelerator just the other side of the loading-bay doors.

“It’s been replaced!” Spiro shouted back. He seemed to be excited, glowing almost.

Finn looked down. The slot on the back of the trolley where the atomiser should have been now contained something else. Like a lump of clay or playdough. Some wires were coming out of it. Finn didn’t get it at first, couldn’t process what it might be, just that it definitely wasn’t an atomiser unit. All was noise and confusion.

And then, in Spiro’s hand, he saw a grey cover, just like the outside of the atomiser box. Just the right size to fit over the lump of clay. Still without joining the dots, but feeling something was very wrong, Finn hit the alarm at the loading-bay doors.

It was difficult to hear, but again nothing sounded, no lights flashed.

Then Finn saw something that really threw him.

Dr Spiro wasn’t wearing any shoes.

They were just behind the trolley. Both heels were askew. In fact, the heels seemed to be chambers, open and empty. The playdough has come out of his shoes, thought Finn absurdly. In a microsecond, a series of fearful connections flashed through his brain and he arrived at an even more absurd conclusion.

While everyone else was watching the display, Spiro was putting a bomb on the trolley. There was plastic explosive in the shoes.

“The boy has seen the shoes. Deal with him,” said a voice only Spiro could hear.

Spiro became very calm and still. As if in a trance.

Just turn, thought Finn.

Just walk away.

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