Terminal (15 page)

The radio crackled and Werner was saying, ‘Hello, hello, are you there?', but Jürgen was holding it away from his ear.

Just as Will and Elliott were doing, he was staring into the distance, at the intersecting point between the three pyramids.

Where something was causing the soil and the crust to be thrown skywards in a huge spout.

There was a low rumble as, all of a sudden, an enormous needle-like structure erupted from the ground itself, thrusting up higher and higher.

‘Just when I thought this couldn't get any weirder,' Will
said under his breath.

Soil and rocks were spilling from the top of the structure as it reached its full height, several times that of the pyramid they were on.

‘A tower?' Elliott murmured.

‘Werner, er … let me get back to you,' Jürgen muttered into the radio. ‘No, I'll call you. You and Karl stay exactly where you are until I do.' Werner's anxious voice could still be heard over the radio as Jürgen simply switched it off.

‘Where's the bushman?' Elliott asked, as she noticed he wasn't with them.

‘There he goes,' Will said, spotting the lone figure making its way purposefully over the bare earth in the direction of the tower. ‘I reckon we need to get after our friend Woody and make him give us some answers.' Squinting at the tower in the distance, Will chuckled. ‘Besides, we need to take a closer look at that!'

Parry was escorted down through the airlock first, followed by Chester. Once inside, they were taken through to the bridge where Chester was peering around at the various terminals manned by the crew. Some of the men looked up from their instrumentation panels to give him and Parry curious but fleeting glances, as if they knew they weren't meant to show too much interest. Chester felt light-headed; he'd been plucked from a seventeenth-century farmers' croft that relied on a generator in an outhouse for its electricity, to a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine stuffed to the gills with electronics. And it belonged to the world's leading superpower, no less.

It was all rather unreal, as if he was in a film. Except in a film you couldn't get a sense of how rank it smelt, with so many men in an enclosed space. It reminded Chester of when he and his parents had joined a long-haul flight on their way home from their holidays one summer.

Two people in dark blue suits suddenly appeared. ‘Homeland Security,' the young woman announced, flashing a badge to Parry.

‘Watch the birdie,' the man accompanying her said, as he aimed a device at Chester and Parry in turn.

‘Facial recognition. They're making sure we are who we are,' Parry said to Chester, as the man scrutinised a screen on
the back of the device and turned to his colleague.

‘Both positive,' he said.

‘Me too?' Chester asked Parry. ‘But how do they know who I am?'

Parry was about to answer when the woman held something up. Chester recognised it immediately.

‘It's one of Danf—!' he began to exclaim, catching himself before he uttered the name of the man he most reviled in the world. ‘It's a Purger,' he corrected himself quickly.

‘Yes. Nothing like having your own technology turned on you, is there?' Parry said.

‘Please don't talk. Focus on this point here,' the woman snapped, indicating the small lens at top of the small cylinder with her finger.

‘Sorry,' Chester muttered as she played the purple beam into his eyes, then Parry's.

‘They haven't been Dark Lighted,' the woman confirmed, typing the result into her PDA.

‘Actually, it's
Darklit
,' Chester piped up before he knew what he was saying.

The woman shot him a frosty look as another man came up to them. ‘Commander,' he said to Parry. From his age and insignia, Chester guessed who he was before he shook hands with them both.

‘Good to meet you, Captain,' Parry said.

‘And you. I apologise for the inhospitable welcome. I hope our squad of marines didn't play too rough with you,' the captain replied. ‘Things being what they are, those procedures are now standard drill before anyone's allowed on board. Even my crew members aren't exempt when they return from dockside.'

‘Quite right,' Parry said. ‘Last thing you want is a body bomber in a confined space like this.'

The man from Homeland Security was clearly concerned about the time as he glanced repeatedly at his watch.

‘Looks like you gentlemen have somewhere to be,' the captain said.

‘Yes, the comms link is up and running, Commander,' the man in the blue suit said.

One of the marines remained behind as the rest of the escort withdrew. Parry's satphones and walking stick were given back to him before he and Chester were taken from the bridge and through several sections of the submarine. The blue suited man from Homeland Security ushered them into a surprisingly small cabin, which had a table in its centre on which three screens had been set up in a row, with some sort of camera mounted on top of the middle one. Parry told Chester to take a place at the table as he remained standing, talking to the blue suit in hushed tones.

With no idea why he was there or what was about to happen, Chester leant back in his chair and slipped his hands into his jeans pockets. He looked from one screen to the other, each of which was showing the United States Naval emblem against a blue background.

Taking a breath, he glanced at the marine stationed by the cabin door, who was holding his assault rifle at the ready position across his chest.

‘AR16,' Chester said out loud, recognising the weapon from one of his videogames. The marine simply frowned at him, so Chester quickly looked away, nodding to himself and muttering, ‘Yes, AR16.'

A tone chimed from a speaker somewhere in the room, and
Parry and the blue suit quickly took their places at the table beside Chester.

The screens were blank except for the words
Transmission Status
with a countdown clicking away the seconds. As the countdown hit zero, the title changed to ENCRYPTION LEVEL ONE, then there was a moment of digital static as random blocks of colour flashed over the displays. The picture finally settled down to show a scene very similar to the one in Chester's cabin – a desk or table top with three chairs arranged along it. A man holding several files of papers wandered into view.

‘Bob Harper,' Parry said. ‘Good to see you after so long, you old devil!'

As the man leant towards where the camera was mounted on top of the middle screen, Chester saw that he was balding and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

‘You too, Parry,' Bob replied, but not as warmly as Chester might have expected if they were really such old friends. But Chester could tell that Bob had other things on his mind as he opened one of the files and extracted several documents, which he arranged very precisely on the tabletop. Then he looked up again. ‘Right, that's me locked and loaded. And a very good afternoon to you all,' he said, with more enthusiasm than before. He squinted at the blue suit on Parry's right, then Chester. ‘And you must be, er, Chester Rause.'

‘Rawls,' Parry put him right. ‘How are the kids, Bob?'

There was a slight lag between the picture and the sound, which meant that Bob's lips had stopped moving but his words were still being relayed. ‘Well, thank you. With one at MIT and the other a Wall Street attorney, I've given them notice that they can provide for their old pa when I finally
hang up my spurs. And you know Debbie would send you her love if I was able to tell her we were talking. When you're next over this side of the pond, you must come to stay with us again, Parry.' Bob rubbed his chin in a troubled way. ‘After all this has gone away.'

‘That's a definite,' Parry said.

No one spoke for a moment as Bob cast an eye over his documents. ‘We've got a frosty but sunny day here in Washington. What's the weather doing where you are, Parry?'

‘Oh, other than it's the middle of the night here, Bob, do you need to ask? This is England; inevitably it'll rain before morning,' Parry replied drily.

But Bob wasn't listening. From the noise in the background, Chester could tell other people had entered the room. A well-built man, younger than Bob and wearing a charcoal-grey suit, came into view. He inspected the screens and the table to make sure everything was as it should be, then moved out of the way to allow someone else to take the central seat.

Chester's mouth gaped open, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

It was true that in the last year he'd spent a great deal of time underground, but it would have been impossible for him not to recognise the man on the screen in front of him.

One of the most famous people alive on the planet, and certainly the most powerful.

‘Is that …?' Chester tried to ask, but no sound came from his throat.

He shot a glance at Parry, who gave him a quick nod.

‘Good day, gentlemen,' the US President greeted them while scanning one of Bob's briefing notes on the table. When
he finally looked up, he ran his eyes over the blue suit and Parry, his gaze coming to rest on Chester.

‘Hi,' the President said.

 

 

 

Chapter Five

D
rake's face was sickly white, but the creases under his eyes and around his mouth were blood red. And although his arm with the wounded shoulder was in a sling and he had numerous dressings on his burns, none of these were troubling him as much as his mouth, which he was now reaching inside as he probed his swollen gums. Despite the fact that the pain was making him wince as he touched them, he chuckled to himself.

‘A man walks into a dentist's and sits in the chair.' It was difficult to understand what Drake was saying because his fingers were in the way, but he went on regardless; ‘The dentist says, “What can I do for you, sir?” The man replies, “You've got to help me; I think I'm a moth.”'

Drake paused for a moment as he pushed against a tooth in his lower jaw and felt it shift in his gum. ‘The dentist says, “But you can see I'm a dentist, and you need a doctor. So why did you come in here?” Drake had taken his hand from his mouth and was examining the blood on his fingertips. ‘The man replies, “Well, your light was on.”'

Jiggs gave a chuckle. ‘That's an old one,' he said, as he took
hold of Drake's good arm and wrapped a cuff around it. He was using an ancient sphygmomanometer, a blood pressure meter, that he'd found in the medical bay. ‘I can always tell when things are at their worst because you start with the jokes.' Jiggs smiled. ‘Remember that time Parry was away, and Sparks, Danforth and I had to drive you sixty miles across Scotland to the nearest hospital, through the heaviest snowfall that winter, because your appendix had ruptured? What were you – maybe sixteen years old? Even though you were in terrible pain, you told non-stop jokes the whole damned way.'

Drake nodded, then leant his head forward and shook it. ‘How about this for a snowfall?' he said. His hair had begun to grow back after he'd trimmed it all off some months before to disguise his appearance, but a few tufts of it now sprinkled down over the surface of the table.