“We need to go now,” Becker said firmly. “The anomaly is fading.”
“He’s right, Abby.” Connor took the binoculars out of her hands. “We can’t wait any longer. I broke the locking mechanism.”
Abby shrugged him off and turned to Becker.
“Not without the others,” she told him.
“Who?”
“Look,” she said, pointing down the hill. Connor and Becker both looked on in amazement.
THIRTY-THREE
Danny, Lester and Sarah emerged into the open, though it took them a moment to realise it. The smoke still swirled thickly around them and they could barely see a few feet ahead, let alone the sky. But the tiles under their feet gave way to concrete, and the sounds around them changed; thick explosions masked the terrible cries of the creatures they’d left behind.
They struggled on, sticking close together for fear of getting lost. Danny could barely breathe or see, his lungs ached with the effort and his body ached from the blows of Samuels’ soldiers. They stepped over bodies, their flesh scorched and pink. The terrible smell of burning flesh clogged his nose.
A few moments later they were running on earth rather than concrete, the ground soft under their feet, the smoke clearing with every step they took. They could hear creatures lowing in the distance, and Danny found himself staring at a herd of huge Brachiosaurus. His eyes seemed to be playing tricks on him, or perhaps it was the smoke, but the creatures seemed far too big, their great long necks too slender.
The three of them kept going, their legs getting heavier, their steps ever diminishing, until they collapsed into the mud, exhausted.
Drawing breath in short, painful gasps, Danny looked around. The mud plain stretched out as far as he could see, and smoke tainted an otherwise pure blue sky. A battered SUV bumped and bucked over the mud as it sped down towards them. Danny took a few steps forward.
“That’s Becker,” he said, amazed and relieved, “and Abby.”
“Well,” Lester observed dryly, “it’s the least they could do.” He tugged at his battered, muddy cuffs. Danny watched him pat his hair into place, as though annoyed not to have a comb with him.
The SUV skidded to a halt in front of them.
“Good afternoon,” Danny said, and smiled weakly.
“Get in!” Abby shouted, her face streaked with mud and sweat. “The anomaly’s about to close!”
They didn’t need to be told twice. Lester and Sarah piled into the car, Danny clambering in behind them. Becker had already put his foot down before he closed the door, and Danny had to cling onto the headrest in front of him so as not to fall out.
The car thumped up the plain. Danny finally got the door closed and then banged his head on the ceiling as the SUV bounced over the lip of a crater. Mud spattered against the windscreen and Becker had to flick on the wipers. Ahead of them an anomaly flickered dimly.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Abby asked, looking back at the three of them.
“Short version,” Danny said, hanging on to his seatbelt, “old mate of Lester’s.”
“It was Samuels!” Sarah said. “He tried to kill us.”
Abby stared at her. “What? Why?”
Danny smiled wryly.
“I think Lester bullied him at school.”
“He should have been grateful,” Lester said. “It builds character.”
The car lurched over another crater and Becker swore under his breath. They were pressed back into their seats as he pushed the accelerator flat on the floor. The sky showed blue through the anomaly. Danny held his breath.
Suddenly they were through the rucked-up ground, the car speeding forward over the level plain. The anomaly flickered, the centre of light puckering like the last gasp of a candle flame. And they plunged right into it.
In an instant the sky had switched off and they were in darkness. Becker stood on the brake and the car skidded to a halt. Danny smacked hard into the seat in front of him.
He sat back, rubbing at his bruised nose.
Steam hissed from the car’s knackered engine. And just beyond the end of the hood stood Connor, eyes and mouth open wide in horror.
“You almost hit me,” he protested to Becker as they climbed out of the car.
“Yeah,” Becker said, “but I didn’t.”
Connor made to say something else, then he noticed Danny, Lester and Sarah emerging from the back.
“Hey, where’d you come from?”
“South Africa,” Danny replied with a wink. “Found a short cut.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The office was empty now, cleared of the mess of papers and broken ornaments. A faint trail of blood on the carpet hadn’t quite been scrubbed away. Papers stood stacked in neat piles on Lester’s desk, in the process of being put back in their files. And a small number of pages lay face down in the tray of Lester’s printer. Sarah hurried over, scooping up her two-page proposal and crumpling it into a ball. It was late at night and Sarah was exhausted, but she wanted this all to be gone before the others got in the next morning.
When she turned back round, Lester was barring her way, his arms folded.
“It’s just something Samuels asked me to do,” she said nervously.
“But you agreed with the idea? Very well argued, I thought.”
She blushed.
“I’m sorry. I would have brought it to you if you’d been here.”
“Of course you would have. But you know what I’m going to say.”
“That we can’t risk telling people about what we do.”
“Stephen felt like you did. I think Cutter might even have considered it for a while.”
Sarah shivered. “And look what happened to them.”
“But before they died they’d agreed to keep the anomalies secret — until we knew more about them.”
“But perhaps we’d know more about them if we shared the information.”
Lester shook his head sadly.
“It won’t work like that. We’ve got enough interested parties muscling in as it is. Imagine what it would be like if we gave private enterprise a chance. There’d have to be a press conference every time we sneezed, and there’d be all the correspondence to answer. Do you know how much time gets eaten up by school groups writing in to the Home Office?”
“How much?”
“Well, I don’t have the figures to hand. But the fewer people know about what we do here, the fewer people get hurt.”
“Then that’s your final answer?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She nodded slowly.
“All right, I can understand the reasons. It’s just...”
“You think we could do better.”
“Yes.”
“So do I. I need you on this team, Sarah. I need you to make sense of what we’re doing, write your reports, analyse anything you like, but bring your insights to me.”
“You might not like what I come up with.”
“But I’ll consider anything you bring me.”
Sarah thought for a moment.
“And if the truth ever gets out anyway? Can I publish my findings then?”
Lester sighed. “I think you’ll have to ask whoever is in charge.” She frowned at him and he leant forward to whisper in her ear.
“The public only find out about this over my dead body.”
“... in Maidenhead is that police are allowing people back into their homes. We also hear reports of the army helping clear the tunnel at Rotherhithe, which had filled up with raw sewage. Not a pleasant job for anyone, that!
“Apparently the methane it gave off caused problems for the locals. One woman I spoke to said she thought she’d seen monsters with enormous long necks peering over her garden wall! But anyway, the monsters seem to have vanished back into thin air this morning.
“Back to the studio.”
Lester switched off the screen and turned to regard his team. Abby and Connor sat together on the leather sofa. Sarah sa
t down beside them, squeezing up next to Connor. Danny stood framed in the doorway.
“Job done,” he said. “Jenny left a good team behind her.”
Lester perched on his desk.
“I trust we’re all fully rested after last night’s fun and games?” The team murmured their assent. “Good. We seem to be back on our feet just now, but we need to raise our game.”
“Don’t tell me,” Connor said. “You want us all working 110 per cent.”
“I’d be disappointed if you weren’t doing that already, but we’re going to prioritise a few things. It’s no good just waiting for the alarm to sound so we can start chasing our tails. Connor, Sarah, get back to work on the artefact.”
He turned to Danny.
“You and Becker —” Lester began. Then he looked round. “Where is Becker?”
“Gone to see the family of the soldier who got killed in Maidenhead,” Connor said. “He had a wife and kids. Then I think he’s got some more visits as a result of our trip into the past.”
“Ah, well, when he’s back, he and Danny are going to shore up our security here. I’m a little fed up with having just any old riff raff coming through our doors.”
“Gotcha,” Danny said. “I’ve an idea how we can do that...”
“Good. Well, that seems to be that. Go on, then. You all have work to do.”
Connor shook his head. Then he spoke up.
“But hang on — is that really it?”
“Not in the slightest,” Lester said, sitting back in his seat. “The South African authorities will go into the mine at any moment and find there’s nothing there. All those people who thought they had a share in this miraculous new oil field are going to realise they’ve been cheated. The British government, of course, denies any involvement in the debacle, but there’s going to be some serious questions asked. It might well mean someone’s job.”
“And then there’s the game reserve,” Danny pointed out.
“We’re not quite sure at what level it was involved,” Lester said. “But there are some unpleasant rumours. It seems the management have gone into a free-fall now that they know they won’t get their money. Perhaps some of the old keepers they fired can be brought in to put things right. But it’s not really our concern.”
“That’s it?” Danny said, appalled.
“What else can I offer you?” Lester inquired impatiently.
“Well, what about Samuels?”
“Trust me,” Lester said, smiling, “you won’t make yourself popular mentioning that name in senior circles.”
“But he can’t have been working alone. They must have needed money to set something like that up. Just the wages for all those soldiers...”
“His men have been dealt with,” Lester said. “They’re going to spend a long time in jail. And the money is traceable: there’s a lot of investors when you promise a new source of oil.”
“But who was Samuels working for?” Danny insisted. “Surely he wasn’t alone.”
Lester looked round the team.
“All right, fine,” he sighed. “We have to assume that what we do here interests other people. Samuels — and Leek before him — had their own ideas about how we go about our work. However, no one in government admits they know anything about any of it. In fact, they’re falling over themselves to deny it.”
Connor leaned forward eagerly.
“Which means it has to be a cover-up.”
“Or that they don’t know anything about it,” Lester said. “What we do is still a reasonably well-kept secret.”
“What about Helen Cutter?” Abby put in. “She knows much more about the anomalies than she’s let on. He could have been working with her.”
“Or your friend Christine,” Sarah put in.
“We can’t link either of them to Samuels,” Lester said. “We can’t prove anything. And I don’t like conspiracies. So unless you bring me some solid evidence, we have to leave things as they are.”
“We can’t do anything about them, anyway,” Danny said. “Can we?”
“We do what we always do,” Lester responded. “We carry on. We investigate the anomalies, put things right where we can, and we wait for whoever might be working against us to make the next move.”
The team stared back at him, but no one had anything to add.
“Well then,” he said. “If there are no more questions, you’re not being paid to sit on my sofa all day.”
“Yes, sir,” they barked, struggling from their seats to file out in mocking formation.
Lester watched them go. Then he walked slowly round to the chair behind his desk and sank back into it, a king returned to his throne. But the papers stacked up in front of him would not sort themselves.
Sighing, he leant forward and got on with his work.
From inside the ventilation grate just off to his left, a tiny camera watched him.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book had a lot of help along the way. Adam Newell and Sharon Gosling thought of me in the first place, and Cath Trechman, my beleaguered editor at Titan, supplied me handsomely with books and scripts and answers.
As luck would have it, a week before I met Cath to discuss what I might write, my Aunt Sal and Uncle Richard took me to Pilansberg National Park, two hours drive from Johannesburg. It’s an awesome, beautiful place stretching 55,000 hectares, and entirely undeserving of the mangled, corrupted and despicable version here. Thanks also to my cousins Georgina and Natalie for pestering a waiter.
Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges spared time from busy schedules to let me rabbit at them down the phone. They suggested many neat fixes to problems with my plot and I’m extremely grateful for their care and patience.
Nancia Leggett at Impossible Pictures let me visit the set twice during filming of series three (I got to watch the recording of episode two, scene 16 and episode five, scenes 89 and 91). The cast and crew could not have been nicer or more forthcoming, and this book is full of details scrounged from those days out.
Paul Cornell and James Moran shared insights from writing for the TV series while Steve Savile and Dan Abnett advised me on the books. Thanks also to Martin Day for his words of wisdom.
Debbie Challis and Joseph Lidster battled through my clunky prose, red-penning the more awful bits. Anna Kodicek’s expertise should make her an honorary member of the ARC. Thank you to them all.
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Fire and Water Page 24
