He raised a hand to knock.
“Enter!” came a gruff, gravelly voice from the other side, before his kuckle touched the door.
The gentleman shook his head in disbelief. How did the old man do that?
Opening the door, he entered a large office that was suffused by a cloud of blue tobacco smoke. From the shape of the room, it looked as though it had been built beneath a railway arch.
The gentleman put a hand to his mouth to smother a cough, and blinked excessively as his eyes began to water.
Sitting behind a large mahogany desk, positioned strategically in the middle of the room, was a portly old man, all wobbling jowls with only a few wisps of silvery hair on his otherwise bald pate. He was wearing a black waistcoat and a spotted bow-tie. His jacket and bowker hat hung from a stand in the near corner.
The man took the cigar he was smoking from between his teeth with fat white fingers and said, “Ah, Quicksilver. There you are. And about time too.”
“You wanted to see me, WC?”
“Yes. About two bloody hours ago! What kept you? Some fine filly over in Soho, was it? Or stayed too late at the blackjack table, did you? Game of poker you couldn’t get away from?”
“Breakfast, WC,” the other replied curtly.
“Breakfast?” Churchill blustered.
The gentleman looked at the head of the mysterious Department Q, eyebrows raised. “You know; the meal you break your fast with after sleep.”
“Sleep?”
“Don’t tell me you never sleep, WC.”
“No time for sleep! You can sleep all you want when you’re dead. Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?”
Quicksilver said nothing, merely fixing the older man with a piercing stare from beneath the brim of his top hat.
Winston Churchill, in return, regarded the young man standing in front of him.
Somewhere in his mid-twenties, he was tall, classically handsome, with a chiselled jaw and patrician nose, and he moved with the grace of a natural athlete.
He removed his hat, wiping the drips of rain from it with a gloved hand, releasing a thick mane of brown hair, the same colour as his well-developed moustache.
Churchill knew he was from a long line of loyalist agents of the Crown of Magna Britannia. Indeed, his great-great-uncle Erasmus Quicksilver was the man who first proposed the life-support throne for her ailing Majesty back in 1901, when it was feared that her death might result in the collapse of the British Empire. The man was as patriotic as they came. He had no other ties to hold him – no wife, no family – and would do anything for Queen and country. He was just the man for the job.
“So, what did you want to see me about?” Quicksilver said, bringing Churchill back to the reason for the agent’s summons to the bowels of Whitehall.
“Ah, yes, that,” Churchill blustered, taking another drag on his smouldering cigar. “Got a job for you.”
“I rather thought you might,” the other replied.
“I want you to go to Edinburgh and pick up a package from the Medical School there.”
“Right,” Quicksilver said, warily. “And what do you want me to do with this ‘package’ after I’ve collected it?”
“Deliver it, of course,” the old man grunted, and then added, “behind enemy lines.”
“Ah, I see,” Quicksilver said, sucking in air noisily through his teeth and leaning back in his seat.
“Rum do and no mistake,” Churchill went on, pushing a file across the desk. Quicksilver looked at it, but assiduously avoided picking it up.
“I can imagine.”
The old man looked at him, the concern in his eyes evident to the younger man. “We’ve received intelligence that the Nazis are developing a secret weapon – one that could change the course of the war and ensure their victory.”
“I see,” Quicksilver said, sliding the folder towards himself with a tentative finger, his curiosity piqued.
“And I want you to destroy it before it can be used against our great nation,” Churchill added casually, as if asking Quicksilver to pop out and pick up some more brandy.
“Just like that?” Quicksilver picked up the slim file and flicked it open, casting a weather eye over its contents.
“You’ll have help,” Churchill added. “That’s what the ‘package’ is for.”
Quicksilver turned a page and read on. “I see.”
“So you’ll do it? You’ll take the job?” the old man pressed, jowls wobbling as he lent forward across the desk, inadvertently blowing smoke into the younger man’s face, causing him to cough again.
Quicksilver closed the file and put it back down on the desk. Stroking his moustache with one hand, he said, “When do we start?”
Churchill took another puff on the cigar clamped between his teeth. “We already have.”
CHAPTER THREE
Frozen Assets
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, 1943
RAGS OF CLOUDS scudded across the coke-choked sky over Edinburgh, chased across the heavens by the approaching storm like lambs running before a wolf.
By the time the horse-drawn hansom deposited him before the imposing gothic façade of the Medical School, the sky had turned the colour of a bad bruise as the sun began to set.
Hercules pulled his cape tighter about his shoulders as the wind tugged at it hungrily. Seizing hold of one of the heavy verdigris-coated doorknockers, he hesitated, glancing left and right along the empty cobbled street. It was devoid of life, other than for the departing carriage, the gig’s iron-shod wheels clattering over the cobbles in counterpoint to the tink, tink, tink of the horse’s hooves.
Happy that his arrival at the Medical School had gone unobserved, he slammed the knocker against the cracked wood of the door three times.
The sound echoed ominously along the empty street, like the tolling of a funerary bell, or the hollow knocking of the Grim Reaper himself at the home of one not long for this world.
It was only a matter of moments before he heard the rattle of a latch and the door groaned open. A hunched porter stood in the shadows – looking like a carrion crow in his black porter’s garb – and ushered him inside.
Before he could even announce himself the porter said, “Professor Knox is waiting for you in his study.”
Hercules Quicksilver raised his eyebrows, but he was not wholly surprised. His masters at the Department moved in mysterious ways at the best of times. Since Magna Britannia’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany, even more so.
“Then lead on, Macduff.”
“This way,” the porter rasped, turning and shuffling away into the dusty gloom of the arching hallway beyond.
THE PLACE SEEMED to be deserted. All the while as the porter led him through its echoing, marble galleries and down wood-panelled corridors, the air redolent with beeswax and camphor, they didn’t see another soul.
Finally, after walking for what felt like miles through the halls and passageways of the Medical School they came at last to a musty office that smelt of mildew and preserving fluid. A thin, bespectacled man sporting a straggly beard sat behind a desk overloaded with books and teetering piles of paperwork.
“Professor Knox,” the porter said, “Mr Quicksilver is here.”
Knox looked up from what appeared to be a book on anatomy, judging by the printed plates Hercules could just make out over piles of unmarked essays and yellowing professional journals. A pair of heavy purple drapes were half-drawn across the office’s one window, but by the sliver of grey daylight that made it into the stuffy room, he could see the Professor’s face was unnaturally pale, his cheeks gaunt, the tiny eyes behind his glasses sunken and red-rimmed. Considering that he was a Professor of Medicine, he wasn’t a very good advert for the accomplishments of the medical profession.
“Ah, yes, Mr Quicksilver,” Knox said, sounding out every syllable in the name with clinical precision. He looked at the porter waiting at the door. “That will be all, thank you, Muir.” The porter departed.
/> Neither of the two men that remained said anything for a good few seconds as they listened to the aging porter’s receding footsteps, making his way back along the hallway outside the office.
“So,” Professor Knox said at last, “you’re here for the…” He broke off, looking away from Hercules and peering at a spot just beyond the edge of his desk.
“The package,” Hercules finished for him.
“Ah, yes. The ‘package,’ as you put it.”
The professor smiled at him enigmatically, which made Hercules feel even more uneasy.
“You do have it, I take it?” he challenged, casting an unimpressed eye around the cluttered room.
“But of course.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Hercules asked. Now wasn’t the time for pleasantries. Didn’t the man know there was a war on?
“What indeed?”
The Professor rose to his feet. Opening a drawer in his desk he took out a set of heavy iron keys.
“If you’d like to follow me,” he said, making for the door.
And so Hercules Quicksilver set off again through the echoing, empty corridors of the Medical School, easily keeping pace with the professor, who seemed to be dragging his heels. Thankfully, this time, the journey was a much shorter one.
He followed Knox to the university’s Anatomy Museum. Every chamber and gallery was suffused in shadow. Above their heads, in the streaked gloom, the skeletons of whales and dolphins creaked on their suspending wires.
They passed skulls entombed within smeared glass cabinets, displayed alongside death-mask casts and a full human skeleton. The bones dated from the last century and before, when only the bodies of executed criminals were allowed to be used for the purposes of anatomical dissection and study. There were other dusty glass cases filled with unborn babies’ bones. Grotesques, stuffed and mounted in frozen poses by the taxidermist’s art so that they might horrify generation after generation of morbidly-fascinated museum visitors. Alien things pickled in huge jars of yellow liquid that surely couldn’t be human; things that made Hercules’ skin crawl.
And as they made their way through the museum, deeper into the depths of the university, Professor Knox raised his objections.
“You should understand that I and my colleagues are not, ah – how shall I put it? – happy about this.”
“About me being here?” Hercules asked, as they walked past rows of glittering cabinets crammed with bottled embryos with malformed crania.
“No, not that so much – although it has implications for the other. No, we are not happy that you are taking the…”
“Package.”
“Of course. The package,” Knox laughed. It was an unpleasantly mirthless sound. “Yes. We are not happy that you are taking it away.”
Hercules arched an eyebrow at the professor’s back.
“I have my orders,” he said, plainly. “Besides, this is a matter of national security. For Queen and country.”
“So I’ve been told,” Knox replied.
Having reached the furthest limits of the eerie Anatomy Museum, leaving the mummified freaks and foetuses behind, Knox took his bundle of keys from his pocket again.
“It’s this way,” he said, fumbling an old iron key into the lock of a sturdy oak-panelled door, set back into a porticoed alcove.
The door opened onto a marble spiral staircase that corkscrewed its way down into the depths of the Medical School.
The two of them began to descend.
“My colleagues and I have tried to continue the doctor’s ground-breaking work, in our own small way,” he said as the staircase wound deeper and deeper into the basements of the museum. Knox passed one landing after another, along with the doors leading off from them. As far as Hercules could tell, peering over the rail into the persistent gloom below, they were heading for the very bottom.
“Really?” Hercules said, not really sure what Knox was talking about now.
“However, as unpalatable as it may be, we were unable to replicate its effects.”
Reaching the bottom of the stairs at last, Hercules saw a single door.
He glanced back up the staircase. It was a long way back up to the top. Hercules guessed that they must be some way below the cobbles of the Royal Mile, deep within the core of granite on which the Auld Reekie had risen up over the centuries.
“And so, he remains unique.”
It felt cold down here; cold and damp. Hercules pulled his cape tighter about him.
Cold, like a tomb.
Knox rammed another large iron key into the black door’s lock and gave it a turn. There was a click and with a firm push from the professor the great portal creaked open.
The temperature instantly dropped by a few degrees. Nitrogen mist coiled about their feet.
Clutching himself against the chill, Professor Knox stepped through the evaporating cloud into the eerie blue glow beyond it. Hercules followed.
His breath misting in front of his face, feeling that his lips must already be blue with cold, he looked about him in wonder.
They were in some kind of cryogenic vault. Pipes, encrusted with hoarfrost, covered the walls and ceiling.
As the two men advanced further into the cryo-crypt, the soles of their shoes crunched on the brittle sheen of ice covering the floor.
Arrayed in front of them were a number of large, coffin-like, steel pods, from which the blue glow was emanating. Each pod reclined at forty-five degrees and was connected to a whirring, half-frozen Babbage engine via a network of cables and flexible hoses. In the front of each was an ice-crusted glass panel.
Knox approached one of the pods, Hercules close at his shoulder, his indefatigable curiosity well and truly piqued.
He peered at the glass panel. There was something in there and, while he couldn’t see clearly through the frosted pane, it appeared to be a body.
“And so he remains unique,” Knox said, concluding his little speech, “and on ice.”
There was an etched plate at the foot of the cryogenic coffin. Hercules lent forward and brushed the needles of frost away with a hand, reading what was etched into the metal beneath.
It was a name.
Doctor Henry Jekyll.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Return of the
Bloody Red Baron
HESSEN, GERMANY, 1943
GERMANY WAS A land at war with the rest of the world. Every ancient family estate and crag-perched castle had been commandeered by the army to become barracks, or prisoner of war camps, or weapons caches. Listening posts and early warning stations pointed their scopes at the sky whilst the giant clanking walkers of the swastika-daubed Landsknecht legions stalked the landscape, keeping the native populace in order as much as looking for enemy escapees or Allied spies.
But the sky over the town of Darmstadt was empty, but than for one lone zeppelin. The first fingers of dawn stretched over the eastern horizon, caressing the dirigible’s sails, bathing the red, white and black of the airship’s swastika markings in vibrant sunlight as the new day chased away the last scraps of the previous night’s storm clouds.
Below, Darmstadt was little more than a huddle of dun-coloured buildings, many dating back two centuries or more in their construction. The more recent additions included minefields and barbed-wire-topped fences, along with a checkpoint on every road leading into and away from the small Hessen town. If it hadn’t been for the castle and its former master’s legacy, it would have remained an insignificant speck on the map. As it was, Darmstadt was the location of the jewel in the Führer’s crown, Germany’s great hope, home to the Frankenstein Corps and their near-indestructible, undying super-soldiers.
And that was, after all, why the zeppelin was there.
Over seventy miles from the castle, the town and the dam named after it, Lieutenant Eichmann of early warning look-out post Valkyrie 7 set down his coffee, turned to the radar operator and said, “A zeppelin, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
/> The two men stared at the return on the scope, a green, fish-like shape that was closing on the town.
Eichmann picked up a clipboard and flicked through the ruffle of curling papers attached to it.
“There are no flights scheduled for this time today.” He flicked his gaze back to the scope. “Speed?” he asked.
“Approximately thirty knots,” the operator replied after a moment’s hasty calculation.
“And it’s heading for Darmstadt.”
The lieutenant frowned. He picked up a telephone handset and quickly wound the call handle.
“Kahler?” he said as the line connected. “Are you tracking the zeppelin approaching from the north-west?”
“Yes, sir,” a voice came back in a crackle of static. “Tracking it now.”
“Can you see any registration markings or identifier tags?”
”Yes, sir,” came Kahler’s voice again after a moment’s empty static. “NCC-1701. Repeat, NCC-1701.”
Lieutenant Eichmann stared into the middle distance, the lines of his frown etched more deeply into his face.
“NCC-1701, you say?” he echoed, scouring another sheet clipped to the board.
“Yes, sir. That’s right, sir.”
Five minutes later, Lieutenant Eichmann was at the top of the watchtower himself, out of breath, with a pair of binoculars held up to his eyes, the cold wind biting at his face. With the coming dawn the zeppelin was clearly visible now, as was the designation stencilled on its tail fin.
“NCC-1701,” he repeated once more. “So, coming in at dawn, eh? Hoping the half-light would hide your approach, eh?”
“Sir?” the look-out beside him asked, his face crumpled in consternation.
“NCC-1701,”Eichmann said again, as if that should explain everything.
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