Infinity Drake 3

by John McNally

The Forum was eminently defendable and their concentrated force could easily be directed against any point of attack.

  “Thirty of you – with me. The rest of you – start diversionary attacks while we take the library, then fall back here and hold the core. FIGHT TO THE LAST!”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Kelly and Delta were creeping through the Tyro dorms when half a dozen figures burst in from the Forum, running and firing – DRTRTTRTT! DRTRTRTRRTRTTT!

  “INCOMING!” Kelly and Delta let rip with their M27s – DRTRTTRTT! DRRRTRTTT!

  Only three of the attackers, all Tyros, managed to survive and find cover – DRTRTTRTT!

  Over the comms link, to the circling C-130, came the explanation: “They’re counter-attacking in a dozen places at once …”

  “Got one right here!” Kelly reported. “They’ll be diversions! Only one attack will be real! Find it!”

  DRTRTRTRRTRT!

  FEBRUARY 22 07:56 (GMT+3). Romanian-Ukrainian airspace, 3,000ft

  Commander King assessed the battle in real-time via dozens of flickering live feeds from tactical headgear. Each counter-attack had been short and aggressive, but easily repelled – all but one: the main passageway down to the library.

  DRTRTTRTT! DRTRTRTRRTRTTT!

  “Library! They’re breaking for the library!” shouted King as he saw the last of his paratroopers driven back.

  FEBRUARY 22 07:58 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki

  Kaparis, firing awkwardly from the hip, personally obliterated the last of the defending troops in the main passage – DRTRTTRTT!

  Oh, it was nice to be back on your feet.

  He had two-thirds of his force left, heavily armed and with their blood up.

  DRTRTRTRRTRT! DRTRTTRTT!

  As they approached the ancient library doors, Kaparis insisted on stumping forward to take the lead. A charge was laid.

  BANG!

  Carriers screamed as the doors flew off their hinges. Ancient pages scattered like confetti.

  Kaparis, blasted, appeared in the doorway. An icon made flesh.

  The Primo turned to face the attack. He had ordered the Carrier children to take cover in the shacks, but fear and pure excitement had brought many of the younger ones out to huddle around him.

  “WHO DARES DEFY THEIR MASTER?”

  The Primo’s blood ran cold.

  Kaparis braced his gun against his hip and fired – DRTRTRTRRTRT!

  Bullets ripped over the Carriers’ heads and they screamed and scattered. The Primo remained bolt upright on the dais. This was their sanctuary. He had failed them. Now he must take responsibility.

  “OUT, RATS! EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU!”

  How Santiago finally made it through the chaos and back to the kitchens was a mystery, but somehow he did. Narrowly avoiding being cut to pieces by a stream of fire from Yvette’s Uzis, he held up his hands to protest his innocence and galumphed across the stone floor and through the door to the ratters’ yard.

  YAP!

  Yo-yo met him with a wet kiss while the rest of the pack ran round ineffectually in yapping circles. Santiago reached into the folds of his rags and brought out a paper bag full of unsightly aged sick. Hudson sick …

  All the dogs took a good long sniff.

  Yo-yo knew the owner well – YAP!

  “Hut-sun! Aduc! Rechercher! Go!”

  As they returned in triumph to the Forum, members of Kaparis’s library raiding party grabbed an injured paratrooper in the gangways and stripped him of his hi-tech tactical helmet. It was taken to Kaparis.

  “Open a line to your Commander!” shouted Kaparis into the lens of the camera embedded in the shell of the helmet. He turned it round and gave it a good view of his adoring Tyros, his brutal Siguri, his Carrier hostages, and the Primo on his knees.

  The transmitted image was crisp and clear on Commander King’s screen in the C-130 Hercules above.

  Then Kaparis turned the helmet camera on himself.

  There he was on screen, able-bodied, his hair slicked back with blood, armed and armoured, towering over the Primo and the cowering children.

  “Commander King!” Kaparis demanded.

  “Dr Kaparis, we meet again,” said Commander King through the speaker in the helmet. “I see you are returned to health. And yet you are surrounded and your forces are defeated.”

  “My forces will fight to the last drop of blood. I demand you withdraw or I will engage in a slaughter of innocents that would make even King Herod blush.”

  He turned the helmet to let it take in the terrified Carrier children.

  King had no choice. “All units: hold your fire.”

  In moments, guns across the complex fell silent.

  Kaparis almost laughed. The great weakness of Western civilisation was assigning value to lives so obviously worth nothing.

  “What do you want, Kaparis?” asked King.

  “A holiday. Time to recuperate,” he smirked.

  “If you give yourself up now, you won’t be mistreated in any way. Your achievements are of significance. Rooms are being prepared for you in the Tower of London.”

  “Haaaaaa! Flattery! Do you really think me so shallow? Play games and their blood will be on your hands.”

  He took a killing knife from a Siguri and held its razor edge to the soft throat of the Primo, drawing a bead of blood from the surface. “And this one will be the first.”

  The Primo felt the blood trickle down his neck.

  “I want those two Chinook helicopters you have flying around outside to land on the roof of the High Chapel and be left there with their rotors running. My own people will pilot them. I want a radio and radar blackout, and if we are followed at any appreciable distance, I will start throwing Carriers from the aircraft. Do you understand? Would you like a moment to digest? You may also like to consider that I have captured Infinity Drake and Carla Salazar, and I have taken the work of Ethan Drake so far forward that, if you kill me, you will be killing the future in ways you cannot possibly understand. No one will thank you. Your pathetic organisation may attempt to persecute a genius, but humankind knows when it’s on to a good thing.”

  “Humankind enslaved by you?” said Commander King.

  “Humankind in thrall of me,” said Kaparis, beaming. “After all, I have the Boldklub sequencing equations now, as you must be well aware. And believe me, my resurrection is only the start of it!”

  Commander King digested this. World leaders digested it. Al, who had just been patched in, and who was at that moment creeping down the gangways to hook up with Delta and Kelly, also digested it.

  Meanwhile, Grandma, up at the front of the plane, popped on her reading glasses and read a communication from the Director of the Brazilian National Crime Agency, one she had urgently requested …

  “Now,” said Kaparis, “I’m going to count down slowly from ten, and if I haven’t had a positive answer by the time I get to zero, I will kill the first hostage. Then we will move on to the second, et cetera. Do you understand, Commander? Can you count, Dr Allenby? Then let us begin. Ten …”

  King put Kaparis on hold and opened a separate channel to Al.

  “What do you say, Allenby? Is what he’s saying credible?”

  “He’s just shrunk a bunch of people to a hundred thousandth of their size. So it must be.”

  “Nine …”

  “We’ve got to keep him alive,” said Al. “He’s got Finn, he’s got the kids, and he’s made some kind of breakthrough. We need to get a handle on it.”

  “Eight …”

  “As I read it,” said General Mount, “we’ve got him in the bag anyway. He can get on that aircraft, but there’s no way in the world he’s going to get far.”

  “Seven …”

  “He’s right. Two Chinooks can’t just disappear,” said General Jackman.

  “What about the radio and radar blackout?” asked the Russian president.

  “Six …”

  The NATO leaders a
ll knew top-secret “invisible” quantum radar stations had been established across Europe. “We have ways,” said King.

  “Five …”

  “He flies them to the middle of nowhere – we pounce,” said General Mount.

  “Four …”

  “But we’ll be straight into another hostage situation,” said the French president.

  “Three …”

  “We’ve all been here before; we have specialists. It may get messy, but there’s only one way this is going to end,” said the British prime minister.

  “Two …”

  “It’s a no-brainer. Give him the choppers,” agreed the US president. “There’s any number of ways we could play this out. In any of them, we win back those choppers.”

  “One …”

  Kaparis tensed the muscles of his forearm, ready to slit the Primo’s throat.

  “Zer—”

  “STOP!” said Commander King “OK. You’ve got your chop—”

  “WAIT!”

  A shout came from the front of the C-130 command aircraft. It was Grandma, who was making her way down the plane towards them. “I’ve got something!”

  Commander King hit hold. “Got what?”

  “Ondine! When she got away from Kaparis – she wasn’t mad, she was pregnant.”

  “What?” said King.

  “What?” said Al on the ground.

  “What?” said the various leaders of the free world.

  Grandma hurried down the cabin, brandishing a printout of the message she’d just read.

  “Pica! That’s what gave it away,” Grandma said. “An absolutely classic case.”

  “What do you mean, ‘pica’?”

  “Ondine wasn’t mad when she tried to escape him. She was suffering from pica. It’s a condition of pregnancy – a craving to eat the strangest things. In mild cases, coal and chalk and so on. In extreme cases, women suffer wild mood swings and even try to eat the walls.”

  “Walls?”

  “Yes! It’s something to do with the taste of plaster,” Grandma said, demanding the microphone from King, who, to his eternal credit, went with his instinct and handed it straight to her.

  “Hello? Is that you, dear?” asked Grandma.

  Kaparis shivered as he suddenly realised Violet Allenby was speaking through the helmet. Their time together in the South China Sea had not been a pleasant one, nor had it ended well.

  “Mrs Allenby, get off the li—”

  “I’ve been looking for your wife and child,” she interrupted, “and thought perhaps you could help me clear a few things up.”

  “What?” hissed Kaparis.

  “We’ve discovered medical records that confirm that a patient was treated at the Convent of the Little Sisters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2002. There, a certain ‘Maria Santos’ was treated for three months for post-natal depression and injuries sustained during childbirth.”

  “What nonsense is this? King! I demand—”

  “She disappeared from the convent on New Year’s Day 2003 under suspicious circumstances. The Brazilian authorities investigated, and it was found she’d registered under a false name. Because of a rare blood condition – to do with a panther parasite – they were able to identify her. It turns out her real name was Dr Ondine St Emmanuel de Morales.”

  Kaparis could barely speak for fury. Who would dare think him weak enough to believe such a thing … Violet Allenby was goading him.

  “The authorities believe she was murdered. But not before she gave birth to a child. Your child.”

  “I have no child!”

  “You do, even if you didn’t know about it. Your wife, I strongly suspect, was suffering from pica at the time of your accident. These hospital records show that, at some point after she escaped from you, she had your child. Then she fled to Brazil.”

  Far beneath, Al was listening in. Wow, what a mum …, he thought – and not for the first time.

  “No doubt she tried to hide it from you, so this will have come as a bit of a shock … emotionally,” suggested Grandma.

  “EMOTIONALLY?” Kaparis finally managed to roar.

  “But then, there’s never a perfect time to reveal these things, I suppose. The important thing to bear in mind here is that there is a child out there somewhere – your child, David. Ondine didn’t hate you, or want to hurt you. She was sick. You don’t need to hate, David – you have loved and been loved, and a child was born of that love. And once you have love, well, you don’t really need to rule the world.”

  There was a long pause. Al, Commander King, Grandma, the waiting world – all held their breath. Had she somehow managed to get through to him? Had she somehow managed to touch his heart?

  They could hear something … Sobbing? Was he actually sobbing?

  “Love!” laughed Kaparis in contempt, as the bubble burst and he laughed and laughed and laughed. Love? What lies! Violet Allenby had gone and overplayed her hand. If children were born of love – well then, there could be no child, as that woman – his wife – had never loved him. Any fraction of doubt he’d experienced was just Ondine reaching from beyond the grave to torment him.

  “My dear, deluded lady! I’ve never felt love in my life,” said Kaparis. “Never given it, never taken it. Power – oh yes, Ondine had power. Power to lie and wound and weave spells. Oh, she was good, was Ondine – and you are undoubtedly cut from the same cloth! Now, set the two Chinooks down on the roof, withdraw your forces to the periphery and clear the gangways. You have three minutes or I will begin the cull. That is all.”

  And with that he tossed the helmet away with a newly acquired flick of the wrist.

  King watched the spinning camera feed and it felt as if all his efforts were being tossed away.

  “Well,” he said to Grandma, “I suppose it was worth a try.”

  “Have faith, Commander,” said Grandma. “It’s not over yet.”

  “Great effort, Mum,” said Al over the comms. “But surely we’re not going to take him at his word, King?”

  “Of course not,” said Commander King. “Most likely he won’t be on those choppers. This is Kaparis we’re talking about. A man who loves games, bluff and double bluff.”

  “What games?” asked the British prime minister.

  “Well, there’s the rub,” said Commander King. “There must be another way out of that place. And we’ve got three minutes to find it.”

  “To the chapel roof!” cried Kaparis, and there was a burst of cheering, a primitive, wicked shaking of fists and a brandishing of guns – DRRRT!

  Poor fools, thought Kaparis, even as he milked their adulation.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The first Tyros, with the first of the hostage Carrier children, emerged at the door of the bell tower that led out on to the High Chapel roof. They weren’t afraid, weren’t scanning for snipers or looking for cover. They were arrogant. They were proud.

  The Chinooks clattered in to touch down before them. The air crews quickly got out. Then the Tyros and hostages poured out of the tower towards them.

  And in the middle of them was Kaparis … Hidden, covered, smuggled, just enough of a view to identify him – his head covered in blood, his Siguri breastplate, his …

  Wait a minute. Al, unable to resist, had run back up to the parapets to see for himself. As Kaparis was rushed into the back of the Chinook, he saw his head flop forward.

  There was a hole in the back of it.

  This was not Kaparis, this was some corpse.

  “Delta! Kelly!” he shouted over the comms. “It’s not him! He must be escaping! The moment those choppers are out of the way, get as far down the complex as you can. He has to be heading for the caverns.”

  At the entrance to the catacombs, Kaparis pulled on the dead Abbot’s robes and laughed as he got ready to make his escape.

  Long ago, Ondine had managed to escape from her prison in these caverns and now it was time for him to follow her lead. She could be horribly clever, and cleverly h
orrible. A combination he had found irresistible.

  Everything was ready. He had ordered the Tyros to escape with the hostages in the Chinooks, directing them to fly into the centre of Bucharest and to disperse as best they could.

  The Siguri were to hold out in the Forum for as long as possible.

  Drake was dead. The G&T defeated.

  There was just one last act to perform.

  He tightened his hold round the blind boy’s throat and continued dragging him down into the caverns with him.

  “Can you see where you’re going, boy?” he taunted, throwing the proud wretch onto the floor. “You betrayed me, you led the vipers to my den, and you shall die here, alone, in the dark, unfollowed and unmourned. Let me leave you with this one final, purest truth. Many pathetic souls inhabit this earth, and for what? To suffer and to die for their masters,” said Kaparis, drawing the knife.

  “You are not my master,” the Primo dared to gasp in the face of death. “I am my master.”

  Kaparis roared at this final insult, and drew back to strike the mortal blow …

  “I WOULDN’T DO THAT, IF I WERE YOU!”

  Kaparis froze. The voice came from inside his head …

  “HE’S YOUR SON!”

  There it was again, loud and clear. It couldn’t be … and yet it was. It was the voice of …

  Infinity Drake.

  In the Forum, the Siguri steeled themselves and checked their weapons. There were forty or so of them left. Their strategy was simple. They would turn their fire, as one, to whichever one of the dozen doorways presented an attack. Like a deadly game of Whac-A-Mole.

  They would fight to the last drop of blood, as they had been ordered.

  From the Tyro dorms, via a probe, Kelly observed the defensive set-up.

  “Whac-A-Mole,” he said. Delta nodded.

  “Henri! All units! Masks on,” Kelly ordered over the comms. “Gas attack. Stun grenades and suppressing fire. Imperative we hit them all at once.”

  “Absolument,” confirmed Henri from the kitchens.

  “Control, count us down from thirty seconds,” said Kelly.