The Case of the Vanished Sea Dragon

by Gareth P. Jones

  Chapter Twenty

  Dirk pushed the tip of his smallest claw into the keyhole and jiggled it about. Picking locks was a fiddly business. Eventually he heard the click of the drawer being unlocked, but, before he could grab the book, the door burst open and Holly entered.

  ‘Hide,’ she whispered. ‘Buchanan’s coming. There’s no time to get out.’

  She ran to the side of the couch. Dirk dived into the corner by the desk. They both blended with their surroundings as the door opened.

  From his position on the floor, Dirk watched Brant Buchanan cross the room. He placed the silver case on the desk, pulled up a chair and sat down. Through the glass, Dirk could read three letters on the base of the silver case;A, O and G.

  ‘Hello, this is Hamish Fraser on security.’ The voice came through the intercom.

  ‘Yes, Hamish,’ replied Buchanan.

  ‘Is everything all right up there, Mr Buchanan, sir? The security cameras are out.’

  ‘Everything’s fine, thank you.’

  ‘Right, then. Sorry to bother you.’

  Buchanan pulled open the desk drawer and lifted out the red book with the white zigzag on the cover. He failed to notice that it should have been locked.

  For a few moments they all sat in silence while Buchanan flicked through the book. The door opened and Dirk saw a man dressed in grey enter the room.

  ‘Ah, Weaver, listen to this,’ said Buchanan. ‘“Snow Dragons are one of the biggest challenges to a dragon-spotter”,’ he read aloud. ‘“Not only do they live in the furthermost regions of Antarctica but, being both white-bellied and white-backed, they are incredibly well camouflaged. If you are lucky and do get close enough to see one in detail you will notice that the underbelly is covered in a very fine fur. This provides excellent insulation against the cold.”’

  ‘Very interesting, sir,’ said Weaver, sounding not at all interested.

  ‘A white furry dragon, how sweet,’ said Buchanan.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you believe in dragons when you were a child, Weaver?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t remember, sir.’

  ‘I did. It sounds stupid but I believed that the world was full of dragons. Only they were in hiding, waiting for the right time to attack us. The funny thing was, I wasn’t scared. Do you know why?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Weaver sounding like he didn’t care either.

  ‘Because for some reason I believed they would destroy everyone except for me.’

  ‘We all think stupid things as children, sir,’ said Weaver. ‘Can we deal with the matter in hand now?’

  ‘It’s always work work work with you, Weaver,’ sighed Buchanan, smiling.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. But don’t you think this is more important than fairy stories about made-up creatures.’

  ‘As usual, you are completely right,’ admitted his boss. ‘Show me how this thing works.’

  Weaver reached over the desk, his grey shoes stepping dangerously close to Dirk’s nose, and pressed buttons on either side of the silver case. It opened but Dirk couldn’t see what it said on the screen.

  ‘Normally it requires the Prime Minister’s DNA authentication to operate,’ Weaver said, ‘but fortunately because of the recent government change we have acquired it during a handover period.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Anyone who knows how to use it can operate it.’

  ‘And do we know how to use it?’ Buchanan asked.

  ‘Luckily, it came with instructions.’ Weaver smiled and dropped a pamphlet on the desk.

  Dirk read the cover:

  AOG PROJECT

  NAPOW TECHNOLOGY

  THE VE 6.2 OPERATING MANUAL

  TOP SECRET

  ‘How very considerate of our friends in the Ministry of Defence,’ said Buchanan.

  ‘Ah’m sorry to bother you again, sir.’ The security guard’s voice came again from the intercom. ‘You’ve got a visitor. Mr Malcolm Bigsby.’

  ‘Thank you, send him up,’ replied the billionaire.

  ‘Are you sure this is wise? We barely know him,’ said Weaver, pacing anxiously.

  ‘Relax. He’s on the payroll. He’s one of us now,’ said Buchanan.

  The door opened and Holly’s dad entered.

  ‘Ah, Malcolm,’ said Buchanan in a welcoming tone. ‘Look what we have here.’

  Mr Bigsby looked at the silver case on the desk. ‘But … but,’ he stammered. ‘But how did you steal it so quickly?’

  ‘I don’t like the word steal. The word I prefer is acquire, and I don’t want you to get bogged down in the details of how we acquired it. The fact is we have what we want and it’s all thanks to you.’

  ‘You promised no one would get hurt?’ said Mr Bigsby, sounding nervous.

  ‘What do you take me for, a monster?’

  ‘But the Ministry will be looking for it, won’t they?’

  Mr Buchanan laughed. ‘Malcolm, you should know yourself that when something as top secret as this goes missing usual procedure is to deny that it exists at all. Looking for it draws too much attention.’

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ admitted Mr Bigsby.

  Buchanan turned to Weaver. ‘By the way, Weaver, good thinking knocking the security cameras out. You can’t be too careful.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything to the cameras,’ said Weaver, a sharp edge of anxiety in his voice.

  ‘But Hamish said that they were …’ Buchanan stopped mid-flow.

  ‘You should get out of here,’ said Weaver urgently. ‘I’ll do a proper sweep of the building, but you need to leave immediately.’ Dirk could tell from his tone that this was an order not a request.

  ‘You worry too much, Weaver. It’s probably just a glitch. You know what technology is like, even our own.’

  ‘All the same. Please, sir,’ said Weaver firmly.

  ‘All right. Come on, Malcolm, we’ll give you a lift home?’ said Buchanan, standing up. ‘We can discuss your role at Global Sands on the way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mr Bigsby.

  Weaver picked up the silver case and hurried the two men out.

  Two and a half minutes later, with his boss safe in the Bentley, Weaver returned to the office. Systematically he checked each camera. The red lights were on, which meant there was no fault with the equipment itself. He searched the room and discovered a small black sphere about the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and inspected it.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said to himself, dropping it into his pocket.

  He walked to the desk and noticed that the instructions for the VE 6.2 and the red book with the white zigzag were no longer there.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said, dropping to his knees and inspecting the floor. He found an area where the thick green carpet had been flattened. He jumped up with his arms outstretched and knocked the ceiling tile away. Where there should have been solid roof, there was a hole revealing the evening sky.

  Weaver grabbed the chair from behind the desk, placed it below the hole and used it to climb out on to the roof. He scanned the rooftops and streets for any sign of the intruder, but whoever it was had gone. He looked closely at the jagged piece of roof that had been cut away.

  ‘Extremely interesting,’ he said, dropping back down into the office.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dirk stopped a couple of streets from his office on the flat roof of a Chinese takeaway, which had a good view of his window. The light was on and the blinds were pulled down.

  ‘Aren’t we going in?’ asked Holly.

  ‘No, Alba will freak out if she sees you. And don’t you want to know what that silver case does first?’

  Holly slipped off his back and opened the instructions for the VE 6.2, reading them out loud. ‘“The VE 6 dot 2 is the latest weapon to come from the AOG project.VE stands for Volcano Erupter. It uses the same sonar technology as the QC3000 to cause any targeted volcano in the world to suddenly erupt regardless of how dormant it is believed
to be.”’

  ‘Another triumph for the AOG project,’ said Dirk grimly.

  ‘Why would anyone want a volcano to erupt?’ asked Holly.

  ‘Nature’s weapons are the most powerful,’ said Dirk. ‘Volcanoes can wipe out entire cities; they can destabilise economies, not to mention the confusion and fear they create. And unlike conventional attacks, there’s no one to retaliate against.’

  ‘At least we have the instructions,’ said Holly.

  ‘True,’ agreed Dirk. ‘Now for Sky Dragons.’

  He pulled out the copy of Dragonlore and turned to the chapter on Sky dragons, flicking quickly through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Holly put her arm around his neck and read it too.

  In spite of keeping their distance from other dragons, Sky Dragons often travel in vast herds, communicating with each other using a type of telepathy beyond the reach of other dragons.

  A keen dragon-spotter might find interesting the theory put forward by some experts that if another dragon were to spit liquid fire from the earth’s Outer Core directly into the heart of a sublimated Sky Dragon it would be forced to materialise, similar to injecting a shot of adrenaline into a human heart to revive a man.

  ‘I should take you home,’ said Dirk.

  ‘Can’t I come in and meet Alba?’ asked Holly.

  ‘Sorry, Holly, this is dragon business. Besides, Alba’s never come face to face with a human being.’

  ‘Dirk, look!’ exclaimed Holly, pointing to his office window, where the blinds were now up and there was a large shadow blocking the light. The shadow shifted and a Sea Dragon jumped out of the window, landing on the roof across the road, knocking off a satellite dish, sending it rolling down then smashing to the ground.

  ‘Rats at a disco,’ groaned Dirk. ‘It’s Alba. What’s she up to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Holly, ‘but I think she may have come face to face with a human being now.’

  On Alba’s back, arms around her neck, was a blond boy. Holly recognised him at once.

  ‘It’s Archie,’ she said.

  ‘Your new friend?’ replied Dirk, surprising himself with how jealous he sounded.

  ‘Yeah, but how …’ started Holly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ interrupted Dirk, ‘but they seem to be in a hurry. Come on.’

  Following Alba, Dirk had to work extra hard to avoid being seen by all the Londoners trying to work out why their aerials and chimney tops had suddenly decided to fly off their roofs.

  Alba eventually came to a standstill on the corrugated roof of a hut inside a yard full of beaten-up old cars. Dirk stopped on a nearby factory, keeping his distance. He looked around for an indication of where they were. On the side of a red-brick wall was a grubby street sign. Dirk read it.

  ‘Now that is interesting,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’ asked Holly.

  ‘This street. It’s Old Ford Street,’ said Dirk.

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Holly.

  ‘Neither had I until Alba asked me where it was. I thought she meant Oxford Street. Something’s going on and I don’t like it. Not one bit.’

  Archie had knocked on Holly’s door every day since Saturday, but every day her dad’s big-haired wife had turned him away.

  ‘She won’t be seeing anybody,’ she would say. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, dabbling in grownup matters you don’t understand.’ Then she would slam the door in his face.

  Archie didn’t want to go back to his usual bunch of friends, hanging around the estate, complaining they were bored and trying to avoid being beaten up by the bigger kids. His day with Holly had been much more exciting.

  After being told yet again by Big Hair to stop bothering her, Archie had gone to a sweetshop near Holly’s house to restock on jelly beans. He stood outside, wondering what to do next. He opened the fresh packet, threw a jelly bean into his mouth and emptied the rest straight into his pockets, idly looking at the adverts on cards in the shop window. Amongst the usual ones for house cleaners, flats to rent and trombone lessons, one caught his eye. It read:

  THE DRAGON DETECTIVE AGENCY

  ALL CASES DEALT WITH

  CONFIDENTIALLY AND WITH ALL DUE

  DISCRETION

  At the bottom of the advert was a phone number. Archie committed it to memory and ran to the nearest phone box. Having spent his only money on sweets he didn’t have any change, so he called the freephone number for the telephone company.

  He got through to a customer care agent, who introduced herself as Paula and asked how she could help.

  Archie put on a deep voice and said, ‘Yes, I’m phoning to report a fault on a line.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Is it the line you’re calling from?’

  ‘No, this is a phone box,’ he said, reciting the telephone number for the Dragon Detective Agency.

  Paula typed it into her computer and said, ‘Can you confirm the address for that number?’

  Archie held up the empty jelly-bean packet and scrunched it by the receiver as he pretended to give his address.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Paula. ‘I didn’t get that.’

  Archie spoke a second time, again making it impossible to hear what he was saying with the sweet packet.

  Paula asked once more but Archie did the same.

  ‘I tell you what,’ she said, getting frustrated, ‘I’ll read your address out and you tell me if that’s right.’

  ‘OK,’ said Archie, smiling. He confirmed the address, put the phone down and jumped on a bus, which took him to the same house he had watched Holly enter a few days previously. He rang the bell and the white-haired old lady answered it.

  ‘Hi, my name’s Archie. I’m a friend of Holly’s,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to see Mr Dilly.’

  ‘I had a budgie called Archie once,’ said the old lady irrelevantly. ‘Is it short for anything?’

  ‘Er … no,’ replied Archie, thrown by this.

  ‘My Ivor used to tell people his name was short for Ivordoodledandy. At parties after he’d had a bit too much to drink he used to swear blind that that was his name and just as he got someone to believe him, he’d admit he was joking. He was a silly man,’ she chuckled.

  ‘Is Mr Dilly in?’ asked Archie, unsure how to respond to this story.

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ she said.

  Upstairs a loud CRASH rocked the whole building.

  ‘Although I could be wrong,’ she added, with a little wink. ‘Let’s go and see. Holly’s told you about Mr Dilly, has she?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’re best friends; we don’t have any secrets,’ Archie said, following her upstairs.

  ‘Mr Dilly,’ she called, knocking on the door. ‘Are you in, Mr Dilly?’

  There was a pause then a female voice with a heavy foreign accent said, ‘I am not in, Mr Dilly is not in, there is no one here.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Alba recoiled in fear as the handle turned and she watched the door open. She tried to hide under the desk but, in her hurry, missed and whacked her head against the corner.

  ‘Ouch!’ She rubbed her head and found herself staring at two humans; an elderly female and a young male. The elderly female was smiling but the young male was staring, utterly gobsmacked.

  ‘A … a dragon,’ stammered Archie, ‘a real live dragon.’

  ‘Actually, to be precise, she’s a grey-backed, blue-bellied Sea Dragon,’ said Mrs Klingerflim. ‘Aren’t you, dear?’

  ‘You are humanos, I am breaching the forbidden divide,’ wailed Alba, trying to hide behind a newspaper but accidentally tearing it in two.

  ‘Ivor and I used to spot Sea Dragons off the coast of Wales,’ said Mrs Klingerflim fondly. ‘You’re Spanish, though, are you?’

  ‘You knew there was a dragon in your house?’ said Archie, looking at the old lady with as much astonishment as he had looked at Alba.

  ‘Oh yes, but I didn’t know there was a Sea Dragon,’ she said, approaching Alba to insp
ect her more closely. ‘Do you mind if I feel your back?’

  ‘Stay away from me,’ said Alba, edging backwards.

  Mrs Klingerflim stroked Alba’s tail and said, ‘I’d say you’ve been out of the sea for a week or so. Am I right?’

  ‘How is a humano knowing so much about our kind,’ said Alba accusingly.

  ‘My dear Ivor used to love Sea Dragons,’ she replied. ‘Sky Dragons have always been my favourite.’

  ‘You know about Sky Dragons?’

  ‘Oh yes, Ivor hated not being able to see them properly but that just made them more interesting to me. In fact I ended up writing the chapter on them.’

  ‘Do you know how I could be finding one?’ asked Alba.

  ‘Well, you could always try summoning it?’ said Mrs Klingerflim.

  ‘How can I be doing this?’

  ‘As I recall, you have to spit liquid fire from the Outer Core into a sublimated Sky Dragon’s heart. Sounds like a terrible to-do, to me.’

  Alba tilted her head to one side, digesting what she was being told. ‘This really works?’ she said.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know for sure. Ivor used to tease me, saying it was just an old dragon’s tale, but I believe it,’ said Mrs Klingerflim. ‘I’ve never had the chance to test it. You can’t exactly buy liquid fire over the counter from Tesco’s.’

  ‘I do not know what is Tesco’s but I must be going now,’ Alba said, pulling up the blinds in front of the window. ‘Do you know which direction I could find a humano place called Old Ford Street?’

  ‘Old Ford Street? I’m afraid I don’t know it,’ said Mrs Klingerflim.

  ‘Old Ford Street in Deptford?’ said Archie, finally recovering from the shock of seeing a dragon. ‘I know where it is; my dad used to have a business down there.’

  ‘Where can I be finding number one hundred and seventy-six Old Ford Street?’ asked Alba.

  ‘I could show you,’ he said. ‘I could ride on your back.’

  ‘It would be very bad to carry a humano,’ said Alba nervously.