by Tom Slemen
Quarrenden rose from the table and was heading for the door of Starbucks when he heard the two Heckler & Koch cracks. He saw Luke Mathews recoiling backwards from the shots with blood spraying from the two exit wounds in his shoulder blades and neck. Luke fell onto his backside then flopped onto his back with a thud and lay on the cold macadam with the hi-tech gun still held tightly in his hand. Quarrenden ran to his aid, and the police screamed at him to stay away from the body, but Quarrenden swore at the advancing armed policemen and as they loomed over him with their weapons in his face, he said, ‘Intelligence! Q-11!”
As the officers exchanged tense glances, Quarrenden slowly took out his ‘badge’ and handed it to one of the cops, who each looked at the warrant card’s hologram closely for a few moments. Quarrenden shook his head after detecting no carotid pulse in his friend’s neck. He lifted his eyelids. He was gone.
‘Sorry sir,’ said the policeman, and when he had handed the card back to Quarrenden, he said: ‘Who is he sir?’
‘A friend,’ Quarrenden said, ‘he was a friend,’ and he looked up and scanned the crowds of sensation-seekers and necrophiliacs standing outside the building society. One grinning bystander held out his iPhone to video the robber’s brains sliding down the building society’s window. ‘Where’s that boy gone?’ Quarrenden asked. The blond child was nowhere to be seen.
‘Why was he trying to kill that kid – ‘ the policeman asked, and his sentence trailed off as he saw that the child in question had left the scene.
‘I don’t know,’ Quarrenden said, and he removed Luke’s wallet and the special neutrino-modulated N-phone all agents were issued with, and put his dead friend’s Gauss 89 in his pocket. Two arriving ambulances and a police squad car drowned out the rest of the attempted conversation with their screaming sirens.
The subterranean citadel was known as Undercity and ‘the sewers’ and a few other derogatory nicknames, but its official title was, surprisingly, just: The City – with no hexadecimal classification codes or abbreviations. Constructed in secrecy at a cost of nine-hundred million pounds in the 1990s, this vast square complex – built to withstand a nuclear attack – lies over 500 feet below the pavements of London, and stretches from Buckingham Palace to Holborn Viaduct on one side, and Camden Town and Maida Vale on the other, and it even has its own transport system in the form of electromagnetically-suspended bullet-shaped vehicles nicknamed ‘cabs’ by the subterraneans who work down there. There is even a nuclear-powered maglev train system which runs on a secret infra-underground national tube network to the five other subterranean cities of mainland Britain. One maglev line even runs (mostly silently) through the unpublicised tunnel that exists under the Channel Tunnel, connecting The City with Medusa, The City’s French counterpart far beneath the Catacombs of Paris. How does one travel to The City? Well, if you know where to look in and around London, you will see some seemingly mundane buildings which provide elevator access to this hidden world; a certain electricity substation that has lain unused for years in Clerkenwell, several basement flats in Bloomsbury, Soho, and Finsbury, a public toilet that is forever out of order off Farringdon Road, and even a mock tomb covered in ivy and knotweed in a lonely section of Highgate Cemetery are just some of the disguised access points, but most of them are to be found in the two-and-a-quarter square miles of streets that cover London’s greatest secret.
Quarrenden sat before the desk of the Controller of The City, a steely-eyed silver-haired man, who began to fill him in on the whys and wherefores of Luke’s death.
‘The blond boy Matthews was trying to kill was not what you think,’ Controller began, and he clicked the mouse of his computer so the other side of his wafer-flat monitor showed the agent what was being shown on the side facing his boss – a collection of CCTV footage of the last minutes of Luke Matthews’s life, captured by several police traffic cameras on Oxford Street. The Controller continued his intriguing and unsettling narrative as Quarrenden watched the footage. ‘That boy has an enormous IQ, and although he looks like a normal human child, he is far from it. He’s part of an emerging race that’s set to take over from us.’
‘I’m not following this, sir,’ Quarrenden confessed.
Controller cleared his voice, then reclined back in his chair with his palms pressed together as he looked at the ceiling. ‘Okay. Before humans arrived on the scene, there was a race of people known as – I don’t know – weren’t they Cro Magnons or something like that?’
Quarrenden raised his eyebrows and pulled his mouth down in a comical frown as he shrugged.
Controller continued: ‘Anyway. Then, um, Homo Sapiens – the race you and I belong to - arrived and took over the planet. That boy belongs to a new race that’s going to take over from us in what has been projected as less than thirty years. They’re appearing all over the world. We’re not sure whether they’re just the next step in human evolution or whether someone has been tampering with the human genome. We did think it was a certain foreign power behind it but now we know that isn’t the case. At one point we also thought Strontium 90, which went into the atmosphere after the nuclear tests in the fifties and sixties, was to blame for somehow altering the genes, but computer simulations have disproved that theory as well.’
‘Was that child actually dangerous enough for Luke Matthews to try and kill him?’ Quarrended asked, and he felt as if he wasn’t ready for the answer yet.
‘Absolutely I’m afraid,’ Controller said, and he gritted his teeth then nodded his head. ‘Do you remember that case a while ago, where three nuclear scientists committed suicide within days of one another?’
‘Yes, sir, the Warminster Suicides – as the Press called it,’ Quarrenden recalled.
‘We are almost certain it was him,’ Controller said, ‘pausing the recording and pointing the arrow of his mouse cursor at the blond head of the boy in the frozen footage.’
‘How?’ Quarrenden wondered out loud.
‘They have some form of powerful ESP, and they can sometimes hypnotise a person within a specific range, usually a quarter of a mile, and if several of these kids concentrate together, the distance can be increased. I was talking to Dr Klein about this before, and he thinks the neurons of these children are completely superior to the architecture of the ones in the human brain.’
‘So Matthews must have had a good reason to try and kill – him?’ Quarrenden nodded to the boy on the monitor.
‘That terrible blaze at Blackledge’s Hotel in the West End, the day before the shooting was caused by that boy. A baby and five people died in that fire. Matthews had been staying at the hotel on a failed reconnaissance mission. He believed the boy lived in Belgravia, but we still don’t know where he’s from. We’re starting to think he can teleport himself about. CCTV cameras across London simply cannot tell us. He’s there one minute then – well look – ‘ Controller ran the footage, and Quarrenden saw himself come onto the screen and crouch by his dead friend. As the armed response officers came over to him, the blond boy seemed to literally vanish into the crowd of bystanders. Controller zoomed in and replayed the now grainer footage, but Quarrenden could plainly see that the boy had apparently vanished into thin air.
‘This is probably the strangest case – I – I mean it’s just – ‘ Quarrenden was lost for words.
Controller closed his eyes, nodded, and said: ‘That incident last year, when the Prime Minister’s top bodyguard tried to shoot him – ‘
Quarrenden recalled the incident clearly. The PM, Aadi Singh received a shot in the shoulder during a televised conference when his own bodyguard, Paul Lance, suddenly opened fire on him, but was shot dead by another bodyguard of the prime minister. Everyone who had known Lance had been completely shocked, as he had a stellar record and had recently received the MBE for his services.
‘Him again,’ a painful smile broke on the Controller’s face as he eyed the blond child on the monitor as the footage ran in reverse. ‘He is actually in the crowd, clear as day,
grinning as Lance opens fire.’
‘How are we going to deal with this threat?’ Quarrenden asked, grasping the unprecedented complexity of the assignment at hand. ‘Is he part of a group or is he working alone? How many of these – things – are there?’
‘He’s not working alone. We think he’s in telepathic communication with a few others across London, and three on the Continent. There’s a definite cell in Japan, and we know they’re in Russia, Australia and the United States. The only way we can stop them is by killing them. Harsh I know, but we can’t risk wounding them or incapacitating them. They have no conscience whatsoever and no regard for life.’
‘I take it you want me to track Blond Boy down, and – ‘Quarrenden hesitated. He felt sick at the thought of killing a child – even a psychopathic one who was set to supersede the human race.
‘That terrorist attack on Canary Wharf five years ago wasn’t the work of the terrorists we blamed,’ Quarrenden suddenly divulged. ‘It was Blond Boy’s race – just three of them.’
Quarrenden looked on in stunned silence. In his mind's eye he saw the shocking images of the airliner flying down into the One Canada Square skyscraper and the billowing cloud of flame…over two thousand had died in that attack.
‘There were no terrorists on Flight 17,’ Controller admitted in a low sombre sounding voice. ‘They made the pilot veer into the Canary Wharf building; the three of them were among the plane-spotters at Heathrow that morning. We have dependable intelligence that seems to suggest a similar attack on Shard London Bridge will possibly be attempted in the near future.’
A question immediately sprung to Quarrenden’s mind: ‘Did Luke Matthews miss – or did Blond Boy somehow manipulate – deflect the bullets?’
‘We think he – and his peers – use telekinesis – something along those lines, anyway – to deflect the bullets, so the people over in The Lab have come up with this – ‘ Controller quickly pressed a succession of numbers on the keypad of his desk drawer and that drawer opened silently, and from it he took a gun with an elongated barrel that resembled a silencer. ‘This fires an intense beam of particles that telekinetics can’t deflect that well. A few powerful Russian telekinetics have helped us develop this thing. If Matthews had used this yesterday he’d probably be alive now. It only arrived today, and its ready to be tested in the field. It’s for you.’
Quarrenden reached out and carefully took the weapon from the Controller’s grasp. The gun felt so light. ‘How’s it powered?’ the agent queried, aiming the barrel at the floor and keeping his finger well away from the trigger as he studied the safety-catch mechanism.
‘The usual laser-battery fusion cell,’ Controller replied. ‘Has a range of just thirty metres and you only get three shots with it I’m afraid. It is just a prototype.’
‘Same effect as a laser, or more penetrative?’ Quarrenden inquired.
Controller shook his head. ‘The beam is entangled with a mild form of antimatter, so when it hits our, um, target, he’ll just disintegrate, like that Russian dissident Litken.’ And Controller gave a sinister smile as he mentioned the Russian’s name.
‘Ah, so that’s why he “spontaneously combusted” on Waterloo Bridge…’ Quarrenden realised. The New Age Internet nuts had always maintained that Alexander Litken had been murdered by someone in the Illuminati who knew how to induce Spontaneous Human Combustion – and for once they had been so close to the truth.
And so the intense training began. Quarrenden told his wife Penny and 5-year-old son Jacob he’d be working away on one of those long shifts for a fortnight, but when he returned they’d all go on a nice long holiday to Gran Canaria. And so the six-day day intensive-training programme commenced with daily three-hour-session in an advanced computerised holographic simulation of the streets of London. Quarrenden surpassed the expectations of his trainers and the military psychologist Dr Klein. In every simulated situation, Quarrenden vaporised the Blond Boy. At the end of the training, Quarrenden was suspended in a sensory deprivation unit wearing a helmet lined with electrodes. It was time to sharpen up his consciousness and implant subliminal firewalls to insulate his thoughts from the Ultras – the ad hoc name of the Blond Boy’s race. And then they pumped Quarrenden’s bloodstream with the psychostimulant Methylphenidate-84 to sharpen his nervous system to well beyond its normal peak.
Quarrenden was assigned to the same district of London that Luke Matthews had patrolled – Belgravia - and on the third day, the hyper-focused agent could not believe his luck. He was walking up Grosvenor Crescent from Belgrave Square at 4pm, and it was a warm and pleasant afternoon. About forty yards ahead was the boy he had to kill, riding a micro kick scooter away from him. The ultra stopped to look back twice, and it was plain he knew he was being followed, and Quarrenden’s face remained expressionless as he slowly walked behind Blond Boy, keeping a safe distance between himself and his prey. Where had the child come from? Was his parents about? Quarrenden looked around; not another adult was about - except for two policemen walking towards him and the boy in the distance; not the type of people you want as witnesses in this unusual assignment, Quarrenden immediately thought. The policemen passed the boy and from the thick shadows under the peaks of their hats, the officers looked at Quarrenden, but he glanced down at the pavement for a moment, and when he looked up, the child and his scooter had vanished. Quarrenden could feel his heart palpitating as he looked about and slowed his pace. He suddenly had an overwhelming urge to take the particle-beam gun from his vest holster and put its barrel in his mouth. ‘You do not do what others wish,’ said Dr Klein’s hypnotically soothing voice, echoing in Quarrenden’s mind. The neurolinguistic firewall was working, and the agent felt the suicidal urge pass off. He kept walking, knowing full well that Blond Boy was watching from somewhere, ready to try another deadly trick, and when Quarrenden reached the entrance of Hyde Park, he passed a man sitting on a bench reading a tabloid, and the front page story was all about the killing of Luke Matthews by the armed response officers, and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the unfortunate child who had been chased by the agent. ‘If they only knew,’ Quarrenden muttered to himself, and he walked through the arches into the park, and about forty minutes later, he found himself walking across Serpentine Bridge, overlooking the artificial lake. Quarrenden halted and looked towards the north west – to the stretch of river known as The Long Water, which coursed through Kensington Gardens, and he knew this part of the park well, because his mother often took him here as a child to see the Peter Pan statue which lay just over three hundred yards away, nestled in a leafy glade on the west bank.
What am I doing? Quarrenden realised he’d let his attention wander; how foolish, and yet how ironic to be dwelling on childhood and Peter Pan when he had a child to exterminate. He suddenly felt the urge to look in the opposite direction, and there he was standing on the other side of the road. He’d rested his little scooter against the balustrades of the bridge wall, and was standing there gazing intently at the agent.
This was the moment he’d been honed to seek. There were only three people in the vicinity and all of them more than a hundred yards away and only a single car on the bridge, passing by as Quarrenden took the particle-beam gun from the holster inside his jacket. He aimed the long bulky barrel at the child and a green LED flashed on the top of the gun to confirm that the target was locked on. Blond Boy held out both palms, and Quarrenden felt something of immense power trying to yank the high-powered weapon from his hand. A needle thin beam of bright blue light sizzled as it left the barrel and missed the boy by a couple of feet. The wall behind him vanished in a flash of light, and a huge cloud of vaporized stone rose into the clear blue sky. A car screeched to a halt at the surreal but frightening sight, and a gaggle of people further down the bridge stopped dead in their tracks as they beheld the strange destruction. Quarrenden leaned forward, and tried to aim the gun but it was like some tug of war between him and an invisible rugby squad. The boy threw his h
ead back and laughed, and then he pointed the index finger of his left hand at Quarrenden, and the agent heard a rumbling sound behind him. Tourists and locals alike screamed, and some ran as the waters of the Serpentine rose into the air as if being sucked up by some tornado. A spinning column of grey-green water approached Quarrenden from behind. He quickly took another shot, and the beam missed, and instead vaporised a clump of old trees in the distance. Within a flash the antimatter entangled in the beam had destroyed the trees and left nothing behind but smouldering holes of earth. Blond Boy let loose a series of swear-words and shrieked with laughter. The column of water was almost upon Quarrenden now, and he had one final shot left.
He aimed the gun – and this time the green target-locking indicator didn’t even blink on, but there was no time to get the boy squarely in the sights. The beam hit a passing hackney cab, and it burst into a fireball – and then it veered towards the left in the process of subatomic annihilation, hitting Blond Boy squarely – and as the blazing taxi hit the child, it flashed out of existence along with its driver – and the antimatter destroyed everything touching the sizzling vehicle – and that included part of the road, and the waters of the Serpentine. And then came an explosion as the waterspout crashed into Quarrenden, knocking him out cold.
He awoke to see a huge round parabolic dish with a blinding light in the middle. He squinted at the halogen supernova and a familiar voice said, ‘Quarrenden, are you okay?’
