Dark Ages
For the Glorious House of Sinanju
With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2005 by Worldwide
First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7515-6089-3
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 Warren Murphy
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
About the Authors
Chapter 1
The castle was burned to the ground.
Funny thing about that. Stone castles aren’t supposed to burn to the ground, but there was no denying that Loch Tweed Castle was reduced to ashes. The local gossip placed the blame on the late Mrs. Tweed-Smythe, who had taken to collecting newspaper clippings during the Second World War. What started as a hobby, the locals claimed, became an obsession. Mrs. Tweed-Smythe tried to keep it secret that she was filing away a copy of the newspaper, each and every day, year after year.
The locals who were employed by the late Mr. and Mrs. Tweed-Smythe reported on the unusual volume of newspapers received by the old couple. The London Times, the Peebles Shire News, plus the Edinburgh Evening News and some others. No one could explain the need for all those newspapers.
There had to have been twenty or thirty thousand daily newspapers stored in the old cellars of the castle. With that much fuel, the fire would burn on and on, until even the stone walls crumbled. It was the only reasonable explanation for the extent of the castle’s obliteration.
“So there’s no chance of finding any bones,” the locals decided as they discussed the matter endlessly. “There’s nothing left but dust.”
This made the tragedy even harder on the good people of the little Scottish village. Many of their sons and husbands and fathers—and a few wives—were driven mad during the recent troubles. They had stormed the castle, for reasons that were too foolish to believe and best left unsaid. They killed the poor old Tweed-Smythe and his helpless, daft wife, then burned the castle down around them. Nobody understood why it had happened. All they knew was that their loved ones were dead and gone, without even bones to bury.
The simple, mourning villagers were wrong. Old Mrs. Tweed-Smythe was as crazy as they came, but she didn’t hoard newspapers, and it wasn’t a stash of six decades of the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald that fueled the flames. The cause was the strategically placed phosphorus tablets. The secret researchers who worked below the castle placed the phosphorous to be sure that, if the castle burned up, it burned up real good.
The villages were also wrong about there being no bodies.
“Fuh! Christ!” The English gentleman got a face full of putrid air when he wrenched open the trapdoor. Something inside was decomposing.
The Englishman staggered away and vomited into the ashes, then rested with his hands on his knees.
This was awful. He shouldn’t have to do this kind of thing. There should be people to do it for him. All his life there were people to do it for him, whatever it was.
But he couldn’t trust anyone else, friends, family or coconspirators. Not with this. And he had to do it now, because surely some sort of a cleanup detail would be here soon to make absolutely sure the place had burned completely. Then his prize would be lost forever.
But did he have what it took? Of course he did! He was an Englishman—a true, old-fashioned, unflappable Brit.
But could he really do it?
Well, certainly. He had faced unpleasantness before and come through with flying colors. There had been the bit of murder down in Africa a few years back, and then the other bit of murder, also, coincidentally, in Africa, also a few years back. His constitution had been fully tested and hardened. Or so he had thought, until he had breathed in the fumes of the rotting corpses down there.
“You must do it, old man, or you’ll never get the empire off the ground,” he stated aloud, using his haughtiest tone. Arrogance always lifted his spirits. Arrogance was his best character trait.
He made for the trapdoor, covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief and stepped into the blackness. He felt his way down the steep emergency stairs, which had buckled from the heat, and didn’t turn on the flashlight until he reached the bottom.
After more vomiting, he picked his way among the corpses. They were charred from the initial blast, but the stone-crumbling heat had missed this place and left, more than enough human flesh to putrefy. He hoped that was a good sign. Maybe his treasure would have survived, too.
Then he saw the state of the containment boxes, the steel walls black and pitted from the heat. The things that had once been inside would be nonfunctional. Dead.
He followed the only corridor, going deep into the earth, until he came to the emergency-isolation development room. Oddly the aluminum containment chamber was open and burned. The corpse on the floor smelled to high heaven, but he wasn’t burned at all. The fire that destroyed the castle hadn’t touched this chamber, and yet the containment cell showed signs of superheating.
In the congealed blood on the floor, the Englishman found a thin crust of opaque crystal.
They had escaped, and then they were burned. Tiny crystal splotches indicated that the fleeing entities had been assassinated, one colony after another. They didn’t get far.
His worry grew, but there was still one last place to look. The drunken American—the same man who secretly removed the phosphorus incendiaries from this wing of the laboratory—had provided him with this secret.
By virtue of his renowned patriotism, unquestioned loyalty and distance from London politics, the Englishman had been asked to lead a security probe into assorted secret projects. That was how he found out about the secret work at Loch-Tweed Castle. It was a joint American and British weapons-development effort. Those very few British who were aware of the project were worried about the security measures at the laboratory.