‘Not so smart now, is he?’ the acne-scarred Grieg said. Hunter could see that he was considering giving Mallory’s prone form a kick.
‘You won’t be so smart when I give my report to the General.’ Hunter stared out of the window, past the blizzard of white towards the glittering lights of Oxford in the sea of darkness below.
‘I had no choice-’
‘There’s always a choice. One of the targets is dead. The other is next to useless now. You’ve ruined the mission.’
‘What use is he, anyway?’
Hunter turned to him. ‘If you had a brain, Grieg, you’d be halfway to being dangerous. As it is, you’re just a psycho who shouldn’t be let near loaded weapons. You were tooled up and ready to kill something the moment you came out of the briefing.’
‘He just wanted to hit back at something, Chief.’ Porter, the one Mallory had knocked down the helicopter, sat nursing an aching jaw. ‘You can understand that, after all the losses we took during the Fall.’
Hunter nodded to Mallory. ‘He might be the only chance we’ve got to hit back. At the Fall, we lost every battle we engaged in — we didn’t even have the weapons to make it a competition. That means we have to be especially clever now, use whatever resources really work. Fight back with the new rules, not the ones we impose on ourselves. The attitude of this idiot here-’ Hunter jerked a thumb at Grieg ‘-is just going to mark us up for extinction. The new dinosaurs, lumbering around till we’re just fossils.’
Hunter turned back to the window. At times like this he was ready to quit. He’d never felt as if he really fitted in, couldn’t remember how he had ended up in the job in the first place. All his performance reviews noted his attitude problem, inability to follow orders and blatant disregard for authority. Yet somehow he kept rising through the ranks. Before the Fall it had been bad enough, with every request for a transfer refused. Now he couldn’t get out if he wanted to.
The helicopter came down in the Deer Park. Hunter climbed out beneath the thundering blades, with his men carrying Mallory on a stretcher behind. A cluster of people were silhouetted against the bright lights of Magdalen.
He motioned for the men to take Mallory straight down to a holding cell where the medics could check him over and then sauntered as nonchalantly as he could manage in the direction of the crowd. The snow was already starting to settle on the grass.
Running to meet him was Reid and two of the shifty, faceless men who populated his department. He stopped the stretcher and briefly searched Mallory before hurrying up to Hunter.
‘Weapon?’ he barked.
‘What’s this? A word-association game? If so, I’ll say “penis”. A big one.’
‘Did he have a weapon?’ There was a flush of excitement in Reid’s cheeks that made him oblivious to Hunter’s attempt to rile him. Hunter didn’t like the look of it.
‘A sword. In the chopper. There we go again with the word association. That Freud bloke really had it sorted, didn’t he?’
‘I’m taking it down to my department for tests, if you want to mark that in your report.’
‘There’s a stone in there, too. Makes pretty pictures in the air.’
Reid had dived into the chopper before Hunter had time to say anything else.
The General came up next, accompanied by a small coterie of serious-faced advisors. ‘What does he want?’ he asked suspiciously, peering after Reid.
‘Typical spook-looting.’
The General nodded. ‘Leave the chopper here. You’ve got forty-five minutes for debriefing and to grab a bite and then we’re off again.’
‘Trouble?’
‘We’ll see.’ The General marched away into the snowstorm with his coterie hurrying behind him like a gaggle of geese. Hunter watched them go, strangely unnerved; and his instincts never let him down.
When he turned back to the helicopter, Hal was standing beside him. ‘Bloody hell, will you stop creeping up on me?’
‘We need to talk,’ Hal said.
Hunter walked quickly, forcing Hal to skip to keep up; it was a game Hunter liked to play. ‘You’re like a bloody ghost. Natural stealth abilities. You should be doing this job instead of pushing paper around an in-tray or whatever it is you do to waste your time.’
‘Something’s up.’
‘There’s always something up.’ Hunter noted the concerned tone in Hal’s voice and relented. ‘What’s wrong?’ It was the first time he had looked his friend full in the face and he was surprised to see the depth of the worry there. ‘All right,’ Hunter said. ‘If you don’t mind watching me shovel food into my face, you can talk while I eat.’
Hunter and Hal sat alone in a corner of a sprawling refectory once used by students. Hunter listlessly played with a plate of cold lamb and mashed potatoes while he listened to Hal relate the pieces of the information he had started to put together.
Afterwards, Hunter said, ‘The mission I’ve just been on was to Cadbury Hill. Old stories say it was the site of Camelot. All rubbish of course, but…’ He took a mouthful of potatoes and grimaced as he swallowed. ‘They can never get the bloody lumps out. But… it’s a hell of a coincidence,’ he finished.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t bloody know, mate, but I’ll tell you this: that Caretaker bloke didn’t choose you at random.’
Hal put his head in his hands and thought for a long moment. ‘I don’t want this. I went straight from university into the MoD for a quiet life — shuffle a few files, eventually carry the odd ministerial briefcase.’ When he raised his head, the look Hunter had seen earlier had grown even more intense. ‘You can sum up my life in two words: nothing happened. And that’s just the way I like it. Safe. Secure. No risks attached. What’s gone wrong?’
‘You know what they say: if you’re not living, you’re dying. Maybe this is just what you need.’
‘Like hell.’ Hal thought for another moment and then said, ‘What do I do? Go to the General-’
‘No chance,’ Hunter said vehemently. ‘Never trust anyone in power. Haven’t you learned anything while you’ve been working here? They’ll either lock you up in one of their little cells while they investigate you — for three or four years — or they’ll bang you up for being a potential traitor.’
‘Well, I’m not supposed to deal with this myself, am I? I’m not you, the man who’s seen every country in the world-’
‘And shagged all the women and drunk all the booze.’ He tapped his belly. ‘Getting close to eating all the pies, too. Listen, you can do anything you want. You’re in charge of your life.’
Hal shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Look, you’re not in this alone. I’m here. We can figure this out together. When I get back from my little jaunt with the General, we’ll have a chin-wag, put two and two together… there’s an answer somewhere.’
‘The Caretaker said something was coming. That we’d been noticed. I’m worried something really bad is going to happen.’
‘Me, too, mate.’ Hunter shoved his plate away from him. ‘Me, too.’
Sophie felt as if she was at the bottom of a deep, dark well. In the tiny circle of sky visible high overhead, she could just make out the morning sun behind clouds. But she couldn’t feel her body at all. Floating in the water, she thought. She could float there for ever-
‘Sister of Dragons! You must hear me!’ The voice was insistent, but mellifluous and soothing.