‘Yes, I’m here, June. Just looking at the Google image. What did you find?’
‘That’s what I’ve been telling you. We found microbes — a species of bacterium in a spore-like state. They must have been under the ice for a long time, moving very slowly towards the terminus. Whether they are associated with your impact crater we aren’t sure yet. But we’re going to thaw them out in the lab and coax them back to life.’
‘Isn’t that a little dangerous? It sounds like the sort of doomsday scenario Michael Crichton would conjure up.’
June snorted. ‘You’ve been reading too much science fiction, and anyway Crichton’s dead. As for thawing out bugs, it’s been done before at Penn State, and nobody’s died yet. Look, I’ve got to go. We’re celebrating here, and Alicia has just waved a bottle of beer in my face.’
Greg pictured the gorgeous Alicia in his mind and wondered if June had got her into bed yet. He had tried and failed. He wished the team good luck and rang off. Greg felt totally dissociated from that world out there, where at this very moment scientists were getting paralytic because they had found a bacterium. All he had was a mug of rapidly cooling coffee and an empty room. Tired of looking for craters, and depressed at being in London when all the action was in Greenland, he returned to Googling Sol Invictus, Bassianus and Elagabal. He flipped from site to site, and after a while the information began to repeat itself, as it frequently did on the net with one site pirating another. Then something caught his eye. A site describing the sun god Elagabal said he was the ‘god of the black stone’. He clicked on this highlighted text and found himself reading about the Baetyl — a black stone venerated as the house of God. There was a quote from the historian Herodian suggesting the stone came down from Zeus. The clincher was the final sentence, which Greg read out loud.
‘In the third century, the stone was believed to be a meteorite.’
Greg knew that the stone lying on the bench in front of him couldn’t be that very stone, if it had come down in Greenland. But if the original stone was lost, who’s to say that some crank wasn’t seeking a suitable substitute? A crank like V. A. Bassianus, for example. It was a little scary that, since the man’s email and Greg’s rebuff, Bassianus had gone silent. Suddenly, the warehouse conversion didn’t feel so safe. A wave of exhaustion rolled over Greg, and he hunched over in his chair. He felt a tingling sensation in his left toes and sighed, reaching out to close Google Earth. Before he managed to hit the keyboard, though, he suddenly pushed himself upright. How could he have had any sensation in his toes? He was a T2 paraplegic. He shook his head, guessing he was more tired than he thought. He was having delusions now. The meteorite still lay on his workbench, and he picked it up, hefting the weight in his hands.
Then it happened again. He felt something in his right foot this time. It was like weak radio signals beaming in from outer space, almost lost in the background wash of white noise. But this time he knew it was real. He needed something stronger than coffee to deal with this, so he tucked the meteorite down between his thigh and the side of the wheelchair and flicked the switch to motor into the kitchen and get a bottle of wine. When he returned, there was a man standing in the middle of the room. He was tall, well muscled and looked quite at ease. His hair was thick and dark, slicked back from a bronzed forehead. His eyes were pale blue and steady.
‘Who the hell…?’ Greg stopped his wheelchair abruptly, and the tyres squeaked on the wooden surface. The man smiled with a lopsided grin that had no doubt charmed many a woman and held out his hand.
‘Greg Janic? My name’s Bassianus.’
Greg’s mind was racing. He couldn’t figure out how the man had got in, and done it so quietly. Then he felt a draught on his neck. Half turning in the chair, he saw that one of the windows that looked out on to the street was open. If Bassianus had come in that way, he was as good a climber as himself. As he once had been. Greg’s apartment was three floors up. He went to move the switch on the arm of his chair so that he could swing out of the room and escape. Maybe he could barricade himself in the bedroom. But the man was too quick for him. Bassianus strode over to him, reached behind the chair and pulled the battery leads free. Greg was disabled all over again. He thought briefly of the bottle that was nestled in his lap, but Bassianus must have thought of it, too, and he gently lifted the wine away from Greg and placed it safely on the workbench.
‘Now, Mr Janic, please may I have what I have come for? Just give me the stone, and I will be on my way. No harm done.’
Greg waved a hand at the shelves on the other side of the room, where his display of meteorites was arranged. ‘Help yourself.’
Bassianus sniggered and shook his head. ‘I’ve already had a look, Mr Janic. The one I want is not there. I want the sacred stone you stole from me on eBay.’
Suddenly, the man surged forward and pushed Greg’s wheelchair roughly back until it was under the open window. Greg felt his legs tense even as the air whooshed out of his lungs with the force of the crash against the wall. His head pitched forward on to Bassianus’s chest. The man grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head cruelly back. He thrust his contorted, red face into Greg’s, all appearance of the urbane man draining away from his features to be replaced by a wild and uncontrollable beast.
‘Where the fuck is it, you miserable cripple? Tell me before you go out that window.’
Greg kept his mouth shut, even as he felt the back of his neck forced over the sill of the window. His head sang as the blood rushed to it, and the night sky hung above him, the stars mocking his terror. The struggle was all too brief and one-sided.
DS Dave Skye leaned out of the window and looked at the body of the man that lay sprawled out on the pavement below. He called down to the police surgeon, who was examining the corpse.
‘Cause of death?’
Andy Topley, who was used to this question from detectives at the scene of a crime, gave a deep sigh. Why did they all think it was like on the TV? The DS would be asking for a time of death next, which in reality was often impossible to specify even after a post-mortem. He looked up to where the red-haired Scot hung out of the window three floors up.
‘How about multiple injuries, consistent with a fall from three storeys up?’
Skye’s head disappeared. No doubt the DS was moaning to someone about the doctor having got out of bed on the wrong side. He thought he had seen DC Harry Parris trailing upstairs after the DS. Perhaps he could deal with him. At least he was a sensible older cop, who would not bother the doctor too much. Then Skye’s head appeared again, and Dr Topley just knew it was the next inevitable question coming, so he pre-empted it with a comment of his own.
‘There is an unusual depressed fracture on his forehead. Dish-shaped. As though he has been hit with something rounded. Of course, there may be something down here that caused it. There is an iron bollard over there.’ He pointed to the old-fashioned cannon-shaped black object by the pavement edge. ‘It’s near the body, but your forensics team will have to check it out first.’