Department 19: Zero Hour (53 page)

OK,
he thought.
What’s next?

The answer came without him even having to think about it.

It was time to go home.

Julian drove to Norwich in silence.

The elderly dark green Mercedes that had belonged to his mother had been extremely reluctant to start, but perseverance and a colourful range of shouted insults had eventually seen the engine splutter into life. The car handled like a tank, and seemed to be drinking petrol at an alarming rate, but its leather seats were soft and comfortable, and the big engine had lost little of its power; it devoured picturesque mile after picturesque mile, until Julian turned off the main road and into a trading estate at the edge of the city.

In an electronics shop the size of an aircraft hangar, he bought a torch and the best radio handset he could find. It was a sleek black device, capable of transmitting across a wide frequency spectrum, with an encryption filter that made it impossible for anyone to monitor any conversation he might use it for, and a fingerprint sensor that locked its control panel. He paid cash at the till, stowed the radio under the passenger seat of the Mercedes, and headed back east.

On the outskirts of Great Yarmouth, he found what he was looking for: a second-hand car dealership with a neon sign in the shape of a deck of cards over its entrance next to the words FULL HOUSE CARS. Julian parked in the car park of a vast twenty-four-hour supermarket on the other side of the road, took his chip off his wrist and put it in the glove compartment, and headed towards the car dealership. It looked as though its best days, assuming there had actually been any, were long behind it, which Julian hoped would make it the kind of establishment willing to deal in cash and forget names and faces.

He was right. Twenty minutes later he was driving his mother’s Mercedes towards the seafront with the owner of FULL HOUSE CARS, a vastly overweight man by the name of Bobby, with a bald head and a goatee, following behind in the decade-old Ford Focus Julian had just bought with a small bundle of fifty-pound notes.

Outside a chain hotel overlooking the sea, Julian took the keys to the Ford and sent Bobby on his way. He left the Mercedes in the hotel car park, then walked round to a long outdoor seating area that faced the flat grey expanse of the North Sea. He took a seat at one of the picnic tables, then carefully removed the locator chip from his wrist and taped it to the underside of the bench, pressing it firmly between two of the wooden boards. Then he strolled as casually as he was able to his new Ford, and climbed behind the wheel.

If Blacklight was closely monitoring him, and he was convinced it would be, for at least the first few days of his release, they would see that he had left his mother’s cottage, driven to a retail park outside Norwich, then to a supermarket in Great Yarmouth, and was now stationary outside a hotel on the seafront, with his car parked in the same establishment. If they were watching
incredibly
closely, they might have noticed that he hadn’t appeared to get out of the car at the supermarket, and if they had him on continuous surveillance, they would eventually become suspicious when he didn’t move from the picnic table; if nothing else, he would need to go to the bathroom at some point.

Three hours there,
he thought, as he turned the Ford’s key.
Half an hour to get what I need. Three hours back.

It was a clear risk; his destination would undoubtedly have been flagged in whatever fake profile Cal Holmwood had given the Surveillance Division, and the potential for discovery was far higher than he would have liked. But there was simply nothing he could do about it; he had taken what precautions he could, and now he would simply have to hope that his luck held.

I’m due some good fortune,
he thought, and smiled as he put the car into gear.
Surely I must be.

Two hours and forty minutes later Julian Carpenter turned the Ford into the driveway of the house he had once shared with his family.

He left it in front of the garage, the same place he had always parked his silver Mercedes when he got home at night. Marie and Jamie had believed he had been returning from a long day spent behind a desk at the Ministry of Defence facility at Manston, sixty miles to the east, which was partly true; he
had
driven back from Manston each evening, but only after a helicopter had ferried him there from the Loop.

It had been easier to keep his real life a secret in those final years, when he had been spending more and more time devising strategy with Henry Seward and less and less on operations. As a younger man, he had been required to spend so many nights out of the house that Marie had once accused him of having an affair, a charge he had infuriated her by laughing at. He hadn’t been able to help it; he had wanted to tell her how much easier keeping another woman secret would have been than the truth.

It had been a crazy way to live, he saw that now. He should have resigned his commission when he married Marie, or when Jamie was born at the latest, but he had been unwilling to give up the part of his life that gave him purpose, and pride, and excitement. He had not neglected his family; he had been as attentive and loving a husband and father as had been humanly possible, and had regularly pushed Blacklight’s goodwill to the limit in the process. In the subsequent years, he had often wondered whether his increasing prioritisation of his family over the Department had made it easier for his colleagues to believe that he was capable of betraying them, when Thomas Morris’s trap slammed shut on him.

Julian got out of the car and looked around in the cool light of the mid-afternoon. He had driven past the house without slowing, checking to see whether it was occupied; if it was, his task would be that much harder. But it had been obvious, even as he sped past, that it was empty; the windows of the living room and the quartered pane of glass in the front door were boarded up, and a heavy padlock hung from the garage door. The oak tree at the bottom of the garden, from the branches of which Alexandru Rusmanov and his acolytes had been watching the last time he stood on this driveway, had grown even fuller; it cast shadow over more than half the lawn, which was now a patchwork of weeds and fallen leaves. A squirrel stared at him from a low branch, a nut in its mouth; it didn’t seem surprised to see him, or scared of him. Julian looked at the tree for a long time, cold fingers dancing up his spine, then turned towards the house.

And froze as he realised where he was standing.

This is where I died,
he thought, looking down at the gravel of the drive.
Right here. This is where my life ended.

There was a stain beneath his feet, long faded. Julian stared at it, his heart pounding, until he forced himself to tear his gaze away, and walked unsteadily along the front of the house. Red letters had been sprayed across the boards that covered the living room’s picture window, forming a single word that made him grimace as he read it.

Julian had seen the press reports of the cover story that had been put up after his death, a horribly detailed fabrication that claimed he had been caught in a plot to sell national-security secrets to a Somalian Islamist group. He had not taken the blackening of his name personally, as he would have done exactly the same thing in Henry Seward’s position. But he had hated the thought of what the stories must have done to Marie and Jamie; believing they were the family of a traitor would have been heartbreaking for them and, as the graffiti attested, would not have made them popular.

He tried to put such thoughts out of his mind; torturing himself with the details of how he had hurt his family would not do him, or them, any good. He turned his back on the hateful graffiti and walked round the side of the house, heading for the back garden. The gate was shut and bolted, but the lock had never been strong, and two heavy kicks sent it tumbling. Julian paused for a second, waiting to see whether the noise had alerted any of his neighbours, if indeed the same people still occupied the houses whose roofs were visible above the trees to the right and left.

Silence.

Julian stepped through the gate, and on to the crazy-paving path that had led between two expanses of immaculate lawn in the days when Marie had tended to it. Now it was as overgrown as the front garden, the path looking like some old trail through deep jungle. He made his way along it, taking care not to turn an ankle on one of the uneven slabs of stone, treading down weeds and bending long grass as he passed. At the top of the garden, on a wide patch of bare earth, stood the shed he had built in the first weeks after they had bought the house, when all their belongings had been in storage and Marie and Jamie had still been living with his mother in the cottage that was now once again his home; it was the shed he had driven more than a hundred and fifty miles for.

He had always padlocked the door, but not for the reasons that his family and neighbours believed; the shed had contained valuable tools and expensive garden equipment, but they were not what he had been securing.

Now it was standing ajar.

Julian pulled it open and stepped inside. The shelves on either side of the shed were empty, and they and the floor were covered in a thick layer of dust; his footsteps sent a cloud of it blooming into the air, making him cough as he crouched down and started pulling up the floorboards.

They came easily; they had never been firmly fixed, either to each other or to the ground beneath them, despite how they had appeared. Julian lifted them one at a time and leant them against the wall. When the task was finished, he stepped back and looked at what had lain beneath them for more than fifteen years, unbeknownst to anyone.

The hatch appeared to be intact.

Julian had been confident that it would, despite the length of time that had elapsed. It was made of thick lead, like the rest of the bomb shelter he had installed below the garden; just one of the many secrets he had kept from his family. There was a keypad set into its smooth surface, which was the only thing that gave him cause for concern. If its batteries had failed, there would be no way to open the hatch from the outside.

Which is exactly the point, of course,
he thought wryly to himself.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth?

He brushed away a fine layer of dirt, held his breath, and pressed the keypad’s power button. For a horribly long moment, nothing happened. Then, as the tension began to become unbearable, green light flickered beneath the small rectangle and illuminated the numbered keys.

Julian released his breath in a low rush and typed in a nine-digit code. The word OPEN appeared on the screen above the keypad, and from beneath the ground came the muffled sounds of heavy locks disengaging. He gripped the handle and, with a rush of stale air and a rattle of loose dirt and gravel, heaved the hatch up and back. Below him, electric lights flickered into life, illuminating a stainless-steel ladder. Julian took a last look behind him, and climbed down.

It was like stepping back in time. The man who had sold him the shelter had rhapsodised to Julian about the thickness of the walls, the blast that they could withstand, and the levels of radiation they could keep out. He had listened politely, even though it had been clear to him that the man was still living in a time when Soviet missiles might have fallen from the sky at any moment; Julian had no intention of explaining what he was actually going to use the shelter for.

There were two shelves of canned and dried food and a large plastic barrel of distilled water, in case the occasion
had
ever arisen when he needed to spend a prolonged period of time beneath his garden. But the shelter’s true purpose rested silently on large metal racks standing either side of the ladder he had just climbed down.

One held MP5 submachine guns, Glock 17 pistols, a pair of American M4 carbines, and boxes of ammunition. A T-Bone gleamed on the top shelf of the other, above rows of regular and ultraviolet grenades, three UV beam guns, a pair of canvas holdalls, and a folded Blacklight uniform. The pungent scent of gun oil hung thickly in the air, a smell that reminded Julian so powerfully of the Loop that it brought tears to his eyes. He blinked them away, and got to work.

In a pale purple hotel room overlooking the sea, Julian set a steaming mug of instant coffee down on the table, briefly regretted destroying his remaining cigarettes, then pushed the thought away.

He had driven back from Brenchley to Great Yarmouth as quickly as he had dared, which, given that the car boot was full to the brim of extremely restricted weaponry, had not been all that fast.

He had retrieved his locator chip from beneath the picnic-table bench, half expecting a squad of Operators to swoop down on him as he did so, ready to bundle him into a van and take him back to his cell. He had transferred the bags from the Ford into his mother’s Mercedes, then walked into the hotel and booked a room.

He didn’t want to spend the night in Great Yarmouth; he wanted to be back at his mother’s cottage, checking his weapons and equipment and considering his next move. But he forced himself to look at the situation from an external perspective; as far as Blacklight knew, he had been sitting on the bench outside the hotel for almost seven hours. If they thought he had been drinking throughout, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption given the circumstances and the location, then it would not do to arouse their suspicions by being seen to drive home. The sensible thing to do would be wait until the morning.