In the middle, strewn across the snowy forest floor, were the last identifiable remains of one of Peter Schuler’s cattle. A horn lay in a puddle of blood and offal, a hoof and a thick piece of the animal’s hide thrown to one side. Blood covered the ground, studded with steaming chunks of meat, through which the wolf had tracked its giant paws. The four men standing at the edge of the trees were hard country men, but the violence that had taken place in the clearing shook them to their cores.
“Shoot on sight,” said Peter Schuler, softly. The men swung their shotguns from their shoulders, racked them with trembling hands, then followed the enormous footprints deeper into the darkness of the forest.
An hour later, with dawn creeping above the horizon to the east, four shivering men emerged from the trees at the edge of the road that led south to Bremen. The tracks had continued in a straight line, until they finally stopped a metre in front of where the men were standing. They disappeared in a wide circle of disturbed snow that looked as though a group of men had been wrestling in it. The snow, and the frozen earth beneath it, had been churned and tossed and thrown in every direction. On the other side of the circle a new set of tracks led away from the circle, parallel to the road. The men stepped carefully round the disturbance, and looked down at the new trail.
“My God,” whispered Lars, and crossed himself.
Stretching away before them was a series of enormous human footprints.
“I don’t understand,” said Sebastian. “I don’t—”
“Quiet,” hissed Peter. “The Langers’ farm is just over that rise. Let’s move.”
The four men marched quickly alongside the footprints. After five minutes or so, the grey roof of the farmhouse where Kurt Langer, Peter Schuler’s oldest friend, lived with his family appeared above the top of the slope they were climbing, and Peter accelerated, urging his men to keep up with him.
I hope we’re not too late. Please don’t let us be too late.
They hurried over the rise, and Peter’s heart sank. Even from thirty metres away he could see the footprints leading through the front gate on to the Langers’ property, towards the farmhouse where the family would normally now be waking up. He shouted for his men to follow him, and took off running down the slope, skidding and sliding as his boots fought for purchase through the thick snow. He grabbed the gatepost, steadied himself and then paused, examining the ground.
There were two sets of footprints, running parallel to each other, in opposite directions. One led into the Langers’ yard, and the second, the heavy treads of winter boots, led back towards the road.
Too late, too late, too late.
Peter shoved the gate wide and lurched into the yard, heading towards the front door of the house, his shotgun at his shoulder. He was about to yell for the Langers, horribly sure that he would receive no reply, when he stopped again.
To his left, running between a low branch of the oak tree that stood at the edge of the farmyard and a brass hook inserted into the wall of the house, was a thick nylon washing line. Fluttering from it in the bright morning air were a number of heavy garments: plaid shirts, long johns, thermal socks and undershirts. But half the line was empty, and beneath it, scattered on the snowy ground, were a handful of wooden pegs. The first row of footprints ran beneath the line, then to the back step of the house. The second started there, a row of boot prints leading back towards the road.
A hand fell on Peter Schuler’s shoulder, and he jumped. But it was only Franck, his big, gentle face staring at Peter’s, his gun lowered at his side.
“You need to see this, boss,” said the head wrangler, jerking a thumb towards the road.
The four men gathered at the edge of the tarmac, looking down at their feet. The last of the prints were etched neatly into the snow, alongside the tracks of a set of heavy-duty winter tyres.
A truck. Four-wheel drive. Probably a pick-up, like the one in the barn at home.
The tracks formed a shallow semi-circle where the driver had brought his vehicle to a halt at the side of the road, before accelerating back on to the highway. There were no more footprints, in any direction.
“I’ll ring Karl,” said Lars. “He can bring the truck up here. We can follow it.”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It’s gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone. Ring Karl, and tell him to come and pick us up. I’ll call Kurt later and tell him what happened. Let’s go home.”
An hour to the south, a battered red pick-up truck chugged steadily along the motorway. The driver, a round, red-faced man in a heavy woollen jacket and an ancient deerstalker hat, watched the road ahead of him, a short cigar clamped between his teeth. On the passenger seat beside him sat a plastic flask of coffee laced with cherry brandy, from which he was taking regular sips.
Behind him, in the truck’s flatbed, shivering beneath the pile of animal hides that the driver was taking south to market, his sleeping face a mask of contorted misery and confusion, lay Frankenstein’s monster.
11
THE BARE BONES
Jamie was about to open the door to his quarters when he felt the console on his belt beep three times, signalling a message that had been unread for more than thirty minutes.
His mind was reeling with everything he had just seen, everything he had just been told, and he was struggling to understand the implications of it.
I can’t believe I got to see that, he thought. I can’t believe Talbot let me. It’s amazing.
Jamie had turned off the beeper during the Zero Hour Task Force meeting, left it off during the unbelievable, mind-bending twenty minutes that followed it, twenty minutes that he knew he could never tell anyone about, not even Larissa, and had only just switched it back on. He pulled it free of its loop, swearing loudly in the empty corridor, and read the short line of text that had appeared on the screen.
G-17/OP_EXT_L2/LIVE_BRIEFING/BR2/1130
The Department 19 shorthand had become second nature.
The first set of letters and numbers was the designation of his squad, G-17, and the second told him that they had been given an external operation with a Level 2 priority. The third was self-explanatory, that there would be a live briefing rather than data supplied to them once they were already on the move, the fourth was the location of the briefing, in this case Briefing Room 2, and the final set of numbers were the time that the briefing would begin. Jamie checked his watch, and saw that it was 11:28. He swore, then ran back down the corridor towards the silver doors of the Level B lift.
On Level 0 he piled out of the lift and ran along the corridor that served as the level’s central thoroughfare. On one side, accessible by the heavy yellow and black striped doors that stood at regular intervals, was the huge hangar that served as the embarkation point for all Blacklight operations. On the opposite side of the corridor, filling the other half of the huge circular level, were the suites of offices and rooms that comprised the Department’s Communications and Surveillance Divisions.
The Ops Room, where Jamie had just been, sat in the middle of the corridor, and therefore at the centre of Level 0. Beyond it, along a series of semi-circular corridors, like the layers of an onion, stood offices, server farms and inventories, accessible by security-coded doors set into the long wall.
Jamie pressed his ID against the sensor beside one of the doors marked BRIEFING ROOMS, pulled it open and raced down the corridor. He skidded to a halt outside the door to Briefing Room 2 and walked through it, as calmly as he was able.
The room was a curved box, much like a classroom. At one end, to the right as Jamie entered, beneath a high-definition screen that filled most of the wall, stood a lectern,