He hadn’t seen it because it was too ridiculous, too outrageous. A scar-faced Russian thug with a gun. It was like something out of a bad spy film.
“I think you’d better put that away so we can get this sorted out,” Cutter said gently. “I think we’ve got our wires crossed. You don’t come in here waving a pistol and threatening friends of mine.”
“I think that’s up to me,” the man with the gun said with deliberate irony.
“Professor Cutter,” Medyevin began, “we need —”
Cutter raised an index finger sharply.
“No. Shut up. I don’t care what you need. This is not acceptable. Tell him to put that gun away and get out. You can stay. Then maybe, maybe, we can talk like civilised people.”
Medyevin looked uncomfortable.
“I’m afraid, Professor Cutter, I don’t get to tell Koshkin what to do. He has authority. So I urge you to cooperate.”
The man with the scarred mouth looked straight at Cutter and spoke again.
“Doctor Medyevin has explained the situation to you. He has suggested that you cooperate. Do you need me to reinforce how serious this is?” He raised the pistol and rested it against the back of Connor’s head.
Connor murmured uncomfortably, and stood stiff as a board.
“Which one?” the gunman asked. “The boy or the girl? Which one will make the point most effectively?”
Cutter froze in horror.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” Medyevin said. “This is not how I would have done things.”
EIGHT
“When you say ‘missing’, what do you mean exactly?” Lester asked.
“Professor Cutter was due in at eight this morning,” Hemple said. “We were going to run a debrief.”
“And the other two?”
“Abby and Connor were expected in at the same time,” Hemple answered.
Lester frowned. He was still on his first coffee of the morning. What Hemple was telling him sounded like a problem, but it didn’t sound like the usual sort of problem.
They both looked up as Jenny entered Lester’s office.
“No answer from their mobiles or land lines,” she said, “so I’ve sent HR round to their homes.”
“They’re just late for work, aren’t they?” Lester said, impatiently. He really wasn’t in the mood. “Or it’s a phone thing?”
“Unlikely,” Jenny replied.
Lester sighed. Cutter was a constant thorn in his side, and now he was even managing to be difficult by not being present. There had been many occasions in the previous few months when James Lester would have cheerfully paid real money for Cutter to disappear. Even that, it seemed, did not make the problem go away.
“When did we last see them?” Lester asked.
“About two-thirty yesterday, at the anomaly site,” Hemple said.
“Nothing since?”
“The three of them were heading to the university,” Hemple replied.
Jenny’s phone rang and she turned away to take the call.
“It’s not like Cutter to be unreliable,” Hemple said to Lester.
Lester raised his eyebrows significantly.
“There’s very little I wouldn’t put past Professor Cutter,” he responded. “He has a willful, maverick streak that seems designed to aggravate me. What’s more, the other two are devoted to him. He could easily lead them both astray. But it doesn’t feel like that.” He looked down at his desk.
“No, it doesn’t,” Hemple agreed.
Jenny turned back to face them, slipping her phone back into her bag.
“There’s no one at Nick’s place, or the flat. Abby’s Mini’s still in the car park outside, but Nick’s truck is unaccounted for.”
“Contact the university,” Lester said. “Perhaps they will have some idea of where our missing children have gone.”
Cutter had signed in at the porter’s lodge the previous afternoon, but he hadn’t signed out again. According to the official record, he was still on the campus.
“There was a young lady and a lad with him,” the porter told Jenny. “I didn’t see them leave, either.”
Cutter had also signed out several sets of keys that hadn’t been returned.
Jenny caught up with Hemple in the car park.
“I’ve found the truck,” he said. “It’s just over there. It’s locked, and the kit seems to be onboard, as far as I can see.”
There was no one in Cutter’s old rooms, but the door had just been pulled to.
“Maybe he met an old friend or a colleague?” Hemple suggested. “We should take some time and ask around the campus.”
“He’d have called us,” Jenny replied, firmly. “He’d have let us know he was going somewhere.”
Hemple was looking out of the office windows into the car park.
“What is it?” Jenny asked.
He pointed.
“They’ve got CCTV.”
***
“Okay, here’s the sequence,” Hemple said, cueing the tape. Jenny leaned in over his shoulder to look at the screen. The porter had droned on about ‘written permission’ and ‘privacy issues’, but she’d flashed him her very important looking credentials and shooed him out of the lodge’s monitor room. Then Lester had called so she’d been forced to let Hemple examine the footage and line it up for her to view while she updated her impatient boss on their progress.
On the screen, the previous afternoon ran by at high speed in muted colours. Cars came and went in jerky spurts, looking like toys on the screen.
“Watch the time code,” Hemple instructed. “Here’s when they arrive. They get out. And they go inside. Okay, now keep an eye on this vehicle. It pulls in about three minutes after them. Blue SUV.”
“It looks grey,” Jenny said.
Hemple took his finger off the cue. The picture blinked, returned to normal speed, and restored its colour balance.
“Blue,” he said.
“Okay.”
He began to jog the tape on again.
“There are two guys in the SUV,” he told her, “and they sit there for about five minutes.”
“Faces?”
“Not clearly. I’m sure our kit back at the ARC could wash things a lot cleaner. I did get a number off the SUV, though. Anyway, here comes Connor, leaving the building.”
Connor crossed the screen, right to left, his accelerated pace comically resembling a silent movie star.
“Another five minutes, and back he comes,” Hemple continued.
Connor reappeared, carrying cardboard coffee cups. He crossed the screen left to right. One of the men suddenly got out of the SUV and followed him off-screen. After a minute or two, the second man got out of the SUV and walked off in the same direction.
“Now another ten minutes,” Hemple said, speeding up the image even more, “and this happens.”
He slowed the video again, and a group of figures entered the screen from the right-hand side. Cutter, Connor and Abby were walking close together just ahead of the two men. They came up to the SUV, and the smaller of the two opened the side door. Cutter, Connor and Abby got inside.
Jenny peered closely at the screen.
“Look at their body language,” she said. “None of them is exactly happy about getting in.”
The two men got into the SUV as well, and it pulled away, moving out of the picture.
“Four-oh-seven,” Hemple said, reading the time code. “We can check the gate log to see who signed out, but I’m guessing it will be a fake ID.”
“Why?” Jenny turned to look at him.
Hemple wound the recording back and the SUV obediently reversed back into the picture and the parking space. He reached the point where Cutter, Connor and Abby were getting into the vehicle, and nudged the tape to and fro until he could pick out one tiny moment and freeze it.
Jenny stared at the image. Connor was already aboard the SUV, and Abby was pulling herself in. Cutter, beside her, was looking back at the larger of the two
men, who had raised his right hand to issue some instruction. There was something in his hand, a fuzzy black speck.
Despite the grainy quality of the picture, Jenny knew it was a gun.
NINE
He woke with a start in the middle of a thunderstorm.
He had no proper sense of place or time. He felt sick, as if he was suffering a terrible hangover, and his limbs ached. He was cold. He could smell metal and fuel. The world was dark, and it rocked and swam like a boat in heavy weather. Constant thunder boomed, a roaring in his ears that wouldn’t stop.
He heard voices behind the thunder, smelled sweat and cheap cologne behind the engine fumes. He was sitting on a hard metal bucket seat. His hands were cuffed together with a plastic tie that had been looped to the seat rim. He was blindfolded.
“Where am I?” he asked, raising his voice against the thundering roar.
He heard voices again, but they were indistinct. Hands removed his blindfold, and he blinked at the light.
The spare metal cargo hold of a military aircraft surrounded him. Illumination came from small bulkhead lights. Everything was spartan and utilitarian.
Abby and Connor were cuffed to bucket seats on the hold wall facing him. They both looked pale and scared, and neither of them seemed entirely awake.
“Are you okay?” Cutter asked them.
Connor nodded, even though he looked like he was about to puke extravagantly.
“They drugged us,” Abby said groggily. There was a grubby mark on her left cheek. Her eyes were absolutely afraid.
“Yeah,” Cutter said. He remembered the needle going into his arm, and had the vague impression of riotously bad dreams. He wasn’t sure what they’d been shot full of, or how long they’d been out, but it explained the horrible sense of dehydration and nausea.
“We’ll be okay,” he told Abby calmly. She nodded.
The aircraft bucked and lurched, making the nausea far harder to manage. Cutter looked around. The man with the scarred face was sitting near the front of the cabin. Medyevin occupied a bucket seat beside Cutter. He was fidgeting with the blindfolds he’d removed from the three passengers.
“How are you, Professor?” he asked anxiously.
“I’ve been drugged, and cuffed to a metal seat for God knows how long,” Cutter replied tersely. “How do you think I am?”
“I would imagine bilious and uncomfortable,” Medyevin replied.
“You missed out angry,” Cutter snapped. “Besides, it was a rhetorical question.”
Medyevin nodded. He was clearly uneasy.
“I think you should tell me what’s going on,” Cutter said.
“Shortly. We —”
“Now,” Cutter insisted. “I’m not playing games any more. This is kidnap. This is not in any way acceptable.”
“Professor, the circumstances —”
“That maniac threatened my friends with a gun,” Cutter growled. “Whatever you want from me, there was no need to bring them into this. There was no need to use them to manipulate me.”
“Koshkin approaches problems in a very direct way,” Medyevin replied. “He likes to accomplish things in the most efficient manner.”
“And he requires my cooperation.”
“Yes.”
“You require my cooperation.”
“We will explain as soon —”
Cutter stared at him.
“You have a creature incursion, don’t you?” he said.
Medyevin started.
“What?”
“I’m not stupid, Doctor,” Cutter said. “What else would this be about?”
The aircraft plunged abruptly, and the thunder grew louder. Cutter felt his stomach flip, and realised that the constant, pounding thunder was the noise of propeller blades. The descent transition didn’t feel like that of a fixed-wing aircraft at all. It wasn’t a plane — they were riding in a big helicopter, probably a twin-rotored machine. There were small portals high up in the hold walls: glazed slits that let in thin, dirty light.
Was it daylight? Cutter wondered. Where were they? How far had they come?
The forward hatch of the hold opened, and an older man leaned through and spoke a few words to the scar-faced man. The older man was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and wire-framed glasses. A fringe of silver hair edged his bald head.
The man with the scars, Koshkin, listened and nodded, and then got to his feet. The older man ducked back out and closed the hatch behind him. Koshkin came down the middle of the hold, bracing one hand on an overhead rail. His face was expressionless, except for a vague hint of satisfaction.
He spoke to Medyevin in Russian.
“What did he say?” Cutter asked.
“I said we’re ten minutes out. We’re on approach,” Koshkin said directly to Cutter.
“Approach to where?” Cutter demanded.
Koshkin grinned and didn’t reply. It was hard to maintain a conversation while competing with the wind and the rotor-chop. He didn’t look as if he cared to supply any answers, regardless.
“I hope there’s an airport there,” Cutter added.
“Why?” Koshkin asked.
“Because you’re going to put me, Abby and Connor on a flight straight back home,” Cutter stated.
“Professor Cutter,” Koshkin replied, “I thought we’d already established that you were in no position to make demands.”
“Uncuff us,” Cutter told him.
“Again —” Koshkin began, and he looked vaguely amused.
“Uncuff us. Give us some water. Water at the very least. Threaten us or hurt us, you’ll get zero cooperation from me. Refuse us basic levels of comfort or sustenance, you’ll get zero cooperation from me. Do we both understand the position we’re in now?”
Koshkin’s vague amusement vanished from his face. He glared down, and Medyevin shot Cutter a look of deep alarm. Cutter knew that Medyevin thought he’d just crossed a line no one in their right mind would want to cross.
Koshkin reached into his pocket and pulled out a clasp knife that opened to reveal a saw-edged blade four inches long. He turned towards Abby.
What have I done? Cutter thought.
Koshkin jerked the blade, but all he cut was the plastic tie that was clamping Abby’s hands. Cutter breathed out, and saw the tension go out of Medyevin’s shoulders, too.
The Russian thug sliced Connor’s cuffs away and turned to deal with Cutter. While he did so, Connor and Abby began rubbing the circulation back into their wrists.
Koshkin leaned in to release Cutter’s hand. For a second, however, he let the toothed edge of the blade rest against the side of Cutter’s throat.
“I understand cooperation, Professor,” he whispered, “but do not push what cannot be pushed.” He took the blade away from Cutter’s neck and cut the cuffs.
Cutter didn’t return his gaze. He got up and crossed the cabin to join Connor and Abby.
“Five minutes!” Koshkin called out. He put the clasp knife away and walked back down the hold. Medyevin unzipped a sports bag and handed plastic drinking bottles to Cutter, Connor and Abby.
“A solution of sugars and essential salts,” he said. “It should help with the aftereffects of the drug.”
“What did you shoot us with?” Cutter wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” Medyevin shrugged. “It was something Koshkin had. I’m just a palaeontologist.”
“No,” Cutter said, taking a sip from his bottle. “At the very least, you’re a kidnapper, Doctor.”
Medyevin looked uneasy.
“This is a complicated situation,” he said. He glanced down the length of the hold at Koshkin, who had returned to his seat.
Then, despite the covering roar of the rotors, he dropped his voice.
“I tried to warn you. You must be careful. Cautious. The word is cautious. Koshkin is a very ruthless man. He is a soldier. Uhm, Spetsnaz. Do you know that meaning?”
Connor whistled.
“That’s like Russia
n special forces. Russian SAS.”
Medyevin nodded.
“Special forces, yes. Koshkin has the role of, uhm, special advisor to this situation. It gives him an authority that outweighs the authority of the scientific group.”
“Why is that?” Cutter asked.
“The situation has become a military matter,” Medyevin replied.
“What is the situation?” Abby looked confused.
“Take a wild guess,” Cutter told her.
The aircraft was descending fast. The noise of the hammering rotors changed pitch. Medyevin took his seat on the other side of the hold.
“You both okay?” Cutter asked Connor and Abby.
“Yeah,” Connor replied, “I just feel like I might be sick, but other than that, just fine.”
“I just don’t understand what’s going on,” Abby said.
“They’ve come to us because they need our help,” Cutter explained, “and there’s only one area we specialise in that would make that worthwhile.”
“Really?” she asked.
He nodded.
“After Madre de Dios we should have known this was coming,” he added. “I think we’re about to find out that we’re not the only ones trying to deal with this problem.”
“But how did they know about us?” Abby asked. “How did they know about you?”
“That’s a good question,” Cutter said. “I’ve no idea, but I imagine we’ll find out.”
“This is like a rendition,” Connor said. “We’ve been... rendered? Rendited?”
“Whichever,” Cutter replied, “that’s exactly what it’s like. Now listen to me. I will not let them hurt you, and I will get us all out of this. If they want our cooperation — if they want my cooperation in particular — they’re going to have to bend over backwards. No more guns, no more threats.”
Connor looked at his watch.
“Any idea how far we’ve come?” he asked. “My watch says 8.15. Is that morning or evening? Have we been knocked out all night?”
“A little longer than that,” Cutter said. “Check the date.”
Connor looked at his watch again. His eyes widened.
“Oh my God,” he said. “I’ve lost two days.”