When Douglas emerged from the disused factory he stood blinking for a moment, like a rat freed from a maze, then froze as a train whistled past, as if becoming motionless would see the danger off. It appeared to work: the train was gone already, a bar of noise and light heading for the suburbs. Douglas looked up at the sky, in which stars had now appeared, shook his head in disapproval, then reached into his pocket for his mobile. He checked the screen, scrolled down for a number, but before he found it was flattened by one of the Black Arrows: an illegal tackle any way you looked at it, and the only way Douglas was looking at it was from underneath. With his mouth against the concrete he couldn’t shout, couldn’t scream: all the breath within him had been scattered into the dark. A voice barked harsh instructions into his ear, but Douglas couldn’t understand them: it wasn’t a foreign language, just a mode of experience he wasn’t accustomed to. A memory exploded in his head of watching while a middle-aged couple did the business, right out here in the open, folded over the back of their car. Knowing these things happened, invisibly observing them, had rendered Douglas untouchable, he thought. The things that people did were jokes to which he alone supplied the punchline. But now the joke was on him: he was being hauled upright, an arm around his throat. He hadn’t been in such close contact with another human since lifesaving lessons at his local pool—2007.
“Okay. I’ll take him.”
Breath was trying to find its way back into his lungs now: the air out here was hot, and seemed even hotter as it forced its way inside him.
It seemed that he had thrown up, too.
“Can you walk?”
He nodded, though he was fairly sure he couldn’t.
The newcomer wore dark clothing, but not the paramilitary gear that the vicious bastard who’d just taken him down wore. He did, though, have a silky-looking black balaclava. “Come on then.”
Douglas could walk, kind of, or at least couldn’t prevent himself being half-dragged, which had the same effect. He was being taken towards a black van, which appeared suddenly out of the gloom: everything was dark now, and shapes were only slowly making themselves understood. Deep breath. And exhale. The trick of it, he was discovering, was not to try too hard: breathing was one of those things you could only manage if you thought about something else while doing it. The problem was, the only other topics he could think of involved being dragged towards this van, shoved into the back of it, its door being closed with a heavy
A small worry, though, compared to being here with this man.
Who said, “You okay now?”
Douglas nodded. Coughed. Nodded again.
“Sorry about that.”
Worry thinned, like fog becoming mist.
“The guys are overexcited, and you can’t blame them. Those are some serious bad actors you let into the facility. You want to tell me why you did that?”
“I’m—it’s—can’t. Classified.”
“Yeah, sure. Listen, son, you really don’t need to worry about that right now.” The man pulled the balaclava off, and became ordinary looking. “I’m from Regent’s Park, name’s Duffy. You can call me Nick. There’s been an incursion, we both know that. An unauthorised incursion into a Service facility. And you know what? It’s not the first time that’s happened today. So don’t worry about what you did or didn’t do, and whether protocols were observed, because we’re all feeling a little foolish at the moment, and all that matters is that this gets cleared up. So tell me, how many of them are there?”
“Four,” said Douglas.
“Good, that’s what we thought. And your crew, how many of your crew are down there?”
“Just me,” Douglas told him, and then said, “Shouldn’t you know that? If you’re from the Park?”
“Yeah, we’re not exactly on the same page today. You know how it gets. Tell me how that back entrance works. Some kind of hatchway?”
Douglas did so.
“And there’s no way of working it from the outside?”
“None. It’s totally secure.”
“Yeah, right, good. That’s also what I thought. Thank you, Douglas.”
