...and Time, a maniac scattering dust, and Life, a Fury slinging flame... Tennyson
Nine thirty in the morning, June 3rd 2025 and a high sun softened tarmac in a deserted riverside car park in Sisteron; alongside the powerful rushing waters of the nearby Durance, the air was much cooler.
A man and a woman sat, a couple of metres apart, on a cast concrete bench just a few feet from the river. The woman clothed in black from head to foot, hunched forward, her face hidden beneath a scarf of fine Egyptian cotton. Beside her, dressed in travel wear, olive skinned with lying eyes, the man relaxed casually into the bench’s harsh contours. He spoke in soft, reedy tones, menacing above the Durance’s dull rumble.
“ It’s Time. We must have your answer now. Please choose wisely.”
The woman remained silent.
“ There can be no more delays.”
As he spoke, Olive Skin slid a plain brown A5 envelope along the bench.The woman reached out hesitantly, fingers reluctant to touch the package, and fumbled it open; a faded black and white photo dropped silently onto the bench. Despite it’s age, the monochrome clearly revealed a man, tanned and handsome with blonde hair, standing amongst coils of rope at the foot of a limestone cliff, shining like bleached bones beneath the Provencal sun.
“ Bastard. How easily you must take to evil,” the woman hissed.
Olive Skin smiled.
“ An answer.”
“ I’ll give you the initial code string now. Your grand design must come later.”
Olive Skin smiled again...
“ Be sure it will.” ... and was gone.
Everyone on the promenade agreed the galleon was incredibly realistic, the cannon’s roar startled young and old alike. On the verge of tears, Vicky hunted desperately for her family through the forest of adults. At the moment she saw her parents burrowing through the crowds towards her, the second cannonball exploded against the sea wall. Metal shards and broken paving cut through crowded holidaymakers, tearing flesh and breaking bones at random.
A crescent of old iron carved away the left side of June Bryant’s head and face. She ran on, dying, heedless, before collapsing at her daughter’s feet, a mess of blood and shattered tissue. Close behind, Gareth Bryant’s horror had barely registered when part of a promenade railing sliced into his groin, destroying the femoral artery. With fast weakening fingers he clutched feebly at the blood jetting from the gaping wound in his upper thigh, blood slicking the promenade as he crawled towards his dead wife.
Staring down at her mother, Vicky tried to scream as carnage erupted around her.
Seventy miles away across the Irish Sea, the same sun beating down on the bloodied mess on Westmouth promenade gently softened tarmac on the Isle of Man’s main roads. It was the last day of the TT races. In packed grandstands alongside the GlenCrutchery Road, thousands of fans sat gripped in anticipation as the Senior TT entered it’s closing stages.
Next day, summer foundered over the North York Moors’ implacable heights. Along the A169 Whitby to Pickering road, drifts of hail filled in the dykes and peat hags. On Fylingdales Moor a vast man-made pyramid thrust upwards into the cloud base. Inside the edifice a nations eyes and ears kept watch with inhuman persistence. It contained the Ministry of Defence’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ( BMEWS ). Deep below the surface of the moor, two men argued.
One, young, fair-haired, deep-set blue eyes, lounged in a battered office chair. Wearing a dark blue Crombie double-breasted suit; he sat back, feet clad in Crockett and Jones loafers, propped up on his desk. A second man paced about the room. Long brown hair fell constantly forward over his face; he wore denims, jeans and shirt, and a leather jacket, soft with age. He was a Ministry man, the first a scientist. Their discussion, intense, was as yet without acrimony.
Leather jacket stopped in front of the desk, held out his arms, hands palm uppermost, in a gesture of entreaty.
“ Ciaran you’ve got to open up. We must have something to go on. I can’t hold this down much longer. Every news desk can lad in the country thinks he’s discovered his own personal Watergate. If I can’t give GHQ a way to defuse this, they’re going to come in here and take the place apart until they find one. And that, my friend, would fuck this lot up good and proper. For Christ’s sake, loosen up.”
As Olive Skin began entering the code sequence for the final TI, a slight noise in the control room went unnoticed.
After a few moments a faint rasping cough caught his attention; he turned slowly, to see Jean-Baptiste Lebrun framed in the backlit rectangle of the doorway. As Olive Skin’s hand went to the control panel the Frenchman stepped quickly into the room.
“ Ah Jean-Baptiste, this is a...pleasure. My apologies for the insensitive Afrikaner’s behaviour; he has been dismissed, yes and quite permanently. I was just about to restore your loving Catherine...”
“ Bastard, perhaps once you could speak without lying. My only blessing is that she never knew what evil she’d spawned.”
Above the control panel an atomic clock showed one and a quarter minutes to six.
Olive Skin half turned away, reaching slowly under the console for his insurance policy, a Heckler and Koch SFP9.
“ So why have you come Frenchman? To bring our Catherine back or join me in triumph. Perhaps re-joining Catherine would be a swifter solution.”
Olive Skin swung the machine pistol up and out but it was too late; Jean-Baptiste fired twice with the late Os van Rindt’s handgun and two 45 magnum bullets hit his step-son in the head and chest. Bloody and broken, Olive Skin died before he hit the floor.
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