19 10:59 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
“Haaarrrurglurgl!” Kaparis gurgled in delight.
Heywood, his ever-faithful butler, leant over to suction excess saliva from the back of his mouth.
Kaparis had loved the casino since he was a spoilt boy holidaying on Cap Ferrat. It was where he first acquired a taste for cheating. Now, all these years later, he lay paralysed in a steel sarcophagus, a great iron lung ensconced within the steel skin of a 30,000-tonne oil tanker. Around his head was a whizzing optical array that allowed him 360-degree vision, and above that, a domed screen array feeding him news, images and data from a vast criminal network, as well as real-time video of events 160 miles away in Monte Carlo.
He knew Allenby and the G&T would never willingly hand over the real Boldklub equations, so he had decided that he would taunt them instead, play games and bully them, wear them down until they got so mad that they did something stupid, or – better – got fired and replaced by someone who would cut a deal.
Over the course of the unfortunate Scarlatti episode, and the more recent disaster in China, Kaparis had managed to capture a great deal of video footage of Infinity Drake, and with it his engineers and animators had managed to construct a perfect hologram of the boy. And the G&T had fallen for it!
“FOOLS!” he roared.
Letting Allenby take on the mission himself showed how desperate they already were.
He had them in the palm of his hand.
RRRRRRRRRRRRR!
A second motorbike shot across the square in pursuit of the first. The rider was an athletic young woman, Delta Salazar. She was the finest pilot in the USAF and she jived her Ducati Multistrada through the traffic as the Tyro bike ahead of her took a sharp left up a side street.
Like Finn, Delta had been shrunk for Operation Scarlatti; but unlike Finn, she had not been captured in the Forbidden City. Her little sister had though. Carla. She was still missing and Delta was going to find her or die trying.
She rounded the corner. The Tyro bike was forty metres ahead, roaring up a narrow street of boutiques.
BANG! The passenger fired back. Delta felt a bullet rip past. In a whip’s beat she drew her own SIG Sauer P226 service pistol and returned fire – BANG!
The bullet punched through one Tyro’s shoulder and into the other’s neck. SMASH went the bike through a boutique window.
Delta powered up, but by the time she reached them, both Tyros had detonated suicide capsules.
Back at the casino, as the last of the confetti settled, a great stone of despair sank through Al’s chest and he fell to his knees.
His fellow agent kicked over a table in frustration.
“HAAAAAHAHA!” Kaparis laughed to see such fun – and then choked as he saw something that spoiled … everything—
“Huuu … hgaah!”
For as Al and his fellow agent tore off their false beards and prosthetic faces, Kaparis instantly recognised the second agent.
Captain Kelly of the SAS.
Missing, presumed dead … Or if not, presumed to be just 11mm tall.
It could mean only one thing.
“NNNMMMMARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!”
It was to be a day of highs – and lows.
FEBRUARY 19 15:11 (GMT+2). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border. Alt. 1,995m/6,545ft
He drank her blood.
They were, after all, in vampire country. Thick forest, thicker snow, a picture-book landscape of peaks and abandoned castles.
Finn was no vampire, of course, nor even a flea, but he had to eat to stay alive, and Carla’s scalp was pockmarked with tiny wounds where he had broken the skin to feed3, using a spike of metal he’d picked up in Shanghai as a sword. Carla’s once-luxuriant hair had been his sanctuary on the never-ending death march, a jungle thatch that had given him cover, warmth and sustenance.
For five months, mostly at night, Baptiste – their captor, and one of Kaparis’s worst Tyros – had dragged them across the ancient spine of the world: up through the Taklamakan Desert, through icebound mountain kingdoms, then across an endless frozen plain, until mountains rose once more, thick forests full of bears and wolves. The only clue to how far they’d come in the faces of the few peasants they saw; even at a distance and wrapped up against the cold, they had grown pale and round-eyed.
Baptiste, bearded and unholy, had no other function but to go on in dumb, endless flight, driven by an urge he could make no sense of. His brain had been so damaged as he escaped Shanghai with the girl that he could barely remember who or what he was. All he had left was a brute sense of purpose, a homing instinct, and a capacity for violence. He knew the girl was his prisoner, but little else. And he had no idea, nor could he conceive, that she carried a thirteen-year-old boy in her hair called Infinity Drake, who was just 9mm tall …
Finn finished his drop of blood and wiped his mouth. “It’s less sugary. You’re getting weaker.”
“Between you and the fleas, I’m surprised I haven’t run dry,” Carla complained, resisting the urge to scratch.
The thuggish form ahead of her grunted and yanked the cable that shackled them together and bound her wrists. She staggered on.
They were traversing the tree line below a steep ridge, Baptiste and Carla high-stepping through deep snow. Finn climbed through her hair to take him in.
How do you kill a giant?
How do you kill someone two hundred times your size? Finn had been trying to figure it out for three thousand miles. Even in this zombie state, Baptiste was still many times faster and stronger than them, many times the murderer.
Finn’s plan was always to attack, but
