“Love you, Grandma, have a great time!”
“You too, darling, but do be careful. Al? Alan?”
“I promise, he’ll be fine, go!”
As Grandma finally disappeared through passport control, Finn fell to his knees in relief, Yo-yo licking his face.
Al looked at Finn, puzzled, and said, “Did she say school?”
Fifteen minutes later, Grandma was in the air, and Finn and Al were gunning it out of Heathrow and on to the M25 in Al’s 1969 silver grey De Tomaso Mangusta, the most extraordinary car ever hand-built in Italy, loud and low, a monster V8 coupe with perfect styling capable of 221bhp. Yo-yo howled and loved it. Finn adored it. Grandma thought the car ridiculous and a prime example of Al’s financial irresponsibility.
“I’ve grown tired of pretty dresses and I can’t think of anything better to waste it on,” Al would tell her, something Finn knew was only partly true because more than once he’d found cheques from Al in Grandma’s handbag, and they seemed huge. For no matter how unconventionally Al behaved, people still seemed to want a piece of him – corporations in need of a technical fix, pharmaceutical companies looking to reconstitute molecules, governments stuck with insoluble nuclear waste. They all came to Al.
He ran a small lab in the heart of London and was a ‘sort of scientist’: an atomic chemist with a wandering mind who found it difficult to fit into any one category – in science or life.
He was the only person, or so he claimed, to have been fired from the staff of the Universities of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the same term (for challenging the Standard Model of particle physics via the Tau Neutrino Paradox and for striking a right-wing economist with a steamed halibut during a buffet, respectively).
Al saw it as proof of moral fibre. Grandma saw it as proof of insanity and prayed it didn’t run in the family. After bringing up two totally reckless children, she had resolved to wrap her only grandchild up in sixteen tonnes of cotton wool.
Finn already shared Al’s bony, clumsy physique, but had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (“your father’s”), and mad blue, deep-blue eyes (“your mother’s”) and now Grandma fretted that he’d inherited a tendency to have his “own views” about things too (rejecting all yellow food apart from custard, pointing out a teacher’s “confrontational attitude” at a recent parents’ evening and bringing up his “problems with religion” with a vicar, during a funeral).
Not that Finn wanted to upset anyone. He was just trying to stay one step ahead of boredom, which meant – as he pointed out on his Facebook profile – ‘not being on the same planet as school’. He loved Grandma and made every effort not to cause her unnecessary suffering – avoiding dangerous sports, playground conflict and potentially lethal pastimes (while retaining the right to self-defence, of course. And who could resist making home-made fireworks? Or skateboarding into a neighbour’s pool, or practising overhead kicks on concrete, or…).
When Finn was with Al though, there were no rules.
Other people’s uncles played golf. Other people’s uncles might give them ten pounds at Christmas. Al was happy to see every moment as an opportunity for discovery and entertainment and he never said no. Even Finn realised this might be crazy, but it made being with him a very exciting place to be.
“I’m training him up,” Al would say whenever Grandma complained.
“What for?!” she would demand, terrified (for she knew he sometimes operated out of a secret world). Life, Finn supposed, trusting Al’s training absolutely, for, if his uncle’s head was in the clouds, his heart was always in the right place. Yes, he was erratic and unreliable, yes, he might have “a difficult relationship with stuff” (which included parking, losing things and an inability to tidy up), but he bridged the gap between everyday life and the way life ought to be – impulsive and instructive and full of things that blew up.
He dropped in every couple of weekends, sometimes staying for a week during the holidays, and he’d stayed the whole summer after Mum had died.
“You pack a bag?” Al snapped at him.
“Yep!”
“Got your passport, checked the date?”
“Yep!”
Yap! added Yo-yo.
“Get all the gear ready?”
“In the garage, all lined up.”
“Weapons? You know they still have wolves?”
“M60 with grenade launch side-barrel.”
“Hah! This is not Xbox, this is life or death – sunblock?”
“Sunblock, shades, tent, clothing, waterproofs, Swiss Army knife, Mars bar, torch, lighter, hand-held GPS – I’ve even got a blow-up pillow.”
“Trust yourself,” had been one of his mother’s Big Three Rules. “You can’t always rely on other people.”
Finn’s stuff weighed 6.5 kilograms packed into a natty dry bag.
He was ready for anything.
“I bet you didn’t remember we were going till this morning! I bet you haven’t even taken a shower!” Finn teased Al.
Al pretended to be appalled.
“Hey! I’ve got credit cards, a restaurant guide and half a tube of Pringles. Now let’s load up and let rip.”
DAY ONE 07:33 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
A convoy of six cars pulled up silently outside Hook Hall.
They were expected. Little was said.
In one vehicle was Commander James Clayton-King (Harrow, Oxford, RN, MoD, SIS, G&T Chair.), known simply as King. Not the jolly King of nursery rhymes, but the cruel, commanding type. Pale skin, powerful jaw, bone-deep intelligence. He wasn’t as menacing as his hooded eyes suggested, but he liked it suggested.
Two Security Service officers hopped out, one held open the door. From the cars behind, more senior figures emerged in similar fashion, including General Mount of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, three aides accompanying him.
They were led through the complex until they reached the Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), a cathedral-sized, concrete-lined warehouse where researchers could recreate and control any climate or environment imaginable, from lunar desert to lush rainforest, and proceed to blow or blast or poison the jelly beans out of it simply to see what happened. In essence it was a giant test tube and one of only three such spaces in the world.1
They climbed a steel gantry to a reinforced glass and concrete control gallery that flanked the space. Others had already arrived: an eclectic mix of soldiers, scientists, engineers and thinkers.
A group of bespectacled experts from a research institute on Salisbury Plain clustered
