The Invisible Assassin (2 page)

The security guard hesitated, then scowled and reached inside the hut. He produced the two hard hats, which Jake and Johnson put on. The inside of Jake’s stank of grease, and part of him regretted insisting on being given it, but it was too late to back down now.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then he and Johnson walked through the gateway and on to the site.

‘Very macho.’ Johnson grinned. ‘I thought you said you weren’t part of the government?’

‘Hmmm,’ said Jake non-commitally, and kept on walking, repeating to himself the mantra the senior press officer had driven into him on his first day: be careful about any comments you make when reporters are around.

The site was alive with activity and noise: huge yellow machines digging, dumper trucks running to and fro laden with dirt and rubble. If there were any fairies here, they’ll be long gone, thought Jake.

A shout above the noise of the machines caught his attention. It came from a hole not far away. Jake headed towards the hole, Johnson tagging along just behind him, notebook and pen at the ready. A huge digger was poised at the edge of the hole, and the driver had withdrawn the equally huge claw-like bucket to the rim. One of the building workers had jumped down into the hole and was scrabbling with his hands at something half-buried in the earth.

Oh, please, God, don’t let it be a body! groaned Jake inwardly, especially with a reporter at the scene.

But no, it appeared to be a parcel of some sort, wrapped in what looked to Jake from this distance like some kind of oiled leather.

Don’t let it be a head, prayed Jake silently. Not even a head from ancient times!

Television news loved pictures of skulls being dug out of the ground. And the bunch of loonies with their placards outside the fence would love it as well; they’d claim it was the head of a fairy king, or some such nonsense. Jake reflected that it was lucky there were no TV cameras here, after all.

But it wasn’t a head. The building worker stood in the hole started to unwrap the worn leather casing, and revealed what looked like some sort of big old book. He began to open it.

Jake heard a gasp of alarm from Johnson.

‘Shouldn’t you stop them?’ she asked. ‘That could be really ancient. He might damage it.’

‘Yes.’ Jake nodded. ‘I was just about to do that.’ Aloud, he called to the worker in the hole, ‘Hey! You shouldn’t have opened that!’

The man glared up at Jake.

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Because . . .’ began Jake. And then he faltered. Why not? He was sure there was some Act of Parliament or other preventing it, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It was something to do with the Queen. ‘Because . . . all property found on this land is the property of the Queen, and as the representative of Her Majesty’s Government on this site . . .’

Jake never finished. The building worker’s expression suddenly changed from one of contempt to one of fear as he dropped the boook, and then he was shaking his arm as if trying to throw off a creature, like a spider or something.

And then Jake saw the man’s hand began to change, turning from a skin colour to a faint green, and the green began to blossom out, like a plant sprouting leaves at rapid speed, but these weren’t leaves, they were . . . fungus. A kind of green fungus was enveloping the whole of the man’s arm, creeping upwards, spreading out.

As Jake and the others watched in horror, the man ran for the edge of the hole, trying to scramble up the sides, but whatever he was trying to escape from had already got hold of him. Before their eyes, the green fungus spread, covering the man’s chest, spreading rapidly downwards over his thighs, his legs, and upwards to his neck, and his head. The man was screaming in fear, but then his screams were cut off; he had disappeared and been replaced by a mass of writhing green fungus.

The weird shape tried to move, to the left, to the right, struggling, and then it collapsed. The next second everyone was yelling and running away from the scene, desperate to put distance between themselves and the mass of what had once been a human being.

Everyone except Jake, who was rooted to the spot in spite of himself, just staring, goggle-eyed, at what was happening.

Chapter 2

‘He turned into a vegetable right in front of me!’

It was the next morning and Jake was back in his office at Whitehall, relating the astonishing events of the afternoon before to his colleague Paul Evans. Paul was two years older than Jake and had been at the department for over a year, which made him an old press hand in Jake’s eyes.

‘What sort of vegetable?’ asked Paul.

‘What does it matter what sort of vegetable?!’ exploded Jake. ‘It was . . . it was . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable! Like something out of a horror movie!’

‘What did you do?’ asked Paul.

‘I did what I’ve been told to do: slapped a D Notice on the whole thing, which meant the reporter who was there . . . and luckily for me the
only
reporter who was there, and a local at that – if it had been one of the nationals I’d have been well and truly sunk . . . anyway, which meant the reporter was stopped from telling anyone what had happened. And then I got on the phone to Gareth. Within twenty minutes, the site was full of helicopters landing, the SAS turning up fully armed, medics, and of course the top brass from the press office to make sure the whole place was shut down. By the time I left, there was a net of security around the site like I’ve never seen. Everyone in the area was taken in and had the fear of God put into them, and was persuaded they’d been the unfortunate victims of a hallucination caused by a leak of toxic gas.’

‘Maybe it was,’ said Paul. ‘Maybe there was a leak of toxic gas, some substance buried long ago. Some experiment that went wrong during the First World War, or something. There’s all manner of terrible stuff buried all over the place.’

‘I know what I saw!’ insisted Jake.

‘You know what you
think
you saw,’ countered Paul. ‘That’s what happens with hallucinations.’ He gave Jake a grin. ‘Considering everything, you did well, Jake, for a trainee.’

But it
wasn’t
a hallucination. Jake knew what he’d seen. A man had picked up something wrapped in faded leather. He’d unwrapped it and exposed an old book.

When he’d opened it, a fungus had started to spread up his arm, and within seconds it had covered his whole body. He remembered an ambulance turning up, and paramedics in complete body-protection suits putting that . . . thing . . . on a stretcher and taking it to the ambulance, and then speeding away. No siren sounding, so he guessed the man was dead. The site itself was sealed off, with armed guards posted around it, all dressed in radiation protection suits, just in case there was still something dangerous there. So how could it have been a hallucination?

‘News about it is bound to leak out,’ said Jake. ‘D Notice or not, one of those workers, or one of the protestors, is going to phone up their local TV station.’

‘What protestors?’ asked Paul.

‘These people who were protesting against building a new science block on the site. They said it was the home of fairies and mustn’t be disturbed.’

‘Fairies?’ chuckled Paul.

‘Don’t laugh.’ Jake shuddered. ‘One woman said to me if the ground was disturbed then whoever did it was cursed. And look what happened!’

‘Nothing happened,’ insisted Paul. ‘Like they said, mass hallucination.’

‘It wasn’t,’ insisted Jake. ‘I saw it. They saw it. And at least one of them will tell what happened, and some news editor hungry for an interesting item for page two will write it up.’

Paul shook his head.

‘It’ll soon get squashed,’ he said. ‘H or H.’

Jake frowned.

‘What?’

‘H or H,’ repeated Paul. ‘Hoax or Hallucination. The standard rebuttal to any story of that kind, whether it’s UFOs, people vanishing into thin air, weird monsters, spontaneous combustion, anything out of the ordinary. I’m surprised you weren’t told about H or H.’ Paul shrugged. ‘But then, you’ve only been here . . . what?’

‘I’ve been here nine months!’ protested Jake.

‘But you haven’t had to deal with one of these stories so far. So, now you have. Welcome to the wonderful world of H or H.’

Jake was about to carry on his protest about what he’d seen, when his phone rang.

‘Jake Wells,’ he said.

It was Gareth Findlay-Weston, his head of section in the press office.

‘Jake,’ said Gareth. Even though Jake couldn’t see Gareth, he could tell by the tone of his voice Gareth was smiling. Or, at least, that he had a smile on his face, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing. ‘Can you pop up to my office?’

Gareth’s office was on the third floor. Jake and Paul and the rest of the grunts in the press office were on the first floor. As Jake walked up the stairs he reflected on how the floor levels indicated seniority. In fact, the whole building that was the Department of Science reflected levels of seniority. The higher you went, the more intimidating the building became: the banisters changed from ordinary metal to brass. The light fittings, which were plain white plastic up to the second floor, became shining gunmetal from the third floor upwards. Jake wondered what the fittings were made of when you got beyond the fourth floor: solid gold, perhaps, or maybe platinum.

He walked along the narrow corridor, panelled with dark oak, the wood adorned with old paintings showing an England long past: hunting scenes, old countryside celebrations, all of it looking backwards. It hardly went with the image the Department of Science liked to present, as thrusting boldly into the twenty-first century. Though the public would never come this far, never see these pictures or the dark oak panels. They’d be kept at the lower levels, the second floor and below, where it was all chromium lighting, modern prints and small abstract shapes, models of molecular structures and large plasma screens.

Jake arrived at Gareth’s door, knocked, and went in to be met by Gareth’s assistant, Janet.

‘He’s ready for you,’ said Janet, ushering Jake smartly over to an inner office.

Gareth was sitting behind a huge desk that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a James Bond film. There was very little on the desk, except two telephones and a photograph in a silver frame showing his wife and sons.

‘Jake!’ Gareth greeted him, the usual broad smile. He waved him to a chair. ‘Well done, Jake. Damn good stuff yesterday! For a trainee, you did a magnificent job under difficult circumstances. You did absolutely the right thing, getting on to me. Averted what could have been a mass panic.’

‘What about the man?’

‘Which man?’

‘The building worker. The one who . . . you know . . . turned into that thing.’

Gareth frowned.

‘Are you feeling all right, Jake?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Jake. ‘Obviously a bit shaken up. I mean, it’s not every day you see something like that . . .’

Gareth got up from his chair and came round the desk to Jake, a look of concern on his face.

‘Did you get yourself checked?’ he asked. ‘By the medicos, I mean.’

‘Well . . . no,’ said Jake. ‘If you remember, you ordered me to come back here to deal with the press because you sent Algy to take over control of the press at the site. You said the situation called for someone with more experience.’

Gareth shook his head apologetically.

‘I’m dreadfully sorry, Jake. I was terribly lax. Trying to stop it turning into a media circus. I think you’d better go and see the quack and get yourself checked out.’

‘But the man who tuned into that . . . thing,’ insisted Jake.

Gareth gave Jake a hard look.

‘It didn’t happen,’ he said firmly. ‘There was some sort of leak of toxic gas which gave everyone the heebie-jeebies and made them see things.’ Then his expression softened. ‘I’m sorry, Jake. After all, as your immediate boss I have a duty of care to you and everyone in my department. So, go to the medico department and get yourself checked out. It could be you’ve still got traces of the gas, whatever it was, in your system. Get fixed up now. Then we’ll talk afterwards.’

Gareth gave a smile and patted Jake on the shoulder, then he picked up his internal phone and tapped out a number.

‘Infirmary,’ he said, ‘Findlay-Weston. One of my department needs a check-up as a result of this gas leak that happened in Bedfordshire. Yes, he’s still suffering the after-effects, so I’m sending him along to you. His name’s Jake Wells. Give him a full once-over, and any treatment he needs. Bill my department. Quote my name as reference.’

Fifteen minutes later, a semi-naked Jake was in the basement of the building, being prodded and poked by a doctor in a white coat while a nurse stood by and made notes. It was a thorough examination, no doubt about that. Blood pressure. Blood sample. Urine sample. Weight. A lung test, blowing into a funnel connected to some machine. Eyes tested, lights shone into them; followed by a standard optician’s eye test.

At the end of it, when Jake had dressed, the doctor handed him a prescription.

‘You’ll need to take these three times a day,’ he said.