The Sons of Scarlatti
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To my children Rose, Huw and Conrad,
with love everlasting and a third share of all royalties*
* conditions apply
Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.
Exodus, 8:21
Consider yourself lucky. So far.
Six-Legged Soldiers – Using Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffrey A. Lockwood, OUP, 2008
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Footnotes
Copyright
About the Publisher
“This is exactly what happened to Liz and Lionel when Kismet went missing in her GAP year…”
Finn’s grandma stood in front of the Departures gate, and fussed.
“Grandma! He’s in the building. He’ll be here any minute,” said Finn.
They were waiting for Uncle Al to turn up. He was supposed to be providing cover for Grandma while she took a well-earned break – flying to Oslo for a ‘knitting cruise’ around Scandinavia with another hundred or so grey-haired needlecraft enthusiasts.
Al had promised to show up at Grandma’s the night before.
Then Al had promised to meet them at the airport, first thing.
Then Al had promised – just now, by phone – to meet them at the Departures gate.
But Al… well, Al was Al, and nothing was certain, and Grandma’s way of coping with the distress her son caused her, from babe in arms to now, thirty-two years later, was to fill the world with a breathless stream of anxious chatter.
“…Kismet their eldest with the tattoos they had to fly out to Kinshasa cost them five thousand pounds silly thing had lost her phone it was the not knowing if she was dead or alive you can’t imagine what that does to a parent – where is he? – I looked after their cat same bladder problems as Tiger…”
“Last call for passenger Violet Allenby, Oslo flight 103, proceed immediately to gate 15,” announced the voice over the loudspeaker.
“…John very helpfully ran me into Woking young vet from New Zealand lovely girl wet food and herbal treatment…”
“Grandma! Please!”
“I can always catch the next one…”
“Noooo, Grandma!” Finn gyrated in frustration.
“Infinity!” she snapped. “I am not moving an inch.”
(Infinity. All Finn knew about his father – all he needed to know – was in his name. Who would name a child after a mathematical concept? “Exactly the sort of man you’d imagine,” Finn’s mother would say wistfully, claiming it had been all she could do to prevent him being named E=mc2.)
“Al is here! I’ll be fine!”
“He is not! One thing you can rely on is that you can never rely on Al. He says he’s ‘in the building’, but that could mean anything. It could mean an imaginary building; it could mean a building on another continent, on another planet…”
“Grandma, get on the plane!”
“I have a duty of care. You are a child…”
“I’m almost a teenager.”
“…and if you really think, if he thinks, I’m going to abandon you to your fate in an airport full of germs, runaway trolleys and international terrorists…”
And then, thank goodness, from around the corner, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, walked Al.
Six foot two and thin as a whip, part muscle, part bone, part wire, suede jacket and ancient cords worn to the point of oblivion, dark hair, darker eyes, designer glasses held together by tape, arm raised in surprised greeting as if he’d just wandered in and spotted them by chance.
“Alan! Where on earth have you been?”
“Ah…? I was in the middle of something.” He thought this would do. “Why are you still here?”
Yap!
On a lead by Al’s side bounced a delighted, knee-high mongrel (a kind of spaniel/hyperactive kangaroo cross, Finn always thought).
“What are you doing with Yo-yo? You can’t bring dogs in here!”
“I saw him tied him up outside. He was crying.”
Officials across the concourse were already beginning to take notice.
“Marvellous! Now we’ll all be arrested…” said Grandma.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Finn to Al.
With that, Al scooped Grandma up like she was a toddler, gave her a kiss on the cheek and put her down again, pointing in the right direction.
“For goodness’ sake, I’m sixty-three!”
Finn wheeled her bag after her and together he and Al herded her through the Departures gate like a reluctant farm animal.
“Have you spoken to Mrs Jennings? She’s agreed to check Finn in and out of school.”
“Mrs Jennings and I speak all the time,” confirmed Al.
“Go, Grandma!”
“You’re lying!” she protested. “All the meals are in the freezer marked—”
“All the meals are in the freezer, all the knives and forks are in the drawers, there are doors and windows that allow access to the dwelling place…” interrupted Al.
“The keys!”
“…the keys to which are in Finn’s pocket, which is a cloth appendage sewn into his trousers about so high. Go on, Mother! I can reheat lasagne and hold a high moral line for a week!”
“That I doubt very much!”
She was being urged through now by a red-faced airline official.
“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 self-consciously. They looked like men who hadn’t slept.
There were handshakes and nods, but no high fives. Tea and coffee were offered and refused. A selection of biscuits lay untouched.
The Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (popularly reduced to ‘the G&T’) was formed in October 2002 to respond to extraordinary threats to global security and the fabric of Western civilisation. It had fourteen expert members and a decision-making core of five including Commander King as its chairman. They had only been forced to meet three times over the last decade2, and they knew whatever they were here for it would be serious.
Deadly serious.
A technician reported: “Ready when you are, sir.”
“Good. Seal the room,” said Commander King.
He waited as doors were locked and blinds whirred down.
“Now… You may be wondering why you’ve been called here.”
His voice was deep and used to command – controlled, no-nonsense and yet also theatrical.
“Well. One of our scientists is missing. And it seems he has released – this…”
The technician hit a key and up on the screen, in enormous scale, appeared an image…
DAY ONE 07:41 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire, UK
Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill…
TWO
“Lamp trap?” snapped Al.
“Check,” said Finn.
“Nets?”
“Check.”
“Traps?”
“Check.”
“Pins?”
“Check.”
“Jars?”
Yap!
“Idiot dog.”
They were back at Grandma’s rambling old house now, going through the gear Finn had got together for their trip.
“Ethyl acetate?”
“‘The Agent of Death?’” mugged Finn. “Check.”
“Cards and fixing spray?”
“Check! It’s all here, let’s go!”
Yap! agreed Yo-yo (particularly delighted as ‘go’ meant ‘run about outside with Yo-yo’), leaping at Finn with such excitement that he knocked a shoebox full of plastic soldiers off a shelf and sent the lot skittering across the garage floor.
“Oh great,” Finn said, having to pick them up one by one.
“There should be some fishing rods back here…” said Al, wading through a decade’s worth of accumulated junk at the back of the garage.
Finn had been on a similar junk hunt on his first summer at Grandma’s, which was how he’d discovered Al’s boyhood bug-collecting gear behind a defunct Mini. He and Al had set up the lamp trap, a glowing, tent-like apparatus, in the back garden, and stayed up half the night collecting and cataloguing the multitude of insects drawn towards the light.
Grandma hadn’t seen it as a proper way to mourn the passing of a mother, a sister, a daughter. But then they were male, and men were different when it came to emotions, especially powerful emotions, and if arranging dead insects helped them to cope then so be it. She also knew her daughter, wherever she was, would be looking down in approval at the two of them forming such an odd, unbreakable bond.
The second of Mum’s Big Three Rules for Finn was: “Be yourself.” Finn had never really figured out what that meant, but he’d ended up with 108 different species of native insects in various states of disrepair mounted on two A3 cards above the fireplace in his room.
Bombus lucorum, Bombus terrestris, Bombus lapidarius (bumblebees that sounded so good it made your mouth go funny); leafcutter, miner and carpenter bees; churchyard, mealworm and common oil beetles; big stags, small stags; seven-spot and eyed ladybirds; sawfly (you should see their wings), blowfly, housefly, horn fly; fantastic, impossible dragonflies and damsels (some in distress); moths upon moths – almost every type of hawk; and butterflies fit for an art gallery – tortoiseshell and fritillary, red admiral and Camberwell beauty, swallowtail and green-veined whites.
The writing on the labels was childish and some of the pins and mounts had been knocked off, but the samples themselves still looked fantastic. He knew everything about them; he’d read every book and article. He could recite all their names and characteristics.
Finn wondered if his interest was just natural or whether he was trying to force a connection back to his parents, both of whom had been scientists (he’d lost his father, Ethan, in a laboratory accident just after he was born, his mother more recently to cancer). Either way it felt right. And when Al asked him what he’d like to do on his ‘week off’ from Grandma, Finn immediately knew he wanted to add to the collection.
“Great idea. How about the blind insects of the Pyrenees?” said Al. “Freakish, eyeless Ungeheuer found in the deepest mountain caverns, evolved over twenty million years of total darkness!”
“The Pyrenees?”
“It’s a mountain range between France and Spain.”
“I know where it is, but Grandma…”
“Never tell Grandma anything; it only worries her and then you can’t shut her up.”
Before Finn knew it, the trip was on.
“Let’s hit the road,” said Al, reappearing from the back of the garage with two fishing rods and a jar of old tobacco pipes. “We’ve got to get to the ferry by three.”
Finn snapped his fingers and Yo-yo sprang into the tiny back of the Mangusta, delighted because everything delighted Yo-yo. Bathtime. Being locked outside in the rain. Being shouted at. And right now – being taken to certain incarceration in kennels.
En route, Al called the secretary at Finn’s school, Mrs Jennings, claiming, with a completely straight face, to be consultant dermatologist “Dr Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P-H—”, and that he was rushing Infinity Drake to his private clinic because of “an acute case of seborrhoeic dermatitis”.
“It is absolutely vital to initiate wire-brushing.” If everything went well, the boy would be discharged in a week, Al continued, though he might be totally bald, and if so what was the school policy on “the wearing of a headscarf and/or wig for medical reasons”? The secretary, alarmed, put him on hold to consult a higher authority, then came back on the line to ask if she could just take his name again. “Of course,” said Al, “Herr Doktor Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P—” and then pretended to be cut off by poor reception.
“That ought to do it.”
He screeched to a halt in front of the kennels.
“Ditch the mutt. Go.”
Finn took a deep breath. “Come on, Yo-yo.”
The dog sprang out of the back seat and followed Finn up to the kennels, excited by the other doggy noises and smells. Once shut inside his cage though, Yo-yo sat on his haunches and howled.
Mum had got him for Finn as soon as she realised she was ill. It was obvious therapy, but it had worked.
Finn touched his chest. Scratched the stone. Although he couldn’t get his head round the concept of his mum’s ‘soul’, he’d long ago decided that if there was such a thing then it lived in the stone that hung from a leather tie around his neck. It looked dull and ordinary, but in fact it was a rock called spharelite that his mum had always worn. When you scratched it – with your fingernail, with anything – it would literally glow. Triboluminescence it was called, but not even science could tell you quite how it worked, or why. Which was in part why Finn loved it. It was mysterious and it was scientific and it had been his mum’s and it had a great name. If he ever had children, one of them was going to be called Spharelite Triboluminescence.
Finn reached in and gave Yo-yo’s neck one last rub.
Yo-yo thought the cruel ‘lock-up-your-dog’ game was over and rolled on his back, offering his tummy to be tickled.
What an idiot.
It was at times like this that Finn remembered his mum’s third and final Big Rule, delivered in her last days alive when she hadn’t seemed like she was dying at all and had showered him with affection and practical instruction.
“If you’re ever in doubt, work out what feels right in your heart of hearts then, whatever happens… just keep going.”
Al watched, appalled, as a minute later Finn marched out of the kennels – followed by Yo-yo.
“What…?”
Yap!
Finn got in the front, Yo-yo hopped in the back.
“Mum…” Finn started to say – and Al knew what was coming: “Mum wouldn’t just leave him like this.”
“Why you little…”
It was an emotionally loaded, totally absurd unwritten rule between them that, if either Finn or Al invoked his mother, the other had to obey. The rule was stone crazy and wide open to abuse (“My sister would’ve loved you to make me another cup of tea…” “My mother would have loved FIFA 14 on PSP…”), but it was not one Finn ever felt he could revoke. It needed Al to be the grown-up and break the spell, to put an end to the madness, but that just wasn’t Al.