The Faceless Stratagem Read online

  The Faceless Stratagem

  Copyright © 2017 Robert Scott-Norton

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  1

  6th May 2013

  “Did you hear that?” DS Stuart Nixon dropped to his knees and peered down into the open hatch.

  “The boss said there were no survivors,” Sally replied. “What did you hear?”

  “Something. Could have been somebody moving around.” He twisted and placed his foot on the top rung.

  “You’re going down there?” Sally asked, her blue eyes wide in fear at the prospect of being left alone on the surface.

  “I think someone needs help,” Stuart replied, his foot already on the top rung of the ladder.

  “The boss told us to protect this hatch.”

  “And we can do that. But they left in a hurry. There’s no way they did a proper search and I trust the boss’s new friend as far as I could throw her.” Stuart wondered whether the events of the last few days had sent DI Payne off on a mid-life crisis of sorts. His behaviour had become increasingly irrational and for the first time in the years they’d been working together, Stuart knew his boss was keeping major pieces of information from him.

  The ambulance crews that had been here had already taken their patients to the hospital. Max Harding’s wife had been in the first one then there’d been that garbled message about the crew being attacked. Whatever was happening, was larger than their ability to control, or to understand.

  “Stuart, be sensible. You haven’t even got a light.”

  “I’ve got this.” Stuart took out his mobile and thumbed on its torch.

  “You’re not seriously hoping to explore with a mobile phone light.”

  “Yep.” He descended another two rungs, ignoring the cold slime at every touch, careful that he didn’t lose grip on the mobile phone as he travelled. “I’ll be half an hour, tops. If there’s a problem, I’ll call you on this.”

  “You won’t get a signal down there.”

  “Then you’ll just have to wait. I won’t be long.”

  Sally paused, her brow furrowed in concentration. Stuart stared at her, wondering what was going through her mind. She’d always been loyal to Payne, but surely she could see the bigger picture here.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, eventually.

  “No, you can’t.”

  She bent down on her knees, reaching for the top rung of the ladder. “Come on, move,” she urged Stuart.

  Stuart wasn’t going to argue.

  He hurried down the ladder and reached the bottom quickly. Cool air breezed across his skin and he shivered at the ghostly touch. Shining his phone torch on the rungs as Sally descended, he promised himself that when this was over, he’d finally take the plunge and invite her out for dinner.

  As Sally descended below ground level, she suddenly gave out a yelp.

  “What’s up?” Stuart asked but his torch caught the problem immediately. The hatch was sliding back into place, seemingly of its own accord. Sally reached a hand up to stop it, but the hatch continued, oblivious to her efforts.

  “I can’t stop it,” she yelled.

  “Get down. Let me try,” Stuart urged, but even before Sally reached the bottom of the ladder, the hatch had clanged down into its home, sealing them in. Stuart passed her his mobile, and he scuttered up the ladder and pressed his hands against the hatch. “It won’t budge,” he said. He tried again, this time feeling his hands over the corrugated metal, searching for any catches he might have missed.

  He climbed down and took his mobile from Sally. “I guess we’d better find the other entrance, the one Linwood entered through.”

  Sally had her head bowed, avoiding eye contact.

  “Hey, it’s not your fault.” But the bravado he’d felt on the surface was rapidly waning.

  “How did it do that?” she asked, her voice almost trembling.

  “Some kind of automatic system I guess.” He shrugged. “We’ll find another way out. Don’t worry about it.”

  It felt colder down here and melting plastic and acrid smoke still hung in the air. As he shone his torch around, it picked up particles floating through the air, making it difficult for the light to penetrate far. Some of that dust was sitting in his mouth drying it out and making him want to cough.

  “What the hell is this place?” Sally said, her voice lower than normal as well.

  “Why are you whispering?” He shone the light up from under his chin to cast a spectral glow on his features. “Are you scared you’ll disturb somebody?”

  The punch to his shoulder was heavy and solid.

  They began to walk along the corridor. The brick walls had been painted red and the light picked up chips and peeling paintwork. It looked like it hadn’t been cared for in many years.

  “Payne called this place the Tombs. I heard him talking to Linwood,” Stuart said.

  “Nice. Not creepy at all.”

  At the end of the corridor, a junction led left and right.

  “Should we toss a coin for it?” Sally asked.

  “Right. We should always go right.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the smart choice.”

  “Why am I listening to you again?”

  “Because you find me irresistible, remember.”

  She bashed his arm again. “In your dreams, sunshine.”

  Stuart coughed several times as they navigated the passage. Walls had been damaged by whatever had happened down here and they stumbled a few times on debris. Stuart chose not to point out the dripping, deciding Sally didn’t need to share his concerns. The tunnel sloped downward, deeper and deeper, and even with both of them shining their mobile lights, they barely broke the gloom.

  “Did you hear that?” Sally had stopped still.

  “What?” he whispered, the skin on his arms breaking out in goosebumps. Stuart held his light forward, willing it to penetrate the darkness farther than it could.

  “Voices.”

  Stuart listened but he couldn’t hear whatever had caught Sally’s attention. He tapped her lightly on the elbow and indicated they should continue. Soon, the passage split once again. He hesitated, shining his light to the left and the right, but ultimately followed his gut and led them right. “Have you wondered why the boss kept his survival secret?”

  “He doesn’t trust someone,” Sally said.

  “Who do you think that might be? Someone in our team?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly,” she replied. “Or maybe he’s not sure about that woman.”

  Their lights made out a doorway. The doors lay discarded on the floor, smashed and broken. Stuart led them to the opening where they paused and shone their lights inside. It had once been a meeting room. A large conference table took
up the bulk of the space but its wooden surface was covered with chunks of plaster and masonry from the ceiling above. Exposed pipework and metal framing poked out through jagged gaps in the ceiling.

  “Hello?” Stuart called.

  For a terrifying moment, he wondered what he would do if someone responded.

  “Who has a boardroom hidden under a lake?” Sally whispered. Her torchlight picked up a broken wall of monitor screens and—“There’s somebody in there,” Sally hissed. She’d picked out the sallow features of a middle-aged man, half buried under the fallen ceiling. Without waiting for Stuart to respond, she pushed into the room, treading carefully, stumbling over the plaster and bits of ceiling.

  “Sally, wait.” Stuart caught up. The man was dead. There was no need to check for a pulse but Sally did it anyway. His eyes were open and a sheet of dust had already accumulated on the man’s grey skin.

  “How long do you think he’s been dead?” Stuart asked.

  “His skin’s cold. He could have been dead hours.” She straightened, shining her light back to the open doorway. Stuart didn’t like how she moved the beam like she was trying to catch sight of something in the tunnel. “We need to get another ambulance crew here,” she said.

  Stuart ventured farther into the room. He coughed again. The dust tasted of plaster. “There’s another body back here.”

  Sally followed him to the far corner where a woman lay crumpled against the wall. There was an obvious black pattern on her top, a burnt patch. “Some kind of scorching? I don’t think this one died from the explosion,” Sally said, pointing at the mark.

  “There’s no blood,” Stuart replied, shining his light around the body. Suddenly, he snapped his head around to the doorway.

  “What is it?” Sally hissed.

  He wanted to tell her he thought they were being watched but realised what a terrible cliché that was and knew it would do little to put either of their minds at ease. “I think we should get out of here. There’s no one else to save. We can get a bigger team together back at the station.”

  “First sensible thing you’ve said all night.” Sally was already making her way to the door and Stuart came up close behind her. But back in the tunnel, Stuart hesitated. They were faced with a junction leading to the left, right, and straight ahead. That dripping sound was louder now. “Have we come out a different door? I don’t recognise this...”

  Sally pressed against him. “I don’t want to sound alarmist, but this feels different.”

  Stuart took a step back to the conference room and looked inside. There was no second doorway. They hadn’t got turned around in there. This was the way they’d entered.

  “We’re tired and this dust is making everything look strange. We must have come in this way,” he said, pointing straight ahead at the tunnel before them. But he’d only taken two steps when a noise from the darkness ahead made him stop. He took Sally’s elbow and guided her back to the corridor on their right. “Let’s try this way, instead.”

  “What? You said that’s the way we came.”

  “I’m not sure anymore.”

  Then Sally froze. “You heard that?”

  “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “I don’t think you’re capable of scaring me any more than I am already.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Footsteps,” she said and turned on her heel to march towards the tunnel on the right. “Come on, there’s someone down here with us.”

  Stuart hesitated. It could be more rescue people. A replacement ambulance crew come to retrieve the bodies. He hurried after Sally into the darkness, his heart racing.

  For a moment, he thought he’d lost her, so he called out, but then he bumped into her back. “Don’t go off ahead without me. Neither of us wants to get lost down here.”

  They carried on together. “Don’t you think this place is large, I mean impossibly large for something under the lake? It must have cost millions. How could they have constructed something like this with no one noticing?”

  “It looks old,” Stuart said, picking out the walls and disabled light fittings with his mobile.

  Sally gripped his arm tight enough to make him wince.

  They both stopped at the noise behind them. A whooping, like a crowd cheering, but low and guttural.

  Animalistic.

  2

  6th May 2013

  Alice Linwood lay back on the grass under the Lovell radio telescope and stared up at the stars wondering how they had ever got to this place. The raw facts were still blowing through her mind, connections forged and then dismissed as she tried to understand how the creature she’d known as Irulal had created so much havoc.

  And on her watch.

  Beside her on the grass were the two men who’d fought this final battle with her, all three of them exhausted after the last twenty-four hours, and she suddenly realised she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been asleep in her bed or eaten a hot meal.

  It could have been a lot worse. If Irulal had succeeded in holding open the dimensional schism above the telescope, and if the signal had continued transmitting as she’d planned, the world would be facing annihilation.

  The wind blustered through the branches in the trees at the edge of the field like whispering ghosts. The large man on the grass beside her stirred and sat up. Linwood propped herself up on her elbows and smiled. DI Spencer Payne wasn’t smiling though. His brow furrowed in concentration and worry. Despite only knowing him for a matter of days, it had become a familiar look to her.

  “I guess we can’t stay here all night. I need to get back to Southport. See how my people are doing,” he said.

  The other man beside her, Max Harding, was a man she barely knew at all. He sat up and exhaled deeply. For some reason she’d yet to establish, he’d been in the thick of the action and had single-handedly dealt with the alien threat whilst she had only been able to monitor and report on what her instruments back at her improvised base of operations at the hotel had told her.

  “I’d like to understand what was happening here,” Linwood said, and she directed her next question at Max. “Are you ready to talk?”

  Approaching sirens made her get to her feet, and she scanned the edges of the site, looking for the source.

  “That’s good right?” Payne asked.

  “Depends on who called them,” she said. Linwood had called no one since leaving Southport with Payne less than an hour ago.

  “There were students here,” Max said. “There were others on site. They’d have heard the gunshots, seen the lights above the dish.”

  “Where’s Irulal’s body?” Linwood asked.

  “There’s nothing left. Nothing I could see anyway. After we fought, she vanished.”

  “No one just vanishes.”

  “I shot her. Then I damaged some equipment she had on top of the antenna structure. That impacted the schism. It stopped after that.” Max looked around, concerned. “Shit, there was a girl that helped me. Stacey. And more Faceless. What’s happened to them?”

  Payne cocked his head. “We saw no one on our way in here. Maybe she went back to the main building. She might have been the one to call the emergency services.”

  “And the Faceless? They could still be out there.”

  “We’ll get teams looking out for them. They won’t get far.” Linwood pulled out a phone. It would make sense to report in what she found, but something held her back. There would be plenty of questions to answer and she had little time to prepare. “We need to get this whole site contained. No one’s leaving without my say so.”

  “How are we going to do that with just the three of us?” Payne said.

  Flashing blue lights broke through the treeline bordering the car park at the main complex, then several vehicles drove into the site: two police cars and a fire engine. Doors opened, footsteps ran across tarmac. Linwood readied herself to take control of the situation.

  But then, there was another noise—a
helicopter approaching quickly.

  Two uniforms ran from the police cars to meet them. Payne stepped forward and fished his ID from his pocket. “DI Payne, Southport CID. We need help to secure this site. No one is to leave without being interviewed by this lady, Alice Linwood.”

  The shorter of the policemen nodded, his face confused. “We had reports of a light show from the dish. People were scared there’d been an explosion.”

  “No. Nothing like that,” Linwood said, looking past the police to the fire crew in the distance. The fire chief was hurrying across the grass.

  “It’s terrorists,” the policeman continued, “a new weapon. Biological warfare. I watched a program on Sky about it.”

  Linwood shook her head but didn’t discourage the man. Until they had a good cover story in place, his version was as good as any. The fire chief joined them and Linwood spoke to him. “I’m Alice Linwood, security service section chief, and I’m taking control of this site and this investigation.”

  Above, and to her left, the sound of the approaching helicopter was almost on top of them. A searchlight kicked on and its focused beam carved up the night, looking for activity. It quickly found the small gathering on the ground and stayed tightly on them. A second searchlight swept sporadically across the field.

  “Who are they?” Max asked, lifting a hand to shield his eyes.

  “Not sure,” Linwood replied, raising her voice against the noise, almost shouting. “Let’s hope they’re friendly.” They tried not to get blown over by the landing helicopter. Its black profile was like a predatory shark. As soon as it landed, the searchlights extinguished and doors slid open.

  Dark figures spilt out. It was clear from the accompanying clatter they were armed. Torches blinded Linwood’s party.

  The rotor slowed and Linwood noticed the others in her group become still.

  “Hands in the air!” A man’s voice commanded. She thought she’d made out three people leaving the helicopter. The two leading the group were wearing black ops gear. The figure at the back wasn’t, but the lights from the helicopter made it difficult to make out the person’s features.