FEBRUARY 19 10:54 (GMT+1). La première table de roulette, Casino de Monte-Carlo, French Riviera
“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs – faites vos jeux!” The croupier’s voice rang out.
The roulette wheel spun, numbers flashed past, and for a few moments all possibilities existed at once.
An agent of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (commonly known as the G&T) prepared to place a five-hundred-euro bet on number 35 black.
The agent, beneath a heavy disguise, was Dr Al Allenby, six foot two inches of angular, eccentric cool; a scientist trapped in the soul of an artist.
His nephew, Infinity Drake – aka Finn – thought him the best uncle in the world. Al thought himself the worst. It was all his fault Finn had been shrunk, all his fault he’d subsequently been captured, all his fault for creating the Boldklub reduction process in the first place, something the world’s greatest terrorist, David Anthony Pytor Kaparis, wanted so badly.
Twice Kaparis had tried to blackmail the world into handing over the Boldklub secret; once by releasing the apocalyptic Scarlatti Wasp, more recently by creating a swarm of deadly nano-bots in Shanghai. Twice he had been thwarted, by a 9mm high Infinity Drake.
Infinity Drake: missing, presumed dead.
Until now.
“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs …”
The silver ball began to lose momentum as it orbited the spinning wheel.
After months of silence – of endless searching, with no result – the G&T had at last received some grainy video footage of what appeared to be Finn, together with a message from Kaparis proposing a deal: a handover of the boy in exchange for the key Boldklub fractal equations1. To consent to the deal, a five-hundred-euro bet would be placed on 35 black at the casino in Monte Carlo at a specified time. An exchange would then take place in the smoking area on the street outside. The equations would be on a memory stick. The 9mm hostage, Infinity Drake, would be inside the aluminium tube of a Cohiba Espléndido fine cigar.
It was a fool’s gambit, but Al was desperate.
“Last chance, faites vos jeux! Place your bets, mesdames et messieurs …” called the croupier.
The rich, mainly elderly players placed safe bets.
Al placed a blue five-hundred-euro chip on number 35 black. The deal was on.
The ball cracked against the spinning wheel then bounced like Al’s heart around his chest.
“No more bets! Mesdames et messieurs – rien ne va plus!”
This was it. The culmination of five months of heartache and uncertainty. Al could not wait to see Finn, to bring him back to size at Hook Hall. He could not wait to hold him, to hang out with him, to eat junk food and play Xbox for nine hours straight. He could not wait to see his late sister, Finn’s mother, in his eyes, or for Al’s own mother – Finn’s epic grandma – to find peace again.
Al could not wait.
He was already on his way out, heading for the smokers of fat cigars on the street outside. As he burst through the swing doors to join them, precisely as planned, a motorbike drew up. A rider with a passenger on the back – both Tyros2.
The passenger, a girl of fifteen or so, withdrew a Cohiba Espléndido cigar cylinder from a bag round her waist.
Al took out a small blue memory stick. The equations it contained were fake. Booby traps. If you ran them through any Boldklub machine it would blow up.
The Tyro thrust out the cigar tube. Al handed over the stick.
Then everything happened in a blur.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
The motorbike roared straight off across the Place du Casino.
Al tried to twist the top off the cigar tube, hands shaking. It was stuck. One of the other smokers, another agent, ran to help. As they struggled, Al’s microphone picked up his desperate incantation, “Finn … Finn … Finn …”
Then the top finally twisted off and – POP! – the tube emitted a spray of confetti.
FEBRUARY 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.