17
1
ON PATROL
THE PILGRIM HOSPITAL BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE
Sergeant Ted Pearson of the Lincolnshire Police stamped his cold feet on the pavement, and checked his watch again. His partner, Constable Dave Fleming, watched him, a nervous look on his face.
Half ten, thought the Sergeant, with a grimace. I should be at home with my feet up. Sharon’s making lasagne tonight, and it’s never as good warmed through.
The 999 call had been made from the hospital’s reception desk at 9.50pm. Sergeant Pearson and his partner had been finishing up the paperwork on an illegal immigration case they were working on one of the farms near Louth, both men looking forward to getting the forms filed and heading home, when they had been told the call was theirs. Grumbling, they had climbed into their car and driven the short distance from the police station to the hospital, blue lights spinning above them, their siren blaring through the freezing January night.
They had reached the hospital in a little over three minutes, and were questioning the nurse who had made the call, a young Nigerian woman with wide, frightened eyes, when Sergeant Pearson’s radio buzzed into life. The message it conveyed was short and to the point.
“Secure access to potential crime scene. Do not investigate, or talk to potential witnesses. Stand guard until relieved.”
Pearson had sworn loudly down his receiver, but the voice on the other end, a voice he didn’t recognise but which was definitely not the usual dispatcher, was already gone. So he had done as he was told: instructed Constable Fleming to cease his questioning of the nurse, and informed all staff that access to the hospital’s blood bank was forbidden without direct permission from him. Then he and his partner had taken up positions outside the side entrance to the hospital, shivering in the cold, waiting to be relieved. By who, or what, they didn’t know.
“What’s going on, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, after fifteen minutes had passed. “Why are we standing out here like security guards?”
“We’re doing what we were told to do,” replied Sergeant Pearson.
Fleming nodded, unconvinced. He looked round at the dimly lit road; it was a narrow alley between the hospital and a red-brick factory that was falling rapidly into disrepair. On the wall opposite, in black paint that had dripped all the way to the ground, someone had sprayed two words.
HE RISES
“What’s that mean, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, pointing at the graffiti.
“Shut up, Dave,” replied his partner, giving the words a cursory glance. “No more questions, all right?”
The young man was going to make a fine copper, Pearson had no doubt about that, but his enthusiasm, and his relentless inquisitiveness, had a tendency to give the Sergeant a headache. The uncomfortable truth was that Pearson didn’t know what was going on, or why they were guarding the hospital door, or what the graffiti meant. But he was not going to admit that to Fleming, who had been on the force for less than six months. He stamped his feet again, and as he did so, he heard the rumble of an engine approaching in the distance.
Thirty seconds later a black van pulled to a halt in front of the two policemen.
The windows of the vehicle were as dark as the panels of its body, and it sat low to the ground on heavy-duty, run-flat tyres. The noise of its engine was incredibly loud, a deep roar that Pearson and Fleming felt through their boots. For almost thirty seconds, nothing happened; the van stood motionless before them, squat and strangely threatening under the fluorescent light emanating from the hospital’s side entrance behind them. Then, with a loud hiss, the vehicle’s rear door slid open, and three figures emerged.
Fleming stared at them as they approached, his eyes wide. Pearson, who had seen things over the course of his career that the younger man would not have believed, was more adept at hiding his emotions than his partner, and managed to keep his confusion, and rising unease, from his face.
The three figures that stopped in front of them were dressed head to toe in black: their boots, their gloves, their uniforms, belts and military-style webbing. All black. The only splash of colour was the bright purple of the flat visors that covered their faces, visors attached to sleek black helmets that looked like nothing the policemen had seen before. There was not a millimetre of exposed skin to be seen; the newcomers could easily have been robots, such was the anonymity of their appearance. On their belts, two black guns hung in holsters alongside a long cylinder with a handle and a trigger on one side. It was obviously a weapon, but it was not one that either of the policemen recognised.
The tallest of the figures stopped in front of Sergeant Pearson, the shiny material of its visor centimetres away from his face. When the figure spoke, the voice was male, but it had a flat, digital quality that Pearson knew from his time on the Met with SO15 meant the person behind the visor was speaking through several levels of filter, to avoid the possibility of voiceprint identification.
“Have you signed the Official Secrets Act?” the black figure asked, turning its visor-clad face sharply between the two policemen, who nodded, too intimidated to speak. “Good. Then you never saw us, and this never happened.”
“On whose authority?” managed Pearson, his voice shaking heavily.
“The Chief of the General Staff,” replied the figure, then leant forward until its visor was a millimetre from the Sergeant’s nose. “And mine. Understood?”
Pearson nodded again, and the figure drew back. Then it stepped past him and strode into the hospital. The other two dark shapes followed.
“The blood bank is—” began Constable Fleming.
“We know the way,” said the third of the figures in a digitally altered female voice.
Then they were gone.
The two policemen looked at one another. Sergeant Pearson was visibly shaking, and Constable Fleming reached a hand towards his partner’s shoulder. The older man waved it away, but he didn’t look annoyed; he looked old, and frightened.
“Who were they, Sarge?” asked Fleming, his voice unsteady.
“I don’t know, Dave,” replied Pearson. “And I don’t want to know.”
The three black-clad figures strode through the bright corridors of the hospital.
The tall one, the one who had spoken to Sergeant Pearson, led the way. Behind, shorter and slimmer than the leader, came the second of the trio, who appeared to glide across the linoleum floor. The third, shorter again, brought up the rear, its purple visor sweeping slowly left and right for any sign of trouble, or witnesses to their presence. As they passed the double doors that led to the hospital’s operating theatre, the tall figure at the front motioned for them to stop, and pulled a radio from his belt. He keyed in a series of numbers and letters, then activated the handset’s wireless connection to his helmet’s comms network. After a pause of several seconds, he spoke.
“Operational Squad G-17 in position. Alpha reporting in.”
“Beta reporting in,” the second figure said, in a metallic female voice.
“Gamma reporting in,” said the final squad member.
Alpha listened as a voice spoke on the other end of the line, and then replaced the radio on his belt.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the squad moved on into the hospital. After only a matter of