Giant Killer. John McNally

      Nano-radar⁴, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.

       “We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.

       What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?

       His father …

      With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”

       It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.

       Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?

       Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.

       Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.

       Here was the bait.

       Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …

       Then out of nowhere it finally happened.

       Luck.

      As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—

      Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.

      L = Place? became Time = Place?

      Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …

      Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.

       It had been there all along. Yet only he, Kaparis, had finally seen it.

       The Boldklub fractal equations that he had so long sought, for which he had spent years terrorising and blackmailing Al Allenby and the G&T, were now blindingly obvious.

       And there was more, so much more … The implications …

       It was as if he had climbed out of a propeller plane and strapped himself onto a rocket.

       He was about to seize control of the future.

       SIX

      FEBRUARY 20 08:53 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK

       SPLASH!

      Six foot six and sixteen stone of pure military meat hit the muddy water at the foot of the five-metre wall, sending it in all directions at once.

      Unstoppable, Captain Kelly of the SAS (seconded to the G&T’s informal military detachment) hammered every muscle in his body towards the next obstacle on the course that ran through the woodland surrounding Hook Hall, the stately home and laboratory complex in Surrey that served as the HQ of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee.

      Thirty metres of monkey walk lay ahead. Kelly grabbed the first bar and began to swing beneath the frame, enjoying the pain, loving it, the complications of the abortive Monte Carlo mission forgotten for a few blissful moments.

      And they had to forget. All who had experienced life at nano-scale had found it difficult to adjust to life back at normal size, but more than anything, life without Finn …

       THUD!

      A four-inch, six-ounce throwing knife, travelling at 130mph, split the surface of the target post, transmitting the concentrated intent of the young woman who threw it from the far end of the Zen-white martial arts studio in the Old Manor.

      Flight Lieutenant Delta Salazar bent her body over and took up her second position. When she wasn’t on fire, chasing down Tyros on motorbikes, she was ice. Lukewarm tears were just not her thing. Except when it came to her little sister. About Carla – still missing, possibly captured, possibly dead … she was a complete mess.

      Hence the yogic knife-throwing routine she indulged in every morning to try and clear her mind.

       THUD!

      Crinkle.

      Engineer Stubbs unwrapped a boiled sweet, popped it into his mouth and began to suck. It was a twenty-two-calorie Werther’s Original, containing soya lecithin and flavouring, and it was the first solid to pass his lips in forty-eight hours.

      He was in his chaotic workshop in the old stables at the back of Hook Hall. He had not taken an active role in the Monte Carlo mission as he didn’t “travel well” and just the thought of going to France caused him an upset tummy.

      Also, he knew it would all go wrong. It was his default position.

      He was a man not of action but of make do and mend. In his time at nano-scale he had improvised a jet-powered jeep and a hydrogen balloon on the hoof, as well as having designed the Ugly Bug experimental nano-vehicle.

      Fat lot of good it had done poor Infinity though, he thought …

       VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM!

      The De Tomaso Mangusta had been designed to take the breath away, a beautiful piece of jet-age engineering built for speed and named Mangusta, or mongoose, to imply it would eat its 1960s rival, the AC Cobra, for breakfast. With Dr Al Allenby’s customisations, it was capable of lunch and dinner too. Al didn’t just drive it round the runway at Hook