Chapter 1

The castle was burned to the ground.

Funny thing about that. Stone castles aren’t supposed to burn to the ground, but there was no denying that Loch Tweed Castle was reduced to ashes. The local gossip placed the blame on the late Mrs. Tweed-Smythe, who had taken to collecting newspaper clippings during the Second World War. What started as a hobby, the locals claimed, became an obsession. Mrs. Tweed-Smythe tried to keep it secret that she was filing away a copy of the newspaper, each and every day, year after year.

The locals who were employed by the late Mr. and Mrs. Tweed-Smythe reported on the unusual volume of newspapers received by the old couple. The London Times, the Peebles Shire News, plus the Edinburgh Evening News and some others. No one could explain the need for all those newspapers.

There had to have been twenty or thirty thousand daily newspapers stored in the old cellars of the castle. With that much fuel, the fire would burn on and on, until even the stone walls crumbled. It was the only reasonable explanation for the extent of the castle’s obliteration.

“So there’s no chance of finding any bones,” the locals decided as they discussed the matter endlessly. “There’s nothing left but dust.”

This made the tragedy even harder on the good people of the little Scottish village. Many of their sons and husbands and fathers—and a few wives—were driven mad during the recent troubles. They had stormed the castle, for reasons that were too foolish to believe and best left unsaid. They killed the poor old Tweed-Smythe and his helpless, daft wife, then burned the castle down around them. Nobody understood why it had happened. All they knew was that their loved ones were dead and gone, without even bones to bury.

The simple, mourning villagers were wrong. Old Mrs. Tweed-Smythe was as crazy as they came, but she didn’t hoard newspapers, and it wasn’t a stash of six decades of the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald that fueled the flames. The cause was the strategically placed phosphorus tablets. The secret researchers who worked below the castle placed the phosphorous to be sure that, if the castle burned up, it burned up real good.

The villages were also wrong about there being no bodies.

“Fuh! Christ!” The English gentleman got a face full of putrid air when he wrenched open the trapdoor. Something inside was decomposing.

The Englishman staggered away and vomited into the ashes, then rested with his hands on his knees.

This was awful. He shouldn’t have to do this kind of thing. There should be people to do it for him. All his life there were people to do it for him, whatever it was.

But he couldn’t trust anyone else, friends, family or coconspirators. Not with this. And he had to do it now, because surely some sort of a cleanup detail would be here soon to make absolutely sure the place had burned completely. Then his prize would be lost forever.

But did he have what it took? Of course he did! He was an Englishman—a true, old-fashioned, unflappable Brit.

But could he really do it?

Well, certainly. He had faced unpleasantness before and come through with flying colors. There had been the bit of murder down in Africa a few years back, and then the other bit of murder, also, coincidentally, in Africa, also a few years back. His constitution had been fully tested and hardened. Or so he had thought, until he had breathed in the fumes of the rotting corpses down there.

“You must do it, old man, or you’ll never get the empire off the ground,” he stated aloud, using his haughtiest tone. Arrogance always lifted his spirits. Arrogance was his best character trait.

He made for the trapdoor, covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief and stepped into the blackness. He felt his way down the steep emergency stairs, which had buckled from the heat, and didn’t turn on the flashlight until he reached the bottom.

After more vomiting, he picked his way among the corpses. They were charred from the initial blast, but the stone-crumbling heat had missed this place and left, more than enough human flesh to putrefy. He hoped that was a good sign. Maybe his treasure would have survived, too.

Then he saw the state of the containment boxes, the steel walls black and pitted from the heat. The things that had once been inside would be nonfunctional. Dead.

He followed the only corridor, going deep into the earth, until he came to the emergency-isolation development room. Oddly the aluminum containment chamber was open and burned. The corpse on the floor smelled to high heaven, but he wasn’t burned at all. The fire that destroyed the castle hadn’t touched this chamber, and yet the containment cell showed signs of superheating.

In the congealed blood on the floor, the Englishman found a thin crust of opaque crystal.

They had escaped, and then they were burned. Tiny crystal splotches indicated that the fleeing entities had been assassinated, one colony after another. They didn’t get far.

His worry grew, but there was still one last place to look. The drunken American—the same man who secretly removed the phosphorus incendiaries from this wing of the laboratory—had provided him with this secret.

By virtue of his renowned patriotism, unquestioned loyalty and distance from London politics, the Englishman had been asked to lead a security probe into assorted secret projects. That was how he found out about the secret work at Loch-Tweed Castle. It was a joint American and British weapons-development effort. Those very few British who were aware of the project were worried about the security measures at the laboratory.

After gaining his confidence, the Englishman wheedled the truth about the security out of the American researcher. About the sabotaged self-destruct system—and about the hidden sample.

‘I couldn’t bear it if all my work was burned alive,” the American slurred after five big gin and tonics.

“Oh, I agree. Good work,” the Englishman said. “I assure you, this is between the two of us.”

Soon afterward, it was the Englishman’s secret alone. After two more gin and tonics, the American had passed out. The Englishman put him in his car, started it and put the transmission in Drive, then slammed the door as the vehicle began rolling away. It rolled directly off the road into the Thames. Windows open, the car went down in seconds and wasn’t hauled out again until morning.

The American researcher’s hidden sample was right where he said it would be—buried two feet under the earth, directly beneath the destroyed aluminum cube. The Englishman unearthed it in minutes. The insulated box contained twenty-four stainless-steel straws, each of which could wipe out a city.

The tiny glass capsule in the bottom of the box was green. The chemicals inside the capsule would react to damaging heat by turning red, permanently, but the capsule was still green.

Which meant the creatures—things, devices, whatever—inside the steel straws were still alive. Viable, functional, whatever.

The Englishmen had just become the most powerful man on the planet.

This was only right and proper.