A Crown of Dragons Read online

  I smiled, but the mention of dragons had made me edgy. Was he swinging the conversation onto them deliberately, or was he just being chatty?

  Sticking to the ET theme, he said, “I thought I’d had a close encounter last week, driving along the coast road at night. Can you find somewhere to plug this in?”

  I ran the cable to a socket under my desk. “You saw a flying saucer?”

  He crouched down, bracing the wood against his thigh. The blade zinged through it in less than three seconds, leaving a warm smell of sawdust in the air. “No, it was a bunch of those Chinese lanterns floating out to sea. I had to look twice, though, before I was convinced. You can easily see why people get spooked. I met a man once who swore that aliens had been in his house and rearranged his cutlery.”

  “His cutlery? That’s dumb.”

  He shrugged. “Aliens have to eat, I guess. I hear the civilized ones like a decent spoon.”

  “Yeah, hello. This is Michael you’re talking to, not Josie.”

  “Hey, don’t dis your sister; she’s a smart cookie.”

  “She’s a pain in the butt!”

  He hit me with his smile. “Naturally. It’s her job. Don’t be fooled by that sharp tongue; she loves you to bits. Here, hold this while I get some screws.” He swung one end of the wood into my hands. He rummaged in a box and took out three long screws, putting two into his mouth and letting the other stand, magnetically, on the end of his drill. “Anyway,” he mumbled, “better the aliens make off with your cutlery than beam you onto their mother ship. Close encounter of the fourth kind. Scary.” He climbed the ladders, held the wood against the ceiling, and drove a screw through it to fix it to a joist. “There you go. Easy as that.”

  “How many kinds of encounter are there?”

  “Someone told me seven,” he said, taking the screws from his mouth, “but I can only remember four. First is a sighting, second is physical evidence, third is contact, fourth requires a note to say you won’t be at school the next morning.”

  I laughed. He was funny, Dennis.

  His phone bleated again. He tutted and dug it out of his pocket. “I’ll switch this off before it drives us both crazy.”

  “Is it a Konnia?”

  “Yes. You got a charger?”

  “Mom does.”

  “Do you think she’ll mind?”

  I shook my head. “There’s a socket on the landing. I can plug it in there.”

  “Good lad.” He threw the phone over.

  I hurried downstairs and grabbed Mom’s charger. I was back on the landing, kneeling down checking that the cord would fit, when the phone lit up with a text alert. A thumbnail of the sender appeared alongside it. I let the cord slide away. I stood up, the phone shaking lightly in my hand. Maybe if I’d thought things through a bit longer, I would have played the next few seconds differently. But I went to the bedroom and I said to Dennis, “You’ve got a text.”

  He blinked. He knew that something was up. “Yeah? Who from?”

  I turned the phone around so he knew I wasn’t lying. “Agent Mulrooney.”

  “Agent?” That seemed to confuse him.

  “Who are you — really?” In less than ten seconds, all the warmth I’d been building up for him had gone. Freya had been right to be suspicious. This could be my crow killer right here.

  He lowered his head. “Michael, I can explain; just give me the phone.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The envelope in the roof. You just pretended it was hidden. You were sent here to plant that DVD. You’re one of them. You’ve seen the film, haven’t you?”

  “Look, I didn’t know what was in the envelope, okay? I don’t know anything about a DVD or film. I just … Give me the phone.”

  He stretched out a hand.

  “Fine. You can have it.”

  But not before I’d rung Mulrooney first.

  “Michael, don’t!”

  But I was already connected.

  “Den?” Mulrooney’s voice.

  “No. It’s me, Michael Malone. I think Den wants to talk to you.”

  Then I passed the phone over.

  Dennis snatched it up. A terse conversation followed. “I don’t know. He … I told you I didn’t want any … Okay, slow down. He’s still here.” He held the phone at arm’s length. “He wants to speak to you.”

  “Tell him to go jump off a cliff.”

  “He says it’s about your father.”

  I waited a second, then took the phone from him.

  “Tell Klimt I’m tired of his games.”

  “This isn’t a game, Michael. Anything but.”

  “I trusted you, Mulrooney.”

  “Michael, listen to me.”

  “A few days ago, I saved your life in the Bulldog’s office.”

  “And I’m trying to save yours now,” he snapped. “We need to talk, but it can’t be on the phone. Meet me at Berry Head. Twenty minutes. The coastal bench where you first saw Klimt.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you. Twenty minutes.”

  He ended the call.

  I threw the phone at Dennis.

  He caught it against his chest. “Look, he was calling in a favor, that’s all. I know nothing about agents or who he works for or how he’s connected to you or your father. I’m just a general maintenance guy.”

  “Go. I don’t want you in the house.”

  He opened his hands. “I can’t go. I’m in the middle of a job. What would I say to your mother? I have no more surprises, Michael. When I’ve finished, you’ll never see me again. Period.”

  I took a pace into the room. “Touch Mom or Josie and you’re crow bait. Got it?”

  “Crows? What have crows got to do with it?”

  Ark! I screamed.

  And there was still enough of the corvid in me to make him lose his balance on the ladders and drain every flush of red from his face.

  I left him groaning on the bedroom floor.

  Ark! Crows: He got it.

  Mulrooney was sitting on the bench when I arrived. It was a calm day, with nothing much happening at sea. Plenty of people were out on the headland, walking alone, or walking their dogs. Help was a shout away if I needed it. I held on to the bike and didn’t sit down. Mulrooney leaned forward, elbows on his knees, a couple of cigarette butts between his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “about the play with Dennis.” He stared at the sea, solemn-faced. He had a dark, clean-shaven face, a minor dimple in the middle of his jaw. He was wearing black gloves and a black leather jacket. He looked like an assassin, dressed for a hit. “Sit down. This might take a while.”

  “I’ll stand, thanks.”

  I heard a flutter of wings. Two crows landed ten feet away and started strutting around on the grass. Backup. Good.

  Mulrooney paid no attention to the birds. “I’ve known Dennis since our time in Special Forces. We ran ops together in the Middle East. One time we were checking an abandoned truck when a device exploded, killing two of our unit. It brought down masonry on a house nearby. Dennis was trapped under rubble. I managed to pull him clear before the smoke dispersed and the snipers sighted him. He’s like a brother to me, Michael. He knows nothing about UNICORNE or your dad. There’s no way he would have looked at the film.”

  “Why did you use him? Why didn’t you just show me the film?”

  “I couldn’t risk exposing myself. I’d been searching for a good way to get the disk to you ever since UNICORNE recruited you. By chance, Den and I were having a drink that lunchtime he came to your house. He told me he was going to look at a roof on one of the old cottages on the outskirts of Holton. When I found out it was yours, everything just fell into place. I asked Den to plant the disk, but to make sure you got it.”

  I nodded, remembering how he’d wanted to look inside the roof space, and the sheepish way he’d said, I, um, just need to get something f
rom my van. The ceiling caving in had made it easier for him.

  Mulrooney went on, “I knew you’d be smart enough — or confused enough — not to run to Klimt with the disk. I was planning to come clean just as soon as I thought it was safe to do so. You beat me to it, that’s all.”

  “Safe?”

  “That film is red-hot, Michael. If the Bulldog knew you’d seen it, I’d be finished — in any sense you want to imagine.”

  “Who shot it?”

  “Nolan — secretly, on a cheap spy cam. That’s why it’s shaky and the quality is bad.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “He gave it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he shares my concerns about a boy of your age taking on these crazy missions. He doesn’t want you to end up floating in an isolation tank like your father — and neither do I.”

  “Klimt told me Liam didn’t know about Dad.”

  “Maybe not the final outcome, but he knew about the regression experiments. That’s his voice on the film.”

  I put my bike down. “What else do you know?”

  He ground a cigarette butt into the grass. “Too much.”

  “Did you see Dad when he came home from New Mexico?”

  “Briefly, yes.”

  “But you came to the house. You told us he was missing.”

  “I was under orders, Michael. And at that time, how could I have known they would drag you into it? Anyway, Thomas wasn’t right when he returned. He was feverish, wild, passing in and out of consciousness, talking fast when he did come around. Quantum physics. Computer jargon. Stuff I couldn’t begin to understand. Nolan was with him a lot of the time. He said your dad produced page after page of equations, literally wrote on anything he could find. Even Preeve struggled to keep up with the math. They said that Thomas’s mind had been expanded because of his deep exposure to the scale. He was clutching it to his chest when the team picked him up in New Mexico. I heard they had to pry it out of his grasp. They wrapped him up. Put him into what they called elite quarantine. Nolan tried to stabilize him, but conventional treatments didn’t work. And bizarre things kept happening. Spontaneous minor reality shifts. Once I saw Thomas walk into a room, disappear out of sight, then walk in again. It was as if he couldn’t settle in this world anymore. In the end, Preeve sedated him in one of those vapor cubes he used on Freya. It wasn’t until they cultured the Mleptra and realized they were a healing influence that the real Thomas began to come back.”

  “Then what? Why didn’t he come home?”

  “He was edgy, keen to work with the scale, not ready to assume domestic cover. Several months had passed by then and we’d put the story into place that he was missing. So we let it run. Hard on your family, I know, but it was his choice as much as anyone’s.”

  “Yeah, like Klimt had nothing to do with it.”

  “Actually, he didn’t. Klimt was nothing but a sophisticated toy until your dad came home with the scale.”

  “So … Dad really did build him?”

  He sat back, folding his arms. “I’m unsure of the exact time frame, but the physical prototype was already in place years before your Dad joined UNICORNE. He was involved on the software side and the race to develop a functionally independent android with true artificial intelligence. I don’t know all the details. I rarely get to see what goes on in the labs. But if this is the Empire State Building,” — he raised a hand above his head — “then the UNICORNE AI program is WAY up here.” He raised his hand higher. “All I know is, they used the scale to accelerate your dad’s thinking processes. Whatever they did must have worked, but it proved to be a double-edged sword. From those experiments, they found the breakthrough they needed to develop a level of consciousness in Klimt, enough to allow him to make judgments based on intuitive logic — the same way humans do. Klimt advanced rapidly after that, but at the same time, your dad began to go downhill. Maybe they pushed him too far, I don’t know. But that’s how valuable he is to them, Michael. He’s the man who gave Klimt life. I guess that’s why they want to keep him alive — and why they’re hoping you can bring him back.”

  At last, I sat down. A gull landed nearby, curious to know if we had any food. The crows chased it off in a flash. “What about the film. Where does that fit in?”

  He sighed and punched his gloves together. “Again, I don’t know everything. I get snippets from Preeve, more from Nolan if I twist his arm. There were side effects.”

  “To the experiments?”

  “Yes. The scale was escalating Thomas’s capacity to think, but it kept giving him what he called intense flashbacks.”

  “To what?”

  “Them — dragons. From the moment he came home, he never stopped talking about the beasts. They came to him at random moments, he said. Gave him insights. Touched what he called his auma, his soul. He began to talk about their lifestyle as if he’d actually been a dragon once. He claimed they existed in a parallel universe with wormholes into this one, but it was forbidden by their laws to open them. The fact that they must have been on earth at one time but had left for some reason really bugged him. I mean really bugged him. I remember him saying to me, ‘Why did they abandon us? Why? What happened?’”

  “Is that why Liam hypnotized him — to find out?”

  He flipped up his collar and looked across the water. “The constant stream of dragon talk irritated the Bulldog. He wanted his genius IT man back, not some self-obsessed storyteller. He asked Nolan for advice. Nolan came up with the idea of regressing Thomas under hypnosis to see if he could access any part of his mind that could shed light on his obsession, or settle him down. Your dad agreed. The first three days didn’t produce much. On the fourth day, they used neural acceleration to boost the process — and what they call The Mexico Phenomenon was born. I showed you the film so you could see what your father went through, what Klimt and the Bulldog want you to experience. From what I can gather from Preeve, TMP describes a specific type of reality shift, one in which the subject is able to regress through previous lives, deeper than regression hypnosis allows; that merely tickles the surface. You can’t see it on the film, but your dad is connected to the scale while Nolan is giving him suggestions. You saw what happened.”

  “The fire from his hand? Was that real?”

  “No, that was a trick of the light. But there was more that wasn’t on the film. You saw Thomas’s skin change color?”

  “Yes.”

  “It cracked and turned green and scaly, like a lizard’s. That’s why you see him looking at his arm. His fingernails extended into claws, Nolan said.”

  I am become you. Men melding with dragons. Just like Harvey had said. I felt sick. “Who was he shouting at? Who was Pa?”

  “I don’t know. Nolan told me that, during the previous three sessions, Thomas had taken on the identity of an unnamed boy. Somehow, in that fourth session, it all got out of control and Thomas stopped responding to Nolan’s voice. Preeve loaded a syringe with a doping agent, but by then it was too late. Thomas had gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  Mulrooney turned and looked at me. “That’s what UNICORNE wants you to tell them. Three years ago, my friend, your father, plugged into a deep-seated memory and found a wormhole into a previous life. He visited a world where dragons roamed. The problem is, Michael, he never came back.”

  Dad used to say the problems that frustrated him most around the house were those that had a simple solution but were hardest to get to. If you had a set of ladders, for instance, replacing a shingle on the roof was easy. According to Klimt, I had the means to scour the multiverse and bring my father home to us. I had the ladders to fix my shingle. The trouble was, did I have the courage to climb them?

  I said to Mulrooney, “What do I do?” I could feel my eyes beginning to moisten. And for all his toughness, his Marine Corps training, he wasn’t far from tears himself.

  He said, “I showed you the film so you’d know what you were
up against. Unless Klimt can guarantee your safe return, I think you should let your father go.”

  The nip of a breeze got under my collar, but it wasn’t the wind that was making me shiver. “I told the Bulldog I’d do anything to get Dad home.”

  “That was before you saw the DVD.”

  “I can’t abandon him,” I said, clenching my fists. “He’s my dad. How can I leave him stranded? You wouldn’t have done that with Dennis, would you?”

  He turned his head and looked at the crows. They were milling about, bored. Three of them now. “That was different. I could calculate my odds of survival. You can’t say the same about this. You’re just a boy, Michael, with another sixty or seventy years in front of you. Don’t throw away your future for one uncertain glimpse of the past.”

  I turned my face to the big blue sky. A solitary gull was wheeling across it. There were my chances, right there, I thought: a dot in a limitless expanse of nothingness. “How would I tell them, Klimt and the Bulldog?”

  “Refuse. Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Say you’re not prepared to lose your mom and Josie.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “No, they’ll find a way. Klimt said they’ve already activated me.”

  “Activated you? How?”

  “I … I don’t know. My hand turned green when he showed me the scale. They’ve done something to me. I know they have.”

  I looked over my shoulder to see a brown-and-white spaniel chasing the crows into flight. The owner called it back, apologizing for the fuss. I took the opportunity to scan the headland. In UNICORNE world, spies were everywhere. You could never be quite sure who was watching you. I said to Mulrooney, “Isn’t this risky? Meeting me, alone?”

  He didn’t even bother looking around. “I have a general remit to protect you. It wouldn’t be difficult to find a reason to be here. What’s the agenda with the TMP run? What’s Klimt told you?”