There is some thick vegetation growing along the foot of the rock-face, bushes and creepers climbing seven or eight feet in places. That will get them an easier start, but there's at least twenty feet of bare rock to scale after that.

As the others wait in place on the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, their breath spiralling steam into the moonlight, Sendak strides on, heading straight for the wall. Blake watches keenly, a.s.suming the military man is going to demonstrate some kind of climbing technique. Instead, Sendak takes a machete from his belt and begins hacking at the bushes in front of him. He tosses away a few branches and beckons the group forward.

'Demon-hunters, party of three?' he says, turning on a torch and directing it through the gap he has created, revealing the walls of a concealed crevice.

They venture in slowly behind Sendak, his torch now the only source of light in a very, very dark place, the pa.s.sage before them disappearing into complete blackness. Adnan raises his shotgun, taking each step tentatively, while Rosemary notches an arrow against the bowstring and tugs it back.

The pa.s.sage widens after a few yards, the torch playing back and forth steadily across the floor of what turns out to be a large cave. Sendak then draws the beam along one wall, looking for where it ends. The torch suddenly lights up a twisted and b.l.o.o.d.y face, its mouth open to scream. Adnan pulls his trigger in fright, finding it locked as he's forgotten the safety. Rosemary, having no such obstacle, looses an arrow that goes through the mouth, pinning the head back against the rock. Sendak draws the torch down beneath the neck and picks out a military uniform.

'Oh my G.o.d,' Rosemary gasps. 'It's a soldier. I've killed him.' Sendak brings the beam down just a little further, then cuts its path short when it briefly discovers the glistening viscera spilling out from the soldier's abdomen.

'No,' Sendak a.s.sures her. 'You're a few hours late for that, but nice shot all the same.'

He resumes his scan of the walls and ground, then finds what he's after. The beam focuses upon a metal panel lying on the floor of the cave, then he sweeps it a couple of feet to one side and picks out the hatch it was previously covering.

'This is where they got out, I'm guessing.'

Adnan keeps his weapon trained on the hatch, remembering the safety this time, while Sendak crouches down and points the torch through it.

'Let me check it out,' he says, disentangling himself from the spraying apparatus. 'Gimme the gun.'

Adnan hands over the weapon and guesses he's not the only one to feel that bit more vulnerable as Sendak disappears out of sight, leaving them in almost total darkness.

There is almost total silence too, a long few seconds of listening to each other breathe, before soft sodium light erupts from the aperture. It is followed shortly by Sendak's face.

'Step into my office,' he says.

They follow Sendak along a narrow, concrete-walled pa.s.sage, which takes them to another, wider hatch and another ladder, this time plunging a long, long way down through an enclosed shaft.

'We must be miles from where Kirk found that MoD sign,' Blake says quietly as they descend. 'How big is this place?'

'Big,' Sendak replies.

'b.l.o.o.d.y typical,' Adnan mutters. 'Why is it that when the military have to host something dangerous, they stash it in b.l.o.o.d.y Scotland?' He puts on a fake upper-crust accent. '"What's that? Polaris? Thames Estuary? No thank you."'

'Adnan?' Sendak interrupts him.

'What?'

He puts a finger to his lips.

Adnan cans it, and the ensuing silence is filled with a pulsing sound, low and powerful, which gets steadily louder the deeper they go.

At the foot of the shaft, they reach a st.u.r.dy metal door, which is visibly vibrating on its hinges with each throb.

'Brace yourselves,' Sendak says, and Blake thinks for a moment that he's talking about how much louder the noise will get when the door opens. However, it's not the sound that Sendak meant them to prepare for, but the sight.

They emerge into a wide corridor. The lighting is low: a few fluorescents are flickering, but most of them are completely smashed. What light there is illuminates a scene of true Stygia. There are body parts scattered across the floor: arms, legs, torsos, heads, a couple of slain demons, and blood everywhere. The walls are sprayed; the floor is awash with it.

Rosemary sucks in a loud gasp, feels her head swim.

'Keep it together,' Sendak tells them. 'We've seen worse s.h.i.t tonight, and we'll see worse yet.'

Rosemary reaches out a steadying arm against a wall and closes her eyes. She puts herself back in that shed, with Deso. It's just for a second, but it's enough. When she opens them again, she's ready to go on.

Sendak is standing amidst a pile of butchered flesh. Instead of mere disgust, it is consternation that is writ lividly upon his face.

'What's wrong?' Blake asks, like there could possibly be anything right right about this scene. about this scene.

'Where the h.e.l.l were these guys' weapons?'

'They must have been taken by surprise,' Adnan suggests.

'Yeah, but . . .' Sendak examines a single bullet hole in one wall, probing it with his finger. 'Looks like all they were carrying were side arms. I don't get it.'

'Father,' says Rosemary. 'You need to see this.'

Blake turns to observe that she has progressed a few yards down the corridor and is standing over another mutilated body, lying halfway out of a doorway. As he approaches, he sees the dog collar, just like his own, around the corpse's neck, but that's not why she has alerted him. On the half-open door is a coat of arms: cross keys beneath a triple-crowned mitre.

'This is a Vatican symbol,' he announces, glancing from the insignia to the sign above the door frame stating: 'Authorised Personnel Only'.

Blake nudges the door open further, but Sendak grabs his arm. Blake moves aside to let the Sarge go first, the spraying lance and its twinkling cigarette lighter preceding Sendak's entry.

Blake is about to step over the body and venture through the doorway when his progress is halted a second time, this time by Adnan scuttling low to crouch over the dead cleric and wrest something from his hand.

'What are you doing?' Rosemary asks in disgust.

Adnan holds up a keycard, wiping blood from it on the thigh of his jeans.

'Sharp thinking,' Sendak approves.

'I play a lot of Doom Doom,' Adnan explains. He opts not to add that he is actually playing it in his head right now, it being the only way he can get through this without turning into a gibbering jelly.

Sendak leads them along a narrow blank pa.s.sageway with a sliding double door at the end, also marked with the Vatican symbol, this time above a bar of printed text. He nudges at the barrier and finds it locked.

'Looks like the Church were running the show,' he states with some disquiet. 'How does that work? "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith",' he reads aloud. 'Mean anything to you, Padre?'

'That's the Vatican arm in charge of investigating the supernatural, ' Blake informs him.

'Figures.'

'Though it's what it used to be called that's most ominous.'

'Do tell.'

'The Holy Inquisition.'

XXIX Merrick needs a lie to give him; even one Tullian can see through will sound less awkward than simply refusing an answer. He comes up with a good one. Naked girlfriend pictures. Can't afford this phone to get found later and her nudie shots to end up on the web. It's thin, but being a priest, Tullian's s.e.xual squeamishness should make him want to drop the subject soon as.

'It's . . .'

Merrick sighs, his hand on the door leading out of the coolant monitoring chamber. He can't lie, no matter the consequences. If it wasn't for the Cardinal, twice, he'd have lost more than his secret back there, so perhaps it's appropriate that it should be Tullian's call.

'I owe you my life, Cardinal, so I can't grudge you the truth. The phone is full of video files. Proof of what happened here, specifically regarding my work on holy water and its effects on the specimens. I'm a scientist. I couldn't bear the idea of it all being lost, of the military erasing my work from history for the sake of their own convenience. Knowledge sometimes is inconvenient.'

'Where did you get the files?'

'I snuck into The Little . . . the Alpha labs. That's where I was when the breakout happened. Forgive me.'

'In my line of work, Dr Merrick, forgiveness is all part of the service. You have more than my forgiveness. You have my grat.i.tude.'

Merrick is puzzled.

'I was under the impression that you didn't want the outside world knowing anything about these creatures, for fear of the resulting hysteria.'

'I didn't,' he replies. 'But that was when I still believed that this operation was under control.'

Tullian goes first through the door and checks the pa.s.sageway, sweeping the rifle back and forth. The stairwell they need is a couple of dozen paces away. The path is clear; or at least clear of threats. Blood, limbs, offal and excrement are strewn from wall to wall.

Merrick spots an ID badge attached to a lump of something dark and moist. 'Avedon', it reads.

Christ.

Tullian recces the stairs and beckons him to hurry. They advance to the next level, where the Cardinal dashes across the pa.s.sageway and holds open the door to Security Control.

Merrick makes his way inside, where he staggers dizzily to one corner and vomits into a waster-paper bin. He's sick again and again, then the dry heaves take him until he wishes there was something, anything else in his stomach so that he could vomit that too. Tullian hands him a half-drunk bottle of water from a desktop and Merrick takes a swig, slumping weakly into a chair. He feels a lump in his throat, the onset of tears. Grief hasn't had a look-in against fear and horror these past few hours, but seeing that name badge has finally kicked it off.

He wipes his eyes when he thinks the tears are receding, his vision cleared to reveal Tullian busily working two different keyboards in front of the bank of computer monitors and CCTV screens.

Tullian is alert to his resumed attention, and looks round with an expression of both sympathy and resolute intent.

'They'll do all this again,' the Cardinal says sorrowfully. 'I've sent the call. They'll dispatch a lockdown team.'

Merrick then hears a series of dampened thumps from the door and the corridor outside. He looks across in alarm, but Tullian puts him at ease.

'That's the mag-locks coming back online. Some of them, anyway: the restart doesn't appear to have fixed them all. The ones in this block are functional, though. We're safe for now. But understand this: the lockdown team will do their job, the military will mop up the mess, they'll spin a story . . . And then after a while, they'll do all this again. As a scientist, you know this to be true.'

Merrick nods regretfully. No matter the price of that glimpse: someone is always going to be willing to pay it.

'Which is why your files could be an invaluable bargaining chip.'

'Generate a public outcry, you mean? But at what cost in terms of panic?'

'We wouldn't release the files. Just let them know we have them, and threaten threaten to release them if they ever reprise this experiment.' to release them if they ever reprise this experiment.'

'I can't see that deterring many scientists.'

'That's not who we'd need to deter. This disaster was only possible through proprietary military technology. What's inside that phone could ensure they don't try and rebuild this abomination. Can I see it?'

Merrick produces the device. 'It's damaged,' he reports. 'The LCD's a mess, but I can hook it up to one of those PCs.'

'Fine. We should back it up anyway. I'll find some blank disks.'

Merrick connects the phone and, to his great relief, is able to access its memory. He copies the data across to the local drive.

'There's not many files,' Tullian observes with disappointment.

'I didn't have much time. I just grabbed everything I could with a time- and date-stamp that matched my experiments. I haven't had the chance to even check what's on this stuff,' he adds, selecting three files at random and launching them in different windows. A simple drag-and-drop on the multiple-monitor control interface puts them up on separate screens, then Merrick begins sliding the progress bars on each in turn, in order to find himself in shot and confirm they const.i.tute the evidence required. He's there in all three: standing over a strapped-down demon, undertaking his own personal deal with the devil, his trade-off for that glimpse.

'Hold on, where did this-' Tullian begins, cutting himself off.

Merrick looks at what has grabbed the Cardinal's attention and instantly understands why there is nothing more to say. One of the files has no soundtrack, evidently a CCTV feed supplementary to the cameras Tullian's men had set up. It's from high on the wall ahead of Merrick, facing back towards the other cameras: an elevated angle showing him smaller in shot, but for that, displaying the bigger picture.

He turns around to confront Tullian, who has picked up the decoherence rifle and is pointing it at him.

'Knowledge sometimes is is inconvenient, isn't it, Doctor?' he says, almost apologetically. 'I wish you hadn't just seen that, but in your own words, you owe me your life. And I'm afraid I do, vehemently, grudge you the truth.' inconvenient, isn't it, Doctor?' he says, almost apologetically. 'I wish you hadn't just seen that, but in your own words, you owe me your life. And I'm afraid I do, vehemently, grudge you the truth.'

Merrick sees the trigger twitch. Then there's light. Lights everywhere, flickering and indistinct: white shapes stretched and pulled by random refractions in the rain and spray before being temporarily shrunk to points and discs by the wiper blades. Nothing holds its form or position long enough for him to focus. The closest thing to a constant is the perforated blur of lines on the road, stuttering just out of syncopation like a slowing zoetrope.

His eyes are closing; it ought to frighten him how involuntary this seems, but it feels so beckoning, so comfortable. It'll be okay. Just a few seconds' rest, ten seconds, three hundred and thirty-three metres, surely he can risk that. NO. He snaps them wide, breathes extra deeply a few times, sourcing oxygen, gives his head a shake. The windscreen is a membrane, fluid and warping, stretching the light, smearing the shapes, blurring the white lines. He's squinting, narrowing his eyes in an effort to shield the pupils, keep them from contracting so that he can see better into the rain-filled darkness. Maybe if he closes one eye and thus keeps it dark-adapted, then he can open it and close the other next time the oncoming lights are too bright. He tries. Yeah. Closing one eye feels good. It feels too good. He wants to close the other one too.

He hits a straight length of road, an interchange. There are streetlights for the first time in however many miles. He can see the road stretch out, unbending, must be half a mile. Six hundred and sixty-six metres would be twenty seconds. He can close his eyes for twenty seconds. The road is straight. He doesn't need to steer for twenty seconds, doesn't need to look for six hundred and sixty-six metres. He can just, yes, that's it, just . . .

x.x.x Adnan unlocks the door with a swipe of the card, then Sendak takes point again briefly before calling them through. When he does, his voice is hollow and weary.

'You might think it'd be redundant for me to say brace yourselves again, but trust me on this.'

A few moments inside the cavernous laboratory beyond and they all understand that it was not redundant. There are further corpses littered about the place, more clerics by the look of it. Blake would guess six, maybe seven. It's impossible to tell precisely how many, as it would require an extensive retrieval operation and subsequent limb count. There's only one that looks comparatively intact, though its head is obscured. It is slumped backwards over a packing crate next to a formidable cylindrical door, this barrier's strength and solidity rendered moot by the fact of it lying half open. The clinical whiteness of the walls and floor tiles serve to make the blood and viscera all the more lurid, but it's not that which has him spooked more than the first gore-spattered corridor.

'What in the name of G.o.d happened here?' Blake asks in a dread-struck whisper.

'Due respect, Padre, I think you answered your own question.'

In the centre of this antiseptically pristine slaughterhouse, there is a dead demon laid out on a cross-shaped wooden board, its face contorted into an agonised, screaming grimace. Its wrists and ankles are held by steel clamps, but it has had nails driven through its palms and feet. Its skin is flayed and blackened where it has not been cut away completely by dozens of stab wounds.

With all of this to hold their appalled attention, it takes a while for anyone to notice the TV monitor sitting on a desktop next to a jar containing a demon's claw suspended in fluid. Once noticed, however, it has all of them silently rapt.

It shows another demon secured to a similarly shaped fixture, a steel one this time, with the further precaution of a neck restraint holding its head in place. A figure in black robes approaches, carrying a small vessel of clear fluid.

'Let these waters be sanctified by the power, the agency and descent of the Holy Spirit,' he incants. 'Let descend upon these waters the cleansing of the Three who are One . . .' . . .'

'It's a rite of exorcism,' says Blake. 'Blessing holy water to drive out demons.'

'. . . that Satan may be crushed under our feet, that every evil counsel directed against us may be brought to naught, and that the Lord our G.o.d will free us from every attack and temptation of the enemy.'