Victoria was shaking, trying to keep her back to the students. 'But no one could... Why didn't you tell me? Poor Daniel. We must find him!'

Christopher's head nodded to one side. His smile froze solid. let me explain again. He's vanished. His program's ringfenced. He can't deprogram himself.'

His patronizing was as much as she could take. 'Horrible modern terms.' She had had enough.

'I do have an appointment, but if you want me to deal with it for you... ?' he said silkily.

She pursed her lips and squeezed her eyes shut to stop herself crying. She nodded. 'Yes. Yes, find him please.' It was playing right into his hands, but what choice did she have? 'I have my own task. To prepare the way.'

To her annoyance, he didn't even thinly disguise his scoffing. 'Not found the Locus yet then?'

She tried hard to pull herself together. This, after all, should be a time of celebration. 'Christopher, the Chancellor is coming home. It seems the time is now. I must find the Locus, before Daniel's misguided hopes wreck everything we've worked for.'

When the alarms started sounding, Harrods had been picking through one of the bins at the back of the gallery buildings.

The things people threw away, especially what students chucked, were a source of constant satisfaction to him. He had furnished his garage entirely with discarded items. And very presentable it looked. The best pickings were always at the end of a semester, when all sorts of stuff got ditched. He'd got blankets and a pillow that way. Almost clean. Oddly though, the Chillys hadn't taken a vacation over Easter perhaps the government had banned holidays but at least that meant there was more food about.

The Chillys normally ignored him, but he kept clear of them anyway. They'd only ever challenged him once. They'd held him against a wall and had gone through the pockets of his long military coat. He'd struggled and shouted, 'Sir, sir, I'm a mature student, I am!' But they'd soon let him go and he'd had no trouble since. Still, they were a netful of cold fish, the Chillys. Not natural.

When the alarms started up today, Harrods was balanced on the edge of a skip, fishing out some wire coat-hangers that might be useful sometime. He clambered down and was knocked sideways by two b.l.o.o.d.y Chillys, who hared past like a couple of dogs on the scent of something defenceless.

He set off after them, keeping to the bushes under the walkways, where no one ever came. He could follow people the length of the campus down there.

There were Chillys running in from all directions. All making for the far side of the maintenance block. He could see their yellow caps bobbing along the top sides of the walkways.

There was some sort of gathering going on. Then the alarm racket switched off. It went deathly quiet.

He heard a scuffle and looked up. One of the Chillys had jumped up onto the walkway parapet. He swayed there, glancing behind and then down at the forty-foot drop. He yelled something Harrods couldn't hear more of a scream of anger or fear and launched himself into the air.

Harrods's yell dried into a croak. Instead, he started to laugh and clap. The boy didn't fall. He glided, his coat billowing around him, his arms outstretched like a bird of prey. He hovered in the air for a moment and then slowly circled down, his face a mask of disbelief. He pa.s.sed right over Harrods' head and finally came to earth, none too cleverly, in a mound of rubbish right under the walkway.

Heads had appeared on the wall above, staring down. But they hadn't seen the bird-boy, or where he'd landed, face down and senseless in the garbage.

'Sir,' croaked the vagrant, scampering up. 'Can't leave you here, sir. They'll be after you. They'll put you in a cage, they will, sir. You come with me. I'll see you right, sir.'

He lifted the insensible boy, who proved as light as a bundle of feathers, and carried him home. His home a disused garage with all mod secondhand cons: collections of knick-knacks, music-hall posters. All of it recycled, most of it nicked.

'You stay there, sir.' He laid the unconscious boy on his bed and pulled down the sacking that covered the garage door.

They would be out hunting, he was sure of that. But this was his prize. No one else's. would be out hunting, he was sure of that. But this was his prize. No one else's.

The boy moaned a little, but he was still out to the world.

Harrods began to rifle systematically through the boy's coat pockets. There was precious little to speak of a couple of pens and a crumpled hanky. He found a mobile phone, which he pocketed, although he had no one to call. Then his fingers closed on a tightly packed bundle. It was a wad of tenners held tight with a rubber band. Harrods couldn't believe his luck.

The boy was bleeding loaded.

His hand suddenly clamped round Harrods' wrist. The tramp dropped the money and struggled. He was held in a vice.

'b.l.o.o.d.y Chilly, I'll break your fingers.'

The vice squeezed tighter, but the boy was still asleep, his head turning fitfully in the grip of an unknown nightmare.

The traffic was the worst the Brigadier had ever seen. b.u.mper to b.u.mper all the way into the City. He had sat in the same position for twenty minutes. He was already late and he couldn't even move far enough to reach a side street where he could park and walk.

Ahead, the traffic lights were flickering through their sequence like demented seaside illuminations. The air was getting thick with exhaust fumes and the blaring of angry car horns. The offices seemed to be emptying of workers, who were thronging the streets like sightseers. Tempers were flaring among the stranded motorists.

He tried to listen to the radio, but the reception was terrible and he could pick up only one station. The pap-brained presenter kept burbling on with traffic reports. London was in total gridlock, extending from the central zone out as far as the suburbs. To compound matters, the entire Underground system had failed and was closing down.

'Well, is it Friday the Thirteenth and they didn't tell us?'

wittered the presenter. 'Seems like that case of computer flu I told you about is spreading. They've just announced they're shutting down all major airports and that's on top of the rail networks. Can you believe it? Don't know how you're gonna get home tonight. That's if you got anything at work to work with. So why not stay tuned for news and chaos updates with New Wor..

The Brigadier snapped the radio off and closed his eyes.

The sun through the window and the heavy air were making him drowsy. His head started to nod.

A loud blast on a nearby car horn brought him up with a start. Ahead of him, through the stationary cars, he saw a figure standing on the busy pavement. She stared across at him as the wave of commuters surged around her. He shuddered, her black cape marked her out as a portent of evil. What nonsense, he reprimanded himself.

And a thought whispered into his head. The Locus. The Locus.

The figure had vanished among the streaming pedestrians.

'It's coming closer,' the Brigadier muttered.

A voice from behind him said, 'Perhaps you have something it needs, sir.'

The Brigadier stared into the driving-mirror. Young Daniel Hinton was sitting on the back seat in his school blazer.

Apparently the wretched boy was now ready to continue the conversation that he had so abruptly cut short on the beach.

'After all this time? I doubt that, Hinton,' he said.

'But you remember what it is, don't you?'

The Brigadier wound down his window and surveyed the beach. It was still deserted. Blown sand whipped around the car, which seemed to be parked on the crest of a dune. In answer to the boy's impudent question, he snapped, 'I'm not as blinkered as people think. It's a sort of mind parasite. The first alien force I ever came up against.'

'Sir?'

All these stupid questions. Lethbridge-Stewart opened the car door and stepped out onto the beach. He surveyed the terrain, looking for trouble. 'In those days it called itself the Great Intelligence.'

Hinton lowered his window and peered out. 'And?'

Despite provocation, the Brigadier no longer really cared whether the information was cla.s.sified or not. 'It had no physical shape of its own, so it enslaved humans as its p.a.w.ns.

And it deployed a squad of strategic robots camouflaged like Yeti.'

He knelt and dusted at a footprint in the sand. When he turned, the boy was leaning against the wing of the car. Was this in Tibet, sir?'

'No. London about thirty years ago. It invaded the city like a virus, using the Underground network as a sort of nervous system. No shape of its own, so it steals others. Grisly business. I thought we were rid of the blighter.'

Danny looked out to sea, where dark clouds rumbled on the horizon.

'It's still out there,' he said. 'On the Bardo, the astral plane.

Trapped outside our physical existence.'

The Brigadier nodded grimly. 'Is it indeed? And what does it want?'

The boy shrugged. 'Don't know, sir. It's you it's hunting.'

'What's this got to do with you, Hinton?' It was the Brigadier's dream and he didn't see why the boy should be dictating events to him.

Daniel Hinton looked ruefully at his teacher. 'Just don't trust anyone, sir.' He turned and started walking away across the sand-blown flats.

'What?' called the Brigadier.

The boy glanced back. 'No one at all.' But he kept walking.

'I'll thank you, Hinton, not to treat me like a total...' It was no use. The boy had rapidly vanished into the sandstorm.

The Brigadier was suddenly startled by the close blast of a horn.

He jolted awake with a start in the driving seat. A chorus of horns was blaring.

The face of the hooded woman was staring directly through the windscreen at him. Her clear blue eyes were fiercely penetrating. He felt her searching into his thoughts. She was angry and accusing. And it was time he put a stop to it.

He opened the car door, but by the time he had scrambled out, she had vanished once again.

There was a furious animal roar behind him. He spun round, reaching inside his jacket for the gun. A huge brown and s.h.a.ggy creature reared above him. Just what he expected.

Its eyes blazed with scarlet fire. Its ma.s.sive claws raked the air. The Brigadier raised his gun to shoot as the Yeti lashed at him.

Its roar mingled with a fresh barrage of car horns.

The monster had vanished. The Brigadier was alone in the traffic, gun in hand.

He mustered a charming smile for the family in the next car two astonished parents and their fascinated daughter.

'd.a.m.n traffic. Brings out the worst in you, doesn't it?' The father, a look of disgust on his face, slammed his fist against the horn.

The Brigadier hurriedly slipped the gun away and got back into his car.

16.

The Summons t's coming closer,' murmured the boy in his sleep.

'I Harrods clapped a hand over his mouth. Outside, something was moving. A steady tap-tap-tap sound that was coming nearer. Harrods' eyes darted round his garage at the dozens of 'useful' things he had collected. An old magpie, he was. Never knew what he might need next, so best to have plenty of things just in case. But what to save if they caught up with him?

The boy was still asleep under Harrods' hand, shifting his body restlessly. A real fight he was having.

The air had gone chill, although the watery sun still shone in at the garage entrance. From outside came the tap-tap-tap and the shuffling of worn-down shoes. Something was wheezing like a landed whale. A hunched shadow lurched across the sacking that hung in the entrance. It stopped, turning back and forth, searching.

The boy sat up with a yell. His eyes staring, wide awake.

He was shaking. Harrods, one hand still on the boy's mouth, shushed him quiet and nodded at the door.

They stared at the silhouette on the sacking. A bulky figure of a man, slowly sweeping a stick before him. Harrods thought of a metal detector.

An unearthly voice broke the stillness. A dry ancient whisper that was full of weariness and hatred. 'Daniel Hinton.

You are summoned.'

Harrods felt the boy's body go so taut it might snap.

The shadow stick jerked forward and the rest of the silhouette followed. The shadow focused darker as the figure approached. The sacking was pushed aside and the light flooded in.

'Daniel,' commanded the figure.

Harrods could not make out the features against the glare, but the white hair was like a halo.

The tramp and the boy scrambled backwards to the wall as the intruder entered, his stick swinging as if it it was searching rather than the old blind man. Something like web seemed to be drifting in around him. was searching rather than the old blind man. Something like web seemed to be drifting in around him.

Harrods edged back further. The stolen phone dropped from his pocket with a clatter.