Prologue

One week ago

Despite his best efforts, fear consumed Myers as he eased the black Mercedes into the alleyway behind the large redbrick building. Dry-mouthed, heart-palpitating, sphincter-tightening fear.

It had been nine minutes since his last visual of the target. Entering through the front door.

Nine minutes. It was too long. The order should have been given by now. What were they waiting for?

Four other units had pulled into place two minutes after Myers’ arrival, sliding along the sides of the pavement slowly, like sharks circulating near a coastal shelf. Sniper teams were on adjoining roofs in four minutes. High above them, two surveillance helicopters equipped with thermal-imaging devices hovered above the cloud layer, unseen and unheard.

Orpheus.

Even thinking the name caused Myers’ arms to gooseflesh.

Orpheus: the great white whale of UK military intelligence. The most wanted name on their list.

He was still in school the last time F Squad thought they had cornered Orpheus. Back then, a team had followed the fugitive to a different building, hundreds of miles away. A different agent had sat in a car just like this one, planning an assault just like this. Life comes full circle.

They were woefully unprepared that day. Twelve men were not enough. One died, his body torn to shreds in a frenzied attack. The leader, Bonner, escaped with only a scar across his throat that still throbs on rainy days.

Now it was Daniel Spokes leading, sitting in one of the helicopters high above, and Myers in charge of the ground operation.

Twenty years later: they would not make the same mistakes.

Every precaution had been taken. Nothing had been assumed. Could Orpheus have penetrated GCHQ or MI5? Chinese walls separated the attack plans, giving each unit only their own in-the-trenches orders. Water supplies had been shut off, and armed amphibian teams crouched in each underground access tunnel. Could Orpheus have accomplices that could come to his aid? That was easy. No. Orpheus always worked alone.

This was the largest coordinated operation in UK military intelligence history. By the end of today, Orpheus would be their captive. Or dead.

The road ended here, in a building that housed what Orpheus had been seeking for a lifetime.

Orpheus walked up the stairs to the main records room, fingertips trailing along the banister.

The entire building seemed to throb through the polished wood, from the basement to the rafters, like an organic entity constructed of brick and glass rather than bone and living tissue. Orpheus could feel the totality of it, from the flickering blue cyclopoid eye of the pilot light peering out from the basement boiler to the buzzing of the pillarbox-red Coke machine on the second floor, to the smell of mouldy stacks of paper in the upper-floor offices and the silent tread of mice feet in the attic.

Fingertips left the polished wood, breaking the connection, and pushed on the crenellated glass doors, which swung open noisily.

The space was empty. No worker at the enquiry desk. No stacker to push the squeaky trolley around. No vagrant at the corner table, napping on newspapers.

Empty.

As if Orpheus had slept through the apocalypse.

Although Orpheus was anything but alone.

The scopes of the snipers felt like voyeurs’ eyes scanning the interior through high windows. Orpheus sensed men in thick rubber suits staring up at the underside of drain covers under the two bathrooms, waiting for their quarry to drop through. High above, the public records office appeared as a magnified cross-section on helicopters’ thermal tracking devices, its walls and roof transparent through X-ray, a single red heat trace throbbing like a character in a videogame.

Orpheus ignored them, keeping focus on the prize. It was in this building. The search was almost over.

Orpheus walked up to the card cataloguing cabinet that ran along the side wall and followed the alphabetized system – Aa, Ab, Ac – until finding the reference and pulling out the index card drawer, which over-extended, like a long wooden tongue.

The secure line buzzed on Myers’ phone, sending it skittering across the dashboard.

He swiped it up immediately and answered the call.

It was Spokes: the operation was a go.

Myers took a swig from his bottle of water; his mouth was desert-dry and he couldn’t risk signalling fear to the others. He then dialled the secure broadcast line to the assembled teams.

‘All units proceed. Orpheus is to be taken alive if possible.’

The antique typewriter font on the index card guided Orpheus to the towering stacks of paper files in the recessed rear of the room.

Stack C.

Row 4.

Motion sensor lights plinged on above.

Shelf 3.

There.

A stack of papers lay in a hammock created by the hanging file, damp from decades of sitting in the dark, kept company by a handful of woodlice that scrambled across the wedge as it was lifted out.

The certificate was in the middle of the sheaf, recognizable from the stamp of the hospital.

Orpheus hesitated, hands suspended, savouring the moment, then peeled back one side and read the block of double-spaced typewriting and the handwritten ink signature beneath.

A deep breath, and then a sigh of dismay.

It was not the end of the journey.

But finally, there was a name.

A chill suddenly ran down Orpheus’ spine, and palms pressed to the table.

They were moving outside, assembling, preparing their assault. Car doors swinging open, boots stepping out, snipers’ fingers hooking around triggers.

Orpheus wasn’t concerned, the escape route would be revealed.

Deep breath. Discern their strategy.

First, containment. Exits were being sealed off with foot soldier and sniper teams. Aerial support formed a second line of cover. Next, they would storm the building. Aiming to corner and then capture. But where would they enter first?

And then a spider-sense fired deep in Orpheus’ head, the high alert of imminent death. Their whole strategy had been a ploy to distract, to draw attention away from the true attack. An elaborate trap. Capture was never their intention.

Orpheus looked up at the high-vaulted ceiling. In the split second before it exploded, Orpheus noticed for the first time the mural that had been staring benignly down. A loving artist’s tribute to the most famous fresco in history. Adam anchored to the earth, reaching for his divine creator. Two worlds separated from each other, fingertip-close and yet forever apart.

And then everything was consumed in the detonation and flashfire.

Having fired its payload of four Hellfire missiles, the Predator drone banked, tracing a wide parabola back towards its secret base in Scotland.

At an altitude of ten miles, the detonation flashed white across its black-and-white video monitors, taking out the entire building with what would later be described to the press as a controlled explosion conducted during a terror operation by police.

When the fire subsided, Myers approached the smoking ruin of the building. A crater had been carved out, an angry black hole in the ground, the contents of the registry office melted and compacted into it.

Orpheus was gone.