The Forbidden City Read online

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF

  The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © John McNally 2015

  Cover illustration © Paul Young

  Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015

  John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007521654

  Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780007521647

  Version: 2015-05-27

  To my mother and father, with love

  and thanks for all the books.

  And the Lord said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.

  Exodus 8:16-19

  Carbon will take over.

  Mildred Dresselhaus

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Footnotes

  Books by John McNally

  About the Publisher

  September 28 23:58 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.

  Midnight in the heart of England. The witching hour. In the woods an owl screeched, then ripped through a mouse, beak blood-wet in the moonlight.

  The great old house of Hook Hall stood empty. It had not been used as a home since the day it had been requisitioned by Her Majesty’s Government to become the top secret headquarters of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committeefn1. It lay now at the heart of a complex of modern laboratories and military installations that spread around it in the darkness like the still, silent courtiers of a grand old lady.

  The silence did not last. A low hum penetrated the dark and along the great drive the largest of the buildings began to glow.

  Inside the cathedral-like space, the massive Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), power surged and a great stone circle of particle accelerators, each the size of a shipping container, came to life.

  “My Henge,” as Dr Al Allenby, the dishevelled genius behind the machine, called it. “Everyone should have a Henge.”

  From the windows of a laboratory overlooking the henge a very small boy sent up a mad private prayer.

  Finn (full name Infinity Drake) was about to turn thirteen. He had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (like his father’s) and deep blue eyes (like his mother’s). He had been orphaned two years before. He was into gaming, mad science and most lethal pastimes, like any other boy. But unlike any other boy, thanks to getting caught up in Operation Scarlattifn2 the previous spring, Finn was now only 9. 8mm tall.

  With a deafening electrostatic crack and hum, white lightning began to spin like candyfloss around the core, the hoop of accelerators whipping up a cyclone of pure energy. With one last push they would form a perfect subatomic magnetic field.

  Perched above the Henge, crammed into his cockpit command pod, Dr Allenby (known to all as Al), recited the snatch of poetry he used to remember the crucial sequencing equations he kept secret from the world –

  “But at my back I always hear

  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity …”

  (… adding in his head: where B is acceleration and E opens and closes brackets and where all other vowels are disregarded).

  Several calculations ran at once inside his brain and in an instant he typed a series of numbers into his control terminal … WHOOOOOOOMMMM!

  The spun lighting became a continuous arc, then, with a flash, the Hot Area was created – a throbbing orb of white light within which the distance between the nucleus of any atom and its electrons would be reduced, thus shrinking all matter to a fraction of its original size. Called the Boldklubfn3 process, it was a remarkable feat of physics that only Al really understood.

  “OH YEAH, BABY!” he cried, incongruous given the surroundings and the presence of so many distinguished scientists, soldiers and political functionaries.

  His boss, Commander James Clayton-King, Chairman of the Global Non-governmental Threat Committee, sighed and briefly lowered his eyelids.

  It had taken months longer than Al had anticipated to reach this point and there had been many mistakes along the way, but finally he thought they’d got it right. In a few moments he would be able to prove that he could shrink a living mammal, then reverse the process and successfully return it to its normal size. Alive. Countless tests had been run with countless objects – up to and including living plants.

  All that remained was a live mammal test.

  A white mouse had been selected, sedated and encased in monitoring devices.

  It had been named ‘Fluffy’.

  It was for his nephew Finn, and his three Operation Scarlatti team mates, that Al had worked so hard day and night in the hope of being able to return them to their normal size.

  A technician up in the Control Gallery, on a command from Al, started the conveyor that fed items into the Hot Area. Fluffy moved along the belt and slipped into the perfect light.

  Finn watched, transfixed, a
s the Hot Area rippled and the white mouse was reduced to ‘nano’ scale, just a 150th of its original size, just like Finn. Next, the process would be reversed, bringing Fluffy back to normal ‘macro’ scale. If it worked, the four nano-humans, including Finn, would be resized next.

  They watched the show together, hopes looping the loop.

  “Come on, Fluffy,” whispered Captain Kelly of the SAS from where he stood beside Finn – six foot six of muscle and scar-tissue, currently reduced to 13mm, and so convinced the experiment would work he’d booked a flight to Scotland where he planned to spend the next few weeks sailing around the Western Isles accompanied by a crate of whisky.

  “Kick it, Fluff!” agreed 11mm-high Delta Salazar from behind her Aviator shades – the best and coolest pilot in the US Air Force. She’d grown as close to her nano-colleagues as she had to anybody in her life, but she couldn’t wait to fly back home to see her younger sister, Carla.

  Even 10mm-high Engineer Stubbs, ancient and given to doom and gloom, had boiled an egg in case things went well (party food would just upset his stomach).

  “Reverse the polarity!” cried Al.

  Finn’s heart beat like a drum. He could not wait to be big again, to open a door, to hug his stupid dog, Yo-yo, to kick a ball around with his best friend Hudson. To—

  Suddenly everything went purple as his view of the action was eclipsed by a gigantic, well-preserved lady of sixty-four in matching top and slacks.

  “Now, does anybody want more Welshcakes?”

  “GRANDMA! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” Finn screamed.

  Nobody in the universe had a more uncanny ability to interrupt than Finn’s grandma – and Al’s mother – Violet Allenby. She was drawn like a magnet to hoover in front of any given TV and always asked too loudly who was on the phone.

  “Oh, am I in the way?” she said, towering over them like a colossus.

  “YEEEEES!” Finn wailed until she moved along to offer yet more cake to the technical staff, her way of taking her mind off everything that could possibly go wrong.

  The Henge reappeared just as Al cut the power to the Hot Area, everyone watching as the spinning cyclone evaporated into a million specks of light.

  As the sparkles faded Fluffy’s test rig was revealed at centre of the Henge … at full size.

  There were whoops from technicians. A smattering of applause.

  “Yes!” shouted Finn.

  Delta got him in a headlock-come-hug.

  Kelly began to dance a jig, then got Stubbs in a headlock too.

  Out in the CFAC Al popped the perspex lid on his command pod and hurried down the ladder.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep … went an alarm.

  Al ran into the middle of the Henge.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep …

  Fluffy was very still.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep …

  Al examined her.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep …

  Seeing the angle of his uncle’s shoulders, Finn knew at once.

  B­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­e­p …

  Fluffy was dead.

  September 29 07:04 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  Dawn broke over the South China Sea.

  Song Island stood roughly 150 miles southwest of Taiwan and 150 miles southeast of Hong Kong, part of a forgotten archipelago – uninhabited, untouched, undisturbed, except for the occasional visit from a mad nationalist or a passing naval patrol. Three countries lay claim to Song and it had been the subject of a United Nations disputed territory process since 1948, though Song’s file lay at the very bottom of the pile, uncared for by a diplomatic community with better things to do. After all, it was just a Karst Limestone sugarloaf – a big conical rock stuck like a sore thumb out of the deepest azure ocean, baked by the sun and whipped by typhoons, with barely a scrap of life upon its rocky surface. True, there were some nesting seabirds, patches of vegetation, but mostly it was just a sheer 200-metre column of barren, bare rock …

  … within though?

  Kaparis settled down. There was nothing quite like moving into a new HQ: they always had that irresistible ‘new top secret operations facility’ smell. And this place, even Kaparis had to admit, was special. The creation of his eccentric personal architect, Thömson-Lavoisiér, it boasted 2km of tunnels, bunkers and laboratories built into the seabed, a submersible weapons platform, a sub-aquatic escape vehicle and – the pièce de résistance – a personal recumbent operations chamber for Kaparis and the iron lung he’d spent his life in since he was totally paralysed by a medical ‘accident’ in 2001.

  The chamber was set into the sugarloaf itself and featured not only ‘the usual’ domed screen array and cranial panopticon (allowing a 360 degree field of vision and eye-track control of all screens) but also: a window. Unremarkable, until you realised the whole chamber could move up and down like an elevator within the stick of rock. Kaparis could enjoy a commanding view of the South China Sea and the surrounding islands one minute, then descend to a point six metres below sea level to watch the local sharks the next.

  All in all he was delighted. His eyes spun round the opticon as he sought out his butler.

  “Heywood?”

  “Yes, Master?” Heywood stepped forward – bald, immaculate.

  “What do you think to something local for dinner?”

  “Of course, Master.”

  Heywood pressed a button. For mood music, Kaparis flicked his eyes across the screen array and called up a performance of The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The sharks circled.

  A portal opened on the seabed and an official of the Taiwanese Coastguard – who had attempted to report his superiors for accepting bribes to keep clear of the island – was expelled. He began to swim desperately for the surface.

  The sharks exposed their teeth, then expressed their delight … in the only way they knew how. And the chorus sang –

  “Behold the Lord High Executioner

  A personage of noble rank and title

  A dignified and potent officer

  Whose functions are particularly vital!

  Defer! Defer!

  To the noble lord, to the noble lord

  To the Lord High Executioner!”

  Blood bloomed through the waters and what remained of the coastguard official drifted down to the ocean floor.

  Kaparis ordered his chamber to rise then checked the progress of his agent in Shanghai via a live video feed. It was all so nearly over, the Vector Program so nearly complete. He could imagine the weight lifting from his shoulders. The long months of struggle, the long months of effort and excellence in his secret factories beneath the deserts of Niger had resulted in the production of fifty-two of the most devilishly sophisticated robots ever conceived.

  Finally he was on the road to recovery, putting distance between himself and the memory of Infinity Drake and all the damage he’d managed to inflict during the Scarlatti episode.

  Finally, he was to master mankind and take over the world …

  All that remained was to enjoy the yields of his genius. As the chamber broke the surface of the water, sunlight flooded in and momentarily Kaparis felt free again, as free as the Booby Birds and Great Crested Terns now wheeling around the rocks. And in that moment he forgot himself and a thought bubbled up through his mind: I … am … happy …

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep …

  An alarm sounded.

  The bubble burst.

  September 29 07:22 (Local GMT+8). Kung Fu Noodles, Concession#22, Food Hall D, Sector 9, Forbidden City Industrial Progress Zone, Shanghai, China.

  The food hall was vast. At dozens of outlets staff in ridiculous paper hats served hundreds of customers, night workers just off shift. The air was hot and street-food aromatic.

  Baptiste spotted the plain-clothes cop as soon as he wal
ked in – neat, serious, casually checking out the handful of westerners in the food hall. Including Baptiste. The cop glanced down at a palmtop screen, then immediately walked across the seating area towards him.

  As he approached, Baptiste touched his phone and initiated emergency contact. His free hand felt instinctively for the fountain pen in the front pocket of his bag.

  The cop flashed his ID and said something in Mandarin Chinese.

  Instantly, Song Island relayed a translation back to an audio device embedded behind Baptiste’s ear. “He’s asking your name.”

  “Jaan Baptiste.”

  Baptiste. It had started as a nickname. Many religious scenes remained on the walls of the Kaparis seminary, a school for Tyros housed in an abandoned monastery high in the Carpathian Mountains, including an icon of John the Baptist. With greasy hair that dripped as far as his shoulders and a soft-as-silk teenage beard ‘Baptiste’ was a dead ringer for the dead saint. Aged between twelve and seventeen, the Tyros were the foot soldiers of Kaparis, secretly selected from care institutions across the world and brought to the Carpathians for training and NRPfn1 indoctrination.

  “Passport?” the cop asked, in English now.

  “At hotel.” Baptiste answered in a Bulgarian accent, mentally checking off the six ways he could kill the cop with his bare hands.

  “Hotel name?”

  “Tiger Star.”

  “This just received by Shanghai Police Command …” Kaparis heard Li Jun report.

  From her bank of screens at the edge of his operations chamber, Li Jun posted the image of Baptiste that the cop had just sent to his headquarters. She was an unassuming young Tyro who had became Kaparis’s chief technologist.

  Kaparis seethed.

  “Happy …” His brief moment of sentiment had been punished. By fate. The following moments would determine the outcome of the entire project.

  What to do?

  There was a fifty-fifty chance Baptiste would be exposed as his agent. Half the world’s security services were on the lookout for the Tyros and their telltale retinal scarring. Baptiste’s cover could be blown. But if they aborted the Vector operation now and started again they would waste months, years even, of careful planning and preparation.