Free A Thousand Suns by Alex Scarrow

department’s life, at any one time, roughly half of the names on that list were being watched discreetly, from a distance. However, over the decades, there were fewer names as Mother Nature had whittled their number down, and in turn the head count on the department’s payroll had slowly dwindled too as the data to collate correspondingly decreased.
    To be fair, from time to time, the department’s personnel had temporarily grown. There had been other very special files over the years that had been entrusted to the department to look after. These files had come to join n-27, like reluctant house guests. In particular, file 759-j had arrived in ’63, and had stayed in its own filing cabinet for over thirty years. Its arrival had once more restored, if only for a little over a decade, some semblance of life to the duty corridor. A second water-cooler had even been installed against one lime-green wall, and a poster of Marilyn Monroe had mysteriously appeared one Monday morning. But the years passed, Marilyn’s print faded, the corners and edges of the poster scuffed and ripped. In the mid-eighties, file 759-j was eventually closed and its paper contents incinerated. The second water-cooler was removed as staff became reassigned and n-27 once more slumbered fitfully alone. And as the second millennium came to an end, the department became all but a shell. A single office, a single phone line, a trickle-feed black budget no longer topped-up but allowed to slowly spend itself out and one solitary clerical officer, counting off the last months until his retirement . . . and just one sleeping file.
    That all changed with a small clipping from a local newspaper, arriving by internal post in a plain brown envelope.
    The clerical officer read it quickly and understood its importance instantly; his traditional mid-morning cheese and bacon bagel was forgotten for now.
    The Medusa has been found .
    The clerical officer knew what to do.
    There was a protocol to follow; a protocol originally written with a fountain pen sixty years ago, and again on a typewriter ten years later, and when the ink on that had finally faded, rattled off on a dot matrix printer . . . and that too was fading now.
    The clerical officer read through it and finally located in faint grey dots the name he was after.
    He dialled the number, hoping that it was still current. If not, he wasn’t sure whom he would have to call next . . . there was no one else’s number to dial.
    He tapped in the number, surprised at how edgy he was. After so long, file n-27 had come back to life.

Chapter 7
    McGuire
    It had been raining all day.
    Chris finally decided to venture out of the coffee shop and head back to the motel as the dull grey of the afternoon was darkening with the approaching evening. Normally he would have grumbled and cursed the mean-spirited weather, as the fresh wind pulled at his clothes and the rain stung his cheeks, but right now his mind was on that aborted phone call to the museum and the very odd way it had ended.
    The shortcut from the coffee shop led him down from the coast road, through dunes of sand peaked with wild grass, to a small, deserted cove. Across the cove he could see the bright quayside lights of Port Lawrence.
    There were numerous boats at rest on the shingle, many of them little more than dinghies or just the stripped-down remains of larger vessels. All of them eroded by the elements, many worn away to exposed ribcages of ageing timber. Littering the ground between these dead and dying hulls like scattered body parts were ropes, tackle, anchors, cleats . . . the loose detritus of several dozen boats. A man could make a fortune selling this sort of junk in the right place to the right kind of people. A trendy little boutique in Greenwich Village, catering for dim-witted rich people seeking a slice of ‘traditional’ to slot inappropriately into their modern homes.
    The shower was easing now, nothing more than a few wilful spots.
    It