Free Catacombs of Terror! by Stanley Donwood Page A

finished my pint and lit a cigarette. I nodded towards the door.
    “Okay. Let’s go to my office.”

Chapter 13
Biological Weapon
    We didn’t speak on the way. It was getting dark too early because of the rain. The street was crowded with people. Most of them had the weekend glint in their eyes. Alcohol, and lots of it, was on their agenda. Then sex or violence or some drunken species of misery. I kind of envied them. Even their misery would most likely be gone by the morning. Mine had legs though. Stamina. And it just kept on getting more nourishment.
    We sidestepped the puddled vomit in the alley and I let us into the office. There was a message on the phone from Colin Kafka, asking me to call him urgently. Yeah, well. There’s urgent and there’s urgent. My main urgency was to find out what Stonehenge had to say. I checked the time. 9 P.M . Already. Something about the day was nagging at my mind. It was the guys in the car, mainly. I’d been followed, shoved into a car and driven out of town and interrogated, sort of. But would they have done that to just anyone? What if I’d been legit? Polite apologies and a lift back into town? Somehow it didn’t quite gel. No, it didn’t gel at all. They must have known very quickly that I wasn’t who I said I was. That visual mapping thing . . . .
    I remembered the CCTV camera I had looked up at after leaving the control room. If they had doubts about me, they could have taken a zoomed-in still of my face, run it through their database, and—what? What could they have seen that would make them want to warn me off the whole deal? Did they have me on file already from somewhere else? If so, then where from? Maybe the cameras at Charlcombe had got me. I couldn’t be sure that I’d avoided them all, especially on the way out from under the tarpaulin. Unless there’d been cameras actually down the hole. Infrared cameras? But why? I was getting nowhere. I got out the whiskey and poured a couple of glasses. I turned to Stonehenge and passed him one. He was sitting on the couch. I grabbed my remaining chair, pulled it over, and sat down facing him.
    “You were going to tell me. Who’s ‘we’?”
    “This might come as something of a surprise.”
    “Oh, goody. I like surprises. I’ve had more than my share recently, and you know what? I’m getting to like them. Now. Who is ‘
we
’?”
    “Barry Eliot and myself. Barry is, or rather was, closely involved with Them. Almost one of Them, you could say. He became involved through his wife. Through Karen. Who I think you know. Rather closely, I fear.”
    He had been right about the surprise. Except it was more of a shock. A jaw-dropper. I stared at him. I was paralysed. But it wasn’t very long before it stopped being paralysis and became potentially fatal for my only chair. I might have said, ‘Excuse me,’ before I hurled it across the room, but I probably didn’t. I did some swearing and only just stopped myself from throwing my drink after the chair. Okay. I could probably speak now. I looked back at Stonehenge. He was watching me. Warily, I thought. Well, yeah.
    “Barry Eliot?” My words were choked.
    He nodded. “Barry Eliot.”
    “You’re asking me to accept that you and
Barry Eliot
are the good guys? Barry threatened to kill me two weeks ago. He threatened to get my licence revoked. And he plays golf. These are not the actions of a good guy.”
    “He walked in on you having sex with his wife. What did you expect him to do? Pat you on the back? He doesn’t care about you sleeping with Karen. He hates her. But he can’t let her know that. His is the only direct contact we have with Them. I assure you, Barry’s outburst was entirely for Karen Eliot’s benefit.”
    “You’re kidding me,” I said, but somehow I felt he wasn’t. He shook his head slowly.
    “Karen Eliot is one of—
Them
?”
    He nodded again. I went over and picked up by chair. It wasn’t broken. Thankfully. I sat down again. I needed