The Paths Less Travelled (The Winds of

Fortune Book 2) John Wiltshire

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The Paths Less Travelled
The Winds of Fortune #2

MORE HEAT THAN THE SUN

SERIES 2

JOHN WILTSHIRE

WWW.DECENTFELLOWSPRESS..COM
Copyright © 2023 Decent Fellows Press

ASIN: B0C1C74WSD
PRINT ISBN- 9798389984196

First Edition

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magazine or journal.

The characters and events described in this book are fictional. Any resemblance between characters
and any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Paths Less Travelled, Copyright © 2023 Decent Fellows Press
Cover Art Design by Isobel Starling
 Dedication:
For Dad,
who spent his life
at peril on the sea.
 CONTENTS

Map- The Scilly Isles

Map – Light Island
Key- Light Island

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36

About the author

 … for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

Matthew Arnold, On Dover Beach

 Map Key

1. Seabird Stack with stone bridge

2. Lighthouse
3. Cathedral Cliffs
4. Ben's Bottom
5. Kittiwake Cottage
6. Clearwater Pond
7. Old Mutt Island
8. The Medieval Wall
9. Walled Garden
10. Guillemot House
11. PB's Beach
12. The Well
13. Crow's Nest
14. Coronation Cove
15. Pavilion
16. Lookout Point
17. Dock and boatshed
 Chapter One

It was strange, Aleksey reflected, as he strode over the dry, yellowed turf with Ben, what could be
contagious. He’d always thought it was things like the flu or smallpox or the plague that you caught.
But no. Apparently the concept of sleepovers could be spread as well. Once Molly began them,
appearing in her pyjamas once a week with fixed determination, earlier and earlier each appointed
day, now here they were, he and Ben, going on a…sleepover.
They’d been invited.
The professor, shy, anxious, proud, and stuttering, had invited them over—dinner—and stay the
night of course…house warming…not that it was his house, obviously. But nice summer walk across
Dartmoor…probably too late to walk back. Spare room all finished now…
So, here he was, going to spend the night in the cottage. A place that held mixed memories for him.
He glanced slyly sideward, wondering just how intuitive Ben was. Apparently, a lot. Ben stirred out
of his reverie, swished his stick against some bracken and observed a little gloomily, ‘I hope this
night is better than our last one there.’
Aleksey laughed and messed up his dark hair, pleased with this connection they shared. Bodies
and now thoughts. Well, some of them. It wouldn’t do for Ben Rider-Mikkelsen to know all his
secrets, even now.
‘On the floor, I seem to recall. And cold.’
‘And…not loving me very much.’
‘Huh. Yes, that’s why I was on the floor and cold, Ben—because I did not love you.’
Ben poked his ribs then offered more cheerfully, ‘I hope Tim’s not gone to too much trouble, but I
kinda think he has.’
‘Trouble? How do you mean?’
Ben glanced at him disbelievingly. They were climbing some rocks around the base of a tor,
wading through the summer-withered bracken. ‘You do know he’s…totally in awe of you, yeah?
Everything he does revolves around what you’ll think or say or do.’
‘I thought that was you.’
Ben made a small scoffing noise, quite audible, and continued, ‘He’ll have cooked and…well,
gone to a lot of trouble—as I said. So be nice.’
‘Me? I am always nice, am I not?’ He grinned. ‘I have even brought a little gift. A house-warming
present.’
Ben gave him a swift, suspicious eye flick. ‘What? Where? It’s not something weird, is it?’
Aleksey only smiled to himself and waited for Radulf to catch up. PB was keeping close to his
heels already. He sometimes did that these days on their Dartmoor walks—the level of his anxiety
seeming to depend on which direction they took.
‘How’s the leg? And don’t ask what leg. It’s annoying.’
‘It’s fine. Honestly. In case you haven’t noticed, you have my stick.’
‘It’s my bracken sword.’ Ben demonstrated this concept with a particularly accurate and vicious
swipe, beheading an innocently curled fern. It did clear the path nicely though.
‘Do not make a sour face and say oh God, but I have been thinking. That face is unnecessary too. I
have been thinking that we should maybe get a caretaker for the island. A fulltime job for someone
who would like the opportunity to live there and, well, take care of it, I suppose.’
‘Where would they stay? In Guillemot?’
‘No. That’s ours. Maybe the cottage? I could have a new place built? What do you think?’
‘I think it would be better with just us there.’
‘I agree, but we can’t be there enough to tend the grass, look after the garden and glasshouse
plants.’
‘Maybe someone would be willing to travel over from St Mary’s once a week or something?’
Aleksey nodded. ‘Maybe.’ Maybe not. If you wanted to keep something secret, the fewer people
who knew about it the better.
They came in sight of the cottage sitting bathed in sunshine on the southern slope of the tor. In
winter, as he’d only just recalled, the place had been nightmarish, a situation not helped by the
ruinous state of the old farm buildings at the time. Now it was unrecognisable. Not only had he built a
large extension of oak and glass which formed the kitchen and main living area, he’d had a granite
wing added which housed the bedrooms and bathrooms, the roof of which had huge skylights that let
the sunshine stream in. What had been the single bedroom above the tiny old living area was now
merely ceiling space with a mezzanine gallery lined in bookshelves, reached by a spiral staircase.
The old one-up, one-down farm labourer’s hovel was no more. Only that week the bespoke oak
garage, which had replaced the old barn forming one side of the courtyard, had been signed off. In the
end, rather than lay a modern driveway, they’d left the old cobbles and drainage channels, had them
blasted clean, and turned them into a feature patio, which now formed an outside room, consisting of
teak furniture under a solid oak pergola, with an impressively large, but often necessary fire pit.
However, as they approached up the sheep track, this area now appeared to be covered by…
vehicles. ‘Why are there lots of cars, Benjamin?’
Ben gave a small poke of his stick to Radulf who was eating horse-dung. ‘It’s a house warming.
He mentioned he might invite some…friends.’
‘Oh, God. Professors? Terrorists?’ He was tempted to ask if he'd be able to tell the difference.
‘This is why I didn’t tell you! They might be from the university, yes. Can you not—say things.
Please.’
‘What do you mean? Say what? I shall be my charming self.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t talk about the war. Or the government. Or that American
Imperialists faked the moon landings and you can prove it. And don’t go off on a rant about anything.’
‘I am deeply offended. Well in that case, you don’t talk about the island. Or zombies.’
‘Why not the island?’
‘Because.’
‘Uh huh.’
Tim was waiting for them at the door. The dogs pushed past him, regardless of social niceties, and
headed in, heads down on a food mission. Ben grinned at his friend and handed over a bottle of wine
he’d carried in their overnight duffle.
Aleksey smirked inwardly and gave him a very small wrapped parcel. ‘Happy house warming.’
‘Oh, thank you. You shouldn’t have…well, obviously, I mean, it is your house after all…but
thanks.’ He laid the little package down on the patio table. ‘Come in and meet everyone…Michael is,
err…anyway…come in.’
 Ben gave Aleksey a final eyes-narrowing of warning for good behaviour and they stepped in
together.
***
 Chapter Two
Aleksey was used to the sensation of entering places with Ben Rider-Mikkelsen now. He’d been
doing it one way or another for fifteen years, after all. He was also not entirely unaware that Ben’s
attractions were somewhat mirrored, enhanced, by his own. He hadn’t always thought this, had once
deliberately kept himself physically and metaphorically in the shadows, believing that everyone who
looked upon him would see what he saw in the mirror: a murderer wearing the face of his victim. But
now he enjoyed the effect they both made. A pair. He liked enhancing Ben. He tried to do it often, was
intending to do it that night as well, despite being in Timothy Watson’s special guest suite. Ben didn’t
do anything to draw all eyes to him other than walk into the room, but he had that kind of rare beauty
that caused pauses in conversation. He, being also six-foot four, could hardly be overlooked either,
and he supposed scarred, blond-haired, rangy Vikings were pretty rare for Devon as well.
Maybe they were all just alarmed by the dogs. A wolfhound and a husky helping themselves to a
plate of cocktail sausages (which was not on the floor), would be something a little different for the
average professorial house warming.
It was fairly clear to Aleksey why Tim had been unable to complete his comment about his
boyfriend. The moron was dressed in a suit, neatly shaved, hair styled, and was standing chatting to a
group of what he assumed were Tim’s ex-University of Exeter colleagues. Squeezy gave him a tiny lip
quirk and introduced him. ‘Sir, this is Madeline, an old friend of Tim’s from his department, and her
husband, Austin. This is Aleksey, our boss in ANGEL.’
Aleksey was entirely floored how to respond to this, so murmured, ‘I think my age has finally
caught up to me. Sorry, who are you?’
Squeezy clapped him amusingly on the shoulder, old buddies and their jokes, and asked in his
apparently new cut-glass English accent, ‘Can I get anyone another drink? Austin?’
He retreated to the bar which Tim had set up on the kitchen island.
Aleksey followed.
Squeezy, back to the room, for his ears alone, muttered, ‘Save me. Get me the fuck outta here.’
‘You actually do not appear to need saving.’
‘Nag, nag, nag. Don’t say this. Don’t fucking say that.’
‘Ah, I got some of that, too. I think they may have been conspiring.’
‘That’s not fucking fair. That’s what we do about them.’
They stared gloomily into their drinks for a while.
‘How come it’s always fucking us that has to not say things, hey? Fucking hell. I’d like to take
these poncy prats and stick them in a shell scrape somewhere and see what their fucking topics of
conversation would be then.’
‘Save me. Get me the fuck outta here, I’d assume.’
Squeezy turned and hooked his elbows over the bar, surveying the room. ‘How does he do it? Our
little Benjie. He knows fucking nothing about anything but look at him: he’s got them eating out of his
bleeding hand.’
‘I think it’s because he’s nice.’
‘Yeah. Reckon that must be it.’
‘I wonder what that is like.’
 ‘What? Being nice?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Dunno. You should see him when he’s at our charity whatnots with the veterans. Those poor old
bastards are out on the streets because they tried to have fucking conversations about things no fucking
bugger wanted to hear, especially their bleeding wives. They look at him and see hope or something; I
don’t fucking know. They look at me and think why the fuck isn’t he sitting here with us? Or maybe
one day, Matey, one day.’
‘You think you’ll end up homeless one day? You might be right. I’m not taking you in.’
‘Ta, Mate. If I wanted your fucking glass house, Crusoe, I’d fucking take it. Nice little home
invasion one day. Take what’s in it, too, if you get my drift.’
‘Hah. I long for the day you try it. Then we’d finally find out, would we not?’
‘We would.’
‘What are you doing over here! I told you to mingle!’ Tim was fussing with some nuts. Aleksey
was tempted to make a joke about this.
Squeezy only replied calmly, ‘We’re practising being nice. With each other. Like you said.’
‘Oh, you’d try the patience of a bloody saint. Pass these around.’
They went back, as ordered, into the fray.
‘Ah, almonds, no thank you.’ Madeline held up her hand at the offered snack. ‘I only eat food I
know is ethically sourced. You have to be so careful these days.’
‘Do rabbits count?’
Austin appeared to pick up on Aleksey’s accent, if not his joke, or he may have been forewarned,
for he asked, ‘What do you, as a Russian, think about the PM’s stance on Ukraine? You must have
some interesting thoughts on it all.’
Aleksey did, but not ones he was apparently allowed to share.
Instead, he employed a tactic he’d used many times with Phillipa’s friends and family. It worked a
treat, regardless of what subject was being discussed. He hung his head thoughtfully, toed the
beautiful slate slabs, which he was fairly sure were not particularly ethical, and murmured, ‘May we
live in interesting times.’
‘Ah, yes, quite so. Good point.’
The war nicely brushed over, he asked politely, ‘Do you live in Exeter?’
‘Yes, we snapped up one of the new apartments on the canal off plans. It’s rather nice—entirely
green. Almost doubled in value since we bought it. Maddy’s a rower.’ He gazed thoughtfully at his
wife's back as she chatted to another couple next to them. ‘Very handy for her to practise—the whole
complex has its own dock.’
‘I know two men who recently did a long paddle. They were…outstanding.’
‘Maddy competes internationally. She’s got a race in a couple of weeks. She’s going to be…’ He
quirked his lip, as if seeking for a word, and was berating himself for not being able to find it.
‘Standing out, too. Yes, I think she’ll be standing out.’ He shook himself lightly and glanced out once
more at the view. ‘Do you live in the city, too?’
‘No, we live here on the moors. We walked over today.’
‘Really? I got the impression from Michael that you both worked in London.’
Aleksey was going to query worked? but amended this to, ‘London? Yes, occasionally.’ He was
struggling. ‘Do you teach at the university?’
 ‘No, I own my own company: Belleropon Labs. Tim’s lucky to be out of it though, if you ask me.
Although he's a bit vague about what he does do now. He’s done a marvellous job with this house. We
had absolutely no idea. The interiors are superb. We just adore the Florentine brocade on the
armchairs and sofas. Obviously, we wouldn’t have it—ours are upholstered in organic hemp. But the
oak framing…Tim assured us it was a local sustainable hardwood? Although, I believe he also let
slip once that he just rents? Bit of a puzzle really.’
Aleksey wasn’t going to enlighten him and changed the subject. ‘Do you have children?’ He could
usually find something amusing to relate about Molly that didn’t fall into Ben’s your usual bullshit
embargos.
Madeline spoke again. She’d tuned back into their conversation and had been staring at Aleksey
intensely. ‘No. We decided it wasn’t environmentally friendly.’
Aleksey frowned. ‘What? Sex?’
Her eyebrows rose in a quick shiver as if she’d bitten into a lemon. ‘Reproduction. We’re
antinatalists.’
Five minutes. Five fucking minutes of trying to be nice and here he was unable to translate and
having no fucking clue what anyone was talking about. Why couldn’t you eat fucking almonds?
‘Interesting.’ It was a shorter version of his Chinese philosophy tactic, but usually worked just as
well.
Noticing his confusion, however, Madeline helped him out. She was a professor. Aleksey assumed
being informative was contagious too. ‘We’re committed to voluntary human extinction. We believe
procreation is actually just child abuse— it’s entirely unethical to bring children into a world where
they will inevitably suffer. Population growth causes environmental degradation, resource depletion,
poverty and inequality.’
‘Uh huh.’ He glanced around, saw Ben was chatting and unlikely to hear him, so countered softly,
‘But also to wonders like Bach, no?’
‘His entire body of work doesn’t even compare to one tiger. We’re working towards changing the
future of the planet.’
‘Ah. I heard someone else claim that recently. I helped him out, actually—well, with the human
extinction part anyway.’
‘Tim says it’s time to eat.’ Ben had a very firm grasp on his arm. He had apparently been
surreptitiously monitoring him. Aleksey turned his winning smile on Sunny Boy and informed him
cheerily, ‘I was just going to tell Madeline about your flying lessons, Ben.’ He turned back. ‘Benjamin
is becoming a pilot. Then I’m going to buy him a plane.’ He was dragged away before he could
mention the off-road Mercedes, the Maserati and Ben’s Monster Diesel. He was extremely annoyed
he’d been conned into walking over now and suspected another plot concocted behind his back.
***
 Chapter Three
At dinner, which was actually just a relaxed supper around Tim’s kitchen table, Aleksey found
himself sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as Rachel, a friend of Tim’s from his animal
rights days. Her brother, Maxwell, was sitting on the other side of the table, next to Ben. Aleksey
didn’t tell Rachel, for obvious reasons, the exact details of how he came to know their mutual
acquaintance. He wasn’t too sure what he thought about animals having rights, and decided to consult
Radulf on this concept later.
The silence was a little awkward, but he had no particular reason to want to break her resistance,
so asked politely, ‘Are you and your brother lecturers too?’
‘Oh, no, we never fancied teaching. Too much like hard work. We both went into research.’
‘Interesting.’ It was such a sure-fire tactic.
‘It has its moments. I did some work on Richard III’s remains last year. That was terribly exciting.
Chance of a lifetime.’
‘I had to read that at school. I’m not sure Shakespeare translated all that well. Our tutor seemed as
confused as we were.’
‘They think now that the entire play was little more than propaganda for Elizabeth to bolster her
family’s Tudor claims by knocking the last of the Plantagenets—that Richard wasn’t a hunchback at
all. And most contemporary accounts written in his lifetime seem to bear that out.’
She was asked to pass the wine by the man on the other side of her. She topped up her own first
and then they began to discuss the view of the sun setting on the tor, which was a splendid backdrop
to the dinner table. Aleksey glanced over to see what Ben was up to. He wasn’t so possessive that he
had to monitor Ben’s every move, of course not, that would be immature and suggest insecurity. He
was merely curious. He knew Ben knew he was being observed. That’s just the way they were
together.
It was actually amusing how strenuously Ben was not catching his eye. Aleksey assumed he was
being studiously ignored in punishment for breaking his don’t say anything rules. Ben hadn’t enjoyed
being followed to the table and lectured by Madeline on the carbon footprint of his new hobby.
Aleksey had been fairly sure Ben had been tempted to mutter, ‘I don’t use my feet,’ and possibly not in
jest either. Ben didn’t do deep subjects, and if he did, it wouldn’t be a discussion on fossil fuels.
Ben’s need for speed was definitely not electric-friendly. Although Aleksey was amused and pleased
in equal measure just how much Ben genuinely enjoyed reading more challenging fiction these days.
His subjects of interest were deepening. And he’d also done as Aleksey had hoped he would—he’d
begun to foster Molly’s interest in books too.
She could actually read quite well, although she was only three. But like most children, she
preferred to be read to. Privately, she admitted she liked his made-up stories about the secret lives of
Radulf and PB best, because he did their voices in funny accents, but they’d mutually agreed to keep
this little nugget to themselves. They both thought Ben reading bedtime stories to her on her special
night was an excellent idea which should be encouraged.
Maxwell appeared as intense as all Tim’s other guests. He was listening to something Ben was
saying, chin on hand, engrossed. It was entirely possible it wasn’t Ben’s topics that were fascinating
him.
 The subject of the tor now apparently exhausted, Rachel turned back to him, and he reluctantly took
his eyes off Ben. ‘Sorry, what were we saying?’
‘Humps—or lack of. Are you a historian? Is that what you were researching?’
‘Oh, no, they had some forensic anthropologists in the team studying the bones for deformities. I
was looking at the soil around the body.’
‘Was it nice?’
She smiled. Faintly. ‘I'm a microbiologist. So's Max. And that’s how he met Austin. I study and
collect pathogens—that might still be present in places like ancient burial sites.’
‘I thought Richard died of a sword thrust. Or many, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but his remains were found on top of a much older monastery burial pit where they found
skeletons of monks who seemed to have died of syphilis—yes, sorry, hardly a topic for dinner, is it?
Occupational hazard. And it doesn’t say much for the religious vows. I was on contract to the
university for a three-month study. They wanted to find proof that syphilis, rather than travelling from
the New World to the Old, was actually taken to the Americas from Europe. So, if they date the find to
before Columbus they've got a good chance. It fit in with my own area of study, so I agreed to do it.’
Aleksey had once heard of people who were sewage divers. Literally, they dived into human
waste pits with no protective gear to clear blockages. He’d always thought that was the worst job in
the world until meeting this woman who apparently dug around in syphilis-infested muck. He moved
his mackerel pâté to one side. Rachel saw this, frowned a little and offered to top up his glass. He put
his hand over it, so she emptied the remainder of the bottle into hers.
‘And did you?—find proof?’
‘Not definitive. I ran out of time. Such a shame because it's very rare that something like that
comes up on public land—mostly old monastery ruins are privately owned. Crown estates usually.’
‘Sorry, I'm not following you.’
‘Well, obviously, when Henry dissolved all the monasteries it wasn’t because he didn’t like God
—he just wanted all the land and the enormous revenues attached to the Church to fund his French
wars. And our Royal Family still owns most of those old estates. There’s one or two that survived—
Buckfast Abbey, for example, just down the road of course. But the rest we can’t get access to.
Sometimes things do pop up. I’ve recently heard of one that might become available for a dig. Fingers
crossed. I’ve just come back from Ukraine, so I’ve not had a chance yet to follow up on my spy’s
information. I suppose you’ve been following what’s happening over there?’
‘I know they have a blue and yellow flag, yes.’
‘Oh. Well the war crimes investigations being done at the mass graves in Mariupol turned up
lower level burial pits with much older skeletons. So, it was too good a chance for me to miss, even
though it was a bit scary going into a war zone to be honest. But bug-lady here—it’s my mission, my
Holy Grail.’
‘Holy Grail?’
‘Well, Ukraine, or Gallicia-Volhynia as it was when these deaths occurred, was known as the
epicentre for the spread throughout Europe. It came across from what is now Crimea over the Black
Sea from Turkey.’
‘Again, I am not following you. Sorry. What came where?’
She drained her glass. ‘The Black Death. Sorry, didn’t I say that? It’s quite a bit more exciting than
the pox. The remains that have been dug up were from bubonic plague pits. Yersinia pestis. It’s one of
the most fascinating bacterium you can imagine.’
He sent his pickled onion the same way as his pâté. ‘It’s not something I spend much time
imagining.’ Which was another lie, he supposed; he often recalled a tale of six hundred bleeding men
striding across Devon, tearing their skin with nails.
‘Most people don’t. But nothing ever really dies.’
‘And did you find it?’
‘Oh, yes. I found your bog-standard bubonic plague.’
‘You found…?’ Aleksey had shifted away from people at dinners once or twice before. He
supposed it was an occupational hazard when you mixed with the kind of people he had in the past,
especially the Royal Family, but this felt like a good time to declare a Radulf emergency and leave.
She was stretching over the table to liberate another bottle of wine as he asked, hesitantly, ‘Is it
still…catching…?’
‘Oh, absolutely, it wiped out over half the world, remember—fifty million people in some
estimates. Seventy percent death rate at least. We’re not too sure of the numbers for England as there
was no official census until much later in the century, but they extrapolated the estimates we do have
from deaths of clergy, which were always recorded. But they had no antibiotics available then, of
course. Don’t worry, Y. pestis still pops up all the time all over the world—maybe a couple of
thousand cases a year? It’s usually pretty quickly treated with antibiotics nowadays.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Yes.’
‘No? You don’t sound…happy about that.’
‘Have you heard of the term gain of function?’
‘I broke my leg recently. I heard it a lot then, yes.’
She mulled this over for a moment then reassured him with a smile, ‘I think that’s regain function—
well I hope it was.’
‘Why? What is this other thing?’
‘That’s how we met Tim, actually.’ She glanced down the table to where he was sitting chatting
animatedly to Madeline. Aleksey wondered what they were finding so fascinating. Tim Watson might
have had him marked as a human in need of extinction once or twice, now he came to think about it.
Rachel was tapping the table lightly with her fork, drinking absentmindedly, apparently deep in
thought about this subject. ‘Gain of function is the cutting edge of microbiology. It increases the
transmissibility, lethality and virulence of pathogens. If you can break down the gene sequence of a
virus or bacterium you can splice it, combine it, enhance it—and increase its function—you can
create a chimera.’
‘Chimera? Is that not a…?’ She offered to top up his glass but he shook his head once more. ‘I’m
sorry. I sometimes struggle to translate words. Did you just say you make pathogens more lethal, more
transmissible?’
‘Look, this is how I explain it to a layman. Take your basic car. What functions does it do?’
‘It allows me to leave places where the Black Death has just been mentioned.’
‘Hah, yes. But other than this driving to and from locations, what else might you want your car to
do? A futuristic car, if you like.’
‘You mean…fly?’
‘Why stop there? What about a submarine function too? So, someone able to make those
modifications to a basic car would be increasing its functionality. That’s what we do with pathogens.
We enable them to do things they can’t currently. What was the main spreader of the medieval plague,
do you know?’
‘I believe it was bites from fleas carried by rats.’
She made a finger like a gun and pointed it at him. ‘Almost right. It was actually flea vomit. Isn’t
that incredible? Y. pestis bungs up their guts, so to try and clear the blockage they vomit and flush this
incredibly dense plug of plague out, and that flood of hugely concentrated bacteria goes into the bite.
So, to increase transmission and lethality, what would we need?’
‘To be utterly insane first, I would think, but then more nauseous fleas? You’re going to create an
army of queasy plague-infected fleas and release them? I know someone who would read a book
about that, if you wanted to write one.’
She smiled. ‘It’s funny you should say that. It’s actually already been done—and not in fiction. In
1940, the Japanese mixed plague fleas in a bathtub with wheat, and bombed China with the lethal mix.
The wheat grains attracted rats, which then got infested by the infected fleas…I know, sounds like
lurid fiction, doesn’t it? But think the other way around.’
Aleksey considered this for a moment. ‘Change the function of the plague so it does not require
transmission by fleas…?’
‘Yes! As I said, we have outbreaks of plague all the time in countries now, but mainly places that
have massive populations and lots of poverty and pretty grim hygiene—i.e., lots of rats and fleas for
easy transmission. But here in our affluent societies, such as America and the UK, an outbreak of
plague is always quickly contained because it’s so difficult for it to spread. When’s the last time you
came into contact with a flea? I mean seriously?’
Aleksey heard a rumble from under the table, but gave Radulf the benefit of the doubt he was just
snoring.
‘You see? No fleas, no rats equals almost impossible to spread.’
‘Well, good, as I think I have already said.’
‘Oh, no, that’s not good at all. We needed to find a way for it to spread in places where it doesn’t
currently. So, we didn’t actually concentrate on bubonic plague. It’s too…commonplace.’
‘Huh. That’s something you don’t hear every day.’
‘No, the really interesting one is pneumonic plague. And the primary strain of that.’
‘I have not heard of—’
‘No, I know, isn’t it fascinating? Most people haven’t and yet untreated it still has a one hundred
percent lethality rate and, more importantly, it is human-to-human transmissible without intervention
needed by something like a flea. And the treatment has to be in the first twenty-four hours or it’s
useless. What’s one thing every human has in common?’
Aleksey was seriously struggling now. He could think of lots of things, but none that seemed good
topics for a dinner party. But this was a party about pox and plague, apparently, so he ventured,
‘Sex?’
She shook her head, but smirked, pleased, as if she’d expected him to say this. ‘Nope, that’s
voluntary, or can be made safe for transmission of viruses. Guess again.’
‘Breathing?’
‘There you go. Primary pneumonic plague is spread by breathing.’ Again with the smug look. ‘I
know what you’re going to say.’
 ‘I seriously doubt that.’
‘Oh, but if there was an outbreak, we’d just issue masks or something, or respirators? Or keep
everyone in environmentally safe buildings?’
‘Did they not do this in their own way in the middle ages—locked people in their houses? Nailed
them in and left them to die?’
‘Well, yes—but we couldn’t do that today. Well, I suppose we could. Anyway, we probably
wouldn’t. But the real downside to the pathogen is that it’s susceptible to heat and light. It would have
initial devastating effects, but then gradually all those measures would be enacted in some form or
another and it would be contained. So what’s the next thing everyone has to do?’ She didn’t wait for
his input this time. She was clearly on a roll. ‘Food! Everyone has to eat. So, imagine, if our primary
pneumonic plague was spliced with something that jumped species—to something we ate!’
‘Yes, let’s imagine.’ There wasn’t much left on his plate to push to one side, but he neatly
separated out a prawn and put that with the onion and brown mush. If he were an imaginative sort of
man, or just one with food issues he still fought on a daily basis, he might say it resembled a very
large, skinned flea. She polished off another glass of wine.
‘Do you know anything about biological warfare?’
‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Oh, well, you see most people suspect many rogue countries around the world have bio-weapons,
but probably wonder why they don’t use them more.’
‘Really?’
‘What would be your guess why not?’
‘Oh, just a random stab, I know nothing about this as I said, but I’d guess they tried it but it proved
too difficult to contain on a battlefield? Took out our—their own troops as well?’
‘Exactly. That’s what most analysts believe. But we’re into a new era now: bioterrorism, and
those restraints no longer apply.’
Aleksey leaned back in his chair considering this. ‘No care for collateral damage to the enemy or
to themselves.’
‘Yes, but not only that, it sort of links in with the whole point of terrorism in the first place.’
‘To force your enemy to bring in measures to contain you that restrict their citizens’ freedoms more
than your actions could ever do.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right. You do know a bit about this.’
‘I may have read a book about it once.’
‘Have you seen that film War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise? About a Martian invasion of Earth?’
‘Does it feature major unlikely head trauma and excessive explosions?’
‘Well, one or two. It’s pretty gory.’
‘Ah, well then, yes. I will probably have seen it.’
‘Wells wrote that book in 1897, but when they first broadcast a dramatised version of it on the
radio in the 1930s people believed it was real. That the Martians were actually invading—and they
fled their homes in panic. There was utter pandemonium. Mass hysteria. A wave of terror and panic
swept the entire continent. But nothing had actually happened. Just words spoken on a radio.’
She helped herself to some more wine, but once more he refused a top up. It wasn’t the hardest
thing he’d ever done, but it ranked up there along with them. But as he’d already discovered, although
there was no observable monitoring occurring, it actually would be. Promises made. Promises kept.
Although he couldn’t swear to it, he had a feeling his loquacious companion was being very closely
observed by her sibling too, although Maxwell couldn’t, apparently, hear what she was saying.
Perhaps she was just known in the family as the one who always talked about the plague.
‘What was I saying? Oh, yes, the food. This is lovely wine, by the way. I’m probably talking too
much. Am I talking too much? But see, you’d want our wee beastie to jump species into the food
chain, particularly the meat and dairy industry—cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffalo, pigs—and then
be endemic and permanent. The easiest functional gain therefore would be our primary pneumonic
plague spliced with something that already has that level of lethality to ungulates—that’s hoofed
animals. A picornavirus like foot and mouth disease, or perhaps something like bacillus anthracis—
anthrax.’
Aleksey sincerely wished he’d followed Ben’s imperatives now and not spoken to anyone. He and
Radulf could have sat in the corner and talked to each other. Fortunately, Rachel got distracted by the
man next to her once more who was offering her the choice from a platter of cheese, so he was able to
scrutinise the Ben-and-another-man situation once more. Ben was now listening intently to something
Maxwell was saying. Aleksey tried to stretch out his leg and connect, but all he managed to do was
kick Radulf who was curled up by his feet. He took some cheese when it was offered to him and
passed it down under the table in surreptitious apology. He wanted to know what the conversation
across the table was about. Ben was now showing the man something on his phone.
Aleksey hoped it was directions back to Exeter.
***
 Chapter Four
‘Have you heard of Gruinard Island?’
Aleksey reluctantly brought his thoughts back from Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen and onto Rachel’s
question and was tempted to tell her that he’d not but that he had heard of a very nice one called Light
Island, and that he wished he was currently there.
‘It’s in Scotland? Anthrax Island as it’s better known? It was used by the army in 1942 to engineer
enhanced anthrax, and those seeds are still deadly now eighty years later. No one can step foot there.’
‘Ah, yes, I have heard of this place, although I did not know its name.’
‘Soil was illegally collected there forty years later in the ’80s and dumped at a military lab by
terrorists, and it was still lethal!’
‘So, you would have this primary-pneumonic-anthrax plague in the food chain, but as you have
already said, easily contained by antibiotics?’ Please say yes.
‘Ah, well, no, that’s the second of the gains you’d give it—splice that new hybrid, our chimera,
with a CRE—that’s a strain of bacteria totally resistant to antibiotics—and we have a depressingly
increasing catalogue of those available. Human-to-human transmission, one hundred percent lethal, no
cure, all the food chain permanently infected.’
‘Uh huh. Plague and famine?’
‘Well, yes, although it’s referred to as pandemic and food shortages now.’
‘Ah, someone else corrected me about that only recently. I believe it’s also called food insecurity.
You said second gain? There is another?’
‘Absolutely. The actual power of a virus doesn’t lie in its virulence—how quickly it can kill its
host—but in the longevity of its asymptomatic incubation period—how long the host unwittingly
carries it around infecting others before they succumb themselves. Have you ever heard of that puzzle
about a chessboard and a grain of rice? If you put one grain on the first square and doubled it for the
next square to two grains, and kept doing that for all sixty-four squares, how much rice would you
have, do you think? A kilogramme? Maybe a bit more?’
‘I usually consult my resident genius on such issues, but, please, do enlighten me. I suspect more
than a kilogramme though.’
‘Yes, just a bit. You’d have enough rice to cover the whole of the UK a mile deep.’
Aleksey nodded thoughtfully.
‘Exactly. That’s called the seduction of the exponential curve.’ She had trouble saying this, and
slurred a little. Another visit to the wine glass helped things along. ‘Picture our patient zero, our first
person infected with the chimera. We don’t want him to die right away, do we? Oh, no. We want him
infectious but utterly unaware of this—so he’s travelling around the place as much as possible. All of
the countries that got the plague in the 1300s got it through ships bringing the rats and fleas with them.
Even Iceland, of all places. They tried to keep the sailors offshore and didn’t let the boats dock, but
the rats swam to land for the better food sources, and thus the plague came with them. But today, our
patient zero could get infected then travel to Heathrow, take a plane to, say, Australia, transit through
Singapore, land in Sydney, and behind him on the plane and at Changi airport he leaves hundreds,
even thousands, of infected travellers and aircrew going to other countries. Exponential growth. It’s
perfect. If you could splice that delay factor into the chimera it could spread to almost the entire
world before people started getting sick. Then entire health systems would collapse simultaneously.
‘The best weapon of terror—it’s not the actual virus or bacteria necessarily, but the fear and
instability you can create in the population. And as you said: the restrictive measures necessary to
contain it are sometimes worse than the disease itself. You’d have to lock people in their homes,
restrict their food, possibly put them in mandatory quarantine facilities. And who would enforce it
all? The army would be decimated in the first wave. Think about America. They’ve got four hundred
million guns. Who’s going to come and take any of them to a facility?’
‘Six hundred naked men in a line whipping themselves with scourges tipped with nails to cleanse
the land of plague.’
‘Oh, my God, you’ve heard that story too! Isn’t it fantastic? Well, horrible, too, obviously. They
marched right across Europe, swelling their ranks with survivors of the Black Death—traumatised,
disfigured, raving. They marched two-by-two in a column through towns, singing hymns as they
flagellated themselves. Pretty ghastly.’
She twirled her glass for a moment, staring into the liquid as it swirled around, perhaps picturing
an apocalyptic landscape broken only by a chain of bloodied men marching. ‘Do you know, an
American scientist once predicted that it would only take twenty years before gain of function genetic
engineering would effectively make all our current antibiotics or other treatments completely
ineffective against biological warfare attacks.’
‘When did he predict this?’
‘Twenty years ago.’
‘Ah.’
‘So, anyway, my brother is glaring at me that I’m talking too much. I can feel the waves of
disapproval. Tell me about the stuff Tim does now for you with your charity. I’m fascinated to know.’
Aleksey supposed he would be, too, if he actually knew. ‘But this is all theoretical, yes? This
super-plague. This chimera? This is just stuff you believe to be possible but would obviously never
do.’
‘Tim didn’t tell you how we’d met then. I assumed he had.’
‘No, you said you were all in his little three musketeers’ outfit.’
‘No, I said we met because of them. He and his cell raided the lab I worked at. Fortunately, they
only penetrated the Level 1 facility; although I’m not sure they entirely got that. I think they might have
released a mouse with a sniffle, but that was it.’
‘You…are you telling me you’ve actually made this super-plague thing? I’m sorry, again, I struggle
to translate sometimes. Please, don’t tell me you actually went ahead and made this thing?’
She thought about this for a moment and replied a little testily, ‘No, we were making a vaccine for
it.’
‘Oh, good.’ He pondered this for a moment, staring at Ben’s beautiful tousled hair, then asked,
‘Why would you need a vaccine for something that doesn’t exist?’
Testy turned to snippy. ‘Well, yes, obviously, you have to make the new pathogen first. Then you
attempt to make a vaccine.’ Snippy turned to outright tetchy. ‘We believed we needed to have
vaccines ready in case someone else made it. Hello, remember? Bioterrorism? To make a vaccine
you have to make the functionally improved virus or bacterium first. Your lot, the Russians,
weaponised Marburg, so no one at this table has got any cause to be smug and censorious, have they?
They made a vaccine-resistant strain of anthrax, too. The Americans tried to get a sample, but they
couldn’t, so they had to make it then. I have these kinds of conversations a lot, by the way; nothing
you’re saying surprises me. It’s very hard to explain the necessity for this research to laymen. Forty
members of al-Qaida were found dumped on the roadside in Iraq in 2009, dead of bubonic plague—
huh, I wonder how they just tripped over that.’ She hiccupped. ‘Excuse me. What do you think would
happen if someone else made this gain of function chimera before we have a chance to make the
vaccine?’ She drew a line across her throat in a rather un-microbiologist way, Aleksey thought, and
murmured, ‘Seventy percent of the global population killed in the first wave through human-to-human
transmission, then the remaining thirty percent facing a food chain permanently infected and lethal.
Then that tiny, traumatised thirty percent would starve.’
‘Wait, did you say have a chance. You have not actually made a vaccine?’
She took a deep breath and then acknowledged, ‘Yes, well. We couldn’t. We tried for years. In the
end, we destroyed our chimera and left that lab. We’d met Tim then, you see. The ethics of what we
were doing seemed all wrong. We left and set up our own laboratory. Max and Austin run it. I’m just
a majority shareholder. They’re working on a drug for tinnitus at the moment—that’s a dreadful
condition that doesn’t get enough attention. But my investment in the company funds my projects a bit,
although I still take the occasional contract work—like the syphilis study. Ironically, the lab we
worked for in Middlesex closed not long after we left. But my whole experience there, and meeting
Tim, is why I’m now doing what I’m doing.’
Aleksey was tempted to murmur what, scaring the fuck out of me?
‘Have you heard of the Order of the Light?’
‘No. Something to do with Florence Nightingale?’
She smiled. ‘No, she was the lady of the lamp, but I suppose there is a connection. Remember the
six hundred flagellants? They tried to rid the land of death with what was nothing more than medieval
barbarism and superstition. Well, there was another group travelling through Europe at the same time
called The Order of the Light. They were thought to be a splinter group of a larger religious order, the
Carthusians.’
‘Why do I have a feeling this is going to bring us back to Richard III?’
‘Monasteries, yes. Exactly. When they find monastery burial sites across Europe that date from
1345 to 1348—the second Black Death pandemic—all the skeletal remains show signs of death by
plague—except for some. In every mass grave, they find one or two bodies that didn’t die in the
pandemic, in fact appear to have no indication whatsoever of disease. They were entirely healthy.’
‘But…dead. So what did they die of?’
‘It appears in all cases they were tortured to death, hideously mutilated—some showed signs of
trepanation—holes drilled into their skulls while they were alive—or they were broken on the wheel.
And in every single case where these bodies have been found, if there are contemporary records
available, the medieval scribes talk of the light—that men of light robed in white came to the village
and lived and worked with the dying. That these men did not get sick at all, despite pulling the dead
from houses, eating the infected animals as the villagers were doing, burning corpses, trying to tend
and heal.’
‘Men of light robed in white? Please don’t tell me you think they were angels.’
She actually blushed. It was surprisingly attractive. She swirled her wine thoughtfully. ‘No, of
course not. Gold-star atheist here. But I do have a religion of sorts, I suppose: science. And if you
separate out all the myth and fear, you have a curious correlation between accounts of this plague-
immune group and the discovery of the mutilated remains in the pits alongside the plague victims. And
orders such as the Carthusians wore white.’ She chuckled. ‘I do call this my Holy Grail, so maybe I’m
falling under a bit of a spell too.’
‘Holy Grail? You mentioned that before.’
‘I’m searching for the place the few surviving members of the order ended up. We didn’t have the
technology in the past to make use of the remains when they were found. Now we do. I do. I want to
find the Order of the Light, and I want to find out what made them immune to bubonic plague and, it
seems, all other pathogens around at the time.’
‘All other pathogens?’
‘Yes, you see the really odd thing about these corpses is that they have tested to be well over a
hundred years old...possibly a lot more. No disease. It may be that they were just more scrupulous in
their hygiene for some reason. I often think of baptism and its association with, well, bathing. Who
knows if ancient people saw that those who’d been baptised as part of a religious ceremony were
healthier and that helped spread the myth that the spiritual aspect of the baptism was what gave you
that health? Causation versus correlation.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘Are you a religious man?’
I see dead people and lights from empty lighthouses, so what the fuck do I know? ‘No, but I have
annoying friends.’
She quirked her lip. ‘Join the club. My name, Rachel—my people come from the Holy Land, and
there’s a subset of Jewish people alive today who have a recessive gene that makes them resistant to
plague. My grandmother used to explain this by saying that anyone who touched Yeshua after his
resurrection was imbibed by power. The Bible does say his followers were changed.’
‘But she would not believe in the resurrection, presumably—being Jewish.’
‘Ah, there you’d be wrong.’ She actually admonished him by tapping him on the arm. She was
flirting with him. He suddenly wondered if no one had told her. But on the other hand, it had been a
strange conversation for a pick-up line. He’d never been chatted up over syphilis, plague, and flea
vomit before. ‘Some do—it was God’s trial run for our Messiah yet to come, according to her.’
He found himself tapping his own fork on the table and stopped. ‘Do you know that Jesus is
believed to have come to Cornwall?’
She gave him a look that confirmed his recent suspicions. She clearly didn’t realise his boyfriend
was sitting across the table from him. ‘Yes, I do. I believe that’s why my men of the light—those that
were left, came here. At the end. He was there at the beginning for them, and they wanted to be near
him again at the end…’
Aleksey shook himself. ‘You are talking about 1348, yes? One thousand three hundred years after
the crucifixion?’
‘Yes, I know. It’s hard to take in. Look, I’ve lost all credibility in my profession now. I’m seen as a
loose cannon, a conspiracy theorist, but maybe, just maybe, these are all just different versions of the
same entirely rational truth: that there’s a strain of immunity passed down through a tiny group of
consequently very long-lived people who were spiritual and lived pure lives: possibly just washing
more. Having less sex? Who knows? There are accounts in the Jewish Bible of a man dying who was
nearly a thousand years old. Perhaps these long-lived people joined religious organisations such as
the Carthusians, and whenever plagues broke out, they were there, helping with advice on
quarantining people, keeping things clean…’
‘And they were tortured and persecuted for this knowledge and for their…purity. Their ability to
survive, which would have appeared…supernatural.’
‘Yes.’
‘And some of these bodies have actually been found? These very ancient men? This is fact?’
‘Yes, but nothing was done with them other than verifying their age, and when that was ridiculed
by the scientific community, the whole lot was lost. But I’m going to find their final resting place.
There may have been up to a hundred of them remaining after the persecutions. They left from France.
The Papal Court was in Avignon in France during the years of the Black Death, not where we know it
now. They went to it and had a conference with the Pope, that’s recorded history, and then they set
sail to Cornwall, which was still almost an independent nation at that time. The Black Prince had only
just been named Duke of Cornwall ten years before all this. He was the oldest son of the king, and the
tradition still exists to this day, of course.’
‘Yes, I was aware of that. And your Holy Grail is to find this site?’
‘They would have gone to a monastery or priory. So I’m looking for ones that were recorded as
being founded before 1300 or so, so knowledge of them would have filtered back to the papal court.
It doesn’t help they kept changing names. St Carrok’s in St Winnow, for example. It’s known as St
Carroc’s, St Syriac’s, and St Julitta’s and St Caddix’s.’
‘Why does the name matter if the site was always a religious order?’
‘Well, because I believe I have a name. When they left Avignon, they were said to be going to the
Priory of St Nicholas.’
Aleksey felt a cool, ghostly finger touch the nape of his neck at the name, and turned to face her.
‘Sometimes I struggle not to believe.’
She nodded gravely. ‘Yes. It’s something I contend with every day, too. I need to make
recompense. I made the chimera. I thought we did it to make a vaccine. We tried, but we couldn’t. As
I said, the trial results were awful. It just didn’t work. Max feels the same sense of guilt, although he
doesn’t…’ She swirled her glass again thoughtfully, then put it back on the table untasted.
‘This company of yours is here? In the UK?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s the only one that’s registered to do Level 4 work. We don’t know where all the Fours
in the world are—obviously not, given the number likely in places like Russia or Iran or North Korea
—but there’s over twenty in Europe. Some are huge, the big companies producing flu vaccines and
the like, but some like Max’s are tiny. You only need the space of a double garage. Maybe not even
that.’
‘And…dissemination. How would this chimera be unleashed into the population? A bomb, like
you said the Japanese did?’
‘God no. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo filled plastic bags with sarin liquid and then they
sharpened umbrella tips to puncture the bags as they left them on underground trains. It’s almost funny
really—all the technology available and it comes down to a plakky bag and a pointy umbrella. They’d
tried aerosol spray a number of times before that, but it’s much harder than you think to do: wind
direction, temperature. They rigged up a whole van to spray around the place, driving along the
streets. It really wasn’t very effective. They tried like gardeners with those backpacks of weed killer,
walking around. If you could actually get it right you wouldn’t need anything bigger than the size of
your average deodorant spray. As I said, you only technically need one patient zero, but imagine if
you sprayed the one person who didn’t go anywhere or have any friends or anything. No, one can of
spray, and you’d be able to infect dozens, possibly hundreds of patient zeros.’
 ‘So these labs are well out in the country? In case of…accidents?’ Please don’t say Dartmoor.
‘No, not really. Most of the ones I’ve been to have been in cities. Ours is here. He and Austin have
really struggled to get it on its feet. I don’t think either of them are business men really. It’s not easy to
run a private laboratory. There’s no money for research unless you get grants, and then you’re
beholden to the people who paid you for the research. I just got sick of the in-fighting and left the day-
to-day running of it all to them. I took a different path. What’s the name of that wonderful poem? Two
roads diverged in a wood, I took a path less travelled, and that has made all the difference…? I think
I’ve lost my faith—in science. And now I have my Holy Grail—I believe I might be able to find a
strain of immunity to every known pathogen. Even the ones we create ourselves. Perhaps even to the
ultimate one—death. They’re not drilling holes in my head just yet, but Max and Austin are the only
scientists left in our community who’ll even speak to me. But this different path of mine has to make
that difference the poet spoke of. Or…’
Aleksey thought she looked as if she wanted to draw the finger across her neck once more.

***

Aleksey drew some smoke so deep into his lungs he felt it really ought to kill him on the spot before
the cancer got him. But he needed the hit.
Despite what he’d let on to the undeniably interesting Rachel, he actually knew quite a lot about
bio-warfare, or, he supposed, bioterrorism. Like a lot of things in life, the definition depended on
which side of invisible lines you stood. He’d called it war at the time, legitimate and necessary. Now
he saw these things a little differently.
It was ironic really: horses of the apocalypse and dogs of war. His two favourite creatures in all
other respects.
He’d asked Rachel a final question, one that seemed important to him. How easy would it be for
their chimera to be replicated in another lab, now it had already existed in the world once? Her reply
had not been all that reassuring. Apparently nothing ever really dies in the world of pathogens.
He had thought back to her story of the chessboard and the rice. Occasionally, he feigned a lack of
knowledge on things he actually knew very well. As with his skill at listening, it was a trick that had
served him nicely in the past. She had neglected to mention, or perhaps had not known, the actual
origin of that story. A man had once tried to trick a king who had offered him a reward by asking for
rice measured out just as Rachel had described. The king thought he had a bargain—a pound of rice to
pay up maybe. When he discovered the truth, he’d had the man killed.
This somehow seemed a very applicable moral to understand for those who might want to put into
practice the power of the seductive exponential curve. The word power could be redefined. He
smirked and wondered what Wulf Schultz would have thought about that.
He felt arms slide around him and laid his spare hand over them, rubbing Ben’s warm skin.
‘People are starting to leave.’
‘I’m deeply saddened.’
‘You didn’t eat very much.’
‘Hah, so you did remember I was actually there.’
‘Poor baby, did you think I was ignoring you? You seemed utterly entranced by Rachel.’
‘I could say the same about you and Maxwell.’
 Ben pulled Aleksey’s shirt loose from his belt and slid his hands up onto his belly, stroking it
thoughtlessly. ‘I’m not sure I entirely understood what he was talking about most of the time.’
‘Join the club.’
‘But oddly we found some stuff in common after a while. When he was a student doing his
doctorate, he worked at Porton Down—that’s the army’s nuclear, biological and chemical research
unit. Or it used to be.’
‘That does not surprise me.’
‘I went there quite a few times. Did my NBC instructor training there. I was telling Max about this
one time. They’ve got this cool running track around the whole perimeter of the out-of-bounds area,
and I was told it was okay to use, but to watch out for the two-headed rabbits. Funny, yeah? I actually
believed them for a minute, but Max reckoned it might well have been true. They did experiments on
humans there, too. One guy died of bubonic plague in the 1960s according to him. As if. He was just
winding me up—like my mates did about the rabbits.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. What else did you talk about—with Maxwell?’
Ben plucked his cigarette from him and tossed it out onto the darkened slopes of the tor. ‘This is
self-inflicted chemical poisoning. Come be nice for a bit more.’
Aleksey nodded absentmindedly, his thoughts racing.
He could smell the Dartmoor night air, pure and almost intoxicating. The stars were a river of
silver grains washing across the midnight-blue sky. A sheep bleated briefly until her errant lamb gave
reply. It was so peaceful. So utterly unspoilt. And yet he felt contaminated, itchy in his own skin. He
could not stop an image invading his mind—however much he wanted to think about Ben’s hands
stroking his belly, the feel and smell of him so close, so utterly perfect. All he could see was that third
black horse of the apocalypse which Schultz had been so ardent for. It had become clearer in his mind
now. It was still riven with pain, desperate, maddened, but now it was infected too; its breath brought
death, and it left starvation and misery in its wake. Food insecurity. He almost laughed. Insecurity.
They had no idea. There’d be no sheep on Dartmoor running wild with their lambs, no ponies with
their leggy June foals. No dogs left alive for long either. And he knew what came next. He'd lived it
once—the strong turned upon the weak of their own kind.
Famine.
He sighed and went in with Ben to be nice.
He couldn’t think of anything better to do.
His mood cheered up considerably when Austin’s electric car batteries were flat. He’d expected a
charging station? On Dartmoor? Apparently, it would take eight hours to top up from the cottage, so
Tim volunteered Squeezy to drop it back to Exeter for him another day.
This was all very amusing, and Aleksey tried to look helpful and concerned, but he didn’t find it so
funny when husband and wife just got in with Max, who said he’d drop them off.
His head buzzing with plague, chimera and bio-weapons; he really didn’t need to see voluntary
human extinction along for the ride too.
***
 Chapter Five
By the time everyone had gone it was extremely late, but all four of them appeared more wired than
exhausted, so Tim suggested they polish off Ben’s bottle of wine out on the patio to wind down. He lit
the fire pit and for a few minutes no one said anything, all lost to their own thoughts.
It was extremely pleasant. The Milky Way was so bright that the soft coloured lights Tim had
turned on were not really necessary. It was utterly silent other than the crackling of flames.
Tim was more relaxed than Aleksey had seen him for a long time. He clearly liked mixing back
with people who actually spoke words that made sense.
Squeezy, now out of his suit jacket, tie off, sleeves rolled up, was competing with Ben to guzzle all
the leftovers, at the same time as tossing unsuitable scraps to the dogs. Watching Radulf catch a
stuffed pepper and swallow it whole, Aleksey commented dryly, ‘They’re sleeping down here
tonight.’
Tim’s expression told him that they’d be lucky to be sleeping inside the house at all. ‘I think it went
really well, don’t you? Everyone loved the renovations, of course.’
Squeezy snorted at his boyfriend’s wistful comment. ‘Totally jealous you mean, little man. Despite
all their organic hemp and oh I only drink my own recycled piss, they were just fucking jealous. ‘
‘I think Max was a bit, yes. He’s just bought a lovely old house on the river and wants to do it up,
but he’s mortgaged to the hilt, and with the business struggling as well…and I do wish you’d stop
calling me little man. I keep telling you: in the normal world I’m actually quite tall.’
‘Hah. How d’ya know I was referring to your height?’
‘Because in that case, compared to you, I’m huge.’
Aleksey snorted quietly.
‘Oh, I haven’t opened this yet.’ Tim picked up Aleksey’s present, which he’d left earlier on the
table.
Aleksey had almost forgotten it too. It seemed a long time ago he’d handed it over. He shook
himself lightly. He was sitting next to Ben Rider-Mikkelsen. He’d been freely given a whole glass of
wine, and he had another cigarette. You had to enjoy small pleasures when you got them. Life was
short.
He hadn’t meant to allow that last unfortunate thought, and pulled his concentration back to Tim,
replying, ‘Yes. You gave Molly such a thoughtful present for her sleepover room that I thought I would
reciprocate for our room—when Ben and I come here.’ He could feel Ben’s gaze on him. He was
being excessively polite, and clearly Ben was suspicious. ‘It’s for both of you, of course.’ He gave
the cretin a winning smile, knowing Squeezy would hate the now you are a couple inference in this.
The moron’s main aim in life appeared to be to deny the existence of any such other half, or if he did
admit to one, make its life a misery.
Tim was picking at the wrapping paper by himself, a shared opening having been lip-curlingly
rejected. ‘Oh, yes, it was such a lovely photo of you both. I was convinced it was ruined by the sun
when I took it, but when I was uploading them I saw… Oh, what’s this?’ He pinched out a sheet of
paper, which Aleksey had folded into an empty cigarette packet, then held it closer to the light from
the fire pit. He read it. Disbelievingly, he lifted his gaze to him, this expression of complete
incredulity wavering in the heat. Aleksey shrugged.
 Silently, Tim handed the document to Squeezy who also held it closer to the light. He looked up
sharply when he was done.
‘What?’ Ben plucked it from Squeezy, studying it. ‘A land registry deed for the cottage…in the
names of Dr Tim Watson and Mr Michael Heathcote. Huh.’
‘Yes. I have given you the whole room…and the house surrounding it. I have built my sandcastle
and now I am bored of it. Do not make anything more out—’
‘—you’re giving us this house. With the…’ Tim gazed in complete adoration at the teak patio set,
the extension, the glass and oak kitchen, even the garage. ‘Ben…?’
Out of the corner of his eye, as he pretended to watch the flames, smoking, and dismissing this gift
as nothing more than a careless gesture born of ennui with the whole thing, Aleksey could see Ben
studying him intently.
Ben nodded he was listening to Tim, never taking his gaze off his subject.
Tim just concluded wanly, ‘Kiss him for me. Please.’
Ben grinned and cupped Aleksey’s face. ‘I’m going to do a lot more than that to him tonight.’
‘Oh. I’ve just put brand new thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets on your bed. Please
don’t…’ Tim’s genuine dismay for his four hundred-pound sheets over his million-pound-plus house
broke the tension. He just laughed at his own foolishness. ‘Sorry. Feel free to…well…do anything
you like on them.’ He took the deed back from Ben. ‘Is this actually real? I mean, is it even legal to do
this?’
Aleksey inclined his head seriously. ‘That is the one stipulation I must insist upon. I have to stay
alive for at least another seven years, or you will have to pay all the tax.’ He turned to Squeezy and
added slyly, ‘I thought it a nice motivation for you to work a bit harder to ensure that.’
Squeezy gave him an equally devious look back. ‘Paying the tax might be better for my health.’
Aleksey smirked in acknowledgment of this.
Tim leaned back in his seat. ‘This will entirely change my life. Our lives. Sorry, Michael.’
Aleksey pursed his lips. ‘Yes. It could. Everyone needs to feel secure to plan a future.’ He thought
about this and amended it to, ‘To secure the future you have to own things.’ He thought some more and
added, ‘To protect the future you have to have a stake in it that you value.’
He felt someone watching him and looked across the fire pit to the moron. Squeezy was watching
the flames, but Aleksey was fairly sure the man had been observing him just before.
Uncharacteristically, he had made no comment, inane, profane or otherwise, on this exceptional gift.

***

‘What…are you wearing?’

Ben folded his arms, shifty and defensive, which wasn’t something he often did. He’d just come
out of the ensuite of the guest room. ‘What does it look like? Pyjamas.’
‘Why does everyone think to state the patently obvious to me all the time?’
‘Because you ask dumb questions?’
‘Then why are you wearing pyjamas, Benjamin. Is that a better question?’
‘Because we’re in Tim’s house. It seemed…polite. Here. These are yours.’
Aleksey glanced down at the folded offering. Privately, he thought Ben was incredibly sexy in his
tartan bottoms and buttoned jacket. He was so used to Ben coming to bed naked that seeing him this
way immediately led him to picture the slow reveal now possible.
Once more, Ben appeared more like a model who had just stepped out of the pages of a men’s
fashion magazine featuring the latest range of gentlemen’s bedtime attire, than he did a man just going
to sleep.
Aleksey stretched across the bed and pulled him closer.
‘If we need to get up in the night, go downstairs, see the dogs, whatever. You can’t wander around
someone else’s house naked, or just in your boxers. It’s…rude.’
Aleksey lay back with a sigh.
‘And we’re going to start wearing them on Mol Mol’s sleepover nights, too. Just in case she comes
to find us in the middle of the night.’
‘Hopefully she would fall in the pool before she reached us.’
Ben straddled him. That was better.
Aleksey fingered the soft yellow chequered cotton. ‘This is now between me and my favourite
organic, ethically sourced covering.’
‘Huh?’
‘Your skin. It’s organic, it covers you, and if I ever flay you it would be entirely ethical because—
ah! Don’t twist them. Please.’
‘This is what you get for still being naked.’
‘I thought I was going to get something nice. That’s what you implied earlier…’
Ben just shook his head then tipped off to lie beside him, head propped on his hand. ‘Do not reach
for those cigarettes. You can’t smoke in Tim’s house either.’
‘Yes, speaking of that…Tim’s house…you said you were going to reward—’
‘Without telling me? You just decided to give my friends this house and you didn’t tell me first? Or
ask me what I thought?’
‘I could see in your expression tonight, Ben, what you thought, so don’t try to pretend anything
else, and I didn’t tell you because…’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘As I keep trying to explain to you, you
are just a baby and would—ow! Stop…because you might have guzzled the deeds? Ah—that hurts…
Because you would worry about the moron, that is why. You would worry and fret about him and say I
was making a decision for both of them, and that their relationship was none of my business and now
they were forced togeth—’
‘Sounds to me like you’ve been worrying about them more than me.’ Ben turned onto his back, his
head on folded arms.
Aleksey sighed and turned on his side, propping himself up. ‘Do you remember you asked me a
while ago if I thought Tim loved him?’
‘Yeah, you did that deflection thing I seem to recall, and didn’t answer.’
‘Well, as always, Ben, you are the clever one. I deflected because I didn’t know—it wasn’t
something I ever gave much thought to. Love. In general. But then I did, and it occurred to me that the
only love that means anything is that which is freely given. I will never forget that you sliced the rope
—that you refused to save yourself.’
‘You’ll never forget that because I fell on your leg.’
‘Well, yes, there is that. But that one moment turned my whole life around. Everything I have now,
and intend to have for a very long time, is because you chose freely to love me when, perhaps, that
love was least deserved. I thought I’d try the same experiment with your obnoxious friend.’
 ‘He has seemed a bit…down recently. Have you noticed that?’
‘I’m not sure what the signs would be.’
‘He’s been quiet. For him, anyway. I think he’s taking this homeless thing a bit too much to heart—
as if it touches him personally. Did I tell you he had a fight with someone the other day?’
‘No. Who? What about?’
‘Some old guy. I mean, it wasn’t much of a contest. But it was odd. Squeezy really lost it with him.
Pushed him out of the line.’
‘Did you ask him why?’
‘Course. He said the guy wasn’t a veteran. That he was cheating. Stolen valour.’
‘Does it really matter? If someone needs the food… Ben, you know I would help with this.
ANGEL would help with this if—’
‘I know. But it’s really complex, Nik. I thought just go in all guns blazing and dump money on the
problem—buy houses, feed everyone. But it’s not like that. Maybe eventually. But it feels good to
actually just do something practical. I met a guy I knew briefly in the Regiment.’
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘Yeah. It’s like Squeezy says—imagine how close we were to that. I mean, if I hadn’t met you…’
‘I think you had other outlets, Ben, besides just meeting me. You might have been an officer by now
—if you’d stayed in.’
Ben knew how impossible this was so just laughed. ‘Sir, yes, sir?’
‘Ack, you could have if you’d—’
‘Had the best education at the finest academies?’ He smiled sadly. ‘Yeah maybe.’
‘I was going to say had some table manners and didn’t eat like a—’ One day, he reflected, his ribs
would actually crack from the wearing away of Ben Rider’s poking, like a vast mountain of rock
being worn down, raindrop by raindrop. After the anticipated assault, it grew quiet for a while.
He lay on his back, picturing himself smoking, which wasn’t as good as the real thing but
apparently had to do. He listened to the gears grind, and eventually asked, ‘What?’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Can you think and fuck me at the same time?’
Ben straddled him once more, staring down at him. ‘I’ll try, and we’ll see.’
Aleksey began to laugh, which they knew from previous such moments could lead to unfortunate
outcomes. ‘Take the pyjamas off first, please? I have always thought of you as…wild, ferocious,
feral, when you prepare to ride me. Now I am just being sat upon by Rupert Bear.’
Ben began to unbutton the jacket, slowly, never losing eye contact with him. That was much better.
He knew Ben could not help but feel what was rising behind him, urging him on. When the jacket was
fully open, Aleksey laid his palms onto the smooth chest, grazing Ben’s nipples with his thumbs. Ben
leaned down and kissed him swiftly on his lips, then into his neck, then he bit lightly and Aleksey
groaned. He slid his hands down to the waistband and eased it lower, down to Ben’s thighs. Ben
continued placing kisses into his collarbone hollows, around his ears. They were both heavy with lust
now, engorged, engrossed in this sharing. Aleksey took his cock in his hands and began to slide it
slowly over Ben, slicking him.
In a very soft murmur, Ben broke their unspoken rules and asked him, ‘When’s the last time I told
you I loved you?’
Even more uncharacteristically, Aleksey replied softly into Ben’s tousled hair, ‘When I told you
I’d buy you a plane?’ Ben was laughing when he kissed him. Aleksey began to finger him and Ben
arched in pleasure. ‘Or was it when I told you I’d bought you an island?’
Ben, fully impaled on his strong fingers returned to kissing, but at each movement of Aleksey’s
hand he whispered, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you…’
Finally, unable to delay longer, Aleksey rolled them, lifted Ben’s thigh and slid into him. It never
got old; it was never less pleasurable than it was this time. He closed his eyes to the feel of being
inside, of being welcomed.
Of being home.
***
 Chapter Six
Squeezy drove the four of them back to their house the next morning.
Aleksey sat alongside him pretending not to be gleeful. If their entire relationship were a dick-
measuring contest, then he reckoned he’d just thumped his undeniably more impressive one onto the
table.
Ack, he was a bad man. For the moron’s ears alone, quietly murmured under the sound of the
engine and the radio, he offered, ‘So, planned home invasion off now?’
Squeezy smiled ruefully, possibly admitting he’d been caught unawares for once, out-manoeuvred.
Aleksey chose to take such uncharacteristic silence in that light, anyway.
He dropped them with the dogs at the top of their lane, saying he had to get to a meeting. Aleksey
was about to score another fairly obviously point about this when Ben punched the moron’s arm
lightly. ‘Make my apologies. I’ll come next time,’ and then explained to him, as they started to walk
home, ‘The charity thing. We’re looking into doing outreach from our Exeter setup to the local towns
—even Totnes.’
‘There are many homeless veterans in Totnes?’
‘I kinda think they’re everywhere.’
They strolled together along the rhododendron-lined driveway, not something they did very often,
usually just driving in, glad to be home. The shrubs were past their spring best and the purples and
pinks were browned, many blossoms now lying on the ground. Aleksey turned and began to walk
backwards, considering the old gate, which was still left as they’d found it: two ancient stone pillars
marking the bounds of the ancient manor.
‘What?’
Aleksey turned again and continued walking. He flung his arm over Ben’s shoulder. ‘I was thinking
how easy it would be for a horse to just…walk right in.’
‘Huh?’
He rubbed Ben’s hair and distracted him by asking about his flying lesson that day.
When Ben had ridden away, bent low over his bike, Aleksey wandered over to the cottages in the
woods. As usual, Enid’s door was open, so he knocked for politeness sake and went in. She was in
her usual chair in her garden room, watching the activity outside. She was smiling broadly and when
she saw him, gestured to the scene of three industrious children. ‘They’re making a squirrel run.
Miles designed it. Em is helping him build it, and they’re going to let Molly paint it.’
Aleksey went to put the kettle on, something he realised with a smile that Ben still didn’t get that
he knew how to do. Ack, why keep a dog and bark yourself? He decided swiftly not to put it in those
terms to Ben, however.
He took in a cup for Enid and sat with her to observe the diligent doings outside.
‘Miles was telling me about the red squirrels you have on your island. That’s so exciting. I’ve
never seen one.’
‘Well when you come to visit us there, you will.’
‘Oh, yes, that would be lovely.’
She had trouble lifting her cup without spilling her tea, so this courteous offer wasn’t looking
hopeful. He had never had a lot to do with old people before. Everyone he knew died young,
something he didn’t want to ponder too much, as he’d had a lot to do with most of those deaths. He
remembered his Danish grandparents and their large, austere house in Copenhagen quite well. He and
his brother had stayed with them frequently, sometimes for months at a time. He couldn’t recall why
now, but assumed their mother must have been touring. Nikolas, of course, had remained living with
them during holidays from the academy, but he had not really had much contact with them after he’d
gone to live in Russia. Enid, therefore, was his only real experience with ageing. Her grace and
dignity in the face of such a profound loss of both these things moved him.
‘She really is a beautiful young woman, isn’t she?’
Aleksey turned his gaze back to window. He had seen three children and Sarah when he’d arrived,
but suddenly, at this comment, he recognised Emilia for the young woman she had become. She was
eighteen. He had not thought of himself as a boy when he was that age. She was tall, just as he had
been. She was very thin, too, but for different reasons—she glowed with vitality and health. Her red
hair, which had been the colour of fire when he’d first met her, had darkened now to a deep auburn, a
fiery depth of burnished colour that enhanced her porcelain-pale skin. She had it in a thick braid
which reached almost to her waist.
They had apparently finished building their rodent challenge and Emilia held Molly up so she
could place some tempting treats on the final platform.
When he left, she elected to walk back with him. She pretended to tuck her arm into his then
laughed in delight at his mock disdain.
‘What are your plans for the summer, now you are finally done with school?’
She stopped to pick a couple of buttercups which were growing wild alongside the woodland
path, attempting to test under his chin for butter liking. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Do you have everything you need for your first term?’
Despite all his efforts to get her into Moscow State University, a certain president had recently
thwarted his plans. But she had also been offered a much-coveted place at Cambridge, and was now
due to start there in the autumn if her A-level grades were as expected.
‘You didn’t really go to university, did you? Your degree in international affairs?’
He thought about this for a while, tempted to reply that he’d had affairs with foreigners, so did that
count? But then replied honestly, ‘No. That was my brother.’
She inclined her head thoughtfully, and was also silent for a few moments before asking, ‘Do you
think you’d have been better if you’d gone?’
‘Better? That’s a bit harsh.’
She laughed and punched his arm lightly. ‘Different then.’
‘Possibly. I don’t know. There are many things I would like to have learnt, and many things I do
know that I sometimes wish I didn’t.’
‘Helpful. Thanks. Maybe I’ll ask Timbo.’
‘Are you…having second thoughts?’
She nodded again, destroying the poor flowers in her angst, yellow petals raining down from her
fingers. ‘I just don’t know. It all seems so…’
‘Pointless?’
‘Unnecessary, yes. I mean, you don’t have a degree, Ben doesn’t, Michael doesn’t, and look at you
all!’
‘Well, we are perhaps not the best three for you to base that assessment on. If my grandfather had
not…well, studied engineering, amongst other things, none of us would be here.’
‘No, that’s true.’
‘You do not have to decide this, Emilia. It is not something you need to fret over. The world is
entirely yours. Go, don’t go. Put it off and decide later.’
‘Defer, you mean?’
‘Yes, is that not what everyone does? A gap year.’
‘I suppose. I’d want to do something…worthwhile.’ She smirked and took his arm, ignoring his
expression. ‘I’ve been thinking about Miles. He’ll be on his own at school now.’
‘As opposed to having a sort-of sister there who did not deign to notice him?’
‘I wasn’t quite that bad. It was fully understood: the pecking order. It’s necessary to maintain good
discipline. Imagine if the juniors treated us with contempt.’
Aleksey thought this was a pretty good description of his life with Ben, but obviously didn’t point
this out to her.
‘So…?’
‘So I was wondering, now he’s going up to the seniors anyway and some of his friends are leaving
to go to other schools, would he be happier closer to home? Even…live at home and go daily? To
Molly’s school.’
‘You have thought about this a lot.’
‘Not until I saw Enid, no. She’s…I thought it might be nice for Miles to see more of her.’ She
faltered but continued, clearly trying to steady her voice, ‘I saw them off for a skiing trip and didn’t
go because I wanted to stay with my friends. If I’d known…’
‘Have you mentioned this to Miles?’
‘No, I wanted to see what you thought first.’
‘How old are you again?’
She squeezed his arm. ‘I sometimes think I’m the oldest person alive.’
It was a strange comment, but he only gave her a shove so she fell in the flowers, and that made her
laugh and retaliate, and so the seriousness of the conversation was over.
But her thoughts about Miles reflected his own.
Her worries about Enid matched his, too.
***
 Chapter Seven
Ben returned from his lesson buzzing with information about radio procedure, take-offs and landings,
and other things which Aleksey assumed were fairly important for pilots to get right. He liked his
instructor, who was the ex-CO of 487 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm. Commander Peter Bennington owned
the small flight school, but clearly still preferred flying to being a businessman. Ben could now quote
a lot of interesting facts about the F-35 Lightning II single-seater all-weather stealth combat aircraft.
Possibly more than anyone in the family needed to know. Aleksey wanted to remind Ben, he really
did, that he wasn’t actually joining the Royal Navy, or that he wouldn’t actually be Maverick, but as
he often got the benefit of these bursts of intense machismo, he obviously didn’t want to dampen the
enthusiasm. Besides, if Ben was intent on this mission of his, Aleksey was more than glad to have an
ex-military instructor for him. Like most other ex-service people, he assumed, he didn’t rate civilians
much for doing anything important. Although he conceded that everything he enjoyed—architecture,
books, music, wine, smoking, sex with men, and owning lots of things—had not been aided much by
people in uniform, but that everything he loathed—muck, cold, being shot at, being ordered around,
and very early mornings—had.
The only thing Ben didn’t seem to relish about his weekly lesson was doing his homework, and it
always amused Aleksey to see him frowning over his books just as he had once done at his academy
in Russia. He thought once more about Emilia’s confusion over going to university. What would he
have achieved if he’d stayed in Denmark with his brother? If they’d gone together to Københavns
Universitet, Nika studying his beloved politics, and he architecture? He wouldn’t be here with Ben
Rider-Mikkelsen, that’s what. ‘Four down: Strips in geography class. Six letters.’
Ben looked up from his studying. Aleksey reckoned it was time Ben put the books away and fed
him, and annoying him was a sure way to achieve this objective.
‘What the f—? I mean, can’t you see I’m busy?’
‘So am I. Vital research. Strips in—’
‘Who does? What does it mean? Someone strips in school? It’s meaningless garbage.’
‘It’s quite easy really, when you think about it.’
‘What is it then?’
‘Ah, well…’
‘Give.’ Ben snatched the newspaper and turned it upside down, resisting his attempts to snatch it
back. ‘Isthmi. Who the fuck is Isthmi and why did he take his clothes off in a lesson, and why am I
supposed to know this?’
Aleksey had absolutely no idea either. ‘Do not swear at me. He was a Greek god. It’s a Greek
myth.’ He sighed as if at Ben’s ignorance, and neatly penned in the word, making up the spelling. ‘Are
you hungry?’
Ben suddenly furrowed his brow, clearly astonished by an uncharacteristic neglect of his stomach.
‘I am. Do you want to order in? I don’t think we’ve got anything.’
Aleksey laid his chin down on his hands, studying his empty tea mug gloomily.
Ben ruffled his hair. ‘Okay, I’ll ask you one.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘What is a VAR?’
 Aleksey pursed his lips. ‘Something not good?’
Ben chuckled. ‘Volcanic Activity Reporting form.’
‘Hah, I was right then.’
‘Imagine that, first solo flight and you have to report a volcano erupting.’
They ordered some Chinese, something Aleksey had learnt to appreciate more since he’d widened
his appreciation of food in general. He magnanimously broke his recent rule and allowed Ben to
choose a movie, although he flatly refused to watch anything with sharks, zombies or torture in. He
wasn’t that thrilled by cannibals either. Similarly, demonic possession. And now he added post-
apocalyptic pandemics to his banned list. It was a challenging flick through the menu for Ben.
Finally settled, the dogs sitting patiently waiting for spare prawn crackers, he mentioned casually,
‘The moron is coming here early tomorrow. I want to go over the security team arrangements with
him.’
‘I’m not sure he’ll remember what you’re talking about.’
‘Ack, he keeps a watching brief on it all.’
‘If you say so.’
Ben, nicely distracted by the movie and food, could not now claim, when he discovered his latest
plan, that he’d done the unilateral thing. Again.

***

Squeezy was also helping him with Ben’s birthday present, so when he pulled up in front of the glass
house the following morning, Aleksey went out to meet him.
‘Diesel here?’
‘No, he’s taking Molly to school and then going on with Enid to Derriford for her hospital
appointment. He may not be back at all this month, therefore. Have you got it all?’
Squeezy nodded.
When they’d carried all the parts in and Squeezy had assembled them, which took a couple of
hours, Aleksey told him he wanted to take a walk and show him something.
Again, to his astonishment, he didn’t receive a pile of profane inanity in response to this
suggestion. He almost missed it. They clicked for the dogs and headed out. Aleksey took a shortcut
across the lawns and then took a small path that led up the hill to the driveway. Once there he turned
towards the gate.
‘I’ve been thinking about your team and the logistics of them getting here and arranging shifts—all
the things I know you spend a lot of your time organising.’
Squeezy nodded, looking authoritative and concerned. He couldn’t keep it up for long and smirked.
‘And?’
‘I think we need a base here at the house. Like a guardroom.’
‘Somewhere to make a brew would be nice without having to bother the ladies in their cottages.
Although I reckon Enid enjoys the company. Place to have a piss would be nice too.’
‘Somewhere to safely store their…tools of the trade?’
‘Yeah, tricky driving with them these days.’
‘Communications centre.’
‘Good idea.’
 ‘And overnight bunks, if they need them—bedrooms, I suppose we could call them.’
‘You’re going to build something here?’
‘Yes, by the gate. I think it’s long past the time when I wanted the appearance of no one here. I
want a presence that states that someone is definitely here so fuck off. What do you think?’
Squeezy was nodding. ‘What’s up?’ He had good reason to ask this. He had the right to ask this,
given their history together.
Aleksey just replied simply, ‘Isn’t something always fucking up?’
The moron wobbled his hand, possibly a comment on paranoia versus common sense, but only
suggested, ‘Make it unobtrusive, if you want my advice. You want that fuck off to work, but for those
it doesn’t, don’t give the game away too soon.’
‘Yes. But if I use unobtrusive oak and glass, the glass will be bullet proof.’
Squeezy chuckled and picked up a stone to toss for PB. ‘I’m gathering Diesel don’t know about
this. Won’t see the need for it.’
‘No. He won’t want to acknowledge the need for it. He tends to assume the world is—’
‘Nice?’
Aleksey laughed. ‘Yes. I suppose if you greet it with a smile and a face like he has then the world
smiles back at you.’
‘Yeah. We know better. Stare into the abyss…’
‘Yes. I think he knows better really. I just prefer seeing that smile too.’
‘Ruin my day not his?’
‘Exactly. You owe me one house now…’
Squeezy went for him, but he was too quick and he’d been waiting for it, so the headlock was
completely ineffectual and only got the moron an elbow in the ribs. Squeezy nonchalantly stopped his
attack—it was too hot, apparently, and obviously he didn’t approve of unnecessary physical violence.
They began to saunter back towards the lawns. ‘I guess I should say thank you for the house.’
‘Not try to strangle me?’
‘Just testing your reactions, old man. But I do. You know…thank you.’
‘Do you realise you have not said fuck once in the last two minutes?’
‘Huh. Fuck. It must be these new people I’m mixing with. Got to watch my Ps and Qs.’
‘I thought you were working with the homeless.’
‘Exactly. So, we good? I’ve thanked you for the one point two million pound fucking house—yeah,
the professorial set had it all valued up before they stepped foot in it—and I can get back to being
rude and generally trying to ruin your life?’
‘Ruin away.’
They walked back companionably together until Squeezy asked suspiciously casually, ‘So, how’s
the fucking Aleksey thing going?’
Aleksey snorted. ‘I don’t know. Autosexuality is unnecessary: I have Ben.’
‘You know what I fucking mean. Got the professor a tad confused, see. He thinks you’ve just
changed your name, like you were Nikolas Aleksey or something and now you’re just using your
middle name. How have other people taken it?’
‘Ben, you mean?’
‘No, not fucking Diesel. He knew who you were before. I mean people you’ve—’
‘Lied to? Deceived?’
 ‘Yeah, those people. People you’ve lied to and deceived. Exactly. How they taking it, like?’
‘I have not had a Russian hit squad here for me yet, but I suspect they all have more important
things to be thinking about just now. Why?’
‘Oh, no particular reason. So, you think Diesel’s going to like his fucking birthday present? If he
don’t want it, I’ll have it. Got a nice house to put it in now.’
Aleksey smirked. ‘I have a feeling what goes in that house isn’t really up to you…’
At that, he did get more successfully attacked, but fortunately, when it came down to it, the dogs
were always on his side, and no one, not even Squeezy, risked a raised Radulf muzzle.

***

Ben was just dropping off to sleep when Aleksey saw the clock had clicked over past midnight. He
poked the warm, naked figure in the ribs. ‘Happy Birthday.’
Ben grunted. He knew what day it was; he was just trying to ignore it.
‘Do you want your present now?’
Ben turned over in the bed and regarded him suspiciously. ‘You haven’t bought me anything—I’d
know. You haven’t been out anywhere without me, and I’ve been monitoring the post.’
‘According to you I am the master of second-hand gifts. Maybe I have recycled something we
already had.’
Ben smirked. ‘That means you haven’t. Okay then, yes. I do want my present.’
‘It’s not here.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘In this actual room. It’s in another room.’
Ben hopped out of bed and pulled on his discarded jeans. Aleksey did the same and watched
wryly as Ben checked the study first. It was like a game of spot the difference: he did a quick sweep,
decided there was nothing of interest he wanted, and moved onto the gym. This was a good second
guess, as Aleksey often upgraded his equipment for him, but all was the same. The bathroom, Aleksey
noted with amusement, Ben didn’t bother with. Nothing that came in a wash bag had ever interested
him once.
He glanced in the pool. It was possible he’d been bought some diving equipment. They’d talked
about this one night: some decent scuba kit to keep on the island, but no. He went into the kitchen and
checked under both dogs, ignoring indignant rumbles at having deep sleep, warm baskets, and artfully
arranged blankets disturbed. The kitchen wasn’t a very likely place to find a gift. Ben liked eating, he
enjoyed cooking, but if Aleksey had bought him a new pan, he knew where that would get put fairly
swiftly.
Next came a trawl through the living spaces, from the TV and main area to the piano and billiard
room. He even checked in Molly’s suite.
‘The garage?’
Aleksey shook his head. ‘You’re worse at this game than Nika was. Look harder.’
Ben thought for a moment then glanced back towards the empty suite which used to be Tim and
Squeezy’s, not needed now as they were the proud owners of their own Dartmoor farmhouse.
He went in.
There was a slightly stunned gasp, which Aleksey reckoned was a very acceptable response.
When the moron had called him in after he’d finished assembling the state-of-the-art Obutto flight
simulator cockpit with its three wrap-around curved monitors, ergonomic racing car seat with mounts
for pedals and flight stick, he’d been reduced to a similar stunned silence. Squeezy had already
loaded up the latest Microsoft Flight Sim software on the new Alienware Aurora R11 computer with
the same Cessna plane Ben was learning to fly on. Other than such unpleasantness as crashing in a
deadly fireball, or being killed instantly by bird strike, it was as close to flying a real plane as you
could get.
‘It’s even got a VAR form on it. And an actual volcanic eruption to fly over—in Ecuador. I
checked.’
‘I…’
‘I thought it might make your homework more fun. Happy birthday.’
‘I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you.’
This was a highly agreeable response. He wrapped his arms around Ben’s waist, propping his chin
on his shoulder. ‘Come back to bed and I’ll show you many ways you can earn my generosity…’ He
bit lightly into the back of Ben’s neck, relishing the feel of the warm, strong back against his bare
chest.
Ben slipped out of his hold and hopped over the frame as gracefully as he slid into his Maserati,
murmuring, ‘Okay…’

***

It was oddly restful having the bed to himself. He spread out, starfished, right in the middle, and
smoked very happily, picturing Ben flying somewhere exotic. Every single airstrip in the world was
on the system down to the tiniest detail. Knowing Ben, which he did, some poor country’s innocent
inhabitants were currently being bombed to extinction.
If Aleksey were being entirely honest with himself, his best trait really, he’d rather Ben stuck with
the simulated version of his new hobby and not actually put it into practice. One day, he supposed, he
might be glad Ben could fly them somewhere. But standing with the moron by the site for the new
guardhouse, he could not shake the thought of the four horses. Wulf Schultz had said—I assume you
know what the forth horse portends? Well, he did. And it did not seem to him a particularly wise
thing now to invite that final steed into your life in any shape or form.
There were compensations to falling asleep alone, Aleksey discovered. He got woken up in the
early hours of the morning to be properly thanked for his present. He got to see in the dawn deep in
Ben’s willing body, to watch the swelling soft light slowly reveal smooth, amber skin, to hear the
dawn chorus mixing and mingling with Ben’s low moans of pleasure. And when he was done, he got
to be used like a cockpit, to be manoeuvred and swung and handled and driven, taken off and landed,
so that when it was full light he could not have moved a muscle or done other than he did. He
wrapped himself tightly around Ben’s sweaty, hot body and let the entire morning go.
***
 Chapter Eight
They awoke sticky and a little ashamed of themselves in the middle of the afternoon, which only
provoked some wry smiles from Ben in the shower as they washed off the evidence of their
debauchery. They had a birthday picnic tea to attend, and how they had woken would not do. Once
they were dressed, they headed to the clearing in the woods where the little chapel stood. Everyone
was there already, rugs had been laid on the yellowing grass, and there were heaped bowls of
strawberries and cream, a cake, plates of sandwiches, and some cocktail sausages for Radulf and PB.
There were lots of presents. Ben and Squeezy played cricket with Emilia out on the moorland slope
just beyond the drystone wall. Aleksey lay on his side, watching them with his head propped on his
hand unable still to shake the impression of the night. They’d been wild in a way they’d not been
since returning from the island. There, for one night, under a liquid river of stars beside the glowing
bioluminescence of the ocean, they’d attacked each other’s bodies like a challenge, as if they were
obstacles to subdue by force. So often lately love making had been something of slow sensuality,
brought on mainly by his long recovery, so that this return to past excesses was almost disturbing. He
literally could not have sat up if he’d wanted to. He wondered how Ben had the wherewithal to leap
and dive and roll as he currently was, and concluded Ben was indestructible—he’d certainly
withstood what he’d been put through the previous night.
The game swapped positions and Ben got to bowl for the first time. He was a natural at that too—
he smashed the stumps. Aleksey chuckled at the consequent furious attack from the other two.
He felt himself drifting off, his eyes closing. ‘Did you know that the red squirrels on our island
probably swam there from Tresco? That’s awfully impressive: miles and miles.’
He smiled inwardly. ‘How do you know they didn’t make a raft?’
He couldn’t see the boy, but he was fairly sure Miles was frowning. ‘They can’t do things like
that.’
‘They can build nests…’
‘Dreys. They’re called dreys. Everybody knows that.’
‘Well, there you go. They’re good builders.’ He actually quite liked the idea. Could picture them
up on their little hind legs, paddling bravely.
‘Well, what I was thinking was I could bring two home and we could have red squirrels here.
Introduce them. Granny says she’s never seen them.’
‘Would you need to introduce them if they’d already travelled together?’
‘Oh, that’s the scientific term for putting a new species into an area. You introduce it.’
‘Ah, I didn’t know that. How would you persuade them to come here?’
‘Oh, yes, that’s a bit of a worry. Uncle Tim insisted it wouldn’t be ethical to take them if they
didn’t want to leave. It would be horrible if they were homesick.’
Aleksey snorted, but only quietly. ‘Well, if they didn’t like it, you could take them home again.’ He
glanced over at the boy who was watching the cricket game a little wistfully. Enid had been carried
out to a chair where, bundled in rugs, she could umpire, which as she had only ever watched normal
cricket, and not the Ben-Squeezy-Emilia version of this game, she was obviously finding a little
challenging.
‘Will you think about something for me?’
 Miles’s eyebrows rose. ‘Yes, please. Is it designing mines for the coastline? I’ve got some pretty
good ideas for those already. Oh, and I was thinking about a wind turbine if we can’t find the
generator. But that’s awfully bad for the migrating birds. And I did see a vulture, by the way. It was an
orange-faced Egyptian vulture. Imagine if he flew into my turbine.’
‘Messy, yes. No, I want you to think about school. Now Emilia isn’t going to be there, and your
grandmother lives here… I don’t think she’ll ever go back to her bungalow now, do you?’
Miles became extremely interested in some lichen which was growing on one of the ancient
stones. This was a subject he stoutly refused to discuss.
‘Okay. Well, if you wanted, you could leave your school and go to school here in Devon. Molly’s
school. It’s a much more academic one, which I think you would like.’
‘Oh. Yes, it is. But I don’t think granny could afford that one. It’s terribly expensive, you know.’
Aleksey tried not to laugh. ‘Well, maybe you could win a scholarship. There are some. Which
subject would you choose though…?’
‘Gosh, yes. That’s a tricky question.’
‘And then you could…live at home. Go daily, as Molly does. I think your grandmother would like
that.’
Miles only nodded and began poking the moss with a stick. Miles wasn’t stupid. Aleksey could
see the boy knew. The days of planning his grandmother’s bio-habitat on Mars were long over. He
just didn’t want to face the truth.
It didn’t help, Aleksey supposed, that they were having this conversation sitting amongst the
gravestones.

***

The afternoon just drifted on, relaxed and happy. Ben let Molly open all his presents. Babushka had
brought him back a hoodie from Russia with Cyrillic writing on it. Ben pulled it on over his T-shirt,
and everyone thought it suited him perfectly. But Aleksey had thought he’d looked good in a
homemade rabbit-fur loincloth, so a top to match his eyes didn’t impress him. What did make him
smile however was the slogan: Z-We don’t give up our own. The exaggerated zed-shape was the only
thing Ben would be able to read, as that did resemble the English letter, and he probably assumed
therefore the rest was something about zombies. Babushka and Emilia, being the only other ones
present who could read Russian, just gave him sly lip quirks.
Enid, Emilia and Miles had clubbed together and bought him a dive light, snorkel, mask and
flippers, which Squeezy immediately commandeered and proceeded to wear for the rest of the
afternoon, speaking to everyone in muffled mumbles through his speaking tube, and peering at them
myopically through the lens.
Molly had bought him (or chosen with Aleksey on a secret shopping trip) a World’s Best Daddy
bracelet, a rather beautiful item of leather and hammered metal. Ben fastened it next to his AK47 one,
and Aleksey knew by his expression that it had been a good choice. Of Molly’s.
Tim and Squeezy had bought him a drone, which Aleksey had to admit was a superb surprise gift.
It had a camera which could take video or photos, and a screen on the handset. Flown over the valley,
everything precious it contained—the house, tennis courts, garage and cottages—was fantastically
clear. Everyone wanted a go, and when Aleksey flew it, he sent it over Horse Tor. Hovering above
the granite rocks, he was fascinated by the view of their bedroom. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked
being visible from space, given what frequently went on in that bed.
There was a small mishap on Ben’s turn when he decided to spy on Radulf’s secret doings behind
the chapel, but apparently the rotors were easily replaceable.
Once more, Aleksey was deeply pleased with the mental connection he shared with Ben now, for
as soon as they were out of everyone else’s hearing, Ben murmured something he’d already
considered, ‘Next time we go to the island, we can fly it up to look in the lighthouse.’
Aleksey turned onto his back, arm over his eyes. ‘Miles can hunt down the two squirrels he wants
to kidnap.’
‘How are you feeling?’
Aleksey moved his arm a little and gave him a look. Ben chuckled and shifted a little closer. ‘That
will teach you to stay up all night having sex.’
‘Hmm. I think it’s more our…style of that activity that’s done me in.’
‘You’re having sex with a very old man now, so I don’t see why.’
Aleksey quirked his lip and put his hand on Ben’s thigh, idly smoothing the soft denim with his
thumb. ‘How does it feel to be thirty-eight then? As bad as you were anticipating?’
Ben returned his concentration to his bracelet, twisting it around, admiring it on his strong wrist.
‘We both know what it’s like to be in a thirty-eight-year-old body. You spent many hours last night in
one.’
‘I did.’
Ben lay back, resting against him, their warmth transferring through cotton. ‘Do you remember
once asking me what I would give the army up for?’
Aleksey caught at Ben’s arm, so he could admire the World’s Best Daddy, too. ‘No.’
‘Yes you do. And I couldn’t really tell you then. How could I have ever imagined this…?’ He
swept his free hand over the scene: the children and dogs, the friends, the situation, but mainly the
happiness which was evident in them all.
‘When I asked you that question, I was exactly the same age as you are now.’ He slid his hand
unobtrusively up under Ben’s shirt, spreading his fingers on the warm skin over his spine. Then he
gingerly sat up, putting his mouth to Ben’s ear. ‘I told you, our song…looks like we made it, look how
far we’ve come; we’re still together, still going strong…’
Ben laughed and hung his head, responding equally quietly, if not so tunefully, ‘You’re still the one
I run to. The one I belong to.’
Delighted, Aleksey fell back on the rug. ‘Yes. Owning things, especially you, Benjamin, is
extremely pleasant indeed.’
***
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