'You can go through unimpeded.'
'
You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'
'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'
He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.
Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards, who only needed a short burst from the ovinator to isolate the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was not electrified and I pushed it open to let the car pass.
The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.
'Now can you tell me what we're doing here?' asked Millon, staring intently out of the window and taking frequent photographs.
'Two reasons,' I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies, 'first, because we think someone's been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.'
'So it's true you can't have children?'
Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.
'It is true,' he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.
'Take a left here, Bowd.'
He changed gear, pulled the wheel around and we drove on to a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We proceeded up a hill, took a left turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.
'Stay in the car, keep it running,' I said to Bowden. 'Millon, stay put. Stig — with me.'
Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a licence-built Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the seat leather hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground and it was full of water-related technical stuff, all now mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his 'chimeras running wild' stuff, but all of a sudden I felt nervous.
'Miss Next!'
It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather too quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.
'What's up?'
He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever was in this accident, one of them never left.
'Hear that?' asked Stig.
I listened.
'No.'
'Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.'
We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much more slowly, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them showed the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even more dark and deep and impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath bioengineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.
It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But compared to what we had been led to expect by Millon's hyper-active imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style then popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or had collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.
'What was that?' said Millon.
'What was what?'
'A sort of yummy noise.'
'Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.'