Abrams must have noticed Matt’s wandering focus. “I think untold numbers of lives will depend on us. What I’ve seen, and now what I’ve heard, leads me to believe that a lot is at stake…perhaps everything we hold dear.” He stared hard. “We…need…you.”

Matt sighed. “Okay.” He met Abrams’s eyes. “Okay, I’m in.”

Andy nodded as well, anger in his eyes. “Let’s fucking do this.”

Chapter 9

Bristol, England

Jessica pushed the pram along Coronation Street, and inhaled deeply. The crepe myrtles were in flower and their vanilla scent filled her nose with perfume and her soul with happiness. She stopped briefly under one, letting her eyes travel from its base to its tips – she always loved the trees’ magnificent streaked bark and bunches of small, tight flowers on the end of the branches.

This was her dream job – being a live-in nanny for a prominent surgeon and his wife. Trips abroad, good pay, and Jeremy, an angel to care for. She breathed in the scent of the flowers again and peered through their bouquets to the River Avon, still a little muddy from some recent rain. It was a good-sized watercourse, broad, deep, and with small ferries punting along its rippling surface.

The pram wheels squeaked, but other than that, it was still library-quiet that early in the morning. There was a single jogger and the odd cruising taxicab, but the rest of the up-market street was hers. Looking across the road, the compact two-story houses were jammed in tight together – not a lot of land, but an expensive price tag for a view over the water. The block she lived in on Coronation was one of the biggest, at about two thousand square feet, and bordered Camden Road, Osborne and Allington. But the block more like a village, really, she thought, just as a curtain of cloud pulled back to let in golden shafts of morning light.

The first vibration tickled the soles of Jessica’s feet, and she looked back over her shoulder expecting to see some large lorry approaching – there was nothing.

The next sound was different, and ugly. The wet thump was from a fat, gray pigeon as it dive-bombed into the grass of a front yard in an explosion of feathers and gore.

Ew, she thought, pursing her lips. She thanked her lucky stars that Jeremy hadn’t seen the unfortunate bird’s accident, but then shrieked as another bird struck the ground, then another and another. Soon starlings as well as pigeons were raining down and battering the houses, lawns, and the pavement. She grimaced at the sight, as the birds weren’t just falling from the sky, but actually flying into the ground as if they couldn’t see it, or were determined to strike it as hard as they could – it seemed as though they made war on the Earth.

Jessica felt frozen with indecision. There was no cover for hundreds of yards, and the tree she sheltered under was hardly thick enough to act as an umbrella against the feathered onslaught. She reached forward to pull the small canvas canopy over Jeremy, who was now sitting up, his mouth open in a single-toothed grin of delight as he watched the brown and gray birds fly into the grass and cement around them.