He felt hands reach out for him, noticed faces barely distinguishable in the gloom. As he lashed out with his fist, he felt it make satisfying contact with yielding flesh. Someone groaned, but more bodies piled on top of him before he could take another swing.

They were yelling in what might have been Turkish, his contacts struggling to run a translation, but there were too many talking all at once for the software to come up with anything meaningful.

He kicked and struggled, but they had him down, with his face against the floor. One yanked his head back while another thrust a wad of cloth between his jaws, before pulling a bag over his head and securing it tight around his face.

Hands grabbed the back of his coat and dragged him further into the interior of the shop. A boot struck him hard in the ribs and Saul groaned in pain, just before he felt the prick of a needle in his neck. Immediately, dark tendrils of fatigue spread all the way through him, utterly irresistible, dragging him down into a warm and comforting darkness devoid of dreams.

TWENTY

Florida Keys, 5 February 2235

Disappearing turned out to be even easier than either of them might have hoped.

A few days before, Thomas Fowler had procured a set of contacts reple with fake UPs, for both himself and Amanda, from the ASI’s own evidence lockers, along with a substantial amount of black-market cash. They took off together one morning for his beach house down in the Keys, the ocean stretching out on either side of the highway, throughout the whole drive down from the airport at Marathon.

They had spent the next few days making love to the sound of the ocean crashing against the wharf near the house, often waking in the early hours when minor tremors sent plates crashing to the kitchen floor. Ashes from the recent eruptions of Soufrière and Mombacho were carried north on the wind, plastering rooftops and lawns, and turning them all a dull, leaden grey.

They often heard cars whipping by on the highway, as local residents fled, and one morning just before dawn they also heard gunshots, followed by the screech of rubber on tarmac. Fowler had got up and walked out on to the veranda, without turning the lights on, peering either way down the long road that ran parallel to the shore, but he saw nothing.

He dreamed of a faceless figure hunting him through the darkened rooms of the beach house, and when he woke knew he wouldn’t need a psychiatrist to figure out that he feared Donohue being sent after them. But Fowler had gambled that, with the end so very close, they would be safe – or as safe as it was possible to be, given the end of the world was approaching – so long as they didn’t make any attempt to pass through the Array.