The Presence

By Mads Sorensen

Our deepest fears are realised. Man will survive, but will humanity?

A high-security prison van crashes on a remote Scottish road in freezing fog. It becomes increasingly unclear who’s in charge. The two drivers? The prisoner’s guard? The prisoner herself, once an eminent nanobiologist? Or something entirely different, something from another time and place?
The answer lies buried inside a rocky island inhabited only by sheep. But time is running out for the guard and his prisoner to find the terrifying truth and prevent a threat to Man’s native self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mads Sorensen
• Release date: Jun 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370494279

Mads Sorensen

From the age of six, Mads Sorensen knew he wanted to be a writer. In fact, he could even write before he could read, requiring his mother to read his stories back to him. While living in his native country, Denmark, Mads participated in several geological expeditions to Greenland before moving with his job in the oil industry to England. Here, he continued to pursue his dream, writing at any spare moment he could find. He started out writing novels set in the backdrop of a future Ice Age before moving to the ever popular thriller genre. With 'Echoes of The Kin' Mads has now returned to his beloved frozen future.

Book preview

Part I: The Van

Chapter 1 13:00 hours

Connell found it hard to comprehend that his prisoner only four months ago had been the youngest professor at the prestigious Nanotech Institute in London. Now she was on her way to the hospital for the criminally insane at Rocky Meadow in Scotland. The yellow and green boiler suit hung on her, but at least her cropped chestnut hair had been combed since she got up in the morning.

She pressed her lips against her folded hands and started rocking back and forth on her bench as if in prayer. The chain linking her cuffed wrists and ankles to the floor rose and fell with her motion, reminding Connell of a snake he had once seen performing to a charmer’s flute. He saw a few beads of blood bubbling from fresh grooves in her wrists. They resembled failed suicide attempts, but she didn’t seem to care or notice.

The van swerved for a few seconds before the rear tyres regained traction. Connell tightened his grip on the Heckler and Koch rifle resting on his thighs.

The prisoner raised her head with a jerk, her searing, ocean-blue gaze like that of a predator sensing prey. She tried to rise, but the chain around her waist, doubling as a seatbelt, dragged her back to her bench.

Her head banged hard against the wall of the van behind her, and she let out an ear-splitting scream.

The van started sliding again. Then, with a crunching sound, it came to a halt.

Connell was thrown left, but his seatbelt prevented him from being hurled against the driver’s cabin. He kept his eyes on his prisoner, twisting in her shackles like a tuna caught in a net.

The heavy steel shutter was pulled from the hatch in the wall to the driver’s cabin.

Fingal’s fat cheek and cauliflower ear emerged from behind the iron mesh protecting the hatch. ‘What the fuck was that screaming about?’

‘What happened?’ Connell asked.

‘The road’s like an ice rink and we’ve got a loony yelling in the back. What do you expect?’

Connell undid his seatbelt and went to the hatch. ‘Did we crash?’

Fingal moved his head out of the way to reveal serpents of steam wrapped around a tree on the right side of the road. They melted into the milky fog ahead. ‘What do you reckon?’

Connell sighed. ‘Great.’

Fingal switched on the hazard lights and shouted his identity to an old-fashioned, pear-shaped microphone embedded in his palm.

The radio responded with a noise as grubby white as the fog.

Fingal put out a call on a mobile phone with the same result. ‘Fucking thing’s dead as a man in the Garvellachs,’ he said after several more fruitless attempts at contacting the outside world. ‘Even the GPS is down. Must have some organs missing.’ He let out a rather forced laugh and dropped the microphone, kicking it where it dangled at the end of a stretched spiral cord. Then he slid down the fake leather seat, wriggling his blubbery frame in search of a comfortable position. He pushed Ian, his young co-driver, against the far door with his knee.

‘Keep to your own side,’ Ian squeaked in his thin, boyish voice. He had been a last-minute replacement for someone who had fallen ill. He was far too green for a job like this in Connell’s opinion. He couldn’t have been out of school for more than three or four years.

Ian rose to the mesh, eyeing the prisoner, his rapid pulse visible on his neck. ‘She gives me the creeps.’

Fingal tore open a plastic-wrapped sandwich triangle. ‘Don’t look at her.’

Ian looked away. ‘I’m not sure she’s even human.’

‘You watch too many bad movies,’ Fingal said. ‘She’s cuffed to the hilt and chained to the wall and floor. What can she do? Strangle herself? The sooner the better, if you ask me. Grab some food and calm down. The rescue team will be here in an hour tops.’

More like an hour and a quarter in these conditions, Connell thought. If there hadn’t been any contact with the van for half-an-hour, two police cars from Loch Hill Prison would be sent out to meet the van along its planned route. Even in perfect conditions and with sirens blaring, that would take at least another half hour.

Ian stole a nervous glimpse of the prisoner. ‘I’ll be a happy man when we’re at Rocky Meadow.’

‘Relax,’ Fingal said.

‘She’s a witch.’

‘If you carry on like that, they won’t let any of us back out when we get there. Do like me. Don’t look.’

Ian shut the shutter.

Connell heard what sounded like a shot from a pellet gun. He swivelled on his feet to face his prisoner. He aimed his rifle at her head.

She stared at his chest, the chain in her back taut. ‘The diary.’

These were the first words he had heard in Elena Titova’s slight but distinct Russian accent. Her voice was hoarse. From screaming all night in her cell, he guessed. He didn’t reply.

‘The diary. You’ve got the diary.’

Only then did Connell realise that the sound he had heard was of a button popping from his denim jacket pocket. He saw that John Winter’s shrink-wrapped diary had come into view. It had been found between rocks on the shore not far from his mutilated body.

The hatch was thrown back, and Connell heard the sound of a siren. He stepped closer to the driver’s cabin to ensure the diary wasn’t visible to the two in front.

Ian’s face appeared behind the mesh, his wild eyes on the prisoner. ‘That’s the end for you, sweetheart.’ Then he disappeared from view.

Chapter 2 13:05 hours (+ 0:05)

Connell heard a door being opened and felt a light tremor. He assumed it was Fingal’s boots hitting the verge.

The siren passed. The sound of it, as it left for the distance, was like the voice of a man falling from the top of a cliff.

Through the hatch, Connell watched Ian slipping on the tarmac. He rose and slipped again before crawling to the far side of the road. He got back on his feet and disappeared into the fog along the grassy verge, chasing the last remnants of the fading siren.

How could he even have hoped it was the rescue party, Connell thought, barely five minutes after the crash and with all comms down?

Fingal re-emerged and climbed up into the driver’s cabin. ‘It’s a bloody miracle’—he heaved for breath—‘that we didn’t crash any sooner.’ He sat down, taking in three quick gulps of air. ‘It’s one in the afternoon. You would think they’d gritted the roads by now.’

‘It’s a minor road,’ Connell said.

‘Can’t be that minor. It has a number.’ With some difficulty, Fingal pulled off his jacket and hung it on a hook behind the driver’s door. He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘So much for taking the scenic route to avoid the media. A fat lot of sitting ducks we are now.’

Connell could only agree. Their chosen route to Rocky Meadow was more than twice the distance of the most direct, as well as slower and windier. This meant at least twice as much time for things to go wrong, especially in this kind of weather.

Ian stepped up into the van, and Connell noticed that one of his cheeks was adorned by crimson streaks. From a fall on the tarmac, he assumed.

Ian sat down. ‘How could they?’

Fingal sank deeper into his seat. ‘How could they what?’

‘Pass us.’

‘They weren’t ours, you dimwit. It’s too fucking early.’

‘But …’

‘It’ll happen. Relax.’

Ian looked out of the door he hadn’t closed. ‘That’s the first car we’ve seen since we crashed.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Eight and a half minutes ago.’

‘More like eight minutes thirty-three point four seconds,’ Fingal corrected him.

‘Very funny.’

‘What do you expect in the middle of a Friday in the middle of December in the middle of a small road in the middle of Scotland? A traffic jam?’

‘More than one car every nine minutes.’

‘Our route was chosen because there isn’t much traffic.’

Connell saw Ian’s point. A car every eight to ten minutes seemed a bit light, even out here. They might be in rural Scotland, but the place wasn’t particularly remote. They were somewhere between Stirling and Loch Lomond, not deep in the Highlands.

‘Shut the door, I’m freezing,’ Fingal said, the sound of his voice muffled by food.

Ian didn’t move. ‘Put your jacket on.’

Fingal pulled his considerable belly clear of the steering wheel and leaned across Ian, pressing him against the back of his seat.

‘Watch it,’ Ian said.

‘Why? I can think of nothing better than snuggling up to a spotty wanker like you.’ Fingal closed the door and moved back to his own side. Then he reached up and shut the shutter.

Not exactly the best of mates, Connell thought as he sat down on his bench. But he had no idea if they weren’t. Apart from one or two polite exchanges with Fingal, he hadn’t come across any of them prior to the transport.

Connell pushed John Winter’s diary—a hardback, A6-sized notebook—as far down into the left pocket of his jacket as he could and placed his rifle in his lap. Whoever had picked Ian as a late substitute couldn’t have given it much consideration. Or perhaps those in charge had been so desperate to get the Russian Cannibal off their hands that they hadn’t cared.

The prisoner gave him a curious half-smile, like a cross between an invitation and a warning, enhancing her high cheekbones. ‘Why did you take the diary?’

In that moment, Connell saw the woman he had seen the day after she had been caught in Heathrow Airport with a ticket to Irkutsk—her childhood home on the shores of Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia. Elena Titova had looked at him from the web page, just as she did now, her gaze following his eyes whichever way he turned the screen. It had been a recent portrait, yet she had seemed more student than professor, let alone one of the country’s leading experts in prions, the compound that had caused so much havoc through Mad Cow Disease. She had looked younger than her thirty-one years in that picture, but she didn’t today with her lined face and faintly purple skin.

The prisoner moved her head a little closer to his. ‘Are you aware that the diary wasn’t shown in court?’

Connell wasn’t, but he said nothing.

‘They didn’t produce any DNA evidence either, apart from what they had planted.’

A classic accusation in Connell’s experience. He shrugged in reply.

The prisoner bit her lower lip and folded her cuffed hands, looking at the floor. She commenced rocking back and forth.

Connell switched his gaze from his prisoner to the small barred window, above left of her head from his position. He had hoped that looking out into the fog would kill his budding interest in the diary, but the window hovered like a spirit watching over her, and the sight of uniform greyness only fuelled his curiosity.

He peered at the shrink-wrap through the bottom of his vision. He could only see the fuzzy edges of the sheets, but when they had handed him the diary, he had noticed that most of the pages were untouched.

The prisoner leaned towards him, and her handcuffs moved a little up her arms, exposing her injured wrists. ‘Can I have a drink?’

They ought to have offered her water before she left Loch Hill, but perhaps she had declined, or they hadn’t given her the offer. It was as if the authorities revelled in her humiliation. Why else had they shackled her in such a cruel, pain-inducing way? She was dangerous, no doubt about it, but Connell couldn’t see why she needed to be in quite as many chains.

He wondered if it had been more out of terror than malice, in an effort to curb their fear of her rather than keep her in check. Whatever the case, no one could prevent him from showing her a little compassion. She was after all his prisoner, his responsibility, during the transport, and he felt like a drink himself.

Connell picked a half-litre plastic bottle of water from a six-pack. Then he unscrewed the cap and swilled down about a third. He held out the bottle.

The prisoner moved towards him until the short chain fixing her waist to the wall was at full stretch. He inched the bottle just close enough for her to reach it with her cuffed hands.

She lifted her feet off the floor to ease the pull of the chain linking her ankles to her wrists. She took the bottle and drank from it like a mosquito sucking blood. Once she had emptied it, she wiped the excess fluid from her cheeks and chin and let the bottle fall on the floor.

Picking up the bottle, Connell realised that his other hand was free. Before he could react, his prisoner had grabbed the barrel of his sliding rifle and stuck it between her teeth.

Appalled by his lapse of concentration, he dropped the bottle and put pressure on the trigger.

The prisoner slid her mouth a little up the barrel and slipped her thumb inside the trigger guard. She pushed his finger with hers.

‘Read from the diary,’ she said, her voice distorted by her gagging on the muzzle. ‘Or I’ll pull the trigger.’

Connell wished he’d had a handgun strapped to his left thigh. But he didn’t. His Glock 17 had been a casualty of an elaborate scheme designed to make the van and those in it appear something else.

She pushed a little more. Another millimetre, perhaps less, and her blood and brain would have been spattered across his face and the wall behind her, if …

A shot rang out.

Chapter 3 13:20 hours (+ 0:20)

The prisoner let go of the rifle with her mouth and hand. She seemed a little shaken, but Connell didn’t sense any shock on her face.

The shutter was slammed back, and Fingal’s face appeared behind the mesh. He looked far more surprised than Connell’s prisoner. His gaze pinballed between the walls in the little cell. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

Connell felt giddy with a blend of excitement, terror and elation he had experienced so often in the past. Prior to their departure from Loch Hill, he had left a blank at the top of the magazine in case he should release a round by accident. He had considered it unlikely, but not impossible considering the nature of their cargo and the expected road conditions.

‘I fired a warning shot,’ Connell said.

Fingal looked at him. ‘Shoot to kill or keep the powder dry, wasn’t that your brief?’

Connell had informed those in charge about his plan prior to departure, and they had accepted, albeit reluctantly. He said nothing.

‘What did she do?’

‘Too much thrashing around.’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘The walls in the cell are supposed to attenuate sound,’ Connell said.

Fingal knocked on the wall next to the hatch ‘If this one does, I haven’t noticed. That’s why we bloody crashed.’ He switched his gaze to the prisoner. ‘When she called for her friend in the furnace earlier, it sounded like she was screaming in my ear. And I didn’t hear any of that this time.’

Ian appeared beside Fingal. He inhaled with a sudden gasp, his eyeballs straining to escape their sockets. ‘Stop the witch. Just …’ He raised a trembling finger. ‘She …’

Connell saw his prisoner sitting on her bench, elbows on thighs, staring at the wall behind him.

The tip of Ian’s tongue emerged from the darkness of his mouth. The rest of his face seemed frozen. Then he shut the shutter.

Connell wanted to ask his prisoner what she had done to bring Ian into such a state, but he had made a pledge to himself not to speak to her during the transport.

She faced him with only the white of her eyes showing. It looked truly revolting. Then she rolled her pupils back down like two cherries in a slot machine. ‘It’s a party trick of mine.’

Connell imagined her doing the same in happier days, her feet on the coffee table, a glass of wine in her hand. She would trigger expressions of disgust from her friends. Then she would laugh, take another sip of her wine, and be back to her bubbly self.

‘I knew it was blank,’ she said. ‘I heard one of the guards talk about it when they led me out. They often talked while I was listening. To them, I didn’t exist.’

Connell wouldn’t be surprised if that was true. Equally, it could be something she made up. Perhaps even, she had wanted to die.

‘They saw it as another sign that you are weak,’ she said. ‘In their opinion, you were a bad choice for this transport. They worried you would crack again.’

Connell felt her words like a boot in his stomach, but he managed to hold his tongue.

‘They told me you were someone important once.’ She left a pause for him to comment. When he didn’t, she carried on. ‘You were a sniper in the army, weren’t you?’

Connell had been a sniper, chosen because of his physical abilities. He had felt confident he’d be able to cope with it mentally, but once he had seen his first target, a mere boy, in the crosshairs of his rifle, he realised he couldn’t. After that failure, he had decided to leave the army rather than face the humiliation of demotion. They had been considerate enough to discharge him as a sniper. That was how he had got the job in the new wing of Loch Hill High Security Prison, the first in the UK to employ marksmen in the watchtowers.

The prisoner cocked her head a little. ‘Aren’t you curious to know what’s in the diary or are you too weak, too scared, to do what you want to do?’

Connell said nothing.

‘Why did you steal it?’

Connell hadn’t stolen the diary. He had been tasked with handing it to the director of Rocky Meadow. He assumed it would be passed on to a senior psychiatrist at the hospital, though he did wonder why the diary had been sent on this transport—as if it were as dangerous to the public as the prisoner. To his knowledge, neither Fingal nor Ian had been informed about this, and it made him feel a little exposed.

‘If you read the diary for me, I’ll tell you what’s happening and why we need to stop it,’ the prisoner said.

We only last for as long as the transport, he felt like telling her. She was on her way to Rocky Meadow, diagnosed with a severe case of split personality disorder. Once she was in, she wouldn’t get outside the perimeter fence, not even in a box. And after he had left the premises, he would never see her again.

The prisoner looked up at the diary, a corner poking from Connell’s pocket. Her chin nestled in the palms of her cuffed hands, and she sucked on her little finger, pulling it out and pushing it back in couple of times. She circled the tip with her long, tapered tongue before letting go of her finger. Her blue eyes became velvet as in candlelight and the lines on her face seemed to retreat. Her lips filled out, her cheeks taking on a rosy hue.

‘I suggest you start,’ she said.

Like almost every man in the country, and many around the world, Connell had been fascinated by the tale of the young, intelligent female cannibal. He recalled a picture of her in a lab coat looking into a microscope, and one where a power-dressed Dr Titova gave a talk to a packed auditorium. In a photo from the finishing line of the last London Marathon she had seemed ready for a second run. But the real hook had been a ubiquitous media image from a recent holiday. Her rich chestnut hair hadn’t quite touched her shoulders, and she had been dressed in white cropped jeans with a bikini top. He had been surprised by her nice, five foot seven figure, just over half a foot shorter than him. For some reason, he had perceived scientists as belonging to a different, plainer breed of humanity.

How had this promising scientist become the Russian Cannibal, he wondered. Was the key to her transformation in the diary, and was that why the authorities had kept it from the courtroom? If indeed they had.

‘How many did you kill in Afghanistan before you bottled it?’ she asked. ‘Ten, twenty, thirty?’

Two that Connell was sure of. One had died from a bullet, another from shrapnel. He said nothing.

‘I heard one of the guards say none, except, that can’t be true. They wouldn’t have entrusted you with escorting someone as dangerous as me if you hadn’t killed anyone.’ She gave him a look of something verging on pity. ‘But you did put a blank at the top, so perhaps they were right after all.’

How much easier if he hadn’t, Connell thought. Prisoner gone, job done. He would have got the rest of the day off and a week or two after that, perfectly timed with the Christmas holidays coming up.

‘You must have done a lot of sitting back then,’ his prisoner said, ‘keeping quiet, getting your kicks from killing people in the street below.’ She moved as close to him as the chain in her back would allow. ‘Except you never did. But now they have given you a chance to make amends. I attempt escape and then, pop, a bullet right through my dark heart.’

Connell was in little doubt that those in power would be relieved, even pleased, if that happened. But it wasn’t in his brief to stage an escape attempt. If it had been, he would have refused to take the job, despite the considerable bonus.

The prisoner leaned back against the wall. ‘You could drop the diary on the road next to my dead body before the rescue arrives, and they’ll be even more grateful that you killed me.’

Connell gripped the rounded front edge of his bench, wondering what could possibly be in that diary that was so explosive.

Not a lot, he reckoned. Most likely, she was merely jabbing him with anything she could think of to penetrate his defences. She was clearly highly intelligent, and the most intelligent criminals were invariably the most dangerous.

He shifted in his seat, his little finger straying to the corner of the bench nearest the driver’s cabin. He was surprised how sharp the corner felt, bearing in mind the person sitting on the opposite bench. But it gave him an idea.

He shouldn’t do it. He owed it to Nat to stay out of trouble. He had two jobs today. One, get his prisoner safely to Rocky Meadow, hand the diary to the director and get back to Loch Hill. Two, make sure he wasn’t sacked so that his wage would be transferred to his bank account at the end of the month, and the next and the next and the one after that. There was nothing more. His life was fairly dull these days, and that was how it ought to stay until Nat finished school.

If he opened the diary, he would likely regret his action many times over the years ahead. But he might have even deeper regrets if he didn’t take the chance, perpetually wondering why it hadn’t been shown in court. It was the kind of opportunity most people would never get a sniff of. To waste it would be inexcusable.

He picked the diary from his pocket with his left hand, holding the rifle with his right. Across the centre of the hardback cover was written in thick, black felt tip pen, Elena’s Rock. In the top right hand corner in smaller letters, John Winter, Natural History Museum.

Connell tried to divert his thoughts by picturing the place he was taking Suzie tonight. He had met her in a bar last Saturday and never expected it to last beyond the night. But she had called him during the week, angling for more. And so he had invited her out before he knew anything about this transport.

He envisioned her legs wrapped around his back. But when he looked down into her half-closed eyes, they were set in the pained face of a dead man he had never known, a man who steered his mind to a bleak, uninhabited Scottish island.

With a burst of controlled violence, Connell thrust the book against the corner of his bench, tearing open the heat-sealed plastic cover. As he pulled the diary from the torn shrink wrap, a triangle of the cover dropped to the floor. He realised he had carved a gash so deep the cover had split.

‘Did you just show me what you’ll do if I don’t behave?’ his prisoner asked.

Connell opened the diary. Stuff gets damaged when you crash, he told her in his head. At least, that would be his story. He could only hope the authorities chose to believe it.

But he didn’t have time to waste. If everything went smoothly, rescue could arrive in less than an hour.

On the first page was written THE GARVELLACHS, in ink. It was the name of the short chain of Scottish islands inhabited only by sheep, where John Winter’s body had been found at the bottom of a cliff. In brackets below was written Gaelic for The Rough Islands, in smaller letters.

Connell turned to pages two and three, only to find what he took to be geological drawings with notes. The date was Thursday August 28th, lunchtime. It was the day Elena Titova had murdered a man called Brian Dale in broad daylight in an alleyway in Central London. No one had noticed until the next morning, when a bin man had found him lying on cardboard between rubbish sacks with half his liver missing. Passers-by had believed he was just another sleeping homeless man.

On the right page, number three, was a pencil drawing of a rock with a feature that looked a bit like horsetail, the primitive plant, embedded in something. Page two on the left contained some technical notes with arrows to the drawing on page three. Each strand of the ‘horsetail’ was lined by tiny crystals coloured blood orange and labelled monazite (rare earth phosphate). Based on a scale bar at the bottom, the whole thing wasn’t more than two inches in any dimension.

Connell decided to skip technical notes and turned to pages four and five, dense with text written in pencil.

He felt a rush up his body, incredulous at what he was doing, and a voice in his head told him to put the diary back in its shrink-wrapped sleeve. But there was no way back. The damage had been done.

He started reading in a low voice:

This morning I saw Elena for the first time since I left Cambridge nine years (!!) ago. She showed me a rock a stranger had given her on her way to work. He had claimed it contained the biggest discovery in history (fat chance!), but he hadn’t told her what. He had seemed in a hurry to move on. He gave his name as Brian Dale, a Scottish helicopter mechanic and fossil enthusiast.

Suspicious, if you ask me. Why did this man give Elena the rock and not someone like me (not that I’m jealous!)? Perhaps Elena just used the rock as an excuse to get