Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,30

he could through the crowd of people. He needed to get on the system and pull a list. There were eleven names on it, and so far two of them had been confirmed dead in the past three hours, which was far too precise for his liking to be a coincidence. Walking fast, he pushed open the door to his office and moved around the desk to his computer, then thought better of it and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. He'd need someone familiar with all the government databases to do this, and couldn’t waste time fumbling around trying to do it himself. For the first time in many years, he was going to disobey orders.

He pushed the number and waited for the call to connect.

‘Operations Officer Ryan Jackson, London office. Access code 34321,’ he said.

‘One moment, please,’ the woman on the other end said.

As he waited, Jackson found himself looking at the television in his office. In the commotion and sudden evacuation, he had left it on and there was new footage on the screen with a new Breaking News headline. However, it wasn't reporting on the hoax anthrax threat at the Embassy.

Instead, it was showing the ruined exterior of a two-floored building with a helicopter on the roof. Some kind of police station.

He frowned and looked closer, waiting for the call on his ear to connect. It seemed a police squad across the city had been involved in some kind of gunfight. The news cameras were at the gates, cordoned off, but the shot had zoomed in and showed smashed windows, empty shell casings on the tarmac and three 4x4 Ford Explorers that had been torn apart by automatic gunfire. He read the headline.

Counter-terrorist police unit attacked by two gunmen.

The screen suddenly flicked to a man giving a short statement to the press by the gates. He was a dark-haired man, around Jackson’s age, in an expensive-looking dark suit and with a stern look on his face. His name came up on the screen below, just as it came up from the depths of Jackson's memory.

Director Tim Cobb.

Head of the Armed Response Unit.

The phone to Jackson’s ear connected. An operator asked how she could help him, but Jackson didn’t respond. He was staring at Cobb’s face on the screen, a man he hadn't seen in fifteen years. He looked at the man and the devastation of the police station behind him. The operator asked him again how she could help him, but Jackson ended the call, lowering his phone and staring at the television.

So he wasn't imagining it, or being paranoid.

It was really happening.

They were back.

And they were coming to kill them all.

At that moment, three thousand and thirty one miles and several time-zones across the Atlantic Ocean, a man in his late thirties stepped out of a large family home in a residential neighbourhood in upstate Connecticut. It was a dewy early morning, just coming up to 7 a.m. He shut the door behind him and headed down the path towards his car, stopping to push his son's toy tricycle out of the way with his foot.

His was a real success story. He'd left the military in 2004, after a turbulent career that had started in the Marine Corps. He’d then taken everyone off guard by launching his own business, supplying software equipment to companies in the area. People were waiting for it to fail. A southern boy, originally from Athens, Georgia, the man hadn’t been an academically gifted kid, getting average grades in school, and he wasn’t especially good with computers. He’d done some time in the military but had wanted a change he said. It was just a matter of time, they all figured, before he ended up working security someplace or trying to re-enlist.

But the opposite had happened. Although he wasn’t a genius by any means, the man had good instincts and was quick to identify opportunities in the marketplace. The quality of his product, hard work and the technical proficiency of his small team meant the company had grown at an impressive pace. It was now the premier supplier to offices and companies across the American East Coast. He was a self-made millionaire, had his own facility in Hartford and was on his way there that morning to finish up a big deal with a technological company based in Philadelphia. He had a wife, three kids and a house in one of the best neighbourhoods in the state, and he often