He'd just reached the rear of the car when the sound of approaching sirens and motorcycle engines reached his ears. A red flashing light glowed through the storm, then a yellow one.

Blade suddenly realized that he had to get out of here. He'd done what he saw as simple duty. But the police and the papers would still call him a hero. He would be standing in the full spotlight of publicity for days or even weeks.

Blade had a cover identity, of course. But could it defend him from all the questions the papers and the BBC would be asking? Even more important, could it defend every bit of the secret of Project Dimension X? Blade wondered.

Well, he'd done his duty in one way. Now he had to do it in another. He had lived in the shadows ever since he joined MI6. It was time to slip away into those shadows again.

Blade scrambled across to a window, kicked a few jagged pieces of glass out of the frame, and dropped to the ground. He landed heavily on hands and knees, but rose quickly to his feet. He was gone into the storm before the first motorcycle pulled up beside the wrecked train.

It was another hour before the chief constable for the county appeared. By that time the doctors had finished sorting the hundred-odd passengers into the dead, the hurt, and the unharmed. The three derailed cars and the smashed locomotive still sprawled hideously across the landscape. In the gloom and the falling sleet, the emergency lights made the cars look grotesquely twisted and bloated.

The chief constable's irritation at being dragged out of bed in such grisly weather vanished in a moment. He hadn't seen anything this bad since the Blitz!

«Good God! What happened?»

The police inspector in charge shook his head. «The Railway people think it may have been ice on the tracks, so that they hit this curve too fast. But that's only a guess.»