The Merlin Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

say, “reporting that our numbers are now complete. You can tell the Prince that it’s safe to embark now.” And after the phone had done some angry quacking, he said, “Very good, monsieur. I’ll pass that on to the culprit,” and then he waved at the rest of us.
    Everyone began crowding up the ladder into the nearest helicopter-thing. The man who had spoken to me pushed me up ahead of him and swung onto the ladder after me. This must have put his face up against my legs, because he said angrily, “Didn’t the academy tell you to wear your leathers for this?”
    I thought I knew then. I was sure this was one of my dreams about getting into another world and that it had got mixed up with the sort of dream where you’re on a bus with no clothes on, or talking to a girl you fancy with the front of your trousers missing. So I wasn’t particularly bothered. I just said, “No, they didn’t tell me anything.”
    He made an irritated noise. “You’re supposed to be skyclad for official workings. They should know that!” he said. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?” He sounded quite scandalized about it.
    â€œNo,” I said. Dad and I had been going to have supper after we’d listened to Maxwell Hyde. I was quite hungry, now I thought of it.
    â€œWell, that’s a relief!” he said, pushing me forward into the inside of the flier. “You have to be fasting for a major working like this. Yours is the pull-down seat at the back there.”
    It would be! I thought. There were nice padded seats all round under the windows, but the one at the back was just a kind of slab. Everyone else was settling into the good seats and snapping seat belts around them, so I found the belts that went with the slab and did them up. I’d just got the buckles sussed when I looked up to find the man with the cell phone leaning over me.
    â€œYou,” he said, “were late. Top brass is not pleased. You kept the Prince waiting for nearly twenty minutes, and HRH is not a patient man.”
    â€œSorry,” I said. But he went on and on, leaning over me and bawling me out. I didn’t need to listen to it much because the engines started then, roaring and clattering, and everything shook. Some of the noise was from the other fliers. I could see them sideways beyond his angry face, rising up into the air one after another, about six of them, and I wondered what made them fly. They didn’t have wings or rotors.
    Eventually a warning ping sounded. The bawling man gave me a menacing look and went to strap himself in beside his mates. They were all wearing some kind of uniform, sort of like soldiers, and the one who had bawled at me had colored stripes round his sleeves. I supposed he was the officer. The men nearest me, four of them, were all dressed in dirty pale suede. Skyclad, I thought. Whatever that meant.
    Then we were rising into the air and roaring after the other fliers. I leaned over to the window and looked down, trying to see where this was. I saw the Thames winding underneath among crowds of houses, so I knew we were over London, but in a dreamlike way there was no London Eye, though I spotted the Tower and Tower Bridge, and where I thought St. Paul’s ought to be there was a huge white church with three square towers and a steeple. After that we went tilting away southward, and I was looking down on misty green fields. Not long after that we were over the sea.
    About then the noise seemed to get less—or maybe I got used to it—and I could hear what the men in suede were saying. Mostly it was just grumbles about having to get up so early and how they were hungry already, along with jokes I didn’t understand, but I gathered that the one who had talked to me was Dave, and the big one with the foreign accent was Arnold. The other two were Chick and Pierre. None of them took any notice of me.
    Dave was still