The Tenth Hour

THE TENTH HOUR

12:00 p.m.

The train rocked slightly as it pulled out of Euston Station, metal wheels screeching under the weight, while the city carried on above. Thomas Quinn sat alone by the window; coat collar still turned up against the grey drizzle outside. He hadn’t shaved in two days now, and the coffee in his paper cup had cooled long ago. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t drinking it for the taste.

He reached for the cup and saw something tucked under the sleeve of his coat, barely visible, just a corner of folded paper where it hadn’t been a minute ago. He must be losing his touch, he thought. He had felt nothing, yet it was there. His fingers hesitated before sliding it free. The paper was crisp and clean, folded with care. A single sentence ran across the middle in blue ink, written in sharp, deliberate print.

“The clock is ticking. Ten hours remain. Start where it all fell apart.”

No signature. No explanation. But below it, in smaller writing, almost as if an afterthought:

“What time is it?”

His hands tightened around the note. That phrase, it didn’t just mean something. It belonged somewhere. He hadn’t heard it in years, not since Istanbul. Not since everything went to shit.

The train clattered into King’s Cross station, and he stepped out onto the platform, the noise of the city rushing back in like a wave. People were moving around him in their usual impatient clusters, all rushing to somewhere, from somewhere, heads down, staring at their phones as if their lives depended on it, umbrellas already out in anticipation. He stood still for a moment, then slipped the note into his pocket and headed back upstairs, toward the street, his limp more noticeable now that the weather had turned damp again.

1:01 p.m.

The café hadn’t changed. The same dusty tables, the same worn-out cushions, the same chalkboard sign promising the best baklava in London. It was the place he and Alina used to meet before briefings, pretending to be lovers on holiday, murmuring classified details over their sweet tea and stale scones.

The woman behind the counter gave him a tired smile. “Been a long time,” she said, without missing a beat.

“I need a table in the back,” Quinn said. “And a napkin.”

She didn’t ask why. Just handed over the tea and passed him the napkin with a square of paper concealed within it. Folded just once. Just like the first one.

Written on the paper were a set of GPS coordinates, scrawled in the same handwriting. And beneath it, again:

“What time is it?”

He exhaled slowly. This wasn’t random, he knew that. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble. The message was meant for him, and him alone. But why now? Why, after all this time?

2:06 p.m.

Quinn stood across from a shuttered newsagent, staring at the broken payphone where he’d once left a wiretap. The coordinates had led him to this point, a place soaked in the residue of past failures. His past failures.

It was where he’d given the order to move in on a safe-house that turned out to be filled with innocent civilians. Bodies were his lasting memory. Bodies had come out covered in sheets. Too many of them. And when the dust finally settled, his clearance had gone, his name scrubbed from all the service logs. He was now a ghost.

Now, as the drizzle turned to light rain, he saw a man step out of a black cab and headed toward him. Mid-thirties, clean black nondescript coat, face like he’d been trained to blend in. A company man, without a doubt. The man stopped, pretending to check his phone, and said casually, “Excuse me. What time is it?”

Quinn didn’t answer. He stared at the man instead.

“Do I know you?” Quinn asked.

The man shook his head. “No. But she does.”

He slipped something into Quinn’s coat pocket; it was another note. Then the man turned and walked casually away without looking back. Quinn said no more and watched him go as he hailed another black cab.

This message was longer. It was a list of names. All of them were familiar. They were people he’d worked with. People he had thought were long dead.

At the bottom:

“Find the girl with the red umbrella.” And, of course: “What time is it?”

3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

The next few hours passed in pieces. He moved through streets he used to patrol in the shadows, watched by a city that no longer saw him. The names led him to old ghosts, those retired handlers, unreliable informants with shaky hands and watery eyes, men who’d bartered secrets for silence.

Each one passed him a word, a number, a phrase. The whole thing felt stitched together, but never loose. They all said the same thing before they left him:

“What time is it?”

By now, he’d stopped answering. The question had taken on a strange weight. It was less about clocks and time; it was more about readiness. Like someone clicking the safety off just before the trigger is pulled.

6:00 p.m.

It was raining harder now, people hurrying beneath a field of umbrellas. A typical London in the rain. He was scanning faces, waiting to feel that prickling tug of recognition, when he saw her.

She was young. Sixteen, maybe. With a bright red umbrella. No one else even noticed her.

She walked straight toward him, head down, and as she passed, she slipped something into his coat pocket.

Quinn turned sharply, but she was already gone, vanishing into the crowd.

He found a quiet corner behind a pillar and checked the item: it was a flash drive, a plain and unmarked silver thumb drive. He had seen hundreds like it over the years.

Back at an internet café, one of the few still standing, a rarity since mobile phones. At the counter, he paid with cash, then sat at the appointed station and waited while the computer loaded. He plugged in the drive. It contained just one file.

He clicked on the mp4 file. The voice that played was unmistakable.

Alina.

“Quinn. If you’re hearing this, it means you’re still alive. It also means they haven’t scrubbed all the tapes yet. The bomb is real. But it’s not just a bomb. They’re going to erase everything. Ten years of black ops, the off-book projects, they are going to delete all of it. You were the only one who saw the pattern. That’s why they buried you. You were never wrong.”

The recording crackled.

“You’ll find the rest beneath the station. Look for locker 17. And Quinn, whatever you do, don’t waste any time. We both know what hour it ends.”

Her voice cut out.

And then he heard it again.

A kid behind him, speaking to his mother:

“Mum, what time is it?”

The question struck him like a bell. It was almost seven, and he had three hours left.

6:58 p.m.

Quinn left the internet café and stepped straight into the dark. The rain had stopped, but the city was gleaming, streets were slicked with reflections, headlights smearing across puddles as they passed by. The drive was still warm in his pocket, like it had something left to say.

He walked fast, cutting down side roads and alleyways, sticking to shadows, hiding in plain sight. He’d trained himself, once, to read a city’s rhythm, its heartbeat, its movement, the pattern hiding behind the noise. Now that same instinct told him he was being watched. Someone had picked up his scent.

By the time he reached King’s Cross station, he’d circled twice, doubled back once, and left his burner phone on a bus headed in the wrong direction. If anyone was tracking him, they’d have to work for it.

The station buzzed with Friday night traffic. Students. Office workers. Couples heading out for the night. Nobody noticed the man in the worn coat limping past them. His eyes were now locked on the rows of lockers along the far wall.

Locker 17. It was still there.

But as he reached it, something felt off. Not the locker itself, just... the surrounding silence. A lull in the noise that made his skin crawl.

He didn’t open it. He wouldn’t open it just yet.

He took a slow breath, scanned the area, then stepped away and sat on a bench. Fifteen minutes later, sitting with a clear line of sight; he saw a man in a high-vis jacket walk past slowly, he pause, and glanced at Locker 17. Not for long. That was enough.

Quinn got up and headed straight to the toilets and locked himself in a stall. He took out a small roll of tools. He hadn’t used them in years, but he had never fully unpacked from that old life. He swapped jackets, then removed an 8mm nut from the hinge of the door, and stuffed it into his left boot, creating a false limp he wouldn’t forget. He applied a false moustache and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, then re-emerged as someone else entirely.

8:00 p.m.

Back at the locker, he worked fast. The keyhole had been tampered with recently, just a scratch, barely visible, the only tell tail sign. Someone had already accessed it. That didn’t mean the message was no longer there.

Once inside, he found, tucked beneath a loose panel, a thin envelope and a small pouch wrapped in brown paper. The pouch was too light to be explosive, so he opened it. Inside, he found a drive identical to the previous one. And written on the envelope:

“It was never about the bomb.” And again: “What time is it?”

Quinn felt it now, the shape of the thing. It was never meant to blow up the station. That had been the distraction, the noise to cover the real hit. If it wasn’t physical, it had to be digital. A virus, maybe. Something that could be deployed at the right moment, to exact the maximum chaos.

He opened the envelope.

Inside was a map. Not of the station above, though, but of the real underground levels. The old Cold War-era server banks far beneath King's Cross, long decommissioned. Or so he’d been told.

It was all starting to click into place.

The real target was the data files. The names, the operations. Entire histories. There was someone who wanted to wipe the slate completely clean. And the right virus would do it in one foul stroke. It had to be scheduled to launch remotely.

9:00 p.m.

He had one hour. He punched in his old security code; and to his surprise, it worked.

Slipping through this door, the memories flooded back from years ago, from the days when MI5 used to monitor transport hubs for signs of chemical threats. That door hadn’t been used in ages, but it still gave under pressure, making the old hinges creak. On the other side of the door was the stairwell. It led down to the depth. The old signage was now peeling off the walls, and the old emergency lights were barely flickering overhead. It brought back memories of his old life, a life he thought was gone forever.

His footsteps were the only sound until they weren’t. Somewhere behind him: a scrape. Then silence. Someone else was down here.

Quinn stepped up the pace, then came the fear, the adrenaline, that heart climbing into his throat feeling. It meant he was alive, just like in the old days; he loved that feeling, but he didn’t know why.

At the bottom of the stairwell was the old server room, decked out in pale green tile and rusted switchgear. A few lights still blinked to life, faint as dying stars. He punched in the code on the old faded door entry pad; the door clicked open.

There it was, terminal 3A. An updated server bank, a hidden backup, and connected to the main servers, the real target. But where was the security for such an important resource? He didn’t know.

He slid in the second drive into the USB port, and the screen flickered to life. At the login prompt, he typed in the same one he had from five years ago. His credentials should’ve been wiped completely from the system, but he had typed them in any way. The system paused, then accepted them. The system loaded. He was in.

Files blinked open. Names, faces, locations, projects that had never existed officially, operations buried so deep even parliament had never seen them. And among them, a folder marked CLEANSLATE. That had to be the virus.

He pulled up the timer: 00:58:13.

The plan had already been in motion.

Quinn didn’t think. He yanked the drive and jammed his own into the console. His fingers flew across the keys, running every stop-code and override he remembered. His coding skills had never let him down. He was not about to give up yet. He knew what he had to do, he would have to do this in a different way. The virus creator had expected someone to attack the code head on, and put in safeguards. No, he had to isolate the outgoing signal, before he could corrupt the core package, and reroute the destination node back on itself, all before the system could start its kill sequence. He worked his magic with the keys, but he wasn’t alone. A shadow moved across the glass just outside the room.

Quinn didn’t look up. “If you’re here to shoot me, at least wait until I crush the virus.”

The door creaked open, and he heard boots stepping into the room. A man’s voice, it was low and steady: “You were supposed to disappear.”

“I tried,” Quinn muttered. “It didn’t take, though.”

He hit enter.

The screen glitched… once, twice, then returned to normal. The timer read cancelled. The virus had now been neutralised.

He stood up, slowly.

The man facing him wasn’t young. He was probably in his mid-forties; he was lean, and had a sharp indistinct face. Another ghost from the same closet. But he didn’t raise his gun. He just watched Quinn for a moment, then said, “You always had terrible timing.”

Quinn smiled. “Apparently not.”

10:00 p.m.

The city hummed overhead. No explosion. No more panic. Just trains, rolling on schedule back and forth. People sipping lukewarm coffee, checking timetables, faces glued to their social media feed, just living their mundane lives, none of them knowing what almost happened beneath their feet.

Quinn climbed the stairs alone. His coat was soaked at the hem, and his real limp had returned with a vengeance, but he was still standing.

Back in the station, the crowd hadn’t thinned, but that was just normal for a Friday night, and the night was just beginning.

Walking toward the exit, his hand just grazing the railing. A voice spoke out behind him, one that was light and familiar: “Excuse me, sir. What time is it?”

He turned to see the girl with the red umbrella. There was no fear in her eyes, just something that resembled relief.

He checked his watch, then looked at her.

“Time to stop running,” he said.

And walked into the rain.