Gabriel pushed his way through the crowd, then stopped suddenly.
“Danger,” he said.
Rachel and Adam had already stopped a metre or so behind him. They could feel it too. In the short time since Gabriel had come back into their lives and “re-awakened” them, it had become obvious that in the two years since they had last seen him, their powers had strengthened; their intuition had become more finely tuned.
It had never been clearer than at this moment.
The danger was like a current buzzing across the shiny floor, crackling through the walls. People very close meant them harm.
Rachel felt the blood rushing through her; her pulse slowing as she looked from person to person. She took in everyone around her, noting each detail of every face in no more than a few seconds. Gabriel and Adam were also studying the crowd, looking for the danger as closely as she was. It was as though time had slowed and they were the only three people still operating as normal.
A metre or so away Rachel saw a man whispering into a mobile phone. Two men in suits were watching her from the ticket office; a third lowered his paper, raising it again quickly when he saw her looking at him; a fourth, casually dressed and wearing headphones, was smoking a cigarette and adjusting the volume on his iPod.
A kid wheeled his bike in front of her.
A young woman loaded down with luggage tried to hurry along a reluctant toddler.
An old woman shuffled slowly past on a walking frame.
Rachel tried to speak to Gabriel and Adam with her mind, but it was as if the frequency were scrambled. She turned and spoke out loud. “Who?” she said. “It could be any one of a dozen people. There could be any number of them.”
“Walk slowly towards the exit,” Gabriel said.
They began to move.
“There’re too many people,” Adam said. “They wouldn’t try anything in a crowd, would they?”
“Just keep moving,” Gabriel said.
They drifted through the throng of people, who still appeared to be moving in slow motion, their eyes fixed on their destinations. They parted as Gabriel, Rachel and Adam walked towards the exit.
“Almost there,” Adam said. “Maybe we were wrong.”
“No.”
And as Gabriel spoke, Rachel froze, seeing it too late. The hands of the old woman on the metal handle of the walking frame were smooth and unlined; her eyes were cold and dark. Before Rachel could speak, the walking frame was tossed aside and it became clear that the woman was actually young and strong. She reached for the toddler a few metres away, yanking the crying child towards her while at the same moment producing a gun.
“You know what I want, Rachel,” she said. “Just hand over the amulets and there’ll be no need to hurt anyone.”
The child’s mother began to scream. Others who saw the gun did the same, moving quickly away, until only six figures were left alone in the centre of the concourse.
Rachel, Adam and Gabriel.
The terrified mother and her child.
The young woman who was pressing the gun to the child’s head.
“Please,” Rachel said.
“It’s very simple.” The woman’s voice was as calm and cold as her eyes. “Give me the amulets.”
“Don’t!” Gabriel said to Rachel.
The toddler’s mother was hysterical, screaming at Gabriel, then at Rachel: urging them to do what the woman wanted.
Gabriel sighed and let his breath settle. He closed his eyes and focused, and a kilometre outside the station a signal on the line switched from red to green.
“You should listen to her,” the woman said to Rachel. “Do you really want this child’s life on your conscience?”
“Do you want it on yours?” Rachel said.
“I don’t have one.”
Rachel was finding it hard to focus. It was hard to think, to talk, above the high-pitched whine that was filling her head. She looked at Gabriel. “We’ve got no choice.” She reached up and unfastened the leather thong round her neck from which one of the Triskellions hung. She gestured to Adam – who was carrying the second Triskellion – to do the same.
“That’s good,” the woman said. “Just hand them over nice and slowly…”
People were still screaming, and in the corner of the station a group of armed police had appeared. Their weapons were levelled – but with the child so close to the gun, nobody would give the order to open fire.
A pair of pigeons swooped low over the heads of the horrified onlookers and the automatic Tannoy system announced the arrival of a train from Washington DC.
“Take a step towards me,” the woman said to the twins. She pressed the gun tighter against the child’s head.
The child’s mother dropped to her knees, saying, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
Adam handed his Triskellion to Rachel, and she held the two of them at arm’s length in front of her and moved towards the woman holding the child.
“Nice and slowly,” the woman said again.
“How do we know you won’t shoot us?” Rachel asked.
The woman smiled. “You’ll just have to read my mind.” She put out her hand, beckoning; desperate to get hold of the amulets. Rachel leaned forward to pass them over.
The woman’s eyes, which had been locked on the Triskellions, suddenly flicked away, widening in horror as the roar of an engine became almost deafening.
A second later a huge locomotive smashed through the station wall. Debris exploded across the hall, forcing people to run from cascading rubble and flying rock. Rachel seized her chance to run at the woman with the gun, but she was already tearing away in the opposite direction.
Rachel grabbed the toddler, passing him quickly back to his mother, before starting to run herself.
A few metres away, the engine careered across the floor. Sparks cascading in its wake, it crashed down on to its side before finally stopping, the first of its carriages embedded in the station wall; its wheels were buckled, its sides flayed and twisted like flaps of metal skin.
Rachel looked around, her heart thumping. Adam and Gabriel were right behind her.
“Here!” Adam said.
“We need to get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Now.”
Rachel followed his gaze and felt a stab of panic. Diesel was spilling from the felled engine, pooling out, thick and blue-black, across the marble floor. Near by, the man with the earphones was backing away and, without thinking, he tossed his cigarette on to the floor.
The twins and Gabriel sprinted towards the exit along with everyone else. A second later they heard a whoosh as the fire caught and felt the searing heat from the tide of flame that rolled across the station towards them. The screams of those trapped inside were lost beneath the blast and before Rachel knew what was happening she was picking herself up from the pavement. She was oblivious to the blood pouring from the cut to her head and the smell of burning as the three of them staggered out into the tangle of emergency vehicles waiting outside the main entrance.
“We need your car.”
The man behind the wheel of the taxi-cab had been staring at the smoke billowing from the station; watching people spilling out on to the street – some with their clothes on fire with passers-by beating out the flames. Now he turned and stared into the eyes of the boy looking in through the cab’s window.
“Get out of the car,” Gabriel said.
Without knowing why, the driver did as he was told and stood by watching as Gabriel, Adam and Rachel clambered into the cab. Gabriel got behind the wheel, and a second later the car veered away from the kerb. Pedestrians jumped aside as it tore out into traffic and accelerated away, swerving to avoid the fire engines and ambulances that were speeding in the opposite direction to join those already massed around the station.
The screen went blank as the CCTV feed from the station in Cincinnati was burned out by the fire. The director cursed quietly and flicked through other available sources until he was watching the pic
tures from a Cincinnati news station.
The “welcome” he had arranged for the twins had got a little warmer than he had planned.
He saw fire crews dragging equipment into the station and paramedics tending to those who had been injured. He saw local newscasters interviewing those who had been caught up in the disaster – a young woman jabbered about the girl who had saved her child’s life – and he watched as a cab lurched away from the chaos and was almost hit by an ambulance before disappearing into the distance.
The director turned from his wall of screens and looked down at the picture on his desk. A photograph of Rachel and Adam Newman. They were smiling. Happy.
He picked up the picture and stared at it. “Clever children,” he said.
It was the morning of their fourth day back in America.
The day before, Gabriel and the twins had driven the commandeered taxi all the way from Cincinnati in Ohio to Indianpolis – the state capital of Indiana – one hundred and eighty kilometres to the west. They had checked into a small motel on the outskirts of the city, where each had tried to take in what had happened; what the terrifying incident at the railway station had meant; and what they would do next.
“Run,” Gabriel had said. “Same as always. We just need to keep running.”
Rachel had been unable to sleep. She had lain awake, finding it impossible to shake the terrible images that ran on a seemingly endless loop inside her head: a young woman with flat black eyes, a screaming child, a sheet of flame, screams, flailing limbs…
As cicadas sang in the darkness outside her room Rachel had picked up her grandmother’s letter, reading it again and again until the insects had fallen silent and it had finally begun to grow light outside. As she had been transported back nearly half a century, she could sense that Adam was taking the journey with her; that the words and pictures taking shape in her head as she read were also coming to life in his.
The scorched earth and barbed wire of the air force base. The woman Celia Root had not been expecting to see. The terrible pain of it.
Now, on a Greyhound bus heading for St Louis, Missouri, those events were still with Rachel and Adam as they tried to catch up on the sleep they had missed.
God, it must have been horrible for her, Rachel said, eyes closed, mouth unmoving. When that woman opened the door. His wife.
Never mind the wife, Adam answered. What about those kids? The eldest one sounds weird, and Hilary Wing was obviously a creep even back then.
Rachel shuddered, as though mention of the name had conjured an icy blast that cut through to her bones.
Hilary Wing…
The half-uncle they had thought dead until he had reappeared – more creature than man – to hunt them down, determined to possess the Triskellions for his own dark and twisted reasons.
Adam could sense his sister’s discomfort. He got what was coming to him, he said with his mind. Back in Morocco. Gabriel sorted him out once and for all.
Rachel nodded. She did not know exactly what had happened between Gabriel and Hilary Wing two years earlier when they had fought in the Cave of the Berbers, but she could still recall the look on Gabriel’s face – something hard had glittered in his eyes as he’d fastened the two Triskellions round her neck in the dark deep of the cave. “That creature you saw by your bed,” he had said. “He won’t be bothering you again…”
Gabriel was sitting on the seat in front of her. He had obviously been following her mental conversation with Adam. He turned and smiled. “Adam’s right,” he said. “No need to worry about him. And don’t worry about your grandmother, either. She’s drawing you to Alamogordo. This is what she wants.”
“She’s dead,” Rachel snapped. “How can she want anything?”
“You want something badly enough, nothing can get in the way of it. Certainly not something as … trivial as dying.”
“Trivial?” The bad temper Rachel had woken up in came to the boil. “What about those people caught up in what happened at the station yesterday? What about their relatives?”
“Nobody died,” Gabriel said.
“You sure about that?”
“Some people were … hurt – no more than that. It couldn’t be helped.”
“Sometimes I think that you like hurting people; that you enjoy paying them back.”
“I wasn’t the one with the gun,” Gabriel said.
Adam sat up in the seat across from Rachel. “I meant to ask you about that,” he said to Gabriel. “Why didn’t you just get rid of that woman’s gun? Make it burn or vanish or jump out of her hand or whatever. You can do that kind of thing standing on your head.”
“So can you,” Gabriel said. “I’m not the only one with … party tricks.”
Adam nodded slowly. “I know, but yesterday…”
“It didn’t work,” Rachel said. She knew because she had tried to deal with the gun herself – and failed. “And there was this noise in my head…”
Adam nodded. “I thought it was just because I was scared. I couldn’t see where the danger was coming from, and then when I did, there was nothing I could do. I focused on the gun, tried to get rid of it, but it was as if all my strength was gone. I just hoped you’d be able to do it.”
“I tried.” Something passed across Gabriel’s face and the worry was evident in the way his eyes drifted down to the floor. “That woman had something,” he said. “Something that blocked my mind, and I just couldn’t get to her. Using the train was the only thing I could do in the end.”
“What do you mean, ‘blocked’?” Adam asked.
“They’ve developed something,” Gabriel said. “Moved on from their earphones and dark glasses – and whatever it is, it means that, until we can find some way to shut it off, we’re in trouble.”
“Great,” Adam said.
“I’ll figure it out,” Gabriel said.
Rachel’s mood was still black and bubbling. “Well, try not to hurt too many people in the meantime,” she said. “Even if it can’t be helped.”
Gabriel turned away and slid down low in his seat.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Adam whispered.
Rachel said nothing. She turned her face to the window and closed her eyes against the fierce morning sun as the bus rumbled west along I-70.
“We’ve got an appointment with Detective Scoppetone,” Kate said.
The officer at the desk stared at her.
“We’re old friends,” Kate added. The officer yawned. “She’s expecting us…”
Kate and Laura had landed in New York the previous evening. They had gone straight to Kate’s old apartment, and although Kate had been as disconcerted as the twins to find that her old life had somehow been … erased, she had at least discovered from the present owners that the children had been there. She had tried contacting Ralph at the university – but had run into another brick wall.
Laura had tried her best to be reassuring. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“I’m not sure I want to find out,” Kate had said.
She and Laura had found themselves a cheap hotel and eaten dinner in virtual silence. Having travelled halfway around the world in search of the children, they were now at a loss as to what to do next. Then Kate had remembered an old friend from university.
She had put in a call and asked for a huge favour…
Angie Scoppetone was skinny and hard-faced, with bleached-blonde hair cut very short and a manner that suggested she was scared of very little.
“You don’t look any different,” Kate said. “What’s it been, twenty years?”
“Twenty-one,” Scoppetone said. “You look a little older.”
Kate tried to laugh. “I’ve had a hard life,” she said. She introduced Laura and then the detective led them upstairs to a small room at the far end of an open-plan office, a dozen weary-looking faces turning to stare as they walked past.
“You any idea how big this town is?” Scoppetone asked when she’d dropped into the chair
behind her desk. “Any idea how many hotels there are?”
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Kate said. “You were the only person I could think of. I really need to find them.”
Scoppetone stared at Kate and Laura like they were suspects and she was deciding how best to interrogate them.
“So, did you have any luck?” Laura asked.
Scoppetone waited a few seconds. “Maybe,” she said. She began rifling through some papers on her desk. “Doing this job, you get to know the house detectives at most of the big hotels, and as it happens the guy at the Waldorf is a buddy of mine. According to him, two kids – a boy and a girl, both about sixteen, both dark-haired – spent the night before last in the presidential suite.”
“That’s them,” Kate said. “That’s Rachel and Adam.”
“I thought you were looking for three kids,” Scoppetone said. “My friend only saw two.”
Laura understood, but decided not to try to explain. She knew that people only saw Gabriel when he wanted them to. “I’m sure that’s them,” she said.
Scoppetone shook her head. “God only knows how they managed to check in. That’s one piece of detective work I don’t have time for.”
“Look, we really appreciate this,” Laura said.
Kate leaned forward, impatient. “Are they still there?”
“Checked out,” Scoppetone said, reading her scribbled notes. “My guy says they caught a cab to Penn Station. That’s it.”
Kate’s face fell. She slumped back in her chair and looked helplessly at Laura.
“Or it would be,” Scoppetone said, “if I wasn’t such a damn good detective.” She slid a large black and white photograph across the desk.
Kate leaned forward again and picked up the picture. It was grainy and blurred, but she recognized Rachel and Adam easily enough. She nodded. “It’s them.”
“They bought tickets to Cincinnati, Ohio.” Scoppetone looked serious. “I hope they weren’t caught up in what happened there yesterday.”
Triskellion 3: The Gathering Page 9
