“If this is your future,” he said, “I don’t think I like it. Let’s get off. We have to change here…”
Brakes squealed as the black London cab pulled into the cobbled bay at the side of St Pancras station.
“Enjoy your holiday,” the cabbie said cheerily. He pocketed the wad of crumpled paper Gabriel had just handed him, believing it not only to be the fare from Bank Underground station, where they had got in, but also a handsome tip. “Nice to meet you all!” He grinned at what he perceived to be a pleasant young family with two small children and a nanny, clambering out of his cab on their way to France. He switched on his “For Hire” light, pleased that his day had got off to such a good start, and pulled away to look for his next fare.
“We’re looking for the Eurostar,” Gabriel said. “It goes to Paris.” He led them into a vast, airy concourse, now bustling and crowded with morning commuters.
“Paris?” Adam said, impressed.
“I have … friends there. I’ll check on the departure board to see when—”
“The next one leaves in twenty minutes,” Duncan said in a monotone. “07.28 hours. The journey takes approximately two hours and thirty-five minutes. Platform 14A.”
The others stopped and looked at him in astonishment. It was only the second time that Rachel and Adam had heard Duncan speak at all, and the first time, it had taken several thousand volts to get him going.
“Duncan remembers things like that,” Morag said. “He only has to read something once.”
They walked towards the ticket office, weaving through crowds of people dressed for work and others pulling suitcases on wheels, all of whom seemed intent on running over their toes at every possible opportunity. They squeezed past a statue of a small, fat man in a hat who appeared to be looking up at the glass-domed roof high above their heads. The long queue for the Paris train trailed back from the platform entrance, slowly passing through a ticket barrier and the arch of a metal detector.
“We’ll never get on,” Rachel said, walking towards the queue. “We haven’t even got tickets yet.”
A jogger wearing wraparound sunglasses, apparently oblivious to the outside world – earphones plugged in and determined in his trajectory – clipped Rachel’s shoulder as he ran by. Rachel spun round, holding her shoulder more in shock than in pain.
“Hey!” Adam called after the jogger, instinctively leaping to his sister’s defence. But the man was already gone. Rachel watched the lycra-clad figure disappear and was about to move on when someone else caught her eye. It was a man in a black biker jacket, putting in his own earphones as the jogger passed. He glanced at Rachel, then, quickly breaking the eye contact, fumbled in his pocket and put on a pair of glasses. Rachel was relieved to see him pull out an MP3 player and apparently adjust the volume.
She let out a long sigh of relief. She was tired, she had been sick, and now she was feeling paranoid.
“Here are our tickets,” Gabriel said. He tore up what looked like the back of a cereal packet and handed them a piece each. “Let’s get on the train.”
At the barrier, the guard, having spoken to Gabriel, seemed happy to let them through. Those at the front of the queue smiled indulgently at the young people pushing past who appeared to be helping their ancient grandmother through the turnstile and on to the train for her ninetieth birthday treat in Paris.
“I still don’t know how you do it,” Rachel said to Gabriel as they climbed aboard the train. “It’s like they look at us and see something else.”
“It’s just a knack,” he said. “You’ll pick it up.”
The train was almost full as it pulled out of St Pancras and shot across London, through tunnels and underpasses, emerging five minutes later into the sprawling suburbs. Rows of identical Edwardian houses became a blur in the window as the train sped past. Within another few minutes, the houses had been replaced by trees as they moved on into the countryside.
Rachel breathed deeply, and allowed herself the luxury of shutting her eyes and relaxing back into the velvety seat of the train.
“I want a wee,” a voice piped up from the seat next to her. Rachel opened an eye and saw Morag’s cheeky face, refreshed by a few hours’ sleep, beaming at her. This is what it must be like to be a mother, Rachel thought to herself. She winced as thoughts of her own mother flooded back. She prayed that Gabriel was right; that their mum would remain safe.
“I said, I want a—”
Rachel got to her feet and ushered the little girl back along the carriage.
Walking towards the toilet, she glanced to her left and felt a fierce jolt of panic. Sitting two seats behind them was the man in the biker jacket. His eyes were closed beneath his glasses and he was still wearing his earphones. Rachel told herself to stay calm. He was just a traveller; another passenger going to Paris. He did not stir as Rachel guided Morag past him and pressed the button on the curved, automatic door of the toilet. It slid open.
“You OK by yourself?” Rachel asked. Morag nodded and the door closed behind her. “Don’t lock it!” Rachel shouted.
She waited and looked back down the carriage, just able to make out Adam’s tousled head, above the seat opposite hers, lolling with the movement of the train as if he were asleep. Rachel felt conspicuous standing outside the lavatory and walked a few steps, through the sliding door at the end of the carriage, and looked out of the window. Fields rolled by and the train passed without stopping through an old red-brick station, not unlike the one in Triskellion.
That seemed like a very long time ago.
Mesmerized by the passing landscape, Rachel was only vaguely aware of the hiss as the toilet door opened, but reality came flooding back in an instant, with a shrill scream.
“Help!” Morag squealed.
Rachel spun round to see the jogger who had barged her on the platform. He held Morag round the waist with one arm, his other gloved hand clasped across her mouth. He wrestled the child forward towards Rachel as one or two other passengers craned their necks to see the source of the commotion. Unable to see clearly, they quickly returned to their laptops and papers, not wanting to become involved; sure that someone else would deal with whoever, whatever, was making the noise.
Rachel stepped through the doorway into the path of the man. He barged her with his shoulder for the second time that day, and this one was far from accidental.
Rachel fell back against the window, banging her head. The door to the next carriage slid shut, leaving them in a muffled airlock and giving Rachel a second to swing back her leg and deliver a hard kick to the man’s shin. He grunted in pain and slammed his body into Rachel again, with Morag still writhing in his arms.
Rachel knew that if she made too much noise, the train would be stopped. The police would be called and they’d be delivered back to where they started. Every fibre in Rachel’s body screamed out for Gabriel, but Morag’s panic alerted her own brother first. The doors slid open again and, like a small dog, Duncan few through the opening and sunk his teeth into the back of the jogger’s leg.
The man yelled and dropped Morag.
Then, as if appearing from nowhere, Gabriel was on him. The long index and middle fingers of his left hand pushed under the jogger’s dark glasses and into his eye sockets, his thumb pressed deep into the soft flesh under the man’s jaw, keeping his mouth shut. With his other hand flat, Gabriel delivered a stiff-fingered jab hard underneath the man’s ribs. The door of the toilet hissed open again, and Gabriel pushed the jogger back into it, releasing his fingers from the man’s face. The man’s eyes were clenched shut in agony and his mouth flapped open and shut, gasping for air like a dying fish. As he writhed on the toilet floor, the door closed and Duncan, reaching up to the electric lock, made sure that it would not open again.
A few people had gathered at the end of the carriage and, with Adam helping a tearful Morag back to her seat, Rachel reassured the gawping passengers, telling them the little girl had become stuck in the bathroom and was upset. Th
e guard gave Morag a pack of chocolate buttons as she sat back in her seat.
“Told you that you could do it,” Gabriel said, wiping his hands on a napkin.
“Do what?” Rachel asked, her own hands still trembling on the tabletop.
“Convince people,” he said. “Make them think what you want them to think. Make them see what you want them to see, by suggesting it to them.”
“Like hypnosis?” Adam said.
“Call it what you like: suggestion, hypnotism, programming. It’s probably the most useful tool we have. Practise it,” Gabriel said. “Use it—”
He was cut off as an automated voice came over the speaker in English, then in French: “The next station is Ashford International…”
Gabriel stood up. “Change of plan,” he said. “We’re getting off here.”
The five kids were the only passengers to leave the train at Ashford and, as it pulled away from the station, the man in the biker jacket opened his eyes. He watched the children cross the platform and climb the footbridge.
He removed his earphones, took the phone from his pocket and dialled.
The ferry was the size of a small town, with gift shops, restaurants, bars and even a cinema. Rachel’s eyes darted about. She checked out her fellow passengers, fixing on any person wearing earphones, of which there were many. She and Adam had become hypersensitive to any movement, any stray glances that were cast their way.
Gabriel, on the other hand, seemed relaxed and settled back in the big plush seat, whistling through his teeth and watching through a panoramic window as the white cliffs of the English Coast receded into the distance and finally melted into the grey-brown sea.
The slow train from Ashford had taken an hour or so to arrive at Dover. On reaching the docks, they had quickly assimilated themselves into a group of returning French students. They had disappeared easily among the high-spirited jostling school party; the stressed teacher somehow failing to register them every time she’d attempted a head count. They had been treated as schoolfellows by the other kids as they had sat on the coach and been driven on to the cavernous car deck of the ferry.
At first the gabble of the French schoolchildren had sounded like gobbledygook to Rachel, then gradually the odd disconnected word in English had sounded familiar to her ear: “weekend … super … rock…”
As she had concentrated, Rachel had begun to comprehend more and more of their chatter.
“Can you understand what they’re saying?” she had asked, turning to her brother.
“Oui, un peu,” Adam had said, his eyes widening in surprise at the words that had come from his mouth. “I … I mean, yeah … a bit.”
Rachel insisted that they all stay close together on the ferry. Morag and Duncan were restless, but Rachel knew that they were safest among the gaggle of French kids. She watched them as they sat playing an elaborate game of cards.
It was the first time that they had really had a chance to talk to Gabriel, and Rachel and Adam sat on either side of him in an attempt to pin him down.
“How did they know we were on that train?” Adam asked.
Gabriel shrugged.
“Listen,” Rachel said. “We doubled back from Harwich. No one could have known we got a ride on that fish truck. No one saw us, I swear.”
“Unless, for some reason, you told them?” Adam said, trying to provoke a reaction.
“You think I’d tell them?” Gabriel asked. He turned to Adam and stared at him with such an intensity that Adam had to turn away. “With everything you know about me, with everything you know about us.”
“I’m just saying…”
“Listen, Adam, there’s part of you that is very … human. Part of you that still hasn’t seen the bigger picture. It’s like you only see this in terms of yourself.”
“You think I’ve got an ego problem?”
“Whatever you want to call it. It’s not something I really understand. You need to see where you fit in the bigger scheme of things, like the bees in one of Honeyman’s hives. We’re all part of that whole. Bees in a hive do not let each other down; we do not let each other down. Understand?”
Adam was not really sure he did, but knew he’d been given a harsh lecture and nodded.
“We still have no idea how they knew we were on that train,” Rachel said.
“‘How’ doesn’t really matter,” Gabriel said. “These are powerful people, and there are a lot of them. We know how to evade them up to a point, but in the long term, there’s nowhere to hide. We’ve got to keep moving, got to keep one step ahead of them.”
It was a little over twelve hours since their breakout from Hope, but it seemed to Rachel that they hadn’t stopped moving in that time.
“Can me and Duncan go to the shops now?” Morag piped. “We’re bored.”
“No, we’re nearly there,” Rachel said, sounding like her mother. “Stay close to us.”
You could lose someone on a ferry this size, she thought, and the English Channel that rose and fell behind them looked very cold and deep…
Clay Van der Zee turned away from the huge map of Europe on a screen above the fireplace and looked again at the message on his PDA. The report from their agent in the field. He grunted and shook his head. “Strange.”
Laura Sullivan studied Van der Zee’s expression. There was annoyance there, of course, but also a degree of amusement, as though he was relishing the challenge that Adam and Rachel Newman had set him. She’d seen it too the night before, when the sirens had been ringing through the building and the guards had been sent out to search the surrounding countryside.
A search that had never been meant to succeed.
“These kids are good,” he’d said to her. He’d walked in from the woods, where the guards were still searching, taking off his thick coat and rubbing his hands together, relieved to be back in the warmth of the research facility.
Laura had stared out of her office window into the blackness of the pine forest, the torchbeams dancing in the darkness. “I told you they were special.”
“Still, it’s impressive, and they do keep surprising me.” Van der Zee had nodded, almost pleased. “I certainly hadn’t expected them to escape quite this quickly. Almost caught me off guard…”
Laura had been learning a lot about Clay Van der Zee, and those he worked for, in the hours since the children had escaped from the Hope Project. She had known that the escape had been expected; that it had been allowed to happen. She had argued that they could learn more by setting the kids free, to see where they went, how they behaved. The long arms of the Hope organization could keep track of them. She had argued passionately against the surgical “intervention” that Van der Zee and his superiors favoured a little further down the line.
There were other … interests that could be served first.
She had not known that Van der Zee had allowed the children to take the Triskellion. He had guessed, correctly – thanks to the research that Laura herself had helped conduct – that Rachel and Adam would never leave without it. Now Laura was beginning to understand that Van der Zee saw its loss as a small sacrifice. He was confident that he would get the Triskellion back. That, and plenty more besides…
“What is it?” Laura asked now.
Van der Zee looked up from his PDA. “It’s … interesting. They’re heading for France, but they got off the train before it went into the Tunnel.”
Laura felt a wave of relief pass over her but tried not to let it show. The children were being clever; they were not making it easy.
“And something else,” Van der Zee said. “A couple more surprises.”
“Yeah?”
Van der Zee was almost smiling again. Laura felt the temperature in his den drop a couple of degrees. “Our operative swears there were five of them.”
“Five?”
“The Newman twins, Morag and Duncan, and a boy. About the same age as Rachel and Adam. Foreign looking, according to the report.”
Somethi
ng clicked in Laura’s brain; a memory she couldn’t quite get hold of. Slippery and half-remembered. Had Rachel and Adam mentioned a boy they’d known back in the village? The idea twisted away as she tried to bring it into focus. “A couple of surprises, you said.”
Van der Zee looked at her. “When the train arrived in Paris, they found a man locked in the train toilet. He was half dead by all accounts; blinded in one eye with three broken ribs.” The doctor leant back in his chair and stared up at the map. “And he wasn’t one of ours…”
After the ferry had docked at Calais, they spent a few hours tramping around the grey streets, weaving among the afternoon shoppers intent on their business in spite of the drizzle. “Probably best to keep moving for a while, after what happened on the train,” Gabriel said. “It’s easier to disappear in a town.”
They walked past bakeries and butcher’s shops, past windows filled with hanging sausages, and cafes with old men gathered smoking outside. There was plenty to look at, and in the market square, where stalls were packing up for the day, the tempting smell from a caravan dispensing steaming paper cones of “frites” caused Adam to hang back for a moment. But Gabriel would let no one dawdle. He told them that this was what the future held for the time being. That theirs were now the lives of fugitives; they needed to think fast, stay alert and be ready to leave wherever they were at a minute’s notice.
“It’s harder to hit a moving target,” Rachel said.
Morag inched closer to Adam. “Target?”
Adam threw Rachel a look, then laid a hand on the young girl’s shoulder. “It’s just an expression.”
“Right,” Gabriel said, “we need supplies.”
They walked out of the town centre towards a huge, spiky bell tower with a yellow clock face that loomed over the otherwise featureless horizon like a reject from Disneyland. They headed out on a busy ring road and found a hypermarket – a vast store the size of three football pitches – that sold everything from marshmallows to motorbikes.
The Burning Page 10
