by David Gilman
It’s your mind. Ignore it. It’s only fear, and fear can’t hurt you. He tugged out his compass, found his beta lamp and watched the needle swing. He followed the direction west, stumbling, barking his shins on unseen pipes. Cobwebs caught his face and hair, and as he moved deeper along the tunnel, he heard scratching sounds scurrying before him. Rats.
The service tunnel led to a set of iron steps that went up into the back of the museum’s loading bays.
Max breathed in the cold night air and exhaled the fear he had bottled inside him. Now there were lights. Police cars blocked all the gates, officers came and went, and to the front and to the left of the loading bays, a woman wearing biker leathers was talking to a police officer. She had tufts of colored hair. She was pretty in a funky way. But tough-looking. She never smiled. That was the MI5 woman Sayid had told him about. And she had the place sewn up. There was no way Max could make a run for it.
At the end of the loading dock, an ambulance waited. It was almost as if it was not part of the activity in the nearby courtyard. Doors opened behind him and two paramedics wheeled out a blanket-covered body. They went down the side ramp, opened the vehicle’s doors and began to load Dr. Miller’s body—Who else could it be? Max reasoned—into the ambulance.
Max followed in their footsteps, and as they clambered out, he waited until they noticed him. His sadness was not really an act, but he had to make sure they believed him.
“Excuse me,” Max said.
“You all right, mate?”
“That’s my granddad in there. We were in the museum together when he … fell down.”
“Oh, I’m really sorry, son.”
“I tried to save him,” Max said.
“Yeah, we saw someone had had a go. Look, there’s nothing you can really do in a situation like that. Even if we’d been there, we probably couldn’t have saved him either.”
Max nodded and took genuine comfort from the paramedic’s consolation. “I’ve just spoken to the police. They said if it was all right with you, I could go with him. My mum and dad are on their way to the hospital.”
The female paramedic looked at her partner, who seemed uncertain. “You sure you want to?”
Max just nodded.
They closed the doors. Max sat on the opposite stretcher to Dr. Miller’s body. The ambulance smelled of disinfectant—a cold, functional place created to save lives. Or to ferry the dead on to the next stage of their journey.
The ambulance stopped at the gates. A police officer waved it through, giving it safe passage through the gawping crowd. It slipped away quietly. No flashing lights or siren needed. There was no need to trumpet a man’s death.
Max watched the police activity recede beyond the city streets. He reached out his hand and laid it on the still form in front of him.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
The trail had gone cold.
There was no trace in the database of the fingerprints Charlie Morgan had found in room 27 at the British Museum, and the search was called off by the time it opened the next morning.
Ridgeway had spoken to Fergus Jackson, but, despite his most persuasive efforts, had failed to convince him that taking fingerprints from Max’s room could aid in tracking him. Jackson was adamant. Such an act would be an infringement; he had no desire to have an innocent pupil’s fingerprints on a police or Security Service database.
No one is innocent, Ridgeway wanted to say, but did not.
Now Ridgeway faced a defeated, gum-chewing Morgan in his office.
“We might have to do this off the record,” he said, finally airing his thoughts.
“All right, boss,” she said. She didn’t care. Rules were for the guidance of the unthinking and the masses. The two were not mutually exclusive.
“I had a brief and robust conversation with a senior member of the civil service who had Jonathan Llewellyn as his shepherd dog.”
Llewellyn was a higher-up in MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. “Does Six have an interest in Max Gordon?”
“Not him. Riga. He’s international and seems too big a hitter to bring in to get involved with the Gordon boy. I’ve now been told officially to keep my nose out of it unless, or until, the security of the nation is at risk from an internal threat. Which, from this particular incident, it is not.”
“I’ve got some leave due,” she said, knowing full well the suggestion for any unofficial activity had to come from her. A tacit understanding between professionals. What someone does in their own time is their business, not the department’s.
“Good. I’ll let you know when to take it. There’s absolutely no sign of Max Gordon leaving the country. Passport control at all regional and international airports and ferry terminals has been flagged. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what his involvement is with Riga, nor why Danny Maguire’s body was mistakenly cremated in a supposed mix-up with another boy at a funeral parlor. I don’t know why I’ve been warned off by our government and Six. But I do know that I want to find out.”
“Can you speak to his headmaster? See if there’s a connection with Central America?”
“Not Peru?”
“Don’t know for sure; it’s only a hunch. And I’ve just remembered. I’ve got his laptop. His fingerprints will be all over it.”
She blew a bubble with a satisfying burst. She didn’t need anyone’s permission to lift those.
In the early hours of that morning, Max Gordon had walked away from the busy clamor of a city hospital. Easily lost in the crowds, he was minutes from an Underground station.
By the time the automated voice advised passengers that the train’s doors were closing, he was on a seat, his head nodding in exhaustion onto his chest. A woman with a big suitcase squeezed next to him. She nervously held on to her case’s strap, though Max reasoned it would take some effort to steal it in a hurry. It was obvious by the travel labels that she was going to Heathrow. He asked if she’d wake him when they got there. Then, with an arm hooked through his backpack, he fell into a deep and desperately needed sleep.
Max stood beneath the glistening ceiling of London’s Heathrow terminal five. Vast wings of glass, held fast seemingly to keep them from flight, spanned the concourse. There were a couple of hours to go before he boarded. Sayid had already checked him in online when he made the flight bookings. He could not risk using public email or phone to contact Sayid. It was down to the wire now. He had either got away with it this far or he hadn’t.
If anyone had rumbled what he had done, or if they had interrogated Sayid too strongly and forced his best friend to tell them everything, then Max would be picked up the moment he got to the boarding gate. He would soon find out. In the meantime, he needed a wash, food and a pharmacy. Not necessarily in that order.
Sometimes the small things in life help give you a boost—the airport cost five billion pounds to build, and the showers were pretty good. Max let the steaming water sluice away the grime and sweat. He stood for a long time, letting it pound his skin, allowing his mind to settle. He still had so much to do. And he wished there were a compass that pointed him in the exact direction he needed to go. He would use Miami as a gateway to fly down into the Caribbean and then strike inland through Belize, where he would try to find one of the remote border villages. Someone there had to know what had happened to his mother; a foreigner’s presence would not have gone unnoticed. Danny Maguire must have come close to finding out—and had paid the ultimate price. Max took heart from the fact that he had got himself this far.
By the time he presented himself at the boarding gate, he felt a different person. He had inverted his reversible jacket and settled the cheap reading glasses that he’d bought in the pharmacy onto his nose. He hoped that the brown color tint he had washed into his hair would not stay forever—the bottle’s label had promised him it would not.
He caught a glimpse of himself in a reflection and returned the counter clerk’s smile as she checked him through.
“E
njoy your flight to Miami, Mr. Lewis.”
Joshua John Lewis: eighteen years old, a final-year pupil at Dartmoor High. Max had also taken Lewis’s passport the night he broke into the vault.
Max Gordon had ceased to exist.
Riga went to an office in Canary Wharf. It was high up in one of the new towers that proclaimed themselves to the world as being very modern, very important and very expensive. None of which impressed Riga.
He waited while the ordinary-looking man spoke on a cordless phone. He stood with his back to the mercenary, making no concession to his presence. The balding head had close-cropped gray hair, barely covering the man’s scalp, but there was still a light dusting of dandruff on the crinkled suit. The man reminded Riga of a teacher who had taught English at his school in Finland. If you passed him in the street, you would not give him a second glance. Little did Riga know at the time that the mumbling teacher was a government agent, someone who kept an eye out for promising young men who would work for the state with blind obedience. Young men who could be trained to superfitness and given unpalatable tasks. And, like that teacher, this man speaking softly into the telephone wielded enormous power. Never judge a book by its cover. Never pick a fight with a stranger. Never believe the obvious. Riga had learned his lessons the hard way, and he knew that the man who now turned to face him was answerable to even more powerful people.
He replaced the phone and faced Riga with an ambivalent expression, giving nothing away. A professional. There was a hint of a German accent when he spoke, but Riga knew he was Swiss and that after this conversation, the helicopter on the roof of the building would whisk him away to another building in another city in another country. The extent of these people’s influence was global. His name was Cazamind.
“The Gordon boy is still in the country. Our people have double-checked the computer logs on all airline bookings,” Cazamind said.
“So why pursue him? It’s a waste of time,” Riga said, checking out the view, knowing he could speak freely because his services were so valued.
“I do not know the full details, but our friends”—he laid emphasis on the word friends—“feel it essential that their activities in Central America be kept private.” Cazamind brushed the dandruff from his shoulders and blew it from his desktop to the floor.
Riga wondered if anyone ever took him out to a restaurant and if the sight of that small snowstorm put diners off their food. He kept those thoughts to himself. He could stand his ground on any issue relating to his employment, but to discuss personal hygiene with the man who represented such powerful people would be a breach of etiquette. Even professional killers need good social skills.
“Gordon doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t look as though Maguire got any info to him,” Riga said.
“We cannot be certain. Not yet. He approached the man at the British Museum who was Maguire’s mentor; perhaps something passed between them before the old man died. What do you think of him? The boy.” Cazamind paused and, like a Swiss banker studying a balance sheet, gazed at Riga—reading between the lines, looking for anything not quite right. “Your professional opinion,” he said finally.
Riga gazed down at the bankers and traders scurrying out of their offices and into the man-made oases of food and drink. This was a small city-state created especially for the people who made the country’s wealth. In moments they would be jam-packed into expensive restaurants where they would have to shout to be heard in a conversation. Then an hour later they would surge back to their computer screens and play the equivalent of high-stakes poker with other people’s money. Meanwhile, Riga was a free man. Like the kid. Max Gordon was out there on his own, running scared maybe, being hunted, gone to ground, surviving. Riga respected that. He did not respect the moneymakers. Their risk was not the same as his and Max Gordon’s.
Riga turned back to Cazamind. “He’s resourceful. He’s got guts. He’s tough. He doesn’t give up. He knows how to survive, and he’s got a brain between his ears. If he has anything, anything at all that compromises the people you represent, the kid will exploit it. In a couple more years, I could train him up. He’d be an asset.”
“And you think that is even a remote possibility?”
Riga shook his head. Of course not. The boy did not have the instinct. He would not be able to stand the smell of a man’s fear as he moved in to kill him. He shook his head again.
Cazamind sighed, his palms opening in a small gesture of inevitability. “Then, if he is that tenacious, we should assume the worst-case scenario. We must find him, wherever he is.” He fixed his eyes on the mercenary. “And have you kill him.”
Twelve hours later, in Florida, a bus lurched, a car swerved and there was a scrape of metal. The drivers swore at each other. A man who had obviously been living rough threw up in the back of the bus, and the stench was foul. Passengers shouted abuse at him. The driver turned and called to everyone.
“OK, folks, take it easy. End of the line. I have to call this in. There’ll be another bus along in a few minutes.”
The driver eased himself down the aisle, muttering apologies to his passengers, most of whom he knew by name. His belly pushed against his trouser belt. Maybe that was why he wore suspenders as well, Max thought, just in case the belt snapped one day and, like a dam bursting, his belly disgorged and smothered everything in its vicinity. Max was surprised the man was as good-natured as he was, considering his bus had just had an accident, a bloke had puked all over the backseats and it was hot.
Miami.
Hot, bustling, big sky and brightly dressed people in floral shirts. It looked just like a travel poster. Except down this part of town. This was where the opulent lies of television and movies stopped. There was no glamour around here. There were poor people living on welfare who caught buses. Some of the shops were boarded up.
They stood in the heat while the drivers exchanged details. A Miami–Dade County police car arrived, but there was no sign of a replacement bus. Max turned to a woman who waited in the queue with him. “Excuse me, can you tell me where Backpackers’ Big House is?”
She looked at him for a moment as if an extraterrestrial had suddenly appeared next to her. “You English?”
“Yes,” Max said. “And you’re an American.”
She laughed. “You got a smart brain, son. What you doin’ all the way down here? This is no place for sightseein’, hon. This is the baadlands.”
“My friend in England booked me into a place called Backpackers’ Big House.”
“He wou’n’t be no fren’ o’ mine, he did that to me. I can tell you. No, sir.”
Sayid, what have you done?
“Still, I guess mebbe you kids’ve gotta have somewhere to stay, and it’s better’n bein’ on the streets.”
“I guess,” Max said.
“Well, you go three blocks south, two blocks east and it’s down there near the docks.”
“Thanks.”
“You sure you heard what I just said?”
“I’ve got a compass. I’ll find it, thanks.”
“What are you, some kinda Boy Scout? Son, this ain’t cowboy country—this is hostile territory. You get to this place you lookin’ for, you lock your door and don’t go out at night, you hear?”
“Yes. OK. Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome.” She watched Max walk away. “Damn fool kid’s walking into a mess of trouble. But do they listen? They do not,” she said to herself, and then yelled at the driver being questioned by the police. “Clarence! Where’s this damn bus you said was comin’?”
At least the room at the Backpackers’ Big House was halfway clean. There were only a few cockroaches scurrying around the bare floor. A solid, old-fashioned bed, with a well-worn but laundered sheet and a cotton bedcover on the mattress, was the only furniture. There wasn’t even a wire coat hanger to hook over the back of the door for his clothes. There was a bathroom down the hall. Smelly, industrial-sized rubbish skips, or Dumpsters, a
s the desk clerk had called them, were below his first-story window. It was the only room the guy at the desk had available. He wore a bandanna over his head, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a gold earring. White whiskers clung like cactus spines to his face. It was no good Max’s arguing that his friend in England had made a booking—there was no trace of it, and a whole tour of German backpacking kids had reservations, taking all the rooms. But they hadn’t arrived yet, so why couldn’t he have a room that wasn’t over the Dumpsters? Max wanted to know. Because, the man said slowly, the bookings had all been paid for with a deposit. It was the room above the Dumpsters or nothing.
There was no key in the door lock. That was because, Cactus-Face told him, some dumb kid had lost it. If Max wanted to pay for a new lock, he could have a new key.
Max had slept in worse places. He took his backpack into the bathroom down the hall, where there was a lockable door, and showered. The hair color didn’t wash out. Back in his room, he pulled the bed across the door. He could hear the belly-growling blast of a ship’s horn not too far away. He had enough food and drink he’d picked up at the airport to keep him going until tomorrow. Just as well, looking out at those bleak streets. It was obviously not the kind of area renowned for family diners.
Max lay on the bed fully dressed, dismissing the idea of leaving his clothes on the floor. He hated doing nothing. It was like being in a hide, waiting for an animal to appear and having to find that stillness inside himself. Just as he’d done with his dad when he had taken him to Scotland and they sat next to a sea loch in a camouflaged hide waiting to see the wild otters. He and his dad had barely spoken, because they had had to stay silent, but they shared the same passion. Father and son on a small adventure together. Well, not anymore. His father had abandoned his mother, and now Max was on an adventure on his own.
He calmed himself as the adrenaline pumped at the thought of his dad. He needed to take every day as it came. He fingered the khipu, wishing his thoughts could show him the pictures the knots represented. He was warm, and safe from anyone pursuing him. All he had to do was get up early and reach the airport for the connecting flight to Central America.
