by David Gilman
“Faster, Xavier!” he shouted. “C’mon!”
Max abandoned any thoughts of crocodiles being in the water. He reasoned, and hoped, that the swirling current and boulders would keep them at bay. His leg muscles felt as though they were being torn apart by the effort—the weight of the raft and Xavier together made it enormously difficult to push it across the current. The knot of fire in his shoulder felt like a hard-boiled egg beneath his skin, a small pocket of heat that would erupt at any moment. He kept kicking, shifting the angle of the raft, making it steer more easily. Xavier worked hard, trying to complement Max’s strength by controlling the direction, jabbing the pole against boulders and riverbed as desperation fueled their efforts.
Max angled himself between the raft and the opposite bank; one more shove would get them out of sight. The front of the raft found its way into the cave; Xavier ducked, then lay flat as it went beneath the overhang and nudged into the chill half-light. The current pushed the rear end of the raft away, threatening to suck it out of the hole and take it back into the main stream. Max yelled, urging strength to transfer from his legs to his chest and arms as he made one last desperate shove to get the raft under cover. No sooner were they in the cave than Xavier screamed. A flurry of small bats, like a swarm of starlings, squeaked out of the cave. Max reached up and grabbed Xavier’s shoulder. “Stay down! They won’t hurt you. They’re not vampire bats.”
He could hear Xavier’s smothered breathing as he buried his face in his arms. Max was less concerned about the bats and more worried about the swarm being spotted by whoever was in the helicopter, because now the thundering engine and whirring blades reverberated inside the cave as it drew level. Max saw the helicopter flash past, so low that the skids were less than a meter from the surface. Both doors were open, and he caught a glimpse of someone sitting on the other side, feet dangling over the edge. The aircraft was so close to the water that, had the man been facing the cliff wall where Max and Xavier were hiding, he would have seen them.
They listened as the helicopter noise receded and stopped echoing around the small cave. Finally, it went quiet. Now Max had to make a decision. They either stayed in the cave and waited a few hours, which meant they would be there all night, or they pushed back into the river and took their chances that the helicopter would not return.
Another five minutes, Max decided.
The tree-lined river edge blurred with speed, but Riga scanned everything. The helicopter had jigged ever so slightly to the left.
He pulled a headset and microphone off the bulkhead and spoke to the pilot: “What?”
“Nothing,” the pilot answered. “Bats. We must’ve spooked ’em.”
Riga thought for a moment. Maybe.
“Go back, half a click,” he ordered.
The pilot pulled the helicopter up, banking in a fast, curving turn, then dropped it down again to just above the river, going back downstream for half a kilometer. Riga peered ahead, looking for any caves that might give the boy refuge. There was nothing obvious, but then he saw the slab of low overhang and the dark shadows of water that reached under the rock face.
“See that overhang? Stand off that—I want to look.”
* * *
The cold air in the cave was welcoming at first, but now the water made Max shiver. Xavier still lay facedown as bats returned, seeking darkness. Then the unmistakable sound of the helicopter grew closer.
“Xavier. They’re coming back!”
They were trapped. The water merged into blackness a couple of meters farther in, but there the ceiling of the cave would be almost on top of the raft—certainly no room to stay on board.
“We have to get the raft farther in, right into this corner, as far as we can. You have to get into the water. Come on.”
Xavier shook his head. Going in the water was a fearful experience, but going into that inky darkness filled him with dread.
“You have to!” Max commanded, whispering as if his voice could be heard over the thundering racket of the helicopter that now hovered ten meters from the entrance. Then a searchlight danced beneath the overhang and lit the water.
Riga crouched low on the helicopter’s skids as the pilot controlled the powerful searchlight into the narrow slit.
“Lower!” Riga ordered.
“We’ll be in the water! There might be rotten trees and debris beneath the surface. We could get caught,” the pilot told him.
“Do it,” Riga said quietly.
Carefully the pilot lowered the helicopter so that Riga’s legs went below the surface. Now the killer could bend down and look into the cave. If the boys were in there, he would see them.
Reflections from the water skittered around the walls as the power from the whirring blades created a spray across the surface. The thundering noise was deafening. Xavier covered his ears and screamed again as another swarm of bats fled the sudden terror and scraped across his back, neck and head.
Max reached up, yanked him into the water, pulled him spluttering from beneath the surface and clamped one of the boy’s hands on to the raft. “Kick! We have to get in farther!”
Shocked and frightened, Xavier responded as Max took most of the weight of the raft, forcing himself to kick fiercely, ignoring the weight of his waterlogged cargo pants and boots.
Like a monster’s eye, the light sought them out, but Max and Xavier had managed to shove themselves right into the corner. Their heads were barely above the surface as the water whipped into their faces. Xavier was gasping; Max could barely open his eyes. Holding on to the raft with one hand, he reached out with his injured arm and grabbed the back of Xavier’s T-shirt, holding him up. “Hang on!” he yelled, but his voice was swallowed by the air-pummeling beat of the rotors.
* * *
Riga saw a swarm of bats escape the narrow gap. He stayed, eyes level, for another two minutes, knowing the pilot was struggling to keep the helicopter stable. The current was exerting pressure against the skids. Maybe they were pushing their luck. He didn’t want the helicopter to be pulled into the river. There was nothing beneath that slab of rock except bats.
“OK. Take her up,” he said.
The pilot eased the helicopter gently from the water and wished he had never been chosen for this journey.
The silence was as big a shock as the deafening noise. Their ears rang for a few moments, but then the darkness and still water settled over them. Max eased the raft out, still holding Xavier, until there was space for him to clamber back on board.
“OK? We made it,” Max said cheerfully, despite the inflammation in his shoulder stiffening the muscles.
Xavier seemed exhausted, but opened his eyes and nodded. “We made it,” he whispered. “Who were they?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “Search and rescue, maybe Coast Guard. Maybe not.”
“Who else could it be?” Xavier said.
Max didn’t even want to think that it could be the people who’d been chasing him back in England. How could they know he was here? Right here, on this river, in this cave? He shook his head.
“We’ll give it another few minutes and then we go.”
“The bats will come back,” Xavier said.
“We’re the ones invading their home. How would you feel if you were fast asleep and some monsters came into your bedroom? You’d run outside screaming.”
“Yeah, amigo, but when I go to sleep, I don’ hang upside down in my bed. Let’s get out of here.”
The current, like a gatekeeper, rushed across the cave’s opening, making it difficult to push free and have any degree of maneuverability. It would be like jumping into a slipstream; the river could whip them away onto boulders, which would shatter the raft. If they didn’t get a big enough push into the river, into the deeper, slower-moving water, Max couldn’t see how they could control those first few vital moments.
“Roll onto your back,” he told Xavier, “use your feet against the ceiling and push us out. I’ll shove from here. The mo
ment we hit that current, you’ve got to get up and push us away with the pole. I’ll get aboard soon as I can. OK?”
Xavier nodded. He didn’t mind Max telling him what to do; it took away the responsibility that had always scared him.
“One, two, three—go!” Max yelled.
Xavier pedaled against the ceiling, giving the raft momentum.
They were clear. Max felt the tug of the current. He was now at the back of the raft and, instead of pushing, was now being pulled. His hands were slipping, the wood too wet to hold. He curled his fingers under the thin vine that held the raft together, still trying to use his body as a rudder to shape the raft’s passage. Xavier was doing the best he could, but Max could see he was already losing control; he did not have the intuitive skill to nurse it into the best part of the river. The current pushed Max’s body against the back of the raft, and he used it to help him clamber aboard.
“You OK?” he gasped.
Xavier nodded, pleased he could hand back the steering of the raft to Max. He shoved the pole toward him.
“That was great—well done, mate,” Max said reassuringly.
Xavier grinned. He could not remember the last time someone had said he’d done something well. “Yeah? I do OK?”
“Better than OK. You saved us.”
The boy smiled, wobbling as he kept his balance against the swaying movement, but there was an unmistakable look of pride on his face. Max knew how important it was to be encouraged when things got tough.
“Can you help me balance it now? The current’s getting stronger—we have to be really careful. Whichever way I move to pole us, you go on the opposite side,” Max said.
“You, the angels and me. We make a great team. ¿Sí?”
“The best,” Max said.
As Max shoved hard to slip the raft sideways, out into the middle of the river and the calm water, Xavier moved carefully, concentrating on doing what Max had asked him. For the first time since he could remember, he was no longer a passenger.
Riga flew on for another hour. There was no sign of the boy, and there were a dozen or more small tributaries and offshoots like veins creeping into the jungle. Maybe he had got this far and gone off into one of them. If that was the case, it would take another couple of days of searching, and there was far more cover in those narrow rivers so he would be hard to spot. Riga needed more men, and another helicopter. He would call them in at dawn.
“Find a sandbank or somewhere to land.”
The pilot glanced back. This was not something he was keen to do.
“Weather’s shifting,” he said, hoping it would change Riga’s mind.
Riga checked the sky. He could smell the salt air being pushed upriver by the stiffening breeze. He nodded.
“I know. We stay as long as we can. The boy’s out there somewhere.”
“You think you missed him?”
“He has skills—and maybe luck—so we wait. Until morning, if the weather lets us.”
The pilot nodded, knowing better than to argue. At least they had emergency rations aboard the helicopter. It might be a long night, but they could close up the chopper and keep out the mosquitoes, and they would have food in their stomachs, which was more than that kid would have. But he had seen these local weather fronts hit the coast before. This Riga was not local; he might think he could outlast anything. Not around here.
“It’ll be difficult,” he said, “what with the storm. We might have to get going in a real hurry.”
“I don’t care,” Riga replied. He wanted to stay as close as possible to the hunt. The pilot hoped this crazy man wasn’t going to leave it too late for them to escape. He lifted the helicopter above the tree line and began searching for a landing zone.
Riga knew that if time was on his side, then Max Gordon might fall into his hands and make life—and death—a lot easier.
Danny Maguire’s body was taken through the streets of London to one of the city’s main hospitals in the East End. The men still escorted the ambulance, and Sayid had tracked them using more than twenty street cameras. He stored all the pieces of recovered archive footage in a compressed file so that they could be opened and viewed in sequence.
Sayid could see that the ambulance went to the rear of the building, where the body was off-loaded. The two men parked the car and walked in behind the ambulance crew. There was no movement for more than twenty minutes other than the ambulance leaving the hospital. Then a black, unmarked van arrived and also drove round the back of the building. The men who drove the van up to the mortuary entrance wore suits and looked like funeral undertakers. They unloaded a coffin, went inside and after another half hour came out again. It was obvious to Sayid there was now a body inside the coffin. As the black van drove away, the escort car followed it.
They drove for another hour, well south of the Thames, to an anonymous concrete complex no different from any of the other ugly, faceless buildings that surrounded it. When the van and a car emerged from the underground parking lot of the building, the two vehicles separated. It was at this point that Sayid stopped the surveillance. He was exhausted, but as far as he could see, Danny Maguire’s body never came out again.
There was nothing else Sayid could do other than to get this information into the right hands. But who was that to be? If he told Mr. Jackson what he had been doing, he’d probably get booted out of the school and his mother would lose her job. He decided to contact the White Hat group and get their help to access cameras inside that building and send what he had to MI5. That was why he needed the best IT guys. MI5 could trace back the source of the information, but if the White Hats took it on with their sophisticated equipment, they could hide an elephant in a room and no one would notice.
Sam Keegan was a young desk officer at MI5. He was ambitious and pleased it was he who was delivering news to his boss concerning the ongoing investigation into Max Gordon.
“Sir, we had a bomb-burst message come through.”
Ridgeway had been concentrating on something else and looked blank for a moment.
“It’s a fragmented message sent from a hundred or more encrypted sources,” Keegan explained.
“I know what it is. Show me.”
Keegan swiveled Ridgeway’s keyboard round to face him and made a few keystrokes. The screen showed a myriad of small windows that, after Keegan opened them, ran seamlessly into one screen.
“Someone has tagged together archive footage of Danny Maguire’s death. This took some doing, but they clearly want us to see it.”
Ridgeway gazed at the unfolding picture on his screen. “Can you trace this back?”
“Doubtful, sir. My guess is that there’d be a hundred dead ends.”
Ridgeway nodded. It didn’t matter, because whoever sent this was clearly asking for MI5’s help.
“Can we identify this building?” he asked, pointing at the final frame of the concrete complex.
“It’s south of the river, sir. When they sent it through, it had GPS coordinates attached.”
“How very helpful of them. Well, whoever they are, it’s a pity we can’t get them to work for us. All right, Keegan, you’d better get down there and have a look. I just hope this isn’t some tomfoolery and that we are the victim of somebody’s sick sense of humor.”
Keegan left his boss’s office, neither man knowing that the mild-mannered desk agent would soon face a horror worse than his most frightening nightmares.
“Wake up! Get up! Now!”
Sayid jerked awake. He had been asleep for only a couple of hours, and the programmed alarm on his computer shouted at him like a housemaster. He was still fuzzy-headed as he sat down on a chair, hit the Return key and watched as a message came in from the White Hat hackers. They used his Web name:
Magician: you online, dude? bomb-burst delivered. guess they’ll follow up. government morons won’t find us. you take over the cameras live in that building, watch yourself. we’ll be here and will monitor when you go in. dead bodies
, Men in Black, not good news. could be tight if they attempt a trace on you. we’ll block them as long as we can.
The screen imploded and then flashed up with more than a dozen CCTV camera feeds. Sayid popped a can of energy drink, shoved a handful of crisps into his mouth and washed them down with a swig. He had control of the cameras inside the concrete complex. He was spying in real time.
Wherever Max was, Sayid was still trying to help him. He just hoped his friend would contact him before too long and that Max was not in danger—but as the thought entered his head, he knew that was unlikely.
The storm gathered out at sea, hurled itself furiously toward the coast and then veered, scouring the coastline, doing its best to tear the landscape apart. Funneled by the estuary and deflected by the mountains, it lost much of its strength as it swept down the river, but it was still a force that demanded respect. The accompanying clouds clung to the peaks and dumped rain into the ravine-scarred hills.
Max felt the freshening breeze long before the storm pounded the coast. As he poled the raft on the calmer edges of the fast-moving current, he realized that fresh water had channeled into the river from somewhere—perhaps runoff from the steep banks—and that the water was no longer brackish. He remembered the River Dart at home when the tide pushed the salt water only so far, and then as water soaked downward from Dartmoor, the river became clean and fresh. Now the same happened here. They had made good progress in spite of the fast-flowing current, but the water had become deeper, the swirling eddies tugging at them, and he could feel the end of the pole being almost forced from his hand. There was no sign of the helicopter. Could they have given up the search so quickly? Max could see that as the river widened ahead of them and then twisted round a sweeping bend, the force of the water pounded the far shore. He would not have sufficient control to get them much farther upriver, and if the helicopter came back now, they would be exposed and vulnerable.
