Sleeper 13: The most explosive must-read thriller of 2018

by Rob Sinclair

  ‘What the––’

  ‘Shh,’ Itnashar said. ‘Just come over.’

  Aydin rolled the musty blanket off him and shivered as the unheated air hit his bare skin. He put his feet down softly onto the icy stone floor and crept the few yards to Itnashar’s bunk and the faint light. Itnashar pulled back the cover and shifted across to let Aydin in. They sat hunched together under the blanket and Aydin’s mouth opened wide in amazement at what he saw.

  ‘I can’t bel––‘

  ‘Shh!’ Itnashar said again, with more urgency this time.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Aydin said as quietly as he could as he stared down at the green-yellow screen of the mobile phone.

  ‘From Igor,’ Itnashar said.

  Igor. Clearly not his real name. They called him that because he was . . . it was hard to describe. Basically they thought he was an idiot and Igor just seemed like a silly name for him. He was in his forties with wispy hair and a whiny voice and a peg leg and he walked with a stoop and compared to many of the other men in the place he just seemed so harmless and odd.

  He was, however, a brilliant scientist. A professor from some top university that Aydin had never heard of in Iran. All of the elders at the Farm were experts at something or other. Engineering, chemicals, small arms, bombs, computers, combat. Torture.

  ‘How?’ Aydin asked.

  ‘Igor is a fool,’ Itnashar said, shrugging. ‘I took it from his pocket one day.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  He shrugged again, as though it was nothing that he’d stolen from an elder. ‘They taught us how to pickpocket.’

  ‘How long have you had it?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘What! And it still works?’

  ‘It’s prepaid, so I guess it won’t last forever.’

  ‘But how do you even charge it?’

  They didn’t have any electricity in their room, not even lights, so there were certainly no electrical sockets to charge a phone.

  Itnashar smiled. He reached under the bunk’s painfully thin mattress and his hand came back clutching a bundle of wires. He unreeled them and Aydin saw one end of the two wires was attached to a regular 9V battery. At the other end the wires were each curled around an uncoiled paperclip.

  ‘You made that?’

  ‘I took the parts when we were doing electronics.’ Aydin watched as Itnashar removed the back cover of the phone and took out the battery. He twisted and bent the ends of the paperclips so they straddled the charge points of the battery. ‘It’s pretty easy really.’

  Pretty easy? Maybe it was, but Aydin wasn’t sure he could have cobbled together the makeshift charger himself, though it didn’t surprise him that Itnashar had so easily figured it out. It wasn’t hard to see where his future specialism would lie.

  ‘Why are you showing me this?’ Aydin asked.

  ‘You asked about my family,’ Itnashar whispered. ‘Whether I still think of them. The answer, the real honest answer, is all of the time. In fact, I use this to call them.’

  ‘You speak to them?’

  ‘Of course not! Imagine if the Teacher found out about that. I just . . . listen.’

  He unclipped the battery and placed it back into the phone, then powered it up. After a few seconds he handed it to Aydin.

  ‘The reception isn’t good, sometimes it’s not there at all, but you could try. You know their number, don’t you?’

  Aydin didn’t answer. His mind was too busy thinking about his mother and sister. Their faces were still clear in his head, but when he really tried to hear their voices, they seemed distorted and he worried that what he heard in his head was just a false memory.

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Do you think it will reach England?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It might waste all of the money.’

  Itnashar shrugged again. ‘I can get another phone. Igor’s not the only fool out there. And I don’t mind doing this. For you.’

  Before sense got the better of him, Aydin took the phone from Itnashar’s grasp and dialled the number.

  Was that even the right number now, he wondered? He had no idea if they’d changed number or even moved house.

  He heard the dial tone and held his breath.

  ‘Hello,’ came the woman’s voice, soft and warm in his ear.

  He took a sharp inhale of breath. Her voice . . . it sounded just like he remembered. For some reason that made him feel incredible sadness.

  ‘Hello, is there someone there?’

  ‘Mumya,’ he said. ‘It’s––’

  ‘What the hell are you doing!’ Itnashar hissed, snatching the phone away. Aydin looked at his brother’s face, creased with rage.

  ‘I’m sorry, I––’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to speak to her!’

  There was a thud outside the door.

  ‘Get out, get out!’ Itnashar said, lifting the blanket and shoving Aydin to the floor.

  He jumped across to his own bed as the thumping footsteps outside the door filled his ears. He threw the blanket over him just as the door burst open and a swathe of electric light swarmed into the room.

  He squeezed shut his eyes; he was breathing quickly, his chest heaving, and whoever was at the door would surely know he wasn’t asleep.

  ‘Which one of you brats is it?’ the growly voice asked.

  It was Fardin, though the boys called him Qarsh. Shark. On account of his unyielding hostility to them all. He was one of the guards. The one they all feared the most. It was pure rotten luck that he was the one who’d heard them tonight.

  ‘I won’t ask a second time,’ he said.

  Aydin opened his eyes. He was looking over at Itnashar, who was facing him and doing a much better job of pretending to be asleep.

  ‘It was me,’ Aydin said, locking on to Qarsh’s perpetually bloodshot eyes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was trying to wake Itnashar. I was scared.’

  Qarsh smirked and humphed. ‘Scared? Talatashar, you really are such a disappointment.’

  Aydin said nothing to that.

  ‘Get up,’ Qarsh said.

  Aydin’s eyes again flicked to Itnashar, who was now staring at him, a pleading in his gaze.

  ‘I said get up!’ Qarsh boomed, making both of the boys jump.

  Aydin threw the blanket off him and stepped out of the bed. He flicked his gaze to Itnashar. Aydin was sure his brother mouthed ‘Thank you’ to him. Qarsh loomed forward and grabbed Aydin’s arm, squeezing hard. He dragged him away, out of the room. Aydin was quivering with both cold and fright as they headed along the labyrinth of corridors and out of the door into one of the courtyards, the one where they often took their physical training.

  It was freezing outside, and Aydin’s hands and feet and face were stinging by the time they came to a stop. He looked around, shaking; the only light in any direction was the thin veil seeping out of the still-open doorway several yards away. Everything else all around was just black.

  ‘You’re scared of the dark?’ Qarsh asked.

  He pulled his hand out of his jacket and grabbed Aydin’s wrists. He slung a cuff over, then yanked on the chain, pulling Aydin further across the black space. He grabbed Aydin’s other hand and pulled it up and before Aydin knew it his wrists were clasped together, around one of the thick wooden poles at the outer edge of the courtyard.

  ‘Goodnight, Talatashar. And good luck.’

  Qarsh cackled to himself as he wandered off. He stepped through the door, shut it behind him and Aydin was plunged into darkness.

  ‘Baba,’ Aydin said after a few moments of absolute silence. ‘Baba, Mumya, why won’t you come for me?’

  And as he fell down to his knees, his whole body shaking violently, he did nothing to fight the tears as they began to flow.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bruges, Belgium

  Aydin sipped the milky coffee. It tasted like crap. He had no idea why Itnashar took it like
that. He set the steaming cup down onto the table and looked across at his brother on the opposite brown leather sofa. The apartment, although not exactly luxurious, remained way better than the hell-hole Aydin was given in Paris, and he wondered if Itnashar sensed his resentment – not that it was directed at him.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Itnahsar said, the concern on his face clear. ‘Haroun will be back soon.’

  Aydin didn’t know Haroun, only that he was an administrator. Like Khaled had been for him back in Paris.

  ‘In fact, you shouldn’t have come here at all,’ he added.

  ‘I’ve nowhere else to go.’

  ‘I want to help you, Aydin.’

  Aydin winced at the sound of his real name. Itnashar was the only person who’d called him that in years. A habit the two of them used to cement their bond in their later years at the Farm.

  ‘But?’ Aydin asked.

  ‘But what do you expect me to do?’

  Aydin didn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure of the answer, in fact. Did he really trust Itnashar? He certainly trusted that he wasn’t about to whip out a gun and shoot him in the face right there, just like that. But he couldn’t possibly fully trust that Itnashar would side with him now, against all of the others. They were too far down the road for that to be the case. As close as Aydin was to this man, they weren’t thirteen-year-old boys bunking together in the dark any more.

  Anyway, Aydin wasn’t just there to see an old friend, or to ask for his shelter. There was something else much more important that he needed. He just wasn’t yet sure how to go about getting it.

  ‘You know they’re after you now,’ Itnashar said.

  ‘Who exactly?’

  ‘Wahid has spoken to us all.’

  Who else. Aydin had never been close to Wahid. He didn’t think anyone but the Teacher had. Wahid really was the epitome of what they had wanted to create. He may as well have been a machine for all of the empathy and humanity that remained inside him. A supremely clever, conniving, manipulative machine, that is.

  ‘Wahid has put the order out to capture you. Capture, not kill, Talatashar. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. They want to take me away somewhere so that my death will be extremely slow and excruciatingly painful.’ For some reason Aydin found himself smiling at that horrible statement.

  ‘No,’ Itnashar said, not looking at all impressed with Aydin’s nonchalance, though it wasn’t his life on the line, so Aydin felt his sarcasm was perfectly justified. ‘You’re still one of us. Show them. Prove to Wahid that you can still be part of this.’

  ‘Do you really believe that? That I can just turn back now and everything will be okay?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You know I’d never hurt you.’

  ‘But you’re happy to throw me out there for the sharks.’

  Aydin looked towards the window as the words passed his lips and he imagined them all out there, already circling the waters.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Itnashar said.

  ‘You start by saying I can’t stay here. Now you’re trying to tell me everything will be fine, if I just hold my hands up and stand back in line. That Wahid and the elders just want to know I’m still on board. So which is it, friend?’

  ‘It’s both. You’ll always be my brother, but don’t pull me into your mess. And you don’t need me anyway. If you really want to keep running then I can’t help.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You don’t need me! If you care about me then why would you put me in danger too? You’ve already shown how good you are out there. You got here, didn’t you?’

  Aydin’s eyes narrowed. He wondered just what Itnashar knew of his journey thus far. How connected were the other twelve over his disappearance and over their search for him?

  ‘Wait, why did you come here exactly?’ Itnashar said as though he’d had a eureka moment. He looked more unsettled all of a sudden.

  Aydin didn’t bother to answer the question. Now wasn’t the right time. He took another sip of the coffee. It was now only lukewarm and tasted even worse. Itnashar’s eye caught his.

  ‘I’m sorry for what they did to your mother,’ he said.

  Aydin shook his head. ‘You know about that?’

  Itnashar looked at him quizzically. ‘You haven’t seen?’

  ‘Haven’t seen what?’

  Itnashar got up from the sofa. He moved over to the door behind him and took a key from his pocket. He first typed a combination into the keypad next to the doorframe. Aydin couldn’t see the number because he did a good job of screening it. There was a click and Itnashar then used the key to release the manual lock and pushed open the door. Beyond him Aydin spotted his equipment. Computer terminals, screens, wires. All sorts of homemade electrical devices. Aydin thought he knew what most of them were, but not everything. Electronics remained Itnashar’s unrivalled area of expertise. His work, his knowledge, was essential to their plans.

  Their plans. Like Aydin was still part of it.

  Itnashar grabbed a tablet from the shelf in front of him then moved back into the lounge, closing and locking the door behind him. He stood there, tapping away on the tablet’s screen before turning it round for Aydin to see.

  Aydin was left staring at his own face. A candid picture of him. Not CCTV. He was well used to keeping his face away from street cameras wherever he went, and he knew that no camera in Paris or London would have a good capture of him. The image he was looking at was a high-quality colour picture, of him sitting on the bench in the recreation ground in London two days ago, across the street from his mother’s flat.

  He was both shocked and disgusted. Frowning, he got up from the sofa and moved over to Itnashar. He took the tablet. The picture was attached to an article from the Daily Mail’s website, describing in awful detail the murder of his mother, bludgeoned to death in her own home. A brutal murder during a home invasion gone wrong. An illegal immigrant who’d arrived in the country that same day was wanted for her murder.

  An illegal immigrant. Aydin.

  When he realised what he was looking at . . . no, there were no words to describe how that felt.

  ‘I know it wasn’t you,’ Itnashar said.

  But it really didn’t matter what he thought.

  Not content with just taking her from him, his own people, his brothers, had set Aydin up for the murder of his mother.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Are you ready?’ Aydin whispered to Itnashar as they hunched up against the closed door to their room.

  Aydin looked over to his brother, who just nodded, though his face suggested he was less than sure about what they were going to do.

  ‘You have it?’ Aydin asked.

  Another nod.

  ‘Come on then.’

  Aydin took out the two forks that he’d stolen from the kitchen a few days earlier. Using a knife he’d taken at the same time, he’d slowly sawn and twisted and bent and cut through all but one of the prongs on each of them. Itnashar pressed his ear to the door and listened as Aydin stuck the two remaining prongs into the lock and began twisting and prodding, trying to release the latch.

  ‘Stop!’ Itnashar said.

  Aydin froze. He listened. He could hear nothing other than his own calm breathing and Itnashar’s much more erratic breaths.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard something.’

  ‘No,’ Aydin said, shaking his head. ‘There’s nothing.’

  He carried on. He jerked one of the forks and it clanked inside the chamber and both boys’ eyes went wide at the unexpected sound, which echoed all around. But, after a few moments, all was quiet outside.

  ‘Are you sure you can do it?’ Itnashar said.

  ‘Just one more twist,’ Aydin said, grimacing as he tried to lever the fork around in the confined space.

  There was a click. Itnashar looked at him expectantly.

  ‘I did it!’ Aydin said.

  He twi
sted the handle carefully until the latch released then he carefully pulled the forks out and put them into his trouser pocket. Aydin pulled open the door.

  The corridor outside was dimly lit, yet it caused the boys to squint as they peered out from the darkness of their room. The corridor was all quiet.

  ‘Come on, we need to be quick,’ Aydin said, moving out of the room and pulling up against the bare stone wall outside.

  He crept along, past one closed door, then another, then another.

  ‘Aydin!’ Itnashar whispered. ‘It’s this one. Where are you going?’

  ‘I can hear them,’ Aydin said, cocking his head and concentrating on the faint noise coming from further down the corridor. Chatter. A TV?

  ‘Just get us into the room.’

  ‘No,’ Aydin said. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’

  Itnashar tutted but Aydin ignored him and began moving again. He was soon at the T-junction at the end of the corridor. Off to the left was another long corridor that eventually led out into the yard. To the right was a much shorter corridor with just two doors off it. One of them was the toilet and shower room. The other was the guards’ break room. The door was ajar, and now he was close the sounds were clearer.

  ‘They’re watching football,’ Aydin said.

  He crept further towards the open door.

  ‘No!’ Itnashar said.

  Aydin ignored him. He reached the edge of the doorway and looked behind him to see Itnashar still cowering by the junction. That was fine. He could do this alone. He peeked into the space beyond. There were two sofas in the room, both facing away from the door. He spotted the backs of three heads sticking up. Qarsh was one of them. The nearest to Aydin. As well as the two sofas there was also a table with four chairs in the room, where the guards ate, and a small kitchenette. Both of those areas were empty. Just the three guards. The same as every night.

  Aydin jerked back when the men suddenly erupted in shouts and calls. A bad refereeing decision by the sound of it. They all remained seated, and soon they quietened down again. Aydin scanned the room. He spotted what he was looking for. Midway between the door and the back of the nearest sofa was a row of hooks, from which two sets of keys were dangling.