by Bear Grylls
Beck felt a huge gush of relief to find that she spoke English. ‘No, no, it’s you we want,’ he assured her. ‘Um. I think.’ He and James looked at each other. Where to start? This wasn’t a moment they had prepared for.
‘Um. It’s kind of a long story . . .’ He pulled off his hat, with an instinctive shake of his head to untangle his hair. ‘We, uh, came here because . . .’
But she was staring at him as though she had seen a ghost. Slowly, tentatively, she came forward, not taking her eyes off his.
Beck stood still, puzzled.
Sangmu slowly reached out and touched his face, then felt a strand of his hair.
‘Beck. You are Beck Granger, no?’
Chapter 34
The two boys and Sangmu sat huddled in front of the fire. Beck cradled a mug of warming broth in both hands and listened like he had never listened before.
Sangmu began her story: ‘I heard the explosion. Who could not? It echoed around the mountains. It was ten years ago but I still remember seeing fire falling out of the night. It came down behind the ridge.
‘I was only a small girl, but even I knew it could only be an aeroplane.
‘The next morning some of our herders went to where they thought the wreckage must have landed. To everyone’s surprise, they brought back with them a badly injured Western woman. They had found the wreckage scattered across the slopes, but she had still been strapped into a seat. She was in a terrible state, and no one thought she would live. Many broken bones, and internal injuries, and burns from the explosion. But she was still alive. They brought her to my father, the doctor. He decided that all he could do was make her comfortable until she died. He could not make her better but he could take her pain away.
‘For two days I helped them. I remember wiping her brow and putting water in her mouth – even a small child could do that. The next day, I was alone – and she opened her eyes.
‘Her voice was very faint but I could hear her, and I spoke a little English. There was so much I did not understand but I understood enough.
‘She knew she had survived a crash and she knew she was dying. She told me her name – Melanie Granger. She asked after her husband, David. I could only tell her, “No David.” Our herders had found no sign of him. And I thought she was asking about someone called Beck. I said, “No Beck,” but then I realized that she was not asking, she was telling me about him. Her son.
‘She asked for her things. My parents had undressed her to put her to bed, but we had kept everything. I found her clothes and she told me to look in the pockets. I found a small device. I did not know what it was then, but now I know it was a hard drive. She told me it must go to David’s brother, Alan Granger, in England. She made me promise.
‘I was only a little girl – what could I do? I vowed I would do what I could. And soon after that, she closed her eyes for the last time.’
Beck had tears trickling down his cheeks now; he rubbed his eyes, trying to stop himself. James put a hand on Beck’s shoulder.
‘I knew that one day I would meet you, Beck,’ Sangmu went on. ‘It has been a feeling I have had ever since your mother died.’
‘So . . . what happened to the hard drive?’ Beck asked.
Her face clouded. ‘I decided that I would tell my father about it. He had been educated abroad and he would know what to do. He might know how to find this Alan Granger.
‘But that night I was woken up by someone moving in our downstairs room. He was very quiet. I only heard because I too slept downstairs, in the pantry next door. So I could not wake my parents without the intruder knowing. I peered through the door.
‘It was a man, another Westerner – big and powerful, with thick dark hair. And I saw that he had a gun at his side, so I was terrified and hid. I watched him from under my bed.
‘He was large but he knew how to move quietly. I watched him go swiftly through the room. Everything was put back exactly as it had been, but not a thing escaped his gaze. And he found the hard drive. Immediately he stopped looking – it was what he wanted. And he left as quietly as he had come.
‘I was almost in tears. I had made a vow to a dying woman! I wanted to call my parents, to call anyone – one scream from me and the whole village would have come running. But he had that gun. How many might he kill with it before we got the drive back?
‘So instead, I pulled on my clothes and I followed him.
‘It was easy to do – the night was clear, the moon was half full so there was plenty of light, and I knew the roads. I knew them better than he did. Several times I saw him stumble in the dark, and I learned some English words that I never repeated to my parents.
‘And it soon became clear where he was going. There is a monastery in the next valley. We all knew that some rich Westerner had bought it and made it his home. No one was allowed in now – it was surrounded by guards. Other Westerners came and went by plane – we never saw them in the village, but the villagers sold them food. I had been there a few times when we took them supplies, so I knew the way.
‘And that meant I knew the shortcuts. Where the road bends round a cliff, I could cut across the higher ground and be there first. Soon I saw him coming below me. I jumped on him.
‘I can laugh now – one small girl against a large man! And he laughed too, as he easily beat me off and held me down with the barrel of the gun at my head. I did not care. I was crying – not because of him but because I would not be able to keep my promise.
‘He asked me my name. I told him. I also told him he was a thief and I told him the hard drive was not his. He told me that if I was an adult he would have killed me for what I had seen. But instead, I should forget that any of this had happened, and run on home.
‘And so I did. But every day I ask Melanie to forgive me, because I could not honour her last request.’
Chapter 35
Beck and James sat in stunned silence. Both of them blinked a few times to get rid of tears that neither would admit to.
‘Ian . . .’ James was the first to speak. ‘The man must have been Ian.’
Beck couldn’t care less about Ian. He now knew what had happened to his mother.
Mostly. Some bits were just too unbelievable . . .
‘She survived an exploding plane? Still in her seat?’
Sangmu could only shrug.
‘It’s happened before,’ James said quietly. ‘I read about a Czech woman who survived when her plane exploded ten kilometres up: she was pinned inside the wreckage as it fell. The pieces absorbed the impact.’ Beck stared at him and he shrugged. ‘Hey, weird stuff interests me.’
OK, Beck conceded, so it could happen. But to his own mum?
‘I recognized you immediately, Beck,’ Sangmu said with a little smile. ‘Your face is the same shape as hers.’
‘What happened to my mother’s body?’ he asked in a whisper.
Sangmu took him gently by the hand and led him to the mantelpiece. His eyes fell on a jewelled box that stood alone. It was almost like a shrine, with a small candle on either side.
‘She was cremated. We did not know her religion but our priest said the words he thought would be appropriate. I collected her ashes. They are here. I give her honour each day’ – she paused – ‘in place of my broken promise.’
Mama! A word Beck hadn’t said in ten years. It almost tore its way out of his throat.
‘Please, don’t touch that.’ Sangmu had suddenly switched her attention to James. An old army revolver hung in a leather holster pinned to a wall and he was fingering it thoughtfully. ‘That was my grandfather’s. It was his when he fought with the British Army.’
‘Sorry.’ James took his hand away.
‘And what about my father?’ Beck asked in a whisper.
Sangmu shook her head. ‘I am sorry, Beck. We never found your father. The men looked, when I told them about him, but . . . no. I myself trekked up to where the crash happened – it is not far – but . . .’ She shook her head with a puzzle
d smile, as though she could not believe the memory. ‘There was a small family of snow leopards there. They seemed to be living in the wreckage – they thought it was a cave . . . I could not get close.’
Beck had to force the words out. ‘Thanks for trying.’
He thought of his father’s body lying in a crevasse somewhere, covered with snow and ice for all eternity. Lying in the embrace of the mighty Himalayas with a mountain as his tombstone. A solitary tear rolled down his cheek. How he longed just to hold his father’s hand, one more time.
‘Beck.’ James’s voice broke harshly into his trance, and Beck remembered that he wasn’t the only one learning something new about a parent figure. ‘This hard drive Sangmu mentioned . . . it must be what Ian was coming for. He was going to get it back.’
‘What could be on it?’
‘Who knows? Something your mother wanted taken to your uncle. Something my granddad thought was important enough to kill for. Beck, this is all about the hard drive!’ James’s eyes began to shine with excitement. ‘And it’s at the monastery! We can go and get it!’
Beck thought, then shook his head. ‘If I was Edwin Blake and I got hold of a hard drive full of stuff that could incriminate me, I’d destroy it. Why keep it hanging around for the next ten years?’
James shrugged. ‘Ian thought different. He must have had a reason to think it was still there.’ He turned to Sangmu. ‘This monastery, have you ever been in?’
She shook her head. ‘They are very private. Even when we deliver food, we leave it in the storehouse at the foot of the steps for them to pick up later. No, I have never been inside.’
‘When are you delivering the next lot?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Right.’ James started to think out loud. ‘We hitch a ride with Sangmu. We – I dunno – we disguise ourselves as Sherpas, right, and . . .’ Beck and Sangmu smiled at each other. ‘What?’ he asked indignantly.
‘Neither of us is ever going to look like a Sherpa,’ Beck said. ‘Look, first thing is to take a look at the place. Then we’ll decide on a way in . . .’
Chapter 36
James whistled. ‘Wow.’
He and Beck lay side by side at the top of a rocky ridge and gazed across the valley. The monastery was worth a whistle.
It was a collection of tall, soaring white buildings, topped with flat red tile roofs and patterned with gold leaf. It seemed to cling to the side of a mountain. There was a sheer rock face beneath it, descending all the way to the valley floor. An equally sheer one rose above it and disappeared into the low clouds. It looked like it was glued to the cliff, though when Beck studied it closely he could see that it was actually built on a very narrow ridge.
At one end the ridge angled steeply down towards the valley. There were steps carved into the slope. That was the only way anyone who wasn’t a mountaineer could get in or out.
Sangmu had mentioned the steps, and a storehouse at the foot. Beck peered more closely. There it was – a small hut. Could they get that near? It would be somewhere to hide . . .
A security fence ran down the middle of the valley, from one end to the other. There was a guard post where the dirt track from Sangmu’s village cut through it. Beyond that, the track led up to the foot of the steps.
Also on the other side of the fence, a brand-new tarmac airstrip had been carved into the flat valley floor. At one end the ground fell away. At the other stood a small metal hangar, with a couple of aircraft parked outside. The track bent to go round the hangar and on towards the end of the airstrip.
‘I’ve only seen pictures of this place,’ James said. ‘Never seen it in real life. It looks even better than I imagined. Wow! It’s like a royal palace, isn’t it?’
Beck grunted. Sangmu had told them its history. Once there had been a monk, a holy man, living there. He had attracted a small community of followers who lived in a network of caves, both natural ones and others that they had carved out themselves. Eventually, as the group grew, they built the monastery over the site. It had thrived for a thousand years, but bit by bit the religious community had dwindled until there were only a couple of geriatric monks left. They had been happy to sell up to the crazy Westerner who wanted this place as a home, and move elsewhere.
Now, everything was sealed away behind guards and barbed wire.
So typical of Lumos, Beck thought. Take a place of beauty, a holy place dedicated to goodness, and use it to conceal the secrets of one wicked, selfish old man.
But Edwin Blake must feel secure here. If the hard drive really was still around, it would probably not be tucked away. He would feel no need to be secretive. If they could get in, they stood a good chance of finding it.
Not that it would be easy. The monastery might only be the size of a small village, but that was still a lot of rooms. However, room by room, inch by inch, Beck thought, he would search it and locate what he wanted . . .
Suddenly James was clutching his elbow. ‘Look! Look!’ He was pointing at the aeroplanes at the end of the runway. Beck looked, but couldn’t see anything in particular. A small propeller-driven plane – a two-seater – and a fancy executive jet.
‘What?’
‘That jet! That’s Granddad’s plane! His private one!’ James swivelled his head back to gaze at the monastery in awe. ‘Means he’s here.’
Beck scowled across the valley. OK, that was not good news. Not that he’d mind confronting Edwin Blake one day. But not right now. Right now, Blake’s presence meant extra security. That would make their job harder.
He bit his lip. ‘OK. First thing is to get in. Second is to avoid him . . .’
‘Why should we want to avoid him?’ James asked in an odd voice.
Beck frowned and looked round, and his eyes went wide as he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
It was the gun from Sangmu’s house – the old revolver belonging to her grandfather.
‘James,’ he gasped, ‘what . . .?’
James pulled back on the hammer with his thumb. The gun clicked as it was primed to shoot. ‘I’m taking you in, Granger.’
Chapter 37
‘Really bad idea,’ Beck whispered as the barrier loomed ahead. The guards sat up and took notice as the two boys approached. No doubt they imagined they were dealing with two slightly lost tourists.
‘Shut up and keep walking . . .’
They were at the barrier, and a large man with a sub-machine gun slung over one shoulder blocked their way.
‘Private property.’ He spoke in English but with a strong middle European accent. ‘Even if you’re lost—’
And then, as James produced the pistol from behind Beck, he jumped back in shock, bringing his gun to bear. But James merely prodded the end of the barrel against Beck’s skull, behind his ear. He spoke loudly and clearly.
‘My name is James Blake, my grandfather is Edwin Blake, and trust me, he will be so angry if you don’t let us in.’
After that, it didn’t take long . . .
First the guards put a call through to the monastery. Beck couldn’t make out what the voice at the other end was saying, but it was fast and furious and it made the guard go white. Immediately they were bundled into a Jeep and driven towards the monastery steps. One of the guards took the opportunity to relieve James, gently, of the pistol. He was as uneasy at the thought of a gun being wielded by an over-enthusiastic teenager as Beck was.
It made no difference. Beck was still a captive.
Several times he tried to meet James’s eye and work out if this was for real. James had been raised by a professional assassin. It had once been his life’s ambition to kill Beck. He had changed sides once before in his life. And Beck knew from experience that he was capable of making some really bad decisions . . .
Whether or not James really was taking him in, as far as Beck was concerned, this had all just gone bad – very bad. And there seemed no possible good outcome to this scenario.
But James was carefully avo
iding his eye, and Beck had no way of really knowing. The other boy had his head turned to look at the monastery, so Beck did likewise.
The plus side of James’s action meant that he would soon be in there. The minus was, Beck wondered if he would ever get to leave.
The complex of buildings towered above them on the ridge. Dusk was coming down on the valley, and the rows and rows of shuttered windows were like shining beacons. The walls were all steep and smooth. It would surely be impossible to escape down one.
At one end of the monastery there was a flat terrace set into the mountainside. A single figure leaned on the balustrade and looked down at them. Even though he was just a speck, something about the stance suggested ownership. Possession. That man up there was in total charge of this whole place. Surely, Beck thought, it was Edwin Blake.
Beck kept his face expressionless as he looked up at him. He would not show fear. Even if this was the last five minutes of his life, he would stick to the principles he believed in. Goodness and trust. Blake could kill him, but never defeat him.
The Jeep halted next to the storehouse and they were ushered up the stone staircase towards the monastery. Warm, dry air and bright electric light hit them as they entered through the double wooden doors. The original woodwork must have been ornate and wonderfully bright. Now it had been painted over with bland colours, and the stone floor was covered with thick carpet. It reminded Beck of a flash hotel. It must have cost a fortune to get all this stuff in. For precisely that reason, as far as Beck was concerned, it was tacky. It was showing off: Woo, look how rich I am!
They were led along twisting passages and up flights of stairs, climbing ever higher inside the complex. Beck’s sense of direction told him that they were heading towards the same end of the monastery as the terrace.
And sure enough, they ended up in a huge room, at one end a glass wall with a sliding door opening onto the terrace. The room was dominated by a roaring fire in the middle. The chairs were soft and comfortable. One section of wall was taken up with a single massive flatscreen and a host of smaller ones around it, all showing news channels or streams of data. The rest of the walls were covered with portraits or sculptures. Yet there was a coldness that pervaded the room and sent a chill down Beck’s spine.
