by Paul Adam
Only when the plane was in the air, climbing steeply above the houses and countryside surrounding the airport, did Max sit back and relax. They were on their way home. For a couple of hours at least, they were safe. He stared out of the window, watching the lakes and woods below get smaller and smaller, disappearing completely as the plane soared above the clouds. He was still suffering the after-effects of being attacked and chased, of nearly losing his life to an assassin’s bullet. But he tried to shut all that out, obliterate it from his mind, and focus on the one positive thing that had come out of their visit to Sweden. He had discovered what the Cedar Alliance was. Now he had to expand his knowledge, find out more about the Alliance and, most importantly, about his father’s secret life.
SIXTEEN
It was early afternoon when they landed in London. Max’s stomach was a tight ball of nerves. Would the police, or Penhall, be waiting to pick them up the moment they arrived? But they got through passport control and customs without incident. As they emerged into the arrivals area, Max was on red alert, looking around for danger. He didn’t think even Penhall would be stupid enough to try anything in broad daylight in a busy airport, but he wasn’t going to let his guard down for even a second. He studied the other people in the concourse. There was the usual collection of taxi and limousine drivers holding up cards bearing the names of the passengers they’d been hired to collect, and one or two individuals meeting relatives or friends, but no one appeared to be paying any attention to Max or Consuela.
They went down the escalator into the Underground station and boarded a Piccadilly Line train that was waiting to depart. Other people got on after them – a couple of women pulling suitcases on wheels, a pair of backpackers with rucksacks almost as big as themselves, a young man in a windcheater and trainers. Max half hoped to see Chris, but he knew that was unlikely. Chris’s connecting flight from Copenhagen would have got in forty minutes earlier than Max and Consuela’s flight. He would be halfway home by now.
The tube journey took more than an hour, the train getting gradually more crowded as they got closer to central London. Max watched the other passengers carefully, noting their faces, their clothes, checking whether any of them were taking an obvious interest in him, and getting ready to resist if they made a move towards him. He’d been snatched once by Penhall’s men. He wasn’t going to let it happen again without a fight.
They walked the last quarter of a mile from the tube station. The dark blue Toyota Avensis was no longer parked in the street, but Max noticed a maroon Ford in almost the same location, two men sitting in it. Consuela unlocked the front door of the house and they went inside. Max was extra-vigilant, pausing in the hall to listen for any sounds. Consuela too was on edge. Chris should have been there already. Max had expected him to be waiting for them, but the house was deathly quiet. Maybe he was downstairs in the basement.
Max went warily through into the kitchen and down the stairs. The basement was deserted. Alarmed now, Max tried the door to the garden for which Chris had the key. It was still locked. Where was he? Max found the spare key and unlocked the door. He was just in time to see Chris drop nimbly over the wall at the end of the garden and come running across the lawn, his travel bag slung over his shoulder.
Max heaved a sigh of relief. ‘I thought you’d be here before us,’ he said as Chris reached him. ‘Was your flight delayed?’
Chris shook his head. ‘It was bang on time. I waited around at Heathrow for you and Consuela to arrive.’
‘You did? I didn’t see you.’
‘That was the idea. I wanted to check if anyone followed you home.’
‘I looked, but I didn’t spot anyone,’ Max said.
‘But they were there all the same.’
‘They were?’ Max was stunned. ‘Who?’
‘A youth in a grey windcheater and trainers to begin with. Then he got off the train and a woman took over. She was on your tail until the moment you turned the last corner. Then I assume the guys in the car were watching you. The car is still there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Not the same one. It’s a maroon Ford now.’
‘Where’s Consuela?’
‘Inside.’
‘You checked over the house?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s do it now.’
They went into the basement and locked and bolted the door behind them. Then they went upstairs and did the same to the other external doors. Max went into all the rooms, Chris accompanying him but keeping well back so he wouldn’t be seen from outside, and made sure the window locks were engaged. He saw no sign that anyone had been inside the house during their absence.
Feeling more secure now, Max left Chris and Consuela in the kitchen and went upstairs to do something he’d planned on the flight home from Sweden. At the far end of the landing was the small bedroom that his father had used as an office. Max went in and paused. This had been the place where Alexander Cassidy had done all the paperwork for his escapology shows. Max had never really thought of his dad’s stage act as a business, but that was exactly what it had been. Alex had kept invoices and receipts, drawn up accounts and paid tax just like any other businessman.
Max had never taken much interest in that side of his father’s work – it was the escapology, the performing, that had fascinated him, that had made him want to follow in his father’s footsteps. Since he’d become a performer himself, Max had learned only too well how much preparation and organization had to go on behind the scenes, but when he was growing up and watching his father on stage he’d known nothing about all that boring administrative stuff, and cared even less. What mattered was the next trick, the next illusion, the next escape his dad was going to perform.
Now Max was realizing that there was a lot more about his father’s life that he didn’t know. He sat down at the desk and pondered for a moment on what Axel Svensson had told them. The Cedar Alliance was a secret organization dedicated to saving the Earth from over-exploitation and destruction, a partnership between groups and individuals who shared those aims. It worked quietly and without publicity, coordinating action between its many diverse supporters, organizing protests, galvanizing opposition and funding campaigns to protect the environment. That had surprised Max. He’d never had any inkling that there was a guiding hand working out of sight behind all the world’s great environmental action movements. But what had stunned him more was Svensson’s revelation that Alexander Cassidy was one of the leaders of the Alliance. How could that be? How could Max’s father, a world-famous escapologist, be a part of such an organization? And how had he kept his role in it hidden from his family for so long?
Max now recognized how little he really knew about his father. He was fourteen years old; his dad was forty-eight. When Max was born, Alexander Cassidy had been thirty-four. He had lived for thirty-four years before Max had even appeared on the scene. That was a long time, and Max knew almost nothing about it. His father’s past was a mystery to him.
What had Alexander done during those thirty-four years, particularly during those adult years after he’d left school? He’d been learning the skills of escapology, building himself a career, Max knew that. But what else had he been doing at the same time? Max was realizing that his father was like the two-faced Roman god, Janus. Max had seen one of his faces, but his other face had always been hidden from view. What he had to do now was take another, harder look at his father’s life and try to catch a glimpse of that second face. But where did he begin?
He looked around the office. The walls were covered with framed posters for Alexander Cassidy’s shows – ‘Alexander the Great’, as he was billed. And in between the posters were photographs of Alex, sometimes on his own, posing in the black suit he wore for his act, sometimes with Consuela or Max’s mum. One or two photographs showed them all together, Max included. Max got up and went over to stare at one of the prints – a shot of the four of them outside the Coliseum in Rome, Max ten years old, grinning for the camera wit
h his dad’s arm around his shoulders. Max remembered the trip well. His father was away a lot, touring the world with Consuela to assist him. Max and his mother usually stayed at home, but the Rome trip had been during the school holidays so, for once, Max and Helen had gone too. They’d stayed in a hotel near the Spanish Steps, gone sightseeing to St Peter’s, the Forum and the Castel Sant’Angelo, and in the evenings Alexander had performed on a stage in a gigantic marquee that had been erected in one of the public parks. Thinking about it all brought a lump to Max’s throat. That was why he didn’t often come into his father’s office. It brought back too many painful memories.
Max forced himself to turn away from the photographs. He hadn’t come to wallow in the past. He had a purpose: to see if his father had left any clues that might give Max a clearer idea of his activities for the Cedar Alliance and help him find out where he was now.
Max sat at the desk again and pulled open the drawers, one by one. They contained nothing but stationery and office materials – a stapler, a hole punch, pads of writing paper and envelopes. He stood up and moved on to the two big filing cabinets against the wall. They should have been crammed with papers – Alexander’s business records – but they were completely empty. Max stared in puzzlement at the bare drawers, then he remembered Rupert Penhall and the police search. The officers had been in here, sifting through documents. Max hadn’t realized until now that they’d taken such a lot away. He closed the drawers, feeling suddenly depressed. There was probably nothing left in the office – the police would have cleaned it out, taken everything.
Max opened one of the cupboards. It was empty. He tried the adjoining one. That too had been stripped clean. Max was angry now. How dare they take away all his dad’s papers! They had no right to them. He wondered whether the police had overlooked anything. Was there anywhere else in the house where his dad might have stored documents? The basement? The loft? But the police had been in both those places. They’d searched everywhere.
Thoroughly dispirited now, Max took one last look around the room – and noticed a cardboard box on the floor in the corner. He knelt down and opened the lid. His hopes rose as he saw it contained papers, then fell again as he realized they were just publicity posters and flyers for his father’s shows. That was why the police had left them behind: they were little more than waste paper. Max pulled out a few of the flyers and spread them out on the carpet. They related to a tour of the United States that his dad had undertaken four years earlier – New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco: he’d gone across the entire country over a three-week period.
Max pulled out more leaflets. They were a mini-record of his father’s career. Posters for shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Australia, for Auckland in New Zealand and – closer to home – Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna. His dad had certainly got around. There could hardly have been a major country in the world he hadn’t visited at some point. Max leafed through flyers advertising shows in Moscow and Prague, Budapest and Warsaw, Thailand and Borneo.
Max stopped.
Borneo? Of course. His dad had been to Borneo.
Max looked more closely at the flyers. They advertised a series of shows in Kuching, Brunei and Kota Kinabalu. He didn’t know where any of those places were. He turned one of the flyers over. There were a few scribbled notes on the back of it in his father’s handwriting:
Kalimantan Air Charters – Kuching to Pangkalan Bun. 11 a.m. 3,500 RM.
Then he saw two words that made him suck in his breath quickly:
Narang Anwar.
That was one of the five names Max had found in the files on Shadow Island – the names of prisoners who’d been held captive there.
Narang Anwar. Who was he? Why had Max’s dad written his name on the back of the flyer? And what did the other notes mean?
Keeping hold of the piece of paper, Max went downstairs. On the bookshelves in the sitting room he found an atlas and opened it to the page for Borneo. It was a big island between Southeast Asia and Australia. Most of the northern part of the island belonged to Malaysia, divided into two provinces called Sarawak and Sabah. The southern, larger part was Indonesian and was known as Kalimantan. Max found Kuching, Brunei and Kota Kinabalu along the north coast. Pangkalan Bun was harder to locate, but eventually he found it in southwest Kalimantan. He found something else too; something that set his pulse racing. Very close to Pangkalan Bun was Tanjung Puting National Park – the place where both Erik Blomkvist and Redmond Ashworth-Ames had worked.
Max took the atlas with him into the kitchen, almost shaking with excitement. Consuela and Chris weren’t there so he went down into the basement and found them sitting on one of the exercise mats, Chris drinking tea, Consuela strong black coffee. They were close together, chatting quietly, but broke off as Max came in, closing the door behind him.
Max showed Consuela the flyer he’d found in the office. ‘Do you remember that trip?’ he asked.
Consuela studied the glossy leaflet. ‘Yes, I remember it.’
‘Spring, two thousand and seven. That was the year Dad disappeared. This was probably the last trip he did before he went to Santo Domingo.’
‘I think it was,’ Consuela said. ‘What about it?’
‘Look on the other side.’
Consuela turned the flyer over and read the scribbled notes, frowning as she got to the name at the end. ‘Narang Anwar,’ she said, looking up enquiringly at Max. ‘Isn’t that …?’
‘One of the prisoners on Shadow Island, yes.’
‘Why would your dad write his name here?’
‘I was hoping you might tell me. I know you’ve always said you’ve never heard of Narang Anwar, but are you absolutely sure? You didn’t encounter him in Borneo? Dad didn’t mention him?’
‘No, I’d remember.’
‘Tell me about the trip. Dad seems to have done three shows, with two days in between each one.’
‘That’s right. We did Kuching first – that’s the capital city of Sarawak. Then we went to Brunei, a tiny, independent state just along the coast, and finally to Kota Kinabalu, in Sabah, on the northeastern tip of the island.’
‘That’s all? You didn’t go anywhere else in Borneo?’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘But Dad did?’
Consuela shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what he did. At the end of the tour we returned to Kuching. You couldn’t fly direct from Kuching to Britain so I went on alone to Singapore for a few days’ holiday, and your dad stayed on in Kuching. He joined me in Singapore later and we flew back to London together.’
‘Do you know what my dad did during those few days you were apart?’ Max asked.
Consuela shook her head. ‘He stayed in Kuching, as far as I remember. He said he liked it there – it was more relaxing than Singapore.’
Max indicated the first part of the note on the flyer. ‘Kalimantan Air Charters – Kuching to Pangkalan Bun. It looks to me as if Dad chartered a plane and flew down here to Pangkalan Bun.’ He pointed to the place in the atlas. ‘Eleven a.m.: that was the time of the flight – and three thousand five hundred RM – I’d guess that was the price. What currency do they use in Sarawak?’
‘The ringgit, abbreviated to RM,’ Consuela said. ‘But why would he do that?’
‘The national park where Redmond Ashworth-Ames and Erik Blomkvist worked is very close to Pangkalan Bun,’ Max said. ‘There can only be one possible reason why he went there. He was doing work for the Cedar Alliance.’
No one said anything for a time. Then Chris drained his mug of tea and gave Max a serious look. ‘You want to go to Borneo next, don’t you?’
‘It’s the only lead we have,’ Max said. ‘Blomkvist and Ashworth-Ames were there. So was my dad. And this Narang Anwar has some connection to Borneo too, I’m sure of that. We have to find out what.’
‘Borneo is a long way, Max,’ Consuela said gently. ‘And it could be very dangerous.’
‘Staying here could be dangerous too,’ Max retorted.
‘What about school? You’ve already missed a lot.’
‘We’ve been over all that,’ Max said. ‘I’m not going back to school. We have to find out what the hell is going on, and we’re not going to do that if I’m stuck in a classroom learning French grammar.’
‘When?’ Chris asked.
‘As soon as we can.’ Max turned to Consuela. ‘We can’t afford to wait here doing nothing. Penhall, Clark – they’re closing in on us. We have to stay one step ahead of them.’
‘Borneo’s not like London, you know,’ Consuela pointed out. ‘It’s a wild, untamed kind of place. Who knows what might happen to us there?’
‘Don’t forget that I was snatched from the streets of London by Penhall’s men,’ Max said. ‘We’re not safe here. Not until we find enough evidence to nail Julius Clark. And we’re not going to do that by sitting on our backsides. We have to go looking for that evidence.’
Chris looked at Consuela. ‘I agree with Max,’ he said. ‘We’re running out of time.’
‘But even if we do find evidence – and who’s to say we will? – what use will it be against a man like Clark – a man who appears to have the authorities in his pocket?’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ Max replied. ‘Just wait a minute.’
He dashed upstairs, picked up the telephone directory from the hall table and returned to the basement. He looked up the number of the London News Chronicle and punched it into his mobile.
‘Dan Kingston,’ he said when the switchboard answered.
It took a few seconds for him to be put through.
‘Yes?’ It was a low, man’s voice.
‘Dan Kingston?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I need to talk to you about Julius Clark,’ Max said.
Kingston took a moment to respond. ‘Who is this?’ he asked curtly.
‘My name’s Max Cassidy.’
