by Orca Various
“There are a lot of scooters around,” she said, “and I don’t think the kid we saw could afford to stay in this place.”
“Hi, kids!” A figure stepped out of the shadows. I couldn’t see who it was, but I would recognize that cheerful voice anywhere. Laia groaned audibly as Chad strode toward us. “You two going for a romantic evening stroll?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said. “I thought you had a meeting.”
“All done,” Chad said. “You’ve got to be quick in this business. You snooze, you lose.”
I was tempted to keep walking, but I had a question I wanted to ask. “Do you think your American investors will go ahead with the Roman resort project?”
“It’s a wonderful investment opportunity,” Chad enthused. “In the long term, it can’t fail, and the cleanup costs will be absorbed quickly. I think they’d be crazy not to run with it.”
Now it was my turn to groan. Chad gave me an odd look, part concern and part thoughtful, not like him at all. “But,” he said eventually, “if you want my honest opinion, I suspect the politics will be too much for them. I think we’re a few years away from any development on that land.”
My heart leaped, and I had trouble not shouting out loud. “Oh,” I said as noncommittally as possible.
“You kids have a good walk,” Chad said, winking broadly at me. “Don’t go too far. You never know what kind of people are around these days. Good night.”
“Good night,” I said.
Chad headed for the hotel lobby, and Laia and I continued out to the road. “I was terrified he was going to suggest he come for a walk with us,” Laia said.
“Just as well he didn’t,” I said. “I would have had to kill him.” We laughed. “I was glad to hear he doesn’t think the deal will go through with his investors. Blue Eyes should be glad to hear that.”
Laia nodded, and we linked arms. We strolled along the road and down to the beach, happy just to be in each other’s company. When we got back, I noticed that the red scooter was still there.
FOURTEEN
Breakfast the next day was a long-drawn-out affair with Chad blabbing on about how to make money. He was interested in what Laia and I were going to do that day, and I was terrified he was going to offer to accompany us. I didn’t feel comfortable telling him anything, but Felip gave him a sketchy outline of what we had found out from Grandfather’s notebook. “Well,” Chad had said as we eventually managed our escape, “don’t you kids go finding any more nuclear bombs. It’s hard enough persuading people to invest here as it is.”
With a huge sigh of relief, we wished Felip a good trip to Almería, arranged to meet him that evening for dinner and then escaped both Chad and the naked people who were beginning to show up throughout the hotel. “We need to pick up some bottles of water,” Laia said as we headed into town. “It’s going to be a hot day.”
I glanced up at the clear blue sky which, even in midmorning, was already painfully bright. “I’ll pick up a pair of shades as well,” I said. “I never thought to bring mine. They’re not something I use much in Toronto in December.”
“A flashlight might help as well,” Laia added. “In case we do manage to move that rock.”
“Good idea.” I was about to comment on how glad I was that Chad hadn’t offered to keep us company when the red scooter shot past us. The rider was wearing a green scarf again, even though there was no dust on the main road. “That’s the same guy we saw yesterday—I’m sure of it,” I said. “Do you think he’s following us?”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I’m feeling a bit paranoid what with Grandfather’s secret codes and Blue Eyes’s threats.”
“Palomares is a small town,” Laia explained. “He probably works the night shift at the hotel and passed us on his way to work yesterday. Now he’s heading home.”
“Probably,” I said. It made sense. We found a store and bought water, sunglasses, snacks for the day and a cheap flashlight. “We forgot to get the GPS from your dad,” I said.
“We won’t need it. The rockfall will be easy enough to find.”
That was true—we just needed to follow the track we had come down the day before—but I would have felt more comfortable with the GPS. That was silly, I told myself. If we didn’t do anything stupid, like wandering off into the hills, we would be fine. I was beginning to worry about every little thing. I hadn’t been able to fall asleep the night before, worrying about DJ and whether he was getting into a situation he couldn’t handle. That was really dumb, since DJ could take care of himself and I was the one who had been threatened by the Russian Mafia. Still, I had texted him, asking how he was doing, before switching off my phone and finally falling asleep.
I pushed my worries aside and determined to enjoy the day with Laia, but as we turned off the main road and onto the track into the hills, I looked back and caught a glimpse of a red scooter stopped by the side of the road, the guy in the scarf crouched beside it.
It was lunchtime when we reached our destination. We took a moment to sit on the flat rock, drink some water, eat a snack and enjoy the magnificent view of the sparkling Mediterranean. Then we examined the rockfall carefully.
“No other marks on any of the rocks,” I said.
“True,” Laia said, “but there’s a lot of lichen and dirt on many of the rocks. It would take a lot more time than we have to check thoroughly.”
“I guess we should try and move number fourteen.”
At first, it didn’t seem as if the rock was going to move, but with some scraping around the edges and by rocking it back and forth, we managed to loosen it. Eventually, it came free and rolled to one side. For a moment, Laia and I just stood there, breathing heavily and staring at the dark hole we had revealed.
“I feel like Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb,” I said.
“Well, I hope there’re no dead bodies inside,” Laia commented as she reached into her daypack for the flashlight. She switched it on, and we both leaned forward eagerly.
At first, we couldn’t see much in the narrow beam. The ground seemed to slope gently down, but the hole wasn’t large enough for us both to get our heads in and look around. After we had banged heads a couple of times, Laia pulled back and handed me the flashlight. “Here, you have a look around. It’ll be easier for one person.”
I stretched my arm into the hole, trying not to think of poisonous spiders or mummified bodies. At first I had no better luck than before, but then I caught a dull glint at the edge of the flashlight beam. By stretching as far as I could into the hole and peering hard, I could just make out what appeared to be a pale sphere. The surface was divided into hexagons, like a soccer ball.
I stared at the object for so long that Laia asked, “What do you see?”
I pulled out of the hole, scratching my shoulder and bringing down a clod of dirt that broke into choking dust. I coughed and took a drink of water while Laia fidgeted impatiently. “It’s there,” I said at last.
“What is?” Laia asked, although I was certain she knew what I was talking about. Felip had said the main part of the bomb was about the size of a soccer ball, and that the complex explosives designed to set it off were arranged in a pattern that resembled a honeycomb.
“The plutonium trigger bomb,” I said.
We stared at each other. We had discovered one of the most powerful weapons ever built. It had to be from one of the bombs that had fallen that day in 1966, but what was it doing here? Had sabotage by someone called Gorky caused it to fall here? Had Grandfather found it? Had he hidden it? If so, why had he never told anyone about it?
“The hole’s probably big enough to squeeze through,” I said. “Should I go in?”
“Do you want to crawl into a hole with a plutonium bomb?” Laia asked. “It won’t explode, but what if some of the plutonium has escaped? If we go kicking dust around, who knows what we’ll be breathing in?”
&n
bsp; “I don’t want to go in either,” I said. “Apart from anything else, the rocks above the hole don’t look too stable. Even if there’s no plutonium, I don’t want to get trapped in an old mine, or whatever it is. What should we do?”
“We’ll put the rock back,” Laia said. “Then we’ll go down and tell Felip what we’ve found. He’ll know who to contact.”
I nodded my agreement, glad that we had someone we could talk to. It was even harder to get the rock back in place, but we managed. We ate and drank some more and then, with the afternoon sun high above us, we set off down the hill.
“Is this the end of it?” Laia asked as we walked.
“I don’t know. We’ve certainly done a lot more than I ever thought we could when DJ sent the notebook pages. We broke the code, worked out the locations and much of what Grandfather’s cryptic comments meant—and we’ve discovered the missing bomb. That’s pretty impressive.”
“It is,” Laia agreed, “but we still don’t know the whys—why your grandfather came back to Spain under a false name and why he hid the bomb.”
“And we don’t know who Gorky is, or was, or what the saboteur had to do with everything. I keep making up stories in my head to explain it all, but nothing works. There’s something we’re missing. The question is whether we’ll ever figure it out.”
I looked at Laia walking beside me. She was as dirty and tired as me, and her shirt had a jagged rip on the left shoulder, but she was still beautiful. “You look like you’ve been in a war,” I said.
“And you think you look as if you’ve just walked out of a beauty parlor?” Laia said, looking at me with a broad smile. Her brow suddenly furrowed. “Are you okay?” she asked, pointing at my shoulder.
I looked down at where I had scratched myself on the rocks around the edge of the hole. There was a dark, rapidly drying bloodstain on my T-shirt. “It’s just a scratch,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go for a swim back at the hotel and show off my war wound.”
“If you do, you’re on your own,” Laia said. “Your war wound is not all you’d have to show off to go for a swim.”
We laughed. “I still can’t believe we ended up in a naturist resort. Maybe we can get our swimsuits and go down to the beach for a swim?” I suggested.
“That sounds like a better idea. I’d certainly enjoy washing this dirt off.”
We walked in silence for a while. “I know you don’t think Grandfather was a traitor,” I said eventually, “and I don’t either, but someone obviously did, and we haven’t found anything that proves he wasn’t. That bothers me.”
“Maybe DJ and the others have found out more.”
“I texted DJ last night,” I said, suddenly remembering that I hadn’t turned my phone back on this morning. I took it out and turned it on.
“I’ve only got one bar,” I said, looking at the screen. The phone pinged as it downloaded text that I’d missed. “It’s from DJ,” I said, holding the phone so Laia could see it.
Hope things are going well. We broke the code—sort of–-and it might work for your entries as well. Frequency of letters. 1 = e, 2 = t, 3 = a, 4 = o. You get the idea. Look up the rest. Gotta sleep. Good luck.
“Sounds as if DJ’s code is different from ours,” I said, putting the phone back in my pocket. “I wonder if everyone got a different code.”
“We were lucky you worked out that the key was Lorca’s poem,” Laia said. “We could still be completely in the dark.”
“But there’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It looks like Grandfather was a spy, but who for? He came to Spain, but where else did he go?”
We walked on in silence, both deep in thought. I still hadn’t come up with any answers when the red scooter shot around the bend ahead of us and skidded to a halt. We stopped and stared at the rider, who peered at us over his scarf. “What do you want?” I shouted, stepping forward.
The scooter engine roared, but instead of turning back down the hill, the man accelerated past us in a cloud of dust. When it settled, I looked back up the hill and saw the scooter stopped a couple hundred meters from us; the rider was talking into a cell phone.
“I don’t like this,” Laia said.
“Me neither. Let’s get down to the main road as quick as we can.” We hurried down the hill, the scooter keeping its distance behind us. I had a horrible sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it only got worse when a white panel van appeared on the road ahead. The van slewed sideways across the road and the doors slid open. Right then I would have been happy to see Scarface and Tattoo Head, but three men we’d never seen before jumped out and ran toward us. There was nowhere to go. I put my arms around Laia. The men grabbed us and hustled us into the van, where our hands and feet were bound and rags were tied around our eyes. The van lurched, and I rolled painfully against the side. “Are you okay?” I heard Laia shout.
“¡Callate!” A voice ordered us to shut up.
“I’m okay!” was all I had time to reply before someone hit me hard on the side of the head. We had been kidnapped for the second time in as many days and were helpless in the back of a strange van, going who knew where. The whole thing had taken only seconds.
FIFTEEN
The trip in the van was a nightmare. Because of the blindfolds, every bump and swerve came as a surprise. Because we couldn’t brace ourselves to prepare, we were thrown around mercilessly, often crashing into each other and cursing our captors, who simply responded with kicks. In no time, the only part of me that wasn’t bruised and sore was my back. Our abductors hadn’t bothered to remove my daypack, and now, with my hands tied behind me, I couldn’t have got it off even if I had wanted too. It afforded some protection, but my fear was worse than the pounding I was taking.
I had expected our kidnappers to take us down the hill, back toward town. Instead, the slope of the van floor and the increasingly bumpy road suggested that we were heading farther into the hills. We were totally at the mercy of these people, and the thought of moving away from civilization terrified me. Images of stopping at some remote location, being hustled out of the van, shot and buried in a shallow grave haunted me. Our bodies would never even be found—Felip, Sofia, Mom, DJ and the rest of the world would never know what had happened to us. And I had no idea why this was happening.
After what seemed like a lifetime but could have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes, the van stopped. I heard the door slide open. The binding on our feet was taken off, and we were pushed unceremoniously out of the van. “Laia?” I asked.
“I’m here,” she said. Rough hands grabbed us and dragged us over bumpy ground. We were pushed against a wall. We were going to be shot. I moved sideways until my shoulder touched Laia’s. “I love you,” I said.
“¡Siéntate!” We were ordered to sit. The voice was harsh, but the order was comforting. You didn’t shoot people when they were sitting down—did you?
We slid our backs down the wall until we were sitting. Footsteps receded. After a few minutes of silence, I risked speaking. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, apart from some cuts and bruises. You?”
“The same.” Encouraged by the fact that no one had kicked us or ordered us to shut up, I went on. “Who are these people, and what do they want?” I was scared, but trying to work out what was happening calmed me down.
“I don’t know,” Laia replied. “I don’t think they have anything to do with Blue Eyes. I don’t think this is the way he works.”
“Neither do I. The guy on the red scooter must have been following us.”
“But he didn’t do a very good job. He was obviously surprised to see us when he came around the corner.”
“So he’d lost us,” I said. “When he saw us, he got on his cell phone and called the white van up there.”
“That means they were planning to kidnap us all along.”
The thought didn’t make me feel any happier. “So they were following us ever since we got to Palomares, just waiting for a chanc
e to take us.”
“It looks that way,” Laia agreed, “but that doesn’t get us any closer to knowing who they are or what they want.”
I leaned closer to Laia and lowered my voice. “Do you think it has anything to do with Grandfather’s notebook and what we found behind the rockfall?”
“Maybe,” Laia said. “What we found is certainly valuable, but how could they possibly know about your grandfather’s notebook?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they want to hold us for ransom.”
“Maybe,” Laia said again, but she didn’t sound convinced. “With all the rich tourists around here, I’m sure there are better targets than us. It could be something to do with Felip’s work, either digging up the past or helping the people in Palomares get proper compensation.”
“Could be,” I acknowledged. None of our theories sounded convincing, but I didn’t want to dwell on the other, less pleasant ideas I’d been having. “Where do you think we are?”
“We certainly headed farther into the hills,” Laia said. “Judging from my bruises, the van was being driven fairly fast. Even if we were only traveling for ten minutes, we could be ten or fifteen kilometers away from where they picked us up. That means we could be almost anywhere. There are dozens of tracks cutting through these hills—old roads leading to abandoned mines and hunters’ trails.”
“The wall we’re sitting against could be a ruined mine building,” I suggested.
“Quite possibly. My blindfold lets through a bit of light, and it didn’t get darker when we were brought to this wall, so if we’re in a building, it has no roof.”
We sat in silence for a while, and I thought over what had happened. We had been abducted by strangers for some unknown reason, bound and blindfolded, and we were being held in an abandoned building somewhere in the hills above Palomares. The only encouraging aspect was that we weren’t already dead. We were waiting for something, but what?
“Did you mean what you said?” Laia asked, interrupting my thoughts.
