by Andrew Lane
He was just about to turn away from the computer and swing his way towards the door when he heard movement outside. Scuffling at the door. Scratching.
The sound of the lock being forced.
A feeling of disbelief swept over him. His warehouse, his apartment, being burgled? While he was inside? Unbelievable.
His brain raced, trying to work out what to do, which of the various options that presented themselves would be best. He’d always relied on the security system to deter thieves and intruders, but with the power off it was no more use than a chocolate teapot. He could call the police, in fact he probably should call the police, but it would take them at least ten minutes to get to him, more if they were busy or thought he was a hoax call. He could phone Mr Macfarlane – the man had hidden depths, and might be able to help – but he was miles away. And, apart from his great-aunt, everyone else he knew was several hundred miles away in Georgia.
He picked up his mobile phone from beside the keyboard. At least if he phoned the police he’d know that help was on its way.
The words on the screen were brutally plain. No signal.
He’d always had a mobile-phone signal in the apartment. The intruders were jamming the frequencies, not letting anything in or out.
He was going to have to deal with this himself.
Somehow.
CHAPTER
twelve
It was early the next day that the expedition rolled out of Tbilisi.
Rhino glanced at their driver. Levan Ketsbaia was a burly man with a mass of unruly black hair, thick eyebrows and a few days’ stubble around his cheeks, chin and neck. His eyes were a faded green, quite startling in his swarthy face, and he had a gold stud in his right earlobe.
Rhino had found Levan in a coffee shop in the centre of Tbilisi. They had arranged a meeting there via phone calls, as Rhino had wanted to spend some time in the man’s company, weigh him up, look for signs that he was reliable, honest and knowledgeable.
The first thing Rhino noticed as he sat down was that Levan was drinking mineral water. That was a good sign. A man who drank beer or wine at lunchtime was probably not to be trusted. He might take his own supply of alcohol with him on the expedition, and get drunk at the wrong moment – the wrong moment on an expedition being virtually any moment, of course.
Levan looked up at Rhino. ‘Please, join me.’ He waved at the food in front of him – circles of some doughy substance that filled the plate. ‘Georgian food – please help yourself. It is bread stuffed with local cheese. People call it “Georgian pizza”.’
Another good sign – Levan wasn’t immediately trying to get Rhino to buy drinks and food for him, even before they had agreed on his fees and terms of employment. That suggested he wasn’t a chancer, looking to exploit his employers.
They talked for a couple of hours, and by the end of it Rhino was convinced that they had found their guide. Levan spoke openly and honestly about his life – including service in the army during the era when Russia had controlled the country – and his love for the countryside. Rhino asked him searching questions on survival skills, mountaineering and camping, and he answered them all in detail and with humour. Rhino decided that he trusted Levan and, more than that, he liked him too.
Now, as Levan drove through Tbilisi towards the countryside, Tara leaned forward from her seat in the back.
‘Mr Ketsbaia . . .’
‘Levan,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘I insist – it is Levan. And you are . . . Tara?’
‘That’s right.’ She seemed to glow slightly with pleasure at the fact that he had remembered, despite their brief introduction earlier. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course. Any question you like – apart from mathematics. I do not like mathematics.’
‘No, it’s not mathematics.’ She waved a hand at the scene beyond the windscreen. ‘I can’t help but notice that wherever you look there are signs for art shops, art galleries or art exhibitions. They all look handmade. Is everyone in Tbilisi an artist?’
‘Very much so,’ he replied. ‘Georgians are a very artistic people. If we are not painters, then we are writers. If we are not writers, then we are poets.’
‘What about you?’ Tara asked. ‘When you’re not doing this, what do you do?’
‘I am sculptor,’ he said proudly. ‘I carve stone.’
‘How long until we get to where we’re going?’ Natalie called, removing her headphones.
‘To the Caucasus Mountains? Six hours, I think.’
‘You think?’ Natalie questioned. ‘I thought you were some kind of super-guide or something.’
‘Is depending on traffic, and weather, and state of roads,’ he explained patiently. ‘Never trust a man who gives you an absolute answer to a question like that. He is usually guessing.’
Within fifteen minutes they had got to a point where the city of Tbilisi gave way to rolling countryside – bare earth interrupted by patches of vegetation, outcrops of rock and the occasional shack. To their right the ground rose up into a series of sharp-edged hills that looked like miniature mountain ranges. The highest peaks all seemed to have churches built on them – closer to God, Rhino assumed, but a hell of a walk for the parishioners.
The road curved around the hills and through a pass that led to the other side. As they emerged from the shelter of the hills, and the road dipped away in front of them, the Georgian countryside was exposed in all its glory. Rhino could see small villages, ploughed fields, rivers carving their way through the landscape. On his right was a collection of several houses, all clustered together. They had the same colour walls and the same colour roofs. An attempt by the Soviets to build some kind of collective village, he assumed.
The van rolled on, covering the miles with ease. The engine maintained a constant tone, and Rhino was pleased to see that the fuel gauge was barely moving. That was a relief – he’d had a worry that they were going to have to refuel on a regular basis, which might be difficult in the mountains. In the back, Tara, Natalie and Gecko were all sleeping. That wasn’t a surprise – their body clocks still hadn’t adapted to the new time zone, and he suspected that they weren’t sleeping very well at night. He found that he couldn’t sleep. The passing countryside held too much interest for him.
The road rolled on ahead of them, with the occasional car or truck passing them by. A side road led away to the right. Levan indicated it with a wave of his hand. ‘Down there is village where Stalin was born,’ he said darkly. ‘A son of Georgia, but not one we are proud of.’
Stalin. The man in charge of the Soviet Union for over twenty years until 1953. A brutal dictator who had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens over the course of his bloody reign. And this was where he had been born?
Rhino shook his head in wry surprise. How exactly had he ended up here? he asked himself.
Calum listened, helpless, as the intruders forced the door open.
They were using brute force, rather than finesse, but paradoxically that was worse – it told him they were sophisticated, rather than amateurs. The lock was a state-of-the-art eight-tumbler option with steel deadbolts. Anybody trying to pick it with the high-tech equivalent of a hairpin was going to have their work cut out for them. On the other hand, anyone trying to force it with a crowbar, backed up with a hydraulic jack, wouldn’t have much trouble if the security system was down. Which it was.
The door squeaked and groaned as the intruders put it under more and more pressure. Calum’s heart raced. Maybe someone had broken in downstairs for a look around and was now trying to get in upstairs. Maybe they hadn’t found whatever they were looking for downstairs. Perhaps they didn’t know what they were looking for, but wanted to rifle through everything he possessed to see what came up.
Calum frantically searched his mind for options, and came up blank. If they made it in – and frankly that was looking like a certainty in the next few minutes – then he was toast. He had no defences, nothi
ng with which to fight them off.
Or did he?
He suddenly remembered the weapon that he and Professor Livingstone had argued about – the multi-shot taser gun. He’d stored it in a cupboard on the other side of the room. If he could just get to it in time . . .
Before the thought was finished he was swinging across the room as fast as he could, holding tight to the leather straps that hung from the ceiling.
When he was halfway across, the door burst open, sending splinters of wood flying.
Beyond the threshold was darkness, but the intruders had flashlights. They shone them into the room, scanning from side to side to pick up anyone who happened to be there.
Before the light touched him, Calum used his overdeveloped upper-body strength to pull himself up to the ceiling. The strain on his arms and his back was incredible. It felt like acid burning through his muscles. His biceps started to shake with the strain, but he was up high enough that the flashlights were panning beneath him, not picking up on anything.
‘It’s clear,’ came a whispered voice – female.
Another voice, this one male: ‘You sure?’
‘Yeah. Computer’s on though. Must be someone around.’
‘Not necessarily. Some people never turn their computers off.’
A pause. ‘We were told this kid never goes out. Maybe he’s in the toilet.’
‘All right – you head over to the computer. Remember what we’re looking for. I’ll check the other rooms.’
‘What are you going to do if you find him?’ the man asked.
‘Make sure he can’t call for help,’ the woman said grimly. ‘Ever.’
Two dark shapes entered the room. Calum couldn’t see more than their vague outlines, but he could hear them. And he could smell them – a rancid mix of sweat and tobacco smoke.
One of them headed across to where the computer screens glowed. The other headed straight ahead, beneath Calum, to where the bedrooms and the bathroom were located.
When he judged that both the intruders had their backs to him, Calum silently lowered himself down from the ceiling. He was facing the open door, away from them both. Resisting the urge to look over his shoulder, he swung as quietly as he could across to the other side of the room.
The cupboard where he had left the taser gun was a black shape in the darkness. Still hanging by one hand, he used the other to gently pull out the drawer where the weapon lay.
Wood grated against wood, and he paused, holding his breath.
‘What was that?’
A pause, then the woman answered: ‘Probably the floorboards shifting. This place is old. And it smells.’
Calum counted to five, then eased the drawer further open. Reaching inside he felt the cold metal curves of the taser gun. The hand that was holding on to the leather strap and taking all his weight began to cramp. Sharp pains ran up his wrist like little electric eels. He could feel his fingers trembling. He couldn’t hold on for much longer.
He gripped the butt of the gun and pulled it out of the drawer. The extra weight dragged at his other hand, pulling the tendons in his shoulders tight.
The gun hit the drawer as he pulled it out, making a dull thud.
‘What the . . . ?’ The two flashlights converged on him, catching him like a moth fluttering in car headlamps. ‘It’s the kid!’
‘Get him!’ the woman snapped. ‘Hurt him!’
Calum brought the weapon up, pointed it towards one of the flashlights and pulled the trigger. The barrel rotated and the weapon fired with a dull crack! Something flew out of the barrel and across the intervening space, hitting a patch of darkness just above the flashlight’s glare. Calum was startled to see a blue spark light up a shocked face from beneath, as a rapid clicking sound echoed around the apartment. The man’s mouth dropped open in a surprised exclamation and his eyes widened as the electrical current coursed through his body. Moments later Calum heard the sound of a body dropping heavily to the wooden floor.
‘Giggs?’ the woman shouted. ‘Giggs?’
‘He’s sparked out,’ Calum said, turning the gun towards the sound of the woman’s voice and firing again. Another crack! and another dark shape flew from the rotating barrel of the gun. The woman thrashed around with her flashlight, knocking the projectile away but smashing her lens at the same time. The apartment was suddenly plunged into darkness, apart from the pool of light cast by the fallen man’s torch.
Calum heard footsteps rushing across the wooden floor, then the sound of something being dragged. Pulled down by the weight of his body and the weight of the gun, his straining hand finally slipped off the leather strap. He fell heavily to the floor. The impact momentarily stunned him. For a moment he lay there, head ringing like a bell, knowing that he was helpless if the intruders decided to attack him, but the scuffling sounds he heard suggested that the woman was dragging her colleague towards the open door. It slammed shut, and then there was silence.
Calum counted to sixty, then pulled himself across the floor to where the electrocuted man’s flashlight was still pointed off to one side. He grabbed it and scanned the apartment with it.
There was nobody there but him. The intruders had gone.
The drive from Tbilisi to the village of Ruspiri had become a monotonous endurance test. Tara’s head kept on dropping lower and lower, as she slipped into sleep, only for her forehead to hit the headrest of the seat in front of her and send her jerking back into wakefulness. She didn’t know how long they’d been driving, but it seemed longer than the entire time they’d spent in the aircraft flying over to Tbilisi from Heathrow.
The landscape of scrub, open ground and distant hills didn’t do much to help. Nor did the road, which pretty much kept on going in a dead straight line. A hot sun shone down from a blue bowl of a sky, and only the shifting shadows marked the passage of time. Otherwise they might have been suspended in purgatory, for all the progress they seemed to be making.
Tara glanced sideways. Gecko was asleep. Behind her, Natalie was slumped with her headphones on. She might have been asleep, or she might have been listening to music. Tara tried to guess what kind of music Natalie liked. The most likely things were Rihanna and Britney Spears. Tara was thankful for the headphones.
She turned back to stare out of the windscreen. They seemed to be leaving civilization behind. Any villages they passed through were small, weather-beaten and apparently inhabited only by women in shawls sitting by the side of the road, men bent over the open bonnets of battered old cars and scruffy dogs looking for scraps of food.
They had stopped for lunch at a small roadside restaurant. They were the only people there, but even so, the waitress didn’t seem pleased to see them. Levan had ordered for them – dishes of unidentifiable meat, flat bread stuffed with salty cheese, small pasta dumplings. Natalie had turned her nose up at it and asked if there was any chance of an apple.
Ahead and to her right Rhino was awake, but he wasn’t moving much. Conserving energy, she supposed. Every now and then he would ask their guide a question about the kind of weather they could expect or the types of animals that lived in the Caucasus Mountains. To his left, Levan was driving with fixed concentration, his dark eyebrows low over his green eyes.
‘Does the whole country look like this?’ Tara asked, in an attempt to make conversation.
‘Not at all,’ Levan said without turning his head. ‘Georgia is the point where Eastern Europe meets Western Asia. If you take that set of borders where Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan would otherwise meet, and draw a circle round it, that is Georgia, and so in different parts of the country we have different –’ he struggled for the right word – ‘environments. Different climates. To the south is beaches and blue oceans. The people there are quick-witted and like to play practical jokes. To the east is verging on desert – very dry. The people there have most patience of all Georgians. To the west is forests, and to the north, where we are going, is mountains. Georgia is a very complicated country.
Lots of things to see, lots of things to do.’
They passed over a bridge that carried them across a wide ravine. Somewhere down at the bottom was a river, glinting like silver in the sunlight. Tara glanced along the length of the ravine to where it opened out into what looked like a descending series of flat plateaux, like plates that had been carelessly stacked.
She must have slept again without noticing, because the next time she looked out of the window the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows across the landscape, and her head was muzzy. Her forehead was sore as well, which meant she had probably woken herself up again by slowly pitching forward on to Rhino’s seat back.
There were mountains in the distance ahead. Not hills, as before, but actual mountains. They had craggy tops, like broken teeth, and they were topped with stark white snow. There were patches of snow on the ground by the road as well, but this snow appeared dirty and old, and gave the impression that it hadn’t melted only because it couldn’t be bothered. Around the snow was scrubby grass, and the occasional stunted tree. The road ahead of them meandered with the undulations of the terrain. Rather than being covered with tarmac, it was more like a dirt track that had been defined and compacted by generations of vehicles driving on more or less the same line.
‘We are near Ruspiri,’ Levan announced. ‘That is where we will base ourselves, ready for an expedition into the mountains in the next day or two.’ He glanced quickly back over his shoulder to see whether anybody apart from Rhino was awake and listening. ‘Georgia has a tradition of hospitality,’ he said. ‘The villagers will take us in and look after us, but remember that they are poor by your standards and most of them will not speak any language apart from their own. Be friendly and smile, and everything will be all right. A word of caution – do not talk about Russia, or Soviet Union, or times when Georgia was under their control. People have long memories, and there is much bitterness and disagreement. Most families will have scars caused by Soviet army occupation. Best to avoid whole subject.’
