Blood Sun

16

Danny Maguire’s body was taken through the streets of London to one of the city’s main hospitals in the East End. The men still escorted the ambulance, and Sayid had tracked them using more than twenty street cameras. He stored all the pieces of recovered archive footage in a compressed file so that they could be opened and viewed in sequence.

Sayid could see that the ambulance went to the rear of the building, where the body was off-loaded. The two men parked the car and walked in behind the ambulance crew. There was no movement for more than twenty minutes other than the ambulance leaving the hospital. Then a black, unmarked van arrived and also drove round the back of the building. The men who drove the van up to the mortuary entrance wore suits and looked like funeral undertakers. They unloaded a coffin, went inside and after another half hour came out again. It was obvious to Sayid there was now a body inside the coffin. As the black van drove away, the escort car followed it.

They drove for another hour, well south of the Thames, to an anonymous concrete complex no different from any of the other ugly, faceless buildings that surrounded it. When the van and a car emerged from the underground parking lot of the building, the two vehicles separated. It was at this point that Sayid stopped the surveillance. He was exhausted, but as far as he could see, Danny Maguire’s body never came out again.

There was nothing else Sayid could do other than to get this information into the right hands. But who was that to be? If he told Mr. Jackson what he had been doing, he’d probably get booted out of the school and his mother would lose her job. He decided to contact the White Hat group and get their help to access cameras inside that building and send what he had to MI5. That was why he needed the best IT guys. MI5 could trace back the source of the information, but if the White Hats took it on with their sophisticated equipment, they could hide an elephant in a room and no one would notice.

Sam Keegan was a young desk officer at MI5. He was ambitious and pleased it was he who was delivering news to his boss concerning the ongoing investigation into Max Gordon.

“Sir, we had a bomb-burst message come through.”

Ridgeway had been concentrating on something else and looked blank for a moment.

“It’s a fragmented message sent from a hundred or more encrypted sources,” Keegan explained.

“I know what it is. Show me.”

Keegan swiveled Ridgeway’s keyboard round to face him and made a few keystrokes. The screen showed a myriad of small windows that, after Keegan opened them, ran seamlessly into one screen.

“Someone has tagged together archive footage of Danny Maguire’s death. This took some doing, but they clearly want us to see it.”

Ridgeway gazed at the unfolding picture on his screen. “Can you trace this back?”

“Doubtful, sir. My guess is that there’d be a hundred dead ends.”

Ridgeway nodded. It didn’t matter, because whoever sent this was clearly asking for MI5’s help.

“Can we identify this building?” he asked, pointing at the final frame of the concrete complex.

“It’s south of the river, sir. When they sent it through, it had GPS coordinates attached.”

“How very helpful of them. Well, whoever they are, it’s a pity we can’t get them to work for us. All right, Keegan, you’d better get down there and have a look. I just hope this isn’t some tomfoolery and that we are the victim of somebody’s sick sense of humor.”

Keegan left his boss’s office, neither man knowing that the mild-mannered desk agent would soon face a horror worse than his most frightening nightmares.

“Wake up! Get up! Now!”

Sayid jerked awake. He had been asleep for only a couple of hours, and the programmed alarm on his computer shouted at him like a housemaster. He was still fuzzy-headed as he sat down on a chair, hit the Return key and watched as a message came in from the White Hat hackers. They used his Web name:

Magician: you online, dude? bomb-burst delivered. guess they’ll follow up. government morons won’t find us. you take over the cameras live in that building, watch yourself. we’ll be here and will monitor when you go in. dead bodies, Men in Black, not good news. could be tight if they attempt a trace on you. we’ll block them as long as we can.

The screen imploded and then flashed up with more than a dozen CCTV camera feeds. Sayid popped a can of energy drink, shoved a handful of crisps into his mouth and washed them down with a swig. He had control of the cameras inside the concrete complex. He was spying in real time.

Wherever Max was, Sayid was still trying to help him. He just hoped his friend would contact him before too long and that Max was not in danger-but as the thought entered his head, he knew that was unlikely.

The storm gathered out at sea, hurled itself furiously toward the coast and then veered, scouring the coastline, doing its best to tear the landscape apart. Funneled by the estuary and deflected by the mountains, it lost much of its strength as it swept down the river, but it was still a force that demanded respect. The accompanying clouds clung to the peaks and dumped rain into the ravine-scarred hills.

Max felt the freshening breeze long before the storm pounded the coast. As he poled the raft on the calmer edges of the fast-moving current, he realized that fresh water had channeled into the river from somewhere-perhaps runoff from the steep banks-and that the water was no longer brackish. He remembered the River Dart at home when the tide pushed the salt water only so far, and then as water soaked downward from Dartmoor, the river became clean and fresh. Now the same happened here. They had made good progress in spite of the fast-flowing current, but the water had become deeper, the swirling eddies tugging at them, and he could feel the end of the pole being almost forced from his hand. There was no sign of the helicopter. Could they have given up the search so quickly? Max could see that as the river widened ahead of them and then twisted round a sweeping bend, the force of the water pounded the far shore. He would not have sufficient control to get them much farther upriver, and if the helicopter came back now, they would be exposed and vulnerable.

The approaching storm was a real threat, because the more rain that fell, the more turbulent the river became. Their flimsy craft was already struggling to cope with the torsion of the currents. They had passed two smaller tributaries, but Max had ignored them, wanting to push on as far as he could up the main stream, but now he realized that they could not get much farther.

“We need to find a side stream,” he told Xavier.

Xavier was already gripping the white leather seat as the choppy water bounced the raft around. Like a child clutching a teddy bear, he hugged it to himself with one arm while gripping the raft’s fraying homemade rope with his free hand.

“How do we do that?” he asked, his voice breaking with uncertainty.

“A miracle might help,” Max said as he shoved all his weight against the pole, urging the raft to move toward the forested banks and into calmer water.

“I thin’ we’ve used up all the miracles we had. You better talk to your angels, chico.”

Max smiled. “There’s always one more if you ask for it. Over there, see?”

Xavier was on his knees, the wind was freshening and he could feel that Max did not have the control he had had only a few minutes ago. As they approached the bend in the river, a small headland jutted out, masked by trees. Water gurgled, and in a lumpy, confused way, tore itself away from the main river.

“Right on cue!” Max yelled. “When I push to the right, get back here with me and put your weight behind me. You’re going to get wet as the tail end of the raft goes under, but that’s how we can slew it across. You ready?”

Xavier was nodding furiously and holding on for dear life. Max watched the current, saw the swirl of water and risked a glance over his shoulder, because suddenly the breeze was no longer a gentle whisper on his neck but an insistent, invisible hand pushing at him. The darkening clouds were pouring over the edge of the mountains like a breaking wave. A tidal bore-a churning muddy surge of water forced upstream by the sea-chased the raft. It would take less than a couple of minutes to reach them, and then all would be lost. Even if Xavier clung to the makeshift life belt, it was likely that the force of the water would tear it from his grasp and then he would drown, because Max would not be able to reach him in the turmoil.

“Now! Come on, Xavier! Get here, come on!” The wind was already carrying his voice away from the raft, swallowing it, muting his desperate command. Max jammed the pole into the riverbed, felt it bite into boulders and leaned, pushing the raft across the last stretch of troublesome water.

It was like being sucked down the drain. The narrow outlet pulled them out of danger, but the pole snapped in Max’s hands. He nearly fell, but Xavier grabbed him, and they both clung desperately to the fragile raft as it jiggled, bent and twisted. It would not be much longer before it came apart completely. It was amazing that it had got them this far.

The helicopter pilot flicked the switches and mentally urged the propellers to wind up more quickly than they were doing. The sudden surge of water that came round the bend in the river had taken him by surprise, and he knew that if he could not lift the helicopter clear of the sandbank, they would be washed away. Riga was at the open door of the chopper, standing on a skid as he gazed downriver. If Max Gordon was hiding in the shallows or beneath overhanging trees behind them, this surge of water would have caught him and whoever was with him and flushed them out. But so far there was no sign of them.

The pilot was screaming at him. Riga wasn’t wearing the headset, but he could see the man’s mouth, spittle flecking from his lips in a silent demand that they get going now! Riga nodded, gripped the fuselage and felt the pummeling downdraft of the blades as the helicopter lifted clear. Boulders, trees and mud churned below the skids. Riga felt a twinge of regret-he did not want the storm to kill Max Gordon. The boy had tried his best to survive; he wanted him to live long enough so that he, Riga, could kill him face to face. It was a far more honorable way to die.

The narrow fork that Max and Xavier had turned down was a few kilometers from where Riga had waited in the helicopter, but the noise of the wind and the growling thunder of water as it pursued them stifled any noise of the aircraft they might have heard. Low clouds rode above the crested water like a phantom surfer. The violent wave had surged past the mouth of this channel, but the force of the water now turned its violence toward the two boys.

Max felt the raft begin to break up; the vine string and palm-leaf ties were simply no match for this kind of stress and strain. There were maybe two or three sections of the raft that might hold together, and it was these that Xavier clung to, with the leather seat beneath his chest. Max unrolled the length of rope and tied it to the middle of the metal-tipped shaft. He could see a small pool of water a hundred meters ahead, created by two boulders that made the river spurt its energy around them.

“Over there!” Max shouted. “That pool.” He gripped the shaft, showing Xavier that he intended to throw it and snag the rocks. “The rope’ll be long enough to take you close to the shore. You just hold on tight! Understand? It’s the best chance you’ve got.”

Xavier nodded miserably. Max knew he would have no choice but to go into the water and survive as best he could. If he was lucky, the tongue of water would push him into the undergrowth, where they might have a chance to climb ashore, back into the shelter of the trees where they would have to start their journey again on foot. A thrashing squall of rain caught them, then swept across and past them. Like bullets hitting the surface, the squall momentarily flattened the choppy water. If they were going to have any chance of reaching the bank, now was a good time to attempt it. He stood up, knees bent, balancing on what was little more than the width of a couple of surfboards. Grabbing the end of the metal-tipped shaft, he swung it in a flat arc, low across the water. His shoulder felt as though it had torn apart, the infection from the thorns protesting against the effort. He wrapped the end of the rope round Xavier’s fist, hauled him to his feet and watched as the rope played out.

“Come on, Xavier, it’s now or never!”

“Maybe never’s better,” Xavier shouted, but there was no choice in the matter as the last pieces of wood separated beneath them. The rope tugged, Xavier jumped and within a couple of seconds, Max tumbled into the water, plunging down hard and fast.

Max broke the surface retching, frantically kicking to stay afloat. He saw Xavier, still gripping the white leather seat and rope, his mind acknowledging that the boy was in smoother water and that he had a good chance of reaching the bank. Xavier was sorted. Max had his own problems. He was being pulled away by the current. Another squall splattered down, stinging his face, forcing him to close his eyes. Part of his brain was shouting at him to look downriver. He tried to shake the water from his ears, suck air and force his eyes wide open against the spray. What was that noise? It did not sound like the wind. More like an express train. A couple of hundred meters away, the mist phantoms were forced into the sky by a greater power. A curtain of spray that rose up from the river like steam. Waterfall!

He swallowed water, choked, gasping for breath, forcing himself not to panic. Whatever happened he mustn’t panic; he had to stay in control as long as he could, but his strength was slipping away, and no matter how hard he fought, he could not beat this tidal surge, nor the fever that was swallowing him more quickly than the river. He had finally asked too much of his body, now weakened from battling the infection in his shoulder.

Was this what drowning was like? Everything fell silent about him. The wind and slushing water were muted. There was a lot of water in his ears-perhaps that was why he couldn’t hear anything anymore. He tried to float on his back, arms outstretched, gazing at the cotton-wool-like mist and hoping his spread-eagled position would snag something, anything, to halt the unstoppable course toward the cliff edge. Was it a ten-meter drop or a hundred?

He bounced and bobbed; then a wave overtook him, washed across his face and forced his body down. With no time to take a breath, he simply closed his eyes and mouth and let the water spin him round. Sometimes you can’t fight it-just go with it, son. Find that place in your mind where it is quiet and where there’s no fear. How many times had his dad told him that the mind and body had to work together? It was like going through a door into a silent room where he could watch his body fight its own battle.

It was not his father that he yearned for in these final moments. This vein of river was the route to his mother’s heart, and he called for her, crying out desperately in the darkness of his mind.

His face broke the surface, and he lurched upward, forcing his painful shoulder to raise him high enough so that he could see and breathe. It would take only a second for the water to tumble again, pushing him back down beneath the surface. He couldn’t survive another thrashing. He was going to drown this time-better that way-before the drop.

For a moment he thought the helicopter had returned as a whirring hum of blades thrashed the air. The current spun him round; at least now he would not see the drop into the cauldron when it came, but the crazy image he saw took time to penetrate his mind. It was a big, flat-bottomed boat, and a man sitting on a high seat in front of a massive fan was pointing the boat directly at him. These killers just wouldn’t give up!

A grizzled, bewhiskered man with a gold tooth, tattooed face and arms, an earring and a battered old straw hat with colored feathers shoved into it was mouthing something at him. This apparition stood at the front of the fan-propelled boat as it surged toward him.

Max almost laughed aloud: it seemed there were pirates of the Caribbean after all.