Ice Claw

22

That was what was so wrong.

Peaches had run back to the van with Sharkface’s men. Sayid gulped. Something invisible gripped his throat and stabbed him in the heart with an icicle. The look she gave him didn’t need words.

The vans burned rubber, found the nearest exit from the motorway, took it easy along country roads for the next fifty kilometers and slipped back on to the silky-smooth blacktopped autoroute.

Sayid’s mind was in turmoil. Bobby was probably dead, another man injured, and Bobby’s girlfriend was part of this whole terrifying mess. Desperately alone, he began to shake with fear. The shock was going to shut him down and he couldn’t help but let out a gulping sob.

“Shut up, you sniveling brat!” one of the bikers yelled from the front seat.

The tone in the boy’s voice had an unusual effect on Sayid. In that brief moment of temper, he realized they were rattled. Things hadn’t gone to plan, had they? No, they hadn’t. These evil, violent people had been as shaken by events as had Sayid, but for a different reason-the fear of being caught in an unexpected situation far from home. There was still time for other things to go wrong. For someone to stumble on them.

He brought his scattered thoughts back under control. The magic square numbers burned even more brightly in his mind: perhaps they held essential information that might stop these killers.

Sayid concentrated-the heat-seeking missile was back on target.

Max had to fight the obvious: Sophie was in league with Peaches, involved in killing Zabala and a member of Sharkface’s gang. Bobby Morrell hadn’t abandoned him and Sayid at Hendaye, he had been betrayed, maybe even killed by Peaches. These thugs worked for someone so powerful his reach could stretch across the world to get what he wanted by any means possible. Zabala’s cry, Trust no one-they will kill you, had even more resonance now. Had the whole thing been a charade? Sharkface’s gang attacking Sophie, Max riding like an idiot to the rescue, drawn in and seduced by her vulnerability, only to be used as a means to an end-to find Zabala’s secret?

Obvious? So it seemed, and he wished it weren’t. Distrust eats away at you like a terrible disease.

“Why did she take it?” Fauvre demanded once they were back in his office, his hands sifting through the old monk’s papers. “She must have known its importance. There can be no denying that! Damn her! She’s selling it for money, isn’t she? She’s found a buyer for something invaluable. Selling a man’s life!”

The distraught man’s anger was at a destructive level.

Whatever Sophie had done, Max convinced himself she was not a killer. She could have cut his throat when she took the stone. That gave him some hope, a glimmer of understanding.

Max needed this man on his side, because he had to get out of the Tears of the Angels and back to Europe.

“She’s caught up in something that she doesn’t understand,” Max said. He had pulled Peaches’s photograph from the wall in Sophie’s room. “Do you know this girl?”

Fauvre shook his head. “She is someone Sophie knows?”

“She’s the girl who killed Zabala,” Max said quietly.

The man’s shock was genuine. The flush of anger drained from his face. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked old and beaten. He held the photograph in a trembling hand. “What has my girl done? Why is she with these people? May God forgive me for not loving her enough.”

He poured a drink and gulped it down like medicine, wincing at the whisky’s sharpness. He sat shaking his head. After a moment Max saw a resolve creep back into his body. His broken spine straightened; his voice became more convincing.

“She is in danger. I must help her.”

“Then you need to help me,” Max told him. “Do you see that pattern on the girl’s race suit? I’ve seen it a couple of times, and each time violence has been attached to it. Look at the other competitors. Some of them have sponsorship logos. Do you think that design could mean anything? If it did and Sophie has gone to this girl, it might help us find where she is.”

Fauvre nodded. Now there was something he could do, something positive. He banged on the window. Abdullah was outside, making sure enough water was being poured on the burning embers of the feed store so no sparks got caught on the wind and started another blaze.

The riad owner came inside; rivulets of sweat scarred his soot- and dirt-caked face. Fauvre handed the photograph to the big man.

“Abdullah, take this to the computer room, scan it in and see if that design means anything.”

Abdullah nodded, asked no questions and turned away towards the next building.

“We have a good scanning system here. We use it to compare animals’ faces with those photographed in the wild. It’s a recognition package. Abdullah can do these things much quicker than I can.”

“I have a friend who’s the same,” Max said grimly, thinking of Sayid, who was who-knew-where.

“And that is all we can do? Hope to find an obscure link?”

Max knew he had to play his final card. “No, we can do more than that. We can see what your friend Zabala hid on the pendant’s stone.”

Max reached for the short-bladed knife that served as a letter opener. Sitting quickly, he pulled off one of his trainers, dug the knife into the heel and gouged out the cushioning gel.

He held the stone between his fingers.

“Sooner or later someone would have snatched that pendant. I replaced Zabala’s stone when I was in Abdullah’s riad.”

“Then Sophie-?”

“Has a piece of stone cut from a coaster. She has nothing,” Max said.

Angelo Farentino had enjoyed the first half of his cigar. Max Gordon’s father really had no idea at all who he was, and the hulking bodyguard-cum-nurse was out of earshot, so none of this conversation would be remembered by anyone. Except Farentino. But what Tom Gordon had told him dried the moisture in his mouth. The cigar had gone out, and the cloying, stale tobacco coated his tongue with a bitterness that had more to do with the bile of fear than the life-threatening habit of smoking.

Tom Gordon had made a casual remark, a meandering explanation of how he and other explorer-scientists had gone to Switzerland many years ago. Farentino immediately became more attentive. Gordon’s memory was like a jigsaw puzzle, and not all the pieces fitted, but the scraps and recollections began to form a complete picture for Farentino.

Environmental groups had investigated the huge nuclear particle accelerator establishment in Switzerland and had been invited to see for themselves the safety measures in place. Farentino remembered those days, could almost recall the article someone had written, and that he had published, about the melting glaciers in the Alps and the danger of causing any electromagnetic energy that could contribute towards climate change in that area. Quietly, so as not to cause alarm, safeguards were initiated for the underground research work-like a firewall on a computer. A barrier. But no one knew if it was sufficient should a major catastrophe strike the area.

The lying, deceitful Angelo Farentino had now inadvertently been given information that Fedir Tishenko must be told. Even Tishenko could not have predicted the destruction that he would bring if he went ahead with his plans to harness nature’s energy. Could he?

If Farentino went to the authorities they would arrest him, whether they believed him or not about this long-forgotten theory. Nor could he hide. If this information was correct, everything Farentino owned, every scrap of wealth would be destroyed. Stock markets would tumble, banks would close, property would become worthless. Meltdown. Massive destruction.

If he tried to run, to shift money around the world, to go and live in Brazil or on a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Fedir Tishenko had the resources to find and kill him. If he did not run, everything was finished anyway. It was a no-win situation. It wasn’t that vast numbers of people would die or the environment would be irreversibly contaminated that bothered him-his wealth was going to be destroyed. That was why he had betrayed everyone in the first place. Vast wealth. This was so unfair. Why did he have to learn about this? Why hadn’t fate put someone else in the hot seat?

Angelo Farentino was no hero, but he had to use every charming, persuasive skill he possessed to convince Tishenko that what he was planning could create hell on Earth.

The vans stopped to refuel, but Sharkface kept Bobby’s van out of sight on the slip road to the garage and restaurant complex. They filled containers with diesel and refueled it in the darkness of the trees.

Sayid turned his body around and braced his back against the paneled sides, making sure his plaster cast hid the scribbling on the bottom of Bobby’s surfboard. The door slid back-Sayid flinched. Peaches climbed in. She looked at him and he averted his eyes. Don’t make eye contact with anything dangerous, Max had once told him.

The girl gave him something that looked like soggy cheese in a flaccid roll filled with bits of stir-fried vegetables. It tasted like a sweaty sock full of garden cuttings, but he was starving, and he was desperate for the cup of hot chocolate she held.

Outside he could hear Sharkface telling the others what route they would take. Snatches of place names, including the city of Geneva-he couldn’t catch the rest; his chewing was making too much noise in his ears. He gobbled the food, scared that the cold-faced Peaches might take it away from him. She sat on her haunches, watching him. Her eyes studied every bit of the inside of the van, searching for anything that might allow Sayid to make an escape, or cause problems on the road.

Sayid made sure his foot did not move away from the surfboard. Dare he risk provoking her by asking questions?

Be nice. Be grateful. “Thanks, Peaches. I needed that.”

She nodded and gave him the hot chocolate.

Ask her. Be careful! “I don’t understand why you’re with these creeps,” Sayid said quietly. “I mean, Bobby was such a nice bloke.”

She snatched the hot drink away from his bound hands, splashes scalding him. She threw the contents out onto the ground. “You’re not here to ask questions, Sayid. You can’t talk and drink at the same time-so you’ve just made your choice.”

“I don’t know anything about what’s going on!” he said angrily, desperately wishing he could have had the warmth from the drink.

“We figured that, but you’re more use to us alive than dead for a while longer. You don’t think your friend would abandon you, do you?”

Max! They were using Sayid as a trap! How? They didn’t know where Max was exactly, unless … Sayid’s thoughts slammed into a brick wall. What was the common denominator? Sophie. That was who Peaches had sent a text to. Peaches and Sophie were working together!

Peaches smiled, climbed out and slammed the door closed. Sayid had to find the answer contained in these numbers. And somehow get that information to Max.

Because once they had Max, Sayid was of no use to them.

They would kill him.

Fauvre wiped the sweat from his eyes, wheeling himself backwards and forwards, gathering pieces of equipment. He shifted a crude, old-fashioned microscope into position. Once cutting-edge, now years out of date compared to modern technology, it still had a use in a shoestring operation such as his.

Fauvre held out his hand for Zabala’s crystal. Max felt a possessive surge grip him. He had been entrusted with it by the dying man, had fought for his life to protect its secret and was now handing it over to the father of the girl who had betrayed him.

After a moment’s hesitation he dropped it into the outstretched hand. Fauvre rolled it between his fingertips, caressing it as if it were a priceless diamond. And it was priceless if its secret could be understood.

Fauvre felt the boy’s hesitation. “All right. Let’s see what my friend was killed for.”

The air in the room was heavy with sweat; the breeze helped cool it a little, but the acrid stench of burnt straw still caught their throats. Fauvre wiped his eyes with his sleeve and lowered his face to the lens. The darkened room was lit only by the diffused glow from a light box. Max could barely breathe with the tension. If Fauvre understood what was on that crystal it would be tantamount to opening the vault of a secret tomb.

After what seemed a long time, Fauvre pushed himself back from the table.

“Give me the birth charts,” Fauvre said.

He spun his chair around and clamped the two pieces of paper onto a whiteboard-the original chart Max had found in the chateau and the latest that Zabala had sent to Fauvre. He quickly made a bigger drawing of them so they could both see exactly what they were talking about.

Max watched the black marker slide across the whiteboard as Fauvre sketched the same-shaped triangle that was etched on the crystal, placing a letter at each corner-E, S, Q.

“Several years ago three distant bodies in our solar system were discovered,” Fauvre said as he wrote them out, Eris, Sedna and Quaoar, pronouncing each one as he did, like a teacher back at school: “Eeris, Sedna and Kway-o-are.”

He touched each point of the triangle. “E, S and Q. Zabala could not have known of their existence all those years ago. Back then the planets told him a major disaster was going to happen, but there was something missing-these planets and their conjunction.”

“Their alignment? That’s special, is it?” Max asked.

“Exactly!” Fauvre said. “These are the triggers and they are now in the correct place in the zodiac.”

Max wasn’t getting it. But he concentrated as if his life depended on it-which it might. He knew the moon affected the Earth’s crops and tides, so perhaps these planets could also exert subtle forces. Max’s fingers hovered across the diagrams, touching the unlocked secret, which as yet didn’t make complete sense.

“Zabala had all the vital pieces for his prediction,” Max said. “He wanted you to have the pendant. Because he had sent you the new chart he made.”

Fauvre spoke carefully. “I am convinced Zabala’s prediction of a natural disaster is correct and it will be brought on by a man-made force. Those three missing heavenly bodies now lend an enormous weight of conviction to its happening.”

Max could only go so far with crazy ideas. “I can’t deal with this stuff. There’s no logic. There’s no reasoning behind it. All of this because of a lousy triangle!” he blurted out. His dad had always taught him to be practical, to see the reality behind the facade of nonscientific claims.

“You’re wrong, Max! This information would have died with Zabala had you not taken responsibility and seen this thing through.” Fauvre spoke slowly and precisely, letting the boy’s frustration settle. “Max, this is not the idiocy of reading a horoscope in a daily newspaper. This is a scientist-my friend Zabala-discovering a powerful universal force.”

“I want something more definite to go on,” Max replied.

“This is precise. It is definite,” Fauvre replied. He drew the new triangle into the diagram Zabala had sent him. “This gives us the planetary alignments at the exact hour, day and year that this catastrophe will occur: 11:34 on the eighth of March.”

“Two days’ time,” Max said.

Fauvre held up the numbers he’d scribbled on a pad, taken from the crystal:

7 24 8-10 4 9 12 25-7 11 9 17

“But this is one part of Zabala’s secret I cannot understand. What do you think these numbers mean? I do not believe they have any bearing on the astrological horoscopes. There is no relationship between them and the drawings.”

“It’s a code of some description,” Max said, and as he did so, his stomach plummeted. Sayid! His face intruded into Max’s thoughts. There was nothing he could do about his friend. Not right now.

Fauvre saw the look of anguish on his face. “There is something you haven’t told me?”

Max nodded. “There was a sheet of paper with a square of numbers, twenty-five numbers. It made no sense except they all added up to sixty-five no matter which way you added them.”

“Then that square holds a message. Zabala was passing on vital information, perhaps even telling us how the catastrophe might be averted.”

Max racked his brains. There was no way he could remember the magic square numbers. “To encrypt anything you need a word or a phrase. The people writing the code and those deciphering it have to know it. It’s like a combination for a vault.” Max was sunk even if he had the magic square. He did not have the key words.

“We only found the numbers in the square and those on the crystal,” he said. “We never found the key words to help us decipher it.”

“But don’t you see, Max? Somewhere Zabala has given you those key words to unlock his message. You’ve seen them, or been given them, or been told them. Where is the piece of paper?” Fauvre asked.

“My mate’s got it.”

“And where is he?”

“He should be home, but I haven’t been able to get hold of him. Maybe the cops have him back in England. It doesn’t matter right now.”

Max moved to a wall map. “The triangle brought me here from Biarritz. The other two sides join up …” Max’s finger traced a line. “Here.”

“Geneva,” Fauvre said, alarmed.

Fear twisted Max’s stomach. “The particle accelerator at CERN.”

“You know about it?” Fauvre said.

Europe’s organization for nuclear research. Max was supposed to have gone on a school trip there a couple of years ago but was in a cross-country competition instead. Sayid had gone and said it was stunning. A hundred meters underground, a huge circle of accelerator tubes, eight and a half kilometers across, twenty-seven kilometers in circumference. It was the size of London Underground’s Circle Line. Massive. Biggest, most complex piece of machinery in history!

Sayid tended to get excited about science.

This was every physicist’s dream. The big bang theory. They were going to accelerate beams of protons at very nearly the speed of light. The beams would smash particles together, creating an unbelievable burst of energy. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” Sayid had shouted, stamping his feet like a madman, nearly falling over himself with exhilaration. In fact, he’d rabbited on for days about it. Drove Max crazy. Now Max wished he’d listened more attentively.

Fauvre tapped the map. “Those scientists are attempting to find out how this universe came about. They want to determine when the known forces of nature were born-one trillionth of a second after the moment of creation,” Fauvre told him. “It makes sense. Zabala once spent months in those mountains.”

Max’s gaze stayed locked on Lake Geneva. Suppose, just suppose, every single thing he had discovered was true? A disaster striking that area would cause death and destruction on a vast scale.

“The particle accelerator. Sophie must be taking the pendant to someone there,” Max said. “But when she delivers it and they discover it’s worthless …”

He didn’t say anything more. Fauvre’s stricken face reflected his own. Sophie would die.

Zabala had given them the date and time of the catastrophe, and now Max knew where it was supposed to happen: the French-Swiss border at 11:34 a.m. on March 8.

Their stunned silence was broken by Abdullah barging into the room, gesturing with Peaches’s photo. “That pattern on her ski suit, it can be many things.” And then he smiled. “But two things for sure it is!” He put a couple of printouts on the desk. “This is a photograph of chain lightning. See, it is like a piece of coral in the night sky. And this”-he shifted the other sheet into view-“this is the corporate logo of Perun Industries.”

“Lightning,” Max said, realization stabbing him, “brings light… Lux Ferre …”

“What? Zabala used those words in one of his letters …,” Fauvre said, scrabbling among Zabala’s documents. “Here!” He held up a crumpled sheet of torn paper. “Lux Ferre. This is what he feared! He says so. It made no sense to me.”

“They were clues,” Max said. “What sort of company is it?”

“Oil and gas. The exploration and commercial rights were sold years ago, but the man who owned Perun kept the name. There are no shareholders. It is a private company worth billions. It would appear the man became a recluse. His name is Fedir Tishenko, a Ukrainian. And he lives somewhere in Switzerland.”

Max knew he had found his enemy.

And Fauvre was correct-Zabala had given him the key word. He’d shouted it moments before he died.

Lucifer.

Sayid. Where are you?

L-U-C–I-F-E-R.

The key.