Skeleton Key

BROTHERHOOD SQUARE

Alex said little at dinner that night. Although the hotel had seemed empty earlier in the day, he was surprised how many guests had appeared for dinner in their loose skirts, shirts and sun-tans, and he knew it would be impossible to talk openly now.

They were sitting on the restaurant terrace which overlooked the sea, eating fish-as fresh as Alex had ever tasted-served with rice, salad and black beans. After the intense heat of the afternoon, the air was cool and welcoming. Two guitarists, lit by candles, were playing soft Latin music. Cicadas rasped and rattled in their thousands, hidden in the undergrowth.

The three of them talked like any family would. The towns they were going to visit, the beaches where they wanted to swim. Turner told a joke and Troy laughed loud enough to turn heads. But it was all fake. They weren’t going anywhere and the joke hadn’t been funny. Despite the food and the surroundings, Alex found himself hating every minute of the role he had been forced to play. The last time he had sat down with a family had been with Sabina and her parents in Cornwall. It seemed a very long time ago and this meal, with these people, somehow turned the memory sour.

But at last it was over and Alex was able to excuse himself and go to bed. He went back to his room, swinging the door shut behind him. For a moment he stood there with his shoulders resting against the wood. He looked around him. Something was wrong. He stepped forward carefully, his nerves jangling. Someone had been there. His case, which had been closed when he left, was now open. Had someone from the hotel been in and searched the room while he was at dinner? Were they still there now? He looked in the bathroom and behind the curtains. No one. Then he went over to the case. It took him a few moments to realize that only the Game Boy was missing. So that was what had happened! Turner or Troy must have somehow slipped into the room while he was out. The Game Boy with its hidden Geiger counter was central to their mission. They had taken it back.

Alex undressed quickly and got into bed, but suddenly he wasn’t tired. He lay in the darkness, listening to the waves breaking against the sand. He could see thousands of stars through the open window. He had never realized there were so many of them, nor that they could shine so bright. Turner and Troy returned to their room about half an hour later. He heard them talking in low voices but couldn’t make out what they said. He pulled the sheet over his head and forced himself to sleep.

The first thing he saw when he woke up the next morning was a note pushed under his door. He got out of bed and picked it up. It was written in block capitals.

GONE FOR A WALK. THOUGHT YOU NEEDED A REST. WE’LL CATCH UP WITH YOU LATER. MOM XXX.

Alex tore the note in half-and then in half again. He scattered the pieces in the wastepaper basket and went out to breakfast. It occurred to him that it was a strange set of parents who would walk off, leaving their son behind, but he supposed there were probably plenty of families, with nannies and au pairs, who often did the same. He spent the morning on the beach, reading. There were some other boys of about his own age playing in the sea and he thought of joining them. But they didn’t speak English and seemed too self-contained. At eleven o’clock, his “parents” still hadn’t returned. Suddenly Alex was fed up, sitting there on his own in the grounds of the hotel. He was on an island on the other side of the world. He might as well see some of it! He got dressed and set off into town.

The heat struck him the moment he stepped outside the grounds of the hotel. The road curved inland, away from the sea, following a line of scrubland on one side and what looked like a tobacco plantation-a mass of fat, green leaves rising to chest height-on the other. The landscape was flat but there was no breeze coming in from the sea. The air was heavy and still. Alex was soon sweating and had to swat at the flies that seemed determined to follow him every step of the way. A few buildings, sun-bleached wood and corrugated iron, sprang up around him. A fly buzzed in his ear. He beat it away.

It took him twenty minutes to reach Puerto Madre, a fishing village that had grown into a dense and cluttered town. The buildings were an amazing jumble of different styles; rickety wooden shops, marble and brick houses, huge stone churches. Everything had been beaten down and baked by the sun-and sunlight was everywhere; in the dust, in the vivid colours, in the smells of spice and overripe fruit.

The noise was deafening. Radio music-jazz and salsa-blasted out of open windows. Extraordinary American cars, vintage Chevrolets and Studebakers like brilliantly coloured toys, jammed the streets, their horns blaring as they tried to make their way past horses and carts, motorized rickshaws, cigarette sellers and shoe-shine boys. Old men in vests sat outside the cafes blinking in the sunlight. Women in tight-fitting dresses stood languidly in the doorways. Alex had never been anywhere louder or dirtier or more alive.

Somehow he found himself in the main square with a great statue at the centre; a revolutionary soldier with a rifle at his side and a grenade hanging from his belt. There must have been at least a hundred market stalls jammed into the square, selling fruit and vegetables, coffee beans, souvenirs, old books and T-shirts. And everywhere there were crowds, strolling in and out of the dollar shops and the ice-cream parlours, sitting at tables beneath sweeping colonnades, queuing up in the fast food restaurants and the paladares-tiny restaurants located inside private houses.

There was a street sign bolted to a wall. It read: PLAZA DE FRATERNIDAD. Alex had enough Spanish to translate that. Brotherhood Square. He somehow doubted that he would find much brotherhood here. A fat man in an old and dirty linen suit suddenly lurched up to him.

“You want cigars? The best Havana cigars. But at cheap, cheap price.”

“Hey, amigo. I sell you a T-shirt…”

“Muchacho! You bring your parents to my bar…”

Before he knew it, he was surrounded. Alex realized how much he must stand out in this crowd of dark, tropical people milling about in their brightly coloured shirts and straw hats. He was hot and thirsty. He looked around him for somewhere to get a drink.

And that was when he saw Turner and Troy. The two special agents were sitting at a wrought iron table in front of one of the smarter restaurants, shaded by a great vine that sprawled and tumbled over the pockmarked wall. A neon sign hung over them, advertising Montecristo cigars. They were with a man, an islander, obviously deep in conversation. All three of them had drinks. Alex moved towards them, wondering if it would be possible to hear what they were saying.

The man they were talking to looked about seventy years old and was dressed in a dark shirt, loose trousers and a beret. He was smoking a cigarette which seemed to have been pushed through his lips dragging the skin with it. His face, arms and neck were sun-beaten and withered. But as he drew closer, Alex saw the light and the strength in his eyes. Troy said something and the man laughed, picked up his glass with a hand that was all bone and threw back the contents in one. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, said something and walked away. Alex had arrived just too late to eavesdrop on the conversation. He decided to make himself known.

“Alex!” As ever, Troy didn’t look glad to see him.

“Hi, Mom.” Alex sat down without being invited. “Any chance of a drink?”

“What are you doing here?” Turner asked. Once again his mouth was a straight line. His eyes were empty. “We told you to stay at the hotel.”

“I thought this was meant to be a family holiday,” Alex said. “And anyway, I finished searching the hotel this morning. There aren’t any nuclear weapons there, in case you were wondering…”

Turner stared. Troy looked around nervously. “Keep your voice down!” she snapped, as if anyone could hear him in the din of the square.

“You lied to me,” Alex said. “Whatever the reason you’re here, you’re not just spying on General Sarov. Why don’t you tell me what this is really about?”

There was a long silence.

“What do you want to drink?” Troy asked.

Alex glanced down at Troy ’s glass. It contained a pale yellow liquid that looked good. “What have you got?” he asked.

“A mojito. It’s a local speciality. A mixture of rum, fresh lemon juice, crushed ice, soda and mint leaves.”

“That sounds fine. I’ll have the same. Without the rum.”

Turner called a waiter over and spoke briefly in Spanish. The waiter nodded and hurried away.

Meanwhile, Troy had come to a decision. “All right, Alex,” she said. “We’ll tell you what you want to know-”

“That’s against orders!” Turner interrupted.

Troy looked angrily at him. “What choice do we have? Alex obviously knows about the Game Boy.”

“The Geiger counter,” Alex said.

Troy nodded. “Yes, Alex, that’s what it is. And it’s the reason why we’re here.” She lifted her own drink and took a sip. “We didn’t want you to know this because we didn’t want to frighten you.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“We were ordered not to!” She scowled. “But… all right, since you know so much, you might as well know the rest of it. We believe there’s a nuclear device hidden on this island.”

“General Sarov…? You think he’s got a nuclear bomb?”

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Turner muttered.

But this time Troy ignored him. “Something is happening, here, on Skeleton Key,” she went on. “We don’t know what it is, but if you want the truth, it actually frightens us. In a few days’ time, Boris Kiriyenko, the Russian president, is arriving for a two-week vacation. That’s not such a big deal. He knew Sarov a long time ago. They were kids together. And it’s not as if the Russians are our enemies any more.”

Alex knew all this already. It was what Blunt had told him in London.

“But recently, and quite by coincidence, Sarov came to our attention. Turner and I were investigating the Salesman. And we discovered that among all the other things he’d been selling, he’d managed to get his hands on a kilogram of weapons grade uranium, smuggled out of Eastern Europe. For what it’s worth, this is one of the biggest nightmares facing the security services today-the sale of uranium. But he’d done it-and if that wasn’t bad enough, the person he’d sold it to-”

“-was Sarov.” Alex finished the sentence.

“Yes. A plane flew into Skeleton Key and it didn’t fly out again. Sarov was there to meet it.” She paused. “And now, suddenly, we’ve got a meeting between these two men-the old general and the new president-and there may be a nuclear bomb in the picture. So you won’t be surprised to hear that there are a whole lot of worried people in Washington. That’s why we’re here.”

Alex absorbed what he was being told. Inside, he was seething. Blunt had promised him two weeks in the sun. But it looked like he’d been sent to the front line of World War Three.

“If it is a bomb, what’s Sarov planning to do with it?” Alex asked.

“If we knew that, we wouldn’t be here!” she snapped. Alex looked at her closely. He was amazed to see that she really was scared. She was trying not to show it but it was there, in her eyes and the tautness of her jaw.

“Our job is to find the nuclear material,” Turner said.

“With the Geiger counter.”

“Yes. We need to break into Casa de Oro and take a look around. That’s what we were talking about just now.”

“Who was he? The man you were with?”

Turner sighed. He had already said much more than he wanted to “His name is Garcia. He’s one of our assets.”

“Assets?”

“That means he works for us,” Troy explained. “We’ve been paying him over the years to keep us informed and to help us when we’re here.”

“He has a boat,” Turner continued, “and we’re going to need it because there’s only one way into the Casa de Oro-and that’s by sea. The house is built on a sort of plateau right at the tip of the island. It’s an old sugar plantation. They used to grow sugar cane there and they’ve got an old mill that’s still in full working order. Anyway, there’s only one road that reaches it and it’s narrow, with a steep drop down to the sea on both sides. There are security men and a gate. We’d never get in that way.”

“But by boat-” Alex began.

“Not by boat…” Turner hesitated, wondering if he should go on. He looked at Troy, who nodded. “We’re going to use scuba. You see, we know something that Sarov may not. There’s a way into the grounds of the villa that goes past his defences. It’s a natural fault line, a shaft inside the cliff that runs all the way from the top to the bottom.”

“You’re going to climb it?”

“There are metal rungs. Garcia’s family has been on the island for centuries and they know every inch of the coastline. He swears the ladder is still there. Three hundred years ago it was used by smugglers to get from the villa to the beach without being seen. There was a cave at the bottom. The shaft-they call it the Devil’s Chimney-runs all the way up and comes out somewhere in the garden. That’s our way in.”

“Wait a minute.” Alex was confused. “You said you were going to use scuba.”

Troy nodded. “The water level has risen all around the island and the entrance to the cave is now submerged. It’s about twenty metres underwater. But that’s great for us. Most people have forgotten the cave is even there at all. Certainly, it won’t be guarded. We swim down in scuba gear. We climb the ladder and get into the grounds. We search the villa.”

“And if you find the bomb?”

“That’s not our problem, Alex. Our work will be done.”

The waiter arrived with Alex’s drink. He picked up the glass. Even the feel of it, cold against his skin, came as a relief. He drank some. It was sweet and surprisingly refreshing. He set the glass down.

“I want to come with you,” he said.

“Forget it. No way!” Troy sounded incredulous. “Why do you think I’ve told you all this? Only because you know too much already and I need you to understand that we mean business. You have to keep out of the way. This is not a child’s game. We’re not zapping the bad guy on a computer screen! This is the real thing, Alex. And you’re going to stay in the hotel and wait for us to get back!”

“I’m coming with you,” Alex insisted. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but this is meant to be a family holiday. You dump me on my own in the hotel a second time, maybe somebody’s going to notice. Maybe they’re going to start wondering where you are.”

Turner fiddled with the collar of his shirt. Troy looked away.

“I won’t get in your way,” Alex sighed. “I’m not asking to come scuba-diving with you. Or climbing. I just want to be on the boat. Think about it. If the three of us go together, it’ll look more like a family cruise.”

Turner nodded slowly. “You know, Troy, the kid has a point.”

Troy picked up her drink and gazed into it moodily, as if trying to find an answer inside the glass. “All right,” she said at last. “You can come with us if that’s what you really want. But you’re not part of this, Alex. Your job was to help get us onto the island and if you ask me, we didn’t even need you for that. You saw the security at the airport, it was a joke! But OK, since you’re here, you might as well come along for the ride. But I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you’re there.”

“Whatever you say,” Alex sat back. He had got what he wanted, but he had to ask himself why he wanted it at all. Given the choice, he would have preferred to take the first plane off the island and put as much distance as possible between himself and the CIA and Sarov and the whole lot of them.

But that was a choice he didn’t have. All Alex knew was that he didn’t want to spend time in the hotel on his own, worrying. If there really was a bomb somewhere on the island, he wanted to be the first to hear about it. And there was something else. Turner and Troy seemed confident enough about this Devil’s Chimney. They had assumed that it wasn’t guarded and that it would take them all the way to the top. But they had been equally confident when they had gone to the Salesman’s birthday party, and that had almost got Turner killed.

Alex finished his drink. “All right,” he said. “So when do we go?”

Troy fell silent. Turner took out his wallet and paid for the drinks. “Straight away,” he said. “We’re doing it tonight.”