The Devil's breath

3

The vault was one hundred and thirty-three steps below the ground floor. It was amazingly dry and damp-free because the granite walls were so thick and the warm air from the geothermal heating unit was channeled into the school from beneath there. Mr. Jackson stood back a respectful distance as Max opened his safe-deposit box. The envelope inside was security-stamped and tagged with a tamper-proof clip. Max tore open the envelope. Inside was a USB memory-stick MP3 player that would hold his father’s message. Max’s passport was there, a credit card with a PIN and account number and what looked like a couple of thousand pounds in cash. There was also a lawyer’s letter, which stated that Max’s father had few assets other than the country cottage in France; his dad always rented a furnished apartment during his brief stays in London. All of which, Max realized, meant he was pretty much broke and that Max’s legal guardian was to be someone in Toronto whom he had never heard of-Jack Ellerman. Max looked again at the packet that held the envelope with the money and credit card. But if Dad was stony broke, what was all this about? Then he saw the symbol on the envelope: a small drawing of an Egyptian hieroglyphic-the jackal-headed figure of Anubis, god of the underworld. Underworld. Hidden from view. His dad was sending him a message to hide the contents of the envelope. Max pushed the money and the credit card under his jacket and then turned. Mr. Jackson was right behind him, had he seen Max hide the envelope?

“Everything all right, Max?”

Max held up the USB player and the letter. “Seems Dad’s broke and he’s sending me somewhere I really don’t want to go.”

Mr. Jackson put a protective arm around Max as he read the letter from the lawyer. “I see. Well, that’s why we hold a parents’ contingency fund. We’ll arrange that ticket for you. But there’ll be enough in your school trust fund to cover the rest of this term; we wouldn’t force you to leave. We can make a plan, Max. A lot of the boys have scholarships to be here.”

Max smiled gratefully, but shook his head. “Once I’ve heard Dad’s message I suppose I’d better do as he asks.”

They started their long walk up from the vault-ascending from the underworld-and Max remembered that Anubis was also the Egyptian god of the dead.

* * *

Max said his goodbyes to Sayid and his mother, then Mr. Peterson drove him to the station for the London train. Three hours later, he was in London, a modest-sized rucksack on his back with everything he needed-which was little more than a change of clothes. He’d listened to his dad’s voice on the recording three times, but it was only twenty minutes’ worth. There were no clues, no hint as to what his dad might have expected to happen to him. It was mostly about Mum and how much they’d always loved him, and how his dad hoped that the school had been the right choice … how much he missed Max. It was all a bit vague. But his father’s secret message on the envelope made Max extra cautious.

When Max got off the intercity train, he turned as if making for the Heathrow Express platform, but then he cut around a fast-food stand and backtracked, towards the short tunnel that led to the taxi rank. There was a long queue but he lingered for a while, casually watching to see if anyone was following him. Then he moved quickly back inside the building and went down to the tube station. He kept looking; there didn’t seem to be anyone familiar, but then he saw a man in his twenties-quite scruffy, possibly a musician or art student, listening to his iPod. His rough-cut hair and worn clothes blended in well, but Max noticed that he was wearing a pretty expensive-looking watch, which he checked frequently. Max suddenly realized that he had seen him hanging around the Heathrow train platform.

Max squeezed into the carriage and the iPod man, using another door, got into the same one.

His senses now sharpened, Max looked up and down the carriage, through the connecting doors. He noticed a middle-aged woman, quite smartly dressed, her expensive fashion bag over her shoulder. Max realized she had been about ten places in front of him in the taxi queue.

Someone must be after something he had. But what? Why would they have tried to kill him on Dartmoor if he had something important they wanted? It made no sense. Not yet, anyway. The important thing now was to make sure no one followed him to his father’s contact.

When the train arrived at Charing Cross Underground station there was the usual push-and-shove as those on the crowded platform tried to get on board. Max watched. iPod Man was trying to observe him, looking sideways so there was no direct eye contact. And Smart Bag Woman was doing the same. Half a dozen people managed to squeeze in just as Max pressed towards the doors and the throng on the platform. The doors were closing when he shouldered his way through, and as his feet touched the platform he turned and saw the man and woman push their way out. So, they were following him; it wasn’t a figment of his imagination. However, he’d already thought of a plan. As he stepped onto the platform he dropped his rucksack between the sliding doors so that when they closed they immediately sprang open again. In that instant he plucked the bag off the floor and edged his way back inside. He was strong enough to push aside a couple of heavier men; that was one thing about Dartmoor High, they made you use every muscle in your body-maybe it was so as to deal with traveling on the London Underground.

As the train pulled away he saw the look of surprise and panic on his watchers’ faces. He’d beaten them. How many more were there to get past before he could reach Farentino?

Outside the National Gallery he jumped on a tour bus full of foreign tourists and took a seat upstairs in the open-topped Routemaster. It was too cold for most people, but he wanted a clear view to see if he was still being followed-besides, he didn’t mind the cold; he was used to it.

As the bus made its way along the Embankment, the Thames seemed to be flowing faster than the traffic, so he jumped off, sprinted up the steps near the Courtauld Institute, dodged across the traffic snarled up in the Strand and into the fringe of Soho. At last he felt sure he had put enough distance between himself and whatever teams of watchers there might have been.

By the time he’d walked up towards Soho Square he’d listened to his father’s message again. Dad had always been so open with his feelings when they’d been together. Fathers and sons were always going to fall out at some stage, Dad told him once, but Max should understand that, no matter what happened, he loved him with all his heart. So, Max reasoned, if his dad was usually open about how he felt, why was he saying so little on a recording which he knew would be played if something happened to him? Perhaps it was because he feared someone else might have listened to it first-if that was the case, was there a hidden message Max hadn’t picked up on yet? He didn’t know, but he’d keep listening until he had exhausted that possibility.

Soho Square, its edges planted with shrubs and trees, made a welcome oasis among the city buildings. There were office workers grabbing a quick coffee or a sandwich as they took their lunch hour; a couple of people sleeping rough hogged the benches, while pigeons ducked and bobbed as they hunted for crumbs from the sandwich-eaters.

Max skirted the square, then cut across it diagonally. He was as certain as he could be that he was no longer being followed. He approached a black, high-gloss-painted door, which was crammed unobtrusively in between two other old buildings. One, the Zaragon Picture Company, was an independent filmmaking company, the other the head office for a wine merchant. Max checked the small brass plaque on the black door-FARENTINO-to make sure he’d remembered the location correctly; it had been a couple of years since he was here last. Farentino. That was all it said. No description of what business was conducted there. He pressed the intercom and told the voice that answered who he was. The door clicked open and he stepped into the quiet, safe world of his father’s most trusted friend.

Max could smell the musky odor of the animal’s skin. It seemed so out of place in the well-furnished rooms of Angelo Farentino. The animal pelt had never been properly cured, but it served its purpose of protecting the bundle of handwritten notes from the elements. As Max let his hands feel the texture of the animal skin and the papers it protected that he had just been given, Farentino paced back and forth, his expensive Italian shoes making hardly a sound on the marble floor. Max wanted to devour the words on the pages-they were his father’s field notes-so he skimmed across them, desperate to learn any information about what had happened to him in Africa.

“Your father knew something was very wrong,” Farentino said as he paused to pour himself a glass of red wine. “He always sent his notes by email and a disc copy by courier. This”-he wagged a finger at the bundled papers-“this is … extraordinary!”

Angelo Farentino was not a man to be taken by surprise. For thirty years he had been a publisher of books on environmental issues, and with Tom Gordon on his travels had helped draw attention to many of the most damning ecological disasters across the world. Max kept reading. The notations were neat but in places looked as though they were written in a hell of a hurry…. evidence of heavy machinery … borehole excavations should not be in this location … all indications are … Some of the pages were torn, denying the reader tantalizing conclusions that Max’s father had made.

Farentino sat, his arms resting on an antique walnut table, his fingers nervously fidgeting. “Max. I fear for your father and he is obviously frightened for you. That’s why he gave you so little information. He knew he could trust you to use your brains and not show anyone anything. Which is why he sent you to me.

“And this Canadian, Jack Ellerman? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Fictitious. To throw anyone interested off the scent. So I’m going to send you to very good friends of mine in northern Italy. You’ll be safe there until I can help you find your father.”

Max gazed at his father’s papers. They were pockmarked with grime, and grubby from dirty hands; some of the pages were stuck together and in one place an ugly brown stain crept like a squashed lizard across the paper. “Is this blood?” Max asked.

Farentino shrugged. He wasn’t sure, and even if he were he wouldn’t admit it. Max took another bite of the pizza Farentino had ordered in and sipped the peach smoothie the Italian was so good at making. Despite everything that had happened, Max was hungry and knew he had to keep his blood-sugar levels up if he was to concentrate and make any sense out of all this. “Dad sent his notes, wrapped in a gazelle skin, across two hundred kilometers of desert and wasteland in the care of a Bushman.”

“That’s right. The Kalahari Bushmen are nomadic; they’re the last indigenous people in Africa to live like that, and your father must have established a rapport with them. The Bushman took these notes to a farmer who runs a wildlife sanctuary, a sort of private game park, and who is, I suppose, someone either your father or the Bushman knew.”

“And he sent them to you.”

“To a literary agent I use in Johannesburg. That was the instruction Tom, I mean your father, had written. Max, he was so far out in the wilderness, there was no communication. There are so few people out there. He saw something he shouldn’t have, is my guess.” Farentino averted his eyes.

“What?” Max asked him.

Farentino shrugged and gave a small, noncommittal gesture. “Maybe it’s nothing. No, maybe it is.” He hesitated. “The literary agent I used. His office was destroyed by fire and he was badly injured. Yesterday. The same day you were attacked.”

Max let that sink in. Obviously a big effort was being made to stop any information about Max’s dad or what he’d discovered from getting out.

“Who knows about these notes?” asked Max.

“No one else. I’m not letting anyone know anything until I can work through them. Trouble is, the gazelle skin has sweated acids into the paper. It’s going to take weeks for us to separate the pages.”

“Are there any clues at all in what Dad wrote?” Max asked hopefully.

“We haven’t found anything extraordinary yet; they’re so incomplete we can’t make much sense of them.” Farentino sipped his wine. “But the place the Bushman delivered them to is hundreds of kilometers away from where I thought your dad was working.”

“Is anyone looking for him?”

Farentino winced; he unwrapped one of his expensive cigars, rolled it in his fingers, sniffed it.

Max waited. “Angelo, tell me.”

Farentino looked hard at Max. “No one is looking. Not really. I have tried to do what I can. The Foreign Office has asked local police and game rangers to keep an eye out.” He dabbed the cigar between his lips in a small, nervous gesture. Max knew there was more to come and he felt a tightening in his stomach muscles. Maybe the pizza hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

Farentino opened a file on the desk and showed Max some corporate reports and press clippings concerning an international exploration company called Shaka Spear Exploration. Every picture featured a man as big as an international rugby player-in fact, he looked like a Maori, except that his head was shaved and he wore a topknot of hair like the Chinese warriors Max had seen in the movies. “That’s Shaka Chang,” Farentino told him. “His father was a Zulu, his mother Chinese. He has connections that would make the president of the United States envious. He has a fearsome reputation as a corporate businessman, but he also has an incredible track record for helping the underprivileged, so he’s pretty much untouchable.”

Max gazed at the man who controlled one of the biggest exploration companies in the world. In none of the pictures was Shaka Chang smiling. “Namibia has enormous deposits of diamonds. Is that what Dad was looking for?” Max asked.

“No. A dam is being built there. It has created much controversy. Not everyone is happy. Ecologists are trying to stop it. It will create a massive hydroelectric scheme and bring a lot of wealth to the country. It’ll be worth billions. Shaka Chang is behind it.”

“If the dam is already planned, what was Dad doing there?”

“That I am not sure about,” Farentino replied anxiously. “From what I understand, it will not only flood ancient Bushman burial grounds but will have a huge impact on Namibia’s unique ecosystem. So he was searching for aquifers.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Max said.

“Think of deep underground layers of rocks … like a honeycomb of rocks. All those nooks and crannies contain fossil water. Water can be more precious than diamonds out there, and if your dad found any subterranean rivers or these deep deposits it could cause Mr. Chang a huge headache.”

“Then that’s why Dad got his notes to you. If this Shaka Chang is as powerful as you say, then maybe he thought Dad might have sent something to me. That’s why they tried to kill me. That’s why someone searched my room.”

Farentino shook his head. “It’s possible. But we have no idea what they could have been looking for. Do we?”

“No,” Max said.

Farentino looked at Max, probing his eyes with his own. “Max, did your father leave any kind of clue, any message, anything at all to tell you what he found out there? Anything?”

Max scanned the information in his brain. If he had doubts or suspicions, or if there was anything he had not yet uncovered, then he should tell Farentino. So why didn’t he? Something told him to keep his thoughts to himself. Trust no one. Not even Farentino? No one. Not yet.

Max almost squirmed at his complete lack of trust, but these were extraordinary circumstances. “Angelo, Dad might still be alive. And if there’s a chance of that, then I’m going to help find him.”

Farentino raised his eyes in silent prayer. “Yes, I was afraid of that.”

Max shuffled the pictures of Shaka Chang. One of them slid out from under the others. It was an aerial photo of a fort in the wilderness in what looked to be Africa. Behind the fort was a massive lake or swamp. The boulder-strewn ground to the front was softened by an open plain. The whole place seemed formidable-well, that made sense, it was a fort, after all.

Farentino fingered the photograph. “That is Shaka Chang’s headquarters in Africa. He has private accommodations there. That line you can see in the desert is an airstrip; the river and lake are crocodile-infested. No one goes in, or comes out for that matter, unless Shaka Chang says so.”

Max felt a sense of evil about the place. “It looks really menacing.”

“Yes. Namibia used to be called German South-West Africa. It was their territory. The fort was built before the First World War.”

“Does it have a name?” Max asked.

Farentino went quiet for a moment. There were stories about that place that chilled the blood. “They call it Skeleton Rock,” he answered quietly.

Max watched Farentino’s face for a moment. It was as if his eyes were the portals to his secret thoughts. Max’s intuition was correct. The man was nodding, almost imperceptibly, to himself. He had reached a decision.

“Max. There are matters I must discuss with you. There are things you should know about your father.”

An hour later, heavy with the burden of what he had just learned, Max used the credit card that his father had promised was secure to book a flight. There was a direct flight by Air Namibia from Gatwick, but if the people following him expected him to try to reach his father, they would be watching that flight. Finally Max had one last favor to ask of Farentino, and it was not going to be an easy one, but his father’s friend pulled it off in record time.

They drove to the airport as darkness was falling. Max sat quietly. There were no more questions to be asked. Farentino had explained his mother’s death and passed on the burden of secrecy that surrounded his father’s work. It made Max even more determined to find his father.

Max promised Farentino that he would stay in touch as best he could, but warned him that any information he sent would be through a third party and would carry a webmaster’s name-Magician.

Farentino berated himself loudly for letting Max out of his safekeeping. His only consolation was Max’s assurance that he’d have gone anyway; at least this way Farentino knew about it and would be in London whenever Max needed help.

At Heathrow’s Terminal 3 Farentino hugged Max and kissed his forehead, which Max managed to bear without too much squirming. He gave his new friend a hug-he felt a bit more grown-up now-and there was a nod of acknowledgment and respect from Farentino.

Max pushed his way through the bustling terminal, trying not to look too obvious as he scanned the crowd for anyone who stuck out. The people who had followed him earlier didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight. Luckily, the large number of passengers made it easy to pretend that he was simply deciding where to go-which was partly true. He checked his watch. Time was getting tight now. The Air Canada desk was in Zone D. He joined the business-class queue for Toronto. There were only a couple of people in front of him and as he waited he glanced around again-and his heart suddenly thudded and an invisible fist walloped him in the chest as he saw Mr. Peterson, his geography teacher from school. He could barely hide his shock.

Max tried to settle his breathing, but there was another feeling now, a physical pain which he knew was fear. Mr. Peterson was on his cell phone and half turned his back as Max saw him. Max kept his head, not giving in to the impulse to stare at him; instead, he let his gaze sweep across the crowd in case Peterson used his peripheral vision to watch him. Peterson. He liked him. He was a great teacher. And there he was, part of the conspiracy to track Max down and kill him.

The check-in clerk called Max forward, which snapped his mind back into gear. Max handed his passport and boarding pass across the desk, but the crawling in his stomach wouldn’t go away. Mr. Peterson had been at the school for only a few months. He would have known Max’s daily schedule and he was probably the one who searched his room. Who was paying Peterson to betray him? Max didn’t have time to think about it. “Oh, this is an economy ticket.” The check-in clerk smiled.

Max knew that, of course. He was gambling that, if he played ignorant, the cheerful-looking woman would check him in anyway. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.” He grimaced. “I’ve never been on a big plane before,” he lied.

She quickly tapped her fingers on the computer keyboard. “Oh, that’s all right. I’ll check you in here. I bet you’re really excited.”

Max nodded enthusiastically.

“Any luggage?” she asked as she gazed at the screen.

“No, just my backpack.”

She asked him a few security questions and then packaged his passport and boarding pass together. “I’ve given you a window seat. Enjoy the flight.” She pointed down the hall. “Security and departure’s down there. Have a really nice time in Canada, Mr. Lawrence.”

Max thanked her and turned away. Peterson was still there, but he’d moved a bit further down the concourse. He must have been satisfied that Max was on his way to Pearson Airport, Toronto, to stay with his new guardian, Jack Ellerman, because he snapped his cell shut and turned on his heel, his job done. Max felt a sense of relief, but he still had to get on that plane for South Africa without being spotted. There might be others in the terminal looking for him.

The Toronto plane left at 21.30. The Virgin check-in desk for Johannesburg was in the A Zone, and that plane left at 20.05 and they were already boarding. Max had to get to the gate in time, and if he didn’t do it in the next fifteen minutes his whole plan would be ruined. He quickened his pace, dodging through the crowd, and then he saw another boy about his age. He too wore cargo pants, a sweat top, trainers and a lightweight fleece. His hair was a bit longer than Max’s and his shoulders weren’t as broad-Max had done a lot of white-water canoeing in the swirling waters of the River Dart and that had built up his arms and back muscles-and although Max had never seen this boy before, the orange-colored fleece identified him.

The other boy’s eyes were looking at the crowd ahead of him and then they locked on Max. The boy changed his small rucksack to the other shoulder and as they drew level each nudged the other’s shoulder. It was barely a couple of seconds of contact but in that time, and with a mumbled, “Sorry, mate,” they passed each other. And in those moments, Martin Lawrence, the son of one of Farentino’s clients, exchanged the passport and boarding pass for those in Max’s hand. Martin was happy to get a free trip to Canada-snowboarding was great at this time of year. Max now had his own passport and ticket for South Africa that Martin Lawrence had used to book him onto the South African flight. The two boys looked very similar, close enough not to cause any suspicion from a busy check-in clerk.

So far, so good. In eleven hours he would land in South Africa and be a lot closer to finding out what had happened to his father. It had been a grueling twenty-four hours and he wouldn’t care what movie they were showing on the flight. What he needed was sleep.

Outside the terminal, Peterson waited a few moments as a car approached the pickup area. iPod Man and Smart Bag Woman were inside. Peterson climbed in. “He’s on the Toronto plane. Let’s go.”

As the car edged slowly into the night traffic, an Airbus 343 bound for Johannesburg roared down the runway. Max, settled in his seat and wrapped in a lightweight airline blanket, saw London’s lights shimmer below him, a seabed of diamonds. He was asleep by the time the plane gained its cruising altitude, and as the ground slipped away, dreams were already troubling his exhausted mind. Juggled images of a hostile environment in an unknown country vied with a deep-rooted sense of dread about the forbidding desert fortress, Skeleton Rock.