She kicked away the stand.
“What? What’s he doing?” Garvey screeched. “Hambleton is gonna go nuts.”
But the wind was already in my face, and school now seemed a tame alternative. We sped away, mocking the lines of traffic, and headed off into the flickering sunlight. I had no idea what was waiting for me. All I could think about was holding the girl and breathing her scent, which only seemed to add to her air of mystery — that and the creature inked on her shoulder. Just below the blowing collar of her dress was a small tattoo. As we slowed for a traffic light, I let go with one hand and touched a finger against the design, feeling the shock of her smooth white skin. She parted her lips and looked back, but said nothing. I took my hand away as we picked up speed, thinking about the book I’d been reading, how the tattoos found on The Illustrated Man were still by day but alive by night, foretelling grisly tales of death. What story did this creature tell? I wondered.
Who was the girl with the rearing black unicorn on her shoulder?
We left town and headed for the coast road again. Most of the way, I just did as I’d been told. I sat. I rode pillion. I held on to the girl. But as the salt air began to sting my cheeks, I woke up and gained some focus. I had been … abducted. Somehow mesmerized onto the scooter. I threw my head around as the memories came back, the tussle with the boys outside the school gates, the beautiful girl with the smooth French accent, the words she’d somehow put into my head: au pair.
I shouted, “Stop this. Who are you? Where are you taking me?”
The girl said, “Michael, be still,” her voice ricocheting in the engine drone. I banged a fist twice against her shoulder. She cried out, “Hey!” and told me to stop. Her elbow jabbed back to keep me at bay.
“Let me go!” I shouted, already looking at the streaking road and wondering how much damage it would do to roll off, even in a floral-patterned helmet. I pounded her again. She said something in French under her breath, then responded by tying the brakes into a knot and dragging the scooter through a low, tight arc. That answered my question well enough. It hurts like crazy when you fly off a bike. At least she’d had the grace to dump me on the grass.
I sat up, clutching my knee. One hand was slightly grazed. My left hip was on fire. I learned an important lesson that day: The prettiest girls can hurt you, and not always in the region of the heart.
“Take off your helmet. Don’t think about running.” She gunned the throttle as if she were holding a lion by the collar. And though the accent made her sound cute, there was no mistaking her dark intent.
I unstrapped the helmet. “Who are you? Why am I here?”
She tilted her head toward the sea.
We’d stopped on the same stretch of land where I’d caught the dog. Like yesterday, it was almost deserted — apart from the solitary figure of a man sitting on a bench, looking out to sea.
“Go. He wishes to speak with you.”
I shook my head. “Why? Who is he?”
“Be sensible, Michael. Don’t make me force you.”
I clenched my fist, which only made her sigh. She turned off the scooter’s engine and righted her hair with little nips of her fingers. “I am trained in four disciplines of the martial arts. I could tie you into a parcel if I wished and drop you on the seat beside him. Go, Michael. He does not like to be kept waiting. He told me to say he is a friend of your father.”
It was clear from the unfeeling look in her eyes that she’d offered this line as a bargaining tool, a final persuader if all else failed. It had the desired effect. My stomach lurched and I was slightly sick. For three years, I’d waited for a moment like this, to meet someone who could help me rekindle the memories of a dad that time was eating away. Now it had happened, and here was the result: a pool of sick on the grass. The girl waited till I’d wiped my mouth, then she parked the scooter and beckoned me to stand, telling me to leave the helmet on the ground.
I thought about rushing her, but what were the chances? So I rose to my feet and headed toward the bench. The girl followed, keeping a reasonable distance, crossing her arms like a mother patrolling outside the school gates.
I approached the man slowly, coming close enough to hear a fob watch ticking in the pocket of his vest. He was sitting very upright with his hands on his knees, wearing a crisp black suit. His shoes were patent, also black. Thick-flowing layers of pale gray hair were combed back in watermelon lines across his scalp. From the color of the hair, I thought he might be elderly, but when I saw his face, I realized he couldn’t have been more than thirty, if that. His features were sharp, almost highly machined, as if he’d been made by a 3-D printer.
“Such beauty,” he said, “in so much emptiness.” He spoke with a high-pitched German accent, a voice that seemed to complement his glacial cheekbones and alabaster skin. He patted the bench. “Please join me, Michael. I wish you no harm.”
I lowered myself to a sitting position, keeping plenty of space between us.
He folded a newspaper onto his lap, last night’s edition of the Holton Post. He clasped his hands across my photo, pressing the tips of his thumbs together. I noticed he was wearing a silver ring engraved with an image of a black unicorn. The same design the girl had tattooed on her shoulder, memorable not just for its color, but for a loop in the tail that looked like a lowercase letter e.
“My name is Amadeus Klimt,” he said, as if he’d just read it off a passing cloud. “You may call me Mr. Klimt. Please forgive the abrupt manner in which you were brought here. I trust Chantelle treated you appropriately?”
I looked back at the girl, who now had a pretty name to match her fierce beauty. Appropriately was an interesting choice of word. It seemed to imply “by any means possible.” In their world, that clearly included kidnapping. “She said you knew my father.”
He raised his chin, letting his pale face bask in the warmth. “Yes. Your father was a very fine man. He worked for me — until he disappeared.”
Right away, he’d blown his credibility. Dad had always worked for himself. He had traveled the world, demonstrating software for medical equipment. He didn’t even have an office, just a spare room at home where he kept his paperwork. How could he possibly have worked for this man?
I kept my response as guarded as I could. “I don’t remember Dad ever mentioning you.” I looked again at Chantelle, hovering there, bored. I was wary now, thinking they were also journalists, attracted by my freakish rescue of the dog.
Mr. Klimt brushed a speck of dirt off his arm. “Your father would never have spoken of me, Michael. The organization I represent demands a high level of secrecy.”
“You’re from the government?”
“No, I am not.” He looked up at a circling gull, tilting his head in admiration as though he’d never seen a bird in flight before. “Do you know what a ‘nontemporal event’ is?”
A what? I shook my head.
He stroked the newspaper, straightening my picture with the back of his hand. “I think such an event took place here yesterday. An episode of such unusual proportions that it cannot be explained by normal human mechanisms or environmental conditions. I’m referring, of course, to your adventure with the dog. I’d like to propose an exchange of information. You describe to me, in detail, what happened on this cliff top, and in return I will tell you more about your father.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so. What do you believe?”
For the first time, he turned and looked at me. He had the strangest eyes I’d ever seen. They were a kind of washed-out purple color, set so far back into their shaded sockets, they looked like distant stars. It struck me, vaguely, that he could have been blind.
He smiled, waiting for an answer to his question. I shivered and looked out to sea. I hated thinking back to those awful days when Dad had not come home from his trip. The sleepless nights. The tears. The police. How a man called Mulrooney
had eventually come around and talked to us over the lid of a briefcase. How he’d told us there were no reported problems with the flight, then, later, no ransom demands for a hostage. No passport had been found. No phone signal detected. Every lead they’d pursued had reached a dead end. Dad had vanished like a warm puff of smoke in the hot desert air. Another missing person. Case unsolved.
And as the days rolled into weeks, we knew in our hearts he was never coming back. He was dead. What other explanation could there be? There were rumors suggesting he’d deserted us, that he’d forged a new identity and was living a false life, like a convict on the run. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, let myself believe that. This was the man who had read me countless bedtime stories, who’d made me a chain of paper dragons that still gathered dust around my bedpost at night. The man who, on returning from a trip, always stopped on the bottom porch step and kissed Mom, causing her to lift one foot into the air. Why would he betray us or ever let us down? He was gone, and no one knew what had happened to him, least of all this German stranger and his petulant, scooter-riding sidekick.
I jumped up and whipped my phone from my pocket. “Let me go or I’m calling the police.”
Mr. Klimt seemed unconcerned. He studied me as if I were an act on a talent show.
“All I’ve got to do is dial 911.”
“Then we both leave here with nothing,” he said.
“I mean it.” I started moving my thumb.
He raised his hand to reason with me.
At the same time, a shot rang out.
And the man I’d been talking to just seconds before slumped forward on the bench, a trail of blood running down his neck, staining the rim of his collarless shirt.
A black car had pulled up not far from Chantelle. The barrel of a rifle was pointing through its window. Chantelle shouted, “Run, Michael! Run!” Then another shot rang out and she spun around and crumpled to the grass, and was still.
Two men in dark glasses stepped out of the car. One shouted to the other, “Don’t mess this up! We want the kid alive.”
And that was when the strangeness happened again. As the fear welled up and my breathing quickened, the need to escape reached an unstoppable peak in my mind. My senses went crazy and I flashed toward the scooter. The next thing I knew, I was firing the ignition.
I heard their shouts, but by then I was away, cutting across the headland toward the group of houses that made up Coxborough village. I knew there was a narrow lane through to the green that even a small car couldn’t have passed down. There would be people there. Tourists. Gift shops. The pub. I opened the throttle as wide as it would go, praying I wouldn’t hit any rabbit holes or stones. I heard wheels spin behind me and knew the car was coming. Within half a minute, there’d be horsepower snorting down my neck. But if they wanted me alive, they were going to have to catch me. The chances were, I wouldn’t get a bullet in the back.
At the entrance to the lane, I heard the squeal of their brakes. A fading horn blast signaled their annoyance. I didn’t dare look back; I just kept on going. The gap was tight, but I didn’t slow down. Over puddles and potholes I flew. I could see the green opening up in front of me. And I was almost there, almost clean away, when the scooter hit a mud bump and bucked like a lamb. I fought with the steering but couldn’t stop the front end from pitching against a rough wooden fence. I scraped along, tearing my trousers at the knee, before hitting a clump of privet and finally flying off. The scooter slid into the adjoining road and crashed to a stop against a telephone pole. For the second time that day, I picked myself up from a painful fall. I had scratches on one side of my face from the privet. Other than that, I was sore but okay.
I limped into the open. Three people immediately rushed to the scene. One of them, mercy of mercies, was a policeman.
“Stand back,” he ordered. “I’ll deal with this.” He caught me in his arms as I staggered forward. “Someone call an ambulance. He could be badly hurt. Heck, son, what were you playing at?”
“Murder,” I panted.
“What?” he said.
“On the cliffs. They shot two people.”
He steadied my face. “Who shot two people?”
“These men. Black car. They chased me to the lane.”
He looked hard into my eyes. “Are you well enough to show me?”
I nodded. “I think so, yes.”
“Okay, come with me.”
With an arm around my shoulder, he guided me across to his waiting police car. He strapped me in, then reversed like a race-car driver and sped along the road that exited the village and circled back toward the headland. Barely thirty seconds later, I saw the black car.
“That’s it,” I said, pointing. “That’s the car.”
To my horror, the policeman headed straight for it.
“What are you doing?” I gasped. “No. They’ve got guns.”
He said, “Calm down, Michael. There are no guns.”
“Wha —? How do you know my name?”
He tore off a false mustache. That was when I realized I’d met him before. He was Mulrooney, the man who’d come to tell us about Dad’s disappearance.
We pulled up beside the black car. Mulrooney jumped out and yanked my door wide open. The rear door of the black car also clicked open.
“Very impressive, Michael,” said a voice. “Now please get in before you hurt yourself further. You’re exhausted and your power will be weak.”
I dipped my head and looked into the car.
There, in the backseat, was Amadeus Klimt.
“So, Michael, do we have a deal?”
The car pulled away smoothly. Klimt pressed a button on the armrest beside him, and a screen came up between us and the driver. “Let me remind you. It’s really very simple. You explain to me how you rescued the dog, and I give you information about your father.”
“You were dead,” I said, still a little freaked out. The bloodstain was right there on his shirt.
He laced his fingers, moving his hands like a party clown about to make animal shadows. “In my line of business, things are rarely what they seem.”
“What is your business?”
“We will come to that.”
I tried to look out the window, but the glass was tinted on the inside surface. Whoever these people were, they liked their secrecy. “Where’s Chantelle? Is she okay?”
“Chantelle has returned to her duties. She will be angry about the scooter. You may have to deal with the consequences of that.”
Like it was my fault she’d driven me into their charade. “Where are you taking me?”
“Home,” he said plainly. “We are driving you home. How long the journey takes will be entirely dependent upon our discussion.”
I sighed and looked at the state of my clothing. For the second day running, my uniform was ruined. There was a rip in the sleeve of my jacket, too. Mom was going to go absolutely mental. A year driving around Holton Byford probably wouldn’t be long enough to calm her down. “I need to be in school. Take me there instead.” At school I could cook up some feeble story that might just scrape under Hambleton’s radar and give me time to clean off some dirt. But Klimt quashed that in his very next sentence.
“Chantelle has already reported your truancy.”
“What?”
“You will be punished, of course, but that may yet have a positive outcome.”
I slammed back into my seat. “Tell her thanks — for nothing!”
“You may tell her yourself next time you see her.”
Next time? Never would be far too soon. This was payback for the scooter, no doubt. Now Mom and Hambleton would both be on my case. “How did you know I’d go down the lane? Does everyone in Coxborough work for you?”
He took a sip of blue-colored fluid through a straw dipped into a plastic vessel. A slight smell of menthol filled the air. Whatever he was drinking, it wasn’t water. “Our meeting, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, was staged. I knew you’d be relu
ctant to share your … experience, so I decided to provoke a repeat performance. The guns and the blood were merely illusions, designed to test your emotional response to a dangerous situation. There were only three ways you could have escaped: left or right along the cliffs, or down the lane to Coxborough. Along the cliffs, you would have been caught by the car. It was a simple matter to position an agent on the far side of the lane in a guise you would quickly submit to and trust.”
Opening a compartment on the armrest between us, he picked out an orange and a bright white napkin. He placed the napkin over his lap, then proceeded to peel the orange skin onto it. “Would you like one, Michael?”
I shook my head. I didn’t do fruit, especially not the messy ones. And for all I knew, it might have been spiked with a truth drug or something. “I remember Mulrooney. He came to our house.”
Mr. Klimt nodded. “He and your father were colleagues, and friends. On another day, it could have been Mulrooney on that plane to New Mexico. Then I might have been talking to his son instead.”
“You mean, you sent Dad on some kind of mission?”
I watched him put an orange segment onto his tongue, taking it in like a lizard would a fly. He swallowed it whole, didn’t appear to chew. “Your father was not a salesman, Michael. That was also an illusion. A cover to protect the true nature of his work. Of course, you are going to question this. But consider my line of reasoning first: If your father was all you believed him to be, he or his body would have been returned to you. That is the likeliest conclusion if a man goes missing when his sole occupation is selling computer programs to medical establishments. My account brings you a new kind of hope. Hope that he’s alive. Hope that you will find him. You may be the only person who can.”
I looked away, wondering if I might be dreaming. How could Dad have lived a false life and none of us known a thing about it? “What did he do? Was he some kind of spy?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. He used his abilities to investigate things that did not make sense. Things that go ‘bump in the night,’ you might say.”