Alex shook his head. “There’s no Packard Street around here.”
“Are you sure? That’s what it says here.” The man held out the clipboard, inviting Alex to take a look.
It was the empty van that alerted him.
The doors of the van were open, and if they were making a delivery to an address in Chelsea, why was there nothing inside?
Alex jerked back, but it was already too late. The two men had maneuvered Alex between them so that they were perfectly placed, one of them in front of him, one of them behind. He heard the clipboard hit the sidewalk. It was just a prop. They didn’t need it anymore.
One of the men grabbed him by the throat. Alex twisted around, trying to break free. At the same time, he saw something that sent a chill up his spine. The second deliveryman had produced a hypodermic syringe. They weren’t here to kill him. They were here to take him. The van was for him.
Alex put everything he had been taught into action. He knew that it would be almost impossible even for two grown men to drag him into the van . . . unless they made contact with the needle. That was what he had to avoid. So he didn’t waste any energy trying to break free of the neck lock. It was too strong anyway. Instead, he used the man’s own strength against him, levering himself back, raising both legs off the ground and lashing out. The man with the syringe had been looking for somewhere to plant it, and with a smile of satisfaction, Alex saw the soles of his shoes smash into it, breaking it against the man’s chest. If they’d been planning to knock him out, they could forget it. Now it would be twice as hard to make him disappear.
So far, no more than about ten seconds had passed since the attack had begun, and Alex knew that time was on his side. The streets of Chelsea might be quiet, but it was eight thirty in the morning and people would be on their way to work. He couldn’t call for help. He was still being strangled. But someone would see what was happening. They had to.
Sure enough, a figure turned the corner and Alex was overjoyed to see the blue-and-silver uniform of a policeman. Alex felt the man behind him loosen his grip as the policeman ran forward, and he gratefully sucked in air.
“What’s going on here?” the policeman demanded.
“They . . . ,” Alex began, and stopped as he felt something stab him in the back, just above his waist. A second needle! The man who had been holding him must have taken it out of his pocket. But surely . . .
The policeman wasn’t doing anything, and even as the strength drained out of him and his legs buckled, Alex understood. The policeman wasn’t any more real than the deliverymen had been. They were all in it together. Alex had been tricked and there was nothing he could do as whatever drug had been pumped into him coursed through his system. He saw the street tilt and then turn sideways and knew that the only reason he wasn’t lying flat on the sidewalk was because the deliverymen had caught him and were carrying him into the van.
He was angry with himself. Only a few minutes ago, Jack had been accusing him. He could have died at Elm’s Cross and she would have never known what had happened to him. He had promised her it would never happen again. And yet it already had. In a few hours, the school would report him missing. She would think he had betrayed her again. If he died, he would never be able to tell her the truth.
This was all his fault. He shouldn’t have gone to the film studio. He should never have gotten involved with Desmond McCain in the first place. He wished he could call Jack and tell her. But it was too late. Barely conscious, already unable to struggle, he was bundled into the back of the van. He didn’t even hear the doors slam shut.
Alex opened his eyes.
Someone was doing something to his head. A lock of light brown hair twisted, falling in front of his eyes. At the same time he heard the snip of scissors. He was sitting in a chair in what looked like a hotel room. They hadn’t tied him up, but they didn’t need to. He was still drugged and couldn’t move. He’d been taken out of his school uniform and dressed in an ill-fitting tracksuit. They were cutting his hair. The two deliverymen were standing over him. There was a window covered by a blind and, at the very corner of his vision, an unmade bed. No carpet. His feet seemed to be resting on some sort of metal shelf, but he didn’t have the strength to look down.
The two men were talking, their voices like distant echoes that he couldn’t make out. One of them noticed he was awake and grabbed his head, squeezing his cheeks between thumb and fingers. More of his hair tumbled down into his lap. He could feel the cold air touching his scalp.
“He’s back,” the man said.
“Good.”
A woman appeared from nowhere—she must have been standing behind him—and Alex recognized Myra Beckett, the supervisor of Greenfields. Bizarrely, she was dressed as a nurse, complete with a starched white hat. The diagonal fringe of dark hair looked more severe than ever, as if it had been sliced with a single sword stroke. Her eyes, behind the round, gold glasses, were slightly crazy. Alex’s mouth was dry and he was feeling sick, but he managed to swear at her, a single venomous word.
“We’ll do it now,” she said.
They took hold of his arm and rolled up his sleeve. Alex winced as they gave him another injection, a long needle sliding into the flesh just above his wrist. But this time they didn’t remove it. Beckett taped it in place and Alex saw there was a tube connecting it to a plastic box about the size of a cigarette packet, which they taped to his arm.
“This IV will continue to give you a timed injection of the drugs we are using over the next few hours,” Beckett explained. “You will not be able to move or to speak. There will be other side effects. Try to breathe normally.”
Alex felt a wave of a nausea. He was completely helpless. And whatever these people were planning, it wasn’t going to end in this room.
The men rolled back his sleeve, hiding the plastic box. Alex knew that it was pumping its venom, drip by drip, into his bloodstream. He tried to jerk his arm but he had no strength at all. He swore at Beckett a second time, but his voice was no longer working and all that came out was an inarticulate grunt.
Beckett leaned over him and pressed a pair of glasses onto his face. Alex tried to shake them off, but they were tight-fitting, hooked over his ears. “You can take him out now,” she said.
He was in a wheelchair! Alex didn’t realize it until one of the men spun him around and pushed him out the door. They turned into a long corridor. “Wait a minute,” Beckett said. She stepped forward and crouched beside Alex so that her face was close to his. “What do you think?” she asked, with a thin smile.
There was a full-length mirror at the end of the corridor. Alex stared at himself in shock and disbelief. His hair had been cut so hideously that he looked two years older than his true age and completely pitiful. The tracksuit was the color of a nasty bruise. It was one size too big and it was covered in stains, as if he was unable to feed himself. His skin was pale and unhealthy. The glasses he had been given were deliberately ugly; black plastic with thick lenses. They hung slightly crooked on his face.
The drugs had attacked his muscles, paralyzing him and somehow changing the shape of his entire body. His jaw hung open and his eyes were glazed. Alex knew exactly what they had done. They had turned him into a foul parady of a disabled person. They had made him look brain-damaged . . . but worse than that, they had removed his dignity too. In a way, it was a brilliant disguise. People might glance at him in the street, but they would be too embarrassed to look twice. Beckett was taking their prejudices and using them to her own advantage.
Beckett must have given a signal. Alex was taken down the corridor and around to an elevator. After that, the extra drugs must have kicked in, because his world seemed to skip and jump.
He had the foggy sensation of being on the street and wheeled into the van.
He was in the van.
He was at Heathrow Airport! Hadn’t he been here just a few weeks ago with Sabina and her parents? The terminal lights hurt his eyes and he saw people s
taring briefly at him, then turning away, ashamed of themselves. He tried to call out for help, but the low, pathetic mumbling that came out of his lips only added to the impression that he was handicapped. They had no idea what was going on. They wouldn’t even begin to guess that he was being kidnapped, spirited away in front of their eyes.
Passport control. They had provided Alex with fake documents, of course, but it seemed to him that the official didn’t look too closely. A boy in a wheelchair accompanied by a nurse. The two men had stayed behind.
“Jonathan loves flying on big airplanes. Don’t you, Jonathan!” Beckett was talking to him, addressing him as if he were six years old.
I’m not . . . Alex wanted to tell the passport officer his real name. But nothing resembling a word came out.
And now he was in some sort of lounge.
Now being wheeled down a corridor.
On the plane. A seat had been taken out to make room for the wheelchair. Other passengers were passing him, carrying their luggage. He saw them glance in his direction. Each time the reaction was the same. Puzzlement, the realization that something was wrong, then pity, and finally a sense of embarrassment. The drug was making his knee twitch. His hand, resting on the knee, was doing the same.
“Try to get some sleep, Jonathan,” Beckett said. “It’s a long flight.”
Where were they taking him? And why? Did they really think they could get away with this, whisking him out of the country with a fake ID? Jack would already know he was missing. The school would have called her and she would have alerted MI6. They would be looking for him. Every airport would be watched.
Except . . .
What day was this? He could have been kept drugged for a few hours or a week. Or a month. Alex had no control over his body, but they had left his mind intact . . . hadn’t they?
He was alert enough to realize it wasn’t completely hopeless. Everything led back to Desmond McCain. MI6 knew what had happened at Greenfields. Jack would tell them about Elm’s Cross. They would track down McCain and that would lead them to him.
They were in the air. How was that possible? Alex couldn’t remember taking off. How long had they been flying? He tried to work out where they might be going. It had been light when they were on the runway, and it was still light now. If they had been in the air for a while, that would suggest, at the very least, that they weren’t heading east. The different time zones would have brought the night in faster. South, then, or west? He couldn’t turn his head—the muscles in his neck refused to work—but as they had filed past, he had noticed that many of the other passengers were black, dressed in clothes that were too brightly colored for the UK. They could be going home.
Africa.
Food was served—but not to him. The stewardess smiled at him sadly, as if understanding that he couldn’t feed himself. Beckett brought out some baby food and tried to force it into his mouth with a spoon. Using all his remaining strength, Alex kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to be humiliated by her any more than he had been already.
Hours passed, yet Alex hardly was aware of it.
They were on the ground.
The doors were open.
And then Alex was being wheeled through an arrivals hall, and a poster on the wall answered the question he had been asking himself for the past how-many hours. A brightly dressed black woman with a huge smile, holding a basket of fruit. And a caption.
SMILE! YOU’RE IN KENYA.
Kenya! Vaguely, Alex remembered something that Edward Pleasure had told him. “He’s the part owner of a safari camp somewhere in Kenya.” The words might have been spoken a century ago and on a different planet. Had he really once been in Kilmore Castle, dancing with Sabina? What would she say if she could see him now?
The plastic box was still resting against his arm, and he actually felt the whole thing vibrate as the timing mechanism clicked in, sending another spurt of the liquid into his veins. He felt unconsciousness returning and didn’t even try to fight it. He was on his own, thousands of miles from home. He had fallen into the hands of a ruthless enemy and nobody knew where he was. Ahead of him, a set of automatic doors swung open. Alex was wheeled into the dark.
17
A SHORT FLIGHT TO NOWHERE
MOVEMENT RETURNED, one twitch at a time.
Alex had no idea how long he had been here, but he guessed that it couldn’t have been much more than twenty-four hours. He had watched the sun rise, not out of the window but through the cloth that made up the wall. He was lying on his back on a comfortable bed in what seemed to be a cross between a luxury hotel room and a large tent. The floor was made of polished wood. There was an expensive-looking wardrobe, a carved wooden table, and two chairs. A fan hung from the ceiling above his head, turning continuously. He was completely enclosed by a mosquito net that rippled in the breeze. But the walls were made of canvas. The windows consisted of two flaps, fastened from the outside.
Where exactly was he? From the sounds that surrounded him—the chatter of monkeys, the occasional bellow of an elephant, the constant whoops and screams of exotic birds—it seemed that he was in the bush, somewhere in the middle of Kenya.
That tied in with his memories of the journey here, even if they were still confused. There had been the poster he had seen. SMILE! YOU’RE IN KENYA. As if he had felt remotely like smiling! They had gone through passport control, and after that the drug must have kicked in again. They had driven across a city, but he had barely seen any of it. It had been late evening. Nairobi? And then there had been a second, smaller airport and another plane, this one a four-seater with propellers. They had bundled him in, leaving the wheelchair behind. And then . . .
He had woken up here, on his own. It was dark . . . evening or night. But they had left two little battery lights on—battery, not electric. At least he could see, even if he couldn’t yet move. The plastic box had been removed from his arm and a dirty bandage stuck over the puncture where the needle had gone in. That had been the first thing he had noticed—and he’d been grateful for it. With the drug no longer pumping into his system, he had begun to recover. He could lift his hand. He could turn his head from side to side, taking in the sweep of the room. Eventually he had stood up and tottered on unsteady legs into the bathroom, behind the bed, separated by a screen. He had thrown up and that made him feel better. Then he had taken a cold shower, the water washing away some of the horror of the past day.
He had still been too weak to make his way outside. He had decided he would wait for the sun. Once again he had fallen asleep, but this time more normally.
And now it was morning. Alex rolled off the bed and stood up. He had slept in his shorts. The tracksuit that they had dressed him in was lying on the floor, a crumpled heap. He noticed that his school uniform had been brought over from England. It seemed somehow strange to see it, but of course he had been wearing it when he was kidnapped. He went over to it, feeling in the inside pocket of his jacket.
Yes. It was there. He had been carrying the black gel-ink pen that Smithers had given him and nobody had thought to remove it. It wasn’t as powerful as the device that had brought down the factory chimney, but it might still be useful. At the very least, it gave Alex hope. McCain had made his first mistake.
He was now moving completely normally. They had used a powerful drug on him, but it had left his system completely. Just to be sure, he forced himself to do twenty push-ups, then had another shower. He got dressed in his own pants and shirt, leaving off the jacket. Although it was early morning, it was already warm. He could feel the sun beating through the walls of the tent and the fan was having to fight against the sluggish air. He slipped the gel-ink pen into his pants pocket. From now on, he would make sure it never left him.
The front of the tent was sealed up. There was a large flap with a zipper running around the side. Well, if this was his prison, it was a very flimsy one. Alex went over and unzipped it. At once he saw the green of the jungle, confirming what he had gue
ssed. He was in the bush. But the way was blocked by a guard, a black man dressed in jeans and grimy shirt, a rifle strapped over his shoulder. Alex realized that he must have been there all night.
The guard turned around and scowled. “You stay inside.” That seemed to be the limit of his English.
“What time do you serve breakfast?” Alex asked. He had already decided. He wasn’t going to let these people think he was scared.
“Inside.” The guard brought the rifle around.
Alex raised his hands and retreated. There was no point starting a fight. Not yet.
Breakfast came half an hour later: tea, canned orange juice, and two slices of toast, carried in by a second guard. Alex wolfed it down. It had been a long time since he had last eaten and his stomach couldn’t have been more empty. There was a bottle of water in the tent, and he drank that too. He had no idea what was going to happen to him. He would take any food or water he could get.
Why had they brought him here? Alex almost admired McCain. The man must have nerves of steel, kidnapping him in broad daylight, smuggling him out of England through one of the world’s busiest airports. But what was the point? McCain must have identified him as the intruder at Greenfields. He would have remembered their meeting at the castle in Scotland. Maybe he had decided to take revenge. After all, he had already tried to kill Alex once.
And yet, somehow, Alex didn’t believe it. Whatever McCain was planning, the stakes were too high. This wasn’t personal. This was business. McCain needed Alex for a reason.
And now Alex was completely in his power. It was probably best not to think too much about what might lie ahead.
Instead, Alex thought about Jack. What would she be doing now? And what about MI6? Once they’d realized he was gone, they’d have spared no effort. Every intelligence agency in the world would be looking for him. Surely someone would remember a fourteen-year-old boy being taken through passport control, even if he was in a wheelchair. The trail would lead to Kenya and they must know that McCain had a base here.