“I’m with you,” Scarlett said. She was ready for this. Everything that Richard had said had made her determined that they wouldn’t be beaten, that they would turn this situation to their advantage.
Next to her, Albert Rémy brought out a pistol. He checked that it was loaded.
Richard was surprised. “You always carry that?”
“Of course.” Rémy loaded a bullet into the chamber. “But I do not believe that Tarik would do this, Richard. He is a good man.”
“Maybe he was a good man once. But you fight any war long enough and in the end it’s going to be hard to remember who you are. He’s had too much blood. And maybe too much sand. I’d say he’s become everything he set out to defeat.”
They pulled in. Richard switched the engine off. “I really hope this is going to work out,” he muttered to Scarlett.
“Now I know why Matt thought so much of you.”
“Did he?” Richard smiled. “He never told me that.”
They got out.
And stood face-to-face with Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad.
Although Richard and Scarlett had never seen him before, they knew it had to be him. After a lifetime in uniform, the Arab dress looked almost ridiculous on him. He had the face and the eyes of a soldier and he was examining them with undisguised pleasure.
“Scarlett Adams,” he said, and even hearing the way he pronounced her name, Scarlett knew that he had little knowledge of English. “I am glad to see you,” he continued, framing his words carefully, as if each one had been plucked out of a dictionary.
“I take it your name isn’t Ali,” Richard said.
“It is not.”
Akkad raised a limp, carefully manicured hand. It was a signal. Two armed men appeared, tumbling out of the front of the building. They were dressed in the same dark-green uniforms that Richard and Scarlett had seen when they first arrived. A third uncurled himself from his hiding place on the roof, aiming down with a machine gun.
“It is over for you,” Akkad said. He had also produced a gun, which he aimed at Richard. “The Englishman dies here and now. He should have died before. The girl will come with me.”
“And what do you get out of this?” Richard asked.
“My reward will be great…!”
He got no further.
The explosion was huge and deafening. It came from behind them, from the top of the hill they had just left. The force of it almost threw them off their feet and it was enough to blast the man on the roof onto one knee. A whole torrent of sand and smoke, scooped up from the desert floor, fell on them. They were blinded. But even at that moment, in all the chaos, Richard knew Tarik had paid the full price for his treachery.
Perhaps he and his men had survived the blast but Richard doubted it. Even if there had been time for it, he would have felt no pity for them. They had tried to turn Scarlett and him into unknowing suicide bombers, but they were the ones who had died. How he must have relished his moment of triumph as his finger pressed the button. He had detonated the bomb, thinking it was in their jeep, the vehicle that he had persuaded them to drive down the hill. He had thought that it would kill his greatest enemy, Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad, even if it killed the three of them too.
Richard had the advantage. He had known what was about to happen and so he was the first to react, throwing himself at the Field Marshall, fighting for control of the gun. And Rémy hadn’t hesitated either. However strong his belief in Tarik, it had surely been shattered now. He had seen at once the danger they were in, and even as the blast echoed in his ears he fired three times. The man on the roof cried out and fell backwards. The other two tried to return fire but although one of them let off a couple of rounds, they were too slow and Rémy shot them both.
“Richard!” Scarlett stared in horror. The trap was bigger and more elaborate than any of them could have expected. All around them, men were appearing. They were all in desert camouflage and must have been lying flat until the moment of the explosion, but now they were rising out of the sand as if from the grave, fifteen or twenty of them, forming a circle about fifty metres away. Fortunately, they hadn’t dared get any closer. They couldn’t risk being seen. But they were already moving quickly, covering the distance between them.
Not all of them were men. Scarlett saw a creature with the head and pincers of a scorpion, another dragging broken wings, half-man, half-eagle. These were the mutations that the Old Ones had created to serve them, the shape-changers. The bird-thing screeched in anger and ran forward. The circle closed in.
There was nothing Richard could do. He was still struggling with Akkad, the man’s face close to his, his eyes bulging. Richard could even smell the garlic on his breath. Akkad had his finger on the trigger. He was trying to bring the gun round. There was a gunshot, close and muffled. Richard stared. But it wasn’t he who had been shot. Akkad tried to say something, then fell to his knees. Richard saw the light in his eyes go out. He released him and turned away.
The attackers were less than forty metres from them, moving in from all sides, lumbering across the sand. Scarlett couldn’t wait any longer. She knew what she had to do.
Summoning up every ounce of her strength, she released her power, just as she had done in Hong Kong. She felt it at once, flowing through her like a breeze through her fingertips. The effect was astonishing. It was as if an invisible comet had smashed into the desert. A blast of wind came pounding down, causing the sand to explode outwards. The soldiers were thrown down, cartwheeling then crashing into the ground. Even the shape-changers were forced back. The sky darkened. The wind howled.
“Into the car!” Richard couldn’t make himself heard but he didn’t need to. There was nothing else to do. They were in the eye of the storm that howled all around them, even if the immediate circle in which they stood was calm. Richard grabbed Scarlett and led her into the Land Cruiser. Rémy came with them, his face contorted with pain, one hand clutched across his chest. Scarlett saw that he had been hit by a stray bullet and that the wound was bad.
The three of them piled in, Richard in the driving seat, Scarlett next to him, Rémy sprawled out in the back. They couldn’t see anything. The sand had formed a tornado around them – but it was a barrier through which no living thing could hope to come. For a brief moment, Richard wondered if Akkad had also tried to trick them. Suppose there was no fuel in the car? It might not even work. But when he turned the key, the engine started at once. Perhaps the Field Marshall had been concerned that they would send an agent ahead of them to examine it. So he had decided to take no chances and had provided them with exactly what they had demanded.
“Are you OK?” Richard shouted.
Scarlett nodded. She was controlling the weather. All her attention was focused on maintaining the spinning wall of sand.
In the back, Rémy groaned and slumped against the side.
Richard shoved the car into gear and they set off. They could see no more than a few metres ahead of them but the storm slipped back to let them pass. Gradually they picked up speed. They didn’t see any of the soldiers or the shape-changers. None of them had got close.
The Land Cruiser slid and shuddered across the desert, leaving Cairo behind.
THE TREE
SEVENTEEN
Scott Tyler had come to the conclusion that he really didn’t like Pedro very much.
They had been together in this stinking cell for … how long now? Scott had already lost track of the time but it must have been more than three weeks, maybe as much as a month. However long it had been, Pedro never complained. He ate the disgusting food that they gave him and didn’t ask for more, even though the portions were tiny and they were both starving. He never seemed to be bored. When they were allowed to exercise – just one hour a day – he walked around the empty yard under the black sky as if it were Central Park. They also had one daily visit to a shower and toilet complex, the cubicles arranged around a manhole set in a concrete floor. The water was cold and they h
ad only a few minutes to wash. But he didn’t seem to mind. It was like he was in another world.
Pedro never spoke very much either. That wasn’t his fault. He had lived all his life in Peru and had only recently learnt English, mainly from his conversations in the dreamworld with Matt. But Scott got the impression that it was more down to the fact that he didn’t want to talk. After all, the two of them had spoken together at the start, when they had both been captured. But as the days had gone by, Pedro had retreated into himself. And he had done it deliberately. Scott was sure of it.
He examined the other boy now. Pedro was stretched out on his bunk with his hands folded behind his head (neither of them had been given a pillow), gazing at the ceiling as if he could read something interesting there. Not that he knew how to read anyway. Pedro was much smaller than Scott and although they were almost exactly the same age, he looked five years younger, with the smooth skin and innocent brown eyes of a ten-year-old. His black hair had been cut short with a fringe that went in a straight line from ear to ear. It was the sort of haircut you’d get in a primary school. Even before they’d been put on starvation rations, Pedro had been incredibly thin. Stick Insect. That was the name Scott had given him and he’d even used it from time to time.
“So tell me what you think, Stick Insect…?”
It amused Scott that Pedro didn’t know what it meant. He probably thought it was a term of friendship.
Scott still found it hard to believe that they had been thrown together after Hong Kong, as if by an unlucky toss of the dice. Why couldn’t it have been Scarlett or even Matt? Why not his own brother? He wouldn’t have minded if he’d ended up on his own. Anything would have been better than this.
He knew, of course, what had happened in those last few seconds in the temple. They had all rushed through the door without thinking, without knowing where they were going. So instead of taking them somewhere safe, it had scattered them like seed in the wind. That was down to Matt. Matt had given them the order to get out of there before the storm killed them all, and maybe he’d been right about that but he hadn’t thought it through. Just a few seconds … that was all it would have taken. He could have directed them back to Cuzco or to London or to anywhere they could all be together. But he’d been scared and he’d just run. Perhaps he wasn’t quite the leader he thought he was.
And, for that matter, going to Hong Kong had almost certainly been a mistake in the first place. Chasing after Scarlett had meant walking into the most obvious of traps, something Scott had pointed out from the start … not that anyone had listened. And Matt had even gone so far as to separate him and Jamie. How could he have done that?
Now that he thought about it, Scott disliked Matt even more than he disliked Pedro.
Scott and Matt had never got on, not from the moment that he and Jamie had arrived in Cuzco, Peru, at the end of a long journey that had nearly killed them both. Scott had already been captured once. He had been held prisoner and tortured by a woman, Susan Mortlake. (Scott couldn’t think of her without seeing her … the long, thin neck, the glasses, the piggy eyes.) She had wanted him to use his powers to help her kill a United States senator, using his powers, and in the end he had agreed. Anything to stop the pain. Was that so wrong?
At the same time, Jamie had been busy. He had broken out of a juvenile detention centre in Nevada, travelled in time, fought in the first battle against the Old Ones and ended up on the winning side. All their lives, Scott had looked after Jamie, acting as the older brother, even though they were actually twins. But from the moment Matt had come onto the radar, he had somehow been demoted. Jamie was the hero. Scott was the loser, someone you couldn’t trust. The worst moment had come when Matt had decided to take Jamie with him to London, leaving Scott behind.
No. Even worse than that … Jamie had agreed without putting up any sort of argument. After everything they had been through together, Jamie had simply turned round and betrayed him.
All these jumbled thoughts ran through Scott’s mind as he lay there in the cell, cold and filthy in clothes he hadn’t changed in weeks, remembering how he had got here and wondering what would happen next.
He and Pedro had come through the door from Hong Kong. He could see it still, the walls crashing down, the wind howling in. They had emerged into the cloister of some sort of church, which looked old and run-down. The sky was a dirty grey and smelled of ashes. Had there been a gigantic fire nearby? How he wished now that they had gone back the way they had come, but five seconds of curiosity had been the undoing of them. He had been about to say something to Pedro. Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe we should try and find the others. But the words never left his mouth. Suddenly there were men running towards them from all sides, figures in black uniforms with weapons in their hands and more weapons dangling from their belts. He heard shouting. Then something hit him on the side of the face and the world turned upside down as he crashed to the ground. He tried to get up but a foot slammed into the small of his back. His hands were seized and tied behind him.
There was nothing he could do as he was lifted up and carried into the building. He had been right to think it was a church – weren’t all the doors hidden in religious places of one sort or another? He saw stained-glass windows and, on one wall, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a blue robe, although somebody had defaced it, chiselling out her eyes. The whole place seemed to be empty. All he could hear was the sound of his captors as they dragged him further in, up a staircase, along a corridor past a wooden screen. Nobody had said anything to him yet. Everything seemed to be happening incredibly quickly.
He heard a bolt being drawn. The door opened. Then he was propelled into a small room that might have been an office or a cell, with a stone floor, a tiny barred window, a mattress and a plastic bucket. He thought that Pedro would be thrown in with him but it turned out he was going to be left on his own. One of the guards knelt down and Scott felt a sharp blade cut through the plastic ties that bound his wrists. His hands came free. One of the men was right next to him – bald, unshaven, dark-eyed. Scott turned and spat in his face. The man stared at him and for a brief moment there was dark fury in his eyes. But he must have been given strict orders not to harm his captive. He simply straightened up and walked out.
Scott spent the next three days there. The window had no view. There was a wall directly opposite and he could only tell the time of day by the light reflecting on the brickwork. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody let him out of the room. The bald man brought him bread and water and occasionally a bowl of thin soup. He took out the bucket and emptied it. But he ignored the questions that Scott threw at him. “Where am I?” “Where’s Pedro?” “What do you want with me?” Scott tried to provoke him, swearing at him, using every foul word he knew. It was a waste of time. The man showed no reaction at all.
Scott remained angry. He needed his anger to keep going. Because if he thought rationally about his situation, his complete helplessness, he knew he would get scared. So he blamed Pedro. He blamed Matt. He even blamed Jamie. Refused proper exercise, he paced the cell, slamming the heel of his hand into the stone walls until the skin broke and he bled. Eight paces from wall to wall. Eight paces back again. He was a caged animal, tracing out his territory. If he had stayed there much longer, he might have gone mad.
But after three days they came for him again. He was curled up on the mattress asleep when he felt hands grabbing at him, and before he could react there was a bag over his head and his wrists were locked together behind him once more. He couldn’t see. He could barely breathe. He was scooped up and dragged out and he realized that there was absolutely nothing he could do. He might just as well have been dead. He found himself shouting, his whole body writhing. But the men didn’t care. He thought he heard one of them laugh and kicked out even harder.
They took him upstairs. Scott was able to measure his progress by his heels hitting the steps. They must have passed through a doorway because he felt air against his hands and ?
?? even with the thick cloth pressing against his face – smelled the burning. He heard the whine of a helicopter. The wind from the rotors beat at him as he was bundled inside it – not onto a seat but onto the floor. His shoulders brushed against someone else.
“Pedro!” he called out.
“Scott!” He heard the single word shouted out from close by and felt a surge of relief. He had been glad to have Pedro with him then. He had to admit it. But that had been a long time ago. And as the hours had become days and the days had become weeks, Scott had found that he had changed. Maybe it was the anger that was changing him. He was getting used to being on his own. In a strange way, it was making him stronger.
This new prison had to be in some sort of castle, judging from the look of it, with thick walls, tiny windows and battlements. In the day it was cold and at night much worse, but even so they only had one blanket each and they shivered for hours before sleep came. The exercise yard was at the end of a short, whitewashed corridor with just one door on the way leading into the toilet and shower complex. Apart from the men who took them there and back, they hadn’t met anyone. Scott had decided that the guards were probably Italian. He had seen acrobats from Rome once, when he was performing in the theatre in Nevada, and they had much the same look. None of them ever spoke, though. If either of the boys hesitated, or refused to come out of the cell, they struck out with short, heavy batons, which didn’t break their bones but left plum-coloured bruises that didn’t go away for days.
Scott had preferred the church, or whatever it was, because (he half-smiled at the thought) at least he’d had a room to himself. He was fed up with being with Pedro, day and night … not that there was a lot of difference between the two. There was no window. No TV. Nothing to read. Nothing much to talk about. Scott had given up thinking about the others. He didn’t even know if they were still alive. The last he had seen of Scarlett, she had been shot in the head.