“It doesn’t make any difference,” Cray said. “Eagle Strike will have taken place in less than forty-eight hours from now. I agree with you, Yassen. This boy knows nothing. He’s irrelevant. I can kill him and it won’t make any difference at all.”
“You don’t have to kill him,” Yassen said. Alex was surprised. The Russian had killed Ian Rider. He was Alex’s worst enemy. But this was the second time Yassen had tried to protect him. “You can just lock him up until it’s all over.”
“You’re right,” Cray said. “I don’t have to kill him. But I want to. It’s something I want to do very much.” He pushed himself off the piano stool and came over to Alex. “Do you remember I told you about pain synthesis?” he said. “In London. The demonstration… Pain synthesis allows game players to experience the hero’s emotions – all his emotions, particularly those associated with pain and death. You may wonder how I programmed it into the software. The answer, my dear Alex, is by the use of volunteers such as yourself.”
“I didn’t volunteer,” Alex muttered.
“Nor did the others. But they still helped me. Just as you will help me. And your reward will be an end to the pain. The comfort and the quiet of death…” Cray looked away. “You can take him,” he said.
Two guards had come into the room. Alex hadn’t heard them approach, but now they stepped out of the shadows and grabbed hold of him. He tried to fight back, but they were too strong for him. They pulled him off the sofa and away, down one of the passages leading from the room.
Alex managed to look back one last time. Cray had already forgotten him. He was holding the flash drive, admiring it. But Yassen was watching him and he looked worried. Then an automatic door shot down with a hiss of compressed air and Alex was dragged away, his feet sliding uselessly behind him, following the passageway to whatever it was that Damian Cray had arranged.
The cell was at the end of another underground corridor. The two guards threw Alex in, then waited as he turned round to face them. The one who had found him on the stairs spoke a few words with a heavy Dutch accent.
“The door closes and it stays closed. You find the way out. Or you starve.”
That was it. The door slammed and Alex heard two bolts being drawn across. He heard the guards’ footsteps fade into the distance. Suddenly everything was silent. He was on his own.
He looked around him. The cell was a bare metal box about five metres long and two metres wide with a single bunk, no water and no window. The door had closed flush to the wall. There was no crack round the side, not so much as a keyhole. He knew he had never been in worse trouble. Cray hadn’t believed his story; he had barely even considered it. Whether Alex was with MI6 or not seemed to make no difference to him … and the truth was that this time Alex really had got himself caught up in something without MI6 there to back him up. For once he had no gadgets to help him break out of the cell. He had brought the bicycle that Smithers had given him from London to Paris and then to Amsterdam. But right now it was parked outside Central Station in the city and would stay there until it was stolen or rusted away. Jack knew he had planned to break into the compound, but even if she did raise the alarm, how would anyone ever find him? Despair weighed down on him. He no longer had the strength to fight it.
And still he knew almost nothing. Why had Cray invested so much time and money in the game system he called Gameslayer? Why did he need the flash drive? What was the plane doing in the middle of the compound? Above all, what was Cray planning? Eagle Strike would take place in two days – but where, and what would it entail?
Alex forced himself to take control. He’d been locked up before. The important thing was to fight back – not to admit defeat. Cray had already made mistakes. Even speaking his own name on the phone when Alex called him from Saint-Pierre had been an error of judgement. He might have power, fame and enormous resources. He was certainly planning a huge operation. But he wasn’t as clever as he thought. Alex could still beat him.
But how to begin? Cray had put him into this cell to experience what he called pain synthesis. Alex didn’t like the sound of that. And what had the guard said? Find the way out – or starve. But there was no way out. Alex ran his hands across the walls. They were solid steel. He went over and examined the door a second time. Nothing. It was tightly sealed. He glanced at the ceiling, at the single bulb burning behind a thick pane of glass. That only left the bunk…
He found the trapdoor underneath, built into the wall. It was like a cat flap, just big enough to take a human body. Gingerly, wondering if it might be booby-trapped, Alex reached out and pushed it. The metal flap swung inwards. There was some sort of tunnel on the other side, but he couldn’t see anything. If he crawled into it, he would be entering a narrow space with no light at all – and he couldn’t even be sure that the tunnel actually went anywhere. Did he have the courage to go in?
There was no alternative. Alex examined the cell one last time, knelt down and pushed himself forward. The metal flap swung open in front of him, then travelled down his back as he crawled into the tunnel. He felt it hit the back of his heels and there was a soft click. What was that? He couldn’t see anything. He lifted a hand and waved it in front of his face. It was as if it wasn’t there. He reached out in front of him and felt a solid wall. God! He had walked – crawled rather – into a trap. This wasn’t the way out after all.
He pushed himself back the way he had come, and that was when he discovered the flap was now locked. He kicked out with his feet but it wouldn’t move. Panic, total and uncontrollable, overwhelmed him. He was buried alive, in total darkness, with no air. This was what Cray had meant by pain synthesis: a death too hideous to imagine.
Alex went mad.
Unable to control himself, he screamed out, his fists lashing against the walls of this metal coffin. He was suffocating.
His flailing hand hit a section of the wall and he felt it give way. There was a second flap! Gasping for air, he twisted round and into a second tunnel, as black and as chilling as the first. But at least there was some faint flicker of hope burning in his consciousness. There was a way through. If he could just keep a grip on himself, he might yet find his way back into the light.
The second tunnel was longer. Alex slithered forward, feeling the sheet metal under his hands. He forced himself to slow down. He was still completely blind. If there was a hole ahead of him, he would plunge into it before he knew what had happened. As he went, he tapped against the walls, searching for other passageways. His head knocked into something and he swore. The bad language helped him. It was good to direct his hatred against Damian Cray. And hearing his own voice reminded him he was still alive.
He had bumped into a ladder. He took hold of it with both hands and felt for the opening that must be above his shoulders. He was lying flat on his stomach, but slowly he manipulated himself round and began to climb up, feeling his way in case there was a ceiling overhead. His hand came into contact with something and he pushed. To his huge relief, light flooded in. He had opened some sort of trapdoor with a large, brightly lit room on the other side. Gratefully he climbed the last rungs and passed through.
The air was warm. Alex sucked it into his lungs, allowing his feelings of panic and claustrophobia to fade away. Then he looked up.
He was kneeling on a straw-covered floor in a room that was bathed in yellow light. Three of the walls seemed to have been built with huge blocks of stone. Blazing torches slanted in towards him, fixed to metal brackets. Gates at least ten metres high stood in front of him. They were made out of wood, with iron fastenings and a huge face carved into the surface. Some sort of Mexican god with saucer eyes and solid, block-like teeth. Alex had seen the face before but it took him a few moments to work out where. And then he knew exactly what lay ahead of him. He knew how Cray had programmed pain synthesis into his game.
The gates had appeared at the start of Feathered Serpent, the game that Alex had played in the Pleasure Dome in Hyde Park. Then it had b
een a computerized image, projected onto a screen – and Alex had been represented by an avatar, a two-dimensional version of himself. But Cray had also built an actual physical version of the game. Alex reached out and touched one of the walls. Sure enough, they weren’t really stone but some sort of toughened plastic. The whole thing was like one of those walk-throughs at Disneyland … an ancient world reproduced with high-tech modern construction. There had been a time when Alex wouldn’t have believed it possible, but he knew with a sick certainty that once the gates opened, he would find himself in a perfect reconstruction of the game – and that meant he would be facing the same challenges. Only this time it would be for real: real flames, real acid, real spears and – if he made a mistake – real death.
Cray had told him that he had used other “volunteers”. Presumably they had been filmed fighting their way through the various challenges; and all the time their emotions had been recorded and then somehow digitally transferred and programmed into the Gameslayer system. It was sick. Alex realized that the darkness of the underground passages hadn’t even been part of the real challenge. That began now.
He didn’t move. He needed time to think, to remember as much as he could about the game he had played at the Pleasure Dome. There had been five zones. First some sort of temple, with a crossbow and a sword concealed in the walls. Would Cray provide him with weapons in this reconstruction? He would have to wait and see. What came after the temple? There had been a pit with a flying creature: half butterfly, half dragon. After that Alex had run down a corridor – spears shooting out of the walls – and into a jungle, the home of the metallic snakes. Then there had been a mirror maze guarded by Aztec gods and finally a pool of fire, his exit to the next level.
A pool of fire. If that was reproduced here, it would kill him. Alex remembered what Cray had said. The comfort and the quiet of death. There was no way out of this madhouse. If he did manage to survive the five zones, he would be allowed to finish it by throwing himself into the flames.
Alex felt hatred well up inside him. He could actually taste it. Damian Cray was beyond evil.
What could he do? There would be no way back through the tunnels and Alex wasn’t sure he had the nerve even to try. He had only one choice, and that was to continue. He had almost beaten the game once. That at least gave him a little hope. On the other hand, there was a world of difference between manipulating a controller and actually attempting the action himself. He couldn’t move or react with the speed of an electronic figure. Nor would he be given extra lives. If he was killed once, he would stay dead.
He stood up. At once the gates swung silently open, and there ahead of him was the temple that he had last seen in the game. He wondered if his progress was being monitored. Could he at least rely on an element of surprise?
He walked through the gates. The temple was exactly how he remembered it from the screen at the Pleasure Dome: a vast space with stone walls covered in strange carvings and pillars, statues crouching at their base, stretching far above him. Even the stained-glass windows had been reproduced with images of UFOs hovering over fields of golden corn. And there too were the cameras, swivelling to follow him and, presumably, to record whatever progress he made. Organ music, modern rather than religious, throbbed all around him. Alex shivered, barely able to accept that this was really happening.
He walked further into the temple, every sense alert, waiting for an attack that he knew could come from any direction. He wished now that he had played Feathered Serpent more carefully. He had raced through the zones at such speed that he had probably missed half of the ambushes. His feet rang out on the silver floor. Ahead of him, rusting staircases that reminded him of a submarine or a submerged ship twisted upwards. He thought of trying one of them. But he hadn’t gone that way when he was playing the game and preferred not to now. It was better to stick with what he knew.
The alcove that contained the crossbow was underneath a wooden pulpit, carved in the shape of a dragon. It was almost completely covered by what looked like green ivy – but Alex knew that the twisting vines carried an electrical charge. He could see the weapon resting against the stonework, and there was just enough of a gap. Was it worth the risk? Alex tensed himself, preparing to reach in, then threw himself full length on the floor. Half a second later and it would have been fatal. He had remembered the razor boomerang at the same instant that he had heard a whistling sound coming from nowhere. He had no time to prepare himself. He hit the ground so hard that the breath was driven out of him. There was a flash and a series of sparks. He felt a burning pain across his shoulders and knew that he hadn’t been quite fast enough. The boomerang had sliced open his T-shirt, also cutting his skin. It had been a close thing. Any closer and he wouldn’t even have made it into the second zone.
And silently the cameras watched. Everything was being recorded. One day it would be fed into Cray’s software – presumably Feathered Serpent 2.
Alex sat up and tried to pull his torn shirt together. At least the boomerang had helped in one way. It had hit the ivy, cutting and short-circuiting the electric wires. Alex stretched an arm into the alcove and took out the crossbow. It was antique – wood and iron – but it seemed to be working. Even so, Cray had cheated him. There was an arrow in it, but it had no point. It was too blunt to damage anything.
He decided to take both the crossbow and the arrow with him anyway. He moved away from the alcove and over to the wall where he knew he would find the sword. It was about twenty metres above him but there were loose stones and handholds indicating a way up. Alex was about to start climbing but then he had second thoughts. He had already had one close escape. The wall would almost certainly be booby-trapped. He would be halfway up and a stone would come loose. If he fell, he would break a leg. Cray would enjoy that, watching him lie helpless on the silver floor until some other missile was fired into him to finish him off. And anyway, the sword would probably have no blade.
But thinking about it, Alex suddenly realized that he had the answer. He knew how to beat the simulated world that Cray had built.
Every computer game is a series of programmed events, with nothing random, nothing left to chance. When Alex had played the game in the Pleasure Dome, he had collected the crossbow and then used it to shoot the creature that had attacked him. In the same way, locked doors would have keys; poisons would have antidotes. No matter how much choice you might seem to have, you were always obeying a hidden set of rules.
But Alex had not been programmed. He was a human being and he could do what he wanted. It had cost him a torn shirt and a very narrow escape – but he had learnt his lesson. If he hadn’t tried to get the crossbow, he wouldn’t have made himself a target for the boomerang. Climbing up the wall to get the sword would put him in danger because he would be doing exactly what was expected.
To get out of the world that Cray had built for him, he had to do everything that wasn’t expected.
In other words he had to cheat.
And he would start right now.
He went over to one of the blazing torches and tried to remove it from the wall. He wasn’t surprised to find that the whole thing was bolted into place. Cray had thought of everything. But even if he controlled the holders, he couldn’t control the flames themselves. Alex pulled off his shirt and wrapped it round the end of the wooden arrow. Then he set it on fire. He smiled to himself. Now he had a weapon that hadn’t been programmed.
The exit door was at the far end of the temple. Alex was supposed to take a direct path to it. Instead, he went the long way round, staying close to the walls, avoiding any traps that might be lying in wait. Ahead of him he could see the second chamber – the rain-drenched pit with its pillars rising from the depths below and ending at floor level. He passed through the door and stopped on a narrow ledge; the tops of the pillars – barely bigger than soup plates – offered him a path of stepping stones across the void. Alex remembered the flying creature that had attacked him. He looked up. Yes, t
here it was, almost lost in the gloom: a nylon wire running from the opposite side to the door above his head. He thrust upwards with the burning arrow, holding the flame against the wire.
It worked. The wire caught fire and then snapped. Cray had built a robotic version of the creature that had attacked him in the game. Alex knew that it would have swooped down when he was halfway across, rushing into him and knocking him off his perch, causing him to plunge into whatever lay below. Now he watched with quiet satisfaction as the creature tumbled down from the ceiling and dangled in front of him, a jumble of metal and feathers that was more like a dead parrot than a mythical monster.
The way ahead was clear but the rain was still falling, splashing down from some hidden sprinkler system. The stepping stones would be slippery. Alex knew that his avatar would have been unable to remove its shoes for better grip. He quickly slipped off his trainers, tied them together and hung them round his neck. His socks went into his pocket. Then he jumped. The trick, he knew, was to do this quickly: not to stop, not to look down. He took a breath, then started. The rain blinded him. The tops of the pillars were only just big enough to contain his bare feet. On the very last one he lost his balance. But he didn’t have to use his feet – he could move in a way that his avatar couldn’t. He threw himself forward, stretching out his hands and allowing his own momentum to carry him towards safety. His chest hit the ground and he clung on, dragging his legs over the edge of the pit. He had made it to the other side.
A corridor ran off to the left, the walls close together and decorated with hideous Aztec faces. Alex remembered how his avatar had run through here, dodging between a hail of wooden spears. He glanced down and saw that there was what looked like a smoking stream in the floor.
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