by Peter James
It was seven o’clock and already almost completely dark. Just a few bloody, red streaks stained the sky as they followed him across an open parking lot to a white Mercedes in a meter bay. ‘Where are you taking us?’ John asked.
The driver turned, grinning inanely, and said, ‘I sorry, no good English, sorry, so sorry!’
He put their luggage in the boot, then scurried round to open the rear doors for each of them in turn. Five minutes later they were out of the airport complex, moving in heavy traffic along a wide boulevard of modern hotel buildings that reminded John of the streets around LAX airport in Los Angeles.
Leaning forward, he tried to question the driver again. ‘Where are we going?’
Alarmingly, the man raised both hands in the air, then swivelled around on his beaded seat cover to face him. ‘No-zactly!’ he said, then to John’s relief turned back to face the road.
They were heading away from the city. John decided not to ask the man any more questions. Soon they were on a pitch-dark highway, driving fast in thin traffic. And for the first time since they had started this journey, he began feeling seriously worried.
There was one concern he had simply not permitted himself to think about up until now – which was, what if not all the Disciples had been rounded up in Special Agent Norbert’s raid? What if Luke and Phoebe were being dangled as bait to lure him and Naomi?
Had he really been so clever after all, in throwing a false scent at Detective Inspector Pelham?
As if reading his thoughts, Naomi leaned over and whispered, ‘I don’t feel good about this. Where do you think we’re going?’
‘I don’t know.’ He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the display. Five blots, a full-strength signal. At least he had some means of communication if need be. He put it back. Despite the air conditioning, he felt uncomfortable in his winter-weight jeans, roll-neck sweater and leather jacket. He wriggled out of the jacket and folded it on his lap. ‘Aren’t you warm—?’ he started saying to Naomi, then noticed the car was slowing down, its indicator light winking on the dash.
They turned off the highway onto a long, dead-straight road that seemed to be heading out into desert. Even more anxious now, he turned and peered out of the window. Nothing but total darkness behind them – and ahead of them.
After five minutes of travelling along this road at high speed, again they slowed, and now John could see a complex of industrial buildings ahead of them, inside a barbed-wire compound, the perimeter brightly illuminated. A factory or storage depot of some kind.
They stopped beside a security booth, in front of closed metal gates. The driver put down his window and spoke to an armed guard. Moments later the gates slid open and they moved forward, following a road that threaded around to the rear of the buildings. John, holding Naomi’s hand, was feeling tense as hell now. Was this where Luke and Phoebe were?
But now they were moving away from the buildings, seemingly out into the desert again. And suddenly, catching a sudden whiff of kerosene, he realized where they were going.
A few hundred yards ahead of them, just a silhouette at first, but rapidly becoming clearer in their headlights as they drew closer, was a jet plane, not much smaller than a commercial airliner.
‘Seems like the Magical Mystery Tour continues,’ he said drily, feeling a strange sense of relief at seeing this plane, as if its presence confirmed that at least they weren’t being brought out here to be executed.
Was this the jet Luke and Phoebe had boarded in Le Touquet? He could see cabin lights shining through a row of portholes, and more light spilling out through the open door at the top of the gangway. And now the smell of kerosene was much stronger.
The Mercedes stopped. The rear door opened and a brilliant flashlight beam straight in his face momentarily dazzled him. Outside he could hear a rapid exchange of voices. An argument about something, then calm again.
Elias, their driver, said, ‘Coming please!’
They climbed out. It wasn’t so warm now and John gratefully pulled on his leather jacket. The driver opened the boot and handed him the holdall and his laptop bag. Then an Arab gesticulating excitedly with both arms led them to the gangway.
He climbed up to the top step, then just inside the plane saw a young man and a woman standing motionless, on either side of the doorway, like sentries. They were tall, dramatically dressed in pure white jumpsuits and white trainers, and quite stunningly good-looking. Both were in their early twenties, John guessed. The man had exquisitely cut blond hair, and the kind of tanned, chiselled looks you only ever saw on male models in the fashion pages of magazines; the woman, a blonde, too, had the willowy features and perfect poise of a top model. Neither smiled; their expressions were of slight disdain.
John, waiting for Naomi, felt immediately intimidated by them. ‘Hallo,’ he said, throwing each of them a glance, trying to break the ice.
‘Welcome aboard, Dr and Mrs Klaesson,’ the young man said, in a cold, clipped New England accent that carried no hint of a welcome in it at all.
‘You may select any seats,’ the woman said in a similar accent and even cooler tone.
‘Where are we going?’ John asked.
‘Please do not ask either of us any questions,’ the man said. ‘We have no mandate to answer you.’
‘Can you just tell us one thing,’ Naomi asked. ‘You are taking us to Luke and Phoebe, aren’t you?’
‘I recommend the rear two seats,’ the woman said. ‘Those are the furthest from the engines. You get the least resonance.’
Naomi stared at her. The woman’s face remained totally deadpan. Silent anger rose inside Naomi, but she stifled it. They just had to keep calm, do nothing to jeopardize their situation. Just hope, that was all they could do. Hope.
To their left, the door to the cockpit was closed. They turned right, walked through an area laid out like a small boardroom, with an oval conference table and eight chairs fixed to the floor around it. Then on, past a galley, and into the rear section of the cabin, where there were twenty seats, plushly upholstered in leather and with extravagant leg room, laid out in a row of ten either side of the wide aisle. Naomi realized it wasn’t just for the noise levels that the woman had recommended the rear seats; the cabin was narrower there, making them the only seats that were actually next to each other.
Moments later, the young man pulled the cabin door closed.
Then John heard the whine of the engine turbines starting to rotate. A seat-belt sign flashed above him. He looked out of the window to his left. Saw the reflection of his pale, anxious face in the glass. Tiny balls of white light strobed in the darkness beyond. The aircraft’s own navigation lights, he realized. Moments later, as if put on by a single flick of a switch, he saw runway lights stretching out into the distance.
Then he heard a metallic whirring sound. In seconds his reflection, the strobing light and the runway lights had disappeared. His own surprise was mirrored by a frightened cry from Naomi.
Electronic metal shutters had come down. Across every window.
120
After take-off, the stewardess served them a meal in a pre-packed tray, of the kind they might have had on any airline. A Caesar salad with prawns, scalding-hot poached salmon beneath a foil lid; chocolate fudge cake; a triangle of soft cheese and biscuits. The steward brought them each a glass of Chardonnay, and mineral water.
John ate most of his food, but Naomi just picked at hers. Afterwards they tried to sleep for a while.
Naomi was thinking about the steward and stewardess. Their silent, hostile attitude reminded her so strongly of the way Luke and Phoebe behaved towards her and John. These two could almost be their older siblings.
After five hours, they were given another meal, this time sandwiches and fruit. And then, an hour later, John and Naomi both noticed that the plane was losing height, as if it was starting on a landing path.
The seat-belt light started flashing.
The steward and stewardess
remained out of sight, somewhere beyond the galley, as they had all the time when they weren’t bringing John and Naomi water or serving the meals.
They were very definitely losing height.
Then, just as suddenly as they had whirred down, all those hours back, the shutters over the windows were rising back up. Daylight flooded in. Brilliant, dazzling, early-morning daylight.
John and Naomi stared out of their windows.
They were flying low, no more than three or four thousand feet, above hilly terrain, covered in lush, tropical vegetation. Through John’s window there was only a view of land, and the sun rising into a cloudless sky. But through Naomi’s they could see a wide, white sand beach, cobalt-blue sea. A sharp clunk echoed through the plane, followed by a series of thuds. The undercarriage going down.
Like a current of electricity, excitement suddenly coursed through Naomi, perking her up despite her tiredness. Going to see my children. Going to see Luke and Phoebe. They’re here, they’re here in this beautiful place! They are OK, they are not harmed. Going to see them, they’re going to come in this plane with us, back home.
‘Do you have any idea where we might be?’ she asked John.
He wished he had some knowledge of botany, then he might have been able to figure from the vegetation roughly where they were. He shook his head. ‘I have no real idea how fast we’ve been travelling, nor in what direction we’ve been going, or anything. I just know we’re nine hours’ flying time from Dubai. If this is the same plane Luke and Phoebe were taken on, I remember DI Pelham telling us it has a cruising speed of three hundred and fifty knots. So we’ve covered about three thousand, five hundred land miles. We could be bloody anywhere.’
He stared out of the window again. It looked like early morning, which meant they must have travelled west. If they were flying slower than he had calculated, it could be the west coast of Africa. Faster, and they could be off the east coast of South America.
‘We took off from Dubai at about seven thirty p.m. UK time. So our body clocks are now on about four thirty a.m.,’ he said. He needed a bath, a shave, a change of clothes. He felt grungy and exhausted. Naomi looked beat, too. It hurt him to see her suffering like this, hurt him almost as much as the pain of his missing children was hurting him. And he felt angry at himself, bitterly frustrated, that he wasn’t able to do anything to help her. All he could do was sit here like a lame duck, accepting graceless hospitality from these cold young people.
The hills suddenly dropped sheer away beneath them, as if they had surfed over a ledge, giving onto a flat valley that was a good two miles wide and several long. It was like a secret valley, he thought, as it if had been hewn out the centre of the hills. Probably formed by a volcanic explosion thousands of years ago.
As the plane dropped lower still, it was as if a lever on a lens had suddenly been rotated, turning a foggy blur into pin-sharp focus. One moment there had been a flat valley floor, just a mass of shimmering vegetation, the next it had suddenly become a complex of shapes rising from the ground. Buildings, mostly single-storey, interconnected, he could see now, by pathways, like a university campus stretching away into the distance in every direction, each of them camouflaged, to be invisible from the air, by vegetation on their roofs.
The plane was even lower now. Just a few hundred feet above the buildings. He was looking hard, trying to see people or vehicles, but there was no sign of any life.
It felt almost as if they were coming down to land in a ghost town.
‘What is this place?’ Naomi said.
‘Luke and Phoebe’s winter vacation resort. Bought from millions they’ve secretly made trading stocks on the internet?’
She did not smile.
121
The plane touched down on a runway that was painted a sandy green. It taxied for a few hundred yards and then, without slowing, entered a cavernous hangar, the roof of which, John noticed, was also covered in vegetation, and came to a halt. The place was brightly illuminated and appeared completely deserted.
‘Please come this way.’
The stewardess stood, solemn-faced, in front of them.
Unbuckling his belt, John asked her, ‘What country are we in?’
‘Our mandate is not to answer questions. You must exit now.’
Carrying their luggage, John and Naomi followed her, past the steward who stood by the exit door, down the gangway onto the blue-painted concrete floor. The air was hot and humid, and reeked of spent kerosene, and there was a high, dull whine of the turbine blades spinning down.
John glanced around, intensely curious. He saw a smaller executive jet and a helicopter parked in the hangar, a gantry on rails, a forklift truck, dozens of large containers, and pallets stacked up to the ceiling, a good hundred feet high.
There was no sign of the pilot or any other crew, nor of anyone working in here. Surreptitiously, John slid his cellphone out of his pocket, switched it on and looked at the display. There was no signal.
The stewardess pressed something on a device she was holding and stainless-steel elevator doors, a short distance ahead, slid open.
The steward said, ‘Please step in, Dr Klaesson and Mrs Klaesson.’
The four of them travelled down for several seconds in silence. Then the doors opened onto the gleaming platform of an immaculate underground railway station. A solitary, bullet-shaped carriage, its door open, sat on a monorail.
As they boarded it, feeling as if they were in some surreal dream, Naomi and John exchanged glances but said nothing. They were beyond surprise at this moment, just running on adrenaline. They had come too far to question or challenge anything any more. They were running on hope.
They took two seats and their escorts sat in the two opposite them. The doors hissed shut, and moments later the carriage began to accelerate silently and without vibration, into a dark tunnel.
After two minutes they emerged into a station that was identical to the one they had just come from. The doors opened and they followed their escorts out and into another elevator. It seemed a long ride up. John’s stomach dropped. Then, moments later, the floor pressed up against his feet, and before he was fully aware of it, they had stopped.
The doors opened onto a wide, handsome corridor that had a corporate feel, as if it might be the head offices of a bank or of some major global company.
Naomi shot John a quick glance. What is this place?
And he shrugged back, I have no more idea than you. Then he took another look at his cellphone display. Still no signal.
Now they were being led along the corridor. Past closed, windowless doors. At the far end, the stewardess opened a door and led them into an ante-room. Another exquisitely beautiful woman, also in her early twenties, at most, with short brown hair and a deadpan expression, sat at a desk. She, too, was wearing a white jumpsuit.
‘Dr and Mrs Klaesson,’ announced the stewardess.
In contrast to their escorts, she gave them a pleasant smile, stood up, walked across to grand, double doors and opened them. Then, in a clipped Boston accent she said, ‘Will you please go through,’ and stepped aside for them to pass.
John let Naomi go first and followed her into a large office, with a white carpet and striking modern furniture, the centrepiece of which was an oval, slate-grey desk. And from behind which a figure was rising.
A tall, lean, tanned man, dressed also in dazzling white, with dark, luxuriant hair swept immaculately back and tinged with elegant grey streaks at the temples. Stepping around the side of his desk, he strode across the room, arm outstretched, to greet them. He did not look a day older since they had last seen him four years ago. If anything, he looked younger.
‘Hi, John! Hi, Naomi!’ he said in his warm, assertive Southern Californian accent.
Naomi took a step back as if she had seen a ghost. Then both of them stared at the doctor in stunned silence.
122
‘What the hell’s going on?’ John said. ‘Do you want to explain to
us?’
Beaming at them and ignoring the question, Leo Dettore shook each of their hands, saying, ‘So great to see you guys again!’ He beckoned them to a seating area around a coffee table. But John and Naomi stood still. Behind the geneticist, a wall-to-floor window the width of the room looked out across the campus of buildings, and over to the mountains beyond.
‘You died,’ Naomi blurted. ‘You died – it was on television, in the papers, you—’
‘Please, sit down; you must be shattered. Let me get you something to drink. Water? Coffee?’
‘I don’t want a drink,’ Naomi said, emboldened now. ‘I want to see my children.’
‘Let me have a chance to explain and then—’
‘I WANT TO SEE MY CHILDREN!’ Naomi shouted, close to hysterics.
‘Where the hell are we?’ John said. ‘Just tell us where the hell we are?’
‘That’s not important,’ Dr Dettore said.
‘WHAT?’ Naomi exploded.
‘Not important? We’ve been travelling for twenty-four hours, and it’s not important?’ John marched up to him and raised his fist threateningly. ‘We want our children. We want Luke and Phoebe. If you’ve harmed them in any way, I’ll kill you, I swear it, you bastard, I’ll tear you apart!’
Dettore raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘John, I’ll take you to see them right now. They are safe here. OK?’
‘Yes, right now.’
Unperturbed, Dettore said, ‘Do you think I went to all this trouble to bring you here if I wasn’t going to let you see them?’
‘We have no idea what’s in your sick mind,’ John said. ‘If you’re capable of faking your death then what the hell else are you capable of?’
‘WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN?’ Naomi yelled.
Dettore waited a moment before replying. Then, calmly, he said, ‘Your children came here in order to be safe. Having them here was the only way I could guarantee their safety. You both know that crazy religious sect was on a mission to kill all the children who had been through my programme. There wasn’t an option. But you need to understand that I brought you here because, as Luke and Phoebe’s parents, you have an absolute right to see your children, and to take them home with you – if they want to go with you.’