The television was still on. A commercial break ended and yet another news bulletin began. They were reporting two murders now. Don White, shot at the theatre, and his partner, Marcie Kelsey, killed with the same weapon at her rented home. Kelsey. The name barely registered with Jamie. He had always known her as Marcie or Mars. And now she was dead and he was wanted for her murder. Jamie Tyler, twin brother of Scott Tyler. Both boys missing. Delinquents. High on drugs.
“That’s enough!” Alicia picked up the remote control and turned the television off. “It’s none of it true, so what’s the point of listening to it?”
Jamie said nothing.
“And you’re not just going to sit there. You’ve got to eat something.” She pushed a plastic tub of salad towards him. Jamie glanced at the label. AUNT MARY’S LO-CALORIE CAESAR SALAD. There was a picture of an old lady in an apron. She wasn’t real, of course. The meal would have been prepared in a factory, chilled and trucked in. The lettuce leaves looked fake too.
“I’m not hungry,” Jamie said.
“Of course you’re hungry. You haven’t eaten all day.” Alicia sighed. “We have to get our heads together, Jamie,” she said. “You’ve got the police looking for you. Your brother’s gone. Two people are dead. Do you really think you can help anyone just sitting here like this? Have some food and let’s talk about what we’re going to do.”
She was right. Jamie pronged some of the lettuce with a plastic fork, then took a slice of ham. There were no cooking facilities at the motel and Alicia had chosen food they could eat straight out of the packet. There were also cookies, fruit, cheese and bread rolls. She’d taken a beer out of the motel minibar. Jamie had a Sprite. He opened the ring pull and the hiss of escaping gas seemed to unlock something in him. He was hungry, after all. And thirsty too. He drank most of the Sprite, then began to eat.
“We need to talk,” Alicia continued. Despite what she’d said, she herself wasn’t eating. “That trick you pulled back at your aunt’s place. That was quite something. Are you going to tell me how you did it?”
Jamie shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Well, let me suggest something to you. The act that you and your brother were doing on the stage. It was no act. You could really do it
… read each other’s thoughts. Am I right?” Jamie didn’t answer so she went on, “And I guess what I saw back at the house was some sort of mind control.”
Jamie had finished the Sprite. He was holding the can in his hand and suddenly he closed his fingers, crumpling it. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I never talk about this stuff. Not with anyone. Except Scott.” He looked up at her and she saw that his eyes were filled with anger, challenging her to argue with him. “You don’t know what it’s like. You have no idea. And I’m not going to tell you.”
“All right. I’m sorry.” Alicia drank some beer straight out of the bottle. She thought for a moment. “Look, I know this is difficult for you. But we’re not going to get anywhere fighting each other. Maybe it would help if I told you my story. Right now I’m a complete stranger to you. But it wasn’t just a coincidence, my being in the theatre last night. I was there for a reason.”
“Something to do with that photograph. Daniel…”
Alicia put down the beer. “Exactly,” she said. “Daniel. That’s what this is all about.”
She leant forward, resting her elbows on the table. Then she began.
“The boy in the photograph, Daniel, is my son. Last week should have been his birthday. He turned eleven on 9 June. But I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he’s alive. He disappeared seven months ago and I’ve been looking for him ever since.
“You don’t need to know very much about me, Jamie. I’m thirty-two. I have a sister. My parents are from New Jersey. A year ago, I was living in Washington DC, working for Senator John Trelawny. Maybe you’ve heard of him. You should have. Right now he’s trying to become the next president of the United States and people say there’s a good chance he’s going to win. Anyway, I was with him for five years, sorting his mail, sorting his diary… that kind of thing. He’s a good man and I liked my job.
“The other thing I need to tell you is that I was married for a time. My husband got sick and died two years after Danny was born so I had to bring him up on my own. But in a way I was lucky. I had a little house round the corner from a really nice school. And I had a wonderful home help – Maria – who looked after Danny every afternoon until I got home.
She drew a breath.
“And then, towards the end of last year – it was the first week in November – I got a call from Maria. It was about six o’clock in the evening and I was working late. Anyway, she said that Danny hadn’t come home from school. She’d tried his cell phone but she wasn’t getting any answer and she didn’t know what to do. I remember telling her to call round some of his friends and to phone me if he hadn’t shown up by seven. Looking back, I can’t believe how calm I was. But Danny often went home with one or another of his friends – he was in a band and played drums. And he was rehearsing for a Christmas show. It never occurred to me that anything could be wrong.
“Well, Maria did call back at seven o’clock and Danny still hadn’t shown up and nobody had any idea where he was. It was dark by then and that was when I really began to worry. I called the police. The fact that I was connected to Senator Trelawny helped. They were round in about ten seconds and they put him straight onto the NCIC Missing Persons File. They also put out an Amber Alert, which meant that all the local businesses and shops had his description and his picture and it was like they were building a network of people who would look out for him. And I still thought he was going to show up. I could actually hear myself scolding him for being late!”
She stopped. There was a long pause.
“He never did show up,” she went on. “Nobody had seen anything. Nobody knew anything. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air. I searched all over the house, trying to find some clue as to where he might have gone. I drove out to all the places he used to hang out. I went on the TV and the radio. His picture was in store windows all over town and on the back of trucks too. But nothing…”
“I think Scott saw him,” Jamie muttered. “When you showed him the photograph.”
Alicia nodded. “I know.” She swallowed hard. “It’s the first news I’ve had of him since it happened.”
She forced herself to go on.
“Two weeks before Christmas, I made a decision. The police didn’t know where to look for him. Nobody knew where he was. But I wasn’t going to give up. So I resigned my job and set out to find him myself. There are plenty of organizations that deal with missing children and I contacted them. I passed out leaflets. I trawled the Internet. Do you know how many children go missing every day? I began to put together names, faces, times, places. I noted all the cases that had been reported in the last year. I drew maps. I called the parents and spoke to them.
“To my surprise, a picture began to take shape. At first it didn’t make any sense and I thought maybe I was imagining things. But very quickly I realized that it was true. There was a sort of pattern. A series of coincidences. And that’s what led me to you.
“What I noticed was that in the past six months, a large number of the kids who had disappeared had been what you might call special. What do I mean by that? I’m talking about kids with special abilities. Jamie, I won’t beat about the bush. These were kids with paranormal powers. I know it sounds crazy. You’re not supposed to believe in these things any more – not in the twenty-first century – but even so, there was a definite link…”
Alicia got up and went over to the sofa. She opened a briefcase and took out a sheaf of documents. She spread one of them in front of Jamie. It had been taken from a local newspaper and showed a photograph of a rather intense-looking boy with cropped hair. The headline read, JACK HAS A FLASH OF THE FUTURE.
The story didn’t take itself too serio
usly. Apparently, there was an eleven-year-old boy called Jack Pugh who lived on his father’s farm in Kentucky. He’d had a dream and had warned his parents that a local church was going to catch fire. Twelve hours later, the church had been hit by lightning and had burned to the ground. Fortunately, nobody had been hurt.
“Six weeks after the paper printed that story, Jack vanished,” Alicia said. She took out a second sheet of paper.
This time it was a girl. Her name was Indigo Cotton and her story had been reported in the Miami Herald. It seemed that she could bend spoons and stop watches just by looking at them. There had been a picture of her in the back of a paper, leaning against a grandfather clock. The clock had stopped at exactly midday. According to the story, she had been responsible.
“She disappeared too,” Alicia said. “Two months after the story ran.”
She added more pages to the pile. There was a boy who had managed to predict the winner five times in a row at a local racecourse. Another boy who, without moving, had fused all the lights in his school. A girl who talked to ghosts. An autistic boy who knew the names of everyone he met before he was introduced to them. Another pair of twins who seemed to live in each other’s minds.
“They all disappeared?” Jamie asked.
“A dozen of them in just six months. That may not sound like a lot to you, Jamie, but I know how statistics work and I can tell you it’s completely incredible. Of course, loads of other kids went missing too. But this was something quite different. It seemed clear to me that someone was deliberately targeting these kids.”
“So did you go to the police?”
“No.” Alicia sat down again. “Read the articles. None of them are serious. I mean… one kid who can bend spoons? Another who talks to dead people? ‘TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE. Grave Business of Girl Who Gossips with Ghosts.’ Read it for yourself. Of course, once these children had disappeared, everyone treated them very seriously. But the paranormal stuff was just forgotten. It wasn’t important. In fact it was hardly even mentioned.”
Jamie thought about it for a moment. Then something suddenly occurred to him. “What about Daniel?” he asked.
Alicia nodded. “There was a piece about him too,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t want it to appear and I was annoyed when it did. But the thing is, quite a few strange things happened with Danny too. He used to have these pre monitions. They weren’t dreams… they were just feelings. He once stopped me going on a train. He was only six years old and he got quite hysterical about it. Like, he was throwing stuff around the room and in the end I gave in. I couldn’t leave him with Maria, not like that. So I didn’t go – and you know what happened? A few days later I learnt that there had been an incident on that train. Some guy out of his mind on drugs shot someone. If I’d been travelling that day, could it have been me? I don’t know…
“Then he did it again, only this time at school. He warned a boy not to go home. That same afternoon, a bus skidded off the main road and went straight through one of the walls of the boy’s house. Smashed into the kitchen and brought down most of the upper floor. Of course, everyone at the school was talking about it and a local paper picked it up.”
“And you think someone may have read it,” Jamie said.
“Yeah. I think someone read it. I think someone came for Danny because he was special. And for the last few months, I’ve been scouring the newspapers, looking for kids like you. Because, you see, if there really is someone out there searching for kids with powers, maybe I can get there ahead of them. Maybe I can find out who they are and discover what they’ve done with my boy.
“Now you know why I was in Reno. I happened to see this piece in a magazine. It was about two boys performing a mind-reading act. The writer said he’d seen them twice and he couldn’t work out for love nor money how they did it. So I came over to see for myself…”
“And you arrived just in time,” Jamie said.
“I couldn’t believe it when those men came after you with stun darts and bullets.” For a moment, Alicia’s eyes lit up and she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “But it proves what I’m saying. There is somebody out there who really is going after these special kids. They got your brother and wherever they’ve taken him, that’s where Danny may be too.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Jamie said. “Suppose you’re right and somebody is kidnapping kids with special powers. Why would they do that? What’s the point?”
“It could be the government, the CIA or someone like that. Think about it for a minute. If you could really read someone’s mind, you’d make a perfect weapon. You could be a spy. You could be anything!”
“You really think they’d believe in that sort of stuff?”
“Of course they believe in it, Jamie. They spend millions of dollars every year experimenting with the paranormal. And there are major corporations out there who run programs, working with special children and their families. I even got in contact with one. I thought they might be able to help.”
“Who was that?”
Alicia put down her beer. “They’re a huge multinational. They’re into communications, healthcare, security, energy… just about everything. But they also have a division that specializes in paranormal research.” She paused. “They were the people who came for you in the theatre. Their name,” she said, “is Nightrise.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL
The boardroom was on the sixty-sixth floor of The Nail – which was the name of the newest and most spectacular addition to the Hong Kong skyline. The Nail had been constructed at an angle so that it slanted towards Orchard Hill and away from the waterfront. It seemed to be made of solid steel, an illusion caused by the one-way glass in all of its windows. The top three floors, sixty-four to sixty-six, were circular, and wider than the rest of the building. Viewed from Kowloon, on the other side of Victoria Harbor, it really did look like a giant nail that had been hammered into the heart of the city.
There were just three men in the boardroom, although fifty could have fitted in easily. A conference table made of black, gleaming wood stretched the full length of the room with black leather chairs placed at exact intervals. Two of the men were already seated, going through papers, preparing themselves for the conference that was about to begin. The third was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that curved round in a great arc, enjoying the view.
The Nail was the worldwide headquarters of the Nightrise Corporation. The man standing on his own was its chairman.
Unlike the office, he had no name – or if he did, he never used it. He was simply the chairman, or Mr Chairman when he was directly addressed. He was in his sixties, although he had done his best to disguise his age with extensive plastic surgery. This left him with a face that was younger than it should be and yet strangely unnatural, as if it belonged somewhere else. He had thick, white hair which could have been a wig but was actually his own, and silver, half-moon spectacles. As always, he was wearing a suit, made to measure by his own personal tailor.
It was seven o’clock in the morning and the sun had not yet fully risen. The great sprawl of Kowloon was still half asleep, the bars and electronics shops briefly shuttered before the start of another day. The sky was a blazing red. The chairman thought it appropriate. Kowloon means “nine dragons” and it seemed to him, looking out from the window, that they had all breathed at once.
Behind him, one of the other two men spoke.
“They’re coming on-line now, Mr Chairman.”
The chairman walked to his place at the head of the table and sat down. He rested his hands on the polished surface and composed himself. There were thirteen plasma screens mounted all around the room and one after another they flickered into life as the other executives, in different parts of the world, came on-line. A webcam, standing on the table, pointed at the chairman, carrying his own image out. In Los Angeles, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. In London it was midnight. But the time of the day was
unimportant. This was the monthly meeting of the senior executives of the Nightrise Corporation and none of them would have dared to have been even a minute late.
“My greetings to you, ladies and gentlemen.” As ever, the chairman was the first to speak. He had an unpleasant, throaty voice, as if he were ill. He spoke very softly and his voice had to be amplified as it was transmitted. He had no obvious accent. This was an international businessman and he had managed to develop an international voice.
“I don’t think I need to remind you that this is a critical time for us all,” he went on. “It is a world-changing time. Everything we’ve been working for all these years is about to come to fruition. Business has never been better but right now there is so much more at stake than simple profit and loss. We have the Psi project. We have news from South America. And, of course, we have the upcoming election
… the race to become the most powerful man in the world.” He paused and it was almost as if a thin mist had passed across his eyes. “I hardly need to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is one time we cannot afford to make mistakes.”
He stopped. Nobody moved. The images on the television screens were so still that they could have been accidentally frozen. Two thousand miles away, the private Nightrise Corporation satellite that was making this conference possible continued its orbit around the world, picking up the signals and beaming them into the different countries. And it was as if something of the black emptiness of outer space was being sent with them. The images were dead. The dozen offices with their dozen televisions seemed to contain no life at all.
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