Shadow Creatures

by Andrew Lane

  ‘OK,’ Calum said dubiously. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. Leave it to us. If there’s a need for a hospital ambulance, then I’ll call for one myself. Now, tell me exactly how the accident occurred. Don’t leave anything out.’

  With some embarrassment, Calum explained about going downstairs from his apartment and checking out the storage area in the warehouse. He explained about ARLENE, and the way it had reacted – attacking him, or at least lashing out at him. The voice on the end of the phone was very interested in ARLENE, and wanted to know all kinds of details about what the robot had been used for and where it had been. Calum told the voice as much as he knew – more than he normally would have done, given the fact that ARLENE was nominally a military piece of equipment – but by now it was as if he was sitting in the back of his own head watching himself talk but not actually controlling the words. This was probably what shock felt like, he thought. While part of him continued with the conversation, the rest of him relaxed back into a soft black cloud. He found himself thinking about the accident, remembering the impact and the chaos that had followed, but the emotion had been drained away, and he found he could see it as if it was a film being played in his head. The car, sliding across the road towards them. The way the airbags had deployed. The sudden flash of heat.

  No driver. The car sliding towards them had no driver. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

  ‘Calum? Calum!’

  ‘Wha–?’

  ‘You stopped talking.’

  ‘Sorry. I think I was falling asleep.’

  ‘The tech and medical team is almost there with you. Keep talking. Keep yourself awake.’

  ‘OK.’ Calum tried to reach for the lost memory that he’d recovered during his dream – his hallucination? – but it had gone again. He knew that there had been something there, something important, but it had drifted away from him.

  He caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He shied away, thinking that it was ARLENE again, attacking him, but a reassuring hand came down on his shoulder.

  ‘Mr Challenger? My name is Bob. I’m here to help. Don’t worry.’

  Calum glanced upward, and saw a pink and brown blur that he assumed was a face.

  ‘I’m not worried –’ he started to say, but he suddenly felt a sting in his arm. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m sedating you,’ Bob said. ‘Ready for transporting.’

  ‘I don’t need sedating,’ he said, then added, ‘Transporting where?’

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Bob replied. His voice was coming from a long way away. ‘We’re taking you somewhere we can look after you properly.’

  Calum wanted to protest that this hadn’t been part of the plan, but the soft black cloud that he had sunk into earlier was all around him now, holding him firm, and it closed over his eyes.

  The last thing he heard before he fell into unconsciousness was Bob’s voice saying to someone else, ‘Get the aircraft prepped for take-off. Tell them we’ll be there in thirty minutes. And dismantle that robot while you’re at it.’

  The last coherent thought Calum had was: Aircraft? What aircraft?

  Tara sat against the wall in the bare room where she had been stashed, and shivered.

  It wasn’t that she was cold. In fact, the flat the men had taken her to was warmer than she normally liked – not that she thought she had any choice in the ambient temperature.

  No, she was shivering because she was terrified. She didn’t know what the men wanted with her.

  They had hustled her out of the coffee shop. She had felt something sharp pressing into her side and she was too scared to cry out or say anything. One of the men had thrown some money on the counter as they’d passed to pay for her coffee. The other man carried her computer tablet in his hand. They had a car outside – one of them got into the driver’s seat while the other slid into the back with her. Within a few moments, the car was gliding away into the London traffic – a kidnapping occurring in broad daylight without anyone realizing.

  Tara thought she saw Tom Karavla standing across the road as they pulled away. He was clutching his laptop, and looking desperately unhappy. She wanted to scream at him, make him realize what he had done, but the car pulled away before she could do anything.

  The car had driven east, through Aldwych and Mile End, stopping in an area of cheap flats somewhere around Bow. The two men had pulled her out of the car – not roughly, but making it obvious that she had no choice – and taken her up to the third floor of an old apartment block. They pushed her into what was probably a bedroom, except that there was no bed, just a mattress on the floor. They took her mobile phone from her, and locked the door behind them as they left.

  Tara immediately went to the window. It was screwed shut and barred. Through the grimy glass she could see a road, some trees and a handful of people walking. She supposed she could smash the window and call out to them, but how could she break the glass without cutting herself?

  This was a disaster, and the worst thing was that she didn’t even know why she was there. If the men weren’t working for Nemor Incorporated, then who were they working for? She couldn’t bargain with them if she didn’t know what they wanted.

  The door abruptly opened behind her. She whirled round, pressing herself against the wall.

  One of the men stood in the doorway. He was holding a sandwich in a cellophane package. He threw it into the room.

  ‘Here. Cheese and ham. You need to eat to keep your strength up.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’ she asked, hearing the trembling in her voice.

  He frowned. ‘You? This isn’t about you.’

  She frowned too. ‘Then what is it about?’

  ‘You know a boy named Eduardo Ortiz?’

  She had to think for a moment. ‘You mean Gecko?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, he is the one. This is about him. We need him to do something for us, and he has said no. So, we ask again, and this time we have you. If he likes you, then he will do what we ask.’

  Tara felt a strange whirling feeling in her chest, a mixture of relief at the fact that it wasn’t actually her that they wanted, combined with a sudden flush of worry for her friend. He’d mentioned the Eastern European gangsters who had wanted him to use his free-running skills to steal things for them. That was why he was spending so much time at Calum’s apartment. Obviously the gangsters weren’t going to give up that easily.

  ‘He’s not in England at the moment,’ she said. She wasn’t sure why she was giving them information, except that she had heard somewhere that the best thing to do in a hostage or kidnap situation is to try to establish a relationship with your captors. ‘He’s . . .’ she paused, wondering if she should give away his current location, ‘. . . in China.’

  The man shrugged. ‘He has mobile phone, yes? They have service providers in China. Most mobiles are made there anyway. You will phone him and tell him that he must come back and work for us.’ He paused. ‘We will give him three days to come back. Every day past that, we will cut off one of your fingers. I think he will come back.’ He smiled at Tara, but the smile looked like something that would fit better on the face of a shark. Her heart felt as if it was filled with lead. Taking a breath required effort. ‘Every day you will talk to him on the phone again, but after a few days we will have to hold the phone for you, I think.’

  The arrivals hall at Kai Tak Airport was a marvel of curved glass roofs and walls and white space. People moved across its floor and up and down its escalators like little black ants scurrying around the inside of a refrigerator. As Rhino, Natalie and Gecko walked through its wide corridors towards customs, immigration and their luggage, Gecko found himself mentally planning how he might free-run around the vast space. The possibilities were almost endless.

  The three of them cleared customs in less than twenty minutes. Rhino had already reserved a car. The air outside the airport building was heavy with humidity, and the heat was enough to make Ge
cko break out in a sweat. It reminded him of being back in Brazil. He could smell a combination of flowers, salt water and rotting vegetables.

  ‘We won’t necessarily need a car in the centre of Kowloon,’ Rhino said as they pulled away from the airport. ‘But one of the first rules of covert operations is that you always need to control your own means of transport.’

  Covert operations. Gecko rather liked the sound of that.

  ‘So what are the other rules?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Eat whenever you can, sleep whenever you can and know your cover story,’ Rhino responded. ‘Which reminds me – our own cover story, if anyone asks, is that Natalie is a rich Californian heiress who loves to upstage her friends.’

  Gecko smiled. ‘So our cover story is the truth?’ he said. ‘That makes things easier.’

  ‘Bite me,’ Natalie retorted.

  Rhino drove the hire car out of the airport and along a wide road that was edged on the left by low green hills and on the right by a stretch of water. On the other side of the water was a landmass that rose up gradually to a series of low peaks.

  ‘That’s mainland China over there,’ Rhino said. ‘The largest peak you can see is Tai Mo Shan mountain.’

  As they drove over a series of suspension bridges and into Kowloon Peninsula, Gecko saw that there were all kinds of vehicles on the road, from large black limousines to small battered three-wheeled vans.

  ‘Although the whole area is referred to as Hong Kong,’ Rhino said, ‘Hong Kong Island itself is actually only one of about two hundred separate islands in the area, and it’s not even the largest. Lantau Island is ten times as large. Hong Kong Island is, however, the most densely inhabited.’

  ‘Are we staying on Hong Kong Island or on the mainland?’ Gecko asked.

  ‘I’ve booked us rooms in a hotel on the mainland, in Kowloon itself.’

  As they drove, Gecko stared, amazed, out of the window. The contrasts that he was seeing were stark and amazing. On the one hand, wherever he turned he could see skyscrapers that were sculpted and designed so that they looked like something from a science-fiction film. On the other, there were also residential tower blocks that were surrounded by scaffolding made not from metal pipes, like in any other country he’d been to, but from bamboo rods tied together with rope, while along the edge of the waterline there seemed to be an alternative city made not from buildings but from rafts and small boats all lashed together to form a continuous platform running for miles. And everywhere there were signs – directions, adverts, neon lights, all jostling together with no evidence of planning. It was as if there was an entire novel’s worth of information out there, spread across the landscape in little chunks.

  Rhino manoeuvred the car down increasingly narrow roads, avoiding carts and stalls that seemed to spring up out of nowhere, slowly nosing his way through throngs of pedestrians who crowded across the road without worrying about green or red lights. Eventually he pulled off and down a ramp into a car park.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘Let’s unpack and rest for a while, then we can plan what happens next.’

  Calum’s return to consciousness was gradual and intermittent. Eventually he became aware that he was lying on his back in a crisply starched bed with his arms outside the covers and straight down by his side. He was wearing pyjamas. He lay there for a while, listening for any noise, but there was nothing apart from his own breathing and the faint roar of an air-conditioning system.

  He knew that he wasn’t in his apartment. The sheets felt wrong, and there was a smell in the air that he didn’t recognize – something sharp, like disinfectant.

  He must be at the Robledo premises near Farnborough, the place where he had been trained to use the bionic legs. He was safe.

  Except that someone had mentioned an aircraft.

  Calum opened his eyes. The ceiling above him was white and tiled, and he could see various items of medical equipment attached to the wall behind his head. Something was pressing against his right arm. Raising his head and looking down the bed, he could see that it was a band round his bicep. Lights flashed intermittently on it as it presumably fed information about his vital signs wirelessly to some central monitoring station.

  He pushed himself into a sitting position. The room he was in was empty apart from his bed, the medical equipment attached to the wall behind it, a chair and a flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. A sign on the wall behind his head read Bed 1. There were two doors – one open, through which he could see a bathroom, and one closed that presumably led outside to a corridor. There was also a large window through which he could see blue sky. He couldn’t see a phone, or anywhere his clothes could have been stored.

  He shuffled to the edge of the bed, pulled the sheets back and tried to turn himself round. There were metal rails, like ladders, running along the side of the bed, presumably to stop him falling out, but they were hinged and he managed to lie one flat and turn so that his legs were dangling off the bed and nearly touching the carpeted floor. One of them, he noticed, was in a snazzy-looking plastic cast.

  He turned his attention to the window. From his raised position he could now look down through it. He had been expecting a car park, perhaps, or a walkway, or some flowerbeds.

  Not desert.

  He blinked a couple of times, wondering if his brain was still suffering the lingering after-effects of the sedative, but the view outside steadfastly refused to change. He could see a fence topped with razor wire, a lot of white sand, some scrubby bushes and something that looked like a cactus. And, come to think of it, that sky was bluer than anything he remembered seeing in England.

  ‘Ah,’ a familiar voice said, ‘you’re awake. There was a change in your blood pressure, so I thought I’d better check to see you were OK.’

  Calum turned his head and saw Dr Kircher in the doorway. He was wearing a white coat, and had a stethoscope round his neck.

  ‘Where am I?’ Calum asked.

  ‘You’re safe.’

  ‘I’m not in England, am I?’

  ‘No. You’re in Las Cruces.’

  Calum’s mind raced. ‘Las Cruces, New Mexico? Las Cruces, USA?’

  ‘That’s right. This is where the main Robledo Mountains Technology facility is located.’ Kircher smiled. ‘It seemed to make sense to bring you out here so we could conduct some detailed investigations into what went wrong with the bionic legs.’ He paused. ‘We brought the ARLENE robot back with us as well. It’s in a hangar nearby. There may well have been some unfortunate cross-interference between your legs and the robot.’

  ‘You kidnapped me!’ Calum exclaimed. His brain was filled with whirling thoughts, the most important of which was that he was thousands of miles from home, and completely isolated.

  ‘Not at all,’ Dr Kircher said calmly, smiling. ‘We merely took a decision to relocate you in your own best interests.’

  ‘I didn’t agree to it.’

  ‘You did,’ Kircher continued, still smiling. ‘The form you signed when you were fitted with the legs explicitly gives us permission to treat you wherever we feel best.’ He shrugged. ‘To be fair, it was a small sub-paragraph, buried deep in the text, and you were distracted. I’m not surprised you missed it.’

  Calum felt a rising tide of panic lapping against the shores of his mind. ‘I want to leave. I want to go back to England.’

  ‘Let’s sort out these legs first, eh, and then we’ll see. Can you get back into bed properly, by the way?’

  ‘Then I want to make a phone call.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll get a phone brought in.’ He paused. ‘If I can find one. We don’t have that many around.’ He cocked his head to one side, considering Calum. ‘But, before I do that, I want to get a full psychological profile run on you. I can’t help but feel that you are acting a little . . . paranoid. It might just be the lingering effects of the sedative, of course, but it might be that there was some feedback through the headset from ARLENE’s circuitry. There might be some damage to
your brain. I hope not, but before I let you talk to anyone I do need to check that out.’

  His voice was calm and reasonable, but there was something about the way the light from the window reflected off his glasses that made his words seem menacing. More like a threat.

  Calum examined his options. He was helpless. He couldn’t do anything without the help of the Robledo staff.

  ‘How long have I been unconscious?’ he asked, trying to make his voice calm.

  ‘Oh, eight hours or so. We have a private jet at Farnborough airfield, and our own landing strip here. I came with you.’

  ‘You kept me sedated for that long?’

  ‘You were injured, and we were worried about the possibility of brain damage caused by feedback from ARLENE’s processor, as I said, so we kept the sedative topped up. Now, that’s enough talking. I suggest that you rest for a while, let that sedation run its course. We’ll run some tests later.’

  He backed into the corridor, and the door closed behind him.

  Calum couldn’t help but notice that there was no door knob or door handle on his side.

  Whichever way he looked at it, he was a prisoner.

  CHAPTER eight

  The team – Rhino thought of them as the team, even though it was really just him and two kids – was staying at the Marco Polo Hotel, just a few minutes’ walk from the harbour in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon. It was an exclusive, expensive hotel, but Calum had seemed willing to pay the price for the three rooms. As Rhino had pointed out to him – firstly they needed somewhere comfortable where they could sleep after their long journey and recover from their jet lag, and secondly they needed to have an address in Hong Kong that made them seem as if they had a lot of money, so it wouldn’t be unusual for them to be shopping around for exotic animals if anyone checked. And someone would check; Rhino was sure of it.

  He slept for eight solid hours after they got to the hotel. Waking up naturally, and feeling good, he showered, dressed and grabbed some breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The others were still asleep, so after that he wandered out into the open air. The heat and the humidity – just like walking into a sauna – fell on him like a sodden blanket. He smiled, despite himself. This was Hong Kong, and he loved it.