The priest turned and ran, as his body was engulfed by the flames. Tearing out of the church, down the steps and out into the square he followed the same route his ancestor had taken half a millennium before on his way to light the pyre. From the doorway, Gabriel watched as the burning figure carved its way through the crowd, its scream echoing as shrill as any firework.
Gabriel watched as the priest finally collapsed on to the pyre that he had helped to build, and Gabriel saw the fire begin to rise. He watched the horrified crowd move back from the searing heat, turning their eyes away, then he turned and hurried out of the square in the opposite direction.
* * *
Jean-Luc drove the van, that he and his brother had stolen, as fast as he could, but the traffic was snarled up and many roads had been closed off altogether.
Rachel looked at her watch. “We’ve got two minutes,” she said.
They pulled up hard at a line of stationary vehicles. Jean-Luc sounded the horn but nobody moved. Jean-Bernard pointed across the cars to a narrow street beyond that was all but empty.
“We need to go down there,” he said. “Look…”
Rachel leant forward and peered up the street. She could see the top of the tower a few streets south of them. She looked at her watch again. “Why don’t we just get out and run?”
“No need,” Jean-Luc said. He slammed the van into reverse and backed it up twenty metres.
“You’re kidding, right?” Rachel said.
Jean-Luc shook his head, then gunned the van forward and smashed straight through the two cars that were blocking the route across the road.
Jean-Bernard cheered and banged his hands on the dashboard as his brother put his foot to the floor and accelerated hard down the empty street towards the rendezvous point.
Adam could see the tower and knew he was going to make it. He wondered if the others were already there. He knew that Inez and Carmen would die before they let any harm come to Morag and Duncan and that the French boys would not let anybody down. He was sure that Rachel and Gabriel had been chased, but knew equally that both would have taken some catching.
He wondered where they would be heading next, what this boat trip was that Gabriel had been talking about.
He stepped out into the slow-moving traffic and wove his way between cars until he reached the pavement on the other side. The tower was no more than a minute away.
He checked his watch.
“Adam!”
He turned, stared across a sea of heads on the pavement, but could see nothing. But that voice. It had sounded like…
“Adam … over here.”
He looked again and saw Laura Sullivan, the red hair unmistakable. She was waving him over, pointing to the woman standing next to her. Adam’s breath caught in his throat.
His mother.
He pushed pedestrians aside and began running towards her, flinging himself into her arms, forgetting the package beneath his jacket.
“Mom…”
“Baby, are you OK?”
Adam couldn’t speak, unable to disentangle the mess of thoughts in his head. He clung on, vaguely aware that his mother was asking him where his sister was when he felt other hands on him, pulling him away…
“Adam … no!”
And pushing him through the door of the silver van that had drawn up silently alongside them and down on to a long, low bench inside. Held fast, he could only watch as Clay Van der Zee stepped out to where Laura Sullivan stood, to where his mother was being held back.
“Thank you, Dr Sullivan; we’ll take it from here.”
“But you said … you promised you wouldn’t take them.”
“You bitch! You lied to me!” His mother was shouting and struggling to get at Laura; to hurt her. “You set us up.”
“No, Kate. I swear…”
Adam cried out for his mother as the door of the van slammed shut. He was still crying out as it pulled away into the traffic.
As soon as Rachel arrived, she could see that something was wrong, could feel that something was very wrong. Inez and Carmen were both in tears, clinging for dear life on to the hands of Morag and Duncan, who stared around helplessly. Lost.
She felt excitement flood through her as she glimpsed her mother slumped against the wall, but seeing her face and the way she looked at Laura Sullivan, who stood stock-still a metre or so away, froze her to the spot.
She turned back to the Spanish girls. Asked the question with her mind.
“They took Adam,” Inez said.
Carmen stepped across, took hold of Rachel’s hand. “We saw it as we arrived. A van pulled up, men got out…”
Rachel threw her arms round her mother, holding her close as Kate’s body began to shake with sobs. Rachel stared at Laura, who looked beaten and bloodless, and began to get some sense of what had happened.
Adam…
Just then, Gabriel came strolling round the corner. He looked pleased with himself. “Perfect timing,” he said. “Now we need to leave.” He looked at Rachel holding her mother. “What’s happened?”
Rachel shook her head. Between the explosions of the fireworks, the sound of her mother crying was like a hand getting tighter round her throat.
“What’s happened?” Gabriel said again. He looked from face to face, counting them, and then he knew.
The technician moved forward and leant across the front seats to speak to Van der Zee as the Hope Project’s Mobile Experimentation Unit accelerated away from the city.
“Just to let you know, sir. The thing he was carrying” – the man pulled a face – “it’s a hand. A mummified hand…”
Van der Zee nodded. “Run all the usual tests. Complete medical analysis, and rush the DNA results through.”
The technician said he’d get straight on to it.
Van der Zee asked the driver to find some nice, soothing music and settled back in his seat. He glanced round and saw that the technician was still there, awaiting further instructions. “Oh, and give the boy something to help him sleep, would you?”
Twenty minutes after the fireworks had finished, when people had begun to gather over supper to talk about what had happened in the Plaza de la Constitución, a man in a bright yellow jacket walked up on to a narrow bridge over the river.
The Englishman was waiting.
“They got away from us.”
The Englishman did not bother turning round. “I’m well aware of that,” he said.
The man in the yellow jacket with the embroidered dancing devils held out a package towards the Englishman. “I brought you this,” he said. “I thought it might cheer you up a little.”
The Englishman took the parcel and began to unwrap the stained strip of sheet that bound it.
“From the honey-seller.”
The Englishman nodded his understanding and took out his gift. He turned it over between his fingers. The hand was cold and waxy, its perfectly manicured fingernails already starting to come away from the flesh. “This is good,” he said. “I’m sure you can still harvest honey with one hand.”
The other man looked pleased that his “present” had been so well received. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The children won’t be so lucky next time.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Of course not. I just meant…”
The Englishman held Salvador Abeja’s hand up to the light. “This will show what happens if anyone is foolish enough to lend those children a helping hand.”
The other man laughed, then stopped when he realized that the Englishman was not making a joke. He watched him pull the hood of his robe up a little, before casually dropping the severed hand into the water and turning to walk away across the bridge into the darkness.
part three:
trust
Waves crash against the jagged grey rocks, throwing explosions of spume into the evening sky. The roar of the sea never stops. Incessant and eternal: background music to the life of the cave dwellers.
Every
day the small boats go out, whatever the weather. Every day as the sun the fishermen worship lowers in the sky, the boats return with what they have lured from the unforgiving sea.
The girl stands on the beach, as she does most days, watching the boats come in to provide her family with food. She watches with more interest than usual, because she knows that today, something is different. She saw the blinding flash of light far out to sea just after the sun came up, and now, as the boats come back, she can see that the fishermen are waving their arms and shouting.
She watches as the men run the boat up on to the beach and drag the body on to the sand, pale and apparently lifeless. Her eyes run over the body, curious, fascinated by its whiteness. How smooth and hairless it is compared to the dark, squat men of her tribe; how long and slender. She watches as the body jolts suddenly and as thick, green water pours from its mouth. She watches as spasms of chest and limb bring it back to life.
As the narrow eyes blink open. Deep and green.
She stares as the chief pulls away a golden object clutched tight in the newcomer’s fist, and holds it up high, its three blades glinting in the evening sun…
And now, several seasons later, the girl watches as the stranger works within the caves. She watches, astonished as he paints, then channels light through fissures in the rock on to his strange and wonderful creations: visions of the past, present and future. She sees him mould metal and stone into elaborate and beautiful vessels; she is aware that the men in her tribe are gathering, and talking secretly. She knows that they are frightened, afraid of what he can do, threatened by its complexity. She watches as they drag the stranger deeper into the caves and order him to build to their instructions, to work his magic for their own purpose. She sees the look of acceptance on the stranger’s face as he realizes he is being made to build his own tomb: a place where his bones and relics will be locked away for ever so they are no longer a threat.
Later, the girl cries out as the sun goes down and the men come; as they drag the stranger away from her. She hides her infant twins’ eyes as the men take their father away; as the cave dwellers hold him down on a flat rock and bring the huge stone smashing down on to his skull.
Hides her eyes as the body is pegged out; as the gulls swoop down across the roaring sea to peck the bones clean…
Rachel was dragged from the depths of the dream by a wailing sound, robotic and metallic, cutting deep into the silence of a chilly dawn.
She had had dreams or visions like this before. They had come to her back in Triskellion and had only really made sense when the bodies of Gabriel’s ancestors, of her ancestors, had been discovered.
Dreams and visions.
The arrival of a stranger. A young girl, curious and unafraid. Twin children.
Dreams and visions that always ended the same way. In terror. In murder.
Rachel had not really slept. She had been up late, talking with Laura, her mother, the French twins and the Spanish girls. They had been going over and over the circumstances of Adam’s disappearance and how, since he’d been taken, she had not been able to communicate with him. She had not had a word. It was as if he had been insulated from her so that she could not tune in. What she was receiving, and had been for the last three days, was a terrible sensation of dread in the pit of her stomach.
The other twins had been hugely sympathetic, each knowing the importance of being able to communicate with one another. Each knowing that to lose that channel of communication would be like losing a limb. Rachel’s mother was in a numb state of grief. Having developed a grudging trust of Laura Sullivan, she was now back to where she had started. To resentment and suspicion. For Kate, losing her son felt worse than losing a limb.
It felt more like a death.
“Allahu akbar… Allahu akbar… Haya ala as-sala… Haya ala as-sala…”
God is the greatest… Come to prayer. The recorded, robotic voice droned again, calling to the faithful from a loudspeaker on top of a nearby mosque. Rachel lay back in bed, the arches and decorative patterns in the room just becoming visible in the half-light. She felt the lurch in her guts, at the realization that, for the fourth morning in a row, Adam was still not there. Lulled by her mother’s steady breathing from the bed on the other side of the room, Rachel tried to gather her thoughts and dampen the panic.
To face another day in Marrakesh.
From Seville they had driven in the stolen van to a small port on the Spanish Coast, but when they had arrived at the harbour, Rachel’s idea of the boat they were supposed to be picking up had quickly dissolved.
In her mind’s eye, she had seen a small fishing vessel, white or blue, bobbing at a berth, with a clean, crisp sail and a jolly name like Salty Sue or Seaspray. A boat like the well-polished craft of the fair-weather sailors she had seen back in Cape Cod.
By contrast, the San Miguel was a workhorse. Squat and stubby, its rusting hulk lurked, black and heavy, in the greasy water of the fishing port. As it approached, the boat had slapped its sturdy side against the quay, like a truculent sea monster straining to be free of its ropes. As they had climbed aboard, helped by Inez and Carmen’s Uncle Pepe, Rachel had been winded by the stench of old fish and diesel oil.
Eight of them had bundled into the cabin behind the wheelhouse, while Pepe had started up the engine; the milky bulkhead lights flickering on their pale faces as the generator powered up. Pepe had shouted instructions in Spanish to Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard, who had stayed on deck, to let the ropes go from the quayside bollards. The boat had juddered out of the harbour into a black night and beyond into a bumpy sea, headed for the coast of North Africa.
The combined smells of fish, oil and Pepe’s strong black cigarettes, coupled with the lumpy motion of the boat, had been too much for Rachel and her mother. They had staggered from the cabin and, helped on deck by the French boys, had thrown up over the side: retching their discomfort, their grief and the remains of their last meal into the Atlantic.
They had stayed out in the air, huddled together for comfort and staring up at the bright stars that were the only signs lighting their way.
As dawn had broken the following morning, they had all gone out on deck. A sliver of coastline had just been visible a few kilometres to the left of them and Laura Sullivan had shouted above the roar of the engine. “Where are we?”
Pepe had pointed at the coastline. “Casablanca.”
Rachel had recognized the name from an old film. It had sounded incredibly foreign and exotic.
“We’re docking at a smaller town further up the coast,” Carmen had said. “Uncle Pepe has friends there. We have friends there.”
They had arrived at a harbour that looked as if it had come from a different era: from hundreds of years before. Primitive, wooden boats had been bobbing about, and fishermen in ragged clothes had been stacking crates of sardines and laying out still-twitching eels on the dockside slabs.
They had stepped across tangled nets and wooden crates, walked past hulks of old ships and out through a gate to an area where ancient cars and taxis were haphazardly parked. Pepe had hugged and kissed his nieces. Then he had wiped the tears from his eyes, before squeezing them all into two battered old Mercedes, handing bundles of notes to the very grateful drivers and sending them on their way to Marrakesh.
Three hours later, the taxis had arrived at the red walls of the old town, which the driver had called the medina, before announcing that they could go no further. Men, dressed in skullcaps and long, hooded garments, had filled narrow streets. Mopeds had weaved dangerously around carts pulled by sad-looking donkeys.
Rachel had never seen anything like it…
Before visiting England and Triskellion, Rachel had only really seen New York City and a couple of places upstate. Aside from the cars and bikes everywhere, this place had seemed like something out of the Middle Ages: beggars dressed in rags; street sellers pushing carts full of mint and oranges; craftsmen hammering out ornate pieces of metal-work on the pavement; th
e smells of manure and perfume, woodsmoke and drains…
From nowhere, an old man pulling a wooden barrow had appeared. After a gabbled exchange with the taxi drivers, he had grabbed the few backpacks and bags that the group still possessed and had piled them into his cart. Before anyone could question him, he had barked a command for them to follow and had pushed the barrow through the gate into the old town.
“Wait!” Rachel had shouted. “Where are we going?” She’d seen that Laura, her mother and the others were all as bewildered as she had been by the sudden chaos that surrounded them. The old man had stopped as Rachel caught up with him.
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel had said. He’d stepped through the gate and rested a hand gently on her shoulder. “He knows this place like the back of his hand.”
The man had grinned at Rachel and placed his left hand on his chest, bowing his head to her. That had been when Rachel had noticed the tattoo. It was faded but still distinct, etched on to the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger: a smudgy blue symbol against the leathery brown flesh.
A Triskellion.
They had reached the Riad Magi after a seemingly endless trek that had taken them down alleys and across small squares, past shops festooned with conical red pots, copper basins and carpets of every colour and size. They’d followed the cart past men mending piles of worn-out shoes, past holes in the wall stacked with flat loaves of bread and past tiled shopfronts displaying a single, skinned rabbit or a hook draped with the innards of a recently butchered animal.
With no street names and precious few signs, the whole group – with the exception of Gabriel, who had seemed to know every sudden turn and each hidden alleyway – had collectively lost its sense of direction. Morag and Duncan had looked terrified. They’d stuck close to Kate and Laura, as bicycles and carts had ploughed past them with no apparent concern for their safety, or acknowledgement of their existence.
Finally, they’d turned down a narrow passage, ducked under a low arch and stopped outside a weathered brown door; its polished brass plate was engraved in Arabic. The old man had stepped away from his barrow and knocked. Rachel had taken a deep breath and shuddered as a three-legged black cat had brushed its matted and emaciated body against her leg. Then the bolts on the other side of the door had been thrown back.
The Burning Page 21