To wish her luck.
Water ran slowly down the grey stone walls that rose up ten metres or more on every side before narrowing to a dark ceiling which seemed to shift in the damp shadows high above them. Each drip echoed as it struck the floor. A few thin shafts of light angled down from gaps in the rock, streaking the walls in pale beams, highlighting every detail.
Rachel, Gabriel and the others stood and said nothing for a minute or more, staggered by the size of the cavern. Then they began to move, slowly inching around the walls like a group of tourists, running their fingers across the rock and whispering in wonder.
“My God,” Laura said. “These paintings…” Over the years she had seen hundreds of cave paintings, but none with anything like this degree of detail. There was an incredible level of artistry in every line carved into the stone, and something else too. There was…
“It’s passion,” Rachel said, reading Laura’s thoughts. “This really meant something to him.”
Rachel moved slowly around the walls, seeing … feeling the emotions that had been poured into every scratch and marking. There were images of bees and beehives, of falling stars and shoals of minutely detailed fish. And Triskellions…
She stopped in front of one huge wall and stared at a series of paintings that outlined the story Ali had told her. In swirling lines of black against the pale rock there were pictures of a boat and of a man being pulled from the sea. As Rachel stared, the dream came back once again, and suddenly she was that girl standing on the beach, watching a stranger being dragged from a fishing boat. A girl who had given birth to twin children and then watched as their father was dragged away to his death.
Waited as his body was reduced to a pile of bones.
While Rachel stood and stared, Kate and Laura moved to either side of her. Laura took a picture of the wall with the camera on her phone. She leant in close to Rachel. “Isn’t this amazing?”
“What is this?” Kate asked. Laura opened her mouth to speak. “And keep it simple, OK,” Kate said quickly. “We don’t all have degrees in archaeology.” She glanced across at Gabriel and the other twins. “Or special powers…”
Laura took a deep breath. “OK … I’ve always had this idea that something changed in the evolution of mankind thirty thousand years ago. Something that changed the Neanderthal into modern man – gave him the push to spread out across to Spain and into northern Europe.” She looked at the wall. “This is where it happened. Whoever did these paintings is what made it happen.”
Kate nodded, looking at the pictures. “The falling star isn’t really a star, right?”
“I’m sure that’s what the people who lived here at the time thought it was,” Laura said. “And they wouldn’t have had a word to describe who it was … what it was, they pulled from the ocean.” She turned and looked across the cave at the three sets of twins as they moved around, pointing and muttering. “And it happened again, three thousand years ago, and since. More visitors arrived. In France, Spain, Scotland … and in Triskellion – in your own village.” Laura watched as Kate reached for Rachel’s hand. “And now, kids like yours, kids with these genes, can do the same thing that their ancestors did … can move human beings on to another level. It’s super-evolution…”
Kate nodded again. She was beginning to digest the enormity of Laura’s theory and the importance of her own offspring.
“Was that simple enough?” Laura asked.
Gabriel was standing behind her. He had obviously been listening. He smiled.
There was a shout from the other side of the cave and everyone moved quickly across to where Duncan and Morag were standing and pointing towards the ceiling.
“It’s not shadows,” Duncan said. “It’s alive.”
Morag grinned. “It’s bees. Millions of them…”
Everyone stared up at the colony of insects that crawled across the roof of the cave. The bees hung in a moving canopy as though part of the cave itself; as if their low, insistent buzz was coming from somewhere deep inside the rock, like blood pulsing through a vein.
“It’s like they’re welcoming us,” Morag said.
Then everyone froze, as another sound filtered down from above. A very different and more dangerous buzzing that got louder until it drowned out the noise of the bees. Until Gabriel had to shout to be heard above it.
“Everyone outside. Now!”
Clay Van der Zee rarely raised his voice when he was speaking to the man in New York, but he could not help himself. He had been as furious as he was confused since he’d first seen the aircraft swooping low across the cliff top a few minutes before.
“I did not ask for helicopter support!” he shouted. On the screen he watched the children spilling out of the cave and on to the beach.
The voice of the man in New York crackled over the speaker, filling the cabin. “That was my decision,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”
“What exactly are you expecting?” Van der Zee asked.
“If I knew that, there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“That’s an attack helicopter,” Van der Zee said. “It’s armed…”
“These are not your worries, doctor.” There was a pause and, for a few moments, until the man from New York spoke again, the only sound in the cabin was the distant clatter of rotor blades. “Are you still there, doctor?”
Van der Zee said nothing. He had spun round in his chair to look at Adam, and the expression on the boy’s face had rendered him speechless. It was a look of horror at something that Adam had seen coming and could do nothing about.
The sound of the missile being fired was almost deafening.
Van der Zee twisted back round to face his screens and gasped at the explosion. “What the hell…?”
The speaker distorted as the man from New York shouted. “Who gave that order?”
Van der Zee watched the helicopter soar away and circle the cliff top as the smoke billowed skywards.
“I repeat, who gave that order?”
There were a few seconds of silence before another voice came over the speaker. The helicopter pilot sounded shaken as he identified himself and tried to answer the question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody … told me to fire. I heard him…”
Gabriel and the others picked themselves up and looked back at the cave. A dark cloud hung over the entrance, and black smoke poured from the point higher up the cliff where the missile had hit. Beyond that it seemed clear. Dust and debris were still raining down on to the beach and a solid column of bees swarmed out from the cave, circling the group, rounding them up like a lasso, guiding them back towards the entrance.
Laura Sullivan moved a few metres away from the others and took out her BlackBerry. She dialled a number. It was difficult to keep her voice down when she was so angry.
“What d’you think you’re doing?”
“That was nothing to do with me,” Van der Zee said.
“What?”
“I’m not lying, I swear.”
“Just get that chopper out of here now.”
“Listen, I promise you—”
“Did you bring the boy?”
“He’s right here.”
“Prove it,” Laura said. She waited a few seconds. Then she heard Adam shouting out to her, telling her that he was OK.
Van der Zee came back on the line. “We’ve known each other a long time, Laura. You should know I’m as good as my word.”
“I need to go…”
“Don’t you trust me?”
Laura looked up at the helicopter that was still circling. “I don’t trust the people you work for.” She ended the call and when she turned back to the group, she saw Duncan and Morag staring at her phone. She slipped it back into her pocket as Gabriel stopped to address everyone.
“Well, they clearly know we’re here,” he said. “So I suggest we get back in there and get what we came for as fast as we can.”
Rachel had seen the look on hi
s face a few seconds before the missile had hit. Once everyone had started moving again, she ran to catch up with him. She pointed at the smoke, then up at the helicopter. “Was that you? Did you make that happen…?”
“Well, I didn’t summon up the helicopter if that’s what you mean, but I didn’t think there was any harm in making use of it.”
“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Why fire at the cave?”
“The cave’s only the start of it,” Gabriel said. “It’s like the entrance hall.” He looked up at the helicopter and shrugged. “I needed something to force the front door open.”
Rachel smiled in spite of herself and helped usher the others back towards the cave as quickly as possible. At the entrance, Gabriel stopped and told Jean-Bernard and Jean-Luc to wait.
“You can’t go back in,” he said. The French boys tried to push past, but Gabriel held out an arm. “No, you need to stay here. You’ve got a job to do.”
“What job?” Jean-Luc demanded.
“It’s important,” Gabriel said. “And I think you’ll enjoy it.”
Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard exchanged a look, then turned back to Gabriel and nodded. He thanked them, then followed the others, ducking through the curtain of dust and stepping back into the Cave of the Berbers.
The debris was settling on the inside of the cave. A wider crack had opened in the roof of the cavern and a shaft of yellow light cut through the dusty air. Laura was astonished to see that, although the main walls of the cave and the paintings remained intact, a large, triangular opening had fallen away on the far side.
“That’s the front door I was talking about,” Gabriel said. “Now, we’d better hurry up and get in there…”
They gathered around the exposed opening and, peering through, they could see a passage leading to steps that had been roughly hewn in the rock and which twisted away into the shadows. Gabriel led the way through the opening and they all tentatively followed him into a honeycomb of tunnels, alcoves and chambers burrowed into the side of the cliffs. The tunnels were lit by a pale glow that seemed to come from chunks of a glass-like material set into hollows in the rock face.
“Amazing,” Laura said, stopping. She touched the glass. “It’s mica, or some kind of crystal. It looks like a system of lenses and prisms has been set up to direct natural light all the way from outside through to here. Sophisticated stuff. Not the work of your average caveman.”
“Who ever said this was done by a caveman?” Gabriel asked.
“Tell me what you know about him!” Laura cried, but Gabriel was already pushing on, poking his head into nooks and crannies and moving quickly in and out of small chambers.
Laura and Kate turned into a room on the left while the others explored the one opposite. Laura picked up a bowl and gasped. It was metallic: silvery-grey and unlike any thing she had ever seen before. Unlike anything that had ever been discovered in a Neanderthal cave.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s so modern looking.” She laid the bowl gently on the ground and began taking photos. “This is thirty thousand years old and it looks as if it could have been made yesterday. It looks like it’s been made on a machine. I mean … I don’t even recognize the metal. What am I talking about … these cavemen didn’t even have metal. Never, ever seen anything like it.”
Kate stared at the bowl. “Is that what he’s looking for?”
“Gabriel? No, I don’t think so. This stuff is just a bonus. An amazing bonus. I think he’s looking for a tomb…”
As she said it, the word suddenly sounded in Laura’s mind like a tolling bell.
Tomb.
Years of tombs: finding them, studying them, digging them up. Laura looked closely at the chamber they were in. What she had thought were little rows of sticks drawn on the walls – perhaps some kind of numbering system – had, on closer inspection, turned out to have little heads and arms and feet. They were rows of bodies, laid out flat.
Had that been the purpose of this cave? Was it a burial site: one big tomb?
Her mind raced. What if Van der Zee was really double-crossing … triple-crossing her? What if he had ordered the missile-launching helicopter? She knew that he was certainly capable of pulling a trick like that. She also knew that there were people within the Hope organization whose agenda would be to get as many of the “special” people together in one place and blow them, and all those who protected them, to smithereens.
Was this labyrinth of caves going to be their tomb?
She felt panic rise within her. She had been stupid. She had been blinkered by her own research – research that would be no good to anyone if they were all about to be vaporized. In her blind enthusiasm to prove her theory, in her eagerness to do the right thing by Kate and return her son, Laura had helped set an elaborate deathtrap for them all.
“We need to get back out on to the beach,” she said to Kate, the panic clear in her voice. She shouted into the other chamber. “Gabriel, Rachel, everyone … we have to get out!”
Duncan and Morag scuttled into the room. They looked at the bowl and the figures on the walls.
“What have you found?” Morag asked.
“Never mind,” Laura said. “We just need to get out.”
“We can’t,” Gabriel said, calmly entering the chamber. “We only get one go at this, and the time is now.”
“But they know where we are!” Laura shouted. “That’s obvious, right? Now they’ll be tracking our precise movements underground by satellite … by infrared imaging. They’ll have taken a position from my phone.”
All eyes turned on her.
“I had to tell them where we were so we could get Adam back,” she said.
Kate squeezed Laura’s arm and smiled.
“I know,” Gabriel said. “And you did the right thing. It’s just that this isn’t quite as straightforward as I thought it would be. We could do with buying ourselves a bit more time.”
“Laura … Dr Sullivan?” Morag tugged at Laura’s sleeve. “Why don’t you give Duncan your phone? He knows all the Hope passwords. He might be able to, you know, play around a bit.”
Laura looked at Morag’s innocent face, not understanding what she meant. This was hardly the time for games. Then she saw the smirk creep across Duncan’s features and Morag’s meaning became clear. If anyone could get into Hope’s system and mess up their tracking equipment, then it was Duncan.
“We won’t get a signal down here, though, will we?” Laura said.
“Give it to me.” Duncan took the BlackBerry from Laura and, as soon as it was in his hands, the signal went up to five bars. His chubby fingers moved fast across the keypad. Internet access came up on the screen, then a series of messages flashed past at lightning speed. He punched in number combinations, symbols, letters – his fingers becoming a blur.
“I’m into the mainframe,” he said. Then, a few seconds later, he stabbed decisively at the “enter” key and looked up at everyone. “That should do it.” He waved the phone at Gabriel, allowing himself an uncharacteristic smile.
“Good work, Duncan,” Gabriel said. “Everyone has a job to do here, and that was yours. Now let’s get on with ours.”
“But they’ll still know where we are, won’t they?” Kate asked. She followed Gabriel as he led them down another of the cave’s meandering, half-lit passages.
“They know where we are approximately,” Gabriel said. “But they’re working blind now. Whereas we know where we’re going.”
Laura looked across at Rachel and raised an eyebrow. In turn, Rachel squeezed her mother’s hand and smiled.
The passages grew darker and narrower, the pale light from the prisms becoming even weaker the deeper they went. The air was cooler and damper, and the group quietened as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense.
Ali did nothing to make them feel any easier as he darted between them, waving a small torch around. He tapped the walls and the stone floor with a stick, muttering. He pushed his hands into deep
fissures in the rock, then climbed up to feel for hidden ledges or checked entrances to other chambers on either side.
“What are you looking for?” Laura asked.
“The cavemen did not want this tomb disturbed.” He pointed out huge rocks that hung precariously over their heads, each held in place by smaller stones: primitive booby traps to deter intruders trying to enter the caves.
Intruders like themselves…
They continued more slowly into near darkness and Morag began to whimper. Ali cursed, increasingly frustrated that they seemed to be getting nowhere.
“Wait,” Gabriel said. Everyone stopped. “Ali, you need to be calm. You’re confusing me.”
“I am sorry,” Ali said. His face looked old and worn in the light of his torch. “I have failed you; I thought I would have found it by now. I thought that once we got into the main caves it would be obvious. There should have been” – he made spikes with his fingers, searching for the words – “you know, stalactites, stalagmites…”
“You’ve done your bit,” Gabriel said. “You got us this far. Now we need to stop panicking, and concentrate. Rachel?” He reached out a hand to her and she stepped close to him. “I want you to think really hard. To focus…”
Conflicting thoughts were racing through her head. The dominant one was an increasing desire to escape from the caves. Sensing her doubt, Gabriel took her hand and squeezed. Rachel took a deep lungful of the damp air and, shutting her eyes, began to clear her mind…
At first, she was aware only of everyone’s breathing, of Morag’s nervous sniffs and the shuffling of feet. Then, as the noises faded into the background of her thoughts, another sound came: a low drone, a buzz. Behind her eyelids, a light began to spread and solidify, shaping itself into an orb that floated in her mind, golden and glowing. She tried to sense the direction from which it was coming and placed her hands against the cold wall of the passage. The ball of light drew her along, as it moved slowly back in the direction from which they had come.
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