by Chris Ryan
The two friends heard footsteps coming up the ladder again. The trapdoor was pulled down sharply, extinguishing the light.
Li let out her breath very slowly. ‘That sound was what I heard in the cave. It’s a generator.’
Hex spoke rapidly, excitedly. ‘That’s the missing link. That’s their factory. And who’s that big guy?’
‘Should we report back? Or should we stay?’
‘I think we’d better stay,’ said Hex.
Tiff was lying on the sofa, huddled in a purple blanket. A reading lamp threw a soft pool of light over her blonde hair. Paulo was sitting against the radiator, still watching her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tiff.
The pattern had been the same for the past few hours. She would look like she was going to sleep, then would suddenly start talking, nattering about whatever popped into her butterfly brain.
Paulo wished he felt as wide awake as she did. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘I stole your stash,’ said Tiff.
‘My what?’ said Paulo.
‘Your stash. I’ve seen E before. I know what it looks like.’
Paulo sighed. ‘I don’t take drugs,’ he said. ‘And you shouldn’t either.’
‘What were you doing with that stuff then?’ said Tiff. ‘I found it in your pocket.’
How much should he tell her? She might say the wrong thing somewhere and ruin their cover. ‘I was going to take them to the police,’ he explained. At least that was the truth.
The front door banged and then Alex and Amber walked in.
‘Are you guys still here?’ said Amber. ‘I’d have thought you’d be tired by now.’
Paulo yawned forcefully. ‘One of us is.’
‘Where have you been?’ asked Tiff.
‘Night orienteering,’ said Alex. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it.’
Tiff checked who had come back. ‘Where’s Hex? I’m not going to sleep before he gets back.’
‘He’s coming,’ said Amber. ‘They went a different way. Paulo, I’ll take over if you want.’
Paulo got up and stumbled out. ‘Goodnight all.’
Amber settled down on the beanbag next to the radiator. She waved at Alex as he went out.
Tiff looked at Amber somewhat balefully, then put her head down on a cushion, as if trying to get comfortable. The gesture said, I’m not going to talk to you. Fine, thought Amber. I don’t want to talk to you either. In fact maybe she’d get some sleep.
But Tiff started talking again. Her voice was quiet, the hostility gone. ‘My mum married again,’ she told Amber. ‘She doesn’t want a kid around. She can’t wait to get away on her own with my stepfather.’ There was none of the usual sarcasm in her voice. Not even bitterness. Just sadness.
‘I’m nothing more than a babysitting problem,’ she went on. ‘I have to be farmed out, sent on trips and kept occupied. Brainwashed so that I don’t want anything. They want a robot, not a daughter. They’ve no idea who I am. I don’t matter.’
Her words stirred powerful memories. Once upon a time Amber had thought the same about her parents. They’d left her behind while they went abroad. She later discovered that they were away on missions, but at the time Amber had thought they didn’t want to be bothered with her. ‘I know how you feel,’ she said quietly.
Tiff shifted and something rolled out of the covers onto the floor. It looked like a fat pen. Amber reached forward to retrieve it but Tiff snatched it back and looked at it thoughtfully. It was a spent glow stick, but Tiff was looking at it as if it was fascinating.
‘That’s a dead one, Tiff,’ said Amber. ‘It’s not going to come back on.’
Tiff fixed her with a steely look. ‘It’s a symbol.’ She gazed at it and her voice became sad again. ‘There are dark places you would never understand. Hex understands, though. He understands what it’s like to die.’
Oh dear, thought Amber. We’ve been through the sensitive phase. Now she’s getting morbid. And just when I thought I’d get some sleep.
15
TRAPDOOR
Li made almost no noise as she crawled along the ground towards the faint glow of light leaking around the edge of the trapdoor. She was cold and wet but she kept her movements very slow, as though she was stalking it. They had no idea how thick or thin the ground around it was and whether the men below could hear people moving on the surface.
Hex watched her tracer on his palmtop screen. They were going to mark the exact position of the trapdoor so that they could find it later. Since they’d missed it in broad daylight, it was obviously well hidden.
Not far now. Li wondered what was below her hands and feet and this seemingly solid piece of moor. Was it another cave? Or some kind of manmade structure? How big was it?
Her heart thudded as she moved her hands and knees gently towards the square of light. It glinted off a pair of open eyes. She froze, horrified, then realized it was one of the dead deer. She started to move again.
The trapdoor trembled and she heard a metallic scraping. Footsteps, ringing below her hands and knees. Someone was coming up. She’d have to abort.
If she shouted to Hex she’d be heard. She rolled to the side, twisting so that she got as far away from the opening and the bikes as possible. The trapdoor opened, throwing a glow into the sky. She lay still, trying to calm her breathing. Had she gone far enough away? Had Hex got out of sight?
One of the gamekeepers came out, followed by the big man. Both wore pale surgical masks and white papery overalls over their clothes, like radiation suits. They walked towards her, the gamekeeper flashing his torch along the ground. They were coming straight for her.
She rolled again and felt the ground disappear. She was on the edge of the stream bed. She’d have to stay here – if she went in they’d hear the splash. She tried to flatten herself into the grass. The big man’s overalls were enormous to fit over his baggy clothes. The gamekeeper looked puny by comparison.
They stopped. Li was less than a metre away from them. She stayed stock-still, hardly daring to breathe.
The big man pulled off his mask and ripped open his suit. He bent over as he stepped out of it and Li saw a flash of his face in the torchlight. His features looked Eastern European and distorted, like a boxer who carried many old injuries. The hooked nose was spread, the eyes were slits; the whole face was dotted with piercings – diamonds winked in his nose, his bottom lip, his cheek. As he straightened up, his face slipped into the shadows of his hood. Only the pinpoints of light from the diamonds remained visible, as though he had tiny eyes in the wrong places.
The other man had pulled his mask down around his chin. He put a cigarette between his lips and brought out a lighter. The flame illuminated dark brows, frowning eyes concentrating on the cigarette he was lighting.
Li kept watching. The cigarette caught, his face relaxed and he put the lighter out. But she’d got a good look at his face. She’d be able to identify him.
He put the lighter back in his pocket and took a long, satisfying drag. A strange, chemical smell came off the papery trousers. It reminded Li of the chemistry labs at school.
The big man passed his overalls and mask back to the smaller man. ‘I don’t want any of those green pills,’ he said. His voice was quiet, but dangerous.
‘What were they?’
‘E and ketamine,’ said the gamekeeper.
‘Yeah, well they’re rubbish,’ said the big man. ‘People take them, they get a bad trip, they don’t come back to my dealers. I’ve got important clients who don’t want their heads messed with. You give me just pure Ebenezer, you got it?’
Ebenezer. E. A name for ecstasy.
The gamekeeper nodded.
‘You got the capacity? I can go anywhere and get rubbish. You give me good product, OK? I don’t want to find you’ve put rubbish in there because you don’t have time.’
‘We can do it,’ said the gamekeeper. ‘We’ll be ready for you tomorrow night. Just name a time.’
‘You
better be ready, brother. You’ve got my money. I don’t like being short-changed.’ The man looked the gamekeeper up and down. ‘If the guys could see you now – dressed like Lord Sprockett.’
Hex was crouching behind the bikes. He saw the man turn away from the gamekeeper and start walking towards him, the torch swinging in his hand.
Hex’s blood pressure hit the roof. Which vehicle had the big man come on? The quad or the six-wheeler? The quad, wasn’t it?
Hex watched the swing of the man’s arms. On the downswing of the torch he rolled swiftly behind the six-wheel ATV.
The big man got on the quad. The engine roared into life; next would be the headlights. Hex flattened himself on the ground as the big man opened the throttle. The wheels passed within a metre of his hands.
That just left the other man. And where was Li?
Hex peered up cautiously. The side of the gamekeeper’s face was gently illuminated by the light from the open hatch. The end of the cigarette glowed like a coal as the gamekeeper drew in a breath. Smoke curled over the red tip. Well, at least that cigarette made him easy to spot. Hex couldn’t see Li at all, but now the other man had gone, there was nothing to distract the gamekeeper from any tiny noise that she might make. How long did it take to smoke a cigarette? Three minutes? Five minutes? Stay hidden, Li, prayed Hex.
The gamekeeper inhaled – and stopped. The red tip paused in the air; he held his breath and listened.
Li felt a trickle of sweat pouring down her back. He had seen her.
‘Hello?’ he said. His voice was rough, Glaswegian.
Li saw him peer into the gloom at her.
Then there was a faint patter of feet on metal; a rustle in the heather. Some nocturnal creature had been exploring the ATV. The gamekeeper walked over to the bike to investigate. Li breathed out a long, careful sigh.
Hex rolled into the heather and lay still. The gamekeeper flashed his torch over the bike, took a last drag on his cigarette, then dropped it. Its red glow disappeared under the toe of his boot. He pulled his mask back on, walked back to the trapdoor, climbed in and pulled it shut.
Li stood up and jogged on the spot, trying to warm up. She was freezing. She could see Hex’s pale blue palmtop light like a will-o’-the-wisp. She ran gratefully over to him.
‘Phew – that was close. Did you get the position of the trapdoor?’
Hex nodded. ‘Roughly. We’ll have to come back and look in daylight. It’s too dangerous to do more now.’
They jogged away, prepared to duck down again at any moment, but the trapdoor stayed closed. It was a relief to move after holding still for so long.
Li slowed to a walk. She felt mentally exhausted. ‘I really thought that guy with the cigarette had seen me. Thank heavens for small nocturnal animals.’
‘Or large ones,’ said Hex. His eyes were twinkling in the torchlight. Li looked at him, puzzled, and he ran his fingers lightly up her arm like a scampering animal.
‘It was you!’ She rubbed him on the arm. ‘You probably saved my bacon.’
Li shuddered. ‘They’re making a big pick-up sometime tomorrow night, but we don’t know when.’ Her hands were around a steaming mug of hot chocolate, but lying still for so long in wet clothes had chilled her to the bone.
She and Hex were in the kitchen, giving the others a resumé of what they had seen on the moor. Tiff had finally drifted into a deep sleep and Amber felt it was safe to leave her.
Paulo stared into his mug of hot chocolate – Amber had just got him and Alex out of their beds. ‘That’s got to be the factory,’ said Paulo. He looked sleepy but his brain had grasped the facts swiftly.
‘Is that enough to go to the police with?’ said Amber.
‘I think we need more,’ said Alex. ‘We could tell the police to ambush them, but they might only get the gamekeepers.’
Hex nodded. ‘We’ve got to get a good look at the factory during the day when they’re not around, find the trapdoor. If we can’t find it, the police won’t.’
Amber sighed. ‘If only we’d given you and Li the video camera, you could have filmed what you saw and that would be enough.’
‘There’s more than just the factory,’ said Hex. ‘There’s a big deal going through. If we could find out when they’re making the handover, we could get the hooded guy too.’
Li nodded. ‘He’s not just a dealer, he’s a mega-dealer. He was talking about major clients, a string of dealers. He’s big time. If the gamekeepers get busted too early, he’ll just walk away.’
Paulo yawned. ‘If we’re going to do something, we’d better move fast. The police will probably question the gamekeepers sometime later today about the “polystyrene”. That will put them on alert.’
‘There’s no point trying to get more evidence now,’ said Hex. ‘They’re busy at night. We’ll just run into them again. We’re better off leaving it until the morning.’
Amber sat back thoughtfully. ‘OK, we have two objectives: to find physical evidence of the factory; and to find out when the deal’s being done.’
‘Three objectives,’ yawned Paulo. ‘Get some sleep.’
‘Four,’ said Alex. His voice was serious. ‘Stay alive. My dad’s mate was on a mission watching the IRA when he stumbled across a drugs factory in someone’s back room. The next day three guys came and cut his head off with a chainsaw.’ He looked at his four friends earnestly. ‘We’ve stayed undercover until now. Let’s keep it that way.’
16
RACE AGAINST TIME
At 7 a.m. Li opened her curtains. Four hours’ sleep wasn’t really enough. The sun was already starting to evaporate the dew into a light mist. It was a captivating sight – it almost made her glad to be up.
Someone pounded on the door.
‘Yeah, it’s OK,’ she called. ‘I’m up.’
Paulo’s voice answered her. ‘Tiff’s gone again.’
She threw on some clothes and pounded down the stairs.
In the hall Alex was already making plans. ‘Li, you search the attics, Amber the bedrooms, Paulo the ground floor. Hex and I will take the outbuildings.’
Amber, a slice of bread in one hand, spoke between mouthfuls. She was a diabetic and had to make sure she ate regularly. ‘Hex, couldn’t you just look her up on your thingy?’
‘I’ve done all that,’ said Hex. ‘I couldn’t see her so I tried calling her. Her phone’s in her room.’
Amber gulped down the rest of her breakfast as she climbed the stairs.
Amber had found nothing. She strode out of the front door. Li and Paulo were standing in the drive.
‘Anything?’
They shook their heads.
The mist was lifting, making the valley glow. From the garage came the clunk of the Range Rover door, then Hex and Alex came out.
Alex saw the group and shook his head. ‘Zilch. She’s vanished into thin air.’
‘Most of her stuff’s still in her bedroom,’ said Amber, ‘so she hasn’t gone to the airport or anything. But her walking boots have gone.’
‘Typical,’ sighed Hex. ‘The only way that lazy trout would go for a walk is to annoy us.’
‘All the safety equipment’s still here,’ said Alex. ‘Ropes, helmets, etc.’
‘Pur-leeze!’ exclaimed Li. ‘She’s not going to go for an energetic climb.’
‘I looked at her alarm clock in case she’d set it to go out early,’ said Amber. ‘No clues there. It wasn’t even on.’
Alex looked up into the hills. A gentle breeze made the heather ripple. ‘We’d better find her before she blunders into something she shouldn’t.’
The Ordnance Survey map was spread out on the kitchen table.
‘She can’t have got far,’ said Paulo. ‘She’s not very fit.’
‘But we don’t know what time she left,’ said Li. ‘We went to bed at three; she could have been gone for hours.’
Amber looked at the map. ‘She hates hill walking. So she won’t have gone up here.’ She pointed to th
e contour lines that indicated the steep hill that rose at the back of the hostel.
‘Most likely she went along the road,’ said Hex.
Alex looked at the map, mentally dividing it up. He had learned a number of ways of searching for a lost person. You covered the area according to a set pattern, which meant you didn’t miss anywhere. ‘I think we should take two quad bikes; the rest of us can go in the Range Rover and search the roads.’
‘I’ll take a quad,’ said Paulo.
‘Me too,’ said Amber. She looked at Hex. ‘You coming?’
Hex snorted. ‘Not if you’re driving.’
‘Actually, Hex,’ said Alex, ‘you’d better come in the Range Rover. You can monitor everyone on tracers. And we’d better have just one person on each quad so we’ve got something to bring her back on.’
‘Wish we’d thought to put a tracer on her,’ muttered Li.
Paulo was looking at the map. ‘There are a few farm buildings in the area. We might get lucky with some of those.’
‘We just have to hope she didn’t hitch a ride somewhere,’ said Amber.
‘I don’t think she’d leave her luggage,’ said Li.
Alex stood up. It was time to go. ‘OK, guys, keep in contact, usual protocols. If you have to go into a mobile blind spot, tell someone first so we know where you are. Let’s get her back before she gets herself killed.’
Scottish farmyards were so different from Argentinian ones, thought Paulo. His parents’ ranch was full of wide open spaces. This farm in Scotland was overlooked by brooding hills, as though somebody had taken a regular ranch and rumpled it up to fit into a much smaller space. On an Argentinian ranch everything was wooden – the fences, the buildings, the arch over the entrance. In Scotland the buildings had evolved out of a motley collection of scavenged materials – a stone croft with a patched roof, a big barn made of breeze blocks and corrugated iron. And then there was the mud. Apart from the rain the day before, it had been dry most of the time they had been in Scotland. So why were all the farmyards he’d seen wet and muddy?