by Chris Ryan
'What was that?' he heard someone shout. The voice was much closer than he had expected, and he scrambled desperately to the top of the tree, where Annie was waiting for him, her face white with concern.
'What happened?' she whispered.
'The gun,' Ben replied. 'I dropped it.'
More voices from below. It was difficult to tell exactly where they came from, but they weren't far away, that much was sure.
'If they find it—' Annie breathed.
'I know,' Ben replied. 'If they find it, they'll realize where we are.' He looked seriously at his cousin. 'I'm sorry, Annie,' he said. 'I don't see a way out. If these people think we know about Vortex, they're going to want to silence us.'
He looked around uselessly. In the distance, through the trees, they could see the remains of the burning truck where the ruins of the device were slowly melting away; and beyond that he thought he could make out the hut that concealed the entrance to the underground bunker where they had left Joseph.
Poor Joseph. So keen to confront his wicked brother, he would be at Lucian's mercy yet again. Ben shuddered to think about it, before snapping back to their own predicament. He could hear people moving around at the bottom of the tree.
'The gun,' he heard a voice say. 'The kid must have dropped it. They must have climbed up here.'
Ben closed his eyes. 'It looks like Joseph's not the only person who has no more places to run to…' he whispered.
A minute passed, and neither Joseph nor Lucian spoke. The two brothers just looked at each other, drinking in the sight of the faces that they had not seen for so long.
'I don't want to kill you, Lucian,' Joseph said finally. 'But you will do as I say, or I will detonate the bomb.'
'What is that you want me to do, Joseph?' Lucian asked tersely. A bead of sweat ran down his face.
'I want you to come with me. We will leave the case of Semtex here, and together we will walk out of this place. I want you to promise me that you will never again use your knowledge to devise something that will harm so many people, and I'm going to trust you to keep that promise, though I do not know what you have done to deserve such trust. We will then destroy this place, so all the remnants of your work will be gone.'
Joseph's ultimatum hung in the air between them.
'You need to take control of yourself, Joseph,' Lucian said after a moment, his voice trembling slightly. 'I know you're angry, but this isn't the solution.'
Joseph clutched his finger down firmly on the detonator. 'What you mean, of course, is that it isn't your solution,' he replied.
'It's the solution of an unhinged mind,' Lucian said sharply. 'Fight it, Joseph. Fight it, and think.' He took a step closer. 'You are struggling with your demons. I can see it in your face. Let me help you.'
'Take another step towards me, Lucian, and I will release my thumb without hesitation.'
Lucian trod carefully backwards.
'Fifty years,' Joseph continued. 'Fifty years you stole from me the day you decided that I would be a suitable subject for your experiments.'
'They weren't experiments, Joseph. We knew what the drugs would do. We were saving you from yourself. Do you really believe we were working alone? The intelligence services knew what we were doing, and if you had blown the whistle they would have killed you. My way was much better. It was for your own good.'
'My own good?' Joseph smiled, and appeared to be thinking for a moment. 'You're right. My mind is clouding over. It has been for the last few days. Occasionally I snap out of it, but soon I will be out of control. It's my medication, you see. I don't have it, and without my medication, the world is a dark and frightening place.'
Lucian's eyes narrowed, and Joseph could see hope in his face.
'But the clouds have not yet fully descended,' he continued. 'Some things are clear, and one of them is this: that if there is one person in the whole world who is not fit to judge what is for anyone's own good, it is you, my brother.' He spat the final word with distaste. 'But I am giving you a final chance — a chance to redeem yourself.'
Lucian's lip curled into a sneer. 'Redeem myself? If you believe that I want redemption, you are stupid as well as insane. You have no idea of what I have done. You have no idea of the things my mind has achieved.'
'Ah,' Joseph purred, 'Vortex, you mean? A grand name for such an evil device. I'm sorry to tell you, however, that by now Vortex will be destroyed, or at the very least in safe hands.'
Lucian blinked. 'Destroyed?' he repeated. 'Impossible. It's on its way to the delivery point as we speak.'
Joseph shook his head. 'Not if Ben and Annie have anything to do with it,' he said softly.
'Ben and Annie?' Lucian laughed. 'Those kids? Don't be ridiculous.'
Joseph shrugged. 'Clearly I have more confidence in them than you do. All this, however, is rather academic. I am going to destroy this place, Lucian. Whether or not you come with me is up to you.'
A tiny smile of triumph flickered over Lucian's face. 'But you won't leave me alone with the bomb, Joseph,' he taunted. 'You know I will just remove the detonator. If you try and kill me, you'll kill yourself in the process.'
Joseph raised an eyebrow. 'All that intellect, my brother, and you truly suppose that that hadn't crossed my mind?'
Lucian's eyes narrowed. 'You won't do it,' he whispered. 'You won't sacrifice your life to get back at me.'
'To get back at you, Lucian? Haven't you been listening to a word I've said? What I'm doing is not to get back at you. It's to protect the thousands of innocent lives that you would destroy if you were left unchecked.'
He closed his eyes briefly, then looked back at Lucian. His brother was scared now. Terrified. It gave him no pleasure, but there it was.
'Besides,' Joseph said, his voice cracked now, and trembling, 'do you call this hollow existence you have left me with a life?'
The question remained unanswered as a wave of indecision crashed over Lucian's face.
'Please, Lucian,' Joseph begged. 'Please. You know what the right thing to do is. This can end now. I don't want revenge, and I forgive you for what you have done. Make the right decision, Lucian, for once in your life.'
His brother was looking down at the floor now, his shoulders slumped. Finally, he moved his head up. His lips were thin; his face was white.
'OK, Joseph,' he whispered, his voice suddenly frail, betraying his age. 'You win. I'll come with you.' And with that, the elderly scientist stepped towards his brother. As he walked past the suitcase he paused, as though contemplating doing something; but a quick glance at Joseph, his finger firmly on the detonating button, clearly persuaded him otherwise.
Joseph looked towards the door. 'You go first,' he said. 'I'll follow.'
Lucian nodded, and stepped towards the door.
What made Lucian do it, Joseph would never find out. Perhaps he thought he could overcome his brother; perhaps the thought of his laboratory being destroyed, with all the research and secrets that it contained, was too much for him. Whatever the reason, as he approached his brother, Lucian hurled himself towards Joseph. They fell heavily to the ground, and Joseph felt his brother's hand clasp firmly over his own, pressing down on his thumb so that he could not release the button.
'Get up!' Lucian hissed as they struggled on the floor. 'Get up and walk to the suitcase. We're going to disengage that detonator.'
Lucian had the upper hand, and with all his might he dragged Joseph up to his feet. 'You're as crazy as you ever were,' he whispered as he did so. The old men staggered slightly as they stood up. Joseph found that the room was spinning, and it was all he could do to keep his attention focused on his button thumb, which Lucian was keeping firmly pressed down. But as they edged awkwardly towards the flight case, their legs became tangled and they tripped. As they fell, Joseph's head cracked hard on the corner of the table.
Instantly he went limp and lost consciousness.
Lucian fell too, pulled to the floor by the dead weight of his unconscious
brother. And as he did so, he lost all sense of co-ordination. His knees buckled, and his hand slipped from over the thumb of his brother.
The detonating button made a small click as it was released, and that click was the last sound Lucian Sinclair ever heard.
Chapter Twenty-one
'We know you're there!' the soldier's voice called up from the ground.
Silence.
'You've got two options. Climb down quietly, or have us shoot you down, like birds.'
Ben and Annie glanced at each other, and each of them shook their head. If the soldiers wanted them, they'd have to come and get them.
'I'm going to count to five,' the soldier shouted. 'If you're not down by then, we open fire. One.'
Ben gripped onto the bark of the tree. It hurt his hand he was holding on so hard.
'Two.'
Annie looked frightened. Ben didn't blame her: he was frightened too.
'Three.'
There was a barely audible click from below as the soldier readied his weapon. Ben bit his lip, desperately trying to think of a plan.
But they never heard him say 'Four', because suddenly there was an immense explosion. It was in the distance, clearly, but it was loud enough to make startled birds rise out of the trees in great flocks, squawking with alarm.
'What was that?' one of the soldiers shouted. Even as he spoke, however, Ben and Annie looked sharply at each other and whispered one word.
'Joseph.'
From their vantage point at the top of the tree, they looked back towards the bunker. A huge black pall of smoke was hovering above it, and the whole place was a scene of devastation. Ben squinted his eyes — he thought he could see figures running away from the area. Somehow he knew, without quite understanding how, that neither Lucian nor Joseph would be one of those figures.
Below them, the soldiers had started to talk heatedly.
'The bunker — it's blown!'
'We have to get away from here. This place is going to be crawling with people before we know it.'
'No,' another voice said harshly. 'Those kids know about Vortex. If they tell anyone…'
'Then what? Vortex has been destroyed. So has the bunker. There's no evidence it ever existed. Let's just get out of here before any of our colleagues ask us what we're doing. We can forget about our money, if that's what's worrying you.'
'I agree,' said a third voice.
'Listen, I'm the ranking officer here. I'm giving you an order.'
'You can give us as many orders as you like. What are you going to do, court martial us? We're getting out of here.'
As he spoke, a mobile phone rang. The ranking officer answered, then listened silently to whoever was at the other end of the phone. 'Get back to barracks,' he instructed. 'Now.' He clicked the phone shut. 'Lucian,' he said to the others. 'He was in the bunker when it blew. He's dead.'
There was a brief pause, then one of the other soldiers spoke. 'We really have got to get out of here then. There are going to be questions, and we don't want to have to answer them.'
A moment later, through the treetops, Ben saw the three soldiers leaving. They ran back to the waiting trucks, and drove off out of sight. Half of him wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. Instead he found his eyes fixed on the cloud of smoke drifting away from the bunker.
'There was a room of explosives down there,' he said numbly. 'Joseph must have found it and…' His voice trailed away. In the past couple of days he had gone from fearing Joseph to respecting him; he couldn't bear to think of the old man meeting his final moments in that hated underground bunker.
'Maybe he wasn't down there,' Annie said quietly. 'Maybe he escaped.'
'Yeah,' Ben replied. 'Maybe.' Deep down he knew the truth.
They fell silent and continued to watch the smoke as it drifted across the wild Spadeadam landscape.
How long they sat there, uncomfortable among the upper branches of the tree, Ben didn't know. He was too busy thinking about Joseph. Had it really only been a couple of days ago that they first saw him, alone and haunting on the bridge of the railway station? He had seemed so mysterious then, mysterious and scary. And that hadn't really changed, Ben realized as he thought about it. All that had changed was that they had started to understand him a bit better. Maybe that was why the old man had seemed to trust them. For fifty years, nobody had taken him seriously; for fifty years his ramblings had been dismissed as the paranoia of a madman.
If only it hadn't ended like this.
'He shouldn't have done that,' Annie interrupted his thoughts.
'What?'
'Joseph. He killed his brother. There must have been another way. There's always another way.' Her voice sounded tearful as she spoke, and Ben couldn't tell if she was angry with the old man, or sad for him.
'Yes,' Ben muttered. 'Yes, I suppose you're right.' But in his heart he wasn't so sure. It was unavoidable, what Joseph had done; and it was true that innocent people could have been hurt in the explosion. But what if Lucian had rebuilt Vortex? What then?
Sometimes, he realized, things were not black and white. They were shades of grey.
And what was it Lucian had said was the motto of Spadeadam? Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. He continued to stare at the scene of destruction. Joseph, he finally understood, had been fighting a war in his mind for most of his life. What they had just witnessed was the final battle; only now was he at peace.
Ben took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to Annie.
'What that soldier just said was right,' he told her. 'It won't be long before this place is crawling with RAF. If they catch us, we're going to have some pretty awkward explaining to do.'
'Like what?' Annie asked.
'Like what we were doing wrecking one of their tanks. Like what we were doing blowing up one of their trucks.' He glanced back towards the bunker. 'Like what we had to do with what's going on over there. Listen, Annie, I don't think we're out of trouble yet. Any evidence to do with Vortex has been destroyed; the people involved will deny all knowledge of it. If we try and tell the authorities, they'll never believe us — they'll think that we're just making it all up, that we're trying to wriggle out of what we've been up to here. We're compromised, Annie. We're in a corner. Even your dad wouldn't be able to get us out of this.'
'But we've done a good thing, Ben. We've… we've saved lives, haven't we?'
'I know, Annie. And I know it bites, but we're just going to have to keep it to ourselves.'
Annie's eyes widened as the truth of Ben's words struck her. 'So what do we do?' she breathed.
'There's only one thing we can do. Try and get out of here without being caught. Nobody knows our names; if we can get back to the youth hostel without being collared, nobody will be any the wiser.'
'Do you think we should go now, before the RAF get here?' But as she spoke, there was another noise in the background that answered their question. They peered out from the foliage to see two helicopters approaching. 'They're the same choppers that chased us earlier,' Annie murmured. They landed at a safe distance from the burning bunker, and as their doors opened, a swarm of armed RAF men jumped out. Suddenly there were trucks everywhere, driving up the road to examine the burning vehicle and erecting a human perimeter around the area of devastation.
'I guess that's a no,' Annie whispered.
'We'll have to wait till dark,' Ben said. 'It's our only chance of sneaking out unseen.'
Annie nodded. 'Makes sense,' she said. 'But we've got a long time to wait.' She re-manoeuvred her body against the harsh bark of the tree. 'And this isn't the place I'd choose to be hanging around.'
The day passed unbearably slowly. Ben and Annie kept watch on the movement of the RAF and the emergency services who were swarming around the site — half to distract them from how uncomfortable they were, half because they wanted to keep tabs on where everyone was before they tried to make their escape.
&nbs
p; Morning turned to afternoon, and afternoon to evening. They tried not to think about how long it had been since they had eaten, and their lips seemed to stick together with thirst. As the light began to fail, Ben grew increasingly anxious, and he could tell that the same was true for Annie. Helicopters and trucks were still all over the place, their powerful lights beaming out into the countryside. Ben had the distinct impression that they were looking for something — or someone. Anyone.
'They probably think it's a terrorist attack,' he whispered.
Annie nodded mutely.
'Still, we can't stay up here for days. I reckon we've got another twenty minutes of light. As soon as it's dark, we go, OK?'
'OK.'
The day might have been slow, but the next twenty minutes passed more quickly than Ben would have liked. Almost before he knew it, it was fully dark and they were preparing to leave. Ben descended first, stepping over the gun that was still lying at the foot of the tree — that was the last time he wanted to see a weapon of any kind for a long time — then waited for Annie to join him. Then, treading carefully in the treacherous dark, they started trekking deeper into the forest, away from the focal point of activity. It seemed strange, walking in the opposite direction from where they had left Joseph, almost as though they were deserting him; but Joseph had chosen his own path, and there was nothing they could do about that now.
They walked blindly in the silence and the dark, their hands held in front of them to stop themselves from bumping into trees. Neither Ben nor Annie had any idea where they were going, and soon they were wildly disorientated.
The sounds were strange in the forest. The sounds of night. Wild animals called to each other, and there was mysterious shuffling all around them. All they could do was ignore it and press on, hoping that they would come out of the forest on the other side and find some way of orientating themselves. They held hands in order to stop themselves from getting separated; more than once, one of them tripped and had to be held up by the other. It was a frightening journey.