by John Wilson
JOHN WILSON
BROKEN
ARROW
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2014 John Wilson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wilson, John (John Alexander), 1951-, author
Broken arrow / John Wilson.
(The seven sequels)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-0540-8 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0541-5 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-4598-0542-2 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8595.I5834B76 2014 jc813’.54 c2014-901543-7
c2014-901544-5
First published in the United States, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935383
Summary: Steve’s romantic trip to Spain is interrupted when he undertakes a mission to investigate what part his grandfather played in a bombing off the coast of Spain.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Design by Chantal Gabriell
Cover photography by Getty Images, iStock, Dreamstime and CG Textures
Author photo by Katherine Gordon
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Printed and bound in Canada.
17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1
For Jen, my traveling companion.
TABLE OF CONTENT
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
EXTRAS
TO SEE ALL OF THE COUSINS’ TRAVELS CHECK OUT THIS ONLINE MAP.
TOO SEE HOW ALL OF THE COUSINS ARE CONNECTED, CHECK OUT THIS FAMILY TREE.
PROLOGUE
The man sat on a flat rock on a barren hillside in southern Spain, a pair of high-powered binoculars on his lap. It was much warmer than any January day in the man’s home country, and the glaringly bright sun almost blinded him as he stared out over the blue Mediterranean Sea.
In the clear sky above, a white jet stream showed where a large plane was flying in wide, lazy circles. The man ignored it and kept his eyes fixed to the west. At last, he spotted something and raised the binoculars. Another plane leaped into focus. The man could see that it was a big four-engine jet with long, swept-back wings. The line of white cloud it painted across the sky was heading straight toward him.
Lowering the binoculars, the man returned his gaze to the first plane. It had stopped circling and was flying in a gentle arc that would bring it onto the same course as the new arrival. As the man watched, the two jet streams slowly converged. He raised the binoculars once more. The two planes were very close now, the second behind and slightly below the first.
All at once the first plane lurched down toward the second plane. A blinding flash made the man cry out and tear the binoculars from his eyes. He blinked rapidly until the world came back into focus, and then he looked up. Where the planes had been there was only a fading orange fireball. Burning pieces of wreckage fell to earth, trailing long plumes of dark smoke.
The man put the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the sky. He recognized the tail of one plane, an engine and a large section of wing spiraling away from the explosion. Then he saw the orange-and-white parachute with a body hanging below it. Other parachutes blossomed across the sky.
The man placed the binoculars back on his lap. Everything seemed to be happening in eerily silent slow motion. With the naked eye, he could only see the largest pieces of debris—the tail, the section of wing—but he knew there must be a lot more. Finally, a deep, booming sound reached him. He focused on the parachutes, not the few carrying men, but two larger ones. Each had a long silver container suspended below. One was coming down fast, the parachute only partly open. The other was higher and drifting out over the sea.
The man watched the drifting parachute, surprised that it was traveling so far while everything else was coming down more vertically. Then the debris began to land around him. Most of the pieces were small; the larger bits of plane and the parachutes were landing around the village on the plain below him, but one large piece crashed into the hillside nearby.
When things stopped falling from the sky, the man went in search of the large object. It didn’t take him long to find it lying at the end of a ragged scar on the hillside. It was round and shiny and slightly larger than a soccer ball. Like a soccer ball, its surface was divided into interlocking hexagons. One side of the sphere was badly dented. The man stood for a long time staring down at the object, then stepped forward and attempted to lift it. It was extremely heavy, but by a combination of dragging and rolling, the man worked his way back around the hillside to the rock from which he had watched the drama.
Many years before, part of the nearby hillside had slumped, forming a rocky scar that was so overgrown it was hard to see unless you knew what you were looking for. A couple of days before, an old shepherd had shown the man the scar and told him a local legend about the ghosts of long-dead Roman soldiers coming out of a hole in the hillside and stealing sheep. The shepherd had scoffed at the tale, calling it a “fairy tale to scare children,” but he had found a hole that unwary sheep could fall into and blocked it with a large rock.
The man moved to the side of the scar and located a rock that looked less weathered than the others. With much effort, he worked the rock loose and shoved it to one side. A cool draft of air from the dark hole chilled the man’s sweat-stained face. “Ghosts,” he said under his breath and laughed. As soon as his heart rate slowed, the man mopped the cooling sweat off his forehead and set to work hauling the piece of debris up the slope and into the hole. A final push saw the round object disappear into the dark. The man listened as it rolled away. When there was only silence, he wrestled the rock back into place. He scattered some dirt to make it look as if the rock had never moved, then sat down to recover his breath.
When he felt better, the man went back to where he had found the object and kicked dirt and small rocks about to hide the mark where it had landed. He took a last look around and then hiked back over the hill to the next valley, where he had parked his small car on a disused dirt track. He glanced at his watch. The unexpected events of the morning had delayed him, and it was now midafternoon. He would have to hurry. He had a lot to do.
ONE
“With hedge-fund portfolio management, one has to keep up with evolving market strategies. It’s not a simple matter of being aware of arbitrage mechanics and leveraging assets using derivatives—it’s much more complex than that.”
I think that’s what the guy in the next seat sa
id, although mostly it sounded like “blah, blah, blah, blah.” I gazed out the plane window, wishing I could open it, crawl out and drop onto the snow-covered mountains below. At least that would be a quick end. Listening to this guy was death by boredom, one meaningless sentence at a time. Since he couldn’t use his cell phone on the short flight from London to Barcelona, he had assumed that I would be riveted by his explanations of how he made vast amounts of money by, as far as I could tell, doing no work.
My mind drifted back to the last time I’d looked down on the Pyrenees. That had been in the summer; now it was Christmas Eve—winter and the thick snow made the mountain peaks look like the stiff icing that Mom put on the Christmas cake. Thoughts of Mom made me feel guilty about not being with family at Christmas, but I got over it fast.
Mom had been upset back in October when I had told her I’d been invited to spend Christmas with Laia and her family in Spain, but two things had happened to distract her. A week after I had announced my plans, I came home from school one afternoon and found Mom and her new friend Rod in the backyard, each balancing on one leg and waving their arms about. Mom had met Rod in September at tai chi classes. I hadn’t paid much attention at first; I was too busy thinking about Laia and worrying about getting through the first semester of grade twelve, but this was beginning to look serious.
“What are they doing?” I asked my twin brother, DJ, as we stood staring out the kitchen window.
“I think it’s Carry Tiger and Return to Mountain.”
“What?” I asked, looking at him.
DJ shrugged. “Or it might be Step Back and Repulse Monkey. I’m not too sure about all the posture names.”
“No. I mean, what’s he doing here?”
“Sorry,” DJ said with a grin. “I thought you recognized tai chi.”
“Were you born annoying, bro” I asked, “or did you have to practice?” My relationship with DJ had changed since our adventures last summer. His struggle up Kilimanjaro hadn’t taught him humility, but it had given him a sense of life being more difficult than he had assumed it to be. “What do you think about the relationship between Mom and Rod?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “She seems happier than she’s been since Grandpa died, but…” His voice trailed off.
“Yeah,” I agreed as Mom and Rod, in perfect unison, turned, drew their right feet across the grass and swept their arms wide.
“Stork Spreads Wings,” DJ said.
“But?” I pushed, ignoring the nugget of information about the tai chi move.
I stared out the window, thinking two things: how silly Mom and Rod looked, and how happy Mom looked.
“You know Mom and all the aunts are planning a Caribbean cruise over Christmas?” DJ said.
It took me a moment to realize he’d moved on from Rod and tai chi. “When did this happen?” I asked in shock.
“Couple of days ago.”
“And I was going to find out about it when?”
DJ shrugged. “I’ve been busy. So has Mom.”
“You could have texted me,” I said. DJ was better after Kilimanjaro, but he was still the overcontrolling big brother, even though he was older by only fifteen minutes. “Looks like you’re going to have a lonely Christmas with Mom and me both away.”
“Some of the cousins are talking about getting together at the cottage over the Christmas holidays.”
“Again, bro. When was I going to be informed?”
Once more, DJ shrugged. “You’re not going to be here. We thought it would be good to get together and tell stories about Grandpa and our adventures in the summer.”
“We?”
“Okay, it was my idea, but most of them seem keen on it. It even looks like Bunny might be out of juvie over Christmas. Too bad you can’t be there, little brother.”
There it was again, the annoying big brother/little brother thing. “You know I’ve got my flights booked already,” I said. “Besides, let me think about this—ten days in sunny Spain with a beautiful girl versus a few days freezing and knee-deep in snow with you guys. It’s a tough decision, bro.”
“I just think Grandpa would have liked us all to get together. He was really into family.”
“He was,” I agreed, “but you’ve got to let go, DJ. Grandfather gave us different tasks in his will because he knew we were all different and that we needed to go our own ways—even if it didn’t all work out the way he planned,” I said, thinking of Bunny’s experience, which had led to jail time. “But my path leads to Spain this Christmas. So have fun at the cottage and text me if anything exciting happens, like it stops snowing.”
I’d probably been a bit harsh with DJ, but the family remark annoyed me. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only cousin who wouldn’t be at the cabin—Rennie was going to be on vacation in South America—but as Christmas approached, I felt a twinge of regret at missing the get-together. I got on well with my cousins, and we did have a lot in common. Besides, all the talk about the trip—how they were going to get up to the cottage in winter, what food to take, what they would do while they were there—made it real and made me feel left out. It sounded like it might actually be fun. Then I thought of Laia waiting for me at the Barcelona airport, and all my regrets vanished.
The time Laia and I had spent together discovering what Grandfather had done in 1938 had been special, but the two weeks after that had been amazing. We had traveled up and down the coast on our scooters, walking along beaches, swimming and hanging out in old villages away from the tourist crowds. We had even gone to Lloret de Mar to visit Elsie and Edna, the holidaymakers I had met on the plane out, and spent the evening in the disco in the Hotel Miramar. It had been a fun night, being entertained by a planeload of happy tourists from Wigan, but it was a relief the next day to head off along the rugged coast.
I had spent the last couple of days before my flight home back in Barcelona, where I had met Laia’s mother and heard stories about her great-grandmother, Maria, and the time when she had known Grandfather. It was the best holiday I had ever had, and I was thrilled when Laia texted me and said her mother had suggested I come for Christmas. She proposed that I spend Christmas in Barcelona and then we could go down to Seville to visit her father. I thought about it for all of five or ten seconds before I was online looking for cheap flights. I still had the thousand dollars I had saved to travel to Europe this summer, a couple of hundred from a few weeks’ work and almost another thousand from the money Grandfather had left me.
“Investment banking’s very interesting.” I glanced at the guy beside me, who was still talking. Apparently, nothing he said required a response from me. I guessed he was in his fifties or sixties, but it was hard to tell, and he certainly talked as if he were much younger. He could also probably afford the best in skin care. Even jammed into a tourist seat on a cramped plane, he still looked like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad—not a crease in his suit or a hair out of place and a toothy smile that almost blinded me. His suit probably cost as much as I was paying for this flight. I wondered why, if he was so successful, he wasn’t traveling in business class.
My mind began to wander. Maybe this guy wasn’t into hedges or whatever. Maybe his perfect looks were a cover. Perhaps he worked for the CIA or MI6 or the Russian secret service, whatever it was called these days. What better fake identity than someone who was completely self-involved and unbearably boring? No one would suspect he was really a superspy—a James Bond out to save the world from international terrorists.
I smiled at my meandering thoughts. My companion misread it. “So you see what opportunities there are for someone like yourself to get in on the ground floor of this business. I could put some good deals your way. No pressure.” He handed me a crisp embossed business card. “Name’s Chad.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said, stuffing the card into my pants pocket. “I’ll think about it.”
“Just give me a call when you make up your mind. Cell phone’s always on. Spending
all your holiday in Barcelona?”
“At first. I’m meeting a friend there and then going down to Seville after Christmas,” I said, feeling strangely uncomfortable giving this guy any information about myself. “How about you?” I added before he could ask another question. “You staying in Barcelona?”
“I travel all over,” he said vaguely. “Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Granada this trip. You know what business is like.”
I didn’t, but I nodded as the plane touched down. “What kind of business do you do over Christmas?” I asked.
“This and that. Import/export. I’ll be doing a bit of real-estate work this trip. The markets never sleep. Seville’s a great town. You been there before?” I shook my head. “You going to the beach as well?” I shrugged, although Laia and I were planning on a few days at the coast. “Plenty of nice beaches along the south coast. Good places to pick up girls.” Chad winked broadly at me. He must have caught my expression because he hurriedly added, “Or maybe the friend you’re meeting in Barcelona is your girlfriend?” I nodded again. “Well,” Chad went on as we approached the terminal building, “the best of luck to you. And I mean it: give me a call.”
“Sure,” I said distractedly. I was looking out the window at the terminal building. Laia was waiting for me in there. This was going to be the best Christmas ever.
TWO
I ran from the plane all the way through the airport to the immigration lineup, not just to get away from Chad, but because I knew every step brought me closer to Laia.
The immigration officer scanned my passport, checked that I looked like my photograph, wished me Bon Nadal (which I knew from my attempts to learn Laia’s language was Catalan for Merry Christmas) and waved me through. I smiled at Chad at the next counter—he seemed to be having some sort of difficulty with his passport. He gave me a smile and a thumbs-up. I hurried through to collect my bag.