The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  An instinct of Carla’s protested. “We should pay.”

  “What? How!”

  “It’s dishonest!”

  “You want to wait up there all night? Or get arrested? What are you waiting for? Go!” said Finn from her hair.

  Taking a deep breath, Carla pocketed the key, unlatched the lock on the guard compartment door and they stepped out into the corridor. A divider door into Car 1 hissed open. The corridors were quiet and air conditioned, but they were also narrow. Passengers moved back and forth to the bathrooms and restaurant car, most of them excited tourists and family groups.

  Just as they stepped into Car 2, the attendant appeared at the far end of the corridor, making his way back towards them, smiling at the passengers, answering questions.

  “Oh my God …” said Carla.

  “Make friends! Make friends with that family! Quick!”

  “Hi!” said Carla to a pair of blond-haired children waiting to use the bathroom. “Do you guys speak English? Do you know if there’s a shower in there?”

  “Sure,” said the older girl in a Swedish accent.

  “We never had a shower on a train before!” explained a boy of eight or so, excited, holding up his phone, which had a Batman case. “I take pictures!”

  His older sister rolled exasperated eyes at Carla, making teen-to-teen contact.

  “We’re here with our parents. Did you like Hong Kong?” the teenage girl asked. The attendant was only a couple of metres away. Carla willed herself not to look at him and literally wrung her hands as she spoke.

  “Hong Kong was great, but we had to run like crazy we were so late, so …”

  “Are you on holiday?”

  “I was playing in a concert!”

  The attendant was now literally squeezing past them. Through the curls of Carla’s hair Finn looked directly into his eyes.

  “The cello. I’m a soloist!”

  “Cool,” said the teenage girl. The little boy took Carla’s picture with a flash of his camera.

  “Are you famous?” asked the boy.

  “Not really, I’m just—”

  “Go!” said Finn, seeing the attendant disappear. “We’ve got to get in before he makes it back to his office!”

  “Oh I think I hear my mom calling me!” Carla said, stepping towards the door of Cabin 2 and inserting the key with a little prayer. The key clicked home. She turned it and shot inside.

  The attendant arrived back at his compartment.

  All was well, no more cabin indicators were flashing, and the passengers were settling down for the night. Hold on … He paused for a second as he hung up his jacket. He could have sworn he locked the door before he left? He checked the room quickly … All the passports and papers were as he’d left them. Good. But still he could have sworn—

  Beep.

  His phone sounded. He checked the text. His daughter had passed!

  He picked up a dragon head the size of a dice from the mess on his desk, a charm a cleaner had found that morning that must have fallen from a bracelet. He blew on it, blessed his luck, then texted back his congratulations.

  Diddly-dee diddly-daa, diddly-dee diddly-daa …

  DAY FOUR 00:39 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  It came in a package delivered by a uniformed courier, one of sixty the driver delivered during the all-night shift from the depot in FEDEX/#41/SHANG. It was unusual in that it was unexpected, after midnight, and addressed to ‘Dr A. Allenby, Long March Suite, Siam Towers’.

  Bo Zhang was furious. Al was a top-secret personage whose whereabouts were meant to be a state secret.

  For Al, for all of them, it was if a great balloon of tension that had been filling for the past thirty hours had been popped.

  Suddenly things were moving very fast. Technicians gathered round the package, instruments sniffing for poisons or explosives. Al examined every minute detail, then opened it.

  It contained a single item. A chess piece. A king. And it came with a note in elegant handwriting that read: “Check. Unless you’d prefer an exchange of queens?”

  “Typically flamboyant,” remarked King as Al screwed it up, suddenly deflated.

  “What does it mean?” asked Bo, alarmed at Allenby’s flagrant disregard for the rules of evidence.

  “It means ‘do nothing,’” said King. “Sit this one out.”

  “He knows we’re on to him,” said Al as he began pacing and thinking.

  “And the ‘exchange of queens’?” asked Bo. Before King could answer –

  “Sir!”

  Three minutes later, Al and an undignified rabble of policemen, uniformed security chiefs, scientists and two flying nano-warriors in X2 Skimmers raced each other down the Nanjing Road to look at the large display window of Yolo Electronics.

  They reached it, panting.

  On a screen in the top right ran a gif of a woman in her sixties sat in a rocking chair, knitting. A thoughtful look upon her face.

  Grandma.

  Al leant against the glass and drank her in – the woman who had brought him into the world, had softened its sharp edges, had defined and ennobled his experience of it. Who loved him.

  “You fool …” he said out loud.

  Not to himself. Not to her. To Kaparis.

  Meanwhile, back at the Roof of The World operational centre, the youngest Chinese technician seconded to the G&T team, Shi Jian, approached Major Stubbs with a new piece of evidence and in a state of mild terror.

  Shi Jian had never addressed a 10mm-high person before.

  “You asked, sir, for any unusual activity? Does this qualify?” he said to the tiny, owlish figure who looked up, sceptical.

  With shaking hands Shi Jian held out a plastic evidence bag containing the charred remains of a nit comb.

  “I doubt it. I doubt most things and it’s an attitude that’s served me well,” said Stubbs.

  He indicated the bag should be placed on the table where he could examine it.

  Shi Jian briefly explained. Apparently, a woman’s hair had caught fire in a factory bathroom. First responders had managed to beat out the flames and an investigation had begun. She had finished her shift and suspected she had lice. She had been pulling a nit comb through her hair when it combusted.

  Stubbs stuck on his glasses and peered at the burnt teeth of the comb. Some of the ‘lice’ had become entombed in the melting plastic.

  Stubbs had seen head lice before.

  These were definitely not head lice.

  “Oh dear,” Stubbs said, looking up at Shi Jian as if it was all his fault. “I suppose you better raise the alarm.”

  As Al led the charge back up to the Roof of the World in one of the express elevators, he explained his excitement to Bo and King. “He’s overplayed his hand!”

  At last he felt free. At last he felt vital. Let battle commence.

  “He hasn’t got Finn. If he had Finn he’d show him to us,” said Al, convincing himself. “That woman would happily die a thousand times before she saw a member of her family – or anybody else’s – come to harm. We nix whatever this is, we find Finn, we hunt Kaparis down, and only then do we look for her … Any other way round she’d never forgive us.”

  “For real,” said Delta, hovering beside him in a Skimmer.

  The elevator doors opened to a space suddenly alive with activity.

  “What’s going on, people?” Al demanded, and he was led to where Stubbs had begun to hold court at the large central banqueting table, Delta and Kelly flying up for a ringside seat.

  In the hubbub, Bo Zhang was taken aside. “Sir, Hong Kong on the line …”

  The news from Hong Kong brought Delta to a crashing halt.

  “Your sister has gone missing.”

  “What do you mean ‘missing’?” she finally grunted at Commander King, having to force the words past her own fear.

  Al had never seen her like this. She was tiny on the table before them, but still somehow terrifying, eyes wide, te
eth gritted, ready to run or kill. Probably kill.

  “She disappeared from a hospital in Hong Kong where she was being examined following a ‘delusional episode’,” King explained.

  Tears filled Delta’s eyes. Her baby sister? All her life she’d been determined Carla should be the safest, most normal girl in America, yet she seemed set on being as odd, inquisitive and unusual as possible. And now this?

  “But it’s not that straightforward. She was frightened but rational,” continued King. “Her ‘delusion’ consisted of hearing voices …”

  “Oh God …” said Delta.

  “Of a ‘tiny person’. An English friend.”

  “What?!” said Al.

  “Apparently a friend of her sister’s who was in some kind of trouble. And who could fly,” King finished.

  “Finn …” Delta could hardly believe it.

  “That’s no delusion,” insisted Al. “He must have found her and freaked her out …”

  “How? How could he possibly have got to Hong Kong?” said Delta.

  Al just shook his head in wonder. “He’s some kid …”

  Delta knew in her bones it was true and took the strangest comfort from the thought that two people she loved so much could have found each other.

  “We can’t confirm anything at present,” reported Bo Zhang. “A lot of what’s coming through is chaotic. CCTV systems across Hong Kong have been targeted and wiped in a cyber-attack. But known Triad members were witnessed making their way into the hospital.”

  “Either Kaparis has got them already, or they’re on the run,” deduced Commander King. “And if they’re on the run, I trust Bo Zhang to find her – to find them both.”

  “We are doing the utmost,” Bo Zhang affirmed. “All Hong Kong is on alert. Your sister’s description is circulating nationwide.”

  Delta looked up at all three of them. “Are you sure you’re doing everything? Absolutely everything? Is there anything, anything else we can possibly do?” she pleaded.

  DAY THREE 18:02 (GMT+1). Langmere Secondary School, Surrey, UK.

  Cars put their lights on. Leaves fell. Kids ran to rugby practice.

  Hudson waited.

  Every other Monday evening during term time Hudson had to miss chess club in order to spend an excruciating hour in the presence of the grinning Hertfordshire Schools psychologist. It was excruciating because he had to remember everything he’d made up over the previous two yearsfn1.

  That evening’s session was going to be much worse than usual because, for once, he actually had a genuine psychological hang-up – one he was forbidden by the Official Secrets Act to discuss.

  “Why wasn’t I kidnapped?” he wanted to ask. He had been left reeling on the streets of Chelsea while Grandma and Finn had been whisked off in the most dramatic fashion.

  “Am I so unimportant?” he wanted to ask. “Why did I get left out?”

  His mother always insisted he was ‘special’, but what did she know. She’d never been put to one side during a major terrorist kidnapping.

  The door to the meeting room opened and before the grinning psychologist could even say a jaunty “Hello mate!” Hudson demanded, “What if my entire life is a series of near misses?”

  The psychologist, for once, looked thrown. His grin dissolved, but before he could say anything, one of the new heavyset ‘school caretakers’ appeared in the doorway (in fact one of the Special Branch Officers now detailed to protect Hudson 24/7) .

  “Call,” said the cop and handed Hudson a mobile.

  “Hello?” said Hudson, bemused.

  “Hudson!”

  “Dr Allenby?”

  “Hudson, get Yo-yo from the house, then get on a fast jet to China. There’s one waiting at Hook Hall now. This is a Save the World situation.”

  “Cool,” said Hudson.

  DAY FOUR 01:43 (Local GMT+8). Hong Kong-Shanghai Sleeper Express.

  They lay in the dark with the lights out, headed north through the night along the eastern fringe of the great Eurasian landmass.

  Finn at 9mm. Carla at 1557mm.

  Through the cabin window the vast, moonlit continent rushed past, lights of settlements flashing white and orange.

  And they talked, like only kids could talk, long after they should have gone to sleep. Like good friends talk – good friends with a dramatic secret. Because boy did they have some catching up to do.

  Finn told Carla everything, from the beginning.

  Because of an infant passion for pink Disney-character outfits, the important women in Carla’s life – her sister and her step-mom (a fighter pilot and a judge, for goodness’ sake) – had, to Carla’s fury and indignation, nicknamed her ‘Princess’ and always regarded her as something of a delicate thing, to be protected from life’s bumps and bruises, and even sometimes from the truth.

  This time, Carla thought, Delta had gone too far.

  She listened in awe, interrupting at times to seek a point of clarification, or timing, or to exclaim, “So that’s what all that was about!” or “So that’s why you were acting so weird …” and most often of all, “I am going to kill my sister! How could she have kept this from me?”

  Finn, at least, told her the truth.

  He told her about the Scarlatti crisis, about Uncle Al’s accelerator and his crazy ideas. He told her about how Kaparis nearly killed them all, but they managed to beat the bad guys and return to civilisation – if not to full-size – and of their secret status as global nano-heroes. Then he told her of the events of the last week or so, and of his decision to steal the Bug for a few hours’ fun – a day that had gone so horribly wrong.

  “God knows what state Al will be in. And Grandma? With Kaparis?”

  Carla didn’t judge Finn. What he’d been through was genuinely mind-blowing and besides – he was her friend.

  “They never should have left you this size for this long,” said Carla, angrily. “They should never have kept it secret, bad things always crawl out of secrets. Adults are so blind. They emotionally decay. None of them feel things as intensely as we do, y’know?”

  “Yeah,” Finn said, not entirely sure what he had agreed with.

  “It’s how I know you’re here now,” she said. “That I’m not crazy. You have to feel that something is true as well as know it.”

  “No, you have to prove it,” argued Finn. “Your senses tell you one thing then you experiment to prove—”

  “We’re not robots, we’re human beings.”

  Finn let it go. They were tired and they’d had versions of this ‘science versus life’ debate many times.

  Their plan was to stay hidden overnight, then in the morning they would get hold of a phone and make their escape. They settled down, Carla in the luxury bunk, Finn in a nest behind her pillow, drifting towards sleep until Carla wondered aloud –

  “You think if we’d had proper parents we’d be more chilled and not end up in these situations?”

  Somehow he knew exactly what she meant by ‘situations’.

  “Maybe. But maybe life wouldn’t be as interesting,” said Finn. “Or terrifying.”

  “I sometimes think my real father will show up – Johnny Depp or someone – during school and everyone will scream, ‘Oh wow! Johnny Depp is the new supply teacher!’ but he wouldn’t be listening. He’d seek me out, walk right across the playground and say, ‘I am Johnny Depp, your real father. Everything’s going to be cool now.’”

  “I Am A Loving Billionaire,” suggested Finn in a God-like voice.

  “I Am A Loving Billionaire – Want Some Ice Cream?”

  They laughed it off.

  “I think I’m better off with my adopted mom than wishing my dad would appear. She’s always working, but she’s mine,” said Carla and unexpectedly felt a lump in her throat at the thought of home.

  “You can wish all you want. They won’t come back. We have to bring ourselves up,” said Finn.

  “You ever go to their graves?” Carla asked.

&nb
sp; “To see my mum? All the time.”

  “What about your father?”

  “There is no grave, as such. There’s a field outside Cambridge we went to once. We had a picnic for him.”

  “Is he scattered there?”

  “No. He disappeared. Whatever experiment he was doing blew up and he was vaporised.”

  “Hold on … he ‘disappeared’? And you never got to meet him?” asked Carla.

  There was silence. Finn could read something in it, could feel it. Carla spoke again. “Do you really believe that he disappeared without a trace? You’re not a kid any more. They should tell you what really happened.”

  “What? What really happened?” Finn was suddenly angry and he didn’t know why.

  “Maybe your dad just couldn’t face having a baby, settling down. Maybe he just quit and walked out. Men do it all the time. It’s life stuff.”

  “No way! It was dark matter! He died in an accident.”

  “He died? Have you ever heard them actually say that?”

  “My mum wouldn’t lie. My uncle wouldn’t lie.”

  “But have they actually said that he ‘died’?”

  “No,” Finn had to admit.

  “Did you seriously never think to ask?” said Carla.

  “No! Because they’re telling the truth. He didn’t walk out. I’d know.”

  “How?”

  “I’d feel it!” he snapped.

  There was a long pause.

  “Sorry. My step-mom is a judge in the Family Court. I doubt too much. You OK?” said Carla.

  “Fine.” Finn sulked, defensive.

  He thought about the silences from Grandma and Al whenever they discussed Ethan, like there never were when they talked about his mum. With his mum there would be gales of laughter, storms of tears. But with his dad there was often just … silence.

  “What’s Dark Matter?” Carla asked.

  “It’s a sort of mystery, a mystery that would prove a lot of things if we could get hold of some, or at least understand it,” answered Finn.

  They let this hang in the air a while.

  “Adults don’t tell us things. But we know,” concluded Carla.

  Diddly-dee diddly-daa, diddly-dee diddly-daa …