The last two bats squeaked as he stroked them, coaxing them to explore the furthest crannies of the massive mines.
Max named them Jack and Jill. Each wore a camera.
As he returned to the start of the ventilator shaft for the last time, his shoulders relaxed, his breath deepened and his tension eased.
What he needed next was a storm to cover his tracks during the dash back to the reindeer herd and his link to Sofia.
It came a few minutes later.
*
Jill was a bat with a mission. Her ambition to get back to her home in Italy’s Blue Grotto caves where she’d been wrestled from her brood, who were relying on her for food. And Jack could sense her determination.
So, when Jill leapt out of the ventilator shaft into an abyss, Jack followed her into the void. A void so big, for their sightless souls, it was unimaginable.
Behind them, forty-eight other bats were clinging to the walls nearest to the ventilator exits. In time, every one would follow Jack and Jill but for now they were alone in a space bigger and as scary to them as the Southern Atlantic ocean must be to an arctic tern on its first migration from the Arctic breeding grounds to the Antarctic seas.
Jack and Jill flew over a seemingly endless line of dirt-caked men queuing for their turn with a woman. Ten short minutes in a month when they could forget the infinite misery that was their life and lose themselves in passion, reviving memories of years gone by. And when the short time was over, their brief minutes of passion rekindled their desire for more. It was the carrot that kept them digging, dragging and dropping rocks into barrows drawn by others in their team.
All the while Jack and Jill’s mouths snapped open and shut as they gorged on a generous feast of bugs that thrived in the dank, dark caves. A swarm of moths tempted them through a gap, which separated one cave from another, one world from another.
The world they left was a world of work.
Slavemen digging, lifting, chucking.
Slavemen eating, sleeping, fucking.
Slavemen dying.
Everyone who reached the world for work eventually died in the mines.
The alternatives, earning their freedom or escaping, would have let the cat out of that bag — providing first-hand information about what was going on there.
That was out of the question.
Fifty slaves, mostly men, some women died every week.
And just as in Stalin’s gulags replacing them demanded a constant re-supply. Feeding that demand was the new world Jack and Jill had just discovered.
A world of waiting.
Waiting their turn to dig, lift, chuck, eat, fuck and sleep.
And it was into this desperate waiting world that Jack and Jill flew.
They loved it. Bugs galore.
For men and women, hundreds of them, the World of Waiting was where they metamorphosed from humans to slaves.
A third never made it to the world of work. They died before they got there. Died before they ‘escaped’ would be a better expression, because the World of Waiting was hell incarnate.
It was dominated, as all real hells are, by a hierarchy of human beings whose leaders were insane.
Jack and Jill darted into a cave that had been hewn into a jagged two-mile long tunnel.
Here the slaves were forced to move on hands and knees. But for most of the time they lay on the ground, aching and waiting. Lying on the rock floor as tightly packed as the living cargo on an eighteenth century slave ship, or chickens in a twenty-first century battery.
Food, a flowing protein porridge, was eaten with hands out of a trough that resembled an open sewer, which passed over them. Standing, or bending when the ceiling height was too low, was their only form of exercise.
Standing to eat, crouching to crap, lying to sleep and wait. The strongest got the most space, the weakest the least as they shuffled inch by inch down the waiting mile, slowly nearing the World of Work.
A paradise when compared to where they were.
Jack and Jill fed on the bugs that in turn fed off the slaves.
There were no guards, no need. In their place a brutal extension of Darwin’s theory. Only the fittest survived; the rest were just not needed.
There were too many anyway.
Mostly the wretched poor from the overcrowded cities who were tempted by promises of work, or the even more wretched poor in the countryside, sold by the relatives who rationalised the promise of a better world in return for cash. People who were desperate when their terrible voyage started, looked back to those days as if they were paradise. Thousands of wretched people driven insane by desperation, ravished or raped by those who were stronger.
But some of them found themselves here for very different reasons.
And one of those cupped her hands and seized Jill.
And drew her down.
And peered into her eyes.
And into the tiny camera lens.
And then trapped her inside the rags that were her clothes.
And Jack too.
Two, beating, bats’ hearts now joined with Joy’s, beating hope and life back into her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Independent (Ireland)
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/irish-travellers-were-ready-to-ship-slaves-abroad-2874327.html
Précis:
More than 100 people were believed to have been held prisoner across the country as part of a slavery network targeting homeless and vulnerable men.
The starving men found at an Irish travellers' camp were about to be trafficked to Scandinavia, police believe, as new photographs were issued showing the squalid conditions in which they were kept.
The alleged slaves, many of them British, were forced to carry out manual work and threatened with violence if they fled. They were locked up in filthy caravans and horseboxes at the Green Acres caravan site in Leighton Buzzard, Beds.
UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund
http://www.unfpa.org/gender/violence1.htm
Précis:
Although slavery has been formally abolished from the world, the trade in human misery continues.
Rough estimates suggest that between 700,000 and 2 million women are trafficked across international borders annually. Adding domestic trafficking would bring the total much higher, to perhaps 4 million persons per year.
Some victims are lured into subjugation by advertisements for good jobs. Others are sold into service by a relative, acquaintance or family friend. Traffickers target poor communities, and may show up during a drought or before the harvest, when food is scarce, to persuade poor families to sell their daughters for small amounts of money.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Joy was lucky. If Jean-Pierre Durand had been in the mines he would have sensed her grasp for life and squeezed it out of her.
But Durand was 30,000 feet up in the air staring out of the first class cabin window of an Emirate’s Boeing 777, on his way from New York to Dubai. He was preoccupied and high on his worry list was Dr Tom Palfrey who had recently trumped him in battle. That was unusual, disturbing and unacceptable.
Durand found most of those he’d ever worked with ended up with ‘unacceptable’, stamped in red across their virtual file in the massive database of his mind. And now ‘unacceptable’ was stamped on his own virtual file. He smiled inwardly. He was human, of course he lost sometimes, if you didn’t, you weren’t sailing close enough to the wind.
But with others ‘unacceptable’ invariably triggered one last chance. And when they failed, down they fell into the human pit of failures.
That’s where Joy had gone. He’d encouraged her to spy. Sensed her double crossing, closing his mind from hers so that he had no control over, or even, contact with her. And then she opened up to him again and, using the extraordinary powers of his telepathic mind and hers, he had her thrown into the World of the Waiting. Now her powers had dimmed to almost nothing.
A pity, because her grasp of telepathy was as enticing as
her body.
Durand’s wandering mind stopped for a moment, as it had whenever he and Joy had sex. A brief crescendo of release from the journey he had embarked upon.
Joy was special. Maybe he should have given her another chance.
But why?
Joy was just a plaything. What Durand desired more than anything was the worthy adversary that he’d never found.
He looked around at his fellow, First Class passengers, they all oozed success. Was there one, just one who could challenge him, one, just one as powerful as he?
An image of Dame Marion Palfrey leapt into it into his mind. She too exuded authority, was a stickler for detail, but was no match for him. Nor was Sofia Forli, although she fought him well. But young Palfrey?
There was something about Doctor Tom Palfrey, grandson of the legendary Dr Stanislaus Palfrey, founder of Z5, that Durand couldn’t fathom.
He’d emerged from shocking war wounds in Afghanistan to become an even stronger force. His mother shrank from his breathless risk-taking, but Sofia Forli encouraged it realising that Doc was strangely indefatigable, but was he invincible?
Z5 was one of the few forces in the world that Durand had been careful not to tangle with until the time was right.
Had that time come? Was Doc Palfrey squaring up to becoming a worthy successor to his mother and grandfather? A worthy adversary for Durand? Durand looked forward to a one-to-one with Doc Palfrey — eye-to-eye, face-to-face and mind-to-mind.
*
Viktor Marcel Schobinger wanted a one-to-one, with Durand. Or did he?
Slumped in his favourite armchair in his study, Schobinger’s head dropped to his chest, his eyes closed and he dozed, conjuring himself up as a streetwise cat playing with a wily leopard in a zoo we call the world.
The cat, the revolving chairman of the League of Enlightenment, a believer in the powers of the board and a major, and very exposed, benefactor.
The leopard, former Commander of a nuclear submarine, whose position could have involved blowing up the world, now the de facto CEO of the League of Enlightenment, who had so little respect for the meetings of the board, he didn’t even bother to attend.
The leopard got away with this total disrespect because of the fear he instilled, his can-do capabilities and because he took no salary. Instead he had negotiated generous share options and took excessive advantage of the expense account, which by-passed the need for an agreed budget.
Those expenses were so high that every chair had demanded the leopard’s presence at board meetings. And like every chair before him the cat had failed to get the leopard to turn up.
The cat’s great strength was that he never took no for an answer and unlike his predecessors he ignored the fear and ratcheted up the ante with the help of a lawyer who thought of clauses in contracts as little fingers that can be painfully bent.
Then the leopard’s ruthless call. The cat’s kitten has been killed. A tragic accident. Perhaps the board meeting should be postponed to help the cat mourn?
And then the text and call from the cat’s kitten, which proved she was alive. The Manhattan cat was not a fool and he felt he was being fooled.
And then a kidnapping.
The Manhattan street cat was apoplectic with rage. The board, the whole board, and every shareholder were summoned to a mandated emergency meeting.
The cat’s lawyer unearthed a vicious ‘little finger’ clause and the city cat informed the wily leopard that if he failed to attend he would forfeit all his shares and repay all the expenses.
And so the leopard was on his way to a board meeting in Dubai.
And the cat was shivering with terror.
Schobinger jumped awake as his study door burst open.
“My God, Father!”
*
Just eight hours earlier Ted had led the Jaguar FX through the security gates at Teterboro Airport. The Gulfstream V was bristling to go and moments later Doc, Benadir and I were in the air. Much to my surprise Doc had taken the pilot’s seat for take off.
Not just Doc but Captain Tom Palfrey, no less.
“Always good to get some hours in,” he’d commented, his face tense with concentration.
“And it gives us a chance to get some sleep,” retorted Benadir. “Rather than have him throwing more questions at you.”
Immediately after take off, I was asleep.
Doc had asked a lot of questions. Mostly about Father.
My vivacious father who had taken Mum’s death so badly.
He had celebrated his fiftieth birthday a year ago and still looked thirty. Well, thirty-nine.
Benadir only asked about things I’d know. Anything in the public arena she knew already.
Where Father and Mum had met. When they’d married. Where’d they gone on honeymoon? What did I get for my seventh birthday? My tenth Christmas. Our first family holiday? Father’s favourite home-cooked meal.
What Doc wanted to know from me were all those things that only friends and family might know. And as much as I could recount that only Mum and I would know.
Here are the headlines of what I told Doc.
Father spoke fluent English, German, Italian and French. Passable Slav and Greek.
He was a touch typist before the advent of the computer.
A Mac nut. Steve Jobs had been his hero. Well, one of them.
He read everything he could lay his hands on, had a row of science fiction books and quoted Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
But he’d also quote Plato and Churchill.
Signed everything with a fountain pen. Yes, he looked young but was a true traditionalist in so many ways.
He disdained pumping in gyms too, Father kept flexible with yoga. In winter he skied, he was a sensational down hill skier. He was Swiss but disdained snowboards, which I love. In summer he kayaked daily on the lake where he enjoyed music and audio books on his iPod.
Father piloted his Piper Cub like a bird flies. “If you want to fly just forget all the instructions. Watch a bird and you’ll get it.” But he needed specs and was barred from military flying.
And Father ate elegantly. Knife and fork the European way. But his favourite style of cuisine was New Hampshire food. Mum’s influence. He ate more fish than meat and preferred Californian wine to French.
He dressed like a cross between a Bostonian and a Swiss. Brown and tweedy, not dark blue, black and grey.
And he dressed so young, which is why I screamed “My God, Father!”
He’d aged another ten years, just like when Mum had died.
When we arrived in Geneva I don’t think any one at Z5 knew exactly how Doc would infiltrate himself into the League of Enlightenment and thus be present at the emergency meeting its members in Dubai. Z5 policy, I was discovering, was to confirm a plan at the last moment because so often events changed everything.
“Lucille!” Father was clearly surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?”
“Where else should I be? You look as if you’ve been to hell and back.”
“And you have been.”
Father struggled up from his armchair and grabbed at the mantelpiece to steady himself. I rushed towards him arms outstretched, and we hugged and then stood back to get a good look at each other.
Father’s head glistened with sweat; his face had lost all its colour. He looked grey and scared.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’re ill?” I asked and he feigned a look of surprise, but I ploughed on because I was so shocked at his appearance. “You look terrible.”
But Father was no longer listening. His attention had moved to Doc and Benadir and I started to introduce them. At the mention of Z5, I could feel Father tense and then his legs buckled.
“Father?”
“You shouldn’t have brought them here.” And with that his face contorted, he collapsed on floor and started to hyperventilate.
In the ambulance his condition deteriorated.
The paramedic was
working furiously the ambulance siren screeched into action and I was beside myself with fear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Father had been rushed into intensive care and I had been banned from entry. Doc and Benadir reached the Clinique des Grangettes half an hour after me.
Benadir embraced me. “Doc’s staying here. We’re going to the private ward.”
“What private ward?”
“The one your father was booked into. They’ll bring him there soon.”
We were escorted down the corridor and the ward resembled a five-star hotel suite. Benadir knew the best way to take advantage of it. The bar held a 30-year-old Highland Park whisky and I knocked back a generous measure.
“I’ll run the bath.”
“I don’t need a bath!”
“See how you feel in a minute”
And when the wonderful, single malt had taken effect. I slipped beneath the soapy surface of the tub.
After I’d dressed, Doc and two doctors arrived to tell me what I knew, that Father had died of a heart attack.
I had to prepare for a life without Father. Something that, not an hour ago, I could not have conceived.
Father had joined Mum. Dead to me, dead to the staff at Clinique des Grangettes, but not dead as far as the outside world was concerned, not yet.
Everyone who knew he was dead — doctors, nursing staff, ambulance staff, porters — was summoned to the private ward for an extraordinary meeting. The door was locked and those present were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. They all complied.
Dame Marion appeared on the flat TV screen. She took charge, grasping a difficult situation and turning it around.
When the meeting started, my father was definitely dead. However Marion, with her inherent authority, quietly insisted that Z5 needed to buy time. And that could only be done by persuading the League of Enlightenment that their Chair was still alive.
And so less than an hour after Father had died, he lived.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 13