Lost Worlds

by Andrew Lane

  ‘So they’re keeping an eye on you.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘Which means that they know you are here, right now.’

  This time, the silence was so heavy that it could have drowned out the sound of church bells.

  The sun weighed down on ‘Rhino’ Gillis like a dull weight, and the air was heavy and humid. Breathing was like trying to suck air through a towel that had been soaked in hot water and then clamped over his face.

  He stood at the bottom of King Street and gazed around casually, feeling the sweat prickling down his back. He made it look as if he was glancing at the shops and the street signs, trying to work out which photographs he wanted to take with the camera slung round his neck, but his surroundings weren’t really what he was interested in. He was actually considering the people around him, working out which of them wanted to kill him.

  King Street was the spine running up the centre of the historic district of Alexandria, a part of Washington DC – the capital city of America, and therefore by definition the most powerful city in the world. The Alexandria district had been one of the first areas settled by travellers, several hundreds of years ago, and many of the buildings were obviously old and in need of restoration. The street ran from the marshy banks of the Potomac River – which cut Washington DC in half – and up a shallow hill all the way to the King Street metro station at the top. It was lined with hotels, restaurants and the kind of tourist shops that sold expensive scented candles, or hats that would be worn for a couple of days on holiday and then lost or forgotten about.

  Rhino could never understand why, out of all the places that settlers could have stopped and set up a capital city in a newly explored country, they had chosen an unhealthy, mosquito-infested swamp that was far too hot in summer and far too cold in winter for humans to endure with any degree of comfort. Why not keep travelling for a while and find a better place? Wouldn’t that have made more sense?

  People puzzled him. They always had. People made strange decisions that couldn’t be explained by logic. That was why he preferred guns, and engines, and things that either worked the way you expected them to or broke down in predictable ways and could be repaired. That was what he was good at. That, and rescuing hostages from captivity.

  Rhino realized that he was standing outside a restaurant. The sign above the door read The Fish Market. He remembered eating there before, several years ago. It had been a celebration dinner after he and some colleagues had completed a tough mission rescuing a bunch of backpackers and aid workers from a criminal group in one of those African countries that seemed to measure its history not in years but in the number of times its government got overthrown and replaced. His colleagues had been retired American Special Forces personnel, which was why Washington had been chosen as the best location for the mission to start and finish. They mostly lived inside the ring road called the Beltway that encircled the city, hoping that the Secret Service, or the FBI, or the CIA would call on them for some Top Secret and highly deniable mission in the Middle East or North Korea, and filling in the time with paid hostage-rescue jobs.

  ‘Why do they call you Rhino?’ one of the men asked him.

  ‘I used to play a lot of rugby when I was younger,’ he answered. At the blank looks, he added: ‘Rugby – it’s like your American football, except without the padding and the constant stopping. Anyway, the team I played on used to joke that I had no real talent for the game – my one skill was to run fast with my head down and barge my way past the opposing players. They said I reminded them of a rhino charging. The name stuck.’

  ‘So what’s your real first name?’ the man pressed.

  ‘You know,’ Rhino replied, ‘it’s been so long since I’ve used it that I just don’t remember.’

  That wasn’t true – his name was on his passport, of course – but he preferred ‘Rhino’. It suited him.

  Now, a few years later but back in the same location, he caught sight of his reflection in a shop window as he scanned the passing crowd for signs of pursuit or danger. He was still under thirty, muscular and without an inch of fat on him. The chinos and the polo shirt he was wearing were suitably anonymous. His sunglasses hid his eyes effectively, and the baseball cap he wore cast a shadow on his face. His lightweight cotton jacket was loose enough to allow him to conceal a weapon either in a shoulder holster or tucked into the back of his chinos, but today he was unarmed. Today was not meant to be a day for problems.

  He didn’t know the people tailing him. He had noticed them out of the corner of his eye when he had left a restaurant called the Charterhouse. He had been eating alone, passing the time before a meeting with a potential client later that afternoon. Emerging from the restaurant, he had seen two people glance at him at the same time then look away. It was a subtle sign, but Rhino had been trained to pick up on subtle signs. He had started to walk away, not obviously looking at the two people but using reflections in car windscreens and shopfronts to keep an eye on them. They had both set out after him within a few moments of him hitting the pavement. Interestingly, they hadn’t looked at each other. That meant they had a certain level of training, enough that they could avoid checking with each other all the time, but not enough to stifle that initial impulse to look at their quarry as soon as he emerged from his hiding place. Professional, but not expert.

  Of course they might have been completely independent of each other, but the chances were slim. It made more sense to assume that he was being targeted by a team.

  But who were they? Rhino quickly ran through the options. He doubted that they were official – he hadn’t broken any American laws that he knew about, and he tried as much as possible to stay off official radar screens. Local criminals, maybe, looking to mug an unwary tourist for his camera? Probably not – they had ignored the various better-dressed people who had left the restaurant before Rhino, but they had registered him and started moving as soon as he came through the doors. They had been waiting specifically for him. No, as uncomfortable as the thought was, Rhino was pretty sure that his followers had something to do with the unofficial hostage-rescue business in which he worked. The kidnap gangs in Africa often had links to gangs in America – finance flowed one way, drugs the other. If he had to guess, then he would say that one of the gangs from which he’d rescued hostages had put out a call to have him found and killed. Him and, he supposed, the other members of his team.

  He started moving up King Street, towards the distant metro station. His ‘friends’ followed. One of them was directly behind him, about ten metres back, while the other was paralleling Rhino’s course on the other side of the road.

  He had to assume they were out to kill him. The hostages that he and his colleagues rescued in Africa and elsewhere were usually being ransomed by their captors. Some governments would quietly pay millions of dollars to get their citizens back alive, and if the governments wouldn’t pay then families or employers would often raise the cash. Hostage-taking was fast becoming the major source of income in some Third World countries. And what Rhino and his colleagues did was stop that payment from reaching the gangs.

  Passing the Marriott hotel on his left, Rhino thought momentarily about dodging inside, dashing across the lobby and losing himself in one of the many branching corridors that would lead into the bowels of the building. There were bound to be back exits and ways down to the underground car park, or he could break into an empty storeroom and wait there until everyone chasing him had given up and gone home. He dismissed the idea straight away. He didn’t know how many people were following him. It might just have been the two that he had seen, or it might have been more. If he had been in charge of a pursuit, he would have already scouted the ground out and worked out all the places where the quarry could make a sudden dash for freedom. Hotel lobbies were an obvious option, and he would have stationed operatives with mobile phones or personal radios in each lobby, just in case.

  That was the problem with pursuit operations – they were
very labour-intensive, if done properly. To follow one man effectively took a team of about fifteen people, minimum.

  He kept moving, hoping that somewhere up ahead he could find an opportunity to break and run.

  The darkened glass frontage of the hotel gave him a perfect opportunity to glance sideways and get a better view of the pair following him. They were both male, and both dressed anonymously: T-shirts with sports-team logos, lightweight waterproof anoraks that could hide a variety of weapons, jeans, trainers. Definitely not FBI, CIA or Secret Service then: they wore suits to everything. One of his pursuers wore a blue baseball cap, while the other had a pair of bright orange trainers that looked so new and so inappropriate that he must have bought them himself, recently, and loved them so much he had to wear them everywhere. Rhino labelled the two of them as Blue and Orange. It helped him keep track of them in his mind.

  Orange was about twenty metres behind Rhino. He was talking, muttering a rapid stream of words. There wasn’t anyone nearby, so he was either chatting to himself or speaking into a hidden microphone. When he raised a hand and pressed something more firmly into his ear, Rhino knew that he was communicating with his controllers – or with Blue – using some kind of miniature microphone and earpiece system.

  Rhino’s gaze flickered around, trying to spot Blue. The man had vanished while Rhino was cataloguing what Orange was doing.

  When something sharp scratched his stomach, Rhino suddenly knew where Blue was.

  ‘Keep walking,’ a voice said in his ear: harsh and low. ‘Otherwise I’ll slice you from navel to ribcage and let you bleed out on the street.’

  ‘How?’ Tara asked. ‘How do they know I’m here?’ Her tone was level, but Gecko could hear the stress in it.

  ‘Oh, various ways,’ Calum replied blithely. ‘The most obvious is your mobile phone. I’m guessing it’s on right now, which means it’s broadcasting your location to the world.’

  ‘Not mine,’ she said. ‘I’m a hacker, remember? I know how to use and abuse anything with a silicon chip in it, and I know how to protect myself. The first thing I did when I got this phone was to deactivate any apps that sent my location, or any other information about me, to anyone else.’

  ‘But your mobile-phone company can still track which cell you’re in, and an expert can use other techniques to tell roughly where you are in that cell – like, which cell you were in before. If you move from cell A to cell B, then they know you’re on the A side of cell B.’ Calum thought for a moment. ‘What about Wi-Fi? Does your phone automatically try to link into any Wi-Fi network it can find?’

  Tara nodded. ‘I tend to do a lot of work in coffee shops and the like. Saves 3G roaming charges if I can piggyback on any local networks. I’m a poor student – I need to save all the money I can.’

  Calum nodded decisively. ‘Then anything you email will show up as being sent from my IP address. Just send them a message saying that you’ve downloaded the Lost Worlds website, and asking them what they want you to do with the data.’ Tara looked at him for a long moment, then at Gecko. Her expression didn’t change, but she seemed to soften suddenly. ‘I guess . . .’ she said. She reached inside her jacket and took out her mobile phone. Her fingers danced across the keypad. ‘OK, it’s done. I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  Calum pushed himself back across the room towards his impressive computer desk. As his fingers tapped the keyboard of his multi-screen array, Tara asked Gecko: ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘Search me,’ Gecko said.

  ‘Right,’ Calum said, pushing himself back across the room. This time he was holding a wireless keyboard. ‘Now we wait.’

  ‘For how long?’ Tara asked.

  ‘Probably a matter of seconds.’

  He was right. Tara’s phone pinged to alert her to the arrival of a new email. She quickly opened it up.

  The ten screens over Calum’s computer desk all suddenly moved on their spidery support arms. They twisted and joined up, edge to edge, to form a supersized rectangular array that was flat-on to the three of them across the room. The screens flickered, and an email browser program appeared, with the newly arrived message displayed clearly so they could read it.

  Your instructions were clear, the message said. You were supposed to hack the website, not infiltrate the building. We have other, more skilled, operatives for that kind of operation.

  Tara glanced at Calum. ‘Clever trick,’ she said. ‘You realize that’s a private message?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ he murmured. ‘By all means let’s have a conversation about privacy and security – but not right now, OK?’ His fingers typed something into the keyboard without looking at it. ‘Ask them how they want the files you stole delivered.’

  She typed the message into her phone.

  Moments later: The problem is that we can’t trust anything you send us now. You appear to have defected to the enemy camp. Our arrangement is null and void.

  Tara’s face fell. ‘What have you done? They’re going to report me to the police!’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Calum replied calmly. ‘They pressurized you into committing a criminal act. They can’t shop you to the police for hacking their website without you telling everyone that they wanted you to hack my website. Both sides now have something to hold over the other.’

  ‘I should have worked that out myself,’ Tara chided.

  The screens flashed, and a new message appeared. Your new friend will have explained by now that we cannot hurt you without you causing us some minor and temporary embarrassment. Pursuing you is not worth the trouble – not yet. We will, however, meet again, and when that happens we will determine an appropriate form of punishment for your betrayal. We have long memories.

  The words seemed to echo in the silence of the room like a struck bell. Tara glanced from Calum to Gecko and back. ‘That’s a bad thing, right?’ she said in a small voice.

  CHAPTER

  five

  As the knife blade scratched his skin, Rhino Gillis cursed silently and clenched his fists. He had been looking so hard at Orange that Blue had managed to catch up without Rhino seeing him. He wouldn’t normally fall for something like that. Was he getting old and out of practice, or was he just jet-lagged?

  He glanced down at his stomach. A hand was pressing a small, wickedly curved knife against him. It had already sliced through his shirt, and he could feel a trickle of warm blood from where the blade touched his skin.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked. He tried turning his head to look at the man with the knife, but the man pressed the knife harder into his stomach and muttered, ‘Don’t try to look at me. Just keep moving forward. There’s a van at the next intersection: we’re all going to get inside it nice and simply.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then,’ Blue said, with an amused tone in his voice, ‘there’re some people that want to have a talk with you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care.’

  ‘A movement in the corner of his eye jerked Rhino’s attention to the left. Orange had just come alongside the two of them.

  ‘Nice trainers,’ Rhino said.

  Orange scowled at him. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘No talking,’ Blue snapped.

  ‘But he’s makin’ smart-mouthed comments ’bout mah trainers!’

  Blue growled deep under his breath. ‘Don’t matter what he says about those stupid trainers of yours. He ain’t gonna be in a position to mouth off about anything soon.’

  ‘Look, is this about that parking ticket I got last week?’ Rhino asked mildly, trying to keep the conversation going while he thought of ways to escape.

  ‘Do we look like traffic wardens?’ Orange asked.

  ‘Well, you’re certainly not the fashion police,’ Rhino responded drily. ‘Not with trainers that colour.’

  He could feel Orange bristling with righteous indignation. He was right – the man
was defensive about his new acquisition. Other people were probably making jokes – people in his gang. That gave Rhino a slight edge – and he had to be very precise and quick about exploiting it, otherwise he would end up in the van. And once he was in the van his chances of escape would be considerably smaller than they were now.

  ‘You got some kind of death wish?’ Orange snarled. Rhino could see that he was staring directly ahead and scowling. He wasn’t thinking about Rhino, or his mission. He was obsessively brooding over the insult to his fashion sense.

  Rhino noticed two women up ahead, talking. They were wearing expensive clothes and sunglasses, and they were both holding tiny poodles in their arms.

  Rhino stopped walking abruptly. The knife pulled away from his stomach as Blue moved forward. Blue caught himself quickly, realized what was happening and turned towards Rhino. His knife hand automatically reached out, trying to re-establish contact with Rhino’s skin.

  Rhino grabbed Blue’s wrist and jerked it sideways, towards Orange.

  The knife was already moving in that direction, thanks to Blue’s automatic response to Rhino’s dead stop. All Rhino had to do was help the knife on, and aim it.

  At Orange’s right arm.

  Orange suddenly found his colleague’s knife embedded in his forearm. He stared at it in disbelief. Blood bloomed on the sleeve of his green anorak. ‘What the . . . ?’

  While Orange and Blue were distracted, Rhino stepped towards the two chatting women and grabbed the poodle from the arms of the nearest one.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Sudden emergency.’

  The poodle squirmed in his hands, snarling. Both women turned to stare at him, their mouths twin ‘O’s of surprise.

  Blue realized what Rhino was doing and reached for him with a claw-like hand. So Rhino threw the poodle into the man’s face.

  The dog twisted in mid-air. Blue brought his arms up automatically to intercept it, and it sank its teeth into his hand. He cried out and tried to push the animal away, but it was locked on to his palm and wouldn’t let go. Rhino could hear it growling, deep in its throat.