Lost Worlds

by Andrew Lane

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently ‘give it a go.’

  Rhino’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

  He was sitting in the village hall with a map spread out on the table in front of him. Shota Gigauri and two of the locals were standing around the table, also looking at the map. The villagers were burly men, both hunters who had spent a lot of time up in the Caucasus foothills. They knew the lie of the land. Levan Ketsbaia stood off to one side, ready to interpret as necessary.

  Rhino had been asking the villagers about things that weren’t shown on the map – where was the going best, where were patches of vegetation that were too difficult to get through, where were gullies or defiles too wide to cross easily, where might a tribe of people who didn’t want to be discovered build their village? The men were proving very helpful on the first three questions but a bit vague on the fourth. There was a lot of open terrain out there, but most of it had been covered by the hunters over the years when they were searching for small game – rabbits, deer and so on. They were stumped when it came to guessing where a whole village – even a small one – might be hidden.

  Rhino raised his hands in apology as the phone continued to buzz. Levan said something in a quiet voice, and the three villagers laughed.

  Walking outside, Rhino pulled the mobile from his pocket and pressed the Accept key. He was surprised that he could get any mobile coverage at all that far in the wilds of Tbilisi, but thank heavens for small mercies.

  ‘Hello’ he said cautiously, neutrally, not giving his name.

  ‘Is that Rhino?’

  He recognized the voice, despite the fact that it was faint and almost inaudible over the static. ‘Professor Livingstone?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. How’s Natalie?’

  ‘She’s fine. She managed the journey OK, and she got a good night’s sleep. I’m not sure the food is up to her standards, and her greatest concern at the moment is working out how to recharge her MP3 player, but apart from that she’s doing well.’

  ‘Good. A little discomfort will do her the world of good. Her father and I are guilty of protecting her from reality, I’m afraid. She needs to discover that things won’t always go the way she wants them to.’

  ‘And this is the perfect place to learn that lesson,’ Rhino said, smiling.

  ‘How’s the expedition coming along? Any sign of the elusive Almasti?’

  ‘Not so far, but it’s early days.’ He paused for a second. ‘What about you – getting anywhere with your business meetings?’

  ‘Some positive signs,’ Gillian said non-committally. ‘But that’s the other reason I wanted to talk to you. I’ve heard from some of my contacts here that there’s another expedition heading out from Tbilisi roughly in your direction.’

  ‘Another expedition?’ Rhino felt a cold bud of concern start to unfurl in his chest. ‘What exactly are they looking for – or are they just tourists?’

  ‘They’re not tourists. From what I’ve heard they’re a well-equipped team of men and women in their twenties and thirties. All of them appear to be fit and tanned, which suggests they’ve done this kind of thing before. I’m told they looked like a military unit on manoeuvres. They left Tbilisi this morning in three Humvees, having spent most of the past two days trying to get hold of a guide to the local area.’ She paused, and Rhino could hear the smile in her voice. ‘Apparently you made off with the best one before they could get to him.’

  ‘And there’s no word on the object of their expedition?’

  ‘Nothing. Whatever it is they’re looking for, they’re serious about it.’ She paused. ‘The rumour is that they’re armed. Nothing definite, but someone said that someone else had seen one of them checking over a handgun. Are you armed?’

  ‘No,’ he said, grimacing. ‘I couldn’t get a weapon through airport security, for obvious reasons, and I haven’t got the contacts here to be able to get hold of a gun easily.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe they’re looking for bears or wolves in the mountains – something to stuff and mount on the wall so they can brag to their friends.’

  ‘Just as long as it’s not your head that ends up on their wall,’ Gillian said darkly. ‘Or Natalie’s.’

  ‘I’ll be careful – you can count on it.’

  ‘I already am,’ she said, and rang off.

  Another expedition? It might be a coincidence – they might be heading somewhere else entirely – but Rhino didn’t believe in coincidences. He had a bad feeling that someone else had decided to go looking for the Almasti.

  Or someone had decided to go looking for Calum’s expedition. That, he thought, was even more worrying. He needed to talk to Calum and make him aware of what was going on.

  Every light in the apartment was on. There were no shadows, nowhere that anybody could hide. The apartment’s security systems had been checked over and enhanced by a company that Calum knew and trusted, and the security-system diagnostics were now permanently displayed on one of his ten LCD computer screens – histograms showing power levels and little inset windows showing the output from the various infra-red and low-light cameras that had been fitted to the outside of the building.

  Calum wasn’t taking any chances of there being another break-in.

  He’d upgraded the locks on all the doors as well, upstairs and at street level, and had an uninterruptible power supply fitted.

  Now he sat in front of his computer screens like a spider at the centre of its web, secure in the knowledge that he was safe.

  But he didn’t feel safe. He didn’t feel safe at all.

  He knew what the problem was. He didn’t just live in his apartment the way that other people lived in their apartments, flats or houses. His apartment was his shell, the barrier between him and a hostile world. It was his second skin.

  And someone had broken through that skin.

  He was worried that it was going to happen again, despite all his precautions. He now jumped at the slightest sound in the apartment – the creaking of old wood and old bricks, the pigeons on the roof, the muffled horns from taxis passing by outside. He was unsettled, nervous, jittery.

  He’d wondered whether to inform the police about the break-in, but he had decided in the end that he shouldn’t. He couldn’t stand the idea of a bunch of people invading his privacy to take fingerprints and photographs and statements.

  You head over to the computer. Remember what we’re looking for. That’s what the woman had said. He could feel a red tide of anger rising within him as he recalled the words. They had come into his apartment with an objective in mind. They hadn’t just been looking for things to steal – they had been looking for information. For something on his computer. And they’d been prepared to kill him if he’d tried to stop them from getting it.

  Surely it had to be connected to this new expedition that Rhino had told him about. Was this part of a two-pronged approach – infiltrate his apartment looking for information while at the same time sending a team out to follow his team? But why? He felt his right hand clench as he considered the thought. What was there about the existence of the Almasti that meant people would break the law, commit breaking and entering and theft and possibly even murder, to find out? As committed as Calum was to tracking and discovering the Almasti – assuming they were there to begin with – he knew that their existence was more of an academic issue than anything that could lead to lawbreaking and extreme violence. What could possibly lead a competitor to resort to criminal activity to beat him?

  As he sat at his computer, his gaze switching from one computer screen to another but not really registering the images on any of them, Calum found his mind wandering. He remembered Tara mentioning the international industrial consortium that had targeted her and forced her to hack into his Lost Worlds website. Nemor Incorporated certainly seemed interested in what he was doing – was this new expedition in Georgia something that they had arranged? Could they also have tried to break into his apartment when their efforts to hack his website had been blo
cked? Calum was a big fan of logic, and it certainly seemed logical that Nemor Inc. would escalate their attempts to find out what he was doing once their initial approaches had failed.

  Another thought struck him – one that was a lot darker and less welcome. He had asked Professor Livingstone if she had ever heard of, or worked with, Nemor Incorporated. She had, as far as he could remember, ducked the question.

  Was that, he wondered bleakly, something he ought to be worried about?

  CHAPTER

  fourteen

  Tara adjusted the headband over her forehead, nestling the twin loudspeakers above each ear. She was surprised that the headband didn’t seem too heavy, considering the amount of technology it contained.

  She was sitting on a bench at a heavy wooden table outside the inn in Ruspiri where they were staying. The sun had just dipped below the rounded shapes of the Caucasus Mountains, outlining them in orange and purple. It was probably less than an hour before sunset, which meant that it was mid-afternoon in England.

  She reached up to touch the high-definition video camera that was attached to the headband just above the left speaker. She had a horrible feeling that the headband made her look like a refugee from a 1980s fitness video, but she supposed that was a price she had to pay.

  Right. Time to check that the connection actually worked, otherwise they’d brought the headbands all this way for nothing.

  Her mobile phone and her tablet were sitting on the table in front of her. She reached out and tapped a message – Ready to synchronize? – into her mobile and texted it straight to Calum in England. Thanks to the magic of wireless technology, the message took longer to type than it took to wing its way via radio waves and satellite communications several thousand miles away. Within a few seconds Calum’s response was displayed on her screen – Let’s go!

  She reached up and pressed a button behind the tiny camera ‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.

  Calum’s reply was so clear that it sounded as if he was standing right behind her. She had to fight the urge to turn around and look for him. ‘Not only can I hear you, but I can see what you’re seeing as well.’

  ‘Remind me not to wear this thing into the bathroom,’ Tara murmured, then said, more loudly, ‘OK, let’s check the basics. Audio first.’ She counted to ten slowly. ‘Did you get all that?’

  ‘Everything was loud and clear apart from “three”. That was a little fuzzy. Can you do “three” again?’

  ‘I see that sarcasm gets transmitted clearly as well,’ she said. ‘OK, video now. I’m going to look left and right. Let me know if there are any digital artefacts or any obvious buffering.’

  She glanced left to where a group of local kids was climbing up a pile of lumber that had been stacked there and jumping off from the top. They looked like smaller versions of Gecko. As her gaze tracked back past the inn, she automatically focused on the window of her bedroom on the first floor. To her right was an area of cleared ground where the Delica van was parked.

  ‘All video is clear,’ Calum’s ghostly voice said. ‘Is that the famous van I’ve heard about?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘No clues inside as to who hired it or bought it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Ouch – don’t do that!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shake your head. The way the picture goes makes me feel suddenly nauseous.’

  ‘Take a pill,’ she said. ‘You think you’re nauseous now, you wait until you’ve got all four of us walking over rough ground.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘Do you want to check that the satellite band width can cope with video and audio together?’ Tara asked.

  ‘Not much point,’ he said. ‘I can hear you fine, and the video doesn’t seem to be dropping out. All in all, this is a neat little piece of technology. I feel like I’m almost there with you.’

  ‘But you’re not – you’re somewhere the beds are more comfortable and the food is better.’ She paused, considering. ‘How are things back in England?’

  ‘As usual, the newspapers and news channels report lots of activity but very little change,’ Calum replied.

  ‘And what about Nemor Incorporated?’ Tara asked carefully.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Have they been in contact – about me?’

  Calum didn’t reply for a moment. When he did finally say something, his tone was as carefully composed as hers had been. ‘I’ve not heard anything from them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Tara pressed. ‘If anything’s happened, I can take it. I don’t like being kept in the dark.’

  Calum sighed. ‘Look, someone tried to break into my apartment. It might have been burglars, it might have been Nemor Incorporated or it might have been those Russian gangsters who were targeting Gecko. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve upgraded my security to the point where a mosquito would need a photopass and a set of references to get in here.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ Tara asked, concerned. ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘I thought about it, but decided not to. They can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Enough of this – what’s happening out there? Do the villagers know anything about the Almasti?’

  ‘They say that something’s been sneaking around the village at night and stealing their food, but nobody’s seen it. The older villagers claim it’s an Almast, but the younger ones think it’s a wolf, or maybe someone from a nearby village.’

  ‘Well,’ Calum said, ‘it’s a start. Now, what about my pet?’

  ‘What, Natalie? She’s OK.’

  ‘I see the sarcasm works in both directions,’ he said, his voice sounding like he was smiling. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I know.’ Tara twisted on her bench to look directly behind her. There, in an open area of ground, stood ARLENE. The robot mule looked like some futuristic metal sculpture of a horse. A six-legged horse.

  ‘Very nice,’ Calum said appreciatively. ‘You’ve run all the self-test routines?’

  ‘Every single one.’

  ‘Then let’s see what it can do.’

  Tara turned back and tapped instructions into the application that was open on her tablet. Wireless connections carried her instructions to ARLENE. The robot’s head perked up, and a blue LED lit up on the side of its head.

  ‘Oh, wow, that’s bizarre,’ Calum murmured. ‘Through your camera I can see ARLENE looking at you, and through ARLENE’s camera I can see you looking at it. Very disturbing.’

  Tara held up her left hand. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

  ‘Technically, two fingers and a thumb.’

  ‘And do my lips move in synchronization with what I’m saying?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, yes.’ Tara heard him take a breath. ‘I think we have ourselves an expedition.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ she said, pleased with herself.

  The sun had dropped way behind the mountains when Natalie left the inn.

  The sky was the purple colour of an old bruise, and the stars were beginning to come out. Fortunately there was an almost full moon in the sky, because Ruspiri, as she had discovered, didn’t have any street lights. Unfortunately there were rag-like skeins of cloud being blown by the wind all across the sky, which meant that the moon kept vanishing and then reappearing.

  Not only did Ruspiri not have any street lights – it didn’t have a lot of other things as well. There was no pharmacy, no shoe shop, no gymnasium or swimming pool and no sauna. And, judging from the bright, smiling faces of the villagers she’d encountered so far, it didn’t have any dentists either.

  This was the very definition of hell, she decided.

  She held her mobile phone up and checked the screen. Several of her friends had sent her emails and texts, wondering where she was and what she was doing. Part of her wanted to look through them all and find out what was going on back home, but another part of her didn’t want to know
how epic Savannah’s pool party had turned out to be, or how Bryce – whom she was kinda supposed to be dating - had made out with Deanna, or how the latest handbags had just arrived in Madison’s and were, like, really unbelievable.

  On the other hand, she supposed that she could message them and let them know how she was, what she was doing. Yeah, that would really work. They’d be all But who is doing your manicures for you? and How can you survive wiihout MTV? and she’d feel sad, and there would be tears. The world was passing her by while she was stuck in a backward village in a backward country that didn’t even appear on any maps that she’d ever seen. Or, if it had, she hadn’t noticed it.

  Natalie was so wrapped up in her thoughts that by the time she came back to reality she had wandered into a part of the village that she didn’t recognize. The buildings were mainly barns and stuff, and there was nobody around. The sky was completely black now, apart from the scattering of stars and the tattered grey scarves of cloud that moved across the face of the moon.

  Natalie muttered a word under her breath that her mother would have disapproved of. Who would have thought that this place was even big enough to get lost in? She supposed she could pull the headband and camera thing from the pocket where she’d screwed it up and ask Calum for help, but she really didn’t like the idea of people always keeping tabs on her. She’d had enough of that with her mother and the security firms she had hired over the years. No, that camera was staying in her pocket for as long as she could manage it.

  She turned round, intending to retrace her steps to the inn.

  Someone was standing in the shadows of the nearest building.

  ‘Hi!’ she said brightly, feeling her heart speed up. She was beginning to regret listening to Rhino when he’d told her that there was no chance of her getting her Mace spray through customs. ‘Can you direct me back to the centre of the village? I’m kinda displaced from where I should be.’

  That’s right, a little voice in the back of her mind said. Tell the creepy man that you’re lost. That’ll engage his sympathy.