by Paul Adam
They broke out of the trees into a clearing and Max paused, looking around, realizing he’d been here before. It was where he’d first met Dmitri, where they’d had their terrifying encounter with the bear. An idea suddenly came to him – a thin, improbable, hopeless sort of idea, but it was all he could think of. They couldn’t keep running for much longer.
‘The bear we met earlier,’ he whispered to Dmitri. ‘Does it live around here?’
‘Up the hill over there,’ Dmitri replied. ‘It has a den in an earth bank.’
‘How far?’
‘Fifty, sixty metres. Why?’ Then he guessed what Max had in mind. ‘You mean …’
Max nodded. ‘Quickly. One last effort.’
They picked Alexander up between them again and staggered across the clearing, Dmitri guiding them into the trees. A torch beam flitted across them and Max looked over his shoulder. Clark and the guard were in the clearing, only twenty metres away.
‘There’s the den,’ Dmitri said, nodding away to his left.
Max saw the dark outline of the earth bank. He bent down, picked up a handful of stones and hurled them in a shower towards the bank. They stumbled on for another five or six metres, then stopped, too worn out to continue. They lowered Alexander to the ground, propping his back against a tree trunk, and sat down beside him.
The torch beam hit them full in the face. Max saw Julius Clark walking towards them. He was holding the torch in his left hand, a pistol in his right. Max felt a crushing sense of defeat. It was all over. They’d got so far, but now the game was up. They were at Clark’s mercy.
The tycoon gazed at them triumphantly. Max knew they must have looked a pitiful sight: two exhausted boys and an invalid. They could hardly have been less of a threat.
‘So I’m a diseased animal, am I?’ Clark said, the insult obviously still rankling. ‘A diseased animal that needs to be put down. Well, we’ll see who gets put down now.’
He took a pace nearer, pointing the torch straight at Max.
‘I should have killed you on Shadow Island. You’ve been a thorn in my side ever since. But not any more. You’ve pulled your last stunt, Max, performed your last escape. The show’s over.’
‘For us, maybe,’ Max said, feeling too tired, too despondent to offer much resistance. ‘But killing us won’t save you. There are too many people who know what you’ve been up to. There are too many witnesses to your crimes.’
‘You think so? I wouldn’t be so sure, Max. I have a lot of powerful friends, a lot of influence with governments around the world.’
‘Your friends will be caught too,’ Max said. ‘We have your secret files. Downloaded from your computer in Borneo.’
‘What?’ For a moment Clark seemed unnerved, unsure of himself. Then his confidence returned. ‘You’re lying. You couldn’t have downloaded my files. You don’t know the password.’
‘VICTOR one,’ Max said and enjoyed the look of shock on the tycoon’s face. ‘We’ve cracked the codes too. How else do you think I found out about Woodford Down Laboratories? You’re going to jail, Clark. There’s nothing more certain.’
Clark stared at him. ‘If I do,’ he said with a chilling smile, ‘you won’t be around to see it.’
‘Max, what’s happening?’ Alexander asked in a frail, puzzled voice. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re with me, Dad,’ Max replied gently. ‘You’re safe.’
He took his father’s hand in his own and peered into the forest behind Clark, the earth bank a black shadow in the trees. Nothing moved. Not a branch, not a leaf. Max knew his plan had failed.
Clark raised his pistol, holding the torch beam steady on Max’s face. Max gripped his father’s hand tight, waiting for the end. They were together, at least. They’d found each other again, been reunited. That was one small, bitter consolation. He thought of his mum, hoping that somehow soon – maybe through the information in Clark’s files – her name would be cleared and she’d be released from prison. But whatever happened, it would be too late for Max and his dad. Neither of them would ever see her again.
Then Max saw something move in the trees behind Clark’s shoulder. He thought it was just a bush swaying in the breeze, but then the bush seemed to change position, come forward towards them. Max blinked, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks. But no, it was moving, changing shape. The bush was growing, shooting up from the ground and turning into a tree maybe half a metre wide and two metres tall, with a branch sticking out on either side. The branches whipped round with lightning speed, one catching the guard around the head, the other hitting Julius Clark. There was a crunch of bones snapping and the two men were hurled violently to the ground, Clark’s pistol skittering away across the dirt.
Max choked back a cry of alarm as the bear fell on the tycoon’s body, tearing it apart with its teeth. He watched for a few seconds with a kind of horrified fascination, then had to look away.
Dmitri was already getting slowly to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he whispered, pulling Alexander up.
‘The guard …’ Max began. ‘Maybe—’
‘He’s dead,’ Dmitri said bluntly. ‘A blow like that, he would have died instantly. We can do nothing for him.’
Max stood up, trying not to look at the bear, but aware of it slavering and grunting, its jaws crunching.
‘Come on, Max,’ Dmitri repeated. ‘We have to get to the ship.’
They hooked their arms around Alexander and crept away into the forest, heading back downhill through the trees. Max was in a daze, walking automatically, instinctively avoiding obstacles in his path. But all he could see was the vivid imprint of the bear coming out of the shadows, rising up and killing Julius Clark with a single blow of its massive paw, then falling greedily on the body, its mouth gaping. Max shuddered and tried to erase the pictures, but knew they would always be with him.
It took them fifteen minutes to reach Clark’s jeep. The keys were still in the ignition. They laid Alexander down on the rear seat and climbed in. Neither of them spoke on the short journey to the port until they came over the final rise and saw the Reunion Star berthed alongside the quay.
‘Thank God,’ Max murmured. ‘She’s still here.’
But clearly not for much longer. The cranes were silent, their booms motionless. The forklift trucks were parked neatly by the warehouse, the stevedores passing around a bottle of vodka before they returned to their flats at the platinum mine.
Ken and the other prisoners were already on board. And Max and his father and Dmitri were obviously expected for there were two crew members on hand to help them up the gangplank and escort them to the bridge.
The captain, a big man with a dark beard and an air of quiet competence about him, was listening intently while Ken and the others – those that were fit enough to speak – told him how they’d been abducted and brought to Kamchatka. They broke off as the new arrivals came onto the bridge, Max explaining to the captain who they were. The captain stared at him, as if an extra-terrestrial had just come on board.
‘Max Cassidy? The boy escapologist who died off the Golden Gate Bridge? Who was the lead item on every news bulletin when we left San Francisco?’
‘That’s me,’ Max said modestly.
The captain shook his head in disbelief. ‘This gets more and more incredible.’
‘This is my dad,’ Max said. ‘He’s not well. Please could you find him a bed, some medical attention?’
The captain snapped off an order to one of his officers, then turned back to Max. ‘Is that everyone now? We’re ready to sail.’
‘Not me,’ Dmitri said. ‘I’m not coming.’
Max looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re not? After all that’s happened, you want to stay here?’
‘It’s where I belong,’ Dmitri said simply. He walked away across the bridge and down the stairs.
‘Give me two minutes,’ Max said to the captain and ran after Dmitri, catching him as he stepped off the gangplank onto the quay.
‘You could come with us, you know,’ Max said. ‘To America, then home with me to England.’
Dmitri shook his head. ‘I’m Russian. This is my home.’
‘What are you going to do? Live in your cave, continue stealing food from the mine, drinking vodka in the hot springs? Is that what you really want?’
‘No, I’ve had enough of that. You coming here, all that’s happened, it’s woken me up, made me realize what I should be doing. I’m going to take the jeep, drive to the main road and get back to civilization.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’ll do what I always planned – take up the fight for the environment where my dad left off. Do it properly this time. There are other people like him, people who want to save what we have left of the natural world. Maybe I can do my bit to help them.’
Max held out his hand. ‘Thanks for everything, Dmitri. I owe you my life. So do those people on the ship.’
‘It was nothing. We were a team, Max.’
‘Good luck.’
‘You too.’
They shook hands. Then Max went back onto the ship and stood on the deck as the gangplank was raised and the vessel left port. Dmitri watched from the quay for a while, the Reunion Star heading out to sea, the figure leaning on the rail getting smaller and smaller, then he lifted his arm to wave one last time and walked across to the jeep. Max saw him climb in and start the engine. The jeep pulled off, turned out onto the road and disappeared up the hill.
Max felt an immense sadness, seeing Dmitri go, but he knew in his heart that this wasn’t goodbye. They would see each other again, he was certain of that. He took a final look, then walked away across the deck in search of his father.
Dawn was breaking over the ocean. The shoreline was still dark, Dead Man’s Bay hidden by the headland, but up the valley, beyond the forest, the snow on the top of the volcano was turning pink in the first rays of the new day.
TWENTY-ONE
THE LONG OAK table in the conference room of the London News Chronicle’s offices was covered with neat stacks of paper, so many that barely a centimetre of the polished wooden surface was visible. Dan Kingston gestured at them casually, pulling out a couple of chairs so he and Max could sit down.
‘Julius Clark’s files,’ he explained.
Max stared at the piles, some of them half a metre high. There must have been thousands of sheets of paper.
‘This is all from the memory stick I brought back from Borneo?’
Kingston nodded. ‘Your computer guy finished decrypting them last week. While you were, well’ – the journalist smiled – ‘let’s say, otherwise engaged overseas. They make for very interesting reading. A lot deal with the financial side of Clark’s many businesses. Not the official, audited accounts he put into the public domain, but his secret accounts that detail the bribes and other payments he made to various people around the world.’
‘What kind of people?’ Max asked.
‘Politicians, police officers, government officials. Wherever he did business, there was someone on the take. He spent millions every year on bribes, or bribes disguised as donations to political parties.’
‘Including this country?’
‘Oh, yes, he didn’t neglect the UK. We’ve had a team of reporters going through every single document, checking and cross-checking all the information, making sure we’re absolutely certain of our facts before we publish anything. It’s sensational stuff, Max. Probably the biggest political scandal the world has ever seen. It’s a global affair – here, the US, Europe, Russia, the Middle and Far East. No region is going to come out of it unscathed. In this country alone, we’ve identified sixteen Members of Parliament, four senior police officers, twenty-four civil servants and several employees of the security service who have received illicit payments from Clark or his companies. One of the MPs is a junior minister at the Home Office – the department that controls the police and MI5.’
‘And the man I asked you about on the phone?’ Max said. ‘Have you found his name anywhere?’
‘Rupert Penhall? Yes, Mr Penhall features prominently in the files. He had dealings with Clark going back at least ten years, possibly longer. And he has a numbered bank account in Switzerland into which Clark pays nearly two hundred thousand pounds a year.’
‘Wow!’ Max pursed his lips. ‘That’s a lot of money.’
‘About two million pounds over that ten-year period.’
‘And what did Penhall do in return?’
‘We’re still trying to establish exactly what he did. But he undoubtedly pulled strings for Clark, protected his business interests. Penhall has close connections with both MI5 and MI6. He has a lot of very powerful friends.’ Kingston reached out to pick up a large, bulging manila envelope from one of the stacks of papers on the table. ‘I made copies of the important bits for you. To give to your police contact. I’d appreciate it if you held off for a few days, give us a chance to run the story first.’
‘When’s it going in the paper?’
‘From tomorrow. Then every day after that for the next week.’
‘You have that much?’
‘We could fill the paper for a year with what we’ve got.’ Kingston grinned at him. ‘You’re a journalist’s dream, Max. First all that drama in San Francisco and your escape from Kamchatka, now this. You’re the most famous kid on the planet. Give it a few weeks and the public is going to be heartily sick of hearing your name.’
‘What about Clark’s fifth columnists – the people he kidnapped and brainwashed on Shadow Island and in Kamchatka?’ Max asked. ‘Is there anything in the files about them?’
‘Plenty,’ Kingston replied. ‘Julius Clark was a control freak, an obsessive keeper of records. We have names, places, dates, everything we need to build a detailed picture of what he did: who he abducted, what their jobs were, how many died during the brainwashing, when the survivors went back to their organizations to work for him. There are hundreds of them – ecologists, scientists, lobbyists, lawyers, you name it – covering pretty much every environmental organization in the world.’
‘You’re going to expose them?’
‘They need rooting out. Their employers have a right to know who they are, and the individuals concerned will need medical help to get back to normal, to wipe out the effects of the drug they were given. Kingston paused. He looked at Max and his tone became gentler. ‘How’s your dad?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘Is he still in hospital?’
Max nodded. ‘The doctors say he’s making good progress. They think he should make a full recovery, but it might take a bit of time.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘He seems to have had a very high resistance to Episuderon. He’s an extremely tough, resilient person.’
‘I guess it runs in the family,’ Kingston said dryly. ‘And your mother? When’s she coming out of prison?’
‘It’s going to be a few days yet. There’s all the legal red tape to sort out, but it should be before the end of the week.’
‘Good.’ Kingston wagged a finger at him. ‘And don’t you forget who’s getting the first exclusive interview with you all.’
Max grinned. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
Kingston pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose and regarded Max pensively for a moment.
‘And what about you, Max?’
‘Me?’
‘You’ve been through a hell of a lot, especially for a fourteen-year-old kid. How are you?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘Is that the truth?’
‘Yes,’ Max said. And it was the truth. At least, for the time being. He’d expected some kind of traumatic aftereffects from what he’d been through – nightmares, cold sweats, depression. But they hadn’t happened. He was sleeping well and he felt fine, both physically and mentally. Of course, he thought about Kamchatka and the Golden Gate Bridge, and Borneo and Shadow Island too, but the memories didn’t disturb him – not deep
down. He’d survived all the ordeals, come out the other side in one piece. That was good reason to be cheerful, not depressed.
There were other reasons to be happy too. Julius Clark, his greatest enemy, was dead and Rupert Penhall would soon have to answer for his illegal actions. But most importantly, Max had achieved his two most heartfelt desires – he’d found his father, and his mother would soon be a free woman again. Nothing could be better than that.
Dan Kingston was still looking at him. ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Max replied firmly. ‘Thanks for asking. Thanks for everything you’re doing. I appreciate it.’
‘Are you crazy? I should be thanking you. You’ve given me the scoop of a lifetime.’ Kingston glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Max, I have to go. The editor will be yelling at me if I don’t get back to my work. I’ve tomorrow’s splash to write.’
‘I look forward to reading it.’
‘Keep me posted on your mum and dad. Oh, and one other thing: writing all this stuff about you has given me an appetite for escapology. The next time you do a show, I want to be there in the audience watching you in action.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Max said.
The unmarked police car turned in through the gates of the imposing, three-storey Georgian villa and came to a halt on the gravel forecourt. A second police car, containing two uniformed officers, followed close behind.
Detective Sergeant Kevin Richardson got out of the first car and paused, looking up at the white walls of the house, the stone columns and elegant portico along the front. It was an attractive building, with well-maintained gardens all around it. In this part of London, Richardson estimated, it would be worth several million pounds – and most of it paid for with tainted money.
He waited for the two uniformed officers to join him, then they went up the short flight of steps to the front door and rang the bell. A petite woman with highlighted blonde hair answered.
‘Mrs Penhall?’ Richardson asked politely.