Day of the Assassins (12 page)

J
ack was staggered at how fast he accelerated. He closed his eyes – tight. If he was about to be splattered onto some piece of granite – he didn’t want to know about it. Three seconds later, he hit the river, feet first, and the freezing water exploded around him in a plume of spray. His speed forced him down. Finally, his feet hit the bottom. It took an eternity for him to rise but then he broke the surface with nearly the same speed as he had entered. He gulped down air. He’d made it. But then the cold from the river hit him like the left hook of a heavy-weight boxer, and took his breath away a second time. He started to swim, desperately, to the bank. Soon his breast stroke disintegrated into a flailing doggy paddle. Exhausted, he pulled himself up onto the grassy bank and collapsed in a soggy heap.

From the other side of the riverbank he heard the voices of Angus and the professor. The professor was waving and jumping up and down excitedly, a broad grin on his face.

“Bravo! Bravo!” he shouted. The professor had clearly been impressed by Jack’s decision to jump. Jack pulled himself up onto his feet, still breathing heavily. It was at this point that it dawned on him. It was bizarre. As he gulped down air, his lungs were… working. He felt no wheezy emptiness, no panic that he was about to suffocate, no familiar craving for his puffer. He took deep breaths and it felt – completely normal. He began to feel stronger and stronger and soon this feeling grew into a tingling elation.

He looked at his friends and noticed that to their left, on the far riverbank, was a small cabin built right on the edge of the water. It
was dilapidated and overgrown – well camouflaged, unless you were actually viewing it from the river itself. He waved, pointing out the cabin to Angus and the professor. They followed Jack’s line of sight. When the professor spotted the small wooden building he became even more excited. It was a boat house.

From the opposite bank, Jack saw Angus and the professor clamber up to the rear of the boat house where they disappeared from view. They had been gone for a few minutes when two wooden doors at water level gradually opened out on to the river. Soon, Angus and the professor emerged triumphantly with a rather dishevelled-looking boat. They boarded the boat and with the professor at the twin oars, it glided across the water towards him. It looked like they might have an escape route. Soon the boat had nosed onto the bank where Jack stood shivering.

Angus beamed smugly from the bows. “All aboard! All aboard!” he shouted. “Next stop, er, down there somewhere!” He thumbed in a general downriver direction. Jack jumped onto the boat. The professor reversed and then pointed the craft downstream.

They were off.

Jack shifted into the rear of the boat in front of the professor, who gingerly manoeuvred the craft back into the centre of the river where they soon caught the best of the downstream current. It was larger than a standard rowing boat, and in the back it had a low metal frame attached to each side. It looked as if you could assemble a canvas sheet on the frame and maybe even sleep in it.

The professor concentrated on the rowing, but it took a bit of getting used to and initially, they zigzagged uneasily.

“Any sign of them?” asked the professor. Nervously, they scanned each riverbank. There was no movement and all they could hear was the lapping of the water and the late afternoon chirrup of birdlife rising from the dense woodland. Way above, they could still see the gossamer thin threads of the cable car – but both cars had vanished.

“Seems quiet. But it won’t take them long to catch up.”

The river narrowed and they could feel the current speed up
a notch beneath them. Up ahead, perhaps a half kilometre away, they saw that the banks heightened dramatically as the river passed through a deep mountain gorge.

“We may have a chance – the river will be the quickest way down – and we have a good head start. Soon it will be dark too…” the professor said. “Jack – you need to get out of those things – otherwise you’ll die of cold. The professor nodded towards a compartment behind Jack’s legs at the back of the boat. “Anything useful in there?”

Jack rummaged, “I don’t think this boat has been used for a while…”

There were a couple of dusty blankets and also the canvas sheeting that fitted over the metal awning. He shook out one of the blankets. It was dry enough but smelt dusty and moth-eaten.

“I’ve got some spare bits and pieces with me.” Angus opened his small rucksack, pulled out a T-shirt and fleece and handed them to Jack, “Try those.”

Jack was grateful for the dry clothes and wrapped one of the blankets tightly around himself in an attempt to ward off the chill. Warming up, he scratched around some more in the compartment. He then yanked out a long, thin canvas bag. He undid the ties at either end, and out slid three sticks.

“Eureka!” the professor exclaimed. “A rod. Maybe there’s a reel.”

Sure enough, hidden in the back of the compartment was a reel with a line and, next to it, a small cigar box. Jack opened the box and inside were eight fishing flies carefully pinned to the bottom of the little box.

The professor had now developed a more reliable stroke and the blades slopped rhythmically in the water. Pushed on by the current, the boat made steady progress. There was still no sign of pursuit and they all began to feel a little less edgy. Soon, they were listening to Angus’s remarkable story.

“… I need to tell you what happened after you escaped, Jack, by the way, pretty impressive that… particularly the bit where you squashed Belstaff,” Angus grinned at the memory of their games teacher who had been impaled by the blast screen. “Never liked
him anyway.”

“What happened to him?”

“In pain. But OK. Unfortunately.”

“Thought he was dead.”

“No – I tell you these VIGIL-support guys are tough. Anyway, I was pretty frightened. Particularly after Gordon had knifed poor old Pendelino… and then attacked me… I ask you – I’m even captain of the rugby team!”

“The Rector explained all that… he said they had to act quickly…”

Angus looked at Jack blankly, “Don’t know anything about that… but after the Rector, Tony, Gordon and the others had made their plan to bring you back from 1914, the next morning two guys rescued me and Pendelshape – right from under the nose of VIGIL. There was a short fight, quite scary but no shooting, just karate and stuff, and then these men just bundled us straight into the back of a van and we shot off.”

“Where?”

“Away from the school. And fast.”

“But…”

“Wait – I haven’t told you the rest. We drove on for a bit – but not that long. I was trying to keep tabs on the time, but it was tricky. I was rolling around the back of this van being driven at high speed, and getting really scared about what we’d got ourselves into.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So anyway, this journey went on for a bit longer – I don’t know – maybe an hour, maybe more. We stopped a couple of times… I think we changed cars or vans. I needed a pee. They wouldn’t even let me do that. Whatever. Eventually we stopped. I was led out of the van and it was quiet, and dark, but I could tell we were near the sea. I could smell the salt air, and hear waves lapping against concrete. Then we were in a boat. It was rocking. The engine fired up and we were off, jiggling along through the waves, at a fair old crack. And then we arrived somewhere, the boat was moored up and I was taken up some steep stairs. I thought I was on another boat – but bigger. It was all pretty weird.”

The professor was listening, but because of his central position at
the oars, he had his back to Angus. He gently eased the boat into a shallow pool off the main current and then pulled in both blades and let the craft drift for a while so he could rest and listen.

“Then what?” Jack said.

“The blindfold came off… and there I was!”

“Where?” Jack asked. “Where were you?”

“Well, here’s the strangest thing. You know when we were with Pendelshape that afternoon down in the control room and he was telling us all that strange stuff, and I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t sure I was really believing any of it, and it was like, when are we going to get out of here…?”

“Yeah…”

“Right. So the room I ended up in looked just like the underground control room at the school with the Taurus. Then basically, I found out it was a second time machine – another Taurus! But I tell you – it’s much bigger. You could fit a tank in it.”

“So it’s just as the Rector told us,” the professor said, nodding to himself thoughtfully.

“You haven’t heard the half of it, Professor. It was then that I met him.”

“Who? You met who?” Jack was sitting on the edge of his seat.

Angus’s eyes glazed over. He spoke in a hushed, reverential voice.

“Him.”

“Who?” Jack could hardly contain his curiosity.

“The Benefactor of course. The inventor of time travel. The man with the biggest brain ever.” Angus looked at Jack in awe, “Your dad, Jack. Your dad! I always wondered where you got your brains from.”

Jack shrugged, “Right. I thought that’s who you meant.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Angus’s cheeks suddenly flushed red with anger, “You don’t get it, do you? Remember, he rescued me and Pendelshape then he sent me back using his Taurus to rescue you. I don’t know what has happened to the others who should have come with me – maybe they got caught out with the time signal. Anyway, you should be grateful… and, and you should be proud of him. Your father is a great man. And he has sent us on a mission. Us! Don’t you see?”

Jack felt himself getting angry now, “Not really. I haven’t been sent anywhere. I pressed a random button to escape some people who were about to kill my history teacher, and then you, and who looked like they were about to kill me as well. Then I find out they’re chasing me half way across Europe. We turn up here and they tell me that they’re trying to protect me from, of all people, my own dad. Why? Because if he gets hold of me then there’s apparently nothing to stop him playing God with history – with consequences too awful to imagine…”

There was a tense silence.

“Sorry,” Jack said finally. He sighed, “To be honest I’m not really sure who’s right and who’s wrong in this whole thing. I feel like a pawn.”

Angus replied sheepishly, “Yeah – I’m sorry too, Jack. Maybe it’s a bit more complicated than I thought.”

The professor pulled on an oar to steady the boat and keep it from drifting into a sandbank. “We’ll get through this, boys,” he said. “With my looks and your twenty-first century brains, we can’t fail.” Looking at the professor’s dishevelled yellow hair, his muddied clothes, his round glasses, now with one cracked lens, and two bits of cotton wool still stuffed up each nostril to stop any more bleeding from the balloon crash, the remark sounded ridiculous. Angus and Jack looked at the professor and then at each other and laughed.

The professor took up the oars again and rowed them out to the main channel. A fat orange sun was melting into the rocky horizon. In an hour it would be dark.

“Probably time to try to find somewhere to rest for the night,” the professor said. As they moved slowly down the gorge, they scanned each side for a suitable landing spot. The river was quite low at this point and twisted through a maze of large boulders, rocks and the occasional gravel bank. There were quite a few places where they could pull in and be well protected by the towering granite walls above. In some of the darkening pools off the main current, fish were starting to jump lazily at insects, which buzzed above the surface.

They rounded the next bend in the river and spotted a large, deep pool to the left, where another low sandbank rose gently towards the
cliff wall. The professor manoeuvred the boat towards the bank and they alighted, yanking the boat as far up the slope as they could manage. The professor then scrambled back into the boat to retrieve the rod they had discovered earlier.

“Shall we give it a go?” he said as he looked at the pieces of rod and the reel and then at the box of flies. He had no idea what to do next.

“Allow me,” said Jack. He quickly assembled the three pieces of rod, attached the reel and threaded the line through the eyes in the rod. Then he opened the box. “Which one do you reckon?”

“Don’t ask me – you know I’m rubbish at all that stuff,” Angus replied.

Jack picked a fly at random and threaded a leader, which he had attached to the line, through the narrow eye of the hook.

“Ready.” He looked at the professor, “Fancy a go?”

“It’s not one of my skills, I’m afraid.”

Jack took the rod confidently and marched out to the edge of the sandbank, surveying the pool as he went. There was an occasional ‘plop’ followed by telltale concentric ripples in the water as the trout fed in the fading light.

“Here goes.”

He flicked the rod once, and then repeatedly, until a large loop of line was whooshing back and forth through the still air of the gorge. Then, he thrust out his arm, pointing the rod towards the last set of expanding circular ripples he had seen in the pool. The whole line raced forward across the river. The tiny fly, invisible in the gloom, presented itself just above the rippling water. There was a sudden disturbance and a brown fish leaped up from the surface with a splash. Jack was taken by surprise, but took the strike. He felt the tug on the line as the trout struggled to free itself. Slowly, he reeled it in.