Escape from Shadow Island (16 page)

“DO YOU KNOW WHERE SHE'S BEING KEPT?” Chris asked, pausing for a second as they went out into the corridor.

“No,” Max replied. “I just know she's somewhere in the fortress.”

“We'll have to check all the cells then.”

Chris moved off along the wall. He stopped by the first door he came to and flipped down the small metal hatch that was used for delivering food and water to any prisoner held inside. It was too dark to see whether the cell was occupied. “You see a light switch anywhere?”

“Here,” Max said. His fingers found a switch on
the wall and clicked it on.

“Empty,” Chris said, peering around the interior of the cell. “You check the next one. We'd better move fast. Someone may notice the lights going on and off.”

Max went to the adjoining cell and snapped open the hatch with one hand while his other went to the light switch. That cell was empty too.

Chris had moved farther down the corridor and was squinting through another hatch. “What does Consuela look like?” he said.

“Dark, slim, beautiful,” Max replied.

Chris flashed a grin at him. “Just my type.”

They checked all the cells along the corridor. None of them was occupied.

“You know where the other rooms are?” asked Chris.

“The floor below, I think,” Max said. “But there may be guards.”

“Leave them to me,” Chris said.

His self-assurance boosted Max's own confidence. He was no longer entirely on his own. Chris was a soldier, a man who seemed to know how to take care of himself.

They padded down the stairs to the third floor, Chris
leading the way. He moved softly and dangerously, like a stalking leopard. On the landing at the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and put out a hand, warning Max to keep back.

“There's someone there,” Chris whispered in Max's ear.

They pressed their bodies to the wall. Max could hear the faint scuff of boots around the corner. The sound drew nearer, louder. A guard emerged on the landing. He wore khaki fatigues and a peaked cap; a submachine gun dangled from one shoulder.

Chris moved swiftly. He stepped out behind the man and hooked an arm around his neck. The guard gave a low choking cough and collapsed to the floor, unconscious. His weapon hit the stone tiles with a clatter.

“Damn,” Chris breathed. “Let's hope no one heard that.”

He picked up the submachine gun and Max followed him along the corridor, pulling open the hatches in the doors.

In one cell Max saw a man lying on a bed—the Arabic-looking man he'd watched being strapped into the dentist's chair and given the injection. The man sat bolt upright, as if he were having a nightmare, and
started to scream, his eyes bulging in terror, saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth.

“They'll hear that, though,” Max said. “Quick, check the other cells.”

They sprinted along the corridor, taking alternate doors. Every cell was empty.

“What now?” Chris said. “Where else do we look?”

“I don't know,” Max said. “Consuela could be anywhere in the building.”

The man was still screaming. Max knew it would only be a matter of minutes before a guard came to see what was going on.

“We can't hang around here,” Chris said. “Which way do we go?”

“It doesn't matter,” Max said.

Two soldiers appeared at the far end of the corridor. They shouted out in Spanish and fumbled for their guns.

“Well, that narrows our choices a little,” Chris said.

He turned and ran for the nearest stairwell. “Up or down?” he said.

“Up,” Max decided.

They raced up the stairs. There were footsteps above them, loud, urgent footsteps that echoed about the stairwell. A figure came around the corner and almost
collided with Max. It was another guard. He stopped, a cry of shock bursting from his mouth. Chris took full advantage of his surprise. He grabbed hold of the man and threw him down the stairs.

More guards came into view below them. Chris fired a burst from the submachine gun. The men dived back out of sight.

“I'll handle them,” Chris said. “You get away.”

“But that's not—” Max began.

“Now!” Chris snapped. “I'll give you time.”

He fired another burst, then looked hard at Max. “You know my story. Contact Rainforest Watch—tell them what happened to me.”

Max sprinted up the stairs. On the third-floor landing he paused. He heard gunfire below. Two quick bursts followed by silence. Was Chris still alive? Max's heart was thumping, blood pounding inside his head. He imagined Chris lying dead on the floor, the soldiers trampling over his body and climbing the stairs after him.

His chances of escape were slim. Max knew that. But which way to go? More guards would be on their way now. They'd quickly seal off all the staircases, the corridors, then close the net on him. He couldn't afford to delay. He ran up the next flight of stairs and out
through a door onto the roof of the fortress.

To his intense relief, he saw that there were no sentries up here. But it wouldn't remain that way for long. He looked around desperately for somewhere to run or somewhere to hide. For an instant, he wondered about jumping, before dismissing the idea as suicidal. On one side of the battlements was a sheer drop to the courtyard. On the other he saw only rocks at the base of the cliff.

He ran toward the northeast corner of the roof, keeping well away from the inner parapet so he wouldn't be spotted from the courtyard below. He could see no obvious place to hide, and just running around the roof made no sense at all—he'd simply end up back where he started. There had to be another way off it. There
had
to be.

He glanced over the battlements. Nothing there, just a smooth stone wall. Could he climb down it? Not a chance. There were no foot-or handholds. He checked again a few yards farther on. Still the smooth wall with nothing to hang on to. He reached the corner and took another look over the battlements.

There was a terrace right below him, outside one of the rooms on the fourth floor of the fortress. It was a long drop, but Max could see no other way of escape.
He climbed over the battlements and lowered himself down, hanging by his arms, his body flat against the wall of the building. As he was hanging there, he heard the door from the stairs bang open. Pulling himself up a few inches, he looked back across the roof. Two armed guards were standing by the door, gazing around, arguing about something, though Max was too far away to hear what they were saying. Did they know he'd come up here? Maybe not. No one had actually seen him go all the way up to the roof. For all these men knew, he might have stopped on the fourth floor and hidden in one of the rooms there. They could see Max wasn't on the roof. With any luck, they would just go back down and continue their search for him inside the fortress.

But no, they weren't going back down. They split up, taking a side of the roof each, examining the walls, peering over the battlements. Max knew he had to move now. He dropped so that his arms were fully extended and then let go. As his feet hit the terrace, he bent his knees and rolled onto his side to break his fall. Then he scrambled up, pulled open the door into the building, and darted through it.

The room inside was small, only six to nine feet square, and sparsely furnished. There was a table
against one wall and a cupboard in the corner, but nothing else. The floor, like the rest of the fortress, was made from stone slabs.

Max moved across the room. The door in the far wall, he guessed, gave access to the corridor, but there was also a second, internal door. He tried that first. It was heavy metal, about four inches thick. It opened into a darkened room, but there was enough light trickling in from the windows for him to see that it was much bigger than the first one. And much cooler. Strangely cool, in fact. It wasn't a natural kind of temperature, the sort of chill you often got in old stone buildings at night. It was artificial. Max could feel cold air circulating, hear a low background hum of machinery. That explained the insulated door. He was in some kind of refrigerated cold storage.

But what was stored here? Max could detect a strong, unpleasant smell but couldn't identify what it was. Was it rotten food? He could see no sign of boxes or cartons that might contain foodstuff. The walls of the room were blank. There were no cupboards or shelves. All Max could see was three tables lined up across the center of the room. At least, he thought they were tables. When he moved closer to inspect them, he saw that they were actually trolleys with wheels—like
the beds they used in hospitals for moving patients around.

On each of the trolleys was an object—something bulky, nearly six feet long and a foot and a half wide. Max touched one. It was encased in a zip-up black plastic bag and felt soft under his fingers. He shivered. He was beginning to suspect what the objects were.

He located the zip and tugged it down. The unpleasant smell suddenly grew stronger. The black bag gaped open and Max saw a face inside—a man's face. He could just make out the features. The eyes staring up at him, the mouth contorted into a grimace of pain. However this man had died, it had not been a peaceful end.

Max zipped the bag closed again and stepped away from the trolley, feeling breathless, slightly sick. He didn't want to go near the other two body bags, but he had to know what they contained. He unzipped each of them in turn. There were dead bodies inside both. One was a fat, middle-aged man with a beard, the other a much smaller guy who looked only a few years older than Max. Like the first corpse, these two had faces that were frozen into masks of pain and fear.

What is going on here on Shadow Island?
Max wondered. A “little experiment,” Julius Clark had called it. What had he meant by that? What kind of experiment?
Were they trying out new drugs on the prisoners? Whatever had killed these three men, it hadn't been natural causes.

Max heard the click of a door opening. He went rigid.

A light snapped on in the adjoining room. Someone was coming.

Max looked around, trying not to panic. There was just the one door into the room, no other exit except the windows—and they were too high to jump from. Nor was there any furniture he could use to conceal himself. There was only one place he could hide. He shuddered at the thought, but didn't hesitate for long. He unzipped the body bag on the third trolley and quickly slid inside it, shifting the corpse over to make room. He pulled the zipper shut and lay still, trying not to gag at the foul smell.

The cold-storage door opened. Someone came in. More than one person. Max heard two sets of footsteps. No, three. Three people had entered. The light came on.

“Jeez, this place is starting to stink,” a man's voice said in English. “How long have these bodies been here?”

“Two days, I think, señor,” another man replied.

“Have the technicians finished with them?”

“Yes, señor.”

“Then what're you waiting for? Get rid of them.”

“Now, señor?”

“Yeah, now. Before I throw up.”

One set of footsteps left the room. The two people who'd remained behind had a short conversation in Spanish, then the trolley underneath Max vibrated and began to move. It was being wheeled out of the room.

The body bag shifted slightly as the trolley turned to negotiate the doorway. Max rolled against the corpse beside him and his cheek touched the face of the dead man. The skin felt cold and clammy. Max resisted the urge to pull away in disgust. He clenched his teeth to stop himself retching and kept motionless, his body pressed against the corpse so that from outside it would appear as if there were only one person inside the bag.

They went out onto the terrace, the trolley wheels rattling over the stone walkway. Max felt someone fiddling with the end of the body bag, attaching something to it; then the bag was lifted off the trolley. Max hoped that no one would notice the extra weight. The dead man next to him was only slightly built, as was
Max. The two of them together would probably only weigh the same as a big man.

The body bag swung back and forth a couple of times, then Max felt himself being thrown out into space and falling.

DOWN AND DOWN HE PLUMMETED. MAX could hear the air whistling past the bag as it fell. He was terrified, knowing he might be dead in seconds. He braced himself automatically for the impact that was to come. If it was solid ground, it was all over. If it was water, he had a chance of survival.

It was water. The bag hit the surface of the sea with a force that was like a hammer blow to the body. Max had tensed all his muscles in readiness, but even so the wind was knocked out of him. For a moment he couldn't breathe; then he gasped in a mouthful of air just a split second before the bag submerged and began to sink. Water poured in through the opening
by the zip, flooding over Max's face. He reached up, his hands searching for the tag. The bag was sinking fast. They must have tied weights to it to make sure it didn't float back up. The water was all around him now. He couldn't see. The corpse beside him was pressing against him, crushing his chest. He didn't have much air in his lungs. There hadn't been time to gulp in enough. Where
was
the zip? It was somewhere here. It had to be. The bag was still sinking. How deep were they going? Max thought suddenly of his act—his escape from a sack in a freezing-cold water tank. If he could do that, then he could do this.

His fingers found the tag. He pulled hard on it. The zip didn't budge. He pulled again. His lungs were ready to burst. The zip moved a couple of inches, then jammed. Max tugged on it. It didn't move. He slid both hands into the narrow opening and grabbed hold of the sides of the bag, wrenching them apart with all his strength. The zip came loose and the bag split open. Max got his shoulders out through the opening, then the rest of his body. The bag kept sinking, falling into the murky depths. Max took a last look at it, then kicked toward the surface.

It was a long way up. So long that he thought he wasn't going to make it. There was nothing left in his
lungs. His heart, his muscles were working on determination and grit alone. Max didn't believe in defeat.

He saw a shimmer of light above him and found a new surge of energy. He was nearly there. He broke the surface and gulped in the sweet night air.

He was in a small cove. There were high cliffs on two sides; on the third, the walls of the fortress rose up from a base of massive rocks. The terrace from which he'd been thrown protruded out over the cove, enabling objects to be dumped directly into deep water. Max wondered how many bodies there were down below him at the bottom of the ocean.

He was tired. His earlier swim through the sewage pipe, his escape from the cell, and now his submersion in the body bag had combined to exhaust him. He needed to rest. He swam to the rocks at the foot of the fortress and dragged himself out of the water.

For twenty minutes or more he lay on the rocks, getting his strength back. Then he noticed the sky was getting lighter. Dawn was approaching. If he wanted to find a way back into the fortress, he would have to act now, while he still had the cover of darkness. And he was determined to get back in. He had to save Consuela. If he didn't, they'd strap her into that horrific chair and inject her with chemicals. Max
couldn't let that happen to her.

Getting wearily to his feet, he examined his surroundings. The cove was almost a complete circle, a narrow gap at one side giving access to the open sea. The cliffs were steep. If there was no alternative, he'd probably be able to climb them, but Max thought he could see an easier way out. The rocks immediately below the fortress walls had a much shallower gradient. There was a cave in the center, and from there the rocks were stacked one on top of the other to form a series of steps and platforms. Some of the steps were high, but Max reckoned there'd be plenty of hand-and footholds to help him get up them.

He clambered across the lowest tier of rocks, which, from the thick covering of seaweed and pools of salt water, were clearly submerged at high tide, and over a lip into the cave. He peered into the blackness. The cave only had a small opening, but it seemed to go back a long way. Max went farther inside, picking his way over the slippery pebble-strewn floor. At one side, high up near the roof, he saw a narrow fissure in the rock. If he could get through that, he could climb onto the outcrop at the right of the cave and begin his ascent to the fortress. But first he had to reach the fissure.

He ran his hands over the wall of rock and found
a couple of cracks to hang on to, then a foothold. He pulled himself up, locating more clefts and ledges to assist him. Within a short time he had climbed twelve feet and was almost touching the roof.

It was then that he saw the glint of something shiny in the shadows at the back of the cave. An hour earlier he wouldn't have noticed it—it would have been too dark. But now it was just light enough for him to make out a metallic line on the surface of the rock. He moved sideways along a ledge to take a closer look. There was a thin iron rail embedded in the wall and, below the rail, a series of steps that were too even and uniform to be natural. They had to be manmade.

Strange
, Max thought.
Steps? Why would someone have cut steps into the rock?
Then he remembered something that Angel Romero had mentioned—about the pirates who'd used Shadow Island as their base in the sixteenth century digging tunnels to give them an escape route from the fortress. Was that what this was—the end of a tunnel?

Max took hold of the iron railing and went carefully up the steps, feeling his way more than seeing it. There was a natural chimney at the back of the cave through which the steps ascended, then a narrow passage that had been hewn out of the rock by hand. It had been
cleverly done: At intervals there were boreholes in the side of the passage to allow light to shine through here and there. With the sun already creeping over the horizon, faint glimmers were trickling in, enabling Max to see where he was going.

At one point the passage widened out into a small natural chamber that had a fault line in the roof, allowing even more light in; then it shrank back to a tunnel so low that Max had to stoop to get through.

He'd climbed sixty feet or more, he estimated, when the tunnel came to an abrupt end. It was pitch dark again here, so he couldn't see the wall in front of him, but he could feel that it wasn't a natural slab of rock. There were regular horizontal and vertical joints in the surface where squared-off stones had been cemented together.

Had the pirates' escape route been blocked off sometime in the four hundred years since they'd abandoned the island? Or was this wall an integral part of the route? Max explored with his fingers. It was about the width and height of a standard door. But
was
it a door?

He pushed with his hands. It was as solid and immovable as the rock around it. Max pushed in a different place—on the left-hand side. Still nothing moved. He tried the right and this time felt the stones give a little.
He pushed again, harder. He hadn't imagined it. The stones had definitely moved a fraction. If it was really a door, it probably hadn't been opened for centuries. The mechanism would be stiff. He put his shoulder to the stones and applied all the pressure he could muster. He heard a creak, like a rusty hinge, and the wall suddenly jolted back a couple of inches. Max felt round the edge. There was the beginning of an opening. He pushed with his shoulder again, using all his weight. Very slowly, the wall of stone swung inward to reveal a doorway in the rock.

Max stepped through. Light now filtered through an iron grille on the wall above his head. He was back in the cellars of the fortress. The room was similar to the one he'd entered from the sewage outlet—a high-vaulted chamber with bare stone walls and a stone floor. Max paused to rest for a moment. He was tired, but he knew he had to keep going. He was back inside the fortress. That was risky, but he had to find Consuela, and he had to discover whether his father had come here, and what had happened to him afterward.

Max went to the door. It wasn't locked. He stepped into the corridor and paused, picturing the layout of the fortress in his mind again. He was on the north side of the building. Where was Consuela being held? He'd
have to work his way through the rest of the rooms until he found her, but there was another job he had to do first.

He moved cautiously along the corridor and then up the stairs. Would the guards still be searching the fortress for him? They'd had more than enough time to go through all the rooms, so maybe the search would have been moved outside the fortress.

On the ground floor he stopped again. The floodlights were still on in the central courtyard, but Max could see no sign of any guards. He flitted along the corridor to Julius Clark's office and tried the door. It was locked, but Max still had the piece of wire in his pocket. In just a few seconds he had the door open. There were windows on both the north and west walls of the room. Through the west window, Max could see the mainland, the lights of Rio Verde twinkling on the hillside, the outlines of the buildings emerging from shadow as the sun rose. In the channel near the mouth of the river, Julius Clark's massive yacht was clearly visible.

Max went over to the desk. The drawers were locked, but the locks were no match for Max's skill with a wire hook. He pulled open the top drawer. It contained envelopes and other stationery—and a
gleaming silver automatic pistol. Max lifted it out. He'd never handled a gun before and he was surprised by how heavy it was. He put the weapon down on the desk and went through the other drawers. Most contained nothing of interest—a diary, more stationery, a ball of string, staples, and other office supplies. But one drawer was filled to the brim with money, crisp new U.S. thousand-dollar bills bound together in half-inch-thick packets. Max stared at the cash. There had to be more than a million dollars in the drawer.

But it wasn't money he'd come for. He turned his attention to the metal filing cabinets behind the desk. They contained folders, arranged in alphabetical order, each one labeled with what appeared to be a man's name. Some names looked English, others were clearly foreign.
James Abbott
,
Sergei Alekseev
,
Narang Anwar
,
Redmond Ashworth-Ames
,
Erik Blomkvist
. Max flicked through the folders, noting the dates on the covers, and stopped abruptly, staring at the name on one of the files. His mouth had gone suddenly dry. His hands were shaking. Yes, it was there: a file marked
Alexander Cassidy
.

Max put it on the desk and opened it. There wasn't much inside, just a few sheets of paper. On the first sheet were personal details. His father's name and place
and date of birth. Then there were his postal address and email address, his cell and landline phone numbers, National Insurance number, and other bits of information such as height, weight, eye color, and blood type. Underneath these details was a note that read,
Date of admission—8 June 2007
.

Max gazed at the words, feeling his heart miss a beat: 8 June 2007. That was the day after his father had disappeared, the day after he had supposedly been murdered by Max's mother. Here was confirmation that Helen Cassidy could not possibly have killed her husband and that he had been brought to Shadow Island. But why had he been brought here? What was Julius Clark's interest in him? Were there things about his dad that Max didn't know? Important things?

The file gave no answer to these questions. It said nothing else about his stay on the island. The remaining three sheets of paper looked like printouts of medical tests. The top line of text on the first sheet read,
9 June, 11:25 hrs—5ml Episuderon
, and below that were rows of figures and readings that seemed to relate to bodily functions such as heart rate, brainwaves, blood pressure, and respiration.

Max couldn't understand what the figures meant, but he could guess where they'd come from. Episuderon,
that had to be a drug. His father, like the man Max had seen in the laboratory, had been injected with the drug, and these printouts recorded how his body had reacted to it.

It appeared that Alexander had only been given that one injection. What had happened after that? Had the injection killed him? Was his body down at the bottom of the cove with all the other corpses? If it was, there was no record of it in this file.

Max removed the sheets of paper, folded them up, and slipped them into his pocket. He was returning the folder to the cabinet when he heard a noise behind him. He spun around to see Julius Clark entering the office.