Ice Claw (37 page)

Aladfar lunged, teeth bared, his mighty head ringed with a striped ruff that flared during attack. A snarling roar to challenge the boy who gripped the bars with both hands, who stood his ground. Aladfar’s head dropped, his amber eyes watching.

The boy reached through the bars, first one arm and then
the other. He whispered low sounds, soothing, his eyes slowly blinking. The tiger heard a word he understood: “Aladfar, Aladfar.”

The huge cat padded closer, sniffed the hands that opened before him and allowed the boy’s fingers to close on the thickness of his neck.

“Aladfar, you are magnificent. The most beautiful creature I have ever seen,” Max said gently—the awesome moment nearly overwhelmed him. He could smell the tiger’s heat, feel the deep layer of fur covering the thick muscle below it. “I’ll come back and see you again one day. I will never forget you. Ever.”

It was hot. Aladfar panted. The tiger sniffed and licked the boy’s hand as it stroked his face.

Max walked away. Fauvre and Abdullah waited for him at the pickup. He shook Fauvre’s hand—no more need be said between them—and climbed into the stiflingly hot cab.

As the pickup turned, Max looked back towards the tiger.

Aladfar was standing, full square, his body casting a giant shadow. His eyes followed Max, watching the boy take his freedom. And then Aladfar gave a roar that echoed around the walls of the Angels’ Tears.

A tremor of fear fluttered through Sayid. The old van was struggling. The last thing he wanted now was for it to be abandoned. The numbers on the surfboard had been scribbled and crossed out a dozen times as he tried to find the
phrase or key word needed to decipher the magic square’s numbers.

The one thing the journey had given him so far was time—time enough to remember Max’s spy game. Once you had the key word it was easy. Lay the letters out in the same box as the numbers, don’t repeat any letter, use the numbers Max found on the crystal to translate and it was done.

Easy.

If only he had the key word letters to lay out! He had tried every word associated with his dilemma:
Sharkface, château, Biarritz, Atlantic, surfing, Ethiopia, Zabala, endangered species, Morocco
—that last word made him think of Max, and he wished his friend were right there in the van with him. No, not that. He wanted Max and himself to be free, to be back home. But the more he thought about that, the more his courage seeped away.

The van stopped. The driver lowered the window. Peaches and Sharkface appeared. They both looked past the men in front to Sayid. He turned his face away, pretending to sleep.

“Carry on,” Sharkface said in his spittle-lipped way. “Peaches stays, the vans follow. We wait here with the bikes. The girl’s coming. Take the kid up there.”

A gust of cold air blew snowflakes into the van. The window went back up, Sharkface thumped a signal to go on and the van started again.

The girl? That meant Sophie. Was she bringing Max with her? How could Sayid warn him he was walking into a trap? He couldn’t. Not yet. But perhaps when he got “up there”—
which was where? A building? A mountain? Wherever it was, Sayid realized, that might be the only place he could reach a phone. This was way beyond Max’s being wanted for murder; Sayid needed the police to find Max before murder was committed.

This was like playing tag with the devil. He hooks you and you’re it.

Dead.

And that was the answer he’d been searching for. Take your mind off the problem, give it something else to think about and, like smoke under a door, the devil whispers in your ear.

Lucifer
.

Another two hours. Low gear, winding uphill. The squeak of rubber against windshield as the blades struggled against the snowstorm. The men smoked and cursed, and Sayid felt sick from the cigarette fumes and lack of air. Thankfully, the windshield began to mist up and the men were forced to open the windows slightly. The fresh air cleared Sayid’s head. He had the magic square rewritten. Max’s story of the code breakers was clear in his mind now. He had to lay out each letter of the key word alongside each number of the square, but he must not use any of the key word’s letters more than once.

Once those letters had been used, you then had to carry on with the alphabet. So once the word
Lucifer
had been written next to the numbers, he had to continue with
S, T, U, V
and so on. Trouble was there were twenty-six letters in
the alphabet and he had a square of twenty-five numbers. That meant two of the letters had to share and, if Max’s story was correct, the Second World War code makers used
I
and
J
. Sayid carefully wrote out the key word,
L-U-C-I-F-E-R
, beneath the numbers.

No, the
U
was wrong. Couldn’t repeat a letter if it’d been used. He crossed it out and started the line again.

The driver changed down a gear. The engine lurched. One of the men swore and hit the dashboard. “Come on! We’re almost there! Heap of junk!”

The men pushed open the doors and stepped into the
swirling snow. Sayid heard the other vans pull up: tires scrunched; doors opened and slammed. The shiver that ran through him had nothing to do with the high mountain air. He knew that if the van had finally given up, then they would put him in one of Sharkface’s vans—and he’d be separated from the magic square.

Sayid squirmed towards the cab, reaching for one of the bottles of water the men had shoved between the seats. There was no time now. He had to take the risk. He could still hear their voices, but because Bobby’s van had no windows in the back he couldn’t see where they were. More voices, a couple of them raised. Someone moaned. “I’m not towing it! We’ll never get up the pass. Leave it!”

Sayid spilled the water across his boot and rubbed the accumulated mud and caked slush away. The numbers Max had given him from the crystal revealed themselves. When Sayid took each of those numbers, found it on the magic square, he would then see the corresponding letter. He was a dozen letters away from discovering Zabala’s secret message. The pendant’s first number was 7—Sayid saw that that was the letter
C
on the square; the next, 24, was the letter
U …

Sayid’s eyes darted across the magic square. The voices were getting closer—he wrote quickly. If they ever searched him when they got to wherever they were going, he had to make sure they would not find the deciphered code. And if he was going to find a way of telling Max the secret … 
Concentrate!
Number, letter, number …

He had to do something! If they ever found this van they had to know he was still alive. Sayid tugged the
misbaha
from his pocket and hooked it over the tail fin of a surfboard.

One of the men wrenched the back door open. The glaring snow meant he couldn’t see clearly in the gloom of the van. Sayid slipped the pen into his sleeve.

“Get out, kid!” the man shouted. “Come on, hurry it up.”

As one of the men leaned in to drag him out, Sayid lashed out with his plaster cast as if struggling to comply with their brutal commands. He kicked the surfboard from its bracket and it fell flat onto the floor of the van. Whatever happened next, at least none of these men would see his scribbling on the board’s surface.

They made no concessions for the slow-moving boy. One of them pushed him and he stumbled, but within half a dozen strides of being hauled and kicked across the snow he was flung into the back of one of the vans. It smelled of oil and grease. Motorbikes. The grooved channels on the floor reminded Sayid that each van carried three bikes and they and their riders were back in Geneva. Waiting for Sophie.

The doors slammed closed.

Sayid wrote down the last two letters.

The message made no sense.

Max had left the Tears of the Angels in an old pickup driven by Abdullah. Now the dusty road reached beyond the horizon.

The old pickup didn’t have the luxury of Abdullah’s Land Cruiser, and the rutted road shook Max’s spine. For a long time Abdullah remained silent, but then he turned and spoke to Max.

“Those men who attacked us, they were Tuareg.”

“Yes, Laurent told me,” Max answered.

Abdullah nodded. “It is the men who wear the veil. They believe evil spirits can enter their bodies through their nose and mouth. The women do not wear the veil. Tuareg women are different from other Arab women. They can fight. They are taught from when they are young to wrestle. They are strong. The women are special and they are permitted to choose the men. You understand me? They choose. The men, they accept what the women choose.”

Abdullah stopped talking for a moment and waited, as if expecting Max to grasp the reason why he was telling him all of this.

“I see,” Max said, because he didn’t have a clue why Abdullah was giving him lessons in tribal culture.

Abdullah shrugged. He would have to explain further.

“Sophie’s mother was Tuareg.”

Now Abdullah had Max’s attention. The image of Sophie wrestling the man to the ground in Marrakech began to make some sense.

Another shrug from the big man. Now did the boy understand?

“The attack last night was about Sophie’s mother?” Max asked uncertainly.

“No! Nothing to do with it! You are not listening to me.”

Max sighed. He thought he’d been most attentive. “Sorry, Abdullah, what exactly are you trying to tell me?”

The pickup hit a bone-jarring rut. Abdullah crashed the gears, found an easier route and steered them clear.

“She is Tuareg. She found herself a man who was not crippled.”

“That’s cruel,” Max said, feeling the uncaring act of desertion.

“It was her choice! No matter. Laurent is a Frenchman. His pride as well as his back was broken. And Sophie, no, she could not accept it either. Laurent tried to hold the girl with what love he has left, but she is different as well. His daughter has Tuareg blood. Yes?”

“I suppose she has, yes.”

“And now you understand?”

“Er … no, not really.” Max gave a helpless smile. It was beyond him.

Abdullah shook his head. This boy knew nothing. “Sophie will fight for you. She has chosen you.”

Laurent Fauvre thought of his daughter as he watched Max and Abdullah leave. Secrets were being exposed; frightening power might soon be unleashed. Did he believe in any of Zabala’s predictions? He was uncertain. But his daughter was a part of this madness. And Max Gordon? How much did he care about him?

He knew the telephone number he dialed by heart. The man answered.

“Oui?”

“Where are you?” Fauvre said.

“Marseilles.”

“Get to Geneva. My daughter will be there in a few hours, at the train station. Max Gordon is flying in.”

“We’ll leave now,” said Corentin.

The vans pulled into a vast underground area. It had an industrial chill. In the depth of the tunnels that led off from this massive cave torn out from the mountainside, Sayid could see machinery, lots of it—big earth-moving equipment, tunnel-boring machines, excavators; this was the workmen’s entrance.

The men pulled him towards a set of lift doors. An armed, uniformed guard without insignia watched them approach. He nodded to Sayid’s captors and pressed a button. Doors hissed open and Sayid was pushed into a crystal elevator. It felt as though he were inside a diamond: purposefully cut edges illuminated with soft-glow halogen lamps splashed colors about, like refracted light. They ascended rapidly. Light flickered, catching the bare rock face visible through the etched crystal, every scar on the rock’s surface throwing back the colors.