Shadow Creatures (15 page)

He pushed himself into a sitting position. The room he was in was empty apart from his bed, the medical equipment attached to the wall behind it, a chair and a flat-screen TV mounted to the
wall. A sign on the wall behind his head read
Bed 1.
There were two doors – one open, through which he could see a bathroom, and one closed that presumably led outside to a corridor.
There was also a large window through which he could see blue sky. He couldn’t see a phone, or anywhere his clothes could have been stored.

He shuffled to the edge of the bed, pulled the sheets back and tried to turn himself round. There were metal rails, like ladders, running along the side of the bed, presumably to stop him
falling out, but they were hinged and he managed to lie one flat and turn so that his legs were dangling off the bed and nearly touching the carpeted floor. One of them, he noticed, was in a
snazzy-looking plastic cast.

He turned his attention to the window. From his raised position he could now look down through it. He had been expecting a car park, perhaps, or a walkway, or some flowerbeds.

Not desert.

He blinked a couple of times, wondering if his brain was still suffering the lingering after-effects of the sedative, but the view outside steadfastly refused to change. He could see a fence
topped with razor wire, a lot of white sand, some scrubby bushes and something that looked like a cactus. And, come to think of it, that sky was bluer than anything he remembered seeing in
England.

‘Ah,’ a familiar voice said, ‘you’re awake. There was a change in your blood pressure, so I thought I’d better check to see you were OK.’

Calum turned his head and saw Dr Kircher in the doorway. He was wearing a white coat, and had a stethoscope round his neck.

‘Where am I?’ Calum asked.

‘You’re safe.’

‘I’m not in England, am I?’

‘No. You’re in Las Cruces.’

Calum’s mind raced. ‘Las Cruces, New Mexico? Las Cruces, USA?’

‘That’s right. This is where the main Robledo Mountains Technology facility is located.’ Kircher smiled. ‘It seemed to make sense to bring you out here so we could
conduct some detailed investigations into what went wrong with the bionic legs.’ He paused. ‘We brought the ARLENE robot back with us as well. It’s in a hangar nearby. There may
well have been some unfortunate cross-interference between your legs and the robot.’

‘You kidnapped me!’ Calum exclaimed. His brain was filled with whirling thoughts, the most important of which was that he was thousands of miles from home, and completely
isolated.

‘Not at all,’ Dr Kircher said calmly, smiling. ‘We merely took a decision to relocate you in your own best interests.’

‘I didn’t agree to it.’

‘You did,’ Kircher continued, still smiling. ‘The form you signed when you were fitted with the legs explicitly gives us permission to treat you wherever we feel best.’
He shrugged. ‘To be fair, it was a small sub-paragraph, buried deep in the text, and you were distracted. I’m not surprised you missed it.’

Calum felt a rising tide of panic lapping against the shores of his mind. ‘I want to leave. I want to go back to England.’

‘Let’s sort out these legs first, eh, and then we’ll see. Can you get back into bed properly, by the way?’

‘Then I want to make a phone call.’

‘Of course. I’ll get a phone brought in.’ He paused. ‘If I can find one. We don’t have that many around.’ He cocked his head to one side, considering Calum.
‘But, before I do that, I want to get a full psychological profile run on you. I can’t help but feel that you are acting a little . . . paranoid. It might just be the lingering effects
of the sedative, of course, but it might be that there was some feedback through the headset from ARLENE’s circuitry. There might be some damage to your brain. I hope not, but before I let
you talk to anyone I do need to check that out.’

His voice was calm and reasonable, but there was something about the way the light from the window reflected off his glasses that made his words seem menacing. More like a threat.

Calum examined his options. He was helpless. He couldn’t do anything without the help of the Robledo staff.

‘How long have I been unconscious?’ he asked, trying to make his voice calm.

‘Oh, eight hours or so. We have a private jet at Farnborough airfield, and our own landing strip here. I came with you.’

‘You kept me sedated for that long?’

‘You were injured, and we were worried about the possibility of brain damage caused by feedback from ARLENE’s processor, as I said, so we kept the sedative topped up. Now,
that’s enough talking. I suggest that you rest for a while, let that sedation run its course. We’ll run some tests later.’

He backed into the corridor, and the door closed behind him.

Calum couldn’t help but notice that there was no door knob or door handle on his side.

Whichever way he looked at it, he was a prisoner.

T
he team – Rhino thought of them as the team, even though it was really just him and two kids – was staying at the Marco Polo Hotel,
just a few minutes’ walk from the harbour in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon. It was an exclusive, expensive hotel, but Calum had seemed willing to pay the price for the three rooms. As
Rhino had pointed out to him – firstly they needed somewhere comfortable where they could sleep after their long journey and recover from their jet lag, and secondly they needed to have an
address in Hong Kong that made them seem as if they had a lot of money, so it wouldn’t be unusual for them to be shopping around for exotic animals if anyone checked. And someone
would
check; Rhino was sure of it.

He slept for eight solid hours after they got to the hotel. Waking up naturally, and feeling good, he showered, dressed and grabbed some breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The others were still
asleep, so after that he wandered out into the open air. The heat and the humidity – just like walking into a sauna – fell on him like a sodden blanket. He smiled, despite himself. This
was Hong Kong, and he loved it.

The harbour was only a hundred metres or so from the hotel, and he wandered down towards it. One of the Star ferries was just docking at its jetty. The sight of the familiar boat, with its green
lower deck and white upper deck, sent a shiver of recognition through him.

He wandered to the barrier that separated the jetty from the waters of the harbour and stared across at the incredible sight that was Hong Kong Island. Boats of many different kinds crossed in
front of him: from bamboo junks steered with a single long oar up to the most modern of yachts. At night, he knew, the skyscrapers on the other side of the channel would be lit up with garish neon
purples, blues, greens, yellows and reds of a thousand different advertising hoardings, with the choppy waters reflecting them like a fractured, shifting mirror. Behind the buildings rose the lush
dark green of the hills that sat in the centre of the island, with Victoria Peak the highest.

He shivered as he remembered running through the foliage of the Peak in the dark once, some years ago, desperately trying to get to the tram station and the safety of a crowd of tourists,
knowing that an agent of the Guójiā Ānquánbù, the Chinese Secret Service, was somewhere behind him, armed with a silenced automatic pistol and a knife. Rhino’s
past was littered with such moments – moments where his life depended on something as simple as whether or not a twig cracked beneath his feet, or whether a gate was locked or open. He was
happy to have left those days behind. Well, he thought, kind of happy. And only kind of behind as well, considering what he was now getting himself into with Calum Challenger.

He wondered where that agent was now. Was he dead, or was he perhaps leaning on a barrier somewhere nearby and looking out at the same waters as Rhino?

He shook himself. This kind of introspection would not help the mission. He turned and headed back to the Marco Polo.

The hotel was attached to an exclusive shopping mall of the kind in which Natalie would love to spend her time and her mother’s money, and Rhino wandered across the hotel lobby and into
the heavily air-conditioned mall, looking for places that sold high-quality clothes. Within an hour he had suits in his and Gecko’s sizes, plus several shirts for both of them, and a silk
dress for Natalie that matched the shoes she was already wearing – all charged to the credit card that Calum had given him. He supposed he could have waited until they’d both woken up
and gone shopping
with
him instead of having to shop
for
them, but trailing Natalie around a shopping mall while she tried on all the clothes would have driven him mad. Better that he
just presented her with a fait accompli. The problem was that they hadn’t had the time to get suitable clothes in London before they left, and the way they dressed, like the place they were
staying, would be part of their cover.

He also bought three mobile phones with pay-as-you-go SIMs, and spent a few minutes setting them up and making sure that each phone had the numbers of the others in its memory. Better to be safe
than sorry.

Back at the hotel, he found Natalie and Gecko having brunch. He joined them and showed them what he had bought.

‘Seriously?’ Natalie said when she saw the dress. ‘Green? I have blue eyes. It’ll clash.’

‘So will we if you don’t put it on,’ Rhino said. ‘Besides, you’ll be wearing sunglasses. All rich celebrities wear sunglasses all the time, don’t
they?’

Gecko was running his fingers over the cloth of his suit. ‘Not much flexibility of movement here,’ he pointed out.

‘And you won’t be wearing trainers either.’ Rhino raised up another bag with a shoebox in it. ‘I had to guess your size, but I have a good eye. Fortunately I’m not
expecting any trouble that might require your particular skills.’

‘So apart from the fun of dressing up,’ Natalie said, ‘what exactly
is
the plan? I mean, do we have a full cover story and everything?’

‘You are a rich American named Jayne-Anne Richmond,’ Rhino replied. ‘Your father works in oil. You can be as vague as you like about what he does – the vaguer the better,
actually. You have a trust fund, and you’re interested in buying something cute and cuddly – but, specifically, something that your friends don’t have. It’s like a
competition with you and your friends, to see who can get the rarest, most exotic animal.’

‘I guess that we are her bodyguards,’ Gecko said. ‘The suits give it away. Do we get sunglasses too?’

‘We do. Our job is to stand behind her and look as if we’re ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

Natalie frowned. ‘Giant rats aren’t cuddly or cute,’ she pointed out. ‘How am I going to convince them that I have my heart set on one?’

‘The point when negotiating and in gathering intelligence is that you don’t barrel in and ask for the thing you actually want. If you do, the price goes up rapidly. You play it
carefully, not giving away your interests. Let the seller mention the thing you’re interested in first, and don’t react to it. Be dismissive at first.’

Natalie stared at him. ‘You expect this Xi Lang to mention giant rats first? He’s going to have to get through a lot of cute and cuddly animals before he gets to that.’

‘Not,’ Rhino pointed out patiently, ‘if you mention that you used to have a pet white rat when you were a child, and you loved it.’

‘Like that’s going to come up in conversation.’

‘Trust me, it will. He’s a salesman. He’ll ask you about your pets when you were younger so that he can work out what your likes and dislikes are.’

‘But I’ll have already told him I want something cute and cuddly!’ Natalie protested.

‘Again, it’s the art of the deal. Sellers know that buyers rarely end up buying what they say they want. They almost always buy something else, something that’s been at the
back of their mind, or that means something special to them.’

‘OK!’ She shrugged in a way that said ‘what
ever
’ without actually uttering the word. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘No,’ Gecko said, ‘
you’
re the boss. We’re just the bodyguards.’

‘And remember,’ Rhino pointed out seriously, ‘that these people are criminals. Gangsters. If we stick to the cover story, we’ll be OK, but we’re walking a fine line
here. I want you to leave anything with your name on it at the hotel. I’ve got fake IDs that I brought with us from England, and replacement mobile phones for us that can’t be traced
back to our real identities. Things could get ugly, and if they do it’s my job to get you out fast.’

Rhino coached them for a while longer, making sure that they were comfortable in their personas, and then the three of them went back to their rooms and got changed. When Natalie and Gecko
reappeared in the hotel lobby, he hardly recognized them. Natalie was the absolute picture of a reality-TV star, complete with sunglasses and high heels and baseball cap, while Gecko was hovering
somewhere between inconspicuous and dangerous in his dark suit and sunglasses. He had even gelled his usually unruly hair and brushed it back neatly. Natalie, to give her her due, didn’t even
glance at Gecko or Rhino as she walked towards the lift that would take them to the cavernous underground car park. Of course she didn’t – celebrities never notice their bodyguards.

Before they got into the car, Rhino used his new mobile to dial the number that had been on the receipt that Tara had pulled off the internet – the one from Xi Lang to some unnamed buyer.
It was, presumably, the phone number for Xi Lang’s Emporium of Unusual Animals. As he dialled, he glanced from Natalie to Gecko, silently warning them that this was it. There was no going
back now.

‘Hello?’ a Chinese voice said in English. Rhino noticed that nothing was given away: not the name of the establishment or the name of the person answering the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is that Mr Xi Lang?’

‘Maybe,’ the voice conceded. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to buy something – or, rather, my employer wants to buy something.’