The Burning (35 page)

Ali turned slowly and looked at Rachel, wincing as Mahmoud’s arm squeezed his neck. “He has betrayed you.”

“He is insane,” Mahmoud said.

“No.
He
is the one who has lost his mind.” Ali’s face was twisted with rage and hatred. “He has been trying to keep you here—”

“Don’t listen!” Mahmoud screamed. “He is the one who cannot be trusted. You
know
me!”

“He is taking money from someone, I am not sure who. He has taken money in exchange for you. For your lives.”

“No…”

“
He
sabotaged the coach.”

“It’s not true.”

Ali nodded towards Jean-Bernard and Jean-Luc. “Ask them.”

Jean-Luc turned to Rachel. “It’s what I was trying to say before. Someone removed the distributor cap. We had to find a new one, rewire it—”

“Please don’t listen to him,” Mahmoud said. “Haven’t I taken good care of you? I
welcomed
you—”

Mahmoud was cut off as he was swung across Ali’s back and thrown to the floor. Ali quickly knelt down and grabbed Mahmoud’s wrist, ignoring the squeals of pain.

“There!” Ali nodded towards the tattoo between Mahmoud’s thumb and forefinger. The same tattoo that he had. Ali leant down and spat on his brother’s hand, then rubbed hard at the blue lines of the Triskellion until they disappeared.

Rachel gasped. She had been wrong about Ali.

“You see?” He looked up at Rachel. “You do not have much time. You have been betrayed.”

“Why?” Rachel asked. “Who is it that’s paying him?”

“It doesn’t matter…”

Rachel turned at the voice behind her and saw Gabriel.
His expression was blank, but there was something dangerous flashing in his eyes.

“You heard Ali,” he said. “We need to go.
Now!
”

Half an hour later, the old coach was rattling out of Marrakesh. Ali steered it expertly past the airport and the cluster of tall hotels and through an area of olive groves and small farms that gradually died away until there was nothing but scrub and sky and a long dirt road.

Rachel sat at the front with Gabriel. “Where are we going?”

“It’s a small town on the coast,” Gabriel said. “Mogador…”

“That is its ancient name,” Ali announced. “The name many of us still know it by. We should be there before it gets dark.”

Gabriel stared out of the window. “From there, it’s on foot. Ali knows the way.”

“Trust me,” Ali said. “I’ll get you to the Rocher des Tueurs.”

Rachel understood what the words meant and felt a shudder pass through her.

The Killing Stone.

Ali glanced at Gabriel. “What about Mahmoud?”

Gabriel shrugged and turned away. “He will have to live with himself,” he said. “Provided he
does
live.”

Rachel looked across at Ali and saw him slowly nod. If there was any sadness on his brother’s behalf, he showed no sign of it.

“I think I know the man he’s working for,” Gabriel said. “And he doesn’t like to leave a mess behind…”

Mahmoud was still shaking from the fight with his brother, though he would have been shaking anyway as he reached for the phone and dialled the mobile number he had been given.

“I couldn’t keep them here,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Mahmoud sat back in his chair and let out a long breath. He could have wept with joy and relief. “I’m pleased that it hasn’t caused you a problem.”

“Change of plan, that’s all. I prefer being one step ahead of them. I’m already here.”

“That’s good,” Mahmoud said. “That’s very clever.”

“Thank you. Now, you look after yourself, OK?”

Mahmoud nodded, saying he would be happy to help if there was anything else he could do.

He looked up when a shadow fell across the table and wondered what the noise was behind him.

It was his last thought.

A
dam could hear voices outside the door. When it swung open, he raised his head from the gurney and was pleased to see a friendly face.

Mr Cheung.

“Hi, Adam,” he said.

“Hi.” Adam’s voice sounded strained and weak.

Mr Cheung smiled. “You’ve been one busy guy.”

“You could say that.”

“You OK?” Mr Cheung asked, a look of concern passing over his face.

“I’ve been better,” Adam said, forcing a pained smile.

“OK,” Mr Cheung said. He swung a heavy metal suitcase up on to the steel worktop and opened it. “Let’s try and get this over with as quickly as possible.”

He took a pair of cables and electrodes from the case and attached a couple of clips to the wires. Adam strained his neck round to try and see what the Chinese man was doing. He remembered the sensation from trying to watch the
dentist fix the needle and felt the same flutters of panic spread though his stomach and into his bladder.

He remembered what Morag had taught him, when he was having the tracking device cut out. He would need to be brave. To avoid the pain, he would need to go elsewhere in his mind, to create a personal space away from whatever was about to happen.

Mr Cheung took a long pair of forceps and clamps from the case and swabbed them with antiseptic wipes. Adam’s legs began to tremble.

“What are you doing?” His voice was high-pitched and cracked.

Mr Cheung looked at him, the smile gone from his eyes. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and switched on a CD player. Light, classical music began to fill the room.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not just here to cook.”

The old coach bumped along the narrow, pitted road. The journey was punctuated only by the occasional lorry roaring towards them, or by the overtaking of a solitary donkey cart. Every twenty kilometres or so, they would drive through a one-horse town, where women in long, dun-coloured robes carried baskets of vegetables back towards mud huts and men in shabby clothes smoked idly at the roadside, watching them pass.

Rachel was sitting next to Gabriel. They had not spoken
for some miles, their minds elsewhere. The French boys were playfully thumping one another. The others were dotted around the ten rows of seats, enjoying a greater, if less comfortable, degree of personal space than they had on previous legs of their journey. Morag and Duncan were at the back, stretched out on the long bench seat, singing a song in high, Scottish voices: “The wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long…”

Rachel’s thoughts drifted back to the square in Marrakesh.

“Why did the animals attack them?” she asked Gabriel.

“What?” Gabriel had been miles away. “The monkeys, you mean?”

“Yeah, why did they attack Inez and Carmen? Did that horrible guy
make
them do it?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Why did Adam get beaten up in England? Why were they after you in Spain? It’s always been the same. Some people recognize us, know us by instinct, or from the stories their ancestors have told for many generations. And some
species
recognize us, like the bees. Others can’t see us at all.”

“What? You mean like the people who don’t notice we’re there, even when we’re right under their noses?”

Gabriel nodded. “And of those that recognize us, some will help us, as they have always done.”

“And the others?” Rachel pressed, already knowing the answer.

“The others want to do us nothing but harm.” Gabriel turned and looked her in the eye. “They just want us dead. And usually, they win.”

Adam walked along the beach. He did not know where he was exactly, but it was idyllic. Fine silver sand stretched out in a long white crescent into infinity ahead of him and crystal-clear water lapped gently at the shore. His feet enjoyed the contrast between the hot, soft sand beneath them and the delicious chill of the cool water that rhythmically splashed over them. It was a paradise where parrots and pelicans swooped and screeched overhead before landing in lush green palm trees which rustled in the gentle breeze…

Now and then, the classical music would push through his vision, and the shrill sound of the violins would bring him back towards consciousness. Then Adam would have to fight to return to the island in his mind.

He knew there would be scars – physical and mental – and he knew there would be pain to bear once he was on the other side: once this torture had ended … if it
ever
ended. All he could do for now, though, was focus and float in his subconscious, above the pain. The smell of singed hair began to bring him back into the room. Adam fought on in his mind … running away across the beach and out into the water, splashing across its surface to where the dolphins were playing.

He dived, deep into the cool blue.

*  *  *

Rachel was looking out of the window, daydreaming. A beach, crystal-blue water, somewhere nice… Chance would be a fine thing. Maybe one day she would get a holiday in a place like that…

Her reverie was broken as Laura sat down next to her; Rachel resented the intrusion that brought her back to earth with a bump. Gabriel had moved seats. He was talking to Inez and Carmen, who were nodding and smiling at him enthusiastically.

Rachel glanced at Laura.

“Hi,” Laura said.

“Hi,” Rachel responded sulkily.

“I think I’m building some bridges with your mum, Rachel.”

Rachel shrugged and pushed out her lower lip. “You might want to think about building some with me,” she said. “But to be honest, I think we’re past that point.”

Laura looked disappointed. “Rach…”

“Don’t,” Rachel said. “You are nothing but a liar. You just lie and twist and conceal, and you have done from the very moment I met you back in Triskellion.” Rachel was warming to her theme. These were things she needed to get off her chest. “You might be a smart doctor and all that, but you have no real knowledge of what makes people tick. Morag and Duncan have more intuition in their little fingernails than you have…”

Gabriel and the Spanish girls stopped chattering and looked round.

“I’m not as sensitive as you guys,” Laura said. “You’re special. That’s all I wanted to show.”

“Show
who
?” Rachel spat. “Show your boss? Show the world? With you I’m just research, aren’t I? A lab rat. We’re all research, scientific proof. For what? So you can stick me in a cage and win a load of prizes?”

Laura looked down at the leg of her jeans and picked at the frayed hole that was developing across the knee. She knew that what Rachel had said was true. She
had
lied; it had become a way of life, working for the Hope Project. She was effectively a spy, a double agent. And Rachel’s other comment had
really
hit home. Most of her own emotions had become so deeply suppressed that she really didn’t know what made people tick. She realized that she had no close, personal relationships. Rachel and Adam had been the closest she’d got to loving anyone for as long as she could remember and now she’d lost them.

Lost two friends. Lost a mother’s child.

She had let everybody down, including herself.

Suddenly she was crying like an infant. Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably and tears poured down her freckled cheeks. Her chest heaved, trying to contain the tears held in by years of self-control.

Rachel dug into her sleeve and handed Laura a tissue.

Laura turned to face her. “Thank you, Rachel,” she said
between sobs. “Whatever you may think of me, how ever much you hate me now, I promise you one thing…”

Rachel waited for the crying to subside.

“No more lies.”

T
he Englishman sat in his room and listened to the Atlantic crashing angrily against the town’s ancient stone walls. The sea here was grey and unforgiving; far rougher than he remembered it.

He had visited the town many years before as a younger man, he and a group of his rich, spoilt friends. Their skin was bronzed and their hair bleached after many months travelling through India, Turkey and North Africa. He had stayed here for several months. He had spent hours listening to loud music in rooms filled with like-minded layabouts; the atmosphere heady with smoke and the pungent stink of incense. He had sat up late into the night and talked about changing the world, with friends who would grow up to be bankers and businessmen.