The Devil's Breath (2 page)

But being hunted down and killed was not on the curriculum.

Max’s cuts and bruises were treated by Matron. The headmaster recognized the need for some kind of female role model, so there were a couple of women on the staff. Right
now, Max wished his mother were around to give him a hug. Tears stung his eyes but he tried to be brave and pretend it was caused by the antiseptic Matron was putting on his arm. She murmured a few comforting words about there being no shame in crying, and that no one would know. Max didn’t care about anyone knowing, he had cried for ages when his mum died, four years ago, and he couldn’t help some tears now, but once he put it in perspective and took some deep breaths to calm himself down, he felt better. He was alive.

Once Max had been checked by the school’s on-call doctor and had given his statement to the police, he learned that it was a paratrooper who’d saved his life by hurling him to the ground out of the way of the machine-gun fire that had killed the assassin. The army had been in the training area for two weeks on a live firing exercise, and by chance the eagle-eyed soldier saw Max being chased and, without time to stop the firing, threw himself at the dazed boy, saving his life.

Everything else was a mystery. “I’ve spoken to the police, Max; they don’t know who the dead man is. Not yet, anyway,” Mr. Jackson, the school principal, told him. Fergus Jackson didn’t have the look of a traditional school headmaster. He seemed to live permanently in corduroy trousers, hiking boots and a woolen round-neck sweater. Max sipped the hot chocolate someone had given him as they’d moved to Jackson’s study, a big room with a blazing fire in a massive granite fireplace. Multicolored rugs cushioned the slate floor
and well-worn, creaky leather chairs and sofas were arranged around the fire.

Mr. Peterson, Max’s housemaster, was also in the room, looking more worried than usual. His appearance was that of a rather ineffectual bookkeeper. He had floppy hair and wore spectacles, and he always seemed to be deep in abstracted thought. This appearance was deceptive: he’d led a vigorous life, climbing the world’s highest mountain peaks in between teaching boys geography and white-water canoeing.

The attack remained a mystery. There was no obvious reason for anyone to try to kill Max. “Do you think it could have been a random attack?” Max asked. “Y’know, some kind of nutter who crawls out from under a stone whenever he feels the urge?”

“From what you’ve said, it seems he was determined from the start to kill you. Otherwise, once you’d run he could have simply got himself out of there and disappeared into the night,” Jackson answered.

“How did you realize it was an ambush?” Mr. Peterson said.

Max recalled when he’d first heard the sound of an automatic pistol being cocked, a moment indelibly impressed on his memory.

Every school holiday, the boys could stay on at school and take part in various activities, such as an expedition to climb Ben Nevis, a canoe trip, or even bear watching in Canada; but if they were really desperate they went home to their parents. It was a school rule that families had to be seen at least once a year, otherwise Mr. Jackson and the staff
would never have a breather. Max chose to see his dad every time. He loved it. He always had. Tom Gordon was a … well, Max wasn’t a hundred percent certain what his dad was, to tell the truth, but it was something along the lines of a hydrologist-geologist-archaeologist, who traveled around the world. He found underground wells in the deserts and helped Third World villagers get a clean supply of water; he uncovered hidden cities and identified lost civilizations; he scuba-dived off exotic ocean reefs, searching for lost wrecks. No wonder his dad urged him to go to Dartmoor High—he wanted his son to be as resilient and capable as he was. Life should be an adventure, he always told Max, but you had to be equipped to go on the journey. It was brains as well as physical fitness that were needed.

It had been eighteen months ago when Max had heard the oily slide and click of metal against metal as his dad’s hands cocked a 9mm Browning pistol. Max had never been that scared before and had never seen that look in his father’s eye. It chilled him. It made him feel that the smiling, warm, loving father he’d always cherished had a cold place in his heart that was as deep as glacier ice.

For the summer holidays that year he’d joined his father on a dhow from Zanzibar, sailing down the east coast of Africa. His dad was taking a break from his work, showing Max a spectacular reef that teemed with sharks. Beneath the calm, gentle swell of the Indian Ocean the sea was thick with them. However, on the eighth day, pirates had roared up alongside them in a rigid raider boat, its high-powered outboard engines enabling it to catch up easily with the lumbering dhow. The modern-day cutthroats had a good
intelligence network, gathering the gossip around the harbors as to who was sailing where. They were known to attack yachts and kill their crews. The dhow’s crew was terrified by the half dozen men, each brandishing an AK-47, that virtually indestructible workhorse of the gun world. Max’s dad had ducked down into the cabin and come back a few moments later, just as the first of the pirates clambered aboard, his gold-capped teeth glinting as he laughed at the terrified crew. Max’s dad had quickly stepped forward, grabbed the man’s neck with his left hand and squeezed a pressure point. The pirate was immobilized, his gun clattering to the deck; at the same time Tom Gordon fired twice into the pirates’ boat’s fuel tanks—the shock wave from the tremendous explosion made Max reel. The pirates bailed out and Max’s dad pushed the terrified captive pirate over the side. It had all happened in a matter of seconds. Tom Gordon shouted a command in Arabic and the dhow swung away, leaving the screaming pirates clambering onto what was left of their boat.

“Dad! What about the sharks?” Max finally managed to choke out.

“They should have thought of that before they set out to murder innocent people,” his dad replied, still grim-faced but, unlike everyone else, unshaken by the incident. Then he’d smiled, and he was the same old dad Max loved, though now he realized that there was a lot more to his father than he had ever known. “They’ll have a transponder linked to their mates back on shore, but by the time they get here we’ll be long gone and out of range. They can cling to the wreckage until then.”

The memory lingered a moment longer, before Max realized that Mr. Peterson and Mr. Jackson were still waiting for him to answer the question.

“Oh … sorry. I heard the man who tried to kill me cock the weapon; it was something I’d seen and heard before when I was with my dad.”

Jackson and Peterson looked uneasily at each other for a moment.

“Max,” said Jackson a little hesitantly, “we’ve tried to contact your father, but … well, we’re not sure where he is.”

“He could be anywhere,” Max said. “Maybe you should try the organization he works for.”

Jackson paused. It was Peterson who broke the silence. “We have. It seems … he’s gone missing.” Max barely noticed Jackson’s look of disapproval at his geography teacher’s lack of tact. “Best you should know,” Peterson said.

Gone missing. That had an ominous ring to it. Under any other circumstances Max wouldn’t have been too alarmed—his father was often out of radio or cell phone range. But now? “It’s been more than a week since he made contact with anyone,” Jackson said.

Max nodded, thoughts flooding his mind as he tried to think clearly and picture what might have happened to his dad. “Where was he?”

“Namibia.”

Diamond country. Namibia’s coast ran for thousands of kilometers along the south Atlantic. Vast tracts of land were off-limits because there were diamonds waiting to be picked up. Max’s dad had told him about Namibia before. A huge triangle of a country, bigger than France and the UK put
together. Away from its mist-shrouded coast was an arid, brain-sizzling desert and scrubland. The Okavango swamps with their crocodiles lay to the east in Botswana; Angola was north, beyond the Kunene River; and South Africa lay to the south. There was a lot of game: lions, elephant … but what else? Max’s brain couldn’t put it all together. His dad must have been injured, or worse. If an assassin had come in the night for Max, whoever wanted him dead must have captured or killed his father first. Why?

Jackson’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Naturally, if this wasn’t a random attack on you, then we have to assume there’s a connection.” Max nodded. What would Dad want him to do? “In the circumstances, Max,” Jackson went on, “we think we should go to the vault.”

The vault. That was where you heard voices of the dead. Max had known a couple of boys whose parents had died—they’d been taken down to the vault. Every pupil had his own key, kept in Jackson’s safe, which unlocked a deposit box in the underground chambers of Dartmoor High. The vault was fireproof, bombproof, everything-proof, because it was cut into the granite hills on which the school was built. When a parent died, it was a legal requirement that a guardian be nominated to look after the boy, and that information was in each boy’s deposit box. Sometimes there were personal letters, mementos, and usually a legal document that gave a lawyer’s name for his inheritance—if there was one. It was also a condition of attendance at Dartmoor High that each parent left a digital recording for their child. Jackson believed that if tragedy struck, the comforting voice of a
parent was just about all a boy had left to help him cope with the trauma.

Voices from the dead. Going to the vault was so final.

Matron tapped on the door; Jackson nodded for her to come in. “We thought we’d do that tomorrow, Max,” Jackson said.

Matron was carrying a glass of water and a pill holder. “The doctor reckoned you should get a proper night’s sleep. Help you deal with things.” Matron offered the sleeping pill to Max. “It’s only a mild sedative. OK?” Jackson assured him. Max nodded, took the pill and a gulp of water and gave a reassuring smile to Jackson, Peterson and Matron.

“Good boy,” Matron said.

“We don’t want to cause any alarm, Max, so as far as anyone else is concerned, you strayed into the Danger Zone and took a tumble. Are you all right with that?”

Max nodded.

The moment he was outside the study, Max spat the tablet out. He’d tucked it under his tongue and pretended to swallow it. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust anyone; he just wanted to keep a clear head and think this through. That was what his dad would want him to do. That was why he’d sent him to this school in the first place.

Max’s room was big enough for a single bed, a small table used as a desk, a chair, a bookcase, a trunk for personal bits and pieces, and a single wardrobe. It might originally have been built as a prison cell, but now it offered enough space
to have the essentials—but no luxuries, not even a television, though there was one in each House’s common room. There were four Houses at Dartmoor High: Eagle, which Max belonged to; Wolf, Otter and Badger.

Max lay on his bed. He realized he might be facing the starkest moment of his life. If his dad had been killed, he was an orphan. No, he just didn’t believe that. His father was too resourceful, but no sooner had this positive thought arrived than another one chipped in. Nobody is immortal and if they, whoever they were, had killed his dad then they must have taken him by surprise. Ambushed him. As they had tried to do with Max.

Max let out a deep, troubled sigh. He had escaped; maybe his dad had too.

He turned his head on the pillow, his eyes gazing idly at his desk and bookcase. Something wasn’t right. He looked again. Things weren’t exactly where they should have been. A small pile of textbooks was nudged across the desk at a different angle. He always had them in a certain place because he liked to rest his left elbow on them when he wrote his essays. And that Cook Island figurine of a war god was facing slightly away from the window when it should have been gazing directly across the moors. What else had been moved? Bits of stone from the ruins of Aglason in Turkey where Alexander the Great had attacked across the mountains; a rock crystal found in the Himalayas which had a glint of some magical light in it, said to be from the cave of an ancient mystic; the amber teardrop from Russia which a hundred million years ago had encased a wayward insect in its resin. All bits and pieces his dad had given him. Now Max’s
senses sharpened. Letting his gaze sweep across the room, he realized that someone had pulled books away from the wall, checked them and put them back a bit too neatly. He knew the artifacts were not in exactly the place where they should have been because, despite the obligation to keep his room tidy, there was always a faint layer of dust noticeable on any flat surface. Max wondered what on earth the intruder had been looking for.

There was a knock on the door. “Max?” It was Sayid, whose mum taught Arabic at the school. Max let him in and closed the door quickly behind him. Sayid was his best friend.

When Max’s father had worked in the Middle East, Sayid’s dad had been killed by terrorists and Max’s dad had pulled strings to get Sayid and his mother, Leila, into Britain. Max was never sure what the connection was between the two men, except that they had worked together, and it seemed that Tom Gordon owed some sort of debt to the Khalif family. Max’s father explained that Sayid and his mother needed a safe place, well out of harm’s way, and he told Max to keep an eye on the new boy. Max did exactly that, but now Sayid had been there long enough and didn’t need looking after anymore.

“The whole place is buzzing, Max. The army, the police coming and going. What’s going on?” Sayid whispered quickly.

“I went for a run and decided to get a closer look at the guns.” Max shrugged.

“You can be gated for that! No more Saturdays in town for months.”

“Yeah, I know, it was stupid. The firepower was awesome, though. The whole place was shaking.”

Sayid looked over his shoulder at the closed door nervously and Max could see something was up. “Max, you’d better tell me if there’s anything else. I’m your mate, yeah?”

“Yeah, course. It was nothing. I broke a school rule. Big deal.”

Sayid gave him a disbelieving look and then pulled a crumpled envelope out of his back pocket. “Sorry this got a bit mangled, but I didn’t want anyone else to see it.”