The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (9 page)

High in the hills above the wreckage, Dixie and Les lay on their stomachs, looking down.

“What have you done, Danny?” Dixie said.

“He can’t have survived,” Les said, glancing back at a semiconscious Pearl. In a nightmare flight from the installation, they had half dragged, half carried her this far. She knew little about what had happened; she was tormented in mind and body.

“Of course he survived!” Dixie said fiercely. “But what are we going to do?”

“The only place Pearl will be safe is Wilsons,” Les said. “I could fly back and get help, but I don’t know which way to go. What’s that damn Cherb doing?”

Nala had tumbled a pile of logs onto the ground and was arranging them in a triangular structure.

“Shelter,” he said.

“What’s that?” Dixie asked. Something fluttered across the clearing behind them.

“I don’t know …,” Les answered. With a suddenness that made them both jump, a raven alighted in front of them. It did a strange little dance up and down, then flew off a few yards, looking back expectantly.

“It wants you to follow,” Dixie said. The raven did an impatient jig.

“Yes, but where?” Les said.

“Wilsons?”

“We can’t be sure.” The raven looked at them in exasperation as Dixie thought. It came back toward them, picked up a mouthful of twigs and with incredible speed laid out a “W” on the ground, with an arrow pointing north.

Behind them, Nala had started laying boughs of pine across the logs.

“We’ll wait here for you,” Dixie said. Pearl moaned as if at the memory of some recent pain. “I wish Vandra was here. Hurry, Les!”

Les hesitated, but the raven rose off the ground, fluttering its wings in his face.

“All right, all right, I’m coming,” he said. “I’ll bring back enough Messengers to get you and Pearl and … the Cherb, I suppose.”

“What about Danny?”

“If Danny is still alive, he’ll go his own way now,” Les said. “He’s a danger to himself and everyone around him.” He turned to Nala.

“Here, you—make sure nothing happens to them. If it does I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

With that Les took off. The raven flew in front of him, then sped up, flying fast and true between the tree trunks, heading for the open sky. With a wave to Dixie, Les followed.

A
hundred miles away a group of grim-faced policemen gathered in a back street. At a signal from their leader
they moved out into the open. Half of them went to the back entrance of an exclusive apartment block, half to the front.

The intelligence chief had just settled himself on his satin sheets and turned out the light when a mighty crash shocked him awake. He grabbed the handle of the bedside cabinet, where he kept a Magnum revolver, but before he could open it, men’s hands had tumbled him onto the floor, a gun barrel pressing between his eyes.

The men knew exactly what they were looking for. One of them went straight to the freezer in the kitchen, reached into the back of it and pulled out a sheaf of documents in a plastic bag. In the living room white-overalled technicians unpacked their instruments of detection. They glanced up as Nurse Flanagan, looking radiant, stepped over the threshold. The freezer package was handed to her. She went to the hall table, picked up the telephone and dialed carefully, still slightly wary of the instrument.

“Hello? Ambrose?”

I
n the backseat of a black limousine, Longford received her news with pleasure. He replaced the receiver. The great web he had spun was gathering in its prey. The phone rang again. A clipped military voice informed him that an unidentified flying object had been detected in the area of the destroyed Kilrootford military installation.

“Scramble air cover,” Longford said. “Shoot it down.”

Now it was his turn to make a call. He dialed a
number. In the intelligence chief’s apartment one of the crime-scene technicians answered his mobile. He nodded, then went to one of the other technicians, who were lifting fingerprints from every available surface. The man stopped what he was doing, walked to the hall telephone and began to brush fingerprint powder on it.

SEEK AND DESTROY

T
oxique had gotten over his strange mood, and when Vandra asked him what had happened, he muttered that it was all over now anyway and it didn’t matter. By the time they were summoned into the library of the third landing, she had pushed it to the back of her mind. Devoy and Brunholm were waiting for them.

Devoy motioned for them to sit.

“In the great days of Wilsons we would have the cream of adult spies to call upon,” he began, “but alas, those days are long over. Yet the danger is graver than ever. We have no armies to oppose the might of the Cherbs. We have only our wits.”

“We have to know their deployments!” Brunholm said. “We are deaf and blind. There could be whole divisions on standby waiting to invade. The Ring has stopped
all shipping traffic between Westwald and Tarnstone. Our best agent, Starling, has been unmasked. Wilsons must get someone into Westwald.”

“You mean me and Vandra?” Toxique said.

“Yes, of course,” Brunholm snapped. “There isn’t anyone else.”

“Well, that’s a vote of confidence if ever I heard one,” Vandra said drily. Her thoughts were with Danny. What would he do now? What would he say? She knew that this mission in Westwald was fraught with danger, but it was especially dangerous for her and Toxique. Vandra did not have the skills the others had, nor did she have the capacity to lie so essential to a spy. And Toxique … as a spy he was a positive liability.

She made up her mind. She would go alone. The second she made her decision, a raven who had been sitting unseen in the rafters began a raucous cawing.

“What the devil …?” Brunholm said. But Vandra studied the raven closely. It hopped down to the top of a bookcase and its black eyes met hers.

What should I do? she thought. Should I take Toxique? In reply the raven flew back to the rafters. A second later a white glob dropped from above and landed right on top of Toxique’s head.

“Ugh!” Toxique took out a handkerchief and wiped his head as Brunholm looked on with malicious amusement.

“We’ll go,” Vandra said. For better or worse, the raven had indicated that Toxique should go with her.

“Splendid,” Devoy said. “There’s no time to waste.”

D
anny skirted the back gardens of the little village. He was weak, his limbs shaking. All he wanted to do was lie down and sleep, but he knew he had to get away from the ruins of Kilrootford. The destructive power that had poured through him had been appalling. He had seen the soldiers guarding Pearl run away, but he had no way of knowing if there had been anyone else in the buildings before the terrible fury of the Fifth had blown through the place like a burning wind, leaving nothing standing—except, of course, the source of the destruction: Danny himself.

When he came to and saw the flattened base and the felled trees, he felt sick. It looked like the old pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the atom bomb had been dropped on them. He’d started to run, half blinded by smoke from the smoldering wreckage, his breath coming in great racking shudders.

He had no idea how long or how far he had run before he tripped on a stone and fell face-first into an icy stream. He lay there, barely gathering the strength to turn his head away from the water. He could hear helicopters overhead, circling, and he knew they were searching for him. He staggered to his feet. He needed to sleep, but first he had to find cover.

Keeping under the trees so the helicopters wouldn’t see him, Danny made for distant lights. He found himself passing houses in the suburbs. There was a warm teatime glow to the lit windows, and he imagined people his own
age inside, watching TV, doing homework, playing games on the computer. It made him feel unutterably lonely, and he found himself creeping closer and closer to the houses, until in the end he was under a living room window. He lifted his head carefully. The family—mother, father, two girls and a boy—was gathered around the television.

Danny’s stomach lurched. The images on the screen were of Kilrootford. A somber-looking anchorman came on. At first Danny couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but then the mother turned the volume up. In a few seconds, Danny wished she hadn’t, for he found himself looking at his own face on the screen.

“… police are seeking terrorism suspect Danny Caulfield. Caulfield is wanted for questioning regarding the outrage. The public are warned not to approach him. He is known to be extremely dangerous.”

They’ve got that right, Danny thought; then he stared at the television in puzzlement.

“A foreign spy known to be closely associated with Caulfield has been arrested and held for questioning. The man is a senior representative of a foreign power whose president has referred to the matter as an act of war.

“The prime minister, however, has said that the man’s apartment contained multiple fingerprints belonging to Danny Caulfield, as well as documents linking the conspirators.”

Danny saw footage of a handcuffed man being led from an apartment block. He had never seen the man before in his life, he was sure. But he recognized the sweeping nature of the conspiracy against him, the dramatic
scope of it. Only one man had the ambition and cunning to lead such a conspiracy: Longford. Danny had to get to him and put a stop to his schemes.

Stop him and replace him
, a cold little voice whispered in his mind.

Stop it! Danny thought, shaking his head.

Another helicopter crossed the sky. He shivered. It was getting cold. In the distance he heard a police siren and knew he had to get under cover. He continued along the back of the houses. Dogs were barking. He spotted a coal shed, so he pulled the door open and crept inside. An old quilt lay on the floor. Danny wrapped it around himself and lay down. He was utterly drained. Where were his friends, he wondered, and had they survived?

You don’t need them
, the cold little voice said.
You don’t need them
.

Danny was too tired to fight voices in his head. He fell into a fitful sleep.

I
f he had but known it, Les was very close to Danny—about five hundred feet above his head. The raven flew fast and was hard to see in the dark. Les’s wings ached as he fought to keep up. The night was clear and Les was glad of it, knowing nothing of radar, nor of the fighter jets that had been scrambled to intercept the lone object flying slowly away from the mayhem at Kilrootford. The raven ahead of him did not slow but allowed a thermal to carry it upward. Les rode the thermal in turn, allowing it to carry him a thousand feet upward. He had never flown
at this altitude before, and he looked in awe as he crossed great canyons between the night clouds, the full moon casting mile-long shadows on the ground far below. Lost in the majesty of the night, Les forgot all save for the beat of his wings and the night currents that bore him.

Half a mile behind, four F-16 jets flew in formation while the squadron leader confirmed his orders. His headset crackled.

“Order confirmed. Seek and destroy.”

“Is there an option to engage and force the unidentified craft to land?”

“Negative. Seek and destroy. Be aware that the target will have no heat trace. Heat-seeking ordnance is useless. Engage with gunfire from close range.”

“Roger. Alpha One, take the lead.”

The F-16 on the port side of the flight peeled off. The pilot armed the twin Gatlings slung under each wing. The target was moving so slowly, it would be like firing at a stationary enemy on the ground. But he had been told to take no chances. To approach from ahead, using the moonlight for cover. At briefing they had been told that the target had unknown capability. That it was to be “terminated with extreme prejudice.”

As Les flew through the cloud canyons, he became aware of a distant whistling noise, something coming up fast behind him, darkness on the wing. His own wings beat as they had never beaten. Ahead of him the raven flew on without looking back. Les remembered what had been said at Wilsons: “
The ravens have their own purposes
.” The noise behind him grew louder. Without looking
around he knew that death lurked somewhere behind him. There was a cloud a few hundred meters in front of him. If he could make it that far, the cloud might hide him. In front of him the raven flew at the same steady speed. If the fate of the young Messenger behind him was of concern, he did not show it.