Lost Worlds (24 page)

Tara was exhausted. She wasn’t used to this much physical effort. She had walked around the village twice now: once to check out the best locations and the second time to plant the
sensors. The ground was stony, and some of the shafts had required a lot of pushing. As far as Tara was concerned, her role should be to sit somewhere comfortable and use her computing skills, not
install a comprehensive sensor network by hand, but everybody else had something to do. Well, apart from Natalie. Nobody was quite sure where Natalie had gone.

Once she had got her breath back, Tara reached out and twisted the sphere ninety degrees clockwise. That switched it on. The tiny battery inside would keep it working for a week or so before it
needed to be recharged.

She glanced around. It was lunchtime, and she could see villagers returning from the fields and the hills for food. She realized that she was hungry as well. She hadn’t eaten since
breakfast, and she’d been working hard. Time for lunch, she decided. Sensor network testing could wait until later. It wasn’t as if they’d be using the sensors until sunset, at
least.

Gecko stood in the central area of the village – not quite a square, but the junction of several paths and the nearest thing to a middle that the village had. The inn
where the five of them were staying stood on one side, and a sort of village hall on the other.

Five of the local boys and girls stood in front of him, hands by their sides as if they were in the army and on parade. They had all seen his exhibition of free-running skills earlier on, and
Rhino had decided that it might make the team more accepted in the village if Gecko could give the kids some training. He’d run it past the head man, through Levan’s translation skills,
and the head man had enthusiastically agreed.

‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Time to put some of these moves together.’ He knew that they didn’t know what he was saying, but at least he was attracting
their attention. And they’d already got the hang of ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Stop, you’ll hurt yourself!’.

He gestured to the improvised training course that he had set up. First was a two-metre-high pile of oil-stained wooden blocks that looked like railway sleepers. Second, a couple of metres away,
was a wooden pole set up parallel to the ground about a metre and a half up and running between two trestles. Third, he’d used some of the railway sleepers to build a rough set of steps that
finished in mid-air at about head height. Jumping distance from the top of the stairs was a thick wooden table whose rough surface was about waist height. All in all it was a neat little improvised
free-running course.

He pointed at the first kid – a small, cheeky boy with a wide, gap-toothed grin. ‘You – go!’

The boy ran towards the pile of wooden blocks and stopped when he got to the flat side. Gecko wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it, but the kid jumped as high as he could. His fingers
clamped on the top sleeper and his feet scrabbled to push him up. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. Once on top he jumped down on the other side and ran at the suspended pole. He pulled
himself up and walked precariously along, using his arms for balance. At the other end he jumped back to the ground and made for the wooden steps. He was up them in a flash. He hesitated on the
top, judging the gap to the table, then leaped for it. He hit just millimetres from the edge, and converted his forward momentum into a clumsy roll, which took him to the other side. He sprang back
to his feet, grinning from ear to ear, and turned to look triumphantly at his friends.

‘Good!’ Gecko called. He pointed to the next kid – a girl who was a few centimetres taller and a few years older. ‘Now you.’

The girl was more thoughtful, less impulsive. She considered for a moment before sprinting at the pile of sleepers, calculating her best approach. Just before she got to them she leaped like a
hurdler. Her foot hit the middle sleeper at the same time as her hands caught the top, and she pulled herself smoothly up. Instead of climbing down the other side, she jumped straight for the
horizontal pole. Gecko held his breath, but she landed with perfect balance on the end of the pole and before he knew it she had run delicately along like a gymnast on a beam and leaped down from
the other end. She took the wooden steps two at a time, then jumped for the table. She landed right in the middle, absorbing the impact by bending her knees, then converted her forward motion into
a perfect handstand at the far end of the table, hands clamping round the edge, before toppling forward and landing on her feet with a gymnastic flourish.

‘Now that,’ Gecko called admiringly, ‘is just showing off.’

She turned and flashed him a smile before scampering back to her friends.

The next kid looked like he wanted to back out now, before he hurt himself. Gecko smiled reassuringly at him. He still remembered the time it had taken him to learn how to free-run, and the
bruises, scrapes and sprains he’d picked up in the process. It was a matter of faith – starting a run knowing that you were going to get hurt, not knowing how you were going to get
through to the end, but doing it anyway hoping it would all turn out OK in the end and the hurt wouldn’t be too bad. After all, it was only pain.

‘Come on,’ he said gently ‘give it a go.’

Rhino’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

He was sitting in the village hall with a map spread out on the table in front of him. Shota Gigauri and two of the locals were standing around the table, also looking at the map. The villagers
were burly men, both hunters who had spent a lot of time up in the Caucasus foothills. They knew the lie of the land. Levan Ketsbaia stood off to one side, ready to interpret as necessary.

Rhino had been asking the villagers about things that weren’t shown on the map – where was the going best, where were patches of vegetation that were too difficult to get through,
where were gullies or defiles too wide to cross easily, where might a tribe of people who didn’t want to be discovered build their village? The men were proving very helpful on the first
three questions but a bit vague on the fourth. There was a lot of open terrain out there, but most of it had been covered by the hunters over the years when they were searching for small game
– rabbits, deer and so on. They were stumped when it came to guessing where a whole village – even a small one – might be hidden.

Rhino raised his hands in apology as the phone continued to buzz. Levan said something in a quiet voice, and the three villagers laughed.

Walking outside, Rhino pulled the mobile from his pocket and pressed the
Accept
key. He was surprised that he could get any mobile coverage at all that far in the wilds of Tbilisi, but
thank heavens for small mercies.

‘Hello’ he said cautiously, neutrally, not giving his name.

‘Is that Rhino?’

He recognized the voice, despite the fact that it was faint and almost inaudible over the static. ‘Professor Livingstone?’

‘Yes, it’s me. How’s Natalie?’

‘She’s fine. She managed the journey OK, and she got a good night’s sleep. I’m not sure the food is up to her standards, and her greatest concern at the moment is working
out how to recharge her MP3 player, but apart from that she’s doing well.’

‘Good. A little discomfort will do her the world of good. Her father and I are guilty of protecting her from reality, I’m afraid. She needs to discover that things won’t always
go the way she wants them to.’

‘And this is the perfect place to learn that lesson,’ Rhino said, smiling.

‘How’s the expedition coming along? Any sign of the elusive Almasti?’

‘Not so far, but it’s early days.’ He paused for a second. ‘What about you – getting anywhere with your business meetings?’

‘Some positive signs,’ Gillian said non-committally. ‘But that’s the other reason I wanted to talk to you. I’ve heard from some of my contacts here that
there’s another expedition heading out from Tbilisi roughly in your direction.’

‘Another expedition?’ Rhino felt a cold bud of concern start to unfurl in his chest. ‘What exactly are they looking for – or are they just tourists?’

‘They’re not tourists. From what I’ve heard they’re a well-equipped team of men and women in their twenties and thirties. All of them appear to be fit and tanned, which
suggests they’ve done this kind of thing before. I’m told they looked like a military unit on manoeuvres. They left Tbilisi this morning in three Humvees, having spent most of the past
two days trying to get hold of a guide to the local area.’ She paused, and Rhino could hear the smile in her voice. ‘Apparently you made off with the best one before they could get to
him.’

‘And there’s no word on the object of their expedition?’

‘Nothing. Whatever it is they’re looking for, they’re serious about it.’ She paused. ‘The rumour is that they’re armed. Nothing definite, but someone said
that someone else had seen one of them checking over a handgun. Are
you
armed?’

‘No,’ he said, grimacing. ‘I couldn’t get a weapon through airport security, for obvious reasons, and I haven’t got the contacts here to be able to get hold of a
gun easily.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe they’re looking for bears or wolves in the mountains – something to stuff and mount on the wall so they can brag to their
friends.’

‘Just as long as it’s not your head that ends up on their wall,’ Gillian said darkly. ‘Or Natalie’s.’

‘I’ll be careful – you can count on it.’

‘I already am,’ she said, and rang off.

Another expedition? It might be a coincidence – they might be heading somewhere else entirely – but Rhino didn’t believe in coincidences. He had a bad feeling that someone else
had decided to go looking for the Almasti.

Or someone had decided to go looking for Calum’s expedition. That, he thought, was even more worrying. He needed to talk to Calum and make him aware of what was going on.

Every light in the apartment was on. There were no shadows, nowhere that anybody could hide. The apartment’s security systems had been checked over and enhanced by a
company that Calum knew and trusted, and the security-system diagnostics were now permanently displayed on one of his ten LCD computer screens – histograms showing power levels and little
inset windows showing the output from the various infra-red and low-light cameras that had been fitted to the outside of the building.

Calum wasn’t taking any chances of there being another break-in.

He’d upgraded the locks on all the doors as well, upstairs and at street level, and had an uninterruptible power supply fitted.

Now he sat in front of his computer screens like a spider at the centre of its web, secure in the knowledge that he was safe.

But he didn’t feel safe. He didn’t feel safe at all.

He knew what the problem was. He didn’t just
live
in his apartment the way that other people lived in their apartments, flats or houses. His apartment was his
shell
, the
barrier between him and a hostile world. It was his second skin.

And someone had broken through that skin.

He was worried that it was going to happen again, despite all his precautions. He now jumped at the slightest sound in the apartment – the creaking of old wood and old bricks, the pigeons
on the roof, the muffled horns from taxis passing by outside. He was unsettled, nervous, jittery.

He’d wondered whether to inform the police about the break-in, but he had decided in the end that he shouldn’t. He couldn’t stand the idea of a bunch of people invading his
privacy to take fingerprints and photographs and statements.

You head over to the computer. Remember what we’re looking for.
That’s what the woman had said. He could feel a red tide of anger rising within him as he recalled the words.
They had come into his apartment with an objective in mind. They hadn’t just been looking for things to steal – they had been looking for
information.
For something on his
computer. And they’d been prepared to kill him if he’d tried to stop them from getting it.

Surely it had to be connected to this new expedition that Rhino had told him about. Was this part of a two-pronged approach – infiltrate his apartment looking for information while at the
same time sending a team out to follow his team? But why? He felt his right hand clench as he considered the thought. What was there about the existence of the Almasti that meant people would break
the law, commit breaking and entering and theft and possibly even murder, to find out? As committed as Calum was to tracking and discovering the Almasti – assuming they were there to begin
with – he knew that their existence was more of an academic issue than anything that could lead to lawbreaking and extreme violence. What could possibly lead a competitor to resort to
criminal activity to beat him?

As he sat at his computer, his gaze switching from one computer screen to another but not really registering the images on any of them, Calum found his mind wandering. He remembered Tara
mentioning the international industrial consortium that had targeted her and forced her to hack into his Lost Worlds website. Nemor Incorporated certainly seemed interested in what he was doing
– was this new expedition in Georgia something that they had arranged? Could they also have tried to break into his apartment when their efforts to hack his website had been blocked? Calum
was a big fan of logic, and it certainly seemed logical that Nemor Inc. would escalate their attempts to find out what he was doing once their initial approaches had failed.

Another thought struck him – one that was a lot darker and less welcome. He had asked Professor Livingstone if she had ever heard of, or worked with, Nemor Incorporated. She had, as far as
he could remember, ducked the question.

Was that, he wondered bleakly, something he ought to be worried about?

T
ara adjusted the headband over her forehead, nestling the twin loudspeakers above each ear. She was surprised that the headband didn’t seem
too heavy, considering the amount of technology it contained.