The Power of Five Oblivion (20 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Stop playing games with me. Did you know or didn’t you?”

Rémy said nothing. He looked ashamed.

“Yes.” Richard nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought. You knew all along – but you let Tarik have his way because, like everyone else, you’d do anything to support him. He’s a hero, isn’t he! The saviour of Cairo.” He jerked the door open. “Well, if you ask me, he’s as bad as Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad. I can’t say I know either of them personally, but I’m not sure I’d find it easy to choose between them.”

“Richard…” Scarlett sounded shocked.

The three of them climbed into the jeep.

“There’s something else you might like to know,” Richard continued. “It might not make this journey very pleasant, but right now we could be sitting on about ten kilograms of plastic explosive.”

“What are you…?” Rémy’s voice was a whisper. Next to him, Scarlett had gone very pale.

“Here’s how it works.” Richard started the car, then pushed it into gear and they jolted forward. There was a track leading down the side of the slope. It would take them a couple of minutes to reach the man who was waiting for them at the bottom. “Tarik wanted Scarlett to kill Akkad. As far as he’s concerned, killing the Field Marshall is like Christmas all over again – if they have Christmas out here. She refused because, surprise, she isn’t a cold-blooded assassin. So Tarik came up with his Plan B. What is the one thing in this whole, wretched country that would bring Akkad out of cover? What could Tarik offer him that would make him risk his own neck?”

“Me…” Scarlett answered the question with a single word.

“Exactly.” Richard glanced at the black-and-white photograph of the resistance leader, taped in front of him. Tarik looked so young, so honest. Maybe he had been like that once. When he’d set out, he’d wanted to save the world. “Tarik didn’t need Scarlett any more,” he went on. “So he decided he would use her. He would turn her into a suicide bomber – and you and me with her, Mr Rémy. I’ll bet you any money you like that the man waiting beside that very tempting Land Cruiser is Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad himself. That’s the agreement he’ll have made. He can have us but he has to turn up and show his face first. And as soon as we get close enough, Tarik is going to press a button and blow us all to smithereens … you, me, Scarlett and Akkad too. Right now, we’re delivering the payload.”

“Why are you doing this?” Rémy asked. His voice was hoarse.

They were already halfway down the hill. They could see the man much more clearly now. He was middle-aged, paunchy, almost bald with a little grey hair. He was watching them intently.

“For two reasons,” Richard replied. “First of all, if there really is fuel in that car, I want it. Anywhere’s got to be better than Cairo, and maybe if we get to Dubai, we’ll be able to find a way out of this whole damned continent. And secondly, because the bomb is no longer in this car.”

“Where…?”

“I found it last night, when Scarlett was pretending to be ill. I lifted up the bonnet and there it was.”

“And you dismantled it?”

“Of course not. I couldn’t actually move the bomb. There were too many wires and I was afraid I’d only manage to blow myself sky-high. But I did the next best thing. I swapped over a photograph and a bead necklace that were in the other car. I even found a screwdriver and changed the number plates. Otherwise, the two vehicles were identical and right now, the one with the bomb is up there on the hill. So when Tarik presses the transmitter – and I’m pretty sure he’s the one holding it – everyone’s going to have quite a surprise. And that’s going to be the moment we start moving. Are you with me, Scar?

“I’m with you,” Scarlett said. She was ready for this. Everything that Richard had said had made her determined that they wouldn’t be beaten, that they would turn this situation to their advantage.

Next to her, Albert Rémy brought out a pistol. He checked that it was loaded.

Richard was surprised. “You always carry that?”

“Of course.” Rémy loaded a bullet into the chamber. “But I do not believe that Tarik would do this, Richard. He is a good man.”

“Maybe he was a good man once. But you fight any war long enough and in the end it’s going to be hard to remember who you are. He’s had too much blood. And maybe too much sand. I’d say he’s become everything he set out to defeat.”

They pulled in. Richard switched the engine off. “I really hope this is going to work out,” he muttered to Scarlett.

“Now I know why Matt thought so much of you.”

“Did he?” Richard smiled. “He never told me that.”

They got out.

And stood face-to-face with Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad.

Although Richard and Scarlett had never seen him before, they knew it had to be him. After a lifetime in uniform, the Arab dress looked almost ridiculous on him. He had the face and the eyes of a soldier and he was examining them with undisguised pleasure.

“Scarlett Adams,” he said, and even hearing the way he pronounced her name, Scarlett knew that he had little knowledge of English. “I am glad to see you,” he continued, framing his words carefully, as if each one had been plucked out of a dictionary.

“I take it your name isn’t Ali,” Richard said.

“It is not.”

Akkad raised a limp, carefully manicured hand. It was a signal. Two armed men appeared, tumbling out of the front of the building. They were dressed in the same dark-green uniforms that Richard and Scarlett had seen when they first arrived. A third uncurled himself from his hiding place on the roof, aiming down with a machine gun.

“It is over for you,” Akkad said. He had also produced a gun, which he aimed at Richard. “The Englishman dies here and now. He should have died before. The girl will come with me.”

“And what do you get out of this?” Richard asked.

“My reward will be great…!”

He got no further.

The explosion was huge and deafening. It came from behind them, from the top of the hill they had just left. The force of it almost threw them off their feet and it was enough to blast the man on the roof onto one knee. A whole torrent of sand and smoke, scooped up from the desert floor, fell on them. They were blinded. But even at that moment, in all the chaos, Richard knew Tarik had paid the full price for his treachery.

Perhaps he and his men had survived the blast but Richard doubted it. Even if there had been time for it, he would have felt no pity for them. They had tried to turn Scarlett and him into unknowing suicide bombers, but they were the ones who had died. How he must have relished his moment of triumph as his finger pressed the button. He had detonated the bomb, thinking it was in their jeep, the vehicle that he had persuaded them to drive down the hill. He had thought that it would kill his greatest enemy, Field Marshall Karim el-Akkad, even if it killed the three of them too.

Richard had the advantage. He had known what was about to happen and so he was the first to react, throwing himself at the Field Marshall, fighting for control of the gun. And Rémy hadn’t hesitated either. However strong his belief in Tarik, it had surely been shattered now. He had seen at once the danger they were in, and even as the blast echoed in his ears he fired three times. The man on the roof cried out and fell backwards. The other two tried to return fire but although one of them let off a couple of rounds, they were too slow and Rémy shot them both.

“Richard!” Scarlett stared in horror. The trap was bigger and more elaborate than any of them could have expected. All around them, men were appearing. They were all in desert camouflage and must have been lying flat until the moment of the explosion, but now they were rising out of the sand as if from the grave, fifteen or twenty of them, forming a circle about fifty metres away. Fortunately, they hadn’t dared get any closer. They couldn’t risk being seen. But they were already moving quickly, covering the distance between them.

Not all of them were men. Scarlett saw a creature with the head and pincers of a scorpion, another dragging broken wings, half-man, half-eagle. These were the mutations that the Old Ones had created to serve them, the shape-changers. The bird-thing screeched in anger and ran forward. The circle closed in.

There was nothing Richard could do. He was still struggling with Akkad, the man’s face close to his, his eyes bulging. Richard could even smell the garlic on his breath. Akkad had his finger on the trigger. He was trying to bring the gun round. There was a gunshot, close and muffled. Richard stared. But it wasn’t he who had been shot. Akkad tried to say something, then fell to his knees. Richard saw the light in his eyes go out. He released him and turned away.

The attackers were less than forty metres from them, moving in from all sides, lumbering across the sand. Scarlett couldn’t wait any longer. She knew what she had to do.

Summoning up every ounce of her strength, she released her power, just as she had done in Hong Kong. She felt it at once, flowing through her like a breeze through her fingertips. The effect was astonishing. It was as if an invisible comet had smashed into the desert. A blast of wind came pounding down, causing the sand to explode outwards. The soldiers were thrown down, cartwheeling then crashing into the ground. Even the shape-changers were forced back. The sky darkened. The wind howled.

“Into the car!” Richard couldn’t make himself heard but he didn’t need to. There was nothing else to do. They were in the eye of the storm that howled all around them, even if the immediate circle in which they stood was calm. Richard grabbed Scarlett and led her into the Land Cruiser. Rémy came with them, his face contorted with pain, one hand clutched across his chest. Scarlett saw that he had been hit by a stray bullet and that the wound was bad.

The three of them piled in, Richard in the driving seat, Scarlett next to him, Rémy sprawled out in the back. They couldn’t see anything. The sand had formed a tornado around them – but it was a barrier through which no living thing could hope to come. For a brief moment, Richard wondered if Akkad had also tried to trick them. Suppose there was no fuel in the car? It might not even work. But when he turned the key, the engine started at once. Perhaps the Field Marshall had been concerned that they would send an agent ahead of them to examine it. So he had decided to take no chances and had provided them with exactly what they had demanded.

“Are you OK?” Richard shouted.

Scarlett nodded. She was controlling the weather. All her attention was focused on maintaining the spinning wall of sand.

In the back, Rémy groaned and slumped against the side.

Richard shoved the car into gear and they set off. They could see no more than a few metres ahead of them but the storm slipped back to let them pass. Gradually they picked up speed. They didn’t see any of the soldiers or the shape-changers. None of them had got close.

The Land Cruiser slid and shuddered across the desert, leaving Cairo behind.

THE TREE

SEVENTEEN

Scott Tyler had come to the conclusion that he really didn’t like Pedro very much.

They had been together in this stinking cell for … how long now? Scott had already lost track of the time but it must have been more than three weeks, maybe as much as a month. However long it had been, Pedro never complained. He ate the disgusting food that they gave him and didn’t ask for more, even though the portions were tiny and they were both starving. He never seemed to be bored. When they were allowed to exercise – just one hour a day – he walked around the empty yard under the black sky as if it were Central Park. They also had one daily visit to a shower and toilet complex, the cubicles arranged around a manhole set in a concrete floor. The water was cold and they had only a few minutes to wash. But he didn’t seem to mind. It was like he was in another world.

Pedro never spoke very much either. That wasn’t his fault. He had lived all his life in Peru and had only recently learnt English, mainly from his conversations in the dreamworld with Matt. But Scott got the impression that it was more down to the fact that he didn’t
want
to talk. After all, the two of them had spoken together at the start, when they had both been captured. But as the days had gone by, Pedro had retreated into himself. And he had done it deliberately. Scott was sure of it.

He examined the other boy now. Pedro was stretched out on his bunk with his hands folded behind his head (neither of them had been given a pillow), gazing at the ceiling as if he could read something interesting there. Not that he knew how to read anyway. Pedro was much smaller than Scott and although they were almost exactly the same age, he looked five years younger, with the smooth skin and innocent brown eyes of a ten-year-old. His black hair had been cut short with a fringe that went in a straight line from ear to ear. It was the sort of haircut you’d get in a primary school. Even before they’d been put on starvation rations, Pedro had been incredibly thin. Stick Insect. That was the name Scott had given him and he’d even used it from time to time.

“So tell me what you think, Stick Insect…?”

It amused Scott that Pedro didn’t know what it meant. He probably thought it was a term of friendship.

Scott still found it hard to believe that they had been thrown together after Hong Kong, as if by an unlucky toss of the dice. Why couldn’t it have been Scarlett or even Matt? Why not his own brother? He wouldn’t have minded if he’d ended up on his own. Anything would have been better than this.

He knew, of course, what had happened in those last few seconds in the temple. They had all rushed through the door without thinking, without knowing where they were going. So instead of taking them somewhere safe, it had scattered them like seed in the wind. That was down to Matt. Matt had given them the order to get out of there before the storm killed them all, and maybe he’d been right about that but he hadn’t thought it through. Just a few seconds … that was all it would have taken. He could have directed them back to Cuzco or to London or to anywhere they could all be together. But he’d been scared and he’d just run. Perhaps he wasn’t quite the leader he thought he was.