Alicia didn’t even try to argue. She unlocked the doors. Daniel got into the front. Jamie helped Scott into the back and was about to follow him. But then he remembered something. He straightened up, facing Nathalie.
“The security man,” he said. “Warren Cornfield…”
“You made him do that.” So she had guessed what had happened.
“I couldn’t do anything else. Will you be able to help him?”
“I’ll do what I can, Jamie. I promise.”
Then another policeman appeared, walking towards them. Jamie got into the car. Alicia didn’t even wait for him to close the door.
She started the engine. They sped off.
Nobody said anything for the first few miles. They were heading south towards Placerville, another gold-mining town. From here they would pick up the 50 heading east back to Nevada. Scott seemed to be neither awake nor asleep but somewhere between the two. He was sitting slumped against the window. Jamie was next to him, watching the scenery go past without taking any of it in. He was thinking about Matt. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same Matt that he had spoken to after the battle, at the river’s edge. For a start, this Matt would never have met him or Scott. But they were still the Five. The same… but in a different time. That was how Matt had explained it. Perhaps when they were all together in Peru it would make sense.
Peru. Jamie didn’t even know where it was. Somewhere in South America? Even now, a private jet should have been taking off to collect them. The very thought of it made his head spin. He had never flown in his life.
Alicia glanced round. “How’s Scott?”
“I don’t know.” Jamie had examined his brother. He could see no sign of any external injury, but in a way that made his condition even more disturbing.
“We’ll be there in a couple of hours. Maybe you should try to get some sleep.”
But they never made it to Lake Tahoe Airport.
They had just passed through the Eldorado National Forest and some of the most beautiful countryside in California and were heading north towards the lake itself. They came to a sign pointing to the airport and Alicia turned off, following a narrow leafy road. Nathalie had certainly been right. Nobody would think of coming here.
But the police must have decided to cover every airport in the surrounding area. It was always possible that they weren’t working alone. Perhaps Nightrise had been influencing and advising them. Either way, the road was blocked. There was a single police car parked across with two young officers checking every car that came their way. They were looking bored. There couldn’t have been more than half a dozen cars in the last few hours.
Alicia pulled in and waited with the engine ticking over.
What now?
“Is there another way?” Daniel asked.
Alicia bit her lip. “I don’t think so, Danny. I didn’t see any other signs.”
Jamie was sitting up in the back seat. He was feeling sick.
They were so near. It didn’t seem fair that they should be stopped at the very end. “Can you drive round?” he muttered.
“There’s no point,” Alicia said. “I could get past them - but suppose the plane hasn’t arrived? They’d just follow us into the airport and that would be the end of it. And even if the plane’s there, we’d never reach it in time.”
“We could try on foot…”
“Scott won’t make it. And anyway, it’s too late.”
She was right. The two police officers had noticed them. They were already muttering to each other, staring at them suspiciously. It was always possible that the details of Nathalie’s number plate had been sent out. It didn’t really matter. A car had been driving towards them. Now it had stopped. Something was obviously wrong.
Alicia made a decision. It was probably the wrong one but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She slammed the car into reverse, spun the wheel and sped off.
“What are you doing?” Daniel demanded.
“We can’t get past them. The road to the airport’s closed. The only thing to do is to get back to Reno. We can hide out at the trailer park. Nobody knows we’re there. The senator will help us. Maybe that’s what we should have done from the start.”
The two police officers had seen them leave. Without a moment’s hesitation, they ran back to their car and set off in pursuit. One of them was already on the radio calling for assistance from every town in the area. Four suspects heading east towards Carson City. A blue Mercedes, registration number NATHAL3. There were few roads in this part of the country and the distances were huge. There was no chance they were going to get away.
The Mercedes was doing almost a hundred miles an hour. Alicia was gripping the wheel, her eyes fixed on the road. She already knew that she had made a mistake, trying to break away. She had turned herself into a target. Any minute now she expected to see more cars blocking the road. Maybe a helicopter would come swooping out of the sky. She had lost sight of the police car but she could hear it. The officers had turned on their siren. It was less than a mile behind.
They flashed through a commercial centre with supermarkets and shops selling boat equipment and ski gear. That was the thing about Lake Tahoe. Skiing in the winter, boating in the summer, beautiful all the year round. Now they caught occasional glimpses of the lake on their left, the icy, deep blue water shimmering on the other side of the pine trees that covered the banks. They were still speeding, putting more space between themselves and the pursuing police car, which seemed to have dropped back a bit in the distance. Certainly its siren seemed fainter. Alicia wondered if she should come off the road - but there was no turning, nowhere to hide. On one side there was the lake. On the other, the ground rose up steeply with a rough sandy rock face and above it more trees that seemed to continue all the way to the sky.
They were trapped on the road and Jamie had come to the same conclusion as Alicia. They weren’t going to get away. What would happen if they were arrested by the police? John Trelawny would help them - but would he be able to reach them in time? It only took one policeman, paid the right amount of money, to make sure that none of them were ever seen again.
They shot through a tunnel that had been bored through a huge mass of rock. Ahead of them the road twisted to the right.
And then Jamie heard it. A whisper in his head.
Stop the car…
Three words. But he hadn’t heard them. Nor had he imagined them. With a thrill of excitement, he realized what had happened. Scott had sent them. He had finally made contact.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Alicia carried on driving.
“Alicia! Stop the car! Now!”
The urgency in his voice made itself felt. Daniel was already twisting round, looking at him as if he was mad, but Alicia slammed her foot on the brake and the car sliced across the road and skidded to a halt in a lay-by. The engine stalled. Somewhere behind them, the scream of the siren filled the air.
“Jamie…” Alicia began.
She was on the edge of tears, blaming herself for what had happened. But looking around him, Jamie realized something.
He knew where he was. He had been here before.
Five or six years ago. Before Don and Marcie. Even before Ed and Leanne. Derry, their social worker, had brought them to this exact spot because she had wanted to show them where they had been found. It was this lay-by, right here. This was where the two babies had been abandoned in a box intended for garden seeds.
And she had told them something about the area. According to Derry, the Washoe Indian tribe had been living here as long ago as ten thousand years. It was the main reason she had assumed that Scott and Jamie were Washoe themselves. Lake Tahoe was the very centre of their universe and somewhere below them there was a cave that was so sacred that tourists weren’t allowed anywhere near it. Even the shamans wouldn’t go there.
The Washoe called this place de’ek wadapush. In English, that translated as Cave Rock.
“We’re gett
ing out,” Jamie said.
“Jamie…” Alicia knew from his voice that there was no point arguing. They had only seconds left. The police car was still out of sight but it would be thundering towards them.
“I think this is goodbye, Alicia.” Jamie didn’t know how he knew. He just did. “Thank you for helping me. Thank you for everything.”
“You did it all, Jamie. Not me…”
“Goodbye, Danny.” Jamie reached forward and shook hands with Alicia’s son, then opened the door. He slid out, then waited for Scott to follow. Alicia had also got out. They had no time. She seized hold of Jamie and kissed him briefly on the cheek, then pressed something into his hand. The scream of the police siren had disappeared. For a brief instant she thought it might have gone a different way or even broken down - but her hopes were dashed almost at once. The car had simply entered the tunnel and the bulk of the mountains was blocking any sound. As she looked up the road, it burst out. Worse still, a second police car had joined it. Both cars were racing towards them.
A sandy track ran through the fir trees and past a series of boulders. Jamie and Scott had broken into a run, heading away from the road and down towards the lake. The ground tumbled unevenly all the way to the water’s edge. A wooden platform had been built for tourists and the view was certainly awesome, with the lake a dazzling blue in the afternoon sun and a range of mountains, some of them snow-peaked even now, spread out on the other side. There was nobody else around. Jamie leapt over a fence and breathed a sigh of relief as his brother did the same.
Scott - are you with me? He sent the thought without opening his mouth.
I’m with you. The words were indistinct, as if transmitted by a faulty radio. But Jamie heard them and felt a surge of hope that carried him on. He had no real idea why he was doing this. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing. The very fact that they were here at all was surely some sort of crazy coincidence. But at the same time he knew that it was meant. They were doing the right thing.
“This is the police! Stay where you are! If you don’t stop, we’ll open fire!”
The words rang out, amplified through a bullhorn. Jamie almost laughed. They weren’t going to stop now. Did the police think that having come so far they would turn round and give themselves up? But the smile was wiped off his face a second later. There was a gunshot and a bullet ricocheted off one of the boulders just a few yards away. A warning shot? Or were the police really prepared to shoot them in the back?
He didn’t intend to find out. They were climbing down. The ground had fallen away so steeply that they had to use their hands and feet to guide them. The road was high up above them and unless the police followed them over the fence, they would be out of sight. With Jamie leading the way, they scrambled down the last few yards, using the lower branches of the fir trees to stop themselves falling. At last their feet hit shingle. They had reached the edge of the lake. The water spread out in front of them, millions and millions of gallons. And despite everything that had happened and the exertion of the descent, Jamie felt strangely at peace. It was as if he had come home. He still didn’t know for certain that he would find what he expected to find, but he was glad he was here.
He turned round - and there it was, just as Derry had said. A path of pure, white sand led to an opening in the rock. The cave was very dark and twisted back underneath the road. There was a design scratched into the surface, just above the entrance, so faint that he might not have noticed it unless he had been looking for it. A five-pointed star. Anyone else might think it had been carved recently but Jamie knew differently. It had been put there a long, long time ago.
Someone shouted, high above. One of the policemen. Jamie took a deep breath. It was finally over. It was time for him to go.
He took hold of his brother. The two of them walked up the path and together they went into the cave.
The police never found them. They climbed down and searched along the shoreline. They even looked inside the cave although they had heard of the Washoe traditions and knew they had no right to be there. By the time the sun began to set there were more than a dozen officers in the area. But if Scott and Jamie Tyler had ever been there, they had now completely disappeared. Had they walked into the lake and drowned? It seemed impossible. They would surely have been seen from above, and anyway there was no sign of the bodies.
Alicia was admitting nothing. In fact she and Danny denied that the two boys had ever been in the car. She demanded to speak to Senator Trelawny.
And while the police were calling off the search and discussing what to do next, many thousands of miles away, a door in a church had opened and two boys were stepping out into a strange and unfamiliar world. A few tourists glanced at them curiously. A priest, who had seen them emerge, scratched his head in puzzlement. The door had been kept locked for as long as he could remember and he was sure that there was nothing more than an empty storeroom on the other side.
It took Scott and Jamie half an hour to find a tour guide who spoke English and from her they learnt that they had arrived in Peru, even if they had managed to wind up in quite the wrong part of the country. They were in the city of Cuzco, high up in the Andes. The church was called Santo Domingo and had been built by the Spanish on top of another sacred site… Coricancha, the temple of gold, once a place of worship for the ancient Incas.
They were far away from California and although everything - including the language - was very alien to them, they knew they were safe. That night, they stayed in a hotel. At the very last moment, acting on impulse, Alicia had pressed a hundred dollars into Jamie’s hand. The money would pay for a room and a meal. The next morning they would use it to buy two bus tickets to a little town on the western coast. A place called Nazca.
In fact, the journey took them more than thirty hours. Scott still wasn’t talking - he wasn’t even sending any thoughts -and at night, when he was asleep, he would mutter and cry out and his body would twitch as if it was being prodded or given electric shocks. Jamie forced himself not to worry. Pedro was waiting. The healer. Scott would see him and he would be all right.
Three days later, they arrived. A taxi dropped them at an attractive whitewashed house set in a large garden with fountains playing and llamas wandering across the lawn. As they walked through the gate, the front door of the house opened and a boy emerged. Jamie recognized him at once. Dark hair cut short. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes.
It was Matt.
Another boy stepped out behind him and again Jamie knew at once who he was. Pedro. It seemed strange to think that the last time they had met, they had been drinking wine together in a field just hours after finishing a war. He wondered how he would ever explain it all. Where would he even begin?
Matt stepped forward. Although he was trying not to show it, it was obvious that he was in pain. So that made three of them. Scott needed help. And Jamie still had a large hole in his shoulder. He wondered how many of them would be hurt, how many of them would have to die before this was all over.
At last they stood facing each other.
“Jamie,” Matt said. “And Scott.”
He reached out a hand. Jamie took it.
Four of the Five had come together. The circle was almost complete.
DEPARTURES
The girl in the business-class lounge at Heathrow Airport was dressed in a short white jacket, a pink T-shirt and trousers cut off above the ankle. She had a backpack on the seat beside her and a book open on her lap, although she hadn’t read any of it in the thirty minutes she had been there. There was a glass of Coke on the table in front of her but she hadn’t touched that either.
It was the second week in November and the weather had suddenly turned nasty, blustery showers hitting London and sending the commuters running behind umbrellas and clutched hats. Even now the rain was rattling against the windows of the lounge, dripping off the wings of the waiting planes. The runways looked even greyer than usual. Most of the flights had been delayed.
&n
bsp; The girl carried a British passport but her features were anything but. Her looks were very striking, partly Chinese with long black hair tied at the back and eyes that were an unusual shade of green. She was small and thin but there was a confidence about her, a sense that she could look after herself. She was making the flight as a Skyflyer Solo – that was what the airline called her – and they had given her a plastic label to wear around her neck. She had pulled it off the moment she had sat down.
Her name was Scarlett Adams and she was fifteen years old.
She wasn’t usually a nervous flyer but she was nervous today. She still didn’t know why she was making this journey. Only the day before she had been at the expensive private school in Dulwich where she had been sent when she was thirteen. St Genevieve’s was an all-girls school, housed in a rather grand Victorian building with ivy growing up the walls and extensive grounds at the back. Although the school did have a boarding wing, she was a day girl. Her parents lived abroad but they had a house five minutes away and a housekeeper who looked after her during term time.
Yesterday, just before lunch, the headmistress had asked to see her in her study. As Scarlett had climbed the stairs to the waiting area, which everyone called the graveyard because there were so many portraits of dead teachers, she had wondered what sort of trouble she might be in. Was it that argument with Miss Wilson, the geography teacher? Or the physics homework she had “left on the bus”? Or the fight in the computer block – even if it hadn’t been her who’d started it?
But when she was shown in to the cosy room with its gas fire and view over the front drive, it was the last thing she had expected to hear.
“Scarlett, I’m afraid you’re going to be leaving us for a few weeks.” The headmistress didn’t look at all pleased. “I’ve just had a phone call from your father. He was very mysterious, if you want the truth. But it seems that some sort of crisis has arisen. He’s well – but he needs you with him. He’s already arranged the flight.”
“When am I leaving?”