And all the time the man spoke to him in a voice that was pleasant and utterly reasonable. Perhaps an hour passed. Perhaps it was just a few minutes. Later on, Scott would remember it all.
“We haven’t got a great deal of time,” the man began. “We have to leave Naples in the next forty-eight hours and we have a long journey together … for you a journey in many senses of the word. Right now, Scott, you have a choice. There’s a decision you have to make. And it’s this. Are you with me or aren’t you? Or to put it another way, do you want to travel in first-class comfort with an in-flight movie system and a choice of computer games – or are you going to leave, naked, in a cage? Nobody’s putting any pressure on you. Nobody’s hurting you. It’s entirely up to you.
“Do you want to be a hero, Scott? Is that what you want? I’m sure you used to read lots of books about heroes who wanted to save the world. They never really had any reason. They were just ordinary people like you. But they were the hero and somehow it always worked out all right for them in the end. Harry Potter. Batman. James Bond! You name them.
“But you and I know that real life was never quite like that. It wasn’t as simple. You’d try to help people but they were never that grateful. And I’d say that if you looked at most people living in your street, they were basically just plain bad. Did anyone ever try to help you when you were being beaten around by your foster parents in Carson City? I don’t think so. They were too busy getting on with their own lives to worry about you.
“The fact of the matter is that since the world began – you know it and I know it – the vast majority of people on this planet have only been interested in themselves. Who are the heroes who have always been on the front pages of the press? I’ll tell you. Footballers in fast cars. Actors and singers with their drugs and fat salaries. Models preening themselves on the catwalks all over the world. People were never judged by what they did. They were judged by what they earned – and it didn’t matter that the rest of the world was going hungry. They were the heroes. Everyone wanted to be like them!
“If you ask me, everything you were taught at school was a complete waste of time. There was only one lesson in life that mattered and that was how to be rich. The designer labels you should buy. The cars you should drive. Did you ever walk down Fifth Avenue in New York, Scott? Or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles? You’d have seen shops crammed with things you didn’t need. You could buy a watch for fifty thousand dollars. Designer sunglasses for five hundred and ten thousand. You could even spend a thousand on a shirt! And did you want it? Of course you did! And let’s not think about the ten-year-old boy who’d been shackled to the workbench in Calcutta being paid four pence a day to sew on the buttons.
“Of course, there were the nurses and the doctors, the charity workers, the priests. They’re still out there, even now. But what difference did they make? For all the millions that have been poured into Africa, there have always been children starving while the charity workers drive around in their nice, shiny four-by-fours, looking for people to save. Do-gooders may have felt good about themselves but you know and I know that nothing ever changed. There just weren’t enough of them. They were wasting their time.
“There were never any heroes. But there weren’t any villains either. All the problems that you see in the world right now – global warming, pollution, poverty, over-population, war, famine … all the rest of it – whose fault is it? Is it the wicked businessmen? I don’t think so. Because they’d all go bankrupt if people didn’t want to buy what they were selling. Is it the politicians? Come on! Who voted for them in the first place? I know what Matt would tell you. He’d say it was the Old Ones. The Church has been saying the same for the last two thousand years – not of course that anyone listens any more. It’s just like the Devil in the Bible. You’ve got to blame someone, so blame him. And when the five of you get together, you’ll banish them and that will be the end of it. Everyone will live happily ever after.
“But you know that’s not true. If you think about it for half a second, you can see it’s ridiculous. Man is to blame. Not devils. Not demons. There is no Voldemort. There is no Darth Vader. There’s just selfish, greedy, uncaring, destructive man.”
The meal was over. Scott had left the table and was sitting in an armchair, facing the fair-haired man. Once again, he couldn’t remember getting there. He was very full. He was feeling satisfied and slightly drowsy. He knew who the man was now. His name was Jonas Mortlake and Susan Mortlake had been his mother. That was why he had recognized him. But how did he know it? When had he been told?
“So that’s why I say to you that you have to decide. You have to choose which side you want to be on.”
The man was still talking. It seemed he had never stopped.
“Now, at one level, that’s simply a choice between being here in this room having lunch with me or back in the cell eating leftovers with the Stick Insect. It means having nice clothes and a warm bed and everything you could possibly want to make you happy, or having your brain mashed up by chemicals and electric shocks. I would have said that choice was a no-brainer, if you’ll forgive the expression. I could call my men in and have them beat you right now. I could make you agree to anything and I’d actually quite enjoy doing that, Scott. I like that sort of thing.
“But what would that prove? Nothing! As I sit here now, I’m much more interested in persuading you to see things my way without hurting you. I want to reason with you because at the end of the day the victory will be all the sweeter. To take one of the Five and to turn him against the others. To recruit him. That’s what I’m hoping to do with you, Scott. That’s what the Old Ones want. It’s why they sent me here.”
It was already night-time. Hours had passed since Scott had been given the lunch. And he was no longer in the same room. He was in a small and comfortable bedroom. There was a single bed with a pillow and a blanket, a wardrobe, pictures on the walls. He looked down and saw that someone had put a stuffed toy in the middle of the bed, a monkey. He’d had a toy just like that when he was six years old, living in the orphanage in Carson City. Maybe it was the same one.
“I don’t know what you want,” Scott said. He was feeling very tired and he had eaten too much too quickly. He wanted to get into the bed.
“It’s what you want that matters, Scott. You can go back to that cell if you like. We can take those clothes off you and you can spend another night shivering with the Stick Insect. Stale bread for breakfast. Maybe a beating before lunch. The two of you can stay together for another month or a year or even ten years. Or you can stay here. The only trouble is, I’m going to need some sign from you, some proof that you’ve actually been listening to what I’ve been saying.”
“I have been listening.”
“I know.”
“But I don’t have anything…”
“You’re going to have to give me a sign.”
“What sign?”
Jonas Mortlake seemed to consider for a moment but Scott knew that he was only pretending. He had already worked this out. It was what he had been leading up to all the time.
“I want you to hurt Pedro. I want you to prove to me that he’s no longer your friend. You don’t have to do it yourself. You just have to give the order. You could be giving a lot of orders quite soon. You might as well get used to it.”
“Hurt him…? How?”
Jonas stood in the doorway, considering. “Well, let’s not do anything too unpleasant. Not to begin with. Let’s break one of his fingers! There you are. You tell me which finger we’re going to choose. His left hand or his right hand.”
“No … I can’t do that.”
“Are you quite sure about that, Scott? Think about what you want! Look at the bed. Nice, clean sheets. Tomorrow you and I can have breakfast together and we can be on the same side. Pedro doesn’t mean anything to you. You don’t even like him. And it’s Matt we’re interested in. We need to know that we can trust you.”
“I can’t…”
r />
“Why not? Do you want to be the one wearing that shirt or the one sewing the buttons?”
Scott was so tired. He could barely keep his eyes open. He could feel the weight of the world on him and he’d had enough.
“His left hand,” he said. “The little finger.”
“Whatever you say, Scott.”
Jonas Mortlake left the room. Two minutes later Scott was asleep.
NINETEEN
Pedro was slumped on the floor in the corner of his cell, cradling his injured hand in his lap. It was wrapped in a bandage that had already become grubby, but at least it was throbbing less now and he wondered if he had somehow managed to channel his own healing powers into himself.
It had been six days since Weasel and Ape had come in and hurt him. Those were the names he had given the two guards. One was older and slightly paunchy, his stomach pressing against his black uniform, with sagging cheeks and heavy eyes. It was he who had held Pedro down, crushing him in a bear-like grip, while the other – younger, skinnier with a fuzzy beard and moustache – had quickly and deliberately taken hold of his little finger and pulled it back, away from his hand, until the bone had snapped. From that moment on they had been Mono and Comadreja. Ape and Weasel in Spanish. It made them easier to hate, giving them names.
He had no idea why they had done it. Neither of them had ever spoken to him – not before or since. After they had finished and Pedro was lying there, sobbing with pain and shock, they had tossed him a bandage and simply walked out. For a while, he had been afraid that this was going to be the start of a long process, that they would come back every day and kill him literally one bone at a time. But they hadn’t returned – except to bring him the scraps of food that were his meals and to take him out to the shower and toilet complex and for one hour’s exercise in the yard. Another twenty-four hours had passed – but Pedro had given up trying to keep track of the time. It was as if the attack had never happened.
He hadn’t heard from Scott. In many ways he was more worried about the other boy than he was about himself. He knew what Scott had been through in the past and doubted that he’d be able to take very much more. Pedro was aware that he hadn’t been able to help very much and that there had been a lot of tension between them, but he still thought they were better off together. At least they’d been able to talk.
There was still no sign of the others in the dreamworld. Pedro found himself there every time he went to sleep and he hated being so alone. He had kept walking in the hope that he would come across someone or something, but so far all he had seen was the tree which was now a long way behind him, on the horizon, the leaves sprouting in every direction, dominating the sky. He was glad to be moving away from it. Although he had no idea what it meant, he could sense that it was dangerous, that it was warning him to stay clear.
Warning him to get away while he still could.
Pedro had come to that conclusion quite simply. If he stayed in this cell very much longer, he wouldn’t have the strength to escape. He was used to being half-starved. He had been brought up in poverty, in the province of Canta near Lima. There had never been enough food to go around and, of course, what food there was, the men took first. But things had been even worse when he had moved to the city. Living on the streets, he had eaten only what he had been able to steal – or whatever scraps he had salvaged from the dustbins in the wealthier suburbs. It had never bothered him, eating the cold and congealed pieces of fat that had been scraped off some rich man’s plate. He needed to live. That was how it was.
But this was different. He was like an animal in a cage, starved not just of food but of hope. With every day that passed, he found himself accepting his fate, his one hour’s exercise, the endless hours on his own. Even when they had broken his finger, he had barely fought back. There was a time when he would have bitten and scratched and kicked and done anything to protect himself, but this time he had been too slow. That was what scared him. He was dying on his feet.
He had just one advantage over them. They thought nothing of him. They saw a small, malnourished boy who didn’t even speak their language and who probably cried himself to sleep at night. A stick insect. What they didn’t know, what they had no way of understanding was that he had survived for two years in Lima, one of the most dangerous cities in South America. He had lived in a shanty town, sharing a room with a dozen other boys who would have put a knife in him to steal a single dollar. There had been the police, rival gangs, criminals controlling their little patch of turf, rich men who would bundle you into their car if they could and do things to you that you didn’t even want to think about. To live in Lima without money, you needed to be strong and Pedro was strong in ways his guards couldn’t imagine.
Breaking out wasn’t the problem. Pedro knew that he was in the basement – the dungeon – of some sort of castle and that it was in the middle of a city. He had heard the noise of people passing – not traffic, there weren’t any cars, but the dull murmur of crowds, occasionally punctuated by shrill police whistles. There seemed to be a lot of police. He was near a kitchen. The more starved he was, the greater his sense of smell and he would have been able to name everything that had been cooked in the past week. This building was more than a prison. People lived here in the rooms upstairs. But the two guards – Ape and Weasel – came in from somewhere else. Pedro knew this because of the ash on their uniforms every morning. For some reason, the sky was full of ash and every morning there would be a fresh coating on their shoulders and sleeves.
He could trick Ape and Weasel and he could get out of the cell – but the problem was, what would he do next? He had no friends. He had no money. He was in a strange country that could be anywhere in the world. Almost certainly, he wouldn’t even be able to speak the language. And he didn’t know where to go. The best thing would be to find the door that had brought them to the Abbey and to use it to return to Peru. But he had no idea where it was. On his own, he would have no hope of finding it.
And then there was Scott. He couldn’t leave him behind. Somehow he had to find the American boy and take him along too.
One thing at a time…
Pedro had been watching his guards carefully, examining them as he walked around the yard, and he had noticed something. While he was pacing out his endless, pointless circles, Ape just sat there, occasionally smoking a roll-up cigarette. But Weasel had a hobby. He was carving something out of a piece of wood. It might have been a little statuette or a chess piece but that didn’t matter. What interested Pedro was the Swiss Army knife he was using. When the hour was up and they escorted him back to his cell, Weasel slipped it into his right-hand jacket pocket. The knife was everything Pedro needed. It was a key. It was a weapon.
And he knew how to get it.
The next time they took him out, he was ready. His finger was already feeling a lot better. For anyone else, it would have taken a month to heal – but Pedro was not anyone else. From a very early age he had learnt how to survive and now all his energies were channelled into exactly that. He took a shower, standing naked under the dribbling cold water, idly watching it swirl around and drain out of the manhole set in the floor. He dried himself with the dirty rag that they gave him as a towel. He got dressed again and followed the two men into the yard.
As usual, he spent sixty minutes walking between the blank walls and beneath the dirty, black sky. He wondered why it always smelled of burning. Perhaps part of the city had caught fire – but surely it couldn’t still be smouldering more than a month later? Well, he would find out soon enough. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Weasel whittling away, the little shavings of wood floating down onto his black leather boots. Neither of the men ever came close and Pedro suspected that one of the reasons was that after several weeks of wearing the same clothes he must smell bad. Today that had to change.
Ape looked at his watch; an expensive watch for a man who worked in a prison. Pedro wondered who had owned it before and what had happened to hi
m.
“Tempo!” he announced. Always the same word, spat out with no emotion. Tiempo was the Spanish for “time” and this obviously meant the same.
Weasel put his carving in one pocket and his knife in another, and then went back into the prison complex. But this time Pedro didn’t follow him over.
“I want more,” he called out. He spoke to them in English, then repeated the sentence in his own language. “I’m not coming in.”
Ape turned to look at him. Not angry. Not even surprised. Just bored. He walked over to Pedro, his feet heavy in the dust.
Pedro swore at him.
The man punched him once, hard, in the chest, his fist pounding in above Pedro’s heart. Pedro jerked backwards, almost collapsing onto the ground.
“OK! OK! I’m sorry!” Winded, in pain, Pedro held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, at the same time stumbling towards the door. But when he reached it, he seemed to lose his balance and fell against Weasel, who smiled, grabbed hold of his collar and threw him inside.
Pedro had got what he wanted. Every street child in Lima knew how to pick a pocket. American tourists usually kept their wallets in the back pocket of their trousers. The English preferred the inside of their jacket, near their right arm. And if you were fast enough, there were always expensive watches – a Rolex or an Omega could get you two or three dollars in the local market (where it would be sold on for twenty times that amount). The only trouble was, you had to get close enough to make the steal … and that was what Pedro had just done in the yard. It had cost him a little pain but it had given him the excuse to brush against Weasel and in barely more than a second he had whipped the knife out of the man’s pocket and concealed it under his own shirt. Pedro was still bent over, pretending to be hurt. The knife was safely pressed against his flesh.
The two guards threw him into the cell and locked the door, taking the key with them. Pedro already knew there were no bars or bolts on the outside. He waited until he was sure they had gone, then took out his prize and examined it. The knife had three blades, a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a nail file, scissors and tweezers. It was perfect. A gift from the gods.