The chairman coughed, swallowed some more water, and continued.
“Almost from the very moment that Raven’s Gate was constructed, there were people who were determined to see it open again. Many of them were dismissed as witches and wizards but in fact they were believers, the disciples of the Old Ones. They were, ladies and gentlemen, people like us. They saw exactly what sort of rewards they would receive if they could bring the Old Ones back. Huge wealth. Power. Total dominance over their fellow humans. More luxury and comfort than it is possible to imagine.
“And finally, ten years ago, they succeeded. Raven’s Gate stayed firm but it turned out that there was a second gate in the Nazca Desert, controlled by a combination of the stars and a great man, Diego Salamanda, was able to unlock it. At last the Old Ones were able to return … with results that you have all seen for yourselves.
“As I said in my opening remarks, the last ten years have been very good to us. Is there anyone here who wants to complain? Of course not. But there is a problem. It is what you might call a thorn in our flesh – and it brings me to the point of this conference. It brings me to the endgame.
“Somehow, the same five children – the four boys and the girl – have reappeared. Their names are different this time but it is almost as if they have been born again on the other side of time. And once again they are hoping to lead a rebellion against the Old Ones. Only this time, we are not going to let it happen. This time, they are not going to win.”
The chairman had nearly finished. The effort of talking so much had exhausted him. His skin was sagging and there were strings of grey saliva between his lips. There was so much water in his eyes that he almost seemed to be crying.
“Very soon there will be another battle, a re-run of the one that took place ten thousand years ago. The King of the Old Ones is waiting for it. He has invited it. He has built himself a fortress at the very end of the world – in a place called Oblivion, in Antarctica – and it is acting like a beacon, drawing all the forces of rebellion towards it. This is where the five children will go, bringing all their ragbag followers with them. And when they finally reach the frozen wastes of Oblivion, what do you think they will find waiting for them? A second victory? No. This time we will be ready. An army will have been assembled … and all the resistance that is left on the planet will be wiped out in one fell swoop.
“Now, some of you may be thinking – I can almost hear you asking – why do you need to know all this? What has it got to do with me? You’re all business people, aren’t you. Politicians, consultants, celebrities, pleasure-seekers! You wear fine clothes and work in comfortable offices. You would never dirty your own hands … not even to make yourselves a cup of coffee. So why all this talk of war and battles? Well, this is what it boils down to. In return for the many riches and rewards that have been bestowed upon you, the Old Ones are now asking for a display of loyalty on your part. They want you to join the army. When the last, great struggle comes, you are going to be on the front line.”
There was a murmuring in the room. People were glancing at each other as if they weren’t quite sure of what they had just heard. There had to be some sort of mistake, hadn’t there? Many of them thought the chairman must be joking. Only Jonas Mortlake knew the truth and he was smiling to himself. This was what he had been waiting for.
“You have been chosen to become foot soldiers in the army of the Old Ones,” the chairman exclaimed. “There are a thousand of you here, enough for twenty battalions. Most of you will die. That is tragic but unavoidable. The rest of you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have repaid the debt you owe to the Old Ones, even at the cost of great pain and suffering to yourselves.” He spread his hands, drawing them all in. “You’ve all been recruited and you will begin your new lives immediately.
There are buses waiting outside to take you to training camps, where you will be given clothes and equipment. You are also going to be adjusted to turn you into superb fighting machines…”
“Wait a minute!”
A man in the front row had got to his feet, raising his hand like a policeman stopping the traffic. Such a thing had never happened before. Nobody would have dreamt of interrupting the chairman while he was speaking. But the man was one of the most influential people in the room, with a business empire that stretched from Shanghai to New York. His name was Sir David Lang … he had been knighted even though he wasn’t a British citizen. He had made his fortune in airlines, hotels, expensive boutiques, film production and telecommunications. He was in his fifties, a small, neat man with silver hair and a slightly effeminate face.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “What’s going on here? Are you seriously inviting me to join some sort of army?”
“I’m not inviting you, Sir David. The decision has already been made.”
“You’re crazy!” Lang looked around him, trying to draw the audience onto his side. “If you want people to fight for you, go out onto the street. There are millions of them out there. Pay them a dollar and you can do anything you want with them.”
“We are not interested in the people on the street. We want you.”
“Well, you can forget it. I’m not available.”
The chairman seemed genuinely surprised. “Can I take it that is your final word on the subject, Sir David?”
“You most certainly can.”
“Then I’m afraid we’ve come to a parting of the ways.”
The chairman hadn’t given a signal but a second later there was a gunshot, the sound echoing in the vast space. The sniper must have been hidden somewhere high up in the ceiling. Lang twisted round, his blood splattering over the women who had been whispering together before the conference began. The two of them reeled away, their eyes wide, screaming. Lang collapsed. Jonas Mortlake sat quite still. He had known that the businessman was dead from the moment he had opened his mouth.
And it was as if this first death was rippling outwards, like some fearsome disease. Everywhere, people were getting to their feet, shouting and crying, falling over each other as they tried to fight their way out. At the same time, doors burst open on every side and there was a commotion of whistles being blown, of shouting and barking. Security guards had appeared – the same guards who minutes before had been helping the business people to find their seats. Now their eyes were gleaming with undisguised pleasure as they marched back in, many of them with vicious dogs – Rottweilers and pit bull terriers – straining on leashes. The guards carried truncheons, whips and canisters of mace. There was no way out. The terrified audience was surrounded.
“Stay right where you are!” the chairman commanded. His voice had found new strength. It was louder than ever. “You must learn discipline. You’re in the army now. Try to behave with dignity.”
There was no dignity. People were sobbing, screaming, tearing at each other, trying to hide. A man in his sixties – red-faced and overweight – let out a bellow like a bull and charged towards the nearest exit. He hadn’t taken more than a few steps before the guards rounded on him, clubbing him down with their truncheons and then continuing, pounding him long after he had lost consciousness. Several people had followed him but, seeing what had happened, they fell back, their hands raised in surrender, whimpering. There was a second gunshot. In the very centre of the room, a man stood clutching his stomach. His name was Haywood and he had been the head of a petrol company that had managed to pollute more than one hundred kilometres of the Australian coastline. Now blood, like oil, was leaking through his fingers. He fell to his knees, tumbling over the seat in front of him, and lay still. There was more screaming and confusion. The chairman watched, impassive, from the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please!” he exclaimed. “Let’s be civilized about this.”
It took an hour to clear the hall. The delegates had become a seething mass, fighting against itself. They wanted to get out, to escape. At the same time, they were terrified of leaving, knowing what was wait
ing for them. Gradually, the guards beat them down, setting the dogs onto them or using the mace to blind them. They were laughing, enjoying their work. There were men here who had arrived with their noses high in the air. Women who had spent hundreds of dollars on their hair and nails and now found that they were worth nothing at all. They were jerked to their feet and sent spinning through the doors.
There was a fleet of yellow buses waiting outside. Once they had been used to ferry New York children to school but now they had been adapted – the windows barred, the seats removed. The men and women were jammed into them so tightly that they couldn’t move, could barely breathe. Even at the end, they tried to find a way out, tearing off their own watches and jewellery to offer as bribes to the guards. The guards snatched the precious objects, then pushed them inside anyway.
At last it was over.
Jonas Mortlake was still in his seat, his hands resting on his knees. There were about twenty bodies around the hall. A few of them had been shot and some of them had been crushed in the stampede. But most of them had suffered heart attacks and were sitting there, facing forward with huge eyes and open mouths. The chairman had never left the stage. He was leaning against the podium, framed by the symbol of the Old Ones. The two of them were finally alone.
“Let’s go to my private office,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for a drink.”
TEN
The chairman’s office had a panoramic view over the river that seemed to stretch on for ever to the north and to the south. Jonas Mortlake stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling, triple-glazed windows, looking at the women washing great bundles of clothes in the murky water, the children splashing around in the shallows, the old men turning scraps of meat on bonfires that had been built along the shoreline and that added clouds of grey smoke to the already polluted air. Dozens of ships were lashed together in the mudbanks, slanting at odd angles, the metal ones rusting, the wooden ones rotting. There were still a few ferries afloat, making the journey between Manhattan and Long Island City, but no one in their right mind went over there. The overcrowding was so bad on the island that some buildings had two or three families crammed into each room. The crime levels were off the scale. It was said that you couldn’t walk the length of 21st Street without having your throat cut and that afterwards you would lie there until you rotted. The police never went into the area. There was no rubbish collection. The whole place was left to get on with itself.
Perhaps it was the air-conditioning but Jonas felt a cold shudder rise up between his shoulder blades. He was so glad he was up here, not down there. From as early as he could remember, he had always believed that he had been chosen. It didn’t matter that he was alone, that his mother was always away on the other side of the world. All through his life he’d had the best food to eat, the finest clothes to wear. He had been educated, taken to theatre and opera, encouraged to read. If he became sick, doctors would look after him. He could not imagine scrabbling in the mud like the people he was looking at now. People? It wasn’t even the word for them. They were little more than animals.
“A glass of white wine?”
The chairman had slipped into the office behind him and stood there with a bottle in one hand.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m afraid it’s not quite chilled. Even here in the United Nations, the power is not completely reliable. It goes on and off. Please, take a seat…”
The chairman seemed younger than he had on the stage, as if he had put the effort of his long speech behind him and could now relax. He moved carefully into the room and poured two glasses, then took his place behind the desk. Jonas took a glass and sat on a leather sofa. It occurred to him that he knew nothing at all about the chairman – where he lived, whether he had a family, or even his name.
“Your very good health, sir,” he said.
“No, Jonas. I’m afraid you’re drinking to something that doesn’t exist. I’m old and my body is full of cancer. Fortunately, I have drugs to contain it but the truth is that I may not have more than a year left. Maybe we should drink to the Old Ones. And to the new world that they’re helping to create.”
“Of course.” Jonas sipped his wine. It was excellent. He wondered how many hundreds of dollars the bottle would have cost.
“So what did you make of the conference?” the chairman asked. His face gave nothing away. There were so many folds, so many lines that it was barely more than a leather mask.
“I thought it was amusing,” Jonas replied.
“The other delegates may not have agreed.”
“I’m sure they didn’t.” Jonas paused for a moment, swirling the wine in his glass. “What did you mean by ‘adjusted’ – if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Adjusted?”
“You said that some of them would be adjusted in the training camps.”
“Oh yes.” The chairman sounded uninterested. “They’ll have their hands or their arms cut off and replaced with saws and blades. It’s very hard for a soldier to lose his weapon when he is the weapon. Some of them will be disfigured in other ways. Their faces will be altered to make them uglier. You take someone’s lips away, they never stop snarling. They’ll all be branded – name, rank and serial number. It makes them feel they belong. And it terrifies the opposition.”
There was a pause. The two men sipped their wine.
“Does it ever bother you, Jonas?” the chairman asked. “When the Old Ones have finished with you, they’ll probably kill you too.”
Jonas shrugged. “That won’t happen while I’m still useful to them.”
“And do you think you still are?” He paused. “Useful?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, sir.” Jonas leant forward. “I’ll do anything to prove myself. You only have to ask.”
“That’s good.” The chairman set his glass down. His eyes became hard. It was time for business. “You’ll be leaving today for Italy. We have two prisoners for you to deal with. They were captured a couple of weeks ago in the Abbey of San Galgano, just outside the city of Lucca.”
“Two of the Five?”
“Exactly. There was something I didn’t explain back in the conference hall, but you need to understand it as it’ll make sense of your mission. In fact, it’s very important.”
“Please go ahead, sir.”
“Well, it concerns the Five. I said there were five children at the battle ten thousand years ago and five children now – and, as I explained, they’re the same five children. But what I should have added was that, somehow, they have the ability to exist in two different times, simultaneously. More than that, they can replace themselves. Take the girl, for example. If you killed her today, she would be replaced immediately by the girl from ten thousand years ago.”
“So you’d need to kill her a second time.”
“Exactly. But you’d have to find her first and that might not be so easy. You see what I’m getting at, Jonas? If we want to control them, we have to keep them alive. We can lock them up. We can hurt them. But it’s better for us if they don’t die.”
“Is that how they won … the last time?”
“Yes.” The chairman nodded. “There were five armies but they were hopelessly outnumbered. All the forces of the Old Ones – the shape-changers, the fly-soldiers, the monsters and the mutants – were lined up against them. And then, one of the Five, the boy called Sapling, was ambushed and killed at a place called Scathack Hill.
“The Old Ones thought they were safe. What they didn’t realize was that killing Sapling allowed his modern self to travel back in time and replace him. The American boy, Jamie Tyler, went back without anyone noticing and joined with the four others to make five. That was the trick. The Old Ones didn’t see what had happened until it was too late. The circle was formed, the gate opened, and the rest you know.”
Jonas drank a little more of his wine. He wondered where this was all leading. The chairman had announced that he was dying.
Well, good riddance to him. But was it possible that he was being groomed to take over Nightrise? His face gave nothing away but the thought of it thrilled him.
“Returning to modern times,” the chairman continued, “the Five came together again very briefly in Hong Kong. It’s extraordinary to think that they were actually in the same room, in a temple in Kowloon. If they had been able to stay together, if they had formed another circle, who knows what might have happened! But the city was being hit by a typhoon. It was falling down all around them. They had to get out fast so they all piled into a magic door, which had been specially built for them inside the temple and which could transport them to safety on the other side of the world.
“There are twenty-five of these doors and they’ve used some of them before. But this time they forgot the one simple rule. They had to know where they were going. Otherwise, they would be sent anywhere. And that’s exactly what happened. They went in together through one door but they came out of different ones. Jamie Tyler, for example, turned up in a village in England and we very nearly captured him. We’re still looking for him now. In a way, you’ve got to laugh. All that effort just to come together and they’ve found themselves scattered all over the globe.
“And there’s something else. The door was blown to pieces even as they went through it. The typhoon destroyed the entire temple … and this caused a gash in the fabric of time. Although the journey only felt like a few seconds for them, it actually took them ten years to arrive at the other end.
“I’m afraid they’ve come back to a world very different from the one they left. Their position is hopeless. They’re alone, scared, weak and divided…”
“And we have taken two of them prisoner.”
“Yes, Jonas. We knew the exact location of seventeen of the twenty-five doors and we have been watching them for ten long years, waiting for the children to appear.”