Dark River (31 page)

One of the assistants ran away and returned with an old-fashioned wheelchair— an elaborate construction made of bentwood, a wicker seat, and rubber tires. The handcuffs were removed from Gabriel’s wrists. Using nylon rope and lengths of electric cord, the petitioners tied Gabriel’s arms and legs to the frame of the chair. The commissioner of patrols watched this process, occasionally telling his men to add a few extra knots.

“You’re the leader here,” Gabriel said. “So why can’t you stop the killing?”

“I can’t get rid of the anger and hatred. I can only channel it in various directions. I’ve survived because I’m able to define our enemies— the degenerate forms of life that must be exterminated. Right now, we’re hunting down the cockroaches that conceal themselves in the darkness.”

The commissioner walked down the ramp. The blond man followed him, pushing Gabriel in the wheelchair. Once again, they passed down the school’s ground-floor hallway. The wolves waiting there lowered their heads slightly when the commissioner of patrols walked past them. If he saw some trace of disloyalty in their eyes, then they would immediately become his enemies.

At the end of the hallway, the commissioner took a key out of his pocket and unlocked a black door. “Stay here,” he told the blond man, then pushed Gabriel through the open doorway.

They were in a large room filled with rows of green metal file cabinets. A few of the drawers had been pulled out and the contents dumped on the floor. Gabriel looked down and saw school grades, test results, and teacher comments. Some of the files were stained with blood.

“All these cabinets contain student files,” the commissioner explained. “There are no children on the Island, but when we woke up that first morning this was a real school. There was chalk for the blackboards, paper and pencils, and canned food in the student cafeteria. Little details like that increase the level of cruelty. We didn’t just destroy an imaginary city, but a real place with stoplights and ice-cream parlors.”

“Is that why you brought me here?”

The commissioner of patrols pushed Gabriel past the file cabinets. Two small gas flares were burning from wall pipes, but the light was almost overcome by the shadows in the room. “There’s a reason why I picked this school as my headquarters. All the stories about visitors are connected to this room. There’s something special about this particular location, but I haven’t been able to discover the secret.”

They reached a central work area with tables, trays, and metal chairs. Gabriel was captive in the wheelchair, but he moved his head around, searching for the patch of infinite black space that would provide a passageway back to the Fourth Realm.

“If visitors can travel to this world, then there has to be a way out. Where is it, Gabriel? You have to tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not an acceptable response. You need to listen to me clearly. At this point, I can see only two possibilities. You’re either my only hope for escape, or you’re a threat to my survival. I do not have the time, or the inclination, to guess which option is correct.” The commissioner drew his revolver and pointed it at Gabriel’s head. “There are three bullets in this gun— probably the last three bullets that exist on this island. Don’t make me waste one of them killing you.”

** CHAPTER 29

Maya was still carrying the snub-nosed revolver she had acquired back in New York. The weapon determined her choice of transportation. Avoiding airports, she used a rural bus, a ferryboat, and a train to travel from Ireland to London. She arrived at Victoria Station in the middle of the night without a clear idea of how to find Gabriel. Before he left Skellig Columba, he had promised to contact the Free Runners, so Maya decided to drop by Vine House on the South Bank. Perhaps Jugger and his friends would know if Gabriel was still in the city.

She crossed the Thames and walked up Langley Lane toward Bonnington Square. The streets were empty at this late hour, but she could see the glow of televisions in darkened rooms. Maya passed some renovated terrace houses and a redbrick school built in the Victorian era that had been transformed into an upscale apartment building. In such surroundings, the Vine House looked like a shabby old man surrounded by well-dressed bankers and barristers.

When Maya reached the six-foot-high stone wall that surrounded the garden at Vine House, she smelled a harsh odor that reminded her of a trash fire. The Harlequin stopped and peered around the corner of the house. No one was on the sidewalk or sitting in the little garden at the center of the square. The neighborhood seemed safe until she noticed two men sitting in a florist’s delivery van parked near the end of the block. Maya doubted that anyone had ordered a dozen red roses to be delivered at one o’clock in the morning.

There was no entrance to the back garden from Langley Lane, so she grabbed the top of the stone wall and pulled herself over. The burning smell grew stronger, but she still couldn’t see a fire. Light came from a streetlamp and the new moon glowing in the western sky. As quietly as possible, she moved down the garden pathway to the back of the house, found the door unlocked, and eased it open.

Smoke surged out of the open doorway and flowed around her like a flood of foul gray water. Maya stumbled backward, coughing and waving her hands. Vine House was on fire, and the eighteenth-century oak beams and floorboards gave off as much smoke as a coal pit burning underground.

Where were the Free Runners? Had they fled the house or were they dead? Falling on her hands and knees, Maya crawled into the ground-floor hallway. A door on the left led to the empty kitchen. A door on the right opened to a bedroom with a single electric lamp that gave off a feeble point of light within the darkness.

A man lay in the middle of the room— half on the floor and half on a mattress, as if he were too weary to find his way to bed. Maya grabbed the man’s arms and dragged him out the doorway and into the garden. She was coughing hard and her eyes were filled with tears, but she could see that the unconscious man was Gabriel’s friend Jugger. Straddling his body, she slapped him hard across the face. Jugger’s eyes fluttered open and he started coughing.

“Listen to me!” Maya said. “Is there anyone else in the house?”

“Roland. Sebastian…” Jugger began coughing again.

“What happened? Are they dead?”

“Two men came in a van. Guns. Put us on the floor. Gave us injections…”

She returned to the house, took a deep breath, and stepped back inside. Crawling like an animal, she moved down the hallway and headed up the narrow staircase. One part of her mind was clear while her lungs struggled to breathe. Killing the Free Runners with guns or knives would have attracted too much attention from the authorities. Instead the Tabula mercenaries had drugged the three men and set fire to the dilapidated house. Now they were watching the front door and the entrance to the garden to make sure no one escaped. The next morning, firemen would find what was left of the bodies in the smoldering ruins. The local council would sell the land to a speculator and the London papers would run the story in the back pages: Three Die in Illegal Dwelling.

Maya found Sebastian in an upstairs bedroom, grabbed his arms, and dragged him down the stairs to the garden. When she returned the third time, she could see flames flashing in the darkness, burning the floorboards beneath a parlor chair, reaching up the walls to touch the banisters. There was black smoke at the top of the stairs, and she was completely blind when she reached out and found Roland’s body in the garret bedroom. Pull and stop. Pull and stop again. Sight and sound disappeared and she became a small fragment of consciousness passing through the smoke.

Maya burst out the back door, let go of Roland’s body, and collapsed on the muddy soil of the garden. After several minutes of coughing and gasping for air, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. Jugger was still conscious, talking with slurred speech about the injections. Maya touched the chests of the two other Free Runners and felt them breathing. Still alive.

She was carrying the gun, but using it would be dangerous in this neighborhood. Hollis had once explained that there were so many handguns in Los Angeles that New Year’s Eve celebrations sounded like a firefight in a war zone. In London, the sound of a gun was an unusual occurrence. If she fired her revolver, half the people living around the square would hear it and immediately call the police.

The house continued to burn, and there was a flash of orange flame as the window curtains in Jugger’s bedroom caught fire. Standing up, Maya approached the back door and felt a wave of heat pushing through the cold night air. As her breathing returned to normal, she remembered overhearing a discussion between her father and Mother Blessing about silencers. Gun silencers were illegal in Europe, hard to find and awkward to carry. Sometimes it was easier to improvise a substitute.

Maya searched the backyard and found some overflowing rubbish bins near the wall. She rummaged through the garbage until she discovered an empty two-liter water bottle and a wad of pink rubbery material that looked like carpet padding. Maya stuffed bits of padding into the bottle, then inserted the gun barrel into the opening. An old roll of tape was on the steps near the back door, and she wound it tightly around the gun and the plastic bottle. Jugger was sitting up and staring at her from the other side of the yard.

“What…what are you doing?”

“Wake up your friends. We’re getting out of here.”

Clutching her improvised weapon, she climbed back over the wall, hurried down an alleyway, and approached the back of the delivery van. A side window was rolled halfway down to let out cigarette smoke, and she could hear the two men talking.

“How long do we have to wait?” the driver asked. “I’m getting hungry.”

The other man laughed. “Then go back into the house. Some meat cooking there…”

Maya stepped up to the driver’s window, raised the gun, and fired. The first bullet blew out the bottom of the plastic bottle and cracked through the glass. The gun made a sound like hands clapping— two quick shots, and then silence.

** CHAPTER 30

An hour before his flight reached Heathrow Airport, Hollis stepped into one of the airplane toilets and changed his clothes in the cramped space. He felt conspicuous returning to his seat wearing a navy blue shirt and pants, but people were groggy from the overnight flight and no one appeared to notice. His old clothes were stuffed into a small bag that would be left on the plane. Everything he needed to enter England undetected was inside a manila envelope that he carried under his arm.

During his last few days in New York, Hollis had received an e-mail from Linden telling him that his work was done and it was time to come to England. The French Harlequin wasn’t able to find a merchant ship that would illegally transport Hollis to Europe. It was possible that the Tabula had inserted Hollis’s biometric information into the security data bank that fed information to customs officials throughout the world. When Hollis arrived at Heathrow Airport, he might activate a security alert and be detained by the authorities. Linden told Hollis there was another way— an off-the-Grid way— to enter Britain, but that would require some skillful maneuvering at the terminal.

The American Airlines flight landed on time at Heathrow, and the people sitting around Hollis began switching on their cell phones. Security guards watched the passengers carefully as they walked across the tarmac, then were loaded into airport transit buses and taken to terminal four.

Since Hollis wasn’t transferring to another flight, he needed to take another bus across the sprawling airport to passport control at terminal one. He went into the men’s room for a few minutes, then came back out and mingled with passengers arriving from different flights. Gradually, he was beginning to understand the clever simplicity of Linden’s plan. He was no longer surrounded by anyone who knew that he had just arrived from New York. The other passengers were tired and passive and ready to leave the terminal.

He got on another transit bus that was going to terminal one. When the bus was filled with people, he took a bright yellow safety vest out of the envelope and put it on. The blue shirt, pants, and vest made him look exactly like an airport employee. A card dangling around his neck held a fake ID card, but that really wasn’t necessary. The drones working at the airport looked only at the surface, searching for quick clues to put each stranger into a category.

When the bus reached terminal one, the other passengers got out and hurried through the electric door. Hollis pretended to talk into his mobile phone as he stood on the narrow sidewalk in the loading area. Then he nodded to the bored security guard sitting inside at a desk, turned, and strolled away. He half expected emergency sirens to go off while police officers ran out waving guns, but no one stopped him. The airport’s high-tech security system had been defeated by an eight-dollar reflective vest bought at a bicycle shop in Brooklyn.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Hollis was sitting in a delivery van with Winston Abosa, a plump young man from Nigeria who had a soothing voice and a pleasant manner. Hollis gazed out the window as they drove into London. Although he had traveled through Mexico and Latin America, Hollis had never visited Europe. British roads had lots of roundabouts and zebra-striped pedestrian walkways. Most of the two-story redbrick houses had little gardens in back. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, focusing on the license plates of each passing vehicle.

The new landscape reminded Hollis of a passage from Sparrow’s book, The Way of the Sword. According to the Japanese Harlequin, a warrior had a big advantage if he was familiar with the city that would be his battleground. When the warrior suddenly had to fight in a new area, it was like waking up in the morning and finding yourself in a different room.

“Did you ever meet Vicki Fraser?” Hollis asked.

“Of course.” Winston drove carefully, with both hands on the steering wheel. “I have met all your friends.”

“Are they in England? I could never get an answer from my e-mails.”