Hostage (5 page)

Alex had chosen the three spruce trees because of their spreading, interlinking lower branches. Snow had built up on the top side of the branches, weighing them down so that they bent to the ground. More snow had piled up around the outside of the bent branches, effectively anchoring them in place. Underneath the tent-like branches, where the snow could no longer reach, a natural hollow had formed.

Once they had unloaded the snow shovels from the trailers, Alex showed Amber and Hex how to dig down carefully into the snow beneath the trees to enlarge the existing hollow without disturbing the outer branches. Li and Paulo set off into the trees to collect as much dead wood as they could find. They were going to need huge amounts of fuel to keep them warm through a night of sub-zero temperatures. Alex concentrated on getting a fire going. First, he dug out a fire pit in front of their shelter trees. Using the snow he had dug out and the snow that Amber and Hex were clearing from under the trees, he built a snow bank behind the fire pit to create extra shelter and reflect the heat from the fire back into the hollows under the trees.

Starting with a pyramid of small, dry twigs and another piece of his precious kindling, Alex used his flint to create a spark. Soon the kindling and twigs were burning well and he began building up the fire by adding branches from Li and Paulo's first load of dead wood. Once he had a good blaze going, he filled two billycans with snow and set them on the edges of the fire to melt, then he strapped on his snowshoes and set off towards a willow thicket he had noted on the way in. Rabbits and snowshoe hares were common in this region and they loved to eat willow bark. Alpha Force were carrying a limited supply of food but Alex wanted to supplement it in case they had to stay hidden for a while.

The sun was starting to set as he tramped through the snow towards the willow thicket and everything had an edging of gold. Alex smiled as he looked around. He felt at home in northern Canada. It reminded him of some of the remoter forests and moors back home in Northumberland. His sharp eyes noted a group of ptarmigan under a spruce tree. The birds were pure white and almost perfectly camouflaged against the snow, but they were scratching for food under the trees and the movement of their large, densely feathered feet had caught his eye.

Alex stopped, debating whether to try to catch one, but then he saw that another hunter was already stalking the birds. An arctic fox was stepping slowly through the snow, weaving along the edge of the tree line. The fox already had its white winter coat, which was perfectly adapted for cold-climate survival. Each hair of the coat was hollow inside and full of air. This worked like the layer of air in a double-glazing unit, trapping the fox's body warmth and enabling it to tolerate temperatures as low as forty below zero.

As Alex watched, the fox reached the tree next to the ptarmigan and flattened itself into the snow, preparing to pounce. An instant later, it launched itself at the birds. They rose up into the air and flew off in a flurry of feathers and squawks.

Alex thought they had all managed to escape, but when he looked again at the fox, it was trotting off with a bird hanging limply from its jaws. He smiled in admiration for a hunter that could catch its prey without the use of snares or traps. He also made a note to check his snares before morning. If he did not retrieve his catch pretty quickly, the fox would eat it right out of the snare.

When he reached the thicket, Alex was pleased to see that there were several trails through the snow made by rabbits or hares. Pulling off his outer mittens, he took the snare wire from his survival tin and set to work. He fashioned a slipknot noose out of the brass snare wire and then rubbed the metal with rabbit droppings to dull the shine and hide any human smell. Next, he hung the snare from a willow branch overhanging one of the trails. Finally, he blocked the sides of the trail with a fence of small sticks. This would funnel the rabbit into middle of the trail and it would run straight into his snare. The noose would instantly tighten around the rabbit's neck, cutting off its air supply and killing it quickly.

Alex set a dozen traps in the willow thicket, reckoning that he would catch three or four rabbits if he was lucky. By the time he got back to the camp site, Amber and Hex had finished the shelters. Each hollow had a sleeping platform made of snow, which Amber and Hex had tramped down with their snowshoes and then covered with spruce boughs to create an insulating mattress for their sleeping bags. Paulo and Li had collected a huge pile of dead wood, including two sections of tree trunk which they had set in front of the fire to serve as seats. Paulo had made a hot drink for everyone by adding stock cubes to the first batch of melted snow and now two more billycans were strung over the fire, heating up five boil-in-the-bag meals. Paulo had also placed a large, flat stone on the edge of the fire where he was slow-baking flat, savoury biscuits made from oatmeal and melted snow. A large pat of butter was thawing next to the stone, ready to spread on the biscuits when they were done.

Alex sat down and accepted his share of the stock-cube drink. For a moment, everything was quiet as Alpha Force sat staring into the fire, lost in their private thoughts. Then Alex straightened and looked around the circle.

'Time to talk,' he said. 'Who wants to start?'

'Me,' said Hex, and everyone looked at him in surprise. Usually, when they had a problem to solve, Hex preferred to sit back and listen to them flounder for a while, before coming in with a devastatingly neat and logical solution.

Hex smiled wryly at their surprised expressions, then he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out the object he had taken from their pursuer's body. It was a mobile phone.

'His?' asked Amber, jerking her thumb back the way they had come.

'Yes. This is what gave him away, remember?'

They nodded, remembering how the man's phone had started ringing as they stood in a shocked circle around Papaluk's frozen body. 'I took it because I wanted to know who was calling him,' continued Hex. He stripped off his gloves, switched on the phone and studied the display. 'Text message,' he muttered, accessing the menu.

They were silent, listening to the beeps as Hex negotiated his way around the phone, stopping every now and then to read the information on the display. 'OK,' he said finally. 'Here's what we have. Just after he killed Papaluk, he sent a text message to some guy called "D". The message he sent reads, "Original leak sealed. Poss. 5 more. Total containment?"'

Hex lifted his eyes from the screen and watched the others absorb the meaning of the text message.

'I am thinking our own Papaluk was the original leak,' said Paulo, sending Li a sympathetic glance.

'And by "sealed" he means he killed her!' growled Amber.

'And we must be the five more possible leaks,' said Paulo.

'So, when he talks about total containment, he's asking D whether he should kill us too,' said Alex flatly.

'What was D's reply?' asked Amber.

For answer, Hex pressed a button and turned the phone so that they could all see the one word on the screen. 'Yes.'

'That's why the guy was hiding to start with,' said Hex. 'He was waiting for instructions from his boss.'

'And his boss told him to kill us,' said Alex.

'Just who the hell is this D guy?' demanded Amber.

'Let's find out,' said Hex. He checked the last number dialled and hit the redial button. The phone connected and they all gathered round to hear who picked up at the other end. They got a recorded voice.

'Daniel Usher is busy. Leave a message.'

'So, D stands for Daniel Usher, the head of Usher Mining Corporation,' drawled Hex, breaking the connection.

'He is not polite,' commented Paulo.

Hex smiled without humour. '"Not polite". That's one way of describing him. "Murderer" is another.'

'I – you know, guys, I—' Amber came to a halt with a look of intense concentration on her face. 'I think I know that voice – I just can't place it. ..'

Hex reached inside his jacket and brought out the soft leather pouch that held his palm-sized PC. Quickly, he slipped the little computer from the bag and lifted the lid. The palmtop had been a gift from Amber. It had come straight from the development labs and was so technologically advanced it was not yet available on the open market. There was a flat aerial in the lid which could give access to the Net via the nearest communications satellite. Within minutes, Hex was connected. His fingers danced across the little keyboard as he began his search for information on Daniel Usher. He started with the official Usher Mining Corporation site. As he had hoped, there was a glossy colour image of Daniel Usher smiling out of the screen. He was a white man in his early forties, tanned and fit looking, with blue eyes and thick, dark hair, greying at the temples. His smile was warm and wide and his eyes stared confidently from the screen.

'Does that help?' he asked, turning the screen so that Amber could see it.

Amber gasped. 'That slimeball!' she cried. 'Sure I remember him! He's one of the richest guys in America. He has his fingers in all sorts of pies. He used to show up at some of my parents' parties, before they sold the business and got out of that whole scene.'

'He was a family friend?' asked Paulo.

'Nah! My parents thought he was a slimeball too.'

'Why did they ask him to their parties, if they didn't like him?' asked Alex.

'They weren't the sort of parties you asked your friends to,' said Amber with a sigh, remembering the long, boring hours spent in her parents' New York penthouse, talking to people she didn't know and smiling at people she didn't like.

'What other sort of parties are there?' asked Alex, his face a picture of puzzlement in the firelight.

'Aw, hell, you know. Schmoozing, politics, wheeler-dealing . . .' Amber faltered to a halt, at a loss as to how to explain the sort of corporate entertainment her parents had dutifully provided before they decided to turn their backs on all that. Parties where someone else wrote the guest list, prepared the food and served the drinks.

'You know. Business parties . . .' finished Amber lamely. She and Alex stared at one another across the fire. They were less than a metre apart but there was suddenly a wide gulf between the rich American girl and the boy from a village in Northumberland.

The silence stretched out until finally Alex shook his head.

'What!' demanded Amber.

'Rich people,' said Alex. 'All that money and they still can't throw a good knees-up.'

He grinned and Amber grinned back. 'Yeah, but I can throw a good snowball,' she said, grabbing a double handful of snow and preparing to lob it at Alex. He pounced on her, knocking the snowball from her hands. Amber fell off the back of the log and, as Alex reached out a hand to help her up, she pulled him down into the snow after her.

Paulo laughed and turned to Li, expecting her to be up on her feet and ready to join in. Li did not even raise her head and Paulo's smile disappeared like a light going out. Amber and Alex shared a look, then got to their feet and brushed the snow from their clothes.

'When you two have finished rolling about,' drawled Hex, without looking up from the screen of his palmtop, 'you might want to hear what I've found out so far. On the surface, Daniel Usher is squeaky-clean. Your basic all-American guy. As well as Usher Mining, he owns a chain of retail stores and one of the biggest television companies in the US. He's even planning to run for governor in his home state. He'll be launching his electoral campaign in a few days' time with a live broadcast on his own television channel. Of course, he's keen to stress that he's paying for the airtime just like any other murderer— I mean, just like any other candidate.'

'Yeah, right,' sneered Amber. 'OK. So that's the public face. Now, go on. Do what you do best, Hex.'

Hex interlaced his fingers and flexed them so that the knuckle joints popped. Then, hunching over the little keyboard, he began to explore behind the public face of Daniel Usher. First he entered a university computer system and used a password to get into an obscure corner where he had stored his lock-picking tools. These were programs he had written which would gain him access to sites on the Net that were forbidden to most users. His lock-picking programs were not strictly legal and so, like most hackers, Hex stored them on a large, multi-user system rather than on his own personal hard drive.

Once he had downloaded the programs, he got to work uncovering Daniel Usher's less public connections. He worked with intense concentration, ignoring the others as they moved around him, serving up the food or tending to the fire. Finally, he sat back with a satisfied smile. 'Oh, yes. I've got him. He's involved in a number of really sleazy money-making schemes around the world, but he keeps his name well out of it.'

'What sort of schemes?' asked Paulo, handing Hex a plate of stew and a thickly buttered oatmeal biscuit.

'Sweatshops in Korea,' mumbled Hex around a mouthful of stew. 'Making clothes. Three women who tried to fight for better working conditions there were found drowned in a river. Sound familiar?'

Alex nodded grimly. 'What else?' he asked.

'There's a chemical factory in Mexico merrily sending all sorts of crud out into the environment but the locals are so scared, they daren't make a fuss. There's a dam-building project in India with rumours of bribery and corruption. There's a—'

'Hang on,' said Amber, sitting up sharply. 'Just re-wind a bit. The company building that dam. Does it have a name?'

Hex looked at his screen. 'Goliath something . . .'

'Enterprise,' finished Amber quietly. 'Goliath Enterprise.'

'How did you know that?' asked Hex.

'My mom and dad were trying to get that project stopped when they were killed. A whole bunch of local protestors died in a coach accident on the same day. We think they had managed to find evidence to prove the corruption rumours that were hanging around the project like a bad smell and they were about to go public when they were all killed. The police investigated Goliath Enterprise, but the so-called company directors were only front men. When the police tried to find the real power behind the company, they just kept coming up against a blank wall.'