The Burning (22 page)

A theory was taking shape and her meeting with Clay Van der Zee was in two hours.

She needed more coffee.

“Je déteste les Espagnols,”
Jean-Luc grumbled to his brother. He shambled ahead along the tree-lined avenue that led from the station. He’d been honked at aggressively by a car as he had wandered aimlessly into the road.

“I think I got the meaning of that,” Rachel said to Gabriel, some steps behind. “He hates the Spanish.”

Gabriel smiled at her and, fixed by his green eyes, she
felt a brief, but powerful, surge of the warmth that had once existed between them. It was something she missed hugely; that she had not felt since they had left Triskellion. The day was bright and a little chilly and Rachel pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her fleece. She took the opportunity to probe a little.

“I think Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard hate everything, don’t they?”

Gabriel shrugged. “They’ve had a tough time. They come from a village in Brittany, a small place like Triskellion. People have treated them badly since they were born.”

Several metres ahead Jean-Bernard spat on the pavement.

“I thought you said they were friends.
Our
friends.”

Gabriel let out a sigh and stared at the French boys. They were fighting with one another, landing playful kung-fu kicks with scuffed trainers and bumping into people on the street. “They are,” he said. “They’re like you. Like us. I didn’t say you had to
love
them. Can’t you see them for what they are?”

Rachel said nothing.

She had felt it when they’d escaped from Hope, when they’d gone many hours without sleep and when her brother had carved a microtransmitter from her back. Rachel looked at Gabriel and felt yet again that he was testing her.

They turned down a smaller street with shops on either side. Dawdling some way behind Rachel and Gabriel, Adam was struggling to keep Morag and Duncan moving. They moaned
that they were still tired, stopped each time something new arrested their attention and now Morag was hungry. Adam ducked into a greengrocer’s, then emerged a few seconds later with a bunch of bananas. He handed one to each of the younger twins and watched as Morag greedily peeled and chewed, as if she hadn’t eaten for a week.

Then he became aware that someone was following them.

Adam grabbed Morag’s hand. “C’mon, we’re getting left behind.” He could see Rachel, Gabriel and the French boys up ahead, but they were a good distance away and Morag whined as her little legs tried to keep up.

“Quick as you can,” Adam said. He glanced behind him, trying not to alarm the youngsters.

A man was coming up fast behind them. He caught Adam’s eye and quickened his pace. Adam looked frantically around but saw nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Before he could move, a car pulled up hard alongside them and Adam watched its driver, a big man with a black moustache, jump from the driver’s seat and step out in front of them.

Adam took a defensive stance, but the man just looked at him quizzically before snatching a parcel from the passenger seat and carrying it into a nearby shop. Adam let out the breath he had been holding and looked behind him again. The first man was closer now.

The driver had left the engine running…

“Get in!” Adam pushed Duncan into the front of the car and helped Morag clamber over into the back. He slammed the door behind him and locked it. In the rear-view mirror, Adam could see their pursuer trying to work out where they had gone and then the realization on his face that they had got into the car.

Adam began to panic, cursing himself for locking them into what was effectively a cage. He was sitting in the passenger seat. Duncan was next to him, his hands clamped tightly round the steering wheel. They weren’t going to get far like this, Adam thought. Not that
either
of them knew how to drive.

“I do,” Duncan squeaked, tapping into the scramble of thoughts going through Adam’s mind. “I know how to drive.”

“What?”

“Are you sure?” Morag asked.

“I read a book,” Duncan said.

In the short time he had known Duncan, Adam had been amazed time and again by the little boy’s abilities. Now, as the man bashed his fist on the roof of the car, there was no time to question them.

“Go!” he shouted.

The engine screamed as Duncan stretched one leg to depress the accelerator and the other to operate the clutch. He let off the handbrake and his body twisted with the effort of turning the steering wheel as the car took off down the street, its tyres squealing.

Adam looked behind as their pursuer was thrown into the
gutter. He caught a glimpse of the man with the moustache come tearing out of the shop. Adam watched him help up the first man, and they both started running after them.

Adam stared across at Duncan, who was leaning forward, his head barely higher than the wheel.

“Fast as you like,” he said.

However carefully Duncan had read and memorized the manual, knowing
how
to drive and actually
driving
on a busy Spanish street were two completely different things.

Rachel, Gabriel and the French boys were astonished, then horrified, as the red Seat screeched past in second gear, driven by an eight-year-old boy who could not steer. The car was smashing off the kerb and knocking over rubbish bins. Rachel saw her brother’s terrified face through the window – his body was being thrown from side to side and his arms were braced against the dashboard. She saw Morag flying around on the back seat, and she saw two angry men running down the centre of the street after the car, each one waving fists and shouting curses.

“Adam!”

“Whoa!”
Jean-Luc jeered after the car in French-accented English, while his brother whistled and jumped in the air as the car snaked off out of sight.

“Supercool!”

The two of them immediately began sprinting after the car, with Rachel and Gabriel doing their best to keep up, while a few streets away, a police siren began to wail.

“Stop!” Adam shouted, grabbing at the steering wheel, but Duncan’s foot was jammed down on the accelerator. Adam pulled the wheel clockwise and the car turned into another street, missing a news-stand on the corner by a whisker. Adam tried to straighten up, but the car was going too fast, revving too high. Every yank he made on the wheel needed a push in the opposite direction to compensate, sending the car crashing into the kerb and squealing against the bodywork of vehicles parked on either side of the street.

“Look out!” Morag screamed as a taxi came up the street towards them. A white wall, painted with the bulbous, waving figure of the Michelin Man, stretched between the parked cars, announcing the entrance to a garage.

The taxi was still coming.

Adam saw the gap and pulled the wheel clockwise again, heading straight for the garage’s entrance. Duncan took his hands off the wheel and closed his eyes. Adam wrenched the handbrake and the car spun sideways, bounced over the high kerb and smashed into the long, white wall.

For a few seconds there was silence. Then…

“Quick!
Ven aquí!
Come here; get out!”

Adam heard a kindly voice above the hiss of the burst radiator as the car door was wrenched open. The smiling face of the Michelin Man peered through the shattered windscreen as Adam and the twins clambered out of the wreckage, dazed but unhurt.

“You will be all right.”

The voice belonged to a small, neat man in a white warehouse coat. He ushered Adam, Morag and Duncan across the street to a shop, above which, on a sign spelled out in gold letters, was a single word:

A few minutes later, the policeman examining the written-off car wondered why there were so few witnesses about. Two surly French boys seemed to be the only people who had seen the accident and they simply smirked and shrugged incomprehension whenever he spoke to them.

Then two, out-of-breath Spanish men came charging round the corner.

“They took my car,” said one. “I was just making a delivery.”

The other nodded. “I was serving a customer,” he said. “And this little tearaway stole some bananas.”

Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard were already walking away, their absence going unnoticed. They were relieved that the explanation was a simple one, that the events had not been more sinister, and they were already looking forward to the fun they would have at the American boy’s expense.

The idiot had simply forgotten to convince the shopkeeper that he had paid.

R
achel and Gabriel arrived to find Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard walking away from the scene of the accident. Jean-Luc grinned and smashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. Jean-Bernard supplied sound effects and mimed a crash with screeching tyres, explosive noises, police sirens and, for reasons best known to himself, machine-gun fire.

“Cool!” they said as one, grinning.

“Where’s my brother?” Rachel demanded. “And the little ones?”

Jean-Luc studied her for a moment, then nodded across the street to a row of small shops. They walked over the road, towards one selling straw baskets, and another whose window was full of smoked hams. In between the two was a smaller shop: its window crammed with jars of various shapes and sizes, their contents catching the light in a hundred shades of gold. Etched into the glass door of the shop was an elaborately detailed picture of a bee and above were
the words “Abeja” and “Miel” in old-fashioned script.

“Miel … honey, right?” Rachel asked.

Jean-Luc nodded. “It’s the same in French.”

“This is the place,” Gabriel said. He pushed open the door and walked in.

A man in a white coat was waiting for them. He was standing to attention in the middle of the shop and his face lit up as the boy with green eyes walked through the door. He marched up to Gabriel, his hands trembling, as if he were summoning the courage to touch his face. Then, as though thinking better of the idea, he lightly patted the boy’s arms and spoke, a little nervously.

“I am Señor Abeja.”

The man was in early middle age, nearing fifty perhaps, but his olive skin was so free from wrinkles and the cheeks around his goatee beard so cleanly shaven that the general effect was one of an ageing little boy. His shoulders sloped away from his small head, and the legs of his sharply creased trousers ended in small, black shoes, like those of a dancer.

“I knew you were coming,” he said. Rachel had no need for translation, as the man spoke in good, if slightly tentative, English. “I had a dream about the car crashing across the road. I saw the American boy and the little ones…”

“Where are they?” Rachel asked. She still did not know if anyone had been injured.

Señor Abeja looked at Rachel for the first time. “I’m sorry,”
he said. “They’re in the back. They’re fine. A little shaken, perhaps.”

The shop was packed, floor to ceiling, with jars of honey; some clear, some solidified, some with honeycomb suspended in pale golden liquid. Señor Abeja’s elaborate bee picture was printed on each jar, along with a handwritten label bearing the names of the flowers that had produced the pollen: thyme, orange blossom, rosemary. Screens, smokers and other beekeeping equipment were piled up against the walls, from which hung nets of all sizes and an assortment of beekeeper’s hats and gloves.

“Come through,” Señor Abeja said. He opened a rickety door at the back of the shop that led through to a tiny kitchen. Adam, Duncan and Morag were sitting at a table, sipping from small glasses. “I gave them lemon juice with brandy and honey. It’s good for shock.”

“Hi, sis,” Adam said.

Rachel moved quickly towards her brother. He was very pale and she could see blood on his chin. “You OK?” She looked across at Morag and Duncan. “You guys OK?” They nodded.

Gabriel turned to Adam. “What happened?”

“We were being followed,” Adam said. “I don’t know if it was someone from the Hope Project, or one of the … others.” He saw that the French boys were smiling. “What?”

“Bananas,” Jean-Luc said.

“Bananas,” Jean-Bernard echoed. They no longer seemed
bothered about blocking the translation. “You forgot to ‘pay’ for the bananas.”