The Burning (38 page)

“Yes, we are linked. But don’t forget, the Traveller who came here and lived among the Berbers came maybe thirty thousand years ago.” Ali spread his arms wide to demonstrate the enormous length of time.

“That’s a long time for the genes to get watered down,” he continued. “So by the time you get to Mahmoud and me, there’s not much of the original DNA left.”

“Enough for you and Mahmoud to have … special powers?”

“We sometimes have a sixth sense about what the other is thinking or doing, or when one of us was in pain.” He grimaced. “That’s how I saw what was in his head, and in his heart…”

“And now?” Rachel asked. “What do you hear from him now?”

Ali thought for a while. “Nothing,” he said finally, flicking a thin branch at the donkey’s rump to persuade it to continue uphill.

They spoke no further until they reached the summit of the cliff. Ali helped Morag and Duncan down and unpacked the other donkey. The rest of the party lined up along the cliff top. They steadied themselves against the wind and looked down at the grey sea that roared and smashed tirelessly against the ragged rocks below.

“So how does the legend end?” Rachel asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ali said. “We need to keep moving. We’re going down there.” All eyes widened as he pointed at the jagged coastline, and they began to pick their way through the rocks, down towards the sea.

Half an hour later, Ali had guided them between boulders, exposing narrow paths that zigzagged across and down the cliff-face, and they found themselves standing on a flat shelf that overlooked the sea. From this lower perspective, the coastline suddenly seemed familiar to Rachel. Looking thirty metres to her right, she could see where the rocks crumbled away and became a crescent of sandy
beach. There was nothing of the modern world anywhere, and Rachel could see it almost exactly as it had been thirty thousand years before. In her mind’s eye, she could see primitive tribesmen fishing from this beach. She could see them going out in their wooden boats, day in, day out.

“You were going to tell me the end of the legend,” Rachel said.

Ali sighed. “The usual story,” he said. “The stranger was taken away from his family and his brains were smashed out on a rock, but not before he had been forced to build what would become his own tomb. When the job was done, his body was left out till the gulls had picked it clean, then his bones were sealed up in the caves, where they could do no harm, and where nobody would ever find them.”

“So how are
we
going to find them?”

Ali smiled. “When he built his tomb, he left a way in for those he knew would come one day. For
us
.”

Rachel screwed up her face. “Why was he killed?”

“Because they were frightened of him,” Ali said. “Frightened of his power. People have always been frightened of it. And they still are.”

“Do we know where he died?”

“Right here,” Gabriel said. He was pointing down at the flat table of rock on which they were standing, tears rolling down his cheeks. “This is the Killing Stone.”

“Le Rocher des Tueurs,” Ali confirmed.

Rachel looked down at the rock. Images of men
grappling – of one man fighting for his life – flashed through her mind. Vibrations tingled up through the soles of her feet and prickled at her scalp like electrical currents.

Gabriel was clearly feeling something similar. He dropped to his knees, his palms flat against the cold stone, his tears dripping into the cracks and fissures on the surface.

He began to howl.

The rest of the group gathered around him and murmured sympathetically. Kate and Laura stroked his head, while Rachel and the Spanish girls dabbed at their own tears. Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard coughed and scratched their heads, and Duncan and Morag clutched at the adults, frightened by the powerful emotion that was being released from the boy they knew as Michael.

Gabriel’s cries died as suddenly as they had started. He got to his feet, shrugging off the sympathy that was being offered to him, as if it was holding him up. “Come on,” he said. “We have to keep going. We don’t have long.”

They hopped across the remaining rocks and down on to the beach, the damp sand a relief underfoot after the punishing rocky path. They dumped their bags and Gabriel led them forward. They walked away from the sea and up the beach until they could see, tucked under a rocky overhang, the long shallow arch and the down-turned black mouth that marked the opening of a cave.

“La Grotte des Barbares,” Ali said. “The Cave of the Berbers.”

“This is where our story began,” Gabriel said.

Rachel looked at him. “And where it ends?”

“Only one way to find out.”

And they walked into the black.

T
he sea was choppy and grey, and slapped roughly against the sides of the boat; against the pair of black, motorized dinghies lashed to the stern, and against the name painted in large white letters on the hull:

On the uppermost of the three decks, Clay Van der Zee sat staring at the bank of screens and computer monitors on the wall in front of him. The boat’s communications centre was every bit as well equipped as the one in the mobile unit that had been stationed in Gibraltar until a few hours before. Once word of the children’s final destination had come through from Laura Sullivan, it had been a short voyage across to the Moroccan Coast, and once there, with the boat moored two kilometres
offshore and out of sight of the beach, the command station had been quickly established. Now, Van der Zee was in constant contact with operatives at several different observation points and was able to switch easily between images of the beach and the entrance to the cave itself, both fed live from satellites orbiting the earth high above.

Like the rest of his team, Van der Zee was excited; almost breathless with nerves and anticipation. He had been since the message had come through a few minutes earlier.

They’re going in…

Van der Zee checked in again – as he did every few minutes – with each onshore observation post, with every technician and member of the Hope security team on board the boat. There were more than a dozen of them awaiting orders, ready to move fast once the signal was given. To seize the four sets of twins as quickly as possible, to capture the boy – the outsider – who was leading them, and, most importantly of all, to take possession of what they had all come looking for in the Cave of the Berbers.

From the other side of the room, Adam sat and watched Van der Zee stab at buttons and bark orders into the microphone. Adam had been allowed to move freely around the cabin for some time, but there was no mistaking the purpose of the two security guards who had been assigned to watch him. He looked across at the blank faces; the dark glasses and inhibitors. He knew they carried weapons and that they would not hesitate to use them.

“You won’t get it back,” Adam said. “The Triskellion. You do
know
that, right?”

Van der Zee turned in his chair. “We’ll see.”

“You won’t get
anything
.”

“Let’s just watch and see how this all pans out, shall we?” Van der Zee smiled, and pointed up at the screens. “You’ve got a ringside seat; you should just sit back and enjoy the show…”

Adam looked up at one of the screens, stared into the dark mouth of the cave. He’d seen Rachel, his mom and the others disappear inside a few minutes earlier. More than anything, he wished he was with them, but for now, all he could do was close his eyes and reach out with his mind. To let his sister know that he
was
with her.

To wish her luck.

Water ran slowly down the grey stone walls that rose up ten metres or more on every side before narrowing to a dark ceiling which seemed to shift in the damp shadows high above them. Each drip echoed as it struck the floor. A few thin shafts of light angled down from gaps in the rock, streaking the walls in pale beams, highlighting every detail.

Rachel, Gabriel and the others stood and said nothing for a minute or more, staggered by the size of the cavern. Then they began to move, slowly inching around the walls like a group of tourists, running their fingers across the rock and whispering in wonder.

“My God,” Laura said. “These paintings…” Over the years she had seen hundreds of cave paintings, but none with anything like this degree of detail. There was an incredible level of artistry in every line carved into the stone, and something else too. There was…

“It’s passion,” Rachel said, reading Laura’s thoughts. “This really
meant
something to him.”

Rachel moved slowly around the walls, seeing …
feeling
the emotions that had been poured into every scratch and marking. There were images of bees and beehives, of falling stars and shoals of minutely detailed fish. And Triskellions…

She stopped in front of one huge wall and stared at a series of paintings that outlined the story Ali had told her. In swirling lines of black against the pale rock there were pictures of a boat and of a man being pulled from the sea. As Rachel stared, the dream came back once again, and suddenly she was that girl standing on the beach, watching a stranger being dragged from a fishing boat. A girl who had given birth to twin children and then watched as their father was dragged away to his death.

Waited as his body was reduced to a pile of bones.

While Rachel stood and stared, Kate and Laura moved to either side of her. Laura took a picture of the wall with the camera on her phone. She leant in close to Rachel. “Isn’t this amazing?”

“What is
this
?” Kate asked. Laura opened her mouth to speak. “And keep it simple, OK,” Kate said quickly. “We
don’t all have degrees in archaeology.” She glanced across at Gabriel and the other twins. “Or special powers…”

Laura took a deep breath. “OK … I’ve always had this idea that something changed in the evolution of mankind thirty thousand years ago. Something that changed the Neanderthal into modern man – gave him the push to spread out across to Spain and into northern Europe.” She looked at the wall. “
This
is where it happened. Whoever did these paintings is what
made
it happen.”

Kate nodded, looking at the pictures. “The falling star isn’t really a star, right?”

“I’m sure that’s what the people who lived here at the time
thought
it was,” Laura said. “And they wouldn’t have had a word to describe who it was …
what
it was, they pulled from the ocean.” She turned and looked across the cave at the three sets of twins as they moved around, pointing and muttering. “And it happened
again
, three thousand years ago, and since. More visitors arrived. In France, Spain, Scotland … and in Triskellion – in your own village.” Laura watched as Kate reached for Rachel’s hand. “And now, kids like yours, kids with these genes, can do the same thing that their ancestors did … can move human beings on to another level. It’s
super
-evolution…”

Kate nodded again. She was beginning to digest the enormity of Laura’s theory and the importance of her own offspring.

“Was that simple enough?” Laura asked.

Gabriel was standing behind her. He had obviously been listening. He smiled.

There was a shout from the other side of the cave and everyone moved quickly across to where Duncan and Morag were standing and pointing towards the ceiling.

“It’s not shadows,” Duncan said. “It’s alive.”

Morag grinned. “It’s bees. Millions of them…”

Everyone stared up at the colony of insects that crawled across the roof of the cave. The bees hung in a moving canopy as though part of the cave itself; as if their low, insistent buzz was coming from somewhere deep inside the rock, like blood pulsing through a vein.

“It’s like they’re welcoming us,” Morag said.

Then everyone froze, as another sound filtered down from above. A very different and more dangerous buzzing that got louder until it drowned out the noise of the bees. Until Gabriel had to shout to be heard above it.

“Everyone outside.
Now!
”

Clay Van der Zee rarely raised his voice when he was speaking to the man in New York, but he could not help himself. He had been as furious as he was confused since he’d first seen the aircraft swooping low across the cliff top a few minutes before.