The Burning (39 page)

“I did not
ask
for helicopter support!” he shouted. On the screen he watched the children spilling out of the cave and on to the beach.

The voice of the man in New York crackled over the speaker, filling the cabin. “That was my decision,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”

“What exactly are you expecting?” Van der Zee asked.

“If I knew that, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

“That’s an attack helicopter,” Van der Zee said. “It’s armed…”

“These are not your worries, doctor.” There was a pause and, for a few moments, until the man from New York spoke again, the only sound in the cabin was the distant clatter of rotor blades. “Are you still there, doctor?”

Van der Zee said nothing. He had spun round in his chair to look at Adam, and the expression on the boy’s face had rendered him speechless. It was a look of horror at something that Adam had seen coming and could do nothing about.

The sound of the missile being fired was almost deafening.

Van der Zee twisted back round to face his screens and gasped at the explosion. “What the hell…?”

The speaker distorted as the man from New York shouted. “Who gave that order?”

Van der Zee watched the helicopter soar away and circle the cliff top as the smoke billowed skywards.

“I repeat,
who gave that order
?”

There were a few seconds of silence before another voice came over the speaker. The helicopter pilot sounded shaken as he identified himself and tried to answer the question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody … told me to fire. I
heard
him…”

Gabriel and the others picked themselves up and looked back at the cave. A dark cloud hung over the entrance, and black smoke poured from the point higher up the cliff where the missile had hit. Beyond that it seemed clear. Dust and debris were still raining down on to the beach and a solid column of bees swarmed out from the cave, circling the group, rounding them up like a lasso, guiding them back towards the entrance.

Laura Sullivan moved a few metres away from the others and took out her BlackBerry. She dialled a number. It was difficult to keep her voice down when she was so angry.

“What d’you think you’re
doing
?”

“That was nothing to do with me,” Van der Zee said.

“What?”

“I’m not lying, I swear.”

“Just get that chopper out of here
now
.”

“Listen, I promise you—”

“Did you bring the boy?”

“He’s right here.”

“Prove it,” Laura said. She waited a few seconds. Then she heard Adam shouting out to her, telling her that he was OK.

Van der Zee came back on the line. “We’ve known each other a long time, Laura. You should know I’m as good as my word.”

“I need to go…”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Laura looked up at the helicopter that was still circling. “I don’t trust the people you work for.” She ended the call and when she turned back to the group, she saw Duncan and Morag staring at her phone. She slipped it back into her pocket as Gabriel stopped to address everyone.

“Well, they clearly know we’re here,” he said. “So I suggest we get back in there and get what we came for as fast as we can.”

Rachel had seen the look on his face a few seconds before the missile had hit. Once everyone had started moving again, she ran to catch up with him. She pointed at the smoke, then up at the helicopter. “Was that you? Did you make that happen…?”

“Well, I didn’t summon up the helicopter if that’s what you mean, but I didn’t think there was any harm in making use of it.”

“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Why fire at the cave?”

“The cave’s only the start of it,” Gabriel said. “It’s like the entrance hall.” He looked up at the helicopter and shrugged. “I needed something to force the front door open.”

Rachel smiled in spite of herself and helped usher the others back towards the cave as quickly as possible. At the entrance, Gabriel stopped and told Jean-Bernard and Jean-Luc to wait.

“You can’t go back in,” he said. The French boys tried to
push past, but Gabriel held out an arm. “No, you need to stay here. You’ve got a job to do.”

“What job?” Jean-Luc demanded.

“It’s important,” Gabriel said. “And I think you’ll enjoy it.”

Jean-Luc and Jean-Bernard exchanged a look, then turned back to Gabriel and nodded. He thanked them, then followed the others, ducking through the curtain of dust and stepping back into the Cave of the Berbers.

T
he debris was settling on the inside of the cave. A wider crack had opened in the roof of the cavern and a shaft of yellow light cut through the dusty air. Laura was astonished to see that, although the main walls of the cave and the paintings remained intact, a large, triangular opening had fallen away on the far side.

“That’s the front door I was talking about,” Gabriel said. “Now, we’d better hurry up and get in there…”

They gathered around the exposed opening and, peering through, they could see a passage leading to steps that had been roughly hewn in the rock and which twisted away into the shadows. Gabriel led the way through the opening and they all tentatively followed him into a honeycomb of tunnels, alcoves and chambers burrowed into the side of the cliffs. The tunnels were lit by a pale glow that seemed to come from chunks of a glass-like material set into hollows in the rock face.

“Amazing,” Laura said, stopping. She touched the glass.
“It’s mica, or some kind of crystal. It looks like a system of lenses and prisms has been set up to direct natural light all the way from outside through to here. Sophisticated stuff. Not the work of your average caveman.”

“Who ever said this was done by a caveman?” Gabriel asked.

“Tell me what you know about him!” Laura cried, but Gabriel was already pushing on, poking his head into nooks and crannies and moving quickly in and out of small chambers.

Laura and Kate turned into a room on the left while the others explored the one opposite. Laura picked up a bowl and gasped. It was metallic: silvery-grey and unlike any thing she had ever seen before. Unlike anything that had ever been discovered in a Neanderthal cave.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s so modern looking.” She laid the bowl gently on the ground and began taking photos. “This is thirty thousand years old and it looks as if it could have been made yesterday. It looks like it’s been made on a machine. I mean … I don’t even
recognize
the metal. What am I talking about … these cavemen didn’t even have metal. Never, ever seen anything like it.”

Kate stared at the bowl. “Is that what he’s looking for?”

“Gabriel? No, I don’t think so. This stuff is just a bonus. An amazing bonus. I think he’s looking for a tomb…”

As she said it, the word suddenly sounded in Laura’s mind like a tolling bell.

Tomb
.

Years of tombs: finding them, studying them, digging them up. Laura looked closely at the chamber they were in. What she had thought were little rows of sticks drawn on the walls – perhaps some kind of numbering system – had, on closer inspection, turned out to have little heads and arms and feet. They were rows of bodies, laid out flat.

Had that been the purpose of this cave? Was it a burial site: one big tomb?

Her mind raced. What if Van der Zee was really double-crossing …
triple
-crossing her? What if he
had
ordered the missile-launching helicopter? She knew that he was certainly capable of pulling a trick like that. She also knew that there were people within the Hope organization whose agenda would be to get as many of the “special” people together in one place and blow them, and all those who protected them, to smithereens.

Was this labyrinth of caves going to be
their
tomb?

She felt panic rise within her. She had been stupid. She had been blinkered by her own research – research that would be no good to anyone if they were all about to be vaporized. In her blind enthusiasm to prove her theory, in her eagerness to do the right thing by Kate and return her son, Laura had helped set an elaborate deathtrap for them all.

“We need to get back out on to the beach,” she said to Kate, the panic clear in her voice. She shouted into the other
chamber. “Gabriel, Rachel,
everyone
… we have to get out!”

Duncan and Morag scuttled into the room. They looked at the bowl and the figures on the walls.

“What have you found?” Morag asked.

“Never mind,” Laura said. “We just need to get out.”

“We can’t,” Gabriel said, calmly entering the chamber. “We only get one go at this, and the time is now.”

“But they know where we are!” Laura shouted. “That’s obvious, right? Now they’ll be tracking our precise movements underground by satellite … by infrared imaging. They’ll have taken a position from my phone.”

All eyes turned on her.

“I had to tell them where we were so we could get Adam back,” she said.

Kate squeezed Laura’s arm and smiled.

“I know,” Gabriel said. “And you did the right thing. It’s just that this isn’t quite as straightforward as I thought it would be. We could do with buying ourselves a bit more time.”

“Laura … Dr Sullivan?” Morag tugged at Laura’s sleeve. “Why don’t you give Duncan your phone? He knows all the Hope passwords. He might be able to, you know, play around a bit.”

Laura looked at Morag’s innocent face, not understanding what she meant. This was hardly the time for games. Then she saw the smirk creep across Duncan’s features and Morag’s meaning became clear. If anyone could get into
Hope’s system and mess up their tracking equipment, then it was Duncan.

“We won’t get a signal down here, though, will we?” Laura said.

“Give it to me.” Duncan took the BlackBerry from Laura and, as soon as it was in his hands, the signal went up to five bars. His chubby fingers moved fast across the keypad. Internet access came up on the screen, then a series of messages flashed past at lightning speed. He punched in number combinations, symbols, letters – his fingers becoming a blur.

“I’m into the mainframe,” he said. Then, a few seconds later, he stabbed decisively at the “enter” key and looked up at everyone. “That should do it.” He waved the phone at Gabriel, allowing himself an uncharacteristic smile.

“Good work, Duncan,” Gabriel said. “Everyone has a job to do here, and that was yours. Now let’s get on with ours.”

“But they’ll still know where we are, won’t they?” Kate asked. She followed Gabriel as he led them down another of the cave’s meandering, half-lit passages.

“They know where we are
approximately
,” Gabriel said. “But they’re working blind now. Whereas
we
know where we’re going.”

Laura looked across at Rachel and raised an eyebrow. In turn, Rachel squeezed her mother’s hand and smiled.

The passages grew darker and narrower, the pale light from the prisms becoming even weaker the deeper they
went. The air was cooler and damper, and the group quietened as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense.

Ali did nothing to make them feel any easier as he darted between them, waving a small torch around. He tapped the walls and the stone floor with a stick, muttering. He pushed his hands into deep fissures in the rock, then climbed up to feel for hidden ledges or checked entrances to other chambers on either side.

“What are you looking for?” Laura asked.

“The cavemen did not want this tomb disturbed.” He pointed out huge rocks that hung precariously over their heads, each held in place by smaller stones: primitive booby traps to deter intruders trying to enter the caves.

Intruders like themselves…

They continued more slowly into near darkness and Morag began to whimper. Ali cursed, increasingly frustrated that they seemed to be getting nowhere.

“Wait,” Gabriel said. Everyone stopped. “Ali, you need to be calm. You’re confusing me.”

“I am sorry,” Ali said. His face looked old and worn in the light of his torch. “I have failed you; I thought I would have found it by now. I thought that once we got into the main caves it would be obvious. There should have been” – he made spikes with his fingers, searching for the words – “you know, stalactites, stalagmites…”

“You’ve done your bit,” Gabriel said. “You got us this far. Now we need to stop panicking, and concentrate. Rachel?”
He reached out a hand to her and she stepped close to him. “I want you to think really hard. To focus…”

Conflicting thoughts were racing through her head. The dominant one was an increasing desire to escape from the caves. Sensing her doubt, Gabriel took her hand and squeezed. Rachel took a deep lungful of the damp air and, shutting her eyes, began to clear her mind…

At first, she was aware only of everyone’s breathing, of Morag’s nervous sniffs and the shuffling of feet. Then, as the noises faded into the background of her thoughts, another sound came: a low drone, a buzz. Behind her eyelids, a light began to spread and solidify, shaping itself into an orb that floated in her mind, golden and glowing. She tried to sense the direction from which it was coming and placed her hands against the cold wall of the passage. The ball of light drew her along, as it moved slowly back in the direction from which they had come.