Triskellion 3: The Gathering (14 page)

The twins and Gabriel sprinted towards the exit along with everyone else. A second later they heard a
whoosh
as the fire caught and felt the searing heat from the tide of flame that rolled across the station towards them. The screams of those trapped inside were lost beneath the blast and before Rachel knew what was happening she was picking herself up from the pavement. She was oblivious to the blood pouring from the cut to her head and the smell of burning as the three of them staggered out into the tangle of emergency vehicles waiting outside the main entrance.

“We need your car.”

The man behind the wheel of the taxi-cab had been staring at the smoke billowing from the station; watching people spilling out on to the street – some with their clothes on fire with passers-by beating out the flames. Now he turned and stared into the eyes of the boy looking in through the cab’s window.

“Get out of the car,” Gabriel said.

Without knowing why, the driver did as he was told and stood by watching as Gabriel, Adam and Rachel clambered into the cab. Gabriel got behind the wheel, and a second later the car veered away from the kerb. Pedestrians jumped aside as it tore out into traffic and accelerated away, swerving to avoid the fire engines and ambulances that were speeding in the opposite direction to join those already massed around the station.

The screen went blank as the CCTV feed from the station in Cincinnati was burned out by the fire. The director cursed quietly and flicked through other available sources until he was watching the pictures from a Cincinnati news station.

The “welcome” he had arranged for the twins had got a little warmer than he had planned.

He saw fire crews dragging equipment into the station and paramedics tending to those who had been injured. He saw local newscasters interviewing those who had been caught up in the disaster – a young woman jabbered about the girl who had saved her child’s life – and he watched as a cab lurched away from the chaos and was almost hit by an ambulance before disappearing into the distance.

The director turned from his wall of screens and looked down at the picture on his desk. A photograph of Rachel and Adam Newman. They were smiling. Happy.

He picked up the picture and stared at it. “Clever children,” he said.

I
t was the morning of their fourth day back in America.

The day before, Gabriel and the twins had driven the commandeered taxi all the way from Cincinnati in Ohio to Indianpolis – the state capital of Indiana – one hundred and eighty kilometres to the west. They had checked into a small motel on the outskirts of the city, where each had tried to take in what had happened; what the terrifying incident at the railway station had meant; and what they would do next.

“Run,” Gabriel had said. “Same as always. We just need to keep running.”

Rachel had been unable to sleep. She had lain awake, finding it impossible to shake the terrible images that ran on a seemingly endless loop inside her head: a young woman with flat black eyes, a screaming child, a sheet of flame, screams, flailing limbs…

As cicadas sang in the darkness outside her room Rachel had picked up her grandmother’s letter, reading it again and again until the insects had fallen silent and it had finally begun to grow light outside. As she had been transported back nearly half a century, she could sense that Adam was taking the journey with her; that the words and pictures taking shape in her head as she read were also coming to life in his.

The scorched earth and barbed wire of the air force base. The woman Celia Root had not been expecting to see. The terrible pain of it.

Now, on a Greyhound bus heading for St Louis, Missouri, those events were still with Rachel and Adam as they tried to catch up on the sleep they had missed.

God, it must have been horrible for her,
Rachel said, eyes closed, mouth unmoving.
When that woman opened the door. His
wife.

Never mind the wife,
Adam answered.
What about those kids? The eldest one sounds weird, and Hilary Wing was obviously a creep even back then
.

Rachel shuddered, as though mention of the name had conjured an icy blast that cut through to her bones.

Hilary Wing…

The half-uncle they had thought dead until he had reappeared – more creature than man – to hunt them down, determined to possess the Triskellions for his own dark and twisted reasons.

Adam could sense his sister’s discomfort.
He got what was coming to him,
he said with his mind.
Back in Morocco. Gabriel sorted him out once and for all.

Rachel nodded. She did not know exactly what had happened between Gabriel and Hilary Wing two years earlier when they had fought in the Cave of the Berbers, but she could still recall the look on Gabriel’s face – something hard had glittered in his eyes as he’d fastened the two Triskellions round her neck in the dark deep of the cave. “That creature you saw by your bed,” he had said. “He won’t be bothering you again…”

Gabriel was sitting on the seat in front of her. He had obviously been following her mental conversation with Adam. He turned and smiled. “Adam’s right,” he said. “No need to worry about him. And don’t worry about your grandmother, either. She’s drawing you to Alamogordo. This is what she wants.”

“She’s dead,” Rachel snapped. “How can she want anything?”

“You want something badly enough, nothing can get in the way of it. Certainly not something as …
trivial
as dying.”

“Trivial?” The bad temper Rachel had woken up in came to the boil. “What about those people caught up in what happened at the station yesterday? What about their relatives?”

“Nobody died,” Gabriel said.

“You sure about that?”

“Some people were … hurt – no more than that. It couldn’t be helped.”

“Sometimes I think that you like hurting people; that you enjoy paying them back.”

“I wasn’t the one with the gun,” Gabriel said.

Adam sat up in the seat across from Rachel. “I meant to ask you about that,” he said to Gabriel. “Why didn’t you just get rid of that woman’s gun? Make it burn or vanish or jump out of her hand or whatever. You can do that kind of thing standing on your head.”

“So can you,” Gabriel said. “I’m not the only one with … party tricks.”

Adam nodded slowly. “I know, but yesterday…”

“It didn’t work,” Rachel said. She knew because she had tried to deal with the gun herself – and failed. “And there was this noise in my head…”

Adam nodded. “I thought it was just because I was scared. I couldn’t see where the danger was coming from, and then when I did, there was nothing I could do. I focused on the gun, tried to get rid of it, but it was as if all my strength was gone. I just hoped you’d be able to do it.”

“I tried.” Something passed across Gabriel’s face and the worry was evident in the way his eyes drifted down to the floor. “That woman
had
something,” he said. “Something that blocked my mind, and I just couldn’t get to her. Using the train was the only thing I could do in the end.”

“What do you mean, ‘blocked’?” Adam asked.

“They’ve developed something,” Gabriel said. “Moved on from their earphones and dark glasses – and whatever it is, it means that, until we can find some way to shut it off, we’re in trouble.”

“Great,” Adam said.

“I’ll figure it out,” Gabriel said.

Rachel’s mood was still black and bubbling. “Well, try not to hurt too many people in the meantime,” she said. “Even if it can’t be
helped
.”

Gabriel turned away and slid down low in his seat.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Adam whispered.

Rachel said nothing. She turned her face to the window and closed her eyes against the fierce morning sun as the bus rumbled west along I-70.

“We’ve got an appointment with Detective Scoppetone,” Kate said.

The officer at the desk stared at her.

“We’re old friends,” Kate added. The officer yawned. “She’s expecting us…”

Kate and Laura had landed in New York the previous evening. They had gone straight to Kate’s old apartment, and although Kate had been as disconcerted as the twins to find that her old life had somehow been … erased, she had at least discovered from the present owners that the children had been there. She had tried contacting Ralph at the university – but had run into another brick wall.

Laura had tried her best to be reassuring. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“I’m not sure I want to find out,” Kate had said.

She and Laura had found themselves a cheap hotel and eaten dinner in virtual silence. Having travelled halfway around the world in search of the children, they were now at a loss as to what to do next. Then Kate had remembered an old friend from university.

She had put in a call and asked for a huge favour…

Angie Scoppetone was skinny and hard-faced, with bleached-blonde hair cut very short and a manner that suggested she was scared of very little.

“You don’t look any different,” Kate said. “What’s it been, twenty years?”

“Twenty-one,” Scoppetone said. “You look a little older.”

Kate tried to laugh. “I’ve had a hard life,” she said. She introduced Laura and then the detective led them upstairs to a small room at the far end of an open-plan office, a dozen weary-looking faces turning to stare as they walked past.

“You any idea how big this town is?” Scoppetone asked when she’d dropped into the chair behind her desk. “Any idea how many hotels there are?”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” Kate said. “You were the only person I could think of. I really need to find them.”

Scoppetone stared at Kate and Laura like they were suspects and she was deciding how best to interrogate them.

“So, did you have any luck?” Laura asked.

Scoppetone waited a few seconds. “Maybe,” she said. She began rifling through some papers on her desk. “Doing this job, you get to know the house detectives at most of the big hotels, and as it happens the guy at the Waldorf is a buddy of mine. According to him, two kids – a boy and a girl, both about sixteen, both dark-haired – spent the night before last in the presidential suite.”

“That’s them,” Kate said. “That’s Rachel and Adam.”

“I thought you were looking for
three
kids,” Scoppetone said. “My friend only saw two.”

Laura understood, but decided not to try to explain. She knew that people only saw Gabriel when he wanted them to. “I’m sure that’s them,” she said.

Scoppetone shook her head. “God only knows how they managed to check in. That’s one piece of detective work I don’t have time for.”

“Look, we really appreciate this,” Laura said.

Kate leaned forward, impatient. “Are they still there?”

“Checked out,” Scoppetone said, reading her scribbled notes. “My guy says they caught a cab to Penn Station. That’s it.”

Kate’s face fell. She slumped back in her chair and looked helplessly at Laura.

“Or it
would
be,” Scoppetone said, “if I wasn’t such a damn good detective.” She slid a large black and white photograph across the desk.

Kate leaned forward again and picked up the picture. It was grainy and blurred, but she recognized Rachel and Adam easily enough. She nodded. “It’s them.”

“They bought tickets to Cincinnati, Ohio.” Scoppetone looked serious. “I hope they weren’t caught up in what happened there yesterday.”

“What?” Kate tried to keep the alarm out of her voice.

“There was a disaster at the station. A signal failed and a diesel train crashed right through the buffers.” The detective saw the look of horror on Kate’s face and held up her hands. “Nobody was killed, thank God, but a few people were pretty badly hurt. I checked the local hospitals over there, though, and they didn’t admit any kids matching their descriptions. So looks like you’re OK…”

Laura reached over and laid a hand on Kate’s arm. Then she turned back to Scoppetone. “Listen, thanks for this. Kate really appreciates it. We’ll get out of your way—”

“One more thing,” Scoppetone said. She pointed at the picture. “I only found this thing because somebody else had already punched it up. You understand?”

Kate and Laura waited.

“Somebody else is looking for these kids.” Scoppetone shrugged and sat back in her chair. “You haven’t exactly told me a lot, so I figure I’d better not ask, but just so as you know.”

“Thanks,” Kate said.

They made polite chit-chat for another minute or so, but Kate was eager to leave so that she and Laura could plan their next move. Scoppetone was equally keen to get on with her day, but the women’s behaviour had sparked her curiosity: exciting those instincts that made her so good at her job. As soon as they were out of sight she picked up her phone and made a call.

“I need to run a name, OK, Tony? It’s ‘Kate Newman’. Yeah, I’ll wait…”

She doodled while she waited. It never hurt to check these things. Somebody she had known twenty years ago getting in touch out of the blue was enough to make anyone suspicious. That, coupled with the fact that another party had called up the same photograph, had been enough to ring alarm bells.