Triskellion 3: The Gathering (6 page)

Locals called it the Flight Building.

Since the Second World War, aircraft technology had become a matter of state secrecy and the Flight Trust was now very low-key, operating on a more “hush-hush” basis. To the public, it was ostensibly a charitable organization whose interests were in curing diseases, ending famine and saving the rainforests.

The truth was rather different.

The Trust had set up a secret offshoot in 1950 to continue its research into manned flight and specifically into the space programme. Neil Armstrong had worn a discreetly embroidered “FT” on his spacesuit when he had walked on the moon. This new top-secret organization had within it an even more shadowy department that exclusively investigated extra-terrestrial activity and UFO sightings. It had been especially active during the 1950s, when there had been a rash of sightings across America and even rumours of a landing in New Mexico.

This department was called the Hope Project…

The current director of the Hope Project swung round in his chair and looked out across the river. From his vantage point behind a glass desk on the sixtieth floor of the Flight Building, he could see everything in miniature, including the old ferries chugging in and out of the shabby docks as they had done for years.

Many thousands of those who now made up New York’s cosmopolitan population had come in through those ports. Gasping for air and jostling for space, they would have been unable to believe that they had finally escaped whatever horrors they were running from: poverty, famine, genocide.

The director was grateful that it had happened to his grandparents and not to him. He was one of the lucky generation who had missed out on major wars and persecution, and had lived in relative comfort in the brave new world of post-war America.

He was not an old man, but the efforts of the past couple of years had made him tired. His thick black hair was grey at the temples and he had permanent dark rings under his eyes. Things had been coming together for the Project, but every time he had thought he was getting somewhere, there had been another major hiccup.

He could not afford to let it happen again.

His assistant came in, bringing him his sixth cup of coffee of the day and smiling tightly. The director didn’t really want the coffee, but knew that the cup and the smile were to let him know that they had no further news.

He asked anyway: “Any word from the Australian operatives?”

His assistant shook her head, still smiling, hoping to divert one of the director’s legendary explosions.

“Thanks, Meredith,” he said.

Meredith left, grateful that her boss’s temper had held.

He picked up a pencil and doodled round the edge of the map of Australia that was laid out in front of him. A red circle had been drawn around Perth. No further information. He stared at the map, hoping it would yield something, but all he could see were vast swathes of desert. The place was so featureless that it really could swallow people up.

They could just disappear.

If only they were in New York, he thought. Here he had all the resources to pick them up: CCTV, trackers, street teams, people in the field, phone signals. It would be easy. But they weren’t here, so he had no option but to be patient. He had been waiting for more than two years now and in that time the Hope Project had scoured the globe in search of the Newman twins. A “no questions asked” reward of one million dollars had been offered for information regarding their whereabouts. The details had been posted on a thousand different websites – but as yet the money had gone unclaimed.

He leaned back in his chair and rolled his head around. It did not matter any more. Thanks to the new leads the Australian operatives were following, soon the children would be exactly where he wanted them…

He picked up the remote on his desk and turned up the volume on one of the hundred screens that took up one huge wall of his office. Stock prices were falling again. He did not want to know and turned up the volume on another screen, where an orange-faced girl in a blue suit was saying that it would be sunny upstate tomorrow.

The next screen got his attention.

The man on the TV looked freakish, but his delivery was mesmerizing. The blond hair and teeth were obviously fake, and he had had plenty of work done to his face, but there was just something about him. The TV picture widened to reveal his audience – a thousand or more people, cars parked in dozens of lines behind them.

The man strode across the stage to a microphone, his long legs covering the distance in three paces. Behind him fluttered a banner: something about a “Triple Wheel”. The director was impressed by the way the man held his audience in the palm of his hand, fixing them with his eyes and a pointed finger. And they didn’t look like the regular congregation of trailer-trash and hillbillies either. They looked normal.

A strapline under the image of the man read:
PASTOR EZEKIEL CRANE PREACHING AT THE BALLOON FESTIVAL, ALBUQUERQUE.

The camera cut wider still to show hundreds of hot-air balloons being released into the air and floating over the huge parking lot where Pastor Crane was preaching. The director turned up the volume to hear what the man was saying.

His voice boomed out across the arena:

The man on the screen paused and nodded knowingly at the crowd. “What
was
Ezekiel seeing all those years ago? I’ll
tell
you what he was seeing. He was seeing jets and flaming rocket fuel. He was seeing technology thousands of years in his future.”

The director could not take his eyes off the screen; off this man whose face was so strange, and yet so compelling.

The man continued to preach, his voice getting louder, the pitch and passion soaring as the balloons rose up into the sky all around him. “A technology thousands of years in
our
future. What Ezekiel was seeing was a stargate that was his portal to the Promised Land.” He raised both hands skywards and closed his eyes. “Ezekiel One, Brothers and Sisters. Amen.”

The crowd went wild. They clapped and whooped, and somewhere in the back of the director’s mind, a loud alarm bell began to ring.

C
lifford Possum nudged the joystick and the small crop-sprayer banked left. Rachel and Adam were squeezed in on either side of Levi in the back, the small seats of the aircraft not really having been built for three passengers.

Levi was clearly a nervous flyer and had said very little in the past hour. His eyes darted around the cabin and when he looked at Rachel, his smile was sickly.

Charlie Possum pointed to the arid ground a thousand metres below them. “Look,” he said, his voice barely audible above the roar of the engine. “Can you see the carving?”

Rachel craned her neck and peered out of the small window. It looked like a scale model of a desert, the sparse clumps of green like the sprigs of parsley used to denote foliage on a model railway. Rachel looked around to see what Charlie was trying to show her and then, just as her eyes adjusted to the monotony of the landscape, she saw something that stuck out:

They looked like crop circles, but Rachel soon realized that they must have been carved
into
the sandstone. At first, she saw it as a face – maybe a monkey or a possum – with two eyes and a mouth. It looked quite similar to those animal faces Rachel had seen the Aboriginals paint. She blinked and looked again, and suddenly it was not an animal face but three wheels. Her gaze began to follow each line; the shape drew her eyes hypnotically faster and faster round the carved wheels until another shape revealed itself where the circles intersected…

Rachel felt the hairs on her neck tingle and goose bumps prickle her arms. She glanced at Levi, who was already looking down at the circles in the desert and smiling weakly.

“Adam!” Rachel shouted across at him. “Can you see this?”

Adam strained to see through the cabin window and down on to the landscape below. Initially, he looked confused and then, exactly as it had happened to Rachel, the shape became evident to him. His nervous glance told Rachel that he knew what it was too.

It was a sign that they had not seen for some time.

The plane hit the ground with a bump, churning up dust and skidding for a hundred metres or so before coming to a stop.

Rachel clambered out of the cockpit and stretched her legs. The mountain had looked so close when they were coming in to land, but it was still a kilometre away. It was so immense that it was hard to get a sense of its scale even from this distance.

“It’s quiet,” Adam said. “I thought this was a big tourist destination.”

“It is,” Charlie Possum said. “But most of the tourists come from the road, which is round the other side.”

“Which is where we
don’t
want to be,” Clifford confirmed. “Shall we get going?”

Levi nodded, and they began to walk towards the base of Uluru.

Clifford and Charlie studied the plants around the rock, as if each change in the direction the stems were pointing gave them a more and more precise idea of where they were headed. Eventually, after foraging for an hour around the lower slopes of the monolith, Clifford announced that he had found the right path.

Looking up, Rachel could see a narrow track. Grey streaks ran like veins through the reddish stone of the mountain, and within the streaks tiny fragments of quartz glittered, making the rock look somehow alive. Rachel began to feel a strange pull, almost a magnetic force, drawing her to the mountain. She looked around to see if Adam felt the same, but he was already on his way up the path, following closely behind the Aboriginal brothers.

They climbed for another hour and then Charlie Possum stopped and pointed. “It’s up there.”

“OK, let’s go,” Adam said, striding on.

“This is where we stop,” Clifford said. “We’ll meet you back at the plane.”

“Why?” Rachel asked.

“It’s a sacred site,” Charlie said.

“We’re forbidden to see it,” confirmed Clifford.

Adam looked confused. “But
we
can see it?”

Charlie and Clifford Possum looked at Levi.

“Yes, you can,” Levi said to Adam. “You
need
to see it.”

Rachel wondered why she and her brother had been singled out for such a privilege. Somehow being given special permission did not make her feel any easier.

The three of them clambered on, the path getting narrower and steeper until it appeared to go no further.

“You sure this is the right path?” Adam asked.

“Positive,” Rachel said. Out of nowhere an image had began to form in her mind: bright sunlight, a woman with red hair tied back, climbing round the folds in the rock.

“Laura’s been here,” she said.

Adam looked up at his sister, who was now several steps ahead of him. Before he could ask her how she knew, Rachel appeared to vanish into the red rock. He ran up the last few steps to see what had happened to her, and in doing so, stumbled across the slit-like entrance to a cave, concealed in the body of the mountain.