Jaws of Death Read online

  Never had it felt so good to be in water. Max kicked out hard, propelling himself diagonally away from the blazing platform, the handcuffs dangling from his right wrist. It was only forty metres to the shore, a distance that he could normally swim underwater with ease. But he hadn’t had time to take in much air inside the trunk and knew that he would struggle to get that far. His chest was already tight, his body running out of oxygen. He pulled back with his arms, taking it one stroke at a time, trying to ignore the pain. He couldn’t afford to surface, even for a second. The crowd would surely see him and the stunt would be ruined.

  Just a few more metres … He could do it. He had to. He saw bright lights shining down through the lake ahead of him that could only be coming from the stage. That gave him a target to aim for. He stared at the lights through the cloudy water, watching them get closer with every stroke. Five metres … four … three … He gave one final almighty kick and his outstretched arms touched the concrete wall. His head broke the surface and he sucked in the air gratefully, taking care to make as little noise as possible.

  He was immediately behind the stage, out of sight of the audience. He hauled himself out of the water and crouched down to remove the handcuff from his wrist.

  Out on the Serpentine, the fire was beginning to die down. A thick cloud of smoke was still billowing up into the air, but the flames had largely subsided. The cabinet had gone completely, and the trunk was nothing but a smouldering heap of ash and charcoal.

  There were murmurs of concern in the crowd, whimpers of distress from some of the younger children. What had happened to Max? Was he lying there dead in the embers, or had he escaped from the trunk before it went up in smoke? If so, how? How had he done it?

  Max heard a noise above him and looked up. Consuela was peering out behind the curtain at the back of the wings, her eyes scouring the lake. Then she saw Max down below and her face lit up with joy and relief. She reached down with a hand and helped him up onto the platform.

  ‘Thank God, Max,’ she whispered. ‘I thought … I thought …’

  ‘Relax,’ Max said coolly. ‘It all went according to plan.’

  He hoped that she wouldn’t notice that his clothes were slightly singed, the soles of his trainers half melted. She’d find out later, of course, but he didn’t want to worry her right now.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  Consuela nodded and combed his wet hair with her fingers. He let her do it with good-humoured resignation. He was dripping with water, his clothes were charred around the edges, but at least his hair was neat and tidy now.

  ‘Get in position,’ Consuela said. ‘I’ll tell the technicians.’

  Max slipped behind the curtains at the back of the stage. The lights went out suddenly. A buzz of anticipation swept through the audience. Then a spotlight zeroed in on the backdrop. The curtains parted and Max stepped out, holding up the handcuffs for all to see.

  For a moment there was a stunned silence, then a deafening roar as two thousand spectators let out cries of astonishment, then cheers of delight.

  Max gestured to Consuela and she joined him on stage, bowing with him as an ear-splitting burst of applause boomed out across Hyde Park like a thunderclap. Then, as one, everyone got to their feet and gave them a standing ovation. Five times Max and Consuela left the stage, and five times they were called back by wild cheering and more applause until, finally, they were allowed to slip away.

  Chief Superintendent Richardson was waiting for them by the mobile dressing rooms next to the stage. He shook Max’s hand vigorously. ‘That was incredible, Max. One hell of a stunt. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Max replied. He held out the handcuffs. ‘I believe these are yours.’

  ‘So what’s your verdict on them? Should we buy them for the Met, issue them to our officers?’

  ‘I’d say yes. They’re good.’

  ‘Even though you managed to get out of them?’

  ‘No handcuffs are one hundred per cent escape-proof. I used a few tricks that most criminals won’t know.’

  ‘Tricks? What kind of tricks?’

  Max grinned at him. ‘Now, that would be telling.’

  TWO

  In the car driving home, Max closed his eyes and slumped back in his seat. As usual after a show, he was both exhilarated and exhausted. That had been a close thing. He could still smell the petrol fumes, taste the smoke in his mouth, feel the burning sensation in his feet. A few more seconds and he wouldn’t have been going home in Consuela’s Nissan, he’d have been in an ambulance or, worse, a body bag.

  But he didn’t want to think about that – it unsettled him too much. He let his body relax, taking long, deep breaths, allowing his mind to slip into a trance so that he was no longer aware of the world around him – a meditation technique that his father had taught him years earlier. It was as if he were floating deep in the ocean, complete darkness, complete silence enveloping him.

  He stayed like that for a few minutes, but found he couldn’t maintain the trance any longer; he had too much on his mind. Opening his eyes, he gazed out through the windscreen at the cluttered city landscape – the buildings passing by, the streetlamps and neon signs, the red glow of the tail-lights on the vehicles in front. During the stunt in Hyde Park – his first public performance since he got back from Central America – he’d been concentrating so hard that he’d managed to shut out all distractions, clear his mind of everything except the immediate needs of the act. But now he was off stage, those other parts of his life came flooding back in.

  Since his return to England, he had thought about little except his traumatic experiences in Santo Domingo. About his search for his missing father, his search for proof that his mother hadn’t murdered him, his escape from Shadow Island with Consuela and Chris Moncrieffe. All these things had obsessed him during his every waking hour and even while he was asleep, when nightmares about Shadow Island would torment him until he jolted awake, trembling and clammy with sweat.

  But what worried him most wasn’t the events of the past, but what was to come in the future. He had made an enemy of the ruthless tycoon Julius Clark, and Clark wasn’t the kind of man to let his foes escape. Max knew that he would come after him, and come after him soon. The thought was terrifying. What would Clark do? When would he strike? And what, if anything, could Max do to protect himself?

  Consuela turned off into their street, coming to a stop outside their house. She reversed the car into the drive in front of the garage and they got out. Max unlocked the front door. As he stepped inside the house, he felt a tingle on the back of his neck, some sixth sense telling him that something was wrong.

  Consuela saw him hesitate, saw the frown on his face. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Max replied softly.

  He moved cautiously across the hall, listening hard, his eyes alert, flicking from side to side. The house felt different – he couldn’t work out why.

  Then he went into the kitchen and saw the piece of paper on the table, the words written on it in bold capital letters:

  I’M IN THE BASEMENT

  ACT NORMALLY

  DON’T MENTION MY NAME

  THE HOUSE IS BUGGED

  CHRIS

  Max stared at the message, feeling his stomach lurch. Consuela came up beside him and read the note too. She let out a low, barely audible gasp of surprise and looked at Max. He pointed to the instruction ‘Act normally’, and Consuela nodded.

  ‘I need a coffee,’ she said, heading for the kitchen sink. ‘You want anything? A biscuit? Toast?’

  ‘Toast would be good, thanks,’ Max said, trying to keep his voice as natural as possible.

  He went to the basement door, turned on the light and padded quietly down the stairs. Chris Moncrieffe, wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the wall. His deep blue eyes were tired and there was a thick growth of stubble on his rugged face. He smiled warml
y at Max, then put his finger to his lips and stood up.

  Consuela? he mouthed silently.

  Max pointed to the ceiling.

  Get her.

  Max crept back upstairs. Consuela was spooning coffee into a silver espresso pot, two pieces of bread sliced on the wooden board beside her, ready to be popped into the toaster. Max performed an exaggerated mime, gesturing towards the basement door. Consuela nodded to show she’d understood, then turned on the radio on the worktop, the channel tuned to Max’s favourite pop music station. Max watched her admiringly. She caught on quickly. That was a clever move, providing background noise to cover their absence from the kitchen.

  Chris had the door to the garden open when they went downstairs. He beckoned them out, then headed across the lawn. Max and Consuela followed him, stopping when they all reached the small patio near the rear boundary wall. A trellis covered with wisteria and climbing roses shielded them from the house, turning the patio into a private little enclave where they could talk without being observed.

  ‘We’re safe here,’ Chris said, keeping his voice low.

  ‘What do you mean, “safe”?’ Consuela asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  Chris pulled out one of the plastic chairs from under the garden table and sat down. Max and Consuela took the other chairs. It was late. The darkness closed in around them. An earthy dampness drifted up from the flowerbeds.

  ‘What’s this about the house being bugged?’ Max said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I looked,’ Chris replied. ‘There’s a tiny eavesdropping device in one of the sockets on the kitchen wall, and another in a socket in the sitting room. They’re no bigger than a thumbnail, but powerful enough to pick up every sound in the house.’

  Max gaped at him in alarm. ‘Someone’s listening in to us?’

  Chris nodded. ‘They’ll be tapping your phone too, monitoring your computer, your emails. There’s a car parked up your street, sixty, seventy metres from your front door. A dark blue Toyota Avensis. There are two men inside it, watching your house.’

  Consuela leaned urgently over the table, her eyes wide with shock. ‘Julius Clark’s men?’

  ‘That would be my guess,’ Chris said. ‘His kind of money can buy a lot of manpower, a lot of expertise.’

  There was a silence while Max and Consuela took in what Chris had told them. Max’s stomach was knotted with anxiety. He had no doubt that Chris was right. They were being watched; their phone calls, their Internet searches, their conversations were being monitored. Their entire lives were under surveillance, and that was horrifying.

  ‘What can we do about it?’ Max asked.

  ‘I know some people, guys I used to work with,’ Chris replied. ‘I’ll go and see them tomorrow, borrow the equipment to do a proper sweep of the house. I found two bugs just by guesswork, but there’ll be more. They’ll be all over the place.’

  Consuela looked at him shrewdly. ‘There’s something you’re not telling us, isn’t there?’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘What made you check for bugs in the first place? What made you suspicious?’

  Chris hesitated, as if thinking over his response.

  ‘You have to tell us,’ Max said quickly. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘When I flew in this evening, they were waiting for me at Heathrow. I was followed all the way into central London by a young guy in a suit. I lost him at King’s Cross. Got off the tube, then doubled back again to Leicester Square.’

  ‘You’re sure he was tailing you?’ Consuela said.

  ‘I was in the security business long enough to spot a tail.’

  ‘They knew the flight you were on? How?’

  ‘They must have had access to the airline passenger lists. They were watching out for my name.’

  ‘The passenger lists? How could they get hold of those?’ Max said.

  ‘Because they have friends in the right places,’ Chris replied.

  He glanced away towards the house. Light from the kitchen window was radiating out across the garden, glowing on the lawn with a golden lustre, then seeping through the trellis, casting fragmented shadows over their faces. Max could see Chris’s mouth pulled tight, his expression calm but serious.

  ‘The tail put me on my guard,’ Chris continued. ‘Made me wonder what else was going on. So I checked out the area around the house as soon as I got here, spotted the guys in the car immediately.’

  ‘Did they see you come into the house?’ Consuela asked.

  Chris shook his head. ‘I was careful. I came over the garden wall from the next street, picked up the key you left me and found a toolbox in the garage. These people are professionals. I knew that if they were watching the house, they’d also plant bugs inside if they could, to keep tabs on you. So I checked a few obvious places, and there they were.’

  He smiled wryly, looking from Max to Consuela, then back to Max. ‘But we haven’t said hello yet. It’s good to see you both again. How are you?’

  ‘We’re OK,’ Max replied. ‘It’s good to see you too. How was your journey?’

  They’d split up after their escape from Shadow Island, agreeing to travel back to the UK separately. It seemed safer that way.

  ‘Pretty easy – until I got to Heathrow,’ Chris said. ‘So what’s the situation? You found out much since you got back?’

  ‘Let me get my file,’ Max said.

  He went back into the house and returned with a thin cardboard folder he’d taken from one of the kitchen drawers. Now that Chris was back with them, Max felt an immense sense of relief. Without the soldier turned environmental activist, Max and Consuela would never have got away from Shadow Island. It was reassuring to have him by their side again. He knew all about fighting dangerous enemies. And Max had no illusions. They had very dangerous enemies – some out in the open like Julius Clark, others hidden and waiting to strike.

  Max opened the folder and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘I did some research on the Net,’ he said. ‘Looked into the drug they were using on Shadow Island – Episuderon. The drug they gave my dad when he was a prisoner there. It was developed here in Britain after the Second World War. At a place called Porton Down. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘It’s the government biological and chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire,’ Chris told him. ‘Nasty place. It’s where they developed and tested all sorts of diseases and gases that could be used to attack an enemy – anthrax, mustard gas, nerve gases like sarin that kill people in particularly horrible ways. They tested some of them on young volunteer soldiers in the nineteen fifties, killing at least one of them in the process.’

  ‘I couldn’t find out much about Porton Down itself.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. It’s a top-secret place. Everything’s classified.’

  ‘But I found stuff about Episuderon on some other websites. I didn’t understand it all – some of it was very complicated – but it seems it was originally invented in Nazi Germany, under Hitler, as a drug for brainwashing people – making them do as they were told. After the war the British got hold of the Nazis’ research material and developed the drug further before abandoning it because it was too unreliable. It worked well on some people, apparently, but made others mentally ill and affected their memories. That fits with what we know about my dad.’

  ‘A brainwashing drug?’ Chris said. ‘Why would anyone want to brainwash your dad?’

  ‘Or us.’ Consuela shuddered slightly. ‘They were going to give the drug to us too, remember.’

  ‘They gave it to a lot of people,’ Max said. ‘Those files I found in Julius Clark’s office … I remembered some of the names in them – other Shadow Island prisoners they experimented on. I’ve been trying to trace them, find out who they were.’

  He took more sheets of paper from his folder and spread them out on the garden table. It was too dark to read the words on the sheets, but he didn’t need to. He knew what they were without looking.

  ‘There were five names – all men, som
e of them foreign-sounding. James Abbott, Sergei Alekseev, Narang Anwar, Redmond Ashworth-Ames, Erik Blomkvist. I wrote them down just after we left the island. Then there was the other prisoner, the one who was shot as we escaped – Arhat Zebari. I haven’t got very far. All I have is their names and the dates they were taken to Shadow Island. No addresses or dates of birth or other details. I found an Erik Blomkvist in a newspaper database. He was a Swedish man who went on holiday last autumn and disappeared. His clothes were found on a beach, but there was no sign of Erik. There was an air and sea search for him, but his body was never found. The police concluded that he had been washed out to sea and drowned.’

  ‘What makes you think he was the Erik Blomkvist on Shadow Island?’ Chris said.

  ‘The date he disappeared ties in closely with the date on the file I saw. And there’s something else. He had something in common with you.’

  ‘With me?’

  Max nodded. ‘You were working for an environmental charity in the Amazon, watching out for illegal logging, when you were kidnapped and taken to Shadow Island. Erik Blomkvist also worked for an environmental charity – Grön Värld, in Stockholm.’

  ‘What about the other names on your list?’ Chris asked.

  ‘James Abbott, Narang Anwar and Sergei Alekseev – I can’t find out anything about them. The fifth man, Redmond Ashworth-Ames, sounds English. That’s a pretty unusual name. I’ve found a few R. Ashworth-Ameses on the Internet, got their phone numbers, but I haven’t made the calls yet. I’ve been too busy with school and my shows.’

  ‘Two environmentalists, and then your dad, a professional escapologist,’ Consuela said. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Not if a professional escapologist was all Dad was,’ Max pointed out.

  Consuela looked at him sceptically. ‘You mean this “secret life” you think he had?’