The story didn’t take itself too seriously. Apparently, there was an eleven-year-old boy called Jack Pugh who lived on his father’s farm in Kentucky. He’d had a dream and had warned his parents that a local church was going to catch fire. Twelve hours later, the church had been hit by lightning and had burned to the ground. Fortunately, nobody had been hurt.
“Six weeks after the paper printed that story, Jack vanished,” Alicia said. She took out a second sheet of paper.
This time it was a girl. Her name was Indigo Cotton and her story had been reported in the Miami Herald. It seemed that she could bend spoons and stop watches just by looking at them. There had been a picture of her in the back of a paper, leaning against a grandfather clock. The clock had stopped at exactly midday. According to the story, she had been responsible.
“She disappeared too,” Alicia said. “Two months after the story ran.”
She added more pages to the pile. There was a boy who had managed to predict the winner five times in a row at a local racecourse. Another boy who, without moving, had fused all the lights in his school. A girl who talked to ghosts. An autistic boy who knew the names of everyone he met before he was introduced to them. Another pair of twins who seemed to live in each other’s minds.
“They all disappeared?” Jamie asked.
“A dozen of them in just six months. That may not sound like a lot to you, Jamie, but I know how statistics work and I can tell you it’s completely incredible. Of course, loads of other kids went missing too. But this was something quite different. It seemed clear to me that someone was deliberately targeting these kids.”
“So did you go to the police?”
“No.” Alicia sat down again. “Read the articles. None of them are serious. I mean… one kid who can bend spoons? Another who talks to dead people? ‘TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE. Grave Business of Girl Who Gossips with Ghosts.’ Read it for yourself. Of course, once these children had disappeared, everyone treated them very seriously. But the paranormal stuff was just forgotten. It wasn’t important. In fact it was hardly even mentioned.”
Jamie thought about it for a moment. Then something suddenly occurred to him. “What about Daniel?” he asked.
Alicia nodded. “There was a piece about him too,” she said. “At the time, I didn’t want it to appear and I was annoyed when it did. But the thing is, quite a few strange things happened with Danny too. He used to have these pre monitions. They weren’t dreams… they were just feelings. He once stopped me going on a train. He was only six years old and he got quite hysterical about it. Like, he was throwing stuff around the room and in the end I gave in. I couldn’t leave him with Maria, not like that. So I didn’t go – and you know what happened? A few days later I learnt that there had been an incident on that train. Some guy out of his mind on drugs shot someone. If I’d been travelling that day, could it have been me? I don’t know…
“Then he did it again, only this time at school. He warned a boy not to go home. That same afternoon, a bus skidded off the main road and went straight through one of the walls of the boy’s house. Smashed into the kitchen and brought down most of the upper floor. Of course, everyone at the school was talking about it and a local paper picked it up.”
“And you think someone may have read it,” Jamie said.
“Yeah. I think someone read it. I think someone came for Danny because he was special. And for the last few months, I’ve been scouring the newspapers, looking for kids like you. Because, you see, if there really is someone out there searching for kids with powers, maybe I can get there ahead of them. Maybe I can find out who they are and discover what they’ve done with my boy.
“Now you know why I was in Reno. I happened to see this piece in a magazine. It was about two boys performing a mind-reading act. The writer said he’d seen them twice and he couldn’t work out for love nor money how they did it. So I came over to see for myself…”
“And you arrived just in time,” Jamie said.
“I couldn’t believe it when those men came after you with stun darts and bullets.” For a moment, Alicia’s eyes lit up and she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “But it proves what I’m saying. There is somebody out there who really is going after these special kids. They got your brother and wherever they’ve taken him, that’s where Danny may be too.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Jamie said. “Suppose you’re right and somebody is kidnapping kids with special powers. Why would they do that? What’s the point?”
“It could be the government, the CIA or someone like that. Think about it for a minute. If you could really read someone’s mind, you’d make a perfect weapon. You could be a spy. You could be anything!”
“You really think they’d believe in that sort of stuff?”
“Of course they believe in it, Jamie. They spend millions of dollars every year experimenting with the paranormal. And there are major corporations out there who run programs, working with special children and their families. I even got in contact with one. I thought they might be able to help.”
“Who was that?”
Alicia put down her beer. “They’re a huge multinational. They’re into communications, healthcare, security, energy… just about everything. But they also have a division that specializes in paranormal research.” She paused. “They were the people who came for you in the theatre. Their name,” she said, “is Nightrise.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL
The boardroom was on the sixty-sixth floor of The Nail – which was the name of the newest and most spectacular addition to the Hong Kong skyline. The Nail had been constructed at an angle so that it slanted towards Orchard Hill and away from the waterfront. It seemed to be made of solid steel, an illusion caused by the one-way glass in all of its windows. The top three floors, sixty-four to sixty-six, were circular, and wider than the rest of the building. Viewed from Kowloon, on the other side of Victoria Harbor, it really did look like a giant nail that had been hammered into the heart of the city.
There were just three men in the boardroom, although fifty could have fitted in easily. A conference table made of black, gleaming wood stretched the full length of the room with black leather chairs placed at exact intervals. Two of the men were already seated, going through papers, preparing themselves for the conference that was about to begin. The third was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that curved round in a great arc, enjoying the view.
The Nail was the worldwide headquarters of the Nightrise Corporation. The man standing on his own was its chairman.
Unlike the office, he had no name – or if he did, he never used it. He was simply the chairman, or Mr Chairman when he was directly addressed. He was in his sixties, although he had done his best to disguise his age with extensive plastic surgery. This left him with a face that was younger than it should be and yet strangely unnatural, as if it belonged somewhere else. He had thick, white hair which could have been a wig but was actually his own, and silver, half-moon spectacles. As always, he was wearing a suit, made to measure by his own personal tailor.
It was seven o’clock in the morning and the sun had not yet fully risen. The great sprawl of Kowloon was still half asleep, the bars and electronics shops briefly shuttered before the start of another day. The sky was a blazing red. The chairman thought it appropriate. Kowloon means “nine dragons” and it seemed to him, looking out from the window, that they had all breathed at once.
Behind him, one of the other two men spoke.
“They’re coming on-line now, Mr Chairman.”
The chairman walked to his place at the head of the table and sat down. He rested his hands on the polished surface and composed himself. There were thirteen plasma screens mounted all around the room and one after another they flickered into life as the other executives, in different parts of the world, came on-line. A webcam, standing on the table, pointed at the chairman, carrying his own image out. In Los Angeles, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. In London it was midnight. But the time of the day was unimportant. This was the monthly meeting of the senior executives of the Nightrise Corporation and none of them would have dared to have been even a
