A grey stone face. Skin like putty. Hollowed-out eyes. The figure was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cowboy hat. It was resting on one knee, holding a bowl. There was some sort of metal bridge in the background and a few pieces of old mine works around.
“What is it?” Alicia demanded. She had seen the look on his face.
The camera had only lingered on it for a moment but Jamie had heard the words of the commentary, “… looking for gold, the town was first founded in the nineteenth century…” And suddenly he understood what this man was… the man he had first seen kneeling by the water in his dreams.
Not a cowboy. A gold prospector.
Why?
“Jamie…?” Alicia was becoming alarmed.
“Did you see? Just now…”
“What?”
“On the screen!”
It was too late. The picture had changed. Now it was showing old footage of John Trelawny waving to the crowd at another rally.
“There was a man on the screen just now. Not a man. A statue. I’ve seen it before and. I don’t know why, but it means something. It’s important.”
“In Auburn?”
“Yes. I think so.”
Alicia slid off the bed. She had a laptop with her and she opened it, powering it up and connecting it to the Internet. Meanwhile, Jamie was thinking furiously. He knew he had been sent a sign and that it was up to him, and him alone, to make sense of it.
The statue of a gold prospector in Auburn. A grey giant kneeling on a beach. They were one and the same – Jamie was sure of it. He remembered what Matt had told him. The dream world was there to help them. But sometimes it sent them messages in strange ways. What had the grey man told him?
“He’s gonna kill him. And it’s your job to stop him.”
Was Scott going to be killed in Auburn? Was that what he had meant?
“His name is Claude Chana,” Alicia said. She had accessed an Auburn website on her computer and was looking at a picture of the statue now. “He found gold in the Auburn ravine in 1848 and that led to the establishment of a mining camp which later became the town. There’s a statue of him down by the old firehouse.”
“ He’s gonna kill him.”
“You mean… Scott?”
“No, boy. You don’t understand-”
But suddenly, with horrible clarity, Jamie did understand. There were two men fighting to become president: John Trelawny and Charles Baker. Nightrise supported Baker. But Trelawny was winning.
So Nightrise were going to assassinate him.
And they were going to use Scott.
“He’s gonna kill him.” The “he” was Scott. The “him” was Trelawny. It was as simple as that.
“You have to call the senator,” Jamie said, and it almost sounded to him as if it was someone else who was talking. “You have to warn him.”
“What…?”
“They’re going to try to kill him.”
Alicia stared at him. “What are you saying? How can you know that?”
“Please, Alicia. Don’t argue with me. I can’t explain it to you but they’re going to kill Senator Trelawny in Auburn today and you have to get him on the phone and stop him going there.”
Alicia hesitated only a few seconds more. Then she grabbed her cell phone and speed-dialled a number. Jamie waited as the number was connected. He saw her face fall.
“Senator…” she said, and he could tell she was leaving a message. “This is Alicia McGuire. I’ve been talking to Jamie and he says you’re in danger, that you mustn’t go to Auburn. Please call me back.”
She snapped the phone shut.
“He wasn’t there,” Jamie said.
“I only have his personal cell phone number,” Alicia explained. “He wanted me to be able to call him directly. But he may have left his own phone behind. He may have switched it off. I don’t know how to reach him.”
“How far is it to Auburn?”
“I don’t know. It’s the other side of Lake Tahoe.”
“How long would it take us to get there?”
Alicia’s face brightened. “Not that long. A couple of hours.”
“And when does the parade start?”
“Midday.” She looked at her watch. It was a few minutes after ten o’clock. She made a decision. “We can make it,” she said. “Get dressed. I’ll wake Daniel. It’s going to be tight, but we can get there…”
The crowds had started arriving early for the birthday parade and by eleven o’clock there must have been two thousand people lining the pavements, with more spilling out of their cars every minute. There were dozens of police officers on special duty. The secret service had gone in the night before and cordoned off the area where the parade would take place. While the local residents slept, they had discreetly swept the entire town, using dogs to sniff out any trace of high explosives, installing security cameras, identifying the rooftops and the second-floor windows that might provide a marksman with cover.
There were two quite separate parts of Auburn. The modern section was unremarkable, a couple of streets that met at an angle with the usual assortment of shops and offices. But the Old Town, as everyone called it, had been almost perfectly preserved, a living echo of the nineteenth century and the gold rush that had created it.
It stood – or nestled, rather – at the bottom of a hill. The main street swept down and then split into two, each side curving round like the two halves of a horseshoe with an open area, like a town square, in the middle. Shops and houses ran all the way along the edges, most of them brick or timber-framed. But it was the buildings in the middle of the square that were the town’s pride and joy. One was an old post office, the other a firehouse, which looked like an oversized toy with its pointed roof and red and white stripes.
Auburn had its own courthouse that stood high above the town, its great dome glinting in the sunlight. In the summer months, the heat could be almost too much to bear and the town would resemble not so much a horseshoe as a frying pan. But someone, a long time ago, had planted a cedar tree behind the firehouse and its branches had spread in every direction, the dark green leaves providing at least some shelter from the sun.
The statue of Claude Chana stood next to the cedar tree. This was where the Old Town came to an abrupt end, with Highway 80 carrying six lanes of traffic, roaring past east and west. There were two filling stations facing each other and a railway bridge behind. This was what Jamie had seen on the TV.
It was going to be a hot day.
The sky was almost cloudless and the sun dazzled as it bounced off the tarmac and the shop windows. The entire town had been dressed up for the parade, with a row of bleachers, six high, constructed in front of the post office and facing back up the hill. The parade would come this way. It would turn off past the main shopping parade and make a complete circle behind the cedar tree before stopping once again at the bleachers. There was a platform, a row of microphones, an area for the press. The mayor would make a speech welcoming John Trelawny. John Trelawny would make a speech thanking the mayor. Then everyone would have lunch.
There were flags everywhere. Hundreds of them. Flags on lampposts and street corners, attached to cars, bikes and prams, fluttering from the dome of the courthouse. A great banner had been erected above the bleachers so that everyone would see it as they came down the hill.
AUBURN WELCOMES SENATOR TRELAWNY HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN!
And although the shops had been closed for the day, their windows were filled with messages of support.
VAL’S LIQUOR SUPPORTS JOHN TRELAWNY FOR PRESIDENT PLACER COUNTY BANK WELCOMES JOHN
