Stop the car…
Three words. But he hadn’t heard them. Nor had he imagined them. With a thrill of excitement, he realized what had happened. Scott had sent them. He had finally made contact.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Alicia carried on driving.
“Alicia! Stop the car! Now!”
The urgency in his voice made itself felt. Daniel was already twisting round, looking at him as if he was mad, but Alicia slammed her foot on the brake and the car sliced across the road and skidded to a halt in a lay-by. The engine stalled. Somewhere behind them, the scream of the siren filled the air.
“Jamie…” Alicia began.
She was on the edge of tears, blaming herself for what had happened. But looking around him, Jamie realized something.
He knew where he was. He had been here before.
Five or six years ago. Before Don and Marcie. Even before Ed and Leanne. Derry, their social worker, had brought them to this exact spot because she had wanted to show them where they had been found. It was this lay-by, right here. This was where the two babies had been abandoned in a box intended for garden seeds.
And she had told them something about the area. According to Derry, the Washoe Indian tribe had been living here as long ago as ten thousand years. It was the main reason she had assumed that Scott and Jamie were Washoe themselves. Lake Tahoe was the very centre of their universe and somewhere below them there was a cave that was so sacred that tourists weren’t allowed anywhere near it. Even the shamans wouldn’t go there.
The Washoe called this place de’ek wadapush. In English, that translated as Cave Rock.
“We’re getting out,” Jamie said.
“Jamie…” Alicia knew from his voice that there was no point arguing. They had only seconds left. The police car was still out of sight but it would be thundering towards them.
“I think this is goodbye, Alicia.” Jamie didn’t know how he knew. He just did. “Thank you for helping me. Thank you for everything.”
“You did it all, Jamie. Not me…”
“Goodbye, Danny.” Jamie reached forward and shook hands with Alicia’s son, then opened the door. He slid out, then waited for Scott to follow. Alicia had also got out. They had no time. She seized hold of Jamie and kissed him briefly on the cheek, then pressed something into his hand. The scream of the police siren had disappeared. For a brief instant she thought it might have gone a different way or even broken down – but her hopes were dashed almost at once. The car had simply entered the tunnel and the bulk of the mountains was blocking any sound. As she looked up the road, it burst out. Worse still, a second police car had joined it. Both cars were racing towards them.
A sandy track ran through the fir trees and past a series of boulders. Jamie and Scott had broken into a run, heading away from the road and down towards the lake. The ground tumbled unevenly all the way to the water’s edge. A wooden platform had been built for tourists and the view was certainly awesome, with the lake a dazzling blue in the afternoon sun and a range of mountains, some of them snow-peaked even now, spread out on the other side. There was nobody else around. Jamie leapt over a fence and breathed a sigh of relief as his brother did the same.
Scott – are you with me? He sent the thought without opening his mouth.
I’m with you. The words were indistinct, as if transmitted by a faulty radio. But Jamie heard them and felt a surge of hope that carried him on. He had no real idea why he was doing this. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing. The very fact that they were here at all was surely some sort of crazy coincidence. But at the same time he knew that it was meant. They were doing the right thing.
“This is the police! Stay where you are! If you don’t stop, we’ll open fire!”
The words rang out, amplified through a bullhorn. Jamie almost laughed. They weren’t going to stop now. Did the police think that having come so far they would turn round and give themselves up? But the smile was wiped off his face a second later. There was a gunshot and a bullet ricocheted off one of the boulders just a few yards away. A warning shot? Or were the police really prepared to shoot them in the back?
He didn’t intend to find out. They were climbing down. The ground had fallen away so steeply that they had to use their hands and feet to guide them. The road was high up above them and unless the police followed them over the fence, they would be out of sight. With Jamie leading the way, they scrambled down the last few yards, using the lower branches of the fir trees to stop themselves falling. At last their feet hit shingle. They had reached the edge of the lake. The water spread out in front of them, millions and millions of gallons. And despite everything that had happened and the exertion of the descent, Jamie felt strangely at peace. It was as if he had come home. He still didn’t know for certain that he would find what he expected to find, but he was glad he was here.
He turned round – and there it was, just as Derry had said. A path of pure, white sand led to an opening in the rock. The cave was very dark and twisted back underneath the road. There was a design scratched into the surface, just above the entrance, so faint that he might not have noticed it unless he had been looking for it. A five-pointed star. Anyone else might think it had been carved recently but Jamie knew differently. It had been put there a long, long time ago.
Someone shouted, high above. One of the policemen. Jamie took a deep breath. It was finally over. It was time for him to go.
He took hold of his brother. The two of them walked up the path and together they went into the cave.
The police never found them. They climbed down and searched along the shoreline. They even looked inside the cave although they had heard of the Washoe traditions and knew they had no right to be there. By the time the sun began to set there were more than a dozen officers in the area. But if Scott and Jamie Tyler had ever been there, they had now completely disappeared. Had they walked into the lake and drowned? It seemed impossible. They would surely have been seen from above, and anyway there was no sign of the bodies.
Alicia was admitting nothing. In fact she and Danny denied that the two boys had ever been in the car. She demanded to speak to Senator Trelawny.
And while the police were calling off the search and discussing what to do next, many thousands of miles away, a door in a church had opened and two boys were stepping out into a strange and unfamiliar world. A few tourists glanced at them curiously. A priest, who had seen them emerge, scratched his head in puzzlement. The door had been kept locked for as long as he could remember and he was sure that there was nothing more than an empty storeroom on the other side.
It took Scott and Jamie half an hour to find a tour guide who spoke English and from her they learnt that they had arrived in Peru, even if they had managed to wind up in quite the wrong part of the country. They were in the city of Cuzco, high up in the Andes. The church was called Santo Domingo and had been built by the Spanish on top of another sacred site… Coricancha, the temple of gold, once a place of worship for the ancient Incas.
They were far away from California and although everything – including the language – was very alien to them, they knew they were safe. That night, they stayed in a hotel. At the very last moment, acting on impulse, Alicia had pressed a hundred dollars into Jamie’s hand. The money would pay for a room and a meal. The next morning they would use it to buy two bus tickets to a little town on the western coast. A place called Nazca.
In fact, the journey took them more than thirty hours. Scott still wasn’t talking – he wasn’t even sending any thoughts -and at night, when he was asleep, he would mutter and cry out and his body would twitch as if it was being prodded or given electric shocks. Jamie forced himself not to worry. Pedro was waiting. The healer. Scott would see him and he would be all right.
Three days later, they arrived. A taxi dropped them at an attractive whitewashed house set in a large garden with fountains playing and llamas wandering across the lawn. As they walked through the gate, the front door of the house opened and a boy emerged. Jamie recognized him at once. Dark hair cut short. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes.
It was Matt.
Another boy stepped out behind him and again Jamie knew at once who he was. Pedro. It seemed strange to think that the last time they had met, they had been drinking wine together in a field just hours after finishing a war. He wondered how he would ever explain it all. Where would he even begin?
Matt stepped forward. Although he was trying not to show it, it was obvious that he was in pain. So that made three of them. Scott needed help. And Jamie still had a large hole in his shoulder. He wondered how many of
