and let the smooth engine glide him towards the entrance gates. He stopped the car, slid down the window and called, “Sayid, your taxi’s here.”
The boy stepped out of the shadows. “Max!” He climbed inside. “What was all that racket?”
“Fun,” Max said, smiling. “Not half the racket there’s going to be in a-”
The piercing screech of the chateau’s alarm siren sliced through his words. Max and Sayid turned. Figures ran down the steps. Some tried to lift their motorbikes; two bigger silhouettes pointed and shouted something.
Max laughed, pushed his arm out the window and waved.
Sayid beat his hands on the dashboard and shouted, “We did it! We did it!”
Max turned the car towards Biarritz.
“Put your seat belt on, Sayid. What’s wrong with you? You like living dangerously?”
14
Fedir Tishenko was superstitious. Portents and signs had guided many great men in history, and Fedir modestly counted himself among them. Had he not been marked by the lightning god’s hand? He doubted if any other human could have survived such a ferocious baptism.
The unseen powers of the universe guided his destiny un-equivocally towards that chosen moment when he would shock the world by harnessing and unleashing the greatest force nature possessed.
But he was also practical. Superstition was the foundation of his belief, but cold logic had given him immense financial power. Desire for anonymity from the world’s media was driven not only by his disfigurement but also by stealth and cunning. Behind the scenes he could influence governments, buy politicians and inflict whatever judgment he deemed appropriate on those who failed to live up to his expectations.
One billion dollars buys a lot of influence and privacy. But he knew that no matter how exact he had been over the years, a tiny speck of the unforeseen could create havoc. Like a Formula One racing driver getting a wasp under his helmet at three hundred kilometers per hour, or a precision piece of high technology getting a microscopic mote of dust in a vacuum-sealed area.
Deep underground he was driven past massive pieces of equipment resembling something a hundred times bigger than a jetliner’s engine, and an enormous disk, higher than a six-story building, gripped and secured by steel frames attached to the rock face. Except this disk did not house fan turbines but energy conductors, overlapping, highly polished titanium tiles, solenoids that would snare and capture, then transmit the raw energy he would soon harness.
Energy crisis? A gash appeared in his crinkled face-a smile.
The world did not understand the meaning of the word
Now, as he sat on the electric golf cart being driven through the cathedral-like halls beneath the mountains, a chill prickled his skin. It was not the cold, because massive heat conductors maintained a regular temperature down here at a hundred meters below the surface. No, it was this unexpected complication.
The monk, Zabala, had spent over twenty years searching for proof of some future profound, earth-shattering event. More importantly, it seemed, this evidence was the precise time, the exact hour when the cataclysm would occur. This was the information for which Tishenko had paid Zabala’s closest friend a small fortune. The man had failed to obtain the secret from Zabala, and Tishenko had taken his revenge-the body would never be found. But the man had learned enough to give Tishenko the exact day on which to inflict the terror of his awesome, earth- shattering revelation. He liked that word.
Tishenko’s scientists, tracking powerful weather fronts across the Atlantic, confirmed that the day the storm was expected to strike matched Zabala’s prediction. But for Tishenko there was still a niggling concern. He wanted to unleash his cataclysm at the optimum moment in time for it to succeed. Absolute power demanded absolute knowledge.
Superstition teased at his logic like a child picking a scab. Perhaps the monk had had something Tishenko did not possess, something almost akin to a sixth sense. Zabala had turned to prayer and meditation as well as science and mathematics. He had become like one of those ancient masters who felt an affinity with the universe, who understood things at a superconscious level. Zabala knew things.
And had proved his mystical prediction with facts. Perhaps the scientific community would have still scoffed at Zabala had he lived-but what if they had not? Today’s climate change had scientists so worried that they swapped information like kids exchanging baseball cards. They might just identify where and what Tishenko planned.
Why was this Max Gordon boy involved? Tishenko’s people had scoured the airwaves for months, ensuring that anyone who might even remotely offer any threat could be monitored. This illegal spying on known environmental groups, investigators, scientists and government departments had revealed no cause for alarm. Nothing would threaten Tishenko’s plans, because no one knew of them-except Zabala.
But a meddlesome environmental troubleshooter, Tom Gordon, had been contacted. He was confined to a nursing home in England, but his son was in precisely the same area as Zabala.
Tishenko hated coincidence. There was no such thing. It was destiny throwing forces together like a particle accelerator slamming together beams of protons at the speed of light-well, 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, to be precise, his mind chastised him-and not even the scientists knew what the resulting explosion would create.
Superstition gripped him.
They had checked back. Every Friday afternoon over the preceding weeks someone from the Pyrenees had used a landline phone and contacted Tom Gordon’s nursing home. The location told them it had to be his son, Max.
The boy had phoned again when he was in hospital in Pau, after the assassination of Zabala, and then he had gone to the monk’s mountain home.
Coincidence?
Fate?
Since discovering this information, Tishenko had tried to stop him. Just in case he knew something. But the boy had defied the threat of violence and death from Tishenko’s people at every step. Now he represented that speck of the unforeseen that could destroy everything.
The American boy who helped Max Gordon had been dealt with. The Germans who were in charge of capturing the troublesome English boy at the chateau near Biarritz had failed and had already paid the price-their bodies would never be found. Now the biker gang of hunters would scour the area around Biarritz until Max Gordon surfaced. He had been to the chateau in Hendaye, so the possibility of his finding Zabala’s secret was all the greater.
Max Gordon had succeeded, without even knowing it, in rattling him. Tishenko had to snare this boy and find out once and for all if he had discovered that vital piece of information of Zabala’s that he so craved. Now there was an urgent need to double-check that the father had not instructed the son. How? There was one person who might be able to reach him. A man who was once Tom Gordon’s friend but who had betrayed him.
Would sending this man be a bridge too far?
Superstition demanded Tishenko send him to Max Gordon’s father.
He gave the order-contact Angelo Farentino.
Max didn’t know how to read Sophie Fauvre. She had smiled with relief when he and Sayid had walked through the door, but she kept her distance, almost as if she might be intruding on their friendship. Max nodded a kind of gruff hi, then, thinking he’d been a bit rude, smiled back, told her that Bobby and Peaches were still surfing down the coast.
