Ice Claw

It was hot. Aladfar panted. The tiger sniffed and licked the boy’s hand as it stroked his face.

Max walked away. Fauvre and Abdullah waited for him at the pickup. He shook Fauvre’s hand-no more need be said between them-and climbed into the stiflingly hot cab.

As the pickup turned, Max looked back towards the tiger.

Aladfar was standing, full square, his body casting a giant shadow. His eyes followed Max, watching the boy take his freedom. And then Aladfar gave a roar that echoed around the walls of the Angels’ Tears.

A tremor of fear fluttered through Sayid. The old van was struggling. The last thing he wanted now was for it to be abandoned. The numbers on the surfboard had been scribbled and crossed out a dozen times as he tried to find the phrase or key word needed to decipher the magic square’s numbers.

The one thing the journey had given him so far was time-time enough to remember Max’s spy game. Once you had the key word it was easy. Lay the letters out in the same box as the numbers, don’t repeat any letter, use the numbers Max found on the crystal to translate and it was done.

Easy.

If only he had the key word letters to lay out! He had tried every word associated with his dilemma: Sharkface, chateau, Biarritz, Atlantic, surfing, Ethiopia, Zabala, endangered species, Morocco-that last word made him think of Max, and he wished his friend were right there in the van with him. No, not that. He wanted Max and himself to be free, to be back home. But the more he thought about that, the more his courage seeped away.

The van stopped. The driver lowered the window. Peaches and Sharkface appeared. They both looked past the men in front to Sayid. He turned his face away, pretending to sleep.

“Carry on,” Sharkface said in his spittle-lipped way. “Peaches stays, the vans follow. We wait here with the bikes. The girl’s coming. Take the kid up there.”

A gust of cold air blew snowflakes into the van. The window went back up, Sharkface thumped a signal to go on and the van started again.

The girl? That meant Sophie. Was she bringing Max with her? How could Sayid warn him he was walking into a trap? He couldn’t. Not yet. But perhaps when he got “up there”- which was where? A building? A mountain? Wherever it was, Sayid realized, that might be the only place he could reach a phone. This was way beyond Max’s being wanted for murder; Sayid needed the police to find Max before murder was committed.

This was like playing tag with the devil. He hooks you and you’re it.

Dead.

And that was the answer he’d been searching for. Take your mind off the problem, give it something else to think about and, like smoke under a door, the devil whispers in your ear.

Lucifer.

Another two hours. Low gear, winding uphill. The squeak of rubber against windshield as the blades struggled against the snowstorm. The men smoked and cursed, and Sayid felt sick from the cigarette fumes and lack of air. Thankfully, the windshield began to mist up and the men were forced to open the windows slightly. The fresh air cleared Sayid’s head. He had the magic square rewritten. Max’s story of the code breakers was clear in his mind now. He had to lay out each letter of the key word alongside each number of the square, but he must not use any of the key word’s letters more than once.

Once those letters had been used, you then had to carry on with the alphabet. So once the word Lucifer had been written next to the numbers, he had to continue with S, T, U, V and so on. Trouble was there were twenty-six letters in the alphabet and he had a square of twenty-five numbers. That meant two of the letters had to share and, if Max’s story was correct, the Second World War code makers used I and J. Sayid carefully wrote out the key word, L-U-C–I-F-E-R, beneath the numbers.

No, the U was wrong. Couldn’t repeat a letter if it’d been used. He crossed it out and started the line again.

The driver changed down a gear. The engine lurched. One of the men swore and hit the dashboard. “Come on! We’re almost there! Heap of junk!”

The men pushed open the doors and stepped into the swirling snow. Sayid heard the other vans pull up: tires scrunched; doors opened and slammed. The shiver that ran through him had nothing to do with the high mountain air. He knew that if the van had finally given up, then they would put him in one of Sharkface’s vans-and he’d be separated from the magic square.

Sayid squirmed towards the cab, reaching for one of the bottles of water the men had shoved between the seats. There was no time now. He had to take the risk. He could still hear their voices, but because Bobby’s van had no windows in the back he couldn’t see where they were. More voices, a couple of them raised. Someone moaned. “I’m not towing it! We’ll never get up the pass. Leave it!”

Sayid spilled the water across his boot and rubbed the accumulated mud and caked slush away. The numbers Max had given him from the crystal revealed themselves. When Sayid took each of those numbers, found it on the magic square, he would then see the corresponding letter. He was a dozen letters away from discovering Zabala’s secret message. The pendant’s first number was 7-Sayid saw that that was the letter C on the square; the next, 24, was the letter U …

Sayid’s eyes darted across the magic square. The voices were getting closer-he wrote quickly. If they ever searched him when they got to wherever they were going, he had to make sure they would not find the deciphered code. And if he was going to find a way of telling Max the secret … Concentrate! Number, letter, number …

He had to do something! If they ever found this van they had to know he was still alive. Sayid tugged the misbaha from his pocket and hooked it over the tail fin of a surfboard.

One of the men wrenched the back door open. The glaring snow meant he couldn’t see clearly in the gloom of the van. Sayid slipped the pen into his sleeve.

“Get out, kid!” the man shouted. “Come on, hurry it up.”

As one of the men leaned in to drag him out, Sayid lashed out with his plaster cast as if struggling to comply with their brutal commands. He kicked the surfboard from its bracket and it fell flat onto the floor of the van. Whatever happened next, at least none of these men would see his scribbling on the board’s surface.

They made no concessions for the slow-moving boy. One of them pushed him and he stumbled, but within half a dozen strides of being hauled and kicked across the snow he was flung into the back of one of the vans. It smelled of oil and grease. Motorbikes. The grooved channels on the floor reminded Sayid that each van carried three bikes and they and their riders were back in Geneva. Waiting for Sophie.

The doors slammed closed.

Sayid wrote down the last two letters.

The message made no sense.

Max had left the Tears of the Angels in an old pickup driven by Abdullah. Now the dusty road reached beyond the horizon.

The old pickup didn’t have the luxury of Abdullah’s Land Cruiser, and the rutted road shook Max’s spine. For a long time Abdullah remained silent, but then he turned and spoke to Max.

“Those men who attacked us, they were Tuareg.”

“Yes, Laurent told me,” Max answered.

Abdullah nodded. “It is the men who wear the veil. They believe evil spirits can enter their bodies through their nose and mouth. The women do not wear the veil. Tuareg women are different from other Arab women. They can fight. They are taught from when they are young to wrestle. They are strong. The women are special and they are permitted to choose the men. You understand me? They choose. The men, they accept what the women choose.”

Abdullah stopped talking for a moment and waited, as if expecting Max to grasp the reason why he was telling him all of this.