Ice Claw

language. Do you speak it?”

“No,” Max said. “What does it mean?”

The two women spoke to each other in rapid French. Max couldn’t catch it. The young one eventually shrugged.

“It means: Trust no one-they will kill you.”

The hospital team was thorough. Max had been X-rayed, scanned, checked, cleaned up and pronounced uninjured except for bruised ribs and the aftereffects of the cold. He was lucky to be alive, but they insisted he be kept overnight. It had been Bobby Morrell who raised the alarm. When Max had told him he was going back into the mountains, Bobby immediately warned the ski patrols when they heard the avalanche.

The doctors’ usual questions had to be answered. Where were his parents? Was he on school holidays? How long was he staying in the Pyrenees? Where was he staying? How much money did he have?

Max explained everything, and someone said something about contacting his father; then they left him in peace. Max lay quietly for an hour or more, watching the image in his mind play over and over again.

He had been sucked into two startling events: Sophie and the monk. In both cases he had been involved in different, violent attacks by men using the same black-and-white camouflage. He really should tell the police. What would his dad do? He’d think it through and make his own decision about what course of action to take-and then do it. There are times you’re put in a situation that only you are meant to sort out, Max.

“Where are my things?” Max asked the young nurse when she returned to check his temperature.

She opened the small wardrobe in which Max’s clothes were hung. From a drawer she pulled out a sealed brown envelope. Inside were his blue nylon Velcro wallet and his green silica Moldavite wristband. His father’s watch was missing, the scratches on Max’s wrist confirming that the terrifying events hadn’t been a dream. A dull ache, a sense of loss about the watch, momentarily distracted his feelings from the nightmare scenario he had recently escaped. He said a silent, Sorry, Dad.

In addition to Sayid’s misbaha, there were the two items the monk had ripped from his neck and thrown at Max seconds before he died. The first was a rosary and crucifix, its necklace broken, most of the beads now missing, and the second was a leather cord looped and tied through a brass disk, slightly bigger than a ten-pence piece. Four equidistant spokes inside the circumference of this ring secured what looked like a small rounded crystal, floating in the center of the circle.

Max fingered the disk and curled it into his palm. He suddenly felt very possessive about the dying man’s urgency in giving it to him. Max might have lost his own treasured possession, his father’s watch, but this pendant was so vital to the dying monk, so important, that he had entrusted it to the boy who’d tried to save his life. Trust, that was a huge responsibility, his father had always told him.

If only his dad were here now. Making the right decision about what to do would be so much easier. Maybe he should phone him and tell him about the last desperate moments of the monk’s life. But his father was in London, recovering from the torture he had suffered in Africa, and still struggling to remember things. The doctors believed he was making slow but definite progress, and because his dad worked for an international agency that sometimes helped the government uncover massive environmental threats, he was being well cared for in a private nursing home. Max couldn’t burden him with any of this. He knew that when the authorities finally got through to the nursing home in England to explain Max’s accident, someone else would take the call. Which bought him time.

“What is that pendant?” the nurse asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“It’s nothing,” Max told her.

But he knew that the burning secret he clenched in his fist was probably the answer to the events on the mountain. And the words spoken forged a powerful warning.

“ … allez … abbaye! … le crocodile et le serpent!” Go to the abbey. The crocodile and the snake.

Trust no one-they will kill you.

Lucifer.

They will kill you.

Lucifer.

A monk pursued by a man in black. Shot and wounded. An avalanche. A desperate fight for life. And a message.

A secret message.

Max stood at his room’s window, looking out across the low rooftops of Pau. It was a small city on a bluff above the Gave de Pau, the river that flows beneath the cliffs at the city’s southern edge. The panoramic view of the Pyrenees meant that on clear days the saw-toothed mountains seemed endless. Less than twenty kilometers away, their snow-capped peaks in the background of the Chateau de Pau made the view every tourist’s perfect holiday snap. But tonight was something different. Tonight the mountains held a tight grip on a mighty power that threatened and taunted him. Max slid the window open and felt the rush of wind.

A storm, like a massive battle, had struck the mountains. Thunder and lightning clashed, their percussion slamming across the city. The firelit sky smashed open the darkness and created a whirling exhibition of unparalleled energy. The world shook and trembled. Red- and blue-light lightning unleashed from the cloud-to- ground strikes crinkled the darkness. The light illuminated clouds and mountains, ricocheting around the peaks like a circle of fire. It was more stunning than anything Max had ever seen in any fireworks display.

An almighty crash and flash of light cut across Max’s face. He recoiled, but quickly turned back to face the storm’s anger. He gripped the sill, squinting against the biting wind. The mountains had failed to kill Max, but this enormous power seemed to be telling him that it could still reach out and destroy him.

The Pyrenees reverberated with pounding thunder as nature’s design created an electric lace-wing of shredded light that descended from the clouds. Exactly the same as the camouflage used by Sharkface and the monk’s killer.

Max had been given the responsibility of guarding the pendant, of finding answers in an abbey. He decided not to tell the police. Not yet anyway. But there were two people in his life he could trust. One was his dad; the second was Sayid.

“I can’t believe you were rescued by a helicopter,” Sayid moaned. “It took me two and a half hours in the back of an ambulance to get here.” He was in another room, the lower part of his leg in a cast. “I mean, how cool is that? A rescue chopper!”

Max smiled at him. “Stop moaning or I’ll hide your crutches. Listen, they’re gonna chuck us out of here in the morning and we have to make a plan.”

“Plan is we go home, isn’t it?”

Max nodded. “The flight’s booked for the end of the week, but I reckon they’ll try and pull strings to get us back earlier. But I want to stay.”

“The competition’s over; you can’t do anything about that,” Sayid said. He didn’t need to add how sorry he was that Max had lost the final.

Sayid fingered the misbaha. Max had risked his life to get it and nearly died in the process.

Max second-guessed his thoughts. “Sayid, I was meant to be there. Some things you can’t explain, but if I hadn’t lost the final I would never have been up in the mountains.” He held up the broken crucifix and the brass ring pendant with its opaque stone.

Sayid squinted at the stone. “Where did you get these?”

Max told him everything.

A shudder went through Sayid as he listened. He liked his adventure in small doses: like the time he and Max outran the farmer’s dog in a local orchard as they pinched apples; that had been exciting enough, thanks very much. His friend was proving to be a magnet for bigger trouble.

Max’s story rattled him. He and Max had decided to make the winter holidays a fun thing, so while Max worked to save money for the trip and competition by doing odd jobs, Sayid sorted out local people’s computer