do OK?”
“Better than OK. You saved us.”
The boy smiled, wobbling as he kept his balance against the swaying movement, but there was an unmistakable look of pride on his face. Max knew how important it was to be encouraged when things got tough.
“Can you help me balance it now? The current’s getting stronger-we have to be really careful. Whichever way I move to pole us, you go on the opposite side,” Max said.
“You, the angels and me. We make a great team.
“The best,” Max said.
As Max shoved hard to slip the raft sideways, out into the middle of the river and the calm water, Xavier moved carefully, concentrating on doing what Max had asked him. For the first time since he could remember, he was no longer a passenger.
Riga flew on for another hour. There was no sign of the boy, and there were a dozen or more small tributaries and offshoots like veins creeping into the jungle. Maybe he had got this far and gone off into one of them. If that was the case, it would take another couple of days of searching, and there was far more cover in those narrow rivers so he would be hard to spot. Riga needed more men, and another helicopter. He would call them in at dawn.
“Find a sandbank or somewhere to land.”
The pilot glanced back. This was not something he was keen to do.
“Weather’s shifting,” he said, hoping it would change Riga’s mind.
Riga checked the sky. He could smell the salt air being pushed upriver by the stiffening breeze. He nodded.
“I know. We stay as long as we can. The boy’s out there somewhere.”
“You think you missed him?”
“He has skills-and maybe luck-so we wait. Until morning, if the weather lets us.”
The pilot nodded, knowing better than to argue. At least they had emergency rations aboard the helicopter. It might be a long night, but they could close up the chopper and keep out the mosquitoes, and they would have food in their stomachs, which was more than that kid would have. But he had seen these local weather fronts hit the coast before. This Riga was not local; he might think he could outlast anything. Not around here.
“It’ll be difficult,” he said, “what with the storm. We might have to get going in a real hurry.”
“I don’t care,” Riga replied. He wanted to stay as close as possible to the hunt. The pilot hoped this crazy man wasn’t going to leave it too late for them to escape. He lifted the helicopter above the tree line and began searching for a landing zone.
Riga knew that if time was on his side, then Max Gordon might fall into his hands and make life-and death-a lot easier.
16
Danny Maguire’s body was taken through the streets of London to one of the city’s main hospitals in the East End. The men still escorted the ambulance, and Sayid had tracked them using more than twenty street cameras. He stored all the pieces of recovered archive footage in a compressed file so that they could be opened and viewed in sequence.
Sayid could see that the ambulance went to the rear of the building, where the body was off-loaded. The two men parked the car and walked in behind the ambulance crew. There was no movement for more than twenty minutes other than the ambulance leaving the hospital. Then a black, unmarked van arrived and also drove round the back of the building. The men who drove the van up to the mortuary entrance wore suits and looked like funeral undertakers. They unloaded a coffin, went inside and after another half hour came out again. It was obvious to Sayid there was now a body inside the coffin. As the black van drove away, the escort car followed it.
They drove for another hour, well south of the Thames, to an anonymous concrete complex no different from any of the other ugly, faceless buildings that surrounded it. When the van and a car emerged from the underground parking lot of the building, the two vehicles separated. It was at this point that Sayid stopped the surveillance. He was exhausted, but as far as he could see, Danny Maguire’s body never came out again.
There was nothing else Sayid could do other than to get this information into the right hands. But who was that to be? If he told Mr. Jackson what he had been doing, he’d probably get booted out of the school and his mother would lose her job. He decided to contact the White Hat group and get their help to access cameras inside that building and send what he had to MI5. That was why he needed the best IT guys. MI5 could trace back the source of the information, but if the White Hats took it on with their sophisticated equipment, they could hide an elephant in a room and no one would notice.
Sam Keegan was a young desk officer at MI5. He was ambitious and pleased it was he who was delivering news to his boss concerning the ongoing investigation into Max Gordon.
“Sir, we had a bomb-burst message come through.”
Ridgeway had been concentrating on something else and looked blank for a moment.
“It’s a fragmented message sent from a hundred or more encrypted sources,” Keegan explained.
“I know what it is. Show me.”
Keegan swiveled Ridgeway’s keyboard round to face him and made a few keystrokes. The screen showed a myriad of small windows that, after Keegan opened them, ran seamlessly into one screen.
“Someone has tagged together archive footage of Danny Maguire’s death. This took some doing, but they clearly want us to see it.”
Ridgeway gazed at the unfolding picture on his screen. “Can you trace this back?”
“Doubtful, sir. My guess is that there’d be a hundred dead ends.”
Ridgeway nodded. It didn’t matter, because whoever sent this was clearly asking for MI5’s help.
“Can we identify this building?” he asked, pointing at the final frame of the concrete complex.
“It’s south of the river, sir. When they sent it through, it had GPS coordinates attached.”
“How very helpful of them. Well, whoever they are, it’s a pity we can’t get them to work for us. All right, Keegan, you’d better get down there and have a look. I just hope this isn’t some tomfoolery and that we are the victim of somebody’s sick sense of humor.”
Keegan left his boss’s office, neither man knowing that the mild-mannered desk agent would soon face a horror worse than his most frightening nightmares.
“Wake up! Get up! Now!”
Sayid jerked awake. He had been asleep for only a couple of hours, and the programmed alarm on his computer shouted at him like a housemaster. He was still fuzzy-headed as he sat down on a chair, hit the Return key and watched as a message came in from the White Hat hackers. They used his Web name:
The screen imploded and then flashed up with more than a dozen CCTV camera feeds. Sayid popped a can of energy drink, shoved a handful of crisps into his mouth and washed them down with a swig. He had control of the cameras inside the concrete complex. He was spying in real time.
Wherever Max was, Sayid was still trying to help him. He just hoped his friend would contact him before too long and that Max was not in danger-but as the thought entered his head, he knew that was unlikely.
The storm gathered out at sea, hurled itself furiously toward the coast and then veered, scouring the coastline, doing its best to tear the landscape apart. Funneled by the estuary and deflected by the mountains, it lost
