very lethal weapon meant Max had a long way to go before he was safe.
He jinked left and right. Another stream, another gully, and then he could hear tumbling water. Roots of trees crept into the low banks, and he realized that the water had become shallower, so he would make quicker time. He just had to be careful not to run blindly over the edge; he had to find a way down.
His pursuer had recovered quickly and could be heard splashing through the shallows; he, too, had realized that this was the easiest route. Suddenly there was no place to hide. The man came round the bend of the gully, and he was in plain sight. If Max tried to move now and clamber back into the undergrowth, he would be spotted immediately, and a burst of gunfire would rake him to death.
The gully’s low overhang was his only chance of concealment. With any luck, the man would be looking ahead and might bypass the dark shadow that was Max unmoving among the tree roots. There seemed to be no choice. He lay down on his side, feeling the mud suck at his clothes as he eased himself backward until the bank pressed against him. Bits of tangled root and leaves offered some camouflage in front of his face, and he hoped he could settle his breathing-right now he felt as though the whole world could hear him gasping for breath.
A huge snake, five meters long, stirred. Alerted by movement, its muscles flexed. At full length it resembled a dead tree trunk, its mottled-brown shaded patterns camouflaging it almost to the point of invisibility. Heat-sensitive pits on its head guided it toward the creature that had blundered into its territory. It had not eaten for a couple of weeks. The deer it had crushed to death and swallowed whole had taken that long to digest.
Max had no idea that the shivering turbulence along the stream’s bank was one of the jungle’s most lethal creatures. Its jaws, lined with small, hooked teeth, would grip its prey as it rapidly coiled itself about its victim. Within moments the massive strength would crush bone and suffocate lungs; then the jaws would unhinge, allowing it to swallow its prey. No one was strong enough to fight a boa constrictor of this size once they were held in its coils.
Death was certain.
Now it would eat again.
Sayid had paced the floor, back and forth, eventually sitting on his bed, head in hands. Had his intrusion into the building been traced? He half expected to hear someone pounding on his door at any moment, so powerful was the fear of discovery. What to do? If he admitted hacking into all those cameras, then one thing would lead to another and they would know that he was involved with Max from the very beginning. But if he did not warn the authorities that a man might have been killed or captured, he would never be able to live with himself.
By the time he had made his decision, he found himself already knocking on Mr. Jackson’s door.
“You’re absolutely sure that this is exactly what happened?” Fergus Jackson asked him moments later.
“Yes, sir. I think they held him at gunpoint, and after that they pulled the camera off the wall. It’s all a bit of a mess, sir. I hope I haven’t made matters worse by sending the information through to the people at MI-Five. That would mean I was responsible for whatever happened to that man.”
Mr. Jackson nodded and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Well, you’ve done the right thing now, Sayid. We have to bring in the authorities,” he said as he picked up the phone.
“I really don’t want to hurt my mum. And I’m scared.”
“I’ll make sure nothing happens to you and your mother.” Jackson turned away as he spoke into the phone. “Hello, Bob, I think there’s something you should know.”
The White Hat hackers were safe; Sayid had seen to that. They had left absolutely no trace of their involvement and had created a spaghetti junction of unfathomable complexity to cover their tracks. Robert Ridgeway and another man had landed in the helicopter an hour after Mr. Jackson made the telephone call. Now he stood back as the young man with him keyed information into Sayid’s computer. He turned and nodded, and Sayid could see that he had reconnected to the CCTV cameras in the building.
“The boy’s telling the truth, sir. He was logged into the security circuit.” He adjusted the screen so that Ridgeway, Sayid and Mr. Jackson could see. A dozen camera views flitted through the building, and Sayid could see men and women in every area. They were searching, testing for fingerprints and recording everything on cameras.
“One of our men is missing, and those are my people searching for him. You are certain you saw nothing other than what you’ve told us?” Ridgeway asked Sayid.
“I’ve told you everything. I was the one who alerted you in the first place. I sent you the building’s location.”
“Yes, well, we’d really like to know how you did that. That’s a major security breach as far as we’re concerned.” He glanced at Jackson, who shook his head gently. He did not want any threat leveled against Sayid and his mother again.
“But perhaps that’s a conversation we might have at another time,” Ridgeway said, pressing a button on his mobile phone. They watched as, seconds later, one of the agents on the screen answered his own phone.
“We’re watching,” Ridgeway said.
The man looked up into one of the cameras, speaking directly to them.
“Boss, there’s no trace that Keegan was in the building. No prints, no fibers. Nothing. This is a private hospital. Half a dozen rooms behind each security door. It’s also a mortuary. It’s genuine; we’ve checked it out. It’s run by an independent medical group called Zaragon that uses it for their international clients based in London. Postmortems are done here at the request of a patient’s family. There’s nothing suspicious, so what do we do now?”
Sayid pointed at one of the screens. “There were monitors on that wall where that stainless-steel table is, and your bloke saw something that was really horrible.”
“Did you hear that?” Ridgeway said into the phone.
The agent nodded. “We’ve checked already,” he replied. “They’re viewing screens. So far all we found was a computer library with postmortems recorded. Keegan isn’t the toughest of blokes, with all due respect, sir. Anyone could cringe at an autopsy.”
Ridgeway looked at Jackson. He was stymied. The only evidence he had was that Sayid Khalif had hacked into the building’s cameras and had sent the location to MI5 in the first place. If it were not for the fact that Keegan was missing, he would write this off as a schoolboy prank that had got out of control.
Ridgeway stared at Sayid. “There’s nothing I can do about this, unless you can give me something more to go on. Did you see these men hurt my agent?”
“No, sir, but I think one of the men pointed a gun at him.”
“Then is there anything else at all that can help us find out what happened to him?”
Sayid couldn’t think of one thing. He gazed at the screens and let the computer mouse click on each one. He stopped in the tiled room with the stainless-steel examination table. Then he panned the camera round slightly. Something was different. What was it?
He pointed to the room. “There was something like a clothes rack there. It had special suits hanging on it. They were biohazard suits. Now they’re gone.”
“Biohazard?”
“Yes, the same kind I saw in the tunnel when Danny Maguire’s body was found,” Sayid told him.
Ridgeway considered this information for a moment and then put the phone back to his ear. “Lock that building down and bring in a full forensic science team.”
They saw the agent nod. Ridgeway looked down at Sayid. “I can’t see any reason why you would make that up. You’ve convinced me something’s going on in that building. Well done, son.”
The snake coiled rapidly, twisting round his body. It happened so quickly he had no time to scream. Barely a gasp of fear was possible as it slithered from the mud, caught his ankles and then in a smooth, lethal turn entwined his body. One hand was free, but he couldn’t reach a weapon. If he could have grasped his knife, he’d have slashed at the ferocious head that now stared into his face, its tongue flicking out to touch his bursting, sweating skin.
It crushed him. Steel-like bands of coiled muscle contracted, exerting a force that squelched his organs and made his eyes bulge with horror as the needle-toothed jaws opened.
From a place of darkness, somewhere deep inside his body, Max’s primal scream echoed through the jungle.
