right, let’s see what’s down here.”
They took no more than a couple dozen steps, twisting down, when Max stopped them. Something was wrong. The rising air was suddenly acrid. Their eyes stung and ammonia fumes choked them.
Max felt the shock wave of air. A surge of energy ascending from the bowels of the cave. And then he heard them. It was nothing like the fluttering sounds he had experienced in the river cave. These squealing screams were as if someone had taken the lids from the coffins of the undead.
Vampire bats.
Cazamind drew blood. It hurt and he winced, sucking his finger, hoping the pressure of his tongue would ease the insignificant wound. It was the small things that seemed to hurt the most-a rose thorn, a stubbed toe and this, a torn fingernail. Riga’s crazy cuckoo-clock control freak had developed a bad habit. He bit his nails. It was unsightly, it was unhygienic and, as in this case, painful. It had started when Max Gordon had evaded all attempts at assassination. Then the private hospital had been compromised by someone hacking into the security system, and that had to have something to do with the Gordon boy as well. And now MI5 had taken it upon themselves to examine every inch of the place. Luckily his own cleanup crew had effectively destroyed or altered evidence. His friends in government would soon stop them investigating any further, but it was all getting dangerously close to secrets being exposed. Who could have imagined when that interfering eco-scientist Helen Gordon had stumbled upon his secret in the rain forest all those years ago that her son would now be posing as big a threat? If Cazamind failed his masters, he would bear the full responsibility-and he did not wish to die. Now the situation had just worsened. He listened to the satellite link from Riga. He was on the boy’s trail, right behind him, and was convinced he could finish the job. He was asking for information about what lay in the amphitheater of mountains that for years had remained of no concern to anyone. Cazamind paid gangsters and former drug runners to be his mobile guards; he had stripped back the rain forest, sheltered illegal loggers, dissuaded and even killed environmentalists, all to disguise what lay in those forested mountains. Riga wanted information. Wanted to know what was in there.
Death was what lay hidden there.
“Leave him,” Cazamind told Riga as he fumbled a Band-Aid onto his torn nail.
“Let him go?” Riga answered, his voice crystal clear on the satellite phone.
“Yes. He can’t survive in there. He can’t do us any more harm.”
“He hasn’t done too badly so far,” Riga said.
“I don’t want you going in there,” Cazamind said. It was an order. He could not risk any outsider getting inside, especially not one like Riga, who had the skills to get out. No outsiders-that was the golden rule. You go in, you stay in.
There was a moment’s pause. Riga was obviously considering what to say next, which surprised Cazamind. His brain focused, the finger forgotten. Why was Riga hesitating? Why wasn’t it a quick
“All right,” Riga said. “Understood.”
Cazamind ended the call. The man’s inflection was wrong. Another fear tugged at his nervous system. He had not believed Riga’s compliance. His assassin was going to ignore his orders-he was convinced of it. Riga was going in alone to satisfy some irrational professional desire to complete the kill against an elusive enemy.
Cazamind was being driven to ever more desperate measures to ensure that one of the world’s biggest cover-ups stayed covered up. He had to ensure that it all ended now. He needed to be in absolute control. He would have to make very definite assurances that all was as it should be. He could be in Central America in under twelve hours. His finger hurt when he pressed the button on his phone console.
“Eliminate Riga,” he said coldly.
Dense clouds of bats, their bodies no longer than Max’s thumb, with twenty-five-centimeter wings, unfurled from the darkness and smothered Flint and the two boys. It was a frenzied attack. Unlike legend, the bats did not suck a victim’s blood; their razor-sharp incisors slashed skin while an anticoagulant in their saliva kept the blood flowing as their tongues lapped it up.
Max pushed his back against the rock, swinging the flaming torch back and forth, trying to beat them off to allow the others to move lower down the rock-hewn steps. But everyone was trying to cover their face with their arms to stop the painful attacks from the pug-faced creatures.
Torchlight shadows leapt, creating their own monsters in the mayhem, and then, screaming, Xavier fell. Max watched as he tumbled into the swirling mass. He immediately tossed the burning torch after him, desperate to see the boy. As the torch fell, Max’s gaze followed it down. Xavier’s legs bicycled in the air, his arms flailed and he still screamed. There was no choice. Max leapt into the darkness, following the diminishing light. Not knowing if Flint had seen him jump, he yelled the plant thief’s name as he plummeted downward.
A couple of seconds later, he heard Xavier’s body splash into water, followed rapidly by the hissing torch as it was extinguished by the river. His mind told him he had a couple of seconds before he, too, hit.
And then he was underwater, all the air pounded from his lungs. He kicked hard and quickly broke through the surface. Within moments he could see light glimmering in the distance. “Xavier!” His voice echoed across the smooth surface of the river, reverberating around the cold rock face. No sooner had he called the boy’s name than he heard a mighty splash a few meters behind him. Orsino Flint had jumped into the void to follow him. Max cried out again, “Xavier!” And this time he heard the boy’s cry for help.
Max was surprised to find he still gripped the sturdy spear shaft, and within moments used it for support in the silted riverbed as it grew shallower. Then he saw Xavier’s bedraggled figure clinging to a boulder in the slow- moving water. He had been lucky. The deep pool had broken his fall, and the gentle current had washed him quickly into shallow water. But his foot had become wedged beneath a rock, and even though the water was shallow, he was forced to raise himself on his elbows to keep his face from slipping below the current.
The light was brighter now; they were near the river’s exit into daylight. Max heard splashing behind him. It was Flint, his straw hat soaked but still firmly in place.
Max could see that, despite being dunked in the river, blood still flowed from Xavier’s face and neck, and he knew that he, too, was still bleeding. But his main concern was for Xavier. He could see that his leg was not broken, but the awkward position of his ankle meant that if he tried to drag the boy free, he could damage it. Ramming the spear shaft under the rock, he levered his weight down.
“Pull yourself free!”
It wasn’t enough. “Grab his shoulders, Flint. Ready?”
Max grunted with effort, found a rock to push his legs against and levered downward. In a slush of water and silt, Xavier was yanked free a moment before the spear shaft snapped. Max fell back into the water, but he was unhurt.
Released from the underwater trap, Xavier hugged Max like a long-lost brother. He gabbled something furiously in Spanish. Max eased him away from the embrace. Flint wiped his face with his hands and looked at the smears of blood.
“He said …” Flint sighed. “You don’t want to know what he said. It’s embarrassing.” Then he pointed at Xavier and said something to him that made the boy look guilty. “I told him you jumped after him. To save him, again. And I told him he wasn’t worth it. Now let’s get out of here and get rid of all this blood.”
“Check his leg first. I’m going to look outside,” Max told him.
He trudged through the shallows toward the gaping entrance where the river spilled out. A sheet of rock like a huge split tongue jutted out from the cave’s mouth. The gently flowing water spilled over in a gossamer waterfall. Max stood on the rock’s edge, with water swirling past his ankles, high enough above the tree canopy to look across the vast expanse of encircled rain forest. Wisps of cloud and mist were being tugged from the treetops by the breeze, and the amphitheater’s mountaintop was ringed in a circle of fire from the rays of the sinking sun. Piercing a cleft of rock, a laser beam of sunlight etched across the craggy peaks, broadened into a spotlight and washed the waterfall beneath Max’s feet into a crimson veil.
Max felt as though he had stepped into an unknown paradise: trees and flowering plants swayed in a gentle breeze, the silence broken only by the whisper of the waterfall. The mist was lifting, and in the far distance, as if revealed by a giant hand, the volcano’s smoke drifted lazily away.
He was in the forbidden land.
