‘Carla Vasquez? Maria’s friend?’
‘You know Maria?’ exclaimed the astonished girl.
‘She told us about you,’ replied MacLean. ‘She suspected you were some kind of prisoner.’
‘But not here,’ added Leavey, looking up at the high cliffs against the night sky.
‘Your mother thinks you’re in Madrid,’ explained MacLean.
‘We are given post-cards to write to our parents.’
‘You said “we”. How many are there of you?’ asked Leavey.
‘Twelve. We look after the children.’
‘What children?’ asked MacLean. ‘Where do they come from?’
‘I don’t know Senor. None of us knows. We get babies to look after for a few weeks, then they take them away and we don’t see them again.’
‘What happens then?’
‘We get more babies.’
‘Who brings you the babies?’ asked Leavey.
‘Dr Von Jonek.’
MacLean savoured the moment in silence. He’d found Von Jonek and the knowledge seemed to drain him momentarily of all energy. He rolled over on to his back in the grass and looked up at the sky, thinking of just how long the road had been and how hard. Leavey put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and said, ‘We’re nearly there.’
Leavey said to Carla, ‘We’ll help you escape Carla but we are going to need your help. It’ll be light in three hours and we have no place to hide.’
‘Come with me,’ said Carla. ‘I share a hut with Fernanda Murillo. You can hide there.’
Carla lit up the way with her torch beam and Leavey and MacLean crawled along in the grass behind her. They had almost reached the front door of the hut when they realised that something was wrong. There were voices coming from inside. They were raised in argument and one of them was male. He sounded drunk.
Leavey looked to Carla for an explanation. Carla was distraught. ‘It’s one of the guards!’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes they get drunk and try to bother us. We keep the door locked but I must have left it unlocked when I left!’
The sound of crying came from inside and MacLean made to move but Leavey stopped him. ‘I’ll go,’ he said and started towards the hut.
Leavey turned the handle of the door slowly and steadily until the lock was silently released. He moved the door just an inch, to make sure that it would swing easily, and then in one swift movement he opened it, slipped inside and closed it again behind him. The sound of a girl protesting angrily came from the room to his left. The sound was interspersed with coarse sounds of male assurance. He moved slowly along the wall and pushed the room door very slightly ajar. He saw a man with a large beer gut holding the girl’s hands to prevent her fending him off. In her frustration she spat in his face forcing him to let one of her hands go. The girl immediately brought her fingernails down the right side of the man’s face. He let out a bellow of pain and raised his fist to strike her. The blow never landed. Leavey dropped him with a hard blow to the back of his neck. ‘Not tonight,’ he murmured.
The girl was on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear and shock and she was shaking. Leavey put his finger to his lips and made a reassuring gesture with his hands before opening the door for MacLean and Carla. Carla rushed to her friend to comfort her and apologise for what she saw as her fault.
MacLean looked down at the man on the floor and said, ‘We’ll have to do something with him before daybreak. How about the tunnel?’
They conferred briefly and decided that, at that late hour, their chances of getting the unconscious man up the tunnel to the disused shaft where they had found the skeletons were good. They put the lights off, and moved the man’s body out of the front door.
It took them fully ten minutes to drag him up the shaft because of his weight but they encountered no problems and left him bound and gagged in one of the old cells. Carla made coffee and sandwiches on their return and they learned what they could from the girls.
By the time the first streaks of dawn were in the sky, MacLean and Leavey had built up a picture of life in the hidden valley. There were six separate wooden chalets where the girls lived; each housed two girls. The babies, usually about thirty at any given time, were kept together in a single nursery building and looked after by ten of the girls during the daytime and by three at night. If the babies should start crying at night however, the other girls were under orders to lend a hand in quietening them because Dr Von Jonek got very angry about the noise. ‘There is an echo off the cliffs,’ said Carla. ‘Sometimes people can hear the sound on the other side.’
‘The “lost souls” of the Hacienda Yunque,’ said MacLean.
‘How many guards?’ asked Leavey.
‘Fifteen in all, although they are not just guards; they have other duties. They are split into three groups of five. One group works in the boiler house, one does the maintenance work in the Hacienda and the third group works here.’
‘Any other people?’ asked MacLean.
‘Dr Von Jonek and two other scientists,’ said Carla.
‘And Hartmut,’ added Fernanda, exchanging glances with Carla.
‘Hartmut?’ asked Leavey.
Carla grimaced and said, ‘Dr Von Jonek keeps a strange man with him. He is not normal… not right.’
Leavey asked where Von Jonek and the others worked.
‘Somewhere inside the rock,’ replied Carla. ‘But none of the girls ever get to go there.’
Carla and Fernanda were both on duty in the nursery at seven thirty in the morning so it was agreed that Leavey and MacLean would lie low in their chalet. They would spend the day resting and regaining their strength, waiting for nightfall when they would attempt to find Von Jonek’s laboratory and the Cytogerm they had come for. In the event, neither of them slept much but the rest did them good and by mid-afternoon they felt ready for the final part of their mission.
‘When we get the stuff we’ll still have a problem,’ said Leavey.
‘You mean, how do we get out of here?’ replied MacLean.
Leavey nodded.
When they had entered the tunnel through the fake sterilizer door they had found a button to close the door behind them but both had noticed that there was no obvious way of opening the door from the inside. ‘There must be a way,’ said MacLean. ‘I don’t fancy the climb.’ He looked up at the cliffs.
‘Not easy,’ conceded Leavey.
‘Even if we made it to the top, we can’t get down the other side because of the overhang.’
‘Then we’ll have to ask someone the way out,’ said Leavey with characteristic understatement.
‘And we’ll have to do it tonight,’ said MacLean. ‘They’re going to start taking the absence of one of their guards seriously pretty soon.’
Leavey agreed. They had been counting on a ‘honeymoon’ period when, although the guard was seen to be missing, innocent explanations would prevail for a while. This, they hoped, would be especially true in the case of the Hacienda Yunque, which to all intents and purposes was impregnable. The man had been hopelessly drunk when he ‘disappeared’ so it would be assumed for a while that he had not appeared for duty because of this. When a whole day had passed however, without anyone seeing him, they would start searching for him in earnest.
When the girls returned just after dark MacLean told them of the plan and asked them to prepare themselves to leave at a moment’s notice. They were not however, to have bags packed and waiting by the door because of any search that might be mounted for the missing guard. As a precaution, the four of them searched the chalet for anything that might have belonged to him, no matter how small. They found nothing.
The two men slipped out of the chalet into the darkness and crossed the open ground quickly. They made it to the shelter of the rocks and settled down to wait. The night, a complete contrast to the previous evening, was warm and balmy, pleasant to be out in but with the disadvantage of a clear, starry sky above them and the prospect of moonlight to contend with when the moon cleared the rim of the cliffs.
When they were satisfied that most of the to-ing and fro-ing was over for the day they moved nearer the tunnel that led to the Hacienda. They had already decided that Von Jonek’s laboratories must lie down the shaft in
