He was angry with himself. Only a few minutes ago, Jack had been accusing him. He could have died at Elm’s Cross and she would have never known what had happened to him. He had promised her it would never happen again. And yet it already had. In a few hours, the school would report him missing.
She would think he had betrayed her again. If he died, he would never be able to tell her the truth.
This was all his fault. He shouldn’t have gone to the film studio. He should never have gotten involved with Desmond McCain in the first place. He wished he could call Jack and tell her. But it was too late.
Barely conscious, already unable to struggle, he was bundled into the back of the van. He didn’t even hear the doors slam shut.
Alex opened his eyes.
Someone was doing something to his head. A lock of light brown hair twisted, falling in front of his eyes. At the same time he heard the snip of scissors. He was sitting in a chair in what looked like a hotel room. They hadn’t tied him up, but they didn’t need to. He was still drugged and couldn’t move.
He’d been taken out of his school uniform and dressed in an ill-fitting tracksuit. They were cutting his hair. The two deliverymen were standing over him. There was a window covered by a blind and, at the very corner of his vision, an unmade bed. No carpet. His feet seemed to be resting on some sort of metal shelf, but he didn’t have the strength to look down.
The two men were talking, their voices like distant echoes that he couldn’t make out. One of them noticed he was awake and grabbed his head, squeezing his cheeks between thumb and fingers. More of his hair tumbled down into his lap. He could feel the cold air touching his scalp.
“He’s back,” the man said.
“Good.”
A woman appeared from nowhere—she must have been standing behind him—and Alex recognized Myra Beckett, the supervisor of Greenfields. Bizarrely, she was dressed as a nurse, complete with a starched white hat. The diagonal fringe of dark hair looked more severe than ever, as if it had been sliced with a single sword stroke. Her eyes, behind the round, gold glasses, were slightly crazy. Alex’s mouth was dry and he was feeling sick, but he managed to swear at her, a single venomous word.
“We’ll do it now,” she said.
They took hold of his arm and rolled up his sleeve. Alex winced as they gave him another injection, a long needle sliding into the flesh just above his wrist. But this time they didn’t remove it. Beckett taped it in place and Alex saw there was a tube connecting it to a plastic box about the size of a cigarette packet, which they taped to his arm.
“This IV will continue to give you a timed injection of the drugs we are using over the next few hours,” Beckett explained. “You will not be able to move or to speak. There will be other side effects.
Try to breathe normally.”
Alex felt a wave of a nausea. He was completely helpless. And whatever these people were planning, it wasn’t going to end in this room.
The men rolled back his sleeve, hiding the plastic box. Alex knew that it was pumping its venom, drip by drip, into his bloodstream. He tried to jerk his arm but he had no strength at all. He swore at Beckett a second time, but his voice was no longer working and all that came out was an inarticulate grunt.
Beckett leaned over him and pressed a pair of glasses onto his face. Alex tried to shake them off, but they were tight-fitting, hooked over his ears. “You can take him out now,” she said.
He was in a wheelchair! Alex didn’t realize it until one of the men spun him around and pushed him out the door. They turned into a long corridor. “Wait a minute,” Beckett said. She stepped forward and crouched beside Alex so that her face was close to his. “What do you think?” she asked, with a thin smile.
There was a full-length mirror at the end of the corridor. Alex stared at himself in shock and disbelief.
His hair had been cut so hideously that he looked two years older than his true age and completely pitiful. The tracksuit was the color of a nasty bruise. It was one size too big and it was covered in stains, as if he was unable to feed himself. His skin was pale and unhealthy. The glasses he had been given were deliberately ugly; black plastic with thick lenses. They hung slightly crooked on his face.
The drugs had attacked his muscles, paralyzing him and somehow changing the shape of his entire body. His jaw hung open and his eyes were glazed. Alex knew exactly what they had done. They had turned him into a foul parady of a disabled person. They had made him look brain-damaged . . . but worse than that, they had removed his dignity too. In a way, it was a brilliant disguise. People might glance at him in the street, but they would be too embarrassed to look twice. Beckett was taking their prejudices and using them to her own advantage.
Beckett must have given a signal. Alex was taken down the corridor and around to an elevator. After that, the extra drugs must have kicked in, because his world seemed to skip and jump.
He had the foggy sensation of being on the street and wheeled into the van.
He was in the van.
He was at Heathrow Airport! Hadn’t he been here just a few weeks ago with Sabina and her parents?
The terminal lights hurt his eyes and he saw people staring briefly at him, then turning away, ashamed of themselves. He tried to call out for help, but the low, pathetic mumbling that came out of his lips only added to the impression that he was handicapped. They had no idea what was going on. They wouldn’t even begin to guess that he was being kidnapped, spirited away in front of their eyes.
Passport control. They had provided Alex with fake documents, of course, but it seemed to him that the official didn’t look too closely. A boy in a wheelchair accompanied by a nurse. The two men had stayed behind.
“Jonathan loves flying on big airplanes. Don’t you, Jonathan!” Beckett was talking to him, addressing him as if he were six years old.
And now he was in some sort of lounge.
