Now being wheeled down a corridor.
On the plane. A seat had been taken out to make room for the wheelchair. Other passengers were passing him, carrying their luggage. He saw them glance in his direction. Each time the reaction was the same. Puzzlement, the realization that something was wrong, then pity, and finally a sense of embarrassment. The drug was making his knee twitch. His hand, resting on the knee, was doing the same.
“Try to get some sleep, Jonathan,” Beckett said. “It’s a long flight.” Where were they taking him? And why? Did they really think they could get away with this, whisking him out of the country with a fake ID? Jack would already know he was missing. The school would have called her and she would have alerted MI6. They would be looking for him. Every airport would be watched.
Except . . .
What day was this? He could have been kept drugged for a few hours or a week. Or a month. Alex had no control over his body, but they had left his mind intact . . . hadn’t they?
He was alert enough to realize it wasn’t completely hopeless. Everything led back to Desmond McCain. MI6 knew what had happened at Greenfields. Jack would tell them about Elm’s Cross. They would track down McCain and that would lead them to him.
They were in the air. How was that possible? Alex couldn’t remember taking off. How long had they been flying? He tried to work out where they might be going. It had been light when they were on the runway, and it was still light now. If they had been in the air for a while, that would suggest, at the very least, that they weren’t heading east. The different time zones would have brought the night in faster.
South, then, or west? He couldn’t turn his head—the muscles in his neck refused to work—but as they had filed past, he had noticed that many of the other passengers were black, dressed in clothes that were too brightly colored for the UK. They could be going home.
Africa.
Food was served—but not to him. The stewardess smiled at him sadly, as if understanding that he couldn’t feed himself. Beckett brought out some baby food and tried to force it into his mouth with a spoon. Using all his remaining strength, Alex kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to be humiliated by her any more than he had been already.
Hours passed, yet Alex hardly was aware of it.
They were on the ground.
The doors were open.
And then Alex was being wheeled through an arrivals hall, and a poster on the wall answered the question he had been asking himself for the past how-many hours. A brightly dressed black woman with a huge smile, holding a basket of fruit. And a caption.
SMILE! YOU’RE IN KENYA.
Kenya! Vaguely, Alex remembered something that Edward Pleasure had told him. “
The plastic box was still resting against his arm, and he actually felt the whole thing vibrate as the timing mechanism clicked in, sending another spurt of the liquid into his veins. He felt unconsciousness returning and didn’t even try to fight it. He was on his own, thousands of miles from home. He had fallen into the hands of a ruthless enemy and nobody knew where he was. Ahead of him, a set of automatic doors swung open. Alex was wheeled into the dark.
17
A SHORT FLIGHT TO NOWHERE
MOVEMENT RETURNED, one twitch at a time.
Alex had no idea how long he had been here, but he guessed that it couldn’t have been much more than twenty-four hours. He had watched the sun rise, not out of the window but through the cloth that made up the wall. He was lying on his back on a comfortable bed in what seemed to be a cross between a luxury hotel room and a large tent. The floor was made of polished wood. There was an expensive-looking wardrobe, a carved wooden table, and two chairs. A fan hung from the ceiling above his head, turning continuously. He was completely enclosed by a mosquito net that rippled in the breeze. But the walls were made of canvas. The windows consisted of two flaps, fastened from the outside.
Where exactly was he? From the sounds that surrounded him—the chatter of monkeys, the occasional bellow of an elephant, the constant whoops and screams of exotic birds—it seemed that he was in the bush, somewhere in the middle of Kenya.
That tied in with his memories of the journey here, even if they were still confused. There had been the poster he had seen. SMILE! YOU’RE IN KENYA. As if he had felt remotely like smiling! They had gone through passport control, and after that the drug must have kicked in again. They had driven across a city, but he had barely seen any of it. It had been late evening. Nairobi? And then there had been a second, smaller airport and another plane, this one a four-seater with propellers. They had bundled him in, leaving the wheelchair behind. And then . . .
He had woken up here, on his own. It was dark . . . evening or night. But they had left two little battery lights on—battery, not electric. At least he could see, even if he couldn’t yet move. The plastic box had been removed from his arm and a dirty bandage stuck over the puncture where the needle had gone in.
That had been the first thing he had noticed—and he’d been grateful for it. With the drug no longer pumping into his system, he had begun to recover. He could lift his hand. He could turn his head from side to side, taking in the sweep of the room. Eventually he had stood up and tottered on unsteady legs into the bathroom, behind the bed, separated by a screen. He had thrown up and that made him feel better. Then he had taken a cold shower, the water washing away some of the horror of the past day.
He had still been too weak to make his way outside. He had decided he would wait for the sun. Once again he had fallen asleep, but this time more normally.
And now it was morning. Alex rolled off the bed and stood up. He had slept in his shorts. The tracksuit that they had dressed him in was lying on the floor, a crumpled heap. He noticed that his school uniform had been brought over from England. It seemed somehow strange to see it, but of course he had been wearing it when he was kidnapped. He went over to it, feeling in the inside pocket of his jacket.
