Game Boy in his hand luggage. Turner had forgotten to ask for it back. Alex slipped quietly into his room, took it out and examined it again. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. It was bright blue with the single game, Rayman, lodged in the back. Alex weighed it in his hands. As far as he could tell it wasn’t any heavier or lighter than it should have been.
Then he remembered. The Game Boy he had once been given by MI6 had been activated by pressing the PLAY button three times. Perhaps this model would work the same way. Alex turned it over and pressed the button. Once, twice… a third time. Nothing happened. He gazed for a moment at the blank screen, annoyed with himself. He was wrong. It was just a game, given to him to keep him quiet on the plane. It was time to get dressed. He put the Game Boy on the bedside table and stood up.
The Game Boy squawked.
Alex snapped round, recognizing the sound without yet knowing what it was. The Game Boy was still squawking, a strange, metallic rattling sound. The screen had suddenly come to life. It was pulsating, green and white. What did it mean? He picked the machine up again. At once the noise died away and the lights on the screen faded out. He moved the Game Boy back towards the bedside table. It burst back into life.
Alex looked at the bedside table. There was nothing on it apart from an old-fashioned alarm clock, supplied by the hotel. He opened the drawer. There was a bible inside with the text printed in Spanish and English. Nothing else. So what was causing the Game Boy to act in this way? He swung it away. It became silent. He moved it back to the table. It started again.
The clock…
Alex looked more closely at the dial. The clock had a luminous face. He pressed the Game Boy right up against the glass and the squawking was suddenly louder than ever. Now Alex understood. The numbers on the clock face were faintly radioactive. That was what the Game Boy was picking up.
The Game Boy concealed a Geiger counter. Alex smiled grimly. Rayman was certainly the right game for this machine. Except that the rays it was looking for were radioactive ones.
What did it mean? Turner and Troy weren’t on the island for a simple surveillance operation. He had been right. Both Blunt in London and Byrne in Miami had been lying to him from the very start. Alex knew that he was sitting only a few kilometres south of Cuba. Something he had learned in history came to his mind. Cuba. The nineteen-sixties. The Cuban missile crisis. Nuclear weapons trained on America…
He still couldn’t be certain. He might be jumping to conclusions. But the fact was that the CIA had smuggled a Geiger counter into Skeleton Key and, as crazy as it sounded, there could only be one reason why they needed it.
They were looking for a nuclear bomb.
BROTHERHOOD SQUARE
Alex said little at dinner that night. Although the hotel had seemed empty earlier in the day, he was surprised how many guests had appeared for dinner in their loose skirts, shirts and sun-tans, and he knew it would be impossible to talk openly now.
They were sitting on the restaurant terrace which overlooked the sea, eating fish-as fresh as Alex had ever tasted-served with rice, salad and black beans. After the intense heat of the afternoon, the air was cool and welcoming. Two guitarists, lit by candles, were playing soft Latin music. Cicadas rasped and rattled in their thousands, hidden in the undergrowth.
The three of them talked like any family would. The towns they were going to visit, the beaches where they wanted to swim. Turner told a joke and Troy laughed loud enough to turn heads. But it was all fake. They weren’t going anywhere and the joke hadn’t been funny. Despite the food and the surroundings, Alex found himself hating every minute of the role he had been forced to play. The last time he had sat down with a family had been with Sabina and her parents in Cornwall. It seemed a very long time ago and this meal, with these people, somehow turned the memory sour.
But at last it was over and Alex was able to excuse himself and go to bed. He went back to his room, swinging the door shut behind him. For a moment he stood there with his shoulders resting against the wood. He looked around him. Something was wrong. He stepped forward carefully, his nerves jangling. Someone had been there. His case, which had been closed when he left, was now open. Had someone from the hotel been in and searched the room while he was at dinner? Were they still there now? He looked in the bathroom and behind the curtains. No one. Then he went over to the case. It took him a few moments to realize that only the Game Boy was missing. So that was what had happened! Turner or Troy must have somehow slipped into the room while he was out. The Game Boy with its hidden Geiger counter was central to their mission. They had taken it back.
Alex undressed quickly and got into bed, but suddenly he wasn’t tired. He lay in the darkness, listening to the waves breaking against the sand. He could see thousands of stars through the open window. He had never realized there were so many of them, nor that they could shine so bright. Turner and Troy returned to their room about half an hour later. He heard them talking in low voices but couldn’t make out what they said. He pulled the sheet over his head and forced himself to sleep.
The first thing he saw when he woke up the next morning was a note pushed under his door. He got out of bed and picked it up. It was written in block capitals.
GONE FOR A WALK. THOUGHT YOU NEEDED A REST. WE’LL CATCH UP WITH YOU LATER. MOM XXX.
Alex tore the note in half-and then in half again. He scattered the pieces in the wastepaper basket and went out to breakfast. It occurred to him that it was a strange set of parents who would walk off, leaving their son behind, but he supposed there were probably plenty of families, with nannies and au pairs, who often did the same. He spent the morning on the beach, reading. There were some other boys of about his own age playing in the sea and he thought of joining them. But they didn’t speak English and seemed too self-contained. At eleven o’clock, his “parents” still hadn’t returned. Suddenly Alex was fed up, sitting there on his own in the grounds of the hotel. He was on an island on the other side of the world. He might as well see some of it! He got dressed and set off into town.
The heat struck him the moment he stepped outside the grounds of the hotel. The road curved inland, away from the sea, following a line of scrubland on one side and what looked like a tobacco plantation-a mass of fat, green leaves rising to chest height-on the other. The landscape was flat but there was no breeze coming in from the sea. The air was heavy and still. Alex was soon sweating and had to swat at the flies that seemed determined to follow him every step of the way. A few buildings, sun-bleached wood and corrugated iron, sprang up around him. A fly buzzed in his ear. He beat it away.
It took him twenty minutes to reach Puerto Madre, a fishing village that had grown into a dense and cluttered town. The buildings were an amazing jumble of different styles; rickety wooden shops, marble and brick houses, huge stone churches. Everything had been beaten down and baked by the sun-and sunlight was everywhere; in the dust, in the vivid colours, in the smells of spice and overripe fruit.
The noise was deafening. Radio music-jazz and salsa-blasted out of open windows. Extraordinary American cars, vintage Chevrolets and Studebakers like brilliantly coloured toys, jammed the streets, their horns blaring as they tried to make their way past horses and carts, motorized rickshaws, cigarette sellers and shoe-shine boys. Old men in vests sat outside the cafes blinking in the sunlight. Women in tight-fitting dresses stood languidly in the doorways. Alex had never been anywhere louder or dirtier or more alive.
Somehow he found himself in the main square with a great statue at the centre; a revolutionary soldier with a rifle at his side and a grenade hanging from his belt. There must have been at least a hundred market stalls jammed into the square, selling fruit and vegetables, coffee beans, souvenirs, old books and T-shirts. And everywhere there were crowds, strolling in and out of the dollar shops and the ice-cream parlours, sitting at tables beneath sweeping colonnades, queuing up in the fast food restaurants and the paladares-tiny restaurants located inside private houses.
There was a street sign bolted to a wall. It read: PLAZA DE FRATERNIDAD. Alex had enough Spanish to translate that. Brotherhood Square. He somehow doubted that he would find much brotherhood here. A fat man in an old and dirty linen suit suddenly lurched up to him.
