David Gilman - Blood Sun

She scanned the files on Max Gordon. Definitely, was the answer she came up with. In two hours she had looked at everything to do with Max Gordon. There was no direct relationship or even friendship noted between him and Danny Maguire, and that was confirmed by Jackson. She sweet-talked half the boys who would have told her anything had they known, but the boy who had fought with Max, Baskins, was worth interviewing.

Charlotte watched as Baskins straddled her bike. Its body contour demanded a low-profile riding position. Baskins could see himself screaming along at 150. Wait till he told Hoggart about the babe on the bike.

He’d realized he’d dropped Max in it when he mentioned the khipu. She had smiled and turned away. She’d lured him in and trapped him. The bike didn’t feel that great anymore.

Charlotte Morgan declined to speak to Gordon’s best friend, Sayid, until she had more information about him. She needed a lever. Now the information had been downloaded. No more Miss Cool Nice Person.

Sayid and his mother sat in Mr. Jackson’s office.

“Why has he run, Sayid?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Mr. Jackson told me he might have been expecting a letter or a package. Did he get anything?”

“I checked the postal deliveries myself. Nothing came for Max,” Jackson told her.

“Sayid, I’m here to help Max. There are some dangerous people out there who might want to hurt him.”

Sayid shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know anything. Max keeps things to himself.”

“Then where did he get the khipu?”

Baskins! Sayid couldn’t believe the oaf had blabbed. Well, actually he could.

“I don’t know. He just had it.”

She looked at the laptop screen. “You and your mother were rescued by your late father’s friend, Max’s dad.”

Sayid’s mother looked worried, and Mr. Jackson placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” he said.

“Sayid’s father was a vital link for work that was being done in the Middle East. It was his good standing that allowed Tom Gordon to get Sayid and his mother into this country.” She paused and made a quiet but pointed comment. “I don’t know just how secure that status is or whether there is a case for deportation.”

Sayid’s mother pushed her hand against her lips. Sayid looked panicked. Exactly what Charlie wanted.

“That’s a terrible threat to make to this family. How dare you. I’ll speak to Ridgeway about your behavior. He offered help, not intimidation!” Jackson said.

The girl was unperturbed. “You can do whatever you want, Mr. Jackson, but since you contacted my boss, he’s had a lot of heat put on him from people in our own government. He’s been told not to get involved in this matter. A boy’s death on the London Underground has now triggered something entirely different, and we don’t know what it is. Mr. Ridgeway does not like being squeezed by faceless bureaucrats. We’re the ones who are supposed to know everything. We’re the spooks. So I want information and I want it quickly. This now has as much to do with Max Gordon as it does with Danny Maguire’s death. He knew something important, and we want to know what.”

She looked at Sayid.

“You can save your mother a lot of heartache if you tell me.”

Keep them guessing for a few hours, yeah? Then give it to them . Max’s voice in his head calmed Sayid’s anxiety.

“I’ve got his laptop,” Sayid said.

Robert Ridgeway listened to his field agent. Max Gordon had broken into Jackson’s safe-and how did the kid ever do that? — and taken his passport from a place called the vault. He had also made a dozen online inquiries about flights to Peru, which was where khipus came from. Trouble was he could get to Peru from a dozen local airports via Europe. Charlie had no idea where he might leave from. There was also a composite letter on Gordon’s laptop, forged by pasting elements of the school’s website information pack, which had Fergus Jackson’s signature on it. It was written as a letter of authority confirming that the underage Max Gordon had permission to travel. A second letter was addressed to the British consul in Lima, asking that all assistance be given to the boy while he undertook field studies at a volunteer program in the Andes. The boy had everything planned.

“Then he’s been too clever by half,” Ridgeway told her. He would scan all the airports’ ticketing systems. Sooner or later, Max Gordon’s name would appear; then they would have him.

Morgan finished her report: a certain university lecturer in Oxford should be checked. He was the one who had visited the school and given a lecture on the Peruvian khipus. If Max Gordon had one of those things, then odds were he’d head there first. And then he would have easy access to Luton or Stansted airports, which had flights to Europe. That all seemed to fit neatly.

“I’m going to check CCTV at the most likely train station. If he’s heading anywhere by train, we’ll find him,” she said. “The London train stops at Reading. He could connect to Oxford from there.”

“Or the main London airports,” Ridgeway suggested.

“Maybe.”

“All right. We’ll get an alert at all passport controls,” Ridgeway told her. “For some reason, this boy has, or is able to obtain, information that people want. And until I know more, I don’t want another boy to die under suspicious circumstances.”

“Why? What makes you think that, boss?”

“As soon as we knew about Riga, we tried to double-check Danny Maguire’s cause of death, but we can’t; his body has gone missing. If Danny’s death was something other than suicide, Max Gordon might well be their next target.”

Max’s thoughts raced as he jogged round the perimeter wall of St. Christopher’s. Would they find him? He had laid a false trail, but was it enough? Sayid would keep them at bay for a while as far as giving out information was concerned. Baskins was bound to blab. How carefully had the authorities checked on Max’s escape?

Max had watched all the CCTV cameras at Exeter station out of the corner of his eye. Overcrowded trains made it difficult to spot anyone easily, and as people struggled with cases and backpacks onto the London train, Max ducked round the rear of the Victorian-era waiting room-and waited. It was a blind spot for the cameras. And anyone tracking him would stop watching the CCTV footage the moment the train left.

He gave it another twenty minutes, then made his way back across to the other platform. A slower train bound for Waterloo station, via Salisbury and just about every small town in between, shuddered into view. St. Christopher’s, his dad’s nursing home, was just outside London, and this would take him there.

Now, three hours later, Max’s need to know about his mother was like hunger. It drove him on as it had done since he first learned of the doubt surrounding her death. When Mr. Jackson had phoned St. Christopher’s, they had asked him to call again in a couple of days, because right now Tom Gordon was not in good enough mental condition to see his son.

Jackson would have informed anyone asking about Max’s dad of the man’s condition, which might also have bought Max a few hours. As for the rest? He didn’t know. The killers on the moor were still around. They were hard characters. His dad had told him about men like them before. They took to violence like a bird to the air-effortlessly, unthinkingly-a natural state in which to exist. There would be no reasoning with killers like that. You’re not a thug, Max. You don’t fight because you can’t control yourself. You’ll know when to strike first. It will be in their eyes. And then, God help you, but you have to do it. You’ll know when they want to kill you .