David Gilman - The Devil's breath

“OK,” Sayid had told him, “you’d better take this.” His friend had handed Max his new phone. “I’ve swapped the SIM card, it’s clean. I don’t know where you’re going to end up, but if you really think there’s someone out to kill you and your dad, odds are they’ll have a trace on your phone.”

Sayid explained that if Max texted him, the program he had created would scramble the message. Text was quicker and safer than voice. Sayid would then unscramble the message at his end, once the signal had been bounced in and out of European servers. With any luck the bad guys wouldn’t twig that Sayid was his contact; at least not for a while. The biggest problem would be if Max was out of range of any signal. The best Sayid could offer then was for Max to use a landline, take a chance with uncoded speech, and Sayid would rely on his computer to disguise the download.

Max checked the text. Peterson followed me 2 airprt. Also thnk he searched my rm. Dont trst him. Rpt: Dont trst Ptrson.

Twenty minutes before Sayid received Max’s encrypted text message, he was pounding, tired and wet from a strenuous cross-country run, up the broad granite staircase to his room. The boys always ran as hard as they could across Dartmoor’s demanding terrain because they had the time to themselves from when they crossed the finish line until the evening meal was served in the oak-timbered hall.

His trainers squelched from the bog sludge, so he leaned against the wall and pulled them off, preferring the sensation of the cold stone beneath his feet. In that moment of silence he heard someone talking, and sounding quite exasperated. The voice was coming from Mr. Peterson’s room. As he got nearer to the closed door he could clearly hear Peterson’s voice; it was obviously a telephone conversation. Sayid made sure no one else was in sight and pressed closer to the old door.

“… I told you he never got to Toronto…. I don’t know how he managed it! … and I don’t want to keep going over it … no … no, the boy at the airport must have been a friend, he’s not a pupil here…. None of that matters. We’ve lost him and I’m really worried about it now….”

Then a few muffled words were said that Sayid could not hear. Peterson had probably turned away from the door, perhaps he was pacing back and forth across the room, as his voice was unclear at times. Then Sayid picked it up again.

“… well, obviously South Africa … and if he knows or finds out what his father discovered … yes … yes … We must do what we can…. I feel responsible. Do we have any people over there? Anyone we can use? Good … put them on alert until I can find out more….”

Sayid dropped a shoe. The noise it made was not particularly loud but it was enough for Peterson to stop talking. Sayid ran as fast he could on tiptoe along the corridor to his room, and as Peterson yanked open the door he was already around a corner, out of sight. Peterson looked up and down the corridor and saw no one, but he could not fail to notice the wet footprints and the globule of black mud on the floor. The footprints went straight towards Sayid Khalif’s room.

Peterson weighed up the risks. Had the boy heard anything? He stepped back into his room. If he confronted Sayid now, it might trigger the boy’s suspicions that Max was heading into serious trouble.

Max’s connecting flight to Namibia landed a couple of hours later. Windhoek’s airport had only a small building for its terminal, but South African Cliff Swallows nested there, and White-rumped Swifts swooped across the building’s panoramic windows giving a view of the harsh scrubland that lay beyond the runway. A dozen or more kilometers away, a malevolent-looking black cloud rolled across the horizon like a giant rain-filled tumbleweed; a sudden storm, prodded on by forked lightning, dumping its much-needed rainwater.

The rolling weather front reminded Max of home.

Dartmoor was a remote and sometimes dangerous place, but this huge expanse of wilderness could swallow him up and no one would know.

Max suddenly felt very alone and, if he was honest, scared. The flight to Canada would have landed a few hours before he reached South Africa. If the people following him had watched the airport in Toronto and had seen his look-alike arrive, would that have been enough to fool them? If it hadn’t, maybe they had figured out where he was heading. He was about to check the cell to see if Sayid had sent any messages, when his eyes caught the fleeting blur of a swift as it swooped to catch a flying insect.

The bird probably saved his life.

As he turned to watch it, he saw two men heading towards him who looked as though they wrestled crocodiles for a living. One had long hair and wore a bush shirt and khaki shorts; his squashed-nosed face sported a scrub beard. A scar across his cheek separated the whiskers-a white slash against his sun-baked skin that the beard failed to conceal. The other was pure Hollywood. Tall and broad, his chest like two concrete paving slabs that his T-shirt could barely restrain. His close-cropped hair and pilot’s dark glasses could have got him work for any top fashion magazine. Instead, he and his partner, ex-South African policemen, were hired killers.

Max didn’t have to think twice about their intentions. He ran for the nearest door and they followed, dodging the few remaining passengers. Max pushed through into a STAFF ONLY area, a long corridor with wire cages to one side and a solid concrete-block wall on the other. He heard the thump of the door as the men came after him. He risked a glance over his shoulder-the men were too big to run side by side along the narrow passage, so one of them ducked off to his right and clattered onto a metal spiral staircase that cork-screwed down through the cages which, Max realized, were for storing luggage waiting to be loaded on to aircraft.

Scarface was almost on him. Max felt him snatch at his neck and the man swore, missing him, as Max stretched out an extra pace. But there was nowhere to go, and within a couple of seconds Scarface would grip him with those huge hands. Then Max saw the downwards-twisting rollers used by cargo handlers to slide heavy cases to the loading area below. Max dived, his backpack now on his chest like a belly board. The rollers rattled as he hurtled downwards. The man behind him shouted something in a foreign language and kicked the wire-caged wall in frustration. He would have to retrace his steps to the stairs. Max hit the curved stainless-steel barrier at the bottom of the chute. It flipped him over. He rolled, hugged his bag to his chest, vaulted over the low barrier and ran straight into Mr. Hollywood, who wrapped his muscled arms around him. “Got him!” he yelled; his expensive capped white teeth smiled as they chomped down again and again on a piece of well-chewed gum.

He was too confident. Max threw his head back, giving himself just enough leverage, then slammed his heel down, as hard as he could, on the man’s ankle. It was one of the most painful self-defense tricks he had learned. Mr. Hollywood shouted out in pain and dropped his chin in disbelief as Max whipped his head back up, connecting with the perfect jawline. He heard the teeth shatter and a mumbled, agonizing choking sound. Max knew the man had probably bitten his tongue half through. The shock and pain weren’t enough to stop him though, and he lurched at Max, who rammed a shoulder with all his strength beneath the gasping man’s rib cage, as if he were tackling a rugby opponent. It rocked Mr. Hollywood back on his heels, the momentum forcing his legs against an overweight suitcase; he lost his balance and tumbled helplessly backwards towards the stainless-steel rim of the chute that moments earlier had flipped Max over. It sliced into the base of the man’s skull. Blood oozed around his T-shirt and his eyes rolled back into his head. Air bubbled through what was left of his smashed mouth. He wasn’t very handsome anymore.