Peter James: Perfect People

After five hours, they were given another meal, this time sandwiches and fruit. And then, an hour later, John and Naomi both noticed that the plane was losing height, as if it was starting on a landing path.

The seat-belt light started flashing.

The steward and stewardess remained out of sight, somewhere beyond the galley, as they had all the time when they weren’t bringing John and Naomi water or serving the meals.

They were very definitely losing height.

Then, just as suddenly as they had whirred down, all those hours back, the shutters over the windows were rising back up. Daylight flooded in. Brilliant, dazzling, early-morning daylight.

John and Naomi stared out of their windows.

They were flying low, no more than three or four thousand feet, above hilly terrain, covered in lush, tropical vegetation. Through John’s window there was only a view of land, and the sun rising into a cloudless sky. But through Naomi’s they could see a wide, white sand beach, cobalt-blue sea. A sharp clunk echoed through the plane, followed by a series of thuds. The undercarriage going down.

Like a current of electricity, excitement suddenly coursed through Naomi, perking her up despite her tiredness. Going to see my children. Going to see Luke and Phoebe. They’re here, they’re here in this beautiful place! They are OK, they are not harmed. Going to see them, they’re going to come in this plane with us, back home.

‘Do you have any idea where we might be?’ she asked John.

He wished he had some knowledge of botany, then he might have been able to figure from the vegetation roughly where they were. He shook his head. ‘I have no real idea how fast we’ve been travelling, nor in what direction we’ve been going, or anything. I just know we’re nine hours’ flying time from Dubai. If this is the same plane Luke and Phoebe were taken on, I remember DI Pelham telling us it has a cruising speed of three hundred and fifty knots. So we’ve covered about three thousand, five hundred land miles. We could be bloody anywhere.’

He stared out of the window again. It looked like early morning, which meant they must have travelled west. If they were flying slower than he had calculated, it could be the west coast of Africa. Faster, and they could be off the east coast of South America.

‘We took off from Dubai at about seven thirty p.m. UK time. So our body clocks are now on about four thirty a.m.,’ he said. He needed a bath, a shave, a change of clothes. He felt grungy and exhausted. Naomi looked beat, too. It hurt him to see her suffering like this, hurt him almost as much as the pain of his missing children was hurting him. And he felt angry at himself, bitterly frustrated, that he wasn’t able to do anything to help her. All he could do was sit here like a lame duck, accepting graceless hospitality from these cold young people.

The hills suddenly dropped sheer away beneath them, as if they had surfed over a ledge, giving onto a flat valley that was a good two miles wide and several long. It was like a secret valley, he thought, as it if had been hewn out the centre of the hills. Probably formed by a volcanic explosion thousands of years ago.

As the plane dropped lower still, it was as if a lever on a lens had suddenly been rotated, turning a foggy blur into pin-sharp focus. One moment there had been a flat valley floor, just a mass of shimmering vegetation, the next it had suddenly become a complex of shapes rising from the ground. Buildings, mostly single-storey, interconnected, he could see now, by pathways, like a university campus stretching away into the distance in every direction, each of them camouflaged, to be invisible from the air, by vegetation on their roofs.

The plane was even lower now. Just a few hundred feet above the buildings. He was looking hard, trying to see people or vehicles, but there was no sign of any life.

It felt almost as if they were coming down to land in a ghost town.

‘What is this place?’ Naomi said.

‘Luke and Phoebe’s winter vacation resort. Bought from millions they’ve secretly made trading stocks on the internet?’

She did not smile.

The plane touched down on a runway that was painted a sandy green. It taxied for a few hundred yards and then, without slowing, entered a cavernous hangar, the roof of which, John noticed, was also covered in vegetation, and came to a halt. The place was brightly illuminated and appeared completely deserted.

‘Please come this way.’

The stewardess stood, solemn-faced, in front of them.

Unbuckling his belt, John asked her, ‘What country are we in?’

‘Our mandate is not to answer questions. You must exit now.’

Carrying their luggage, John and Naomi followed her, past the steward who stood by the exit door, down the gangway onto the blue-painted concrete floor. The air was hot and humid, and reeked of spent kerosene, and there was a high, dull whine of the turbine blades spinning down.

John glanced around, intensely curious. He saw a smaller executive jet and a helicopter parked in the hangar, a gantry on rails, a forklift truck, dozens of large containers, and pallets stacked up to the ceiling, a good hundred feet high.

There was no sign of the pilot or any other crew, nor of anyone working in here. Surreptitiously, John slid his cellphone out of his pocket, switched it on and looked at the display. There was no signal.

The stewardess pressed something on a device she was holding and stainless-steel elevator doors, a short distance ahead, slid open.

The steward said, ‘Please step in, Dr Klaesson and Mrs Klaesson.’

The four of them travelled down for several seconds in silence. Then the doors opened onto the gleaming platform of an immaculate underground railway station. A solitary, bullet-shaped carriage, its door open, sat on a monorail.

As they boarded it, feeling as if they were in some surreal dream, Naomi and John exchanged glances but said nothing. They were beyond surprise at this moment, just running on adrenaline. They had come too far to question or challenge anything any more. They were running on hope.

They took two seats and their escorts sat in the two opposite them. The doors hissed shut, and moments later the carriage began to accelerate silently and without vibration, into a dark tunnel.

After two minutes they emerged into a station that was identical to the one they had just come from. The doors opened and they followed their escorts out and into another elevator. It seemed a long ride up. John’s stomach dropped. Then, moments later, the floor pressed up against his feet, and before he was fully aware of it, they had stopped.

The doors opened onto a wide, handsome corridor that had a corporate feel, as if it might be the head offices of a bank or of some major global company.

Naomi shot John a quick glance. What is this place?

And he shrugged back, I have no more idea than you. Then he took another look at his cellphone display. Still no signal.

Now they were being led along the corridor. Past closed, windowless doors. At the far end, the stewardess opened a door and led them into an ante-room. Another exquisitely beautiful woman, also in her early twenties, at most, with short brown hair and a deadpan expression, sat at a desk. She, too, was wearing a white jumpsuit.

‘Dr and Mrs Klaesson,’ announced the stewardess.

In contrast to their escorts, she gave them a pleasant smile, stood up, walked across to grand, double doors and opened them. Then, in a clipped Boston accent she said, ‘Will you please go through,’ and stepped aside for them to pass.

John let Naomi go first and followed her into a large office, with a white carpet and striking modern furniture, the centrepiece of which was an oval, slate-grey desk. And from behind which a figure was rising.