Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

“Alicia has already told me who he is,” Trelawny replied.

“She has?” Cornfield was taken aback. “Sir, the Nevada police are actively looking for this child. He’s wanted for first degree murder. If you let him leave here, if anyone finds out that he’s even been in the same room as you, he could destroy your entire campaign.”

“Come in, Warren. Shut the door behind you.”

The security man did as he was told. Trelawny waited until he had calmed down.

“Have you called the police?” Trelawny asked.

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“That’s good. Let’s leave it that way.” Trelawny turned to Alicia. “You’d better go,” he said. “But I have your cell number and I’ll get in touch. It should be possible to arrange what you’ve asked. I have friends…” He went over to Jamie and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I won’t forget meeting you,” he said. “And what you said, about winning the election – you’re absolutely right.” He smiled. “I hope you find your brother.”

“Sir…” Warren Cornfield couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “These two people should be in jail.”

“It’s OK, Warren. I think I know what I’m doing. I want you to show my guests out. Don’t arrest them. Don’t call the police. Make sure nobody gets in their way.”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

Cornfield was still scowling as he showed them to the door. At the last moment, Jamie turned round and took one last look at the man who might become president. He had picked up the little box and was holding it with a sort of wonderment, as if he too could somehow look through the wooden surface and uncover the secrets locked inside. Then the door closed. He didn’t think he would see him again.

Pain.

Scott Tyler didn’t know how long he had been here. Nor did he know where “here” was or how he had got there.

He was lying on a bed. To begin with, there had been chains around his wrists and handcuffs, but now they had no further need of them. He was too weak to move. If he had been able to examine himself, he would have seen he was still in the same clothes that he had been wearing at the theatre, although the shirt had been ripped open and the trousers were crumpled and torn. Not that he remembered the theatre any more or anything that had happened on the night he was seized. A very large part of his memory had been taken away from him. The drugs dripping into his right arm had done that. The doses had been carefully monitored, the injections exactly timed. They didn’t want to kill him or to drive him mad. Their aim was more complicated than that. They wanted to tear him away from the life he had been living and leave him floating helplessly until he was ready to be made theirs.

He hadn’t eaten for days and they had barely brought him enough water to keep him alive. Nor had he slept. Every time his eyes closed, they would bombard the room with a barrage of sound, drum beats, music, machinegun fire. The lights were kept on all the time. Right now it could have been the middle of the day or the night. It made no difference. Scott was barely conscious. And he was ready for the next stage.

The door opened. Scott didn’t even try to look up to see who had come in. He was afraid to do anything without being told. There was a rustle of fabric as someone sat down. He smelled a scent, some sort of flower. Trembling, he turned his head and saw that a woman had come in and sat down in the chair next to him. She was looking at him as if unsure what to make of him. Or maybe she was deciding what to do next.

She lifted a hand. Scott saw that she wore several rings. For a moment, two of her fingers rested on his arm. “What have they done to you?” She spoke for the first time. Her voice was soft and almost musical. “You poor boy,” she went on. “I’d have come sooner if only I’d known but, you see, it’s so difficult for me. I want to be your friend. But I have to know that you trust me. You have to be on my side.”

Her fingers moved to his forehead, moving a lock of hair out of his eyes.

“Jamie left you,” she went on. “Do you remember – at the theatre? That’s when they came for you and your brother just abandoned you. All your life you looked after him but he didn’t care. The first chance he got, he was away, leaving you to all this. Right now, he’s laughing at you. Because he’s all right. He’s having a fine old time. And you’re stretched out on your back, connected up to all these nasty tubes, and you could die here and nobody would think twice.

“But that’s the mistake you’ve made since you were little, Scott. Do you remember Ed and Leanne in Carson City? You thought they’d look after you but they let you down. And then there were Don and Marcie and they were even worse. But that’s the thing about life, isn’t it? It’s always the good people who get pushed around. The little people. Do you want to be a little person, Scott, or do you want to be with me? Because, you see, in the world that’s coming, I’m going to be in charge, and you’re going to have to start asking yourself, which end of the whip do you want to be?

“I’ll leave you to think about it, my dear. There are some people I work for… well, not exactly people. They’ll be with us very soon and they’ll be so glad to know that you’ve joined us, that you’ve decided to become their servant. Jamie, unfortunately, is not sensible enough to make that choice. But maybe one day you’ll be able to get your own back on him. Maybe one day we’ll let you take that little swine and put a knife through his heart.

“But right now, I must go. You think about what I’ve said and maybe tomorrow we’ll have another little chat.”

The door opened a second time. Somebody else had come into the room. The woman stood up.

“Mr Banes has come to see you now,” she explained. “I wish I could stay with you and keep him away. But until you’re ready for me, until you’re mine, I can’t. I’m so sorry, my dear. But I will come back. I promise.”

The bald man sat down in her place. Scott squeezed his eyes shut and groaned, deep inside himself.

He heard the door close softly and the two of them were left alone.

Jamie had been in court once before so there were no surprises here: not the smallness of the room, the few people in it, the speed at which everything took place. There were two tables facing the judge, and a middle-aged woman dressed in black sat between the flag of Nevada and the Stars and Stripes. Jamie was at one table with his lawyer. His probation officer and a woman from the district attorney’s office were at the other. A clerk took notes and a security man stood by with a seen-it-all-before look on his face. There were two rows of chairs at the back of the room. No press or public were allowed into a juvenile court but Alicia was sitting there on her own, an anxious look on her face. She had come as a family friend.

Jamie’s hands and feet were shackled. That had alarmed him because it hadn’t happened the last time he had been taken into custody. But this time the offence was more serious. He had been arrested, supposedly, for selling drugs at school – a crime which would guarantee him jail time. It was all fake, of course. The probation officer and the lawyer were both part of the set-up, somehow connected to John Trelawny, who had arranged the whole thing. They had even given Jamie a false name – Jeremy Rabb: case number J83157. Somehow they had slotted him into the Nevada juvenile justice system and, as far as Jamie knew, the judge was the only person in the room who didn’t know what was really going on.

It was all fake – and yet the plastic strips binding his wrists and the chains around his ankles were horribly real. Free movement, the most basic of all human rights, had been taken from him. He felt the horror of having his identity stripped away, of belonging to a system that would now do with him as it pleased. Worse still, he remembered what the senator, John Trelawny, had told Alicia on the telephone.