Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

“Where is he now?”

“Not all that far from here. He’s just over the state line in California… in the High Sierra. Have you heard of a place called Auburn?”

Jamie shook his head.

“It’s an old mining town. It got big in the gold rush days. John was born there and today it’s his fiftieth birthday, so they’re giving him a parade.” There was a television in the room, on the kitchen counter, and a remote control next to the bed. Alicia reached out and picked it up. “There should be something on the news,” she said.

She switched on the TV.

It was already tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel. The anchor man was talking about the result of a trial following some big financial scandal. Then there were advertisements. Then a story about a basketball player charged with murder.

“We’ll meet the senator in Los Angeles,” Alicia said.

“Are the police still looking for me?” Jamie asked. It suddenly dawned on him how ridiculous his situation had become. He had committed no crime but he was still wanted for the murders of Don White and Marcie Kelsey. And as Jeremy Rabb, he was presumably wanted for various drug offences and for escaping from Silent Creek. How had he got himself into this mess?

But Alicia never got a chance to answer the question.

“… and in Auburn, California, last-minute preparations for a very special birthday party. John Trelawny, the man most people believe will win the November election, is returning to his home town, where he was born fifty years ago. These are the streets where, in just a few hours’ time, five thousand people are expected to gather to welcome the senator…”

The story they had been waiting for came onto the screen. Glancing at the picture, Jamie froze. It was as if a chasm had opened up underneath him and he had been sucked into it. He found himself grabbing hold of the bed as if to steady himself. His eyes were fixed on the TV.

He had seen a face he recognized. Not John Trelawny. It was the last face he had expected to see. It wasn’t anyone he had met in the real world. It wasn’t a real person at all.

It was a statue.

A grey stone face. Skin like putty. Hollowed-out eyes. The figure was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cowboy hat. It was resting on one knee, holding a bowl. There was some sort of metal bridge in the background and a few pieces of old mine works around.

“What is it?” Alicia demanded. She had seen the look on his face.

The camera had only lingered on it for a moment but Jamie had heard the words of the commentary, “… looking for gold, the town was first founded in the nineteenth century…” And suddenly he understood what this man was… the man he had first seen kneeling by the water in his dreams.

Not a cowboy. A gold prospector.

Why?

“Jamie…?” Alicia was becoming alarmed.

“Did you see? Just now…”

“What?”

“On the screen!”

It was too late. The picture had changed. Now it was showing old footage of John Trelawny waving to the crowd at another rally.

“There was a man on the screen just now. Not a man. A statue. I’ve seen it before and. I don’t know why, but it means something. It’s important.”

“In Auburn?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Alicia slid off the bed. She had a laptop with her and she opened it, powering it up and connecting it to the Internet. Meanwhile, Jamie was thinking furiously. He knew he had been sent a sign and that it was up to him, and him alone, to make sense of it.

The statue of a gold prospector in Auburn. A grey giant kneeling on a beach. They were one and the same – Jamie was sure of it. He remembered what Matt had told him. The dream world was there to help them. But sometimes it sent them messages in strange ways. What had the grey man told him?

“He’s gonna kill him. And it’s your job to stop him.”

Was Scott going to be killed in Auburn? Was that what he had meant?

“His name is Claude Chana,” Alicia said. She had accessed an Auburn website on her computer and was looking at a picture of the statue now. “He found gold in the Auburn ravine in 1848 and that led to the establishment of a mining camp which later became the town. There’s a statue of him down by the old firehouse.”

“ He’s gonna kill him.”

“You mean… Scott?”

“No, boy. You don’t understand-”

But suddenly, with horrible clarity, Jamie did understand. There were two men fighting to become president: John Trelawny and Charles Baker. Nightrise supported Baker. But Trelawny was winning.

So Nightrise were going to assassinate him.

And they were going to use Scott.

“He’s gonna kill him.” The “he” was Scott. The “him” was Trelawny. It was as simple as that.

“You have to call the senator,” Jamie said, and it almost sounded to him as if it was someone else who was talking. “You have to warn him.”

“What…?”

“They’re going to try to kill him.”

Alicia stared at him. “What are you saying? How can you know that?”

“Please, Alicia. Don’t argue with me. I can’t explain it to you but they’re going to kill Senator Trelawny in Auburn today and you have to get him on the phone and stop him going there.”

Alicia hesitated only a few seconds more. Then she grabbed her cell phone and speed-dialled a number. Jamie waited as the number was connected. He saw her face fall.

“Senator…” she said, and he could tell she was leaving a message. “This is Alicia McGuire. I’ve been talking to Jamie and he says you’re in danger, that you mustn’t go to Auburn. Please call me back.”

She snapped the phone shut.

“He wasn’t there,” Jamie said.

“I only have his personal cell phone number,” Alicia explained. “He wanted me to be able to call him directly. But he may have left his own phone behind. He may have switched it off. I don’t know how to reach him.”

“How far is it to Auburn?”

“I don’t know. It’s the other side of Lake Tahoe.”

“How long would it take us to get there?”

Alicia’s face brightened. “Not that long. A couple of hours.”

“And when does the parade start?”

“Midday.” She looked at her watch. It was a few minutes after ten o’clock. She made a decision. “We can make it,” she said. “Get dressed. I’ll wake Daniel. It’s going to be tight, but we can get there…”

The crowds had started arriving early for the birthday parade and by eleven o’clock there must have been two thousand people lining the pavements, with more spilling out of their cars every minute. There were dozens of police officers on special duty. The secret service had gone in the night before and cordoned off the area where the parade would take place. While the local residents slept, they had discreetly swept the entire town, using dogs to sniff out any trace of high explosives, installing security cameras, identifying the rooftops and the second-floor windows that might provide a marksman with cover.

There were two quite separate parts of Auburn. The modern section was unremarkable, a couple of streets that met at an angle with the usual assortment of shops and offices. But the Old Town, as everyone called it, had been almost perfectly preserved, a living echo of the nineteenth century and the gold rush that had created it.

It stood – or nestled, rather – at the bottom of a hill. The main street swept down and then split into two, each side curving round like the two halves of a horseshoe with an open area, like a town square, in the middle. Shops and houses ran all the way along the edges, most of them brick or timber-framed. But it was the buildings in the middle of the square that were the town’s pride and joy. One was an old post office, the other a firehouse, which looked like an oversized toy with its pointed roof and red and white stripes.