Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

Someone shouted, high above. One of the policemen. Jamie took a deep breath. It was finally over. It was time for him to go.

He took hold of his brother. The two of them walked up the path and together they went into the cave.

The police never found them. They climbed down and searched along the shoreline. They even looked inside the cave although they had heard of the Washoe traditions and knew they had no right to be there. By the time the sun began to set there were more than a dozen officers in the area. But if Scott and Jamie Tyler had ever been there, they had now completely disappeared. Had they walked into the lake and drowned? It seemed impossible. They would surely have been seen from above, and anyway there was no sign of the bodies.

Alicia was admitting nothing. In fact she and Danny denied that the two boys had ever been in the car. She demanded to speak to Senator Trelawny.

And while the police were calling off the search and discussing what to do next, many thousands of miles away, a door in a church had opened and two boys were stepping out into a strange and unfamiliar world. A few tourists glanced at them curiously. A priest, who had seen them emerge, scratched his head in puzzlement. The door had been kept locked for as long as he could remember and he was sure that there was nothing more than an empty storeroom on the other side.

It took Scott and Jamie half an hour to find a tour guide who spoke English and from her they learnt that they had arrived in Peru, even if they had managed to wind up in quite the wrong part of the country. They were in the city of Cuzco, high up in the Andes. The church was called Santo Domingo and had been built by the Spanish on top of another sacred site… Coricancha, the temple of gold, once a place of worship for the ancient Incas.

They were far away from California and although everything – including the language – was very alien to them, they knew they were safe. That night, they stayed in a hotel. At the very last moment, acting on impulse, Alicia had pressed a hundred dollars into Jamie’s hand. The money would pay for a room and a meal. The next morning they would use it to buy two bus tickets to a little town on the western coast. A place called Nazca.

In fact, the journey took them more than thirty hours. Scott still wasn’t talking – he wasn’t even sending any thoughts -and at night, when he was asleep, he would mutter and cry out and his body would twitch as if it was being prodded or given electric shocks. Jamie forced himself not to worry. Pedro was waiting. The healer. Scott would see him and he would be all right.

Three days later, they arrived. A taxi dropped them at an attractive whitewashed house set in a large garden with fountains playing and llamas wandering across the lawn. As they walked through the gate, the front door of the house opened and a boy emerged. Jamie recognized him at once. Dark hair cut short. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes.

It was Matt.

Another boy stepped out behind him and again Jamie knew at once who he was. Pedro. It seemed strange to think that the last time they had met, they had been drinking wine together in a field just hours after finishing a war. He wondered how he would ever explain it all. Where would he even begin?

Matt stepped forward. Although he was trying not to show it, it was obvious that he was in pain. So that made three of them. Scott needed help. And Jamie still had a large hole in his shoulder. He wondered how many of them would be hurt, how many of them would have to die before this was all over.

At last they stood facing each other.

“Jamie,” Matt said. “And Scott.”

He reached out a hand. Jamie took it.

Four of the Five had come together. The circle was almost complete.

The girl in the business-class lounge at Heathrow Airport was dressed in a short white jacket, a pink T-shirt and trousers cut off above the ankle. She had a backpack on the seat beside her and a book open on her lap, although she hadn’t read any of it in the thirty minutes she had been there. There was a glass of Coke on the table in front of her but she hadn’t touched that either.

It was the second week in November and the weather had suddenly turned nasty, blustery showers hitting London and sending the commuters running behind umbrellas and clutched hats. Even now the rain was rattling against the windows of the lounge, dripping off the wings of the waiting planes. The runways looked even greyer than usual. Most of the flights had been delayed.

The girl carried a British passport but her features were anything but. Her looks were very striking, partly Chinese with long black hair tied at the back and eyes that were an unusual shade of green. She was small and thin but there was a confidence about her, a sense that she could look after herself. She was making the flight as a Skyflyer Solo – that was what the airline called her – and they had given her a plastic label to wear around her neck. She had pulled it off the moment she had sat down.

Her name was Scarlett Adams and she was fifteen years old.

She wasn’t usually a nervous flyer but she was nervous today. She still didn’t know why she was making this journey. Only the day before she had been at the expensive private school in Dulwich where she had been sent when she was thirteen. St Genevieve’s was an all-girls school, housed in a rather grand Victorian building with ivy growing up the walls and extensive grounds at the back. Although the school did have a boarding wing, she was a day girl. Her parents lived abroad but they had a house five minutes away and a housekeeper who looked after her during term time.

Yesterday, just before lunch, the headmistress had asked to see her in her study. As Scarlett had climbed the stairs to the waiting area, which everyone called the graveyard because there were so many portraits of dead teachers, she had wondered what sort of trouble she might be in. Was it that argument with Miss Wilson, the geography teacher? Or the physics homework she had “left on the bus”? Or the fight in the computer block – even if it hadn’t been her who’d started it?

But when she was shown in to the cosy room with its gas fire and view over the front drive, it was the last thing she had expected to hear.

“Scarlett, I’m afraid you’re going to be leaving us for a few weeks.” The headmistress didn’t look at all pleased. “I’ve just had a phone call from your father. He was very mysterious, if you want the truth. But it seems that some sort of crisis has arisen. He’s well – but he needs you with him. He’s already arranged the flight.”

“When am I leaving?”

“Tomorrow. I have to say, it’s very inconvenient. You’ve got your GCSEs to consider and we’re going to have to recast the Christmas play. But he was insistent. He said he’d talk to you tonight.”

Scarlett had spoken to her father when she got home but he hadn’t added much more to what the headmistress had already said. He needed her to come out for a week or two. He would explain why when she got there. The housekeeper – a dark and rather sour-looking Scottish woman – was already packing. It seemed that there was nothing to discuss. Scarlett had spent the rest of the evening emailing and texting her friends and went to bed in a bad mood.

And she wasn’t feeling much better now, waiting for her flight to be called. She looked around her. There was the usual collection of business people, some of them hitting the free alcohol, others catching up with the day’s news. A plasma TV stood in one corner of the lounge and she glanced at the screen.

“Today, the new president-elect of the United States issued a statement…”

They were going on about the election again. For the past week, the news had been full of little else. Scarlett watched as Charles Baker appeared behind the rostrum, facing the press corps.