Anthony Horowitz - Skeleton Key

“This is your captain speaking. Please fasten your seat-belts and return your seats to the upright position. We will shortly be coming in to land.”

Alex looked out of the window again. The sea was an extraordinary shade of turquoise. It didn’t look like water at all. Then the plane dipped and suddenly he saw the island. Both islands. Cuba itself was to the north. Cayo Esqueleto was below it. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and for a moment the land mass was perfectly clear, laid out as if on the surface of the world, two patches of emerald green with a coastline that seemed to shimmer an electric blue. The plane tilted.

The islands disappeared and the next time Alex saw them the plane was coming in low, rushing towards a runway that seemed almost unreachable, hemmed in by offices and hotels and roads and palm trees. There was a control tower, ugly and misshapen. A low-rise terminal, prefabricated concrete and glass. Two more planes, already on the ground, surrounded by service trucks. There was a jolt as the back wheels came into contact with the tarmac. They were down.

Alex unclipped his seat-belt.

“Wait a minute, Alex,” Troy said. “The seat-belt light is still on.”

She was behaving like a mother. But the sort of mother she had chosen to be was bossy and demanding. Alex had to admit that it suited her. Anybody watching them might believe they were a family, but would have to add that they were an unhappy one. Since the events in Miami, the two agents had practically ignored him. Alex found it hard to work them out. Turner would be dead if it hadn’t been for him, but neither of them would admit it-as if, in some way, he had dented their professional pride. And they still insisted that he had blown up Mayfair Lady, killing everyone onboard. Even Alex was finding it hard to avoid a sense of responsibility. It was true that he had set fire to the petrol. What other reason could there have been for the explosion that had followed?

He tried to put it out of his mind. The plane had come to a halt and everyone had stood up, fighting for the overhead lockers in the cramped compartment. As Alex reached up to take his own bag, the Game Boy almost fell out of his grip. Turner’s head snapped round. Alex saw a flash of alarm in his eyes. “Be careful with that!” he said.

So he was right. There was something hidden inside the Game Boy. It was typical of the CIA agents to keep him in the dark. But that hadn’t stopped them asking him to carry it in.

It was midday, the worst time to arrive. As they came out of the plane, Alex felt the heat reflecting off the tarmac. It was hard to breathe. The air was heavy and smelled of diesel. He was sweating before he had even reached the bottom of the steps and the arrivals lounge offered no relief. The air-conditioning had broken down and Alex soon found himself trapped in a confined space with two or three hundred people and no windows. The terminal was more like a large shed than a modern airport building. The walls were a drab olive green, decorated by posters of the island that looked twenty years out of date.

The passengers from Alex’s flight caught up with passengers still being processed from the flight before and the result was a large, shapeless crowd of people and hand luggage, shuffling slowly forward towards three uniformed immigration officials in glass cabins. There were no queues. As each passport was stamped and one more person was allowed in, the crowd simply pressed forward, oozing through the security controls.

An hour later, Alex was still there. He was dirty and crumpled and he had a raging thirst. He looked to one side where a couple of old, splintered doors led into men’s and women’s toilets. There might be a tap inside but would the water even be drinkable? A guard in a brown shirt and trousers stood watching, leaning against the wall beside a floor-to-ceiling mirror, a machine-gun cradled in his arms. Alex wanted to stretch his arms but he was too hemmed in. There was an old woman with grey hair and a sagging face standing right next to him. She smelled of cheap perfume. As he half-turned, he found himself almost embraced by her and recoiled, unable to hide his disgust. He glanced up and saw that there was a single security camera set in the ceiling. He remembered how worried Joe Byrne had been about security at Santiago Airport. But it seemed to him that just about anyone could have walked in and nobody would have noticed. The guard looked bored and half asleep. The camera was probably out of focus.

At last they reached passport control. The official behind the glass screen was young, with black greasy hair and glasses. Turner slid three passports and three completed immigration forms through. The official opened them.

“Don’t fidget, Alex,” Troy said. “We’ll be through in a minute.”

“Sure, Mom.”

The passport man looked up at them. His eyes showed no welcome at all. “Mr Gardiner? What is the purpose of your visit?” he demanded.

“Vacation,” Turner replied.

The man’s eyes flickered briefly over the passports and then at the people to whom they belonged. He slid them under a scanner, yawning at the same time. The guard that Alex had noticed was nowhere near. He was gazing out of the window, watching the planes.

“Where do you live?” the official asked.

“ Los Angeles.” Turner’s face was blank. “I’m in the movie business.”

“And your wife?”

“I don’t work,” Troy said.

The official had come to Alex’s passport. He opened it and checked the picture against the boy who stood in front of him. “Alex Gardiner,” he said.

“How you doing?” Alex smiled at him.

“This is your first trip to Cayo Esqueleto?”

“Yeah. But I hope it won’t be my last.”

The passport official stared at him, his eyes magnified by the glasses. He seemed completely uninterested. “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked.

“The Valencia,” Turner said quietly. He had already written the name on the three immigration forms.

Another pause. Then the official picked up a stamp and brought it crashing down three times-three gunshots in the confined space of the kiosk. He handed back the passports. “Enjoy your visit to Cayo Esqueleto.”

Alex and the two CIA agents passed through the immigration room and into the luggage hall where their cases were already waiting, circling endlessly on an old, creaking conveyor belt. And that was it, Alex thought. It couldn’t have been easier! All that fuss and he hadn’t even been needed in the first place.

He picked up his case.

At the same time, although he was unaware of it, his picture and passport details were already being transmitted to police headquarters in Havana, Cuba, along with those of Turner and Troy. The “family” had actually been photographed three times. Once by the overhead camera that Alex had seen in the arrivals lounge, but which was far more sophisticated than he would have believed. As old-fashioned as it looked, it could zoom in on the hole in a man’s button or a single word written in a diary and blow it up fifty times if needed. They had been photographed a second time by a camera behind the mirror next to the toilets. And finally, a profile close-up shot had been taken by a camera concealed in a brooch worn by an old lady who smelled of cheap perfume and who had not, in fact, arrived on a plane but who was always there, mingling with the new arrivals, moving in on anyone who had aroused the suspicions of the people she worked for. The immigration forms that Turner had filled in were also on their way, sealed in a plastic bag. His answers to the standard questions mattered less to the authorities than the forms themselves. The paper had been specially formulated to record fingerprints, and in less than an hour these would be digitally scanned and checked against a huge database in the same police building.