8
THE TOWER/ROOM SIX
Dr. Feng’s Office: 4:00 P.M. (Session 3)
DR. FENG: Well, Alex, you’ve been here for almost a week now. How are you feeling?
ALEX: I’m sort of all right, Doctor. But I’m not sleeping very well. And I’m tired all the time.
DR. FENG: I could ask the nurse to give you some more sleeping pills.
ALEX: Yes. That would be great. I can’t think straight at the moment. Do you think it’s because of the accident?
DR. FENG: Of course. What other reason could there be?
ALEX: Have you found out what happened yet?
DR. FENG: I’m sorry?
ALEX: The accident. You said it was being investigated.
DR. FENG: I’m still waiting for the report.
ALEX: But it’s been almost a week—
DR. FENG: Alex, let’s talk about you. You were in Murmansk very recently. I’d like to know what you were doing there.
ALEX: You’re talking about Colonel Sarov.
DR. FENG: That’s right.
ALEX: I can’t talk about it. He had this plan. He was going to start a nuclear war. But everything went wrong, and in the end . . .
DR. FENG: What happened to Colonel Sarov, Alex?
Subject became visibly distressed. Unable to continue. On the edge of tears.
ALEX: Do we have to talk about this now? I’m not feeling well. I want to go to my room.
DR. FENG: Of course. Don’t upset yourself, Alex. I’ll call for the nurse . . .
Session terminated: 4:07 P.M.
The session had gone exactly as Alex had planned. Another two days had passed, and in that time he hadn’t had so much as a sip of the apple juice. It was surprising that the miniature palm tree in the dining room hadn’t wilted and died. Every time Ivan left the room, Alex had emptied his glass into it. But he could already feel the difference in his thought processes. Suddenly he was aware of everything around him. He was beginning to put the pieces together: the guards, the German shepherd, the drone, the electric fence, the lake, the jetty. It was still possible that Bellhanger Abbey was exactly what it pretended to be: an MI6 clinic for agents hurt in action. That didn’t matter anymore. Alex was going to find a way out of here.
From the moment he had entered Dr. Feng’s office, Alex had pretended to be ill and upset—but actually he was neither and he had steered the conversation the way he wanted. He wasn’t going to be coaxed into giving any further information about himself or anything else. It had been interesting, challenging Feng once more about the accident. Could a week really have passed without MI6 finding out anything? For that matter, why had neither Blunt nor Mrs. Jones been to the abbey to visit him? They weren’t the friendliest of people. It was unlikely that either of them would bring grapes or flowers. But they needed him. If they knew he had been hurt, they would want to make sure that he was all right.
There was something else.
It was the mention of Sarov that had done it. At last, Alex knew why he had been on the motorway. He had just returned to England at the end of a mission that had taken him from the Wimbledon tennis championship to the Caribbean island of Skeleton Key. He had been recruited by the American intelligence service, pretending to be the son of two agents he had never met. The adventure had ended on the very edge of Russia, in an extraordinary ship’s graveyard in Murmansk, and from there he had been flown home in a Royal Air Force jet, the Sentinel R1, normally used for intelligence gathering. Very quickly now, piece by piece, his memory was coming back to him. The plane had landed at an RAF base near Newbury. There had been a car waiting for Alex and also a man, someone he knew. But who was it? Alex still couldn’t see his face.
It didn’t matter. He was getting stronger with every minute that passed. The memory would come back soon enough.
Half past six was always a quiet time in the abbey, with dinner being prepared and Dr. Feng on his way home . . . or wherever it was he went when he finished work. That was when Alex left his room, determined to make a proper examination of his surroundings. He headed first for the tower that he had seen from the gardens, which was where the main security office seemed to be located. He had already noticed a low, arched doorway with a spiral staircase leading upward. Moving quickly and silently, he passed through the arch and made his way up. If anyone stopped him, he would say he had gotten lost. After all, he was fairly certain he was meant to be drugged. And he had a good excuse: the abbey was a warren of archways and corridors.
The staircase was narrow, lit by a series of narrow windows that had been cut into the thick stone walls. The tower was about the same height as a six-story building, but there was just a single room right at the top. Alex stopped beside the door and stood there, catching his breath. Then, carefully, he poked his head around and looked into a square chamber with windows on three sides, surrounded by a balcony. The abbey might be centuries old, but this room, the security center, was brand-new.
Two men were sitting at a console, surrounded by computers, television screens, and security apparatus. They were younger than anyone Alex had met so far, maybe in their early thirties. One of them was smoking a cigarette, the other sipping a can of Coke, with his legs stretched out and his heels hooked onto the surface in front of him. They didn’t look at all like MI6 agents. In fact, they reminded Alex of the sort of hired hands he had seen both at Sayle Enterprises and at Sarov’s villa in Skeleton Key. He took in the rest of the room: a couple of filing cabinets, a solid-looking metal cupboard, a dartboard with six darts scattered across its face. The whole place stank of sweat and cigarette smoke.
Suddenly, one of the men turned, and before Alex could duck out of sight, he had been seen.
“What do you want?” the man demanded. He had a scar that zigzagged across his upper and lower lip. It had the effect of twisting his mouth into two pieces, as if he were being reflected in a broken mirror.
“I’m sorry.” Alex stepped into view, trying to look lost and innocent. “Dr. Feng said I could come up here. I want to look at the view.”
The two men exchanged a glance. Then the man with the scar shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Alex was just a kid with nothing better to do. “Sure. If that’s what the doctor said.”
There was a glass door leading out onto the balcony. Alex stepped outside and found himself standing behind a barrier that consisted of a stone wall with a series of columns rising up to his waist. If he leaned too far forward, he would topple over. The sky was getting darker and not just with the coming night. Alex was sure there was going to be a storm. He could feel the closeness in the air. He stood there, examining the lawns far below with the marble fountain and the gate on one side and the tennis court on the other. The electric fence curved around in an almost perfect circle, separating the abbey from the lake with its jetty and crane. From this height, Alex got a sense of the woodland, which continued, uninterrupted, all the way to the horizon. He had been told that he was in Wiltshire, but the truth was that this was a world of its own, utterly enclosed and with no obvious way out.
A car—a bright orange Lada—pulled out from the side of the building and drove toward the gate. Alex could see Dr. Feng in the front seat, sitting behind the wheel like an overstuffed cushion. The two guards, Karl and Vaudrey, examined him briefly before they allowed him to pass. The German shepherd dog sniffed around the wheels, and Alex realized that even if he managed to hide in the back of the car, the animal would know he was there. Anyway, he had tried exactly the same thing when he was a prisoner of Colonel Sarov, and that hadn’t ended at all well. He would have to find another way.
He had the beginnings of an idea. Standing there, with the first angry gusts of wind tugging at his hair, he began to measure the distances: the height of the fence, the position of the gate, the distance to the first trees and the edge of the lake.
Could it work?
No.
It would be suicide. There had to be another way.
He went back into the security room, and this time he noticed the drone—the Crow—that he had seen hovering over him when he was outside. It was lying on a work surface with the joystick control beside it. Looked at more closely, it was an ugly-looking thing with four arms stretching out more like a spider than a crow, each one mounted with a black propeller. There was a sophisticated camera attached to its belly, staring across the room with its single eye. That was something else to consider. If Alex did manage to break out of the abbey, he would be tracked every inch of the way. What was the range of the device? He had heard of drones that could fly for up to three miles. The trees would provide him with cover, but Karl had told him that the camera was thermographic, meaning that it didn’t even need to see him. His own body heat would give him away.
The two security men were becoming uneasy. “That’s enough!” one of them said. “You should get back to your room.”
“Sure!” Alex smiled as if he didn’t care either way. “Thanks!”
He went back the way he had come. He hated having to sound so meek, but it was important not to raise their suspicions. He had no intention of going back to his room. He had seen Dr. Feng leaving. The entire building seemed to be quiet. He was feeling strong and clear-headed. This was too good an opportunity to miss.
He reached the bottom of the staircase and followed the corridor back the way he had come.
Alex was quite certain that he wasn’t the only “patient” being treated at Bellhanger Abbey. Dr. Feng had said that there were two other people in the car when it crashed, and later on, Nurse Wendy had more or less admitted that one of them was here. They had to be in Room 6. It was the only door on Alex’s corridor that was permanently closed, and he remembered how uneasy the nurse had been when they walked past. That was where he was heading now. If there was someone else in the room, perhaps they might be able to tell him what was really going on.
There was nobody around. Alex stopped outside the room and rested his hand against the handle. He pressed down. The door wasn’t locked, but that wasn’t so surprising. There was no need to keep anyone a prisoner in their own room when the entire abbey was little more than a giant prison. Very gently, he opened the door, checking that there was no sound coming from inside. There was nothing. He slipped inside, closing the door behind him.
Room 6 was identical to his own except that it looked out onto the other side of the abbey, with a view of the main gate. Alex saw the same furniture, the same lack of pictures or mirrors, the same white ceiling and wooden floor, the same bed. There was a man lying on the bed. He was partly concealed by shadow, but as Alex drew closer, he was certain that he knew who the man was. An older man dressed in the same striped pajamas that Alex had been given. Hair that was thinning out and a lined, weathered face. His features were slack because he was so soundly asleep, but Alex recognized him at once.
John Crawley. The man who described himself as the office manager at MI6 but who was actually much more. It was he who had first introduced himself to Alex at Ian Rider’s funeral, at the same time opening the door into the dark world of espionage. More recently, he had invited Alex to become a ball boy at Wimbledon, pitching him into a confrontation with the Chinese triads that had nearly cost Alex his life. Crawley had once been an effective field agent himself. Alex had always thought of him as one of Blunt’s toughest and most capable operatives. And now he was here.
The sight of him lying helplessly in the bed smashed the final barriers in Alex’s memory. It was like a falling deck of cards. One after another, Alex saw the images and remembered what had happened.
John Crawley had met him at the air base near Newbury. He had been standing on the tarmac as Alex climbed down from the RAF Sentinel R1. Alex had been exhausted, still drained by what had happened at Murmansk.
“Alex! Good morning. I thought I should come and collect you. How are you?”
“I want to go home.”
“I have a car waiting. Mrs. Jones wants to see you.”
“I don’t want to see her. Just take me home, Mr. Crawley.”
“Of course, Alex. Straightaway . . .”
The car was a silver Jaguar XJ. It was exactly the sort of car that Crawley would drive, only this time he was going to be a passenger, along with Alex. There was a uniformed chauffeur waiting, and as the two of them approached, he opened the back door and stood back respectfully. At the time, Alex had barely registered him. He was too tired. But now, as the images tumbled through his mind, he saw him more clearly.
Karl! The snub-nosed security man from the gate. How was that possible?
Standing in the bedroom, Alex wanted to shout at himself not to get into the car. But he and Crawley had gotten in. He heard the clunk of the closing door and a moment later they were on their way, swinging out of the airfield and following a series of country lanes to the motorway. There was a blue sign. He saw it now as he had seen it then. LONDON 64 MILES.
“Would you like some air-conditioning, sir?” That was Karl’s voice, coming from the front.
“Are you all right, Alex?” Crawley asked.
Alex hadn’t replied, his head resting against the window, staring out.
The motorway was tedious, the cars whipping past. The driver seemed to be in no hurry to get them home.
There was a semi in the road ahead of them. It was moving quite slowly, hogging the middle lane, but for some reason the driver made no attempt to overtake it. Slowly, Alex became aware of it. The whole thing was covered in pictures and there were words in bright red letters.
DR. FENG’S TOURING CIRCUS. FUN FOR ALL THE FAMILY.
A clown stared at him, plastered across the two doors at the back. Green hair. White painted face. Red lips. Now the driver was getting closer and closer to the semi. It was almost as if he wanted to cause a deliberate crash.
“Driver, what are you doing?” That was Crawley again, snapping out the words.
The driver ignored him. The distance between the car and the semi was narrowing with every second that passed.
Alex saw Crawley’s hand disappear into his jacket. He wasn’t reaching for a wallet or a pen. He knew they were in danger. He brought out a gun.
He was too late.
It all happened very quickly. The doors of the semi flew open, revealing two men standing in an interior that was otherwise completely empty. A metal ramp shot out, slanting down toward the road. Both vehicles were traveling at about forty miles per hour but now the chauffeur stomped down on the accelerator and the Jaguar leapt forward, onto the ramp and then up into the truck. The clown doors slammed shut behind them, swallowing them up.
Crawley had his gun trained on the driver’s neck. “Who are you? Who are you working for?”
The two men had positioned themselves one on each side of the car. The car must have missed them by inches as it rocketed in. They were both armed, two guns to Crawley’s one, but then Karl turned and Alex saw that the total had gone up to three. He and Crawley were trapped in a doubly enclosed space. Inside a car inside a truck. They were outnumbered. He knew he had no chance.
Crawley had come to the same conclusion. He lowered his gun, turned, and spoke quietly to Alex. “It’s me they want, not you. Don’t worry, Alex. I’m sure they’ll let you go.”
Karl was leaning over the front seat, still holding the gun. There was something that looked like a grenade in his other hand. He dropped it onto the floor between Alex and Crowley. There was a hiss and a cloud of gray smoke was released, billowing upward. Karl climbed out of the car, closing the door behind him. It was the last thing Alex remembered. The fumes were choking him. He felt his head spinning. Then he passed out.
Crawley had been wrong. Whoever was behind this had wanted both of them. They had both woken up in Bellhanger Abbey. But why? What was the point?
That didn’t matter now. The two of them had to get out of here. Alex hurried over to the bed, grabbed Crawley by the shoulder, and shook him. “Mr. Crawley!” he whispered as loudly as he could. He didn’t want to bring in anyone from outside the room. “Wake up! This is Alex.”
Nothing. Alex shook him harder.
“Mr. Crawley! Wake up!”
It still wasn’t working, and Alex was afraid someone might come in at any moment. He looked around and saw a glass of water on a bedside table. Without a second thought, he picked it up and threw the contents into the agent’s face.
Crawley’s eye blinked open. “Alex . . . ?”
“Wake up, Mr. Crawley. You’ve got to wake up now.”
“Where are we?” Crawley was still struggling, trying to fight his way back to consciousness.
“We’re prisoners. We were grabbed on the motorway. You have to help me get out of here.”
“What?” Water was dripping out of Crawley’s hair. The pillow behind him was damp.
“You have to get out of bed,” Alex insisted. “I need your help!”
“Help . . . ?”
But it was no good. Crawley was too heavily drugged. His head fell back and he said nothing more.
Alex was on his own.