The rattling of metal and the pounding in Beck’s head merged together out of the darkness. He was lying and shivering in the dark on a hard, metal floor, freezing cold, shaking from side to side. He could hear the sound of an engine and the sucking, crackling noise of tyres running over gravel. The floor lurched and with every big bump his head would bounce up and crack down again hard on the metal.
Beck’s eyes focused blearily on the one thing he could see — two pale squares, hanging in mid-air and shaking along with everything else. He coughed and gagged to clear the foul taste in his mouth, and the extra breath cleared away the last shreds of the chloroform that clogged his head like cotton wool.
He was in the back of a moving van. The squares were the rear windows looking out into the moonlit night. That was the only source of light. The driver’s cabin was a separate compartment and there was no way of seeing out of the front of the vehicle.
He pulled his legs up and groggily tried to push himself into a sitting position. Another lurch, and he was flung against a soft body lying next to him. In the dim light he could just make out—
“Jonas!”
He gave his friend a shake, and Jonas’s head flopped from side to side with the van’s motion. Beck felt for the pulse in his neck, where the carotid artery beat against the tendon. The skin was warm, the pulse was steady and strong, and Beck breathed a sigh of relief. Apart from whatever had knocked him out, Jonas was okay. He cautiously sniffed the air above Jonas’s face and got a distinct whiff of something sweet and chemical. Yes, more chloroform.
Poor Jonas. Those men obviously hadn’t expected Beck to have a roommate and they hadn’t taken any precautions against someone else wandering in. So, his friend had innocently got caught up in… In whatever was going on.
Beck groped around in the dark for something, anything that could make him and Jonas more comfortable. He made out the outline of some kind of pack hanging from the side of the van, and he got up on his knees to reach for it. He felt several hard objects inside it, which bumped together with metallic clinks and which he thought would bear further investigation. But first his fingers dug into a pair of travel rugs — waterproof tarpaulin on one side, artificial wool on the other. He pulled them both out, spread one over Jonas’s still form and tucked the other under his head.
Then Beck sat next to his friend with his knees hugged up — more comfortable than lying on the floor, and warmer — and forced himself to think. He remembered staring into that gun barrel and he had no doubt at all that the man had been about to kill him, before the other guy intervened. He had looked before into the eyes of men who intended to end his life, there and then, on the spot, and it had been the same. But no one just randomly turned up in a teenage boy’s room intending to kill him.
Beck was in no doubt — he had been targeted, by… and that's where his mind went cold.