FOURTEEN

Breakfast the next day was a long-drawn-out affair with Chad blabbing on about how to make money. He was interested in what Laia and I were going to do that day, and I was terrified he was going to offer to accompany us. I didn’t feel comfortable telling him anything, but Felip gave him a sketchy outline of what we had found out from Grandfather’s notebook. “Well,” Chad had said as we eventually managed our escape, “don’t you kids go finding any more nuclear bombs. It’s hard enough persuading people to invest here as it is.”

With a huge sigh of relief, we wished Felip a good trip to Almería, arranged to meet him that evening for dinner and then escaped both Chad and the naked people who were beginning to show up throughout the hotel. “We need to pick up some bottles of water,” Laia said as we headed into town. “It’s going to be a hot day.”

I glanced up at the clear blue sky which, even in midmorning, was already painfully bright. “I’ll pick up a pair of shades as well,” I said. “I never thought to bring mine. They’re not something I use much in Toronto in December.”

“A flashlight might help as well,” Laia added. “In case we do manage to move that rock.”

“Good idea.” I was about to comment on how glad I was that Chad hadn’t offered to keep us company when the red scooter shot past us. The rider was wearing a green scarf again, even though there was no dust on the main road. “That’s the same guy we saw yesterday—I’m sure of it,” I said. “Do you think he’s following us?”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I’m feeling a bit paranoid what with Grandfather’s secret codes and Blue Eyes’s threats.”

“Palomares is a small town,” Laia explained. “He probably works the night shift at the hotel and passed us on his way to work yesterday. Now he’s heading home.”

“Probably,” I said. It made sense. We found a store and bought water, sunglasses, snacks for the day and a cheap flashlight. “We forgot to get the GPS from your dad,” I said.

“We won’t need it. The rockfall will be easy enough to find.”

That was true—we just needed to follow the track we had come down the day before—but I would have felt more comfortable with the GPS. That was silly, I told myself. If we didn’t do anything stupid, like wandering off into the hills, we would be fine. I was beginning to worry about every little thing. I hadn’t been able to fall asleep the night before, worrying about DJ and whether he was getting into a situation he couldn’t handle. That was really dumb, since DJ could take care of himself and I was the one who had been threatened by the Russian Mafia. Still, I had texted him, asking how he was doing, before switching off my phone and finally falling asleep.

I pushed my worries aside and determined to enjoy the day with Laia, but as we turned off the main road and onto the track into the hills, I looked back and caught a glimpse of a red scooter stopped by the side of the road, the guy in the scarf crouched beside it.

It was lunchtime when we reached our destination. We took a moment to sit on the flat rock, drink some water, eat a snack and enjoy the magnificent view of the sparkling Mediterranean. Then we examined the rockfall carefully.

“No other marks on any of the rocks,” I said.

“True,” Laia said, “but there’s a lot of lichen and dirt on many of the rocks. It would take a lot more time than we have to check thoroughly.”

“I guess we should try and move number fourteen.”

At first, it didn’t seem as if the rock was going to move, but with some scraping around the edges and by rocking it back and forth, we managed to loosen it. Eventually, it came free and rolled to one side. For a moment, Laia and I just stood there, breathing heavily and staring at the dark hole we had revealed.

“I feel like Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb,” I said.

“Well, I hope there’re no dead bodies inside,” Laia commented as she reached into her daypack for the flashlight. She switched it on, and we both leaned forward eagerly.

At first, we couldn’t see much in the narrow beam. The ground seemed to slope gently down, but the hole wasn’t large enough for us both to get our heads in and look around. After we had banged heads a couple of times, Laia pulled back and handed me the flashlight. “Here, you have a look around. It’ll be easier for one person.”

I stretched my arm into the hole, trying not to think of poisonous spiders or mummified bodies. At first I had no better luck than before, but then I caught a dull glint at the edge of the flashlight beam. By stretching as far as I could into the hole and peering hard, I could just make out what appeared to be a pale sphere. The surface was divided into hexagons, like a soccer ball.

I stared at the object for so long that Laia asked, “What do you see?”

I pulled out of the hole, scratching my shoulder and bringing down a clod of dirt that broke into choking dust. I coughed and took a drink of water while Laia fidgeted impatiently. “It’s there,” I said at last.

“What is?” Laia asked, although I was certain she knew what I was talking about. Felip had said the main part of the bomb was about the size of a soccer ball, and that the complex explosives designed to set it off were arranged in a pattern that resembled a honeycomb.

“The plutonium trigger bomb,” I said.

We stared at each other. We had discovered one of the most powerful weapons ever built. It had to be from one of the bombs that had fallen that day in 1966, but what was it doing here? Had sabotage by someone called Gorky caused it to fall here? Had Grandfather found it? Had he hidden it? If so, why had he never told anyone about it?

“The hole’s probably big enough to squeeze through,” I said. “Should I go in?”

“Do you want to crawl into a hole with a plutonium bomb?” Laia asked. “It won’t explode, but what if some of the plutonium has escaped? If we go kicking dust around, who knows what we’ll be breathing in?”

“I don’t want to go in either,” I said. “Apart from anything else, the rocks above the hole don’t look too stable. Even if there’s no plutonium, I don’t want to get trapped in an old mine, or whatever it is. What should we do?”

“We’ll put the rock back,” Laia said. “Then we’ll go down and tell Felip what we’ve found. He’ll know who to contact.”

I nodded my agreement, glad that we had someone we could talk to. It was even harder to get the rock back in place, but we managed. We ate and drank some more and then, with the afternoon sun high above us, we set off down the hill.

“Is this the end of it?” Laia asked as we walked.

“I don’t know. We’ve certainly done a lot more than I ever thought we could when DJ sent the notebook pages. We broke the code, worked out the locations and much of what Grandfather’s cryptic comments meant—and we’ve discovered the missing bomb. That’s pretty impressive.”

“It is,” Laia agreed, “but we still don’t know the whys—why your grandfather came back to Spain under a false name and why he hid the bomb.”

“And we don’t know who Gorky is, or was, or what the saboteur had to do with everything. I keep making up stories in my head to explain it all, but nothing works. There’s something we’re missing. The question is whether we’ll ever figure it out.”

I looked at Laia walking beside me. She was as dirty and tired as me, and her shirt had a jagged rip on the left shoulder, but she was still beautiful. “You look like you’ve been in a war,” I said.

“And you think you look as if you’ve just walked out of a beauty parlor?” Laia said, looking at me with a broad smile. Her brow suddenly furrowed. “Are you okay?” she asked, pointing at my shoulder.

I looked down at where I had scratched myself on the rocks around the edge of the hole. There was a dark, rapidly drying bloodstain on my T-shirt. “It’s just a scratch,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go for a swim back at the hotel and show off my war wound.”

“If you do, you’re on your own,” Laia said. “Your war wound is not all you’d have to show off to go for a swim.”

We laughed. “I still can’t believe we ended up in a naturist resort. Maybe we can get our swimsuits and go down to the beach for a swim?” I suggested.

“That sounds like a better idea. I’d certainly enjoy washing this dirt off.”

We walked in silence for a while. “I know you don’t think Grandfather was a traitor,” I said eventually, “and I don’t either, but someone obviously did, and we haven’t found anything that proves he wasn’t. That bothers me.”

“Maybe DJ and the others have found out more.”

“I texted DJ last night,” I said, suddenly remembering that I hadn’t turned my phone back on this morning. I took it out and turned it on.

“I’ve only got one bar,” I said, looking at the screen. The phone pinged as it downloaded text that I’d missed. “It’s from DJ,” I said, holding the phone so Laia could see it.

Hope things are going well. We broke the code—sort of–-and it might work for your entries as well. Frequency of letters. 1 = e, 2 = t, 3 = a, 4 = o. You get the idea. Look up the rest. Gotta sleep. Good luck.

“Sounds as if DJ’s code is different from ours,” I said, putting the phone back in my pocket. “I wonder if everyone got a different code.”

“We were lucky you worked out that the key was Lorca’s poem,” Laia said. “We could still be completely in the dark.”

“But there’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It looks like Grandfather was a spy, but who for? He came to Spain, but where else did he go?”

We walked on in silence, both deep in thought. I still hadn’t come up with any answers when the red scooter shot around the bend ahead of us and skidded to a halt. We stopped and stared at the rider, who peered at us over his scarf. “What do you want?” I shouted, stepping forward.

The scooter engine roared, but instead of turning back down the hill, the man accelerated past us in a cloud of dust. When it settled, I looked back up the hill and saw the scooter stopped a couple hundred meters from us; the rider was talking into a cell phone.

“I don’t like this,” Laia said.

“Me neither. Let’s get down to the main road as quick as we can.” We hurried down the hill, the scooter keeping its distance behind us. I had a horrible sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it only got worse when a white panel van appeared on the road ahead. The van slewed sideways across the road and the doors slid open. Right then I would have been happy to see Scarface and Tattoo Head, but three men we’d never seen before jumped out and ran toward us. There was nowhere to go. I put my arms around Laia. The men grabbed us and hustled us into the van, where our hands and feet were bound and rags were tied around our eyes. The van lurched, and I rolled painfully against the side. “Are you okay?” I heard Laia shout.

“¡Callate!” A voice ordered us to shut up.

“I’m okay!” was all I had time to reply before someone hit me hard on the side of the head. We had been kidnapped for the second time in as many days and were helpless in the back of a strange van, going who knew where. The whole thing had taken only seconds.