The Apprentices (31 page)

“Look at this man,” she whispered.

Marcus Burrows, who had been studying the cook’s garden, crawled awkwardly over to peer out. The men in the golf cart wore camouflage, and one of them pushed a prisoner out of the cart. The prisoner’s hands were bound behind his back and he had a shirt over his head, blindfolding him. One of the guards pulled it off, and Jin Lo saw Benjamin’s sandy disheveled hair, his eyes wild and blinking and disoriented. His nose was bleeding; someone had hit him.

Marcus Burrows started to leap up, but Jin Lo grabbed his arm and held tight. “Stay,” she whispered.

“Hullo, Benjamin,” the tall man said. His voice was British and military and lazy all at the same time, and his hands were in his pockets. “You’re looking rough.”

“Mr. Danby,” Benjamin said, and Jin Lo understood why the man was familiar. She had seen him in Nova Zembla climbing out of a helicopter.

“What
took
you so long?” Danby asked. “Feels like
weeks
we’ve been kicking around here, waiting.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” Benjamin said sarcastically.

“Where’s your old dad?” Danby drawled. He looked around, as if expecting to see Marcus Burrows come waltzing out from behind a tree.

And the amazing thing was that Marcus Burrows did. He stood up and walked out of their hiding place, even as Jin Lo grabbed frantically at his pant cuff. It was the most foolish thing she had ever seen anyone do.

“Let my son go!” he called to the guards.

They all turned to look at this strange apparition.

“No!” Benjamin cried when he saw his father.

But the apothecary kept walking. “I’m the one you want,” he said, in a commanding voice. “Take me instead.”

M
agnusson came out of the villa with his arms wide in welcome. He was ruddy-faced with white-blond hair, and his smile was so broad and happy that his blue eyes disappeared into the folds of his cheeks. Benjamin wanted to spit at him, but he didn’t.
Someone
had to have some self-control, if his father was going to do insane things like surrendering to their enemies. Everything had happened too fast, and it clouded Benjamin’s brain with emotion—seeing Danby alive, watching his father walk absurdly across the lawn, and meeting Magnusson. He had to think rationally and figure out what to do next.

They crossed the island again in the jeep and went down the elevator into the mine, which was hot and dirty and suffocating. Benjamin’s fingers had gone numb from having his hands tied behind his back. Guards walked on either side of his father. They walked past tunnels that seemed to descend into the depths of the earth, but Benjamin didn’t see Janie.

Magnusson unlocked a heavy steel door, and they passed into an underground space that was surprisingly clean and
cool and ventilated, with a concrete floor and white walls. “Welcome to our mill,” Magnusson said, sounding pleased with himself.

“What kind of mill?” Benjamin asked.

“You haven’t worked that out yet?”

“He’s not as bright as the girl,” Danby said.

“You’ve seen Janie?” Benjamin asked him. “Is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” Danby said, glancing at Magnusson. “I haven’t had the privilege.”

Benjamin didn’t have time to wonder what that meant, because they had entered another clean, concrete-floored room that was nearly filled with neat rows of black steel barrels. A man in a white coat opened one to reveal a grainy yellow powder. There was a smell of sulfuric acid in the air.

Uranium
. That was what Magnusson was mining.

“It’s been milled,” Magnusson said. “Now the object is for you to make it
effective,
so it can’t be stopped by you or your friends.”

Benjamin’s father pushed his spectacles up onto his nose. “You know the story of Rumpelstiltskin?” he asked.

“The imp in the fairy story?” Danby asked.

“It begins with a miller. Who claimed that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king locked the girl in a tower with a pile of straw, but of course she couldn’t do it.”

Danby smiled. “So you’re the miller’s daughter?”

“I was able to control the effect of an atomic explosion,” Benjamin’s father said. “It doesn’t follow that I can make your uranium immune to such control. You see the logical error in
the assumption? This is not my area of expertise. I can’t do what you want any more than I could spin straw into gold. Or gold into straw.”

“You’re a man of great ability,” Magnusson said. “If you put your mind to it, you’ll find a solution.”

“If I remember the story,” Danby said, “the girl promises the imp her firstborn if he’ll help her. Is that right? But this story’s a little different. You sacrifice your firstborn if you
don’t
do the spinning.” He put his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, and Benjamin shook it off.

“You can’t take my son as punishment for something I can’t do,” his father said.

“Shall we feed him to the sharks?” Danby asked. “Or lock him up and let him starve? Or drop him out of an aeroplane?”

“You must understand,” Benjamin’s father said. “I don’t know how to do what you want. I’ve never considered it.”

“Then I suggest you start,” Danby said. “Think of it as an intellectual challenge. And no
pretending
to spin gold, Burrows—our engineer will test the uranium before we let you have the boy. We’ll leave you to think.” He pushed Benjamin toward the door.

“I need my son to help me!” his father said. “He’s my apprentice, and he has outstripped me. He has a more inventive mind.”

Danby and Magnusson looked at each other. Danby shrugged. “No harm in it, I suppose.”

“You must unbind his hands,” his father said. “And I’ll need supplies. I don’t know yet what they are. Paper and pen,
to start. And I need to send a message, by radio or telegram. You may read it if you like. But I
must
consult with my colleague in Manila if I am to succeed.”

Danby took a small leather-bound notebook and pen from his shirt pocket, and Benjamin’s father scrawled a message and an address on a page. “We also need privacy, to concentrate,” he said. “And please tell me when the message has been sent.”

“Try anything funny and we kill the girl,” Danby said. And they left.

Benjamin rubbed his freed wrists, bringing the blood back to his hands. His fingers throbbed, and his skin itched. “Janie should have escaped by now,” he said.

“I can’t do this,” his father said. “Not ethically, not practically. I don’t think it can be done. I don’t think it
should
be done, even if it could.”

“Good,” Benjamin said.

“But I have to try,” his father said. “What choice do I have?”

“Did you send for help in your note?”

“I asked Vinoray to take your packet of powder and consult the Pharmacopoeia. I swallowed half of what remained before we left Manila, so I might see the book through him if I needed to, in a case like this.”

The idea was both brilliant and insane. “But you sent Vinoray some kind of coded SOS, too?” Benjamin asked.

“Your Mr. Danby would see through such a thing.”

“Why is he
my
Mr. Danby?”

“A cry for help would only alarm Vinoray. He would have
no way of reaching us in time. I need him to be calm and purposeful, with no agitation of mind.”

“You might’ve tried to tell him
something.
”

“If you’ll be quiet a moment, I need to think.”

A guard returned and said the message had been sent. Benjamin’s father gave him a list of supplies, and then plunged into the kind of deep contemplation that Benjamin remembered from his childhood. Occasionally he wrote something in Danby’s little notebook.

Benjamin scratched his wrists and wondered how they were going to get any useful information from the Pharmacopoeia. They couldn’t even tell Vinoray to stop on a particular page. And which page of the ancient book explained how to make an atomic bomb impervious to the antidote that his father and Jin Lo and Count Vili had invented? No page. The whole thing was hopeless.

Finally, his father said, “The message should have been delivered to Vinoray’s shop by now. So I close my eyes and think about him, yes?”

“Once you find him, you can move his left hand a little, if he’s right-handed,” Benjamin said. “The less dominant hand is more open to outside control. You might be able to turn pages.”

“Thank you,” his father said. “I meant what I said about your having the more inventive mind. If you have any other ideas, they would be most welcome.”

Benjamin watched his father sit down and close his eyes. He wondered what ideas he, Benjamin, could possibly have
about their situation. Doing Danby and Magnusson’s bidding went against everything they believed in. Peace was his father’s calling, his vocation. Benjamin should have thrown himself down a mineshaft as they walked through the tunnel. That would have been the brave and noble thing to do. If Benjamin was removed from the situation, then there was no reason for his father to do this terrible thing.

But then he wouldn’t be able to help his father escape. Or was that a rationalization? Did Benjamin only selfishly want to survive? His father looked vulnerable, sitting with his eyes closed, and Benjamin felt a rush of tenderness for him. He couldn’t leave him alone.

Finally his father opened his eyes. “I can’t make contact,” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

Impatience replaced the tenderness, and Benjamin wished
he’d
been the one to take the powder and try. He was better at it.

There was another knock at the door, and two guards came in, carrying a card table piled with things the apothecary had asked for. There was a jug of water, a Bunsen burner, the knapsack full of supplies that Benjamin had hidden in the kitchen garden, a cylindrical container of salt, and two cooking pots, one large and one small.

The two guards stood looking at the list like removal men with the last of the kitchen furniture. They were Americans, a little thuggish, a little simple, probably men with few other options in life. Benjamin looked at the back of the
nearest guard’s thick neck and thought about throwing an arm around it, the struggle, the snap of vertebrae, the escape. He had craved a life of adventure when he was back in school, but after two years he knew something about adventure, and also something about what he was capable of. Killing a man with his bare hands wasn’t one of those things.

The guards left—Benjamin’s chance missed—and his father began arranging the table as a proper workspace. Then he began to work.

1. (of a seed or spore) growth and the putting out of shoots after a period of dormancy

2. the coming into existence or development of an idea or feeling

J
anie sat up with a start in the elevator cage, throwing the pillow off her head and struggling out of the confines of the little blanket. She hadn’t been asleep, but she had been startled by a sudden thought, an inspiration that was something like a dream.

There had been a meaningful look in Osman’s eye when he brought her food, and she had ignored it. The sandwich! He’d kept telling her to eat. She grabbed the sandwich and tore off the waxed paper, looking for a key to the padlock.

What she found instead was a note. She unfolded it.

Janie,
it said.

Benjamin! He was on the island! She looked at the corked bottle. How much time had she wasted? Why hadn’t she even
looked
at what Osman had brought? She pulled the cork. The liquid smelled sharp and burned her sinuses, and she flinched and blinked. She had a sudden, intense memory of Benjamin pulling away from her on a train, two years earlier, the connection between their two cars corroded. He had left her end of the train behind so she couldn’t follow him. The drugged champagne had already started erasing her memories at that moment, but still the image was burned in her brain. It was the moment she’d lost him.

But now Benjamin was
here
! How had he done it? Were the others here? Did Magnusson know?

She tucked the note into the pocket of her pajamas and poured the liquid carefully over the padlock, her hands shaking. The steel sizzled and smoked so much that she thought someone might hear or smell it. She stopped and listened. There were no footsteps in the tunnel. She poured more of the liquid. When it stopped sizzling, she tapped the crusty metal with the side of the bottle. The lower part of the lock fell away. The curved bar now hung useless and free, and she tapped it out of the metal loop, freeing the hasp that held the door closed.

She listened again for footsteps, and then pushed open the door of the cage. The rusty hinges creaked. She wished Benjamin had sent more instructions. Where was the other exit? Which direction was the sea? She headed up the tunnel
toward the main corridor, and the mine seemed weirdly deserted.