The Secret Prophecy (20 page)

Em’s mind raced. Company was the last thing he expected. Should he run? Should he back quietly into the bushes and hide to give himself a chance to survey the situation? Had something gone wrong, or was this something his father had arranged when he stole the documents from Bederbeck? Both Em and Victor had assumed the papers would be buried somewhere, stashed away in a hurry as his father escaped. But suppose it hadn’t been like that? Suppose his father had had the opportunity of hiding the proof at leisure? Suppose he had actually arranged for the hut and the RV out here in the wilderness? It seemed unlikely, but—

There was a loud, metallic click, and the clearing flooded with light. Em screamed and dropped to his knees as the amplification technology in his night goggles blinded him, painfully and absolutely. On a reflex that cut in microseconds too late, he screwed his eyes shut and scrabbled to tear off the goggles.

There was a sound of running footsteps: more than one person. An American voice called out, “Something’s happened; he’s in trouble.” Another voice, closer, almost beside him, asked solicitously, “You okay, Em? What’s the matter?”

“Eyes,” Em managed to gasp. They were stinging like mad, and even without the goggles he was blinded. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they knew his name. Which meant they were expecting him; and whoever they were, they had to be from the Bederbeck Foundation—with the hut and RV on foundation land, nothing else made sense. Em was still watching fireworks in the darkness as strong hands helped him to his feet. But the greatest pain he felt had nothing to do with his eyes. He was both devastated and bewildered. He had been betrayed.

And there was only one person in the world who could have betrayed him.

Chapter 41

T
hey left the main desert highway and turned onto a well-maintained minor road with a prominent sign reading

BEDERBECK FOUNDATION

PRIVATE ROADWAY

NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PRIOR AUTHORIZATION

Em stared blankly as it flashed past. His eyes still stung and watered; but he could see again, and it was obvious there would be no permanent damage. He’d exchanged his infrared outfit for a T-shirt and jeans and was squeezed between two large men in the backseat of a luxury limo. Both wore tailored suits and tinted glasses. Neither showed any inclination to explain what was going on. Not that he needed an explanation. It was clear he was a prisoner of the Bederbeck Foundation, a front organization for his old friends the Knights of Themis. He wondered briefly how much they had paid Victor to turn him in.

Now that he knew what had been going on, there were things about Victor that were just as suspicious as the business with the security phone. He kept thinking about the way Victor had sent him to the airport on his own with the fake passport and visa. That
really
rang alarm bells. All very well for Victor to quote “security”; but all it really meant was that if the forgeries had been discovered, it was Em who was headed for jail with nobody to help him. He could imagine the reception a teenager would get if he started babbling about a government agency so secret nobody had ever heard of it. He didn’t even know Victor’s real name. Then there was the way Victor seemed able to get things done. A car was fine—anybody could call a friend and ask them to pick up a visitor—but a helicopter? A helicopter and pilot, and Em seemed to recall another man there as well. That was big-deal stuff, the sort of thing you wouldn’t expect from a humble field agent. It all added up to one thing: Victor had never been what he seemed.

Their driver, an olive-skinned man with a heavy mustache, said something in Spanish, and the man to Em’s right grunted. There were streetlights along the side of their road now and more lights clustered up ahead. As they drew closer, Em could see a manned barrier. The limo drew smoothly to a halt, and a uniformed guard strolled across carrying a clipboard in his left hand. Em noticed the holstered sidearm on his belt and wondered if it might be worth making a fuss: with a revolver, the guard would be more than a match for his captors. But he dropped the idea as quickly as it emerged. The guard had to be a Bederbeck employee just like the men in the car.

The tinted window whispered down, and the man on Em’s right leaned out. “We have young Goverton,” he said. “Check us through, then phone ahead.”

The guard bent down to look into the car. He was a middle-aged, brown-eyed man who might have had Native American blood. He nodded slightly as he looked at Em, then glanced down at his clipboard. To Em’s surprise there was a black-and-white photograph of Em attached to it. The background was out of focus, so he’d no idea where it had been taken; but the jacket seemed like the one he’d worn when he first met Victor.

The guard looked back up and gave him the benefit of a slow smile. “Welcome to Bederbeck, Mr. Goverton.” To Em’s captors he said, “Go ahead. And congratulations.” The barrier rose as he walked back to the hut. As the limo pulled away, Em could see him lifting a telephone.

Em expected buildings; but when they passed through the barrier, the road led to a gateway in a high, mesh fence with warning signs about electrification. Em’s view was limited, but he could see enough to spot an observation tower exactly like the ones they had in U.S. prison movies. Creepier still, the four guards on this gate wore military uniforms and carried semiautomatic rifles. They moved crisply to surround the car, and one actually shone a flashlight in Em’s face before waving them on. The gate opened of its own accord as they approached.

“Next stop is your champagne reception,” Em’s right-hand man remarked.

It looked more like a small town than conventional company buildings. As the limo drove slowly down a main street, Em could see towering office blocks interspersed with lower-slung research and laboratory facilities. Signposts on junctions guided the unfamiliar. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were pedestrians in suits and pedestrians wearing white coats. There was even—and this was the clincher to the small-town feel—an all-night café that seemed to be doing a roaring business. Victor had mentioned that the Bederbeck Foundation was the largest employer for miles around. It seemed that the foundation worked its employees on a twenty-four-hour shift rotation.

It also seemed his long journey was about to end. He glanced at the men flanking him and amended the thought: end
badly.

Em closed his eyes, partly to relieve the stinging, but mainly to try to think. Now that the shock of his betrayal was wearing off, he was slowly coming to realize that his present situation made no sense. He tried to organize his thoughts in the hope of finding some flaw in his logic; but try as he might, there was none. The situation had unfolded in dramatic, but very simple, steps:

His father’s research into Nostradamus had led him to discover a Knights of Themis plot. Professor Goverton had been murdered in order to keep his discovery quiet. But before he died, he’d hidden documentary proof of the plot, then passed its location on to Em. Since then the Knights had been hot on Em’s heels to stop him from finding it.

Which was exactly where the whole business stopped making sense. Because it was obvious that the Bederbeck Foundation—hence its Themis masters—
already knew
where Em’s father had hidden the proof. And had known it before Em and Victor worked out the secret message only days ago: they’d put up a hut on the site, for heaven’s sake; they’d installed electricity and arc lights; they’d driven in an RV! Then they’d set their men watching, apparently for Em to turn up.

But
why
? Why not simply take back the proof and destroy it?

“You want that I drive to the main entrance?” came the voice of their driver.

“No,” said the man on Em’s right, who seemed to be the senior of the three. “The boss will want to see him at once. If we take him through the lobby, everybody in the building will be trying to catch a glimpse of him. We’ll take him through the side door and use the service elevator. With luck we can make delivery before anybody realizes he’s in the building.”

The man on Em’s left broke his long silence. “We nearly blinded him with the arc lights. The boss won’t like that.”

“It was an accident,” the man on the right growled. “Besides, he isn’t blind—are you, Em?”

“No,” Em muttered sourly. With his eyes still closed, he found himself reminded of the “blind man,” the curiously shaped rock he’d spotted as he walked into the clearing. Could that be the clue to what was happening? Suppose the Knights discovered the area in which his father had hidden the proof but not the proof itself? Once the treacherous Victor told them that Em knew the meaning of the reference to the “blind man,” the Knights would have redoubled their efforts to find him. They didn’t know his claim was a bluff any more than Victor did.

The only problem with that theory was that the blind man rock was obvious. Anyone in the clearing would have spotted it at once. Working on their own property with all the time and money in the world, men from the foundation could have turned the entire site into an archaeological dig. They should have found the documents within days.

Em opened his eyes. The limo had entered a side street and was pulling up opposite a small door in one of the high buildings.

“This is where we get out,” the man on his right told him.

This was where his captors might make a mistake, Em thought. He was no longer helpless. He could see as well as ever now. The three men all seemed relaxed, as if they expected no trouble from him, and he realized his accidental blinding must have lulled them into a false sense of security. All three looked reasonably fit; but they were considerably older than he was, and he was certain he could out-run any of them. Especially if surprise gave him a few yards head start.

The man on his right opened the limo door, slid out, then turned to hold it open for Em. The tinted glasses didn’t allow Em to see his eyes, but his stance gave no hint of wariness. Em slid across the seat to follow him, moving casually—not too quickly, not too slowly. The man to his left opened the other door, climbed quickly out, and walked around the vehicle to join his companion. The driver remained behind the wheel, staring directly ahead. Em tensed. When he got both feet on the ground, he planned to take off like a rabbit. Once he lost the two goons, he still had to get through the security gates and somehow find his way out of the desert, back to the city; but he’d worry about all that later.

Em’s feet landed on the pavement, and his two guards, working like robots, gripped his arms firmly, halting his planned getaway before it even began. In a moment he was frog-marched through the side door. A moment more and he was standing between the two men in an express elevator. He made one more try to find out what was going on. “Where are you taking me?” He didn’t expect an answer and wasn’t disappointed.

The elevator stopped on the twenty-third floor, and the men marched him out without relaxing their guard for an instant. He had a brief impression of luxurious carpeting on the floor of a reception area, the startled expression on the face of a girl behind a desk.

“Is that him?” she asked, staring as if Em had grown a second head.

The man beside him merely grunted in a way that might have meant yes or might have meant no. Then there were swipe cards in security doors that shut off his last hopes of escape as they clicked shut. More carpeted corridors, then a brief halt before another door. One of his captors reached out to knock politely. After a long moment he knocked again.

“Gone off,” said his companion.

“What do we do? The orders were to deliver him here.”

“He’s probably just been called to the conference suite. Do you have clearance to go in?” The man gestured toward the closed door.

“Level five,” his companion nodded. “Should do it. But I’m not sure we—”

“Won’t thank us for leaving him out here. You know the regs. See if your card works.”

Em watched the man step forward and tentatively try his swipe card in the door lock. It flashed green at once.

The man gave a small grunt of satisfaction and turned to Em. “Inside,” he said tersely. “Boss will be with you in a minute.”

Em stepped through the doorway. He was expecting an office, but instead he was in a luxurious penthouse suite with abstract art on the walls, plush modern sofas, thick pile carpet, and a wall-mounted television screen twice as large as any Em had ever seen before. Off the living area was a small study with a polished desk, behind which was a whole bank of personal computers on their own countertop. Several of the screens were tuned to CCTV cameras throughout the building; or possibly some other building.

As the door closed, Em noticed that a swipe card was needed to get out of the office as well as get into it, meaning he was still effectively a prisoner. He wondered who the boss was who was coming to see him. His guess was Bederbeck Foundation’s head of security or some other foundation executive. But a niggling, scary little voice in the back of his head kept asking if it might be the boss of the entire foundation.

Em realized his train of thought was going nowhere and took a cautious step farther into the room. The place reeked of money. Two of the abstract paintings on the wall looked like early Picassos, and Em would have bet anything that they were originals. He found himself wondering if the suite didn’t belong to the CEO of the foundation but rather to the head of the Knights himself.

To take his mind off his increasing nervousness, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling curtains on one wall and drew them aside. As he suspected, the wall behind was entirely glass. Em looked out. The impression of a small town in the desert came through as strongly as ever. The sky to the east was lightening with the approach of dawn, and banks of streetlights were already beginning to wink out. Somehow it made Em feel even more afraid, as if the night had been a fiction but sunrise must bring his day of reckoning. He glanced straight down and experienced a wave of vertigo that drove him away from the window. Instead, he moved through to the study area and walked over to the computer screens. One had an internet connection and was displaying the familiar Google search page. On impulse Em typed in “Bederbeck Foundation.” As he hit
ENTER
, he heard the sound of the office door opening behind him.

Em swung round, heart pounding, then stopped in sudden, absolute paralysis.

“Hello, Em,” said the man in the doorway.

Em squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again before he believed what he was seeing. But even then he could not, did not actually believe it. His heartbeat rose until it almost filled the room. Waves of sudden darkness threatened to engulf him. His knees felt weak; but somehow he managed to speak, somehow he managed to gasp out one word. “Dad?”