The Shadow Project (3 page)

T
here were mountains, of course, but they looked completely different from the last time. Opal stared. This was her third trip to Lusakistan, to the same part of the Pakistan border, but—

She stopped. Mr. Carradine
hadn't
said the Pakistan border, now that she came to think of it. He'd said
border with China.
She didn't even know Lusakistan
had
a border with China. So this was a different part of Lusakistan altogether, but just as rocky, miserable, and depressing as the bits she'd already seen. The mountains were all around her, a barren wasteland.

There was no sign of a camp.

Which meant nothing, of course. On this sort of mission, the coordinates were always approximate and sometimes just plain wrong. You could travel for miles before you found the exact place you were looking for. But there was a standard procedure, drummed into her
by her father and Mr. Carradine. You examined the area where you landed, moving in gradually widening circles. You took your time and were extremely thorough, because even though coordinates were always approximate and mistakes were often made, the area where you landed was still the most likely place to find your target. So you searched it thoroughly before you even
thought
of anything else.

Opal moved away carefully. She was looking, basically, for signs of life—any signs of life. Once she spotted something—anything—she could investigate further. She was excited, as she always was on a mission. After nearly a year as an operative—and eight months of preliminary training—that had never faded. It wasn't the thrill of danger. When she was tracking terrorists, she felt like she was doing something really important. And her work was respected in the Project. Her success rate was the highest of all the operatives', even though many of her missions drew a blank. She suspected this one would be among them.

Despite Mr. Carradine's remark about strong intelligence, she knew the chances of finding the Skull were slim; the agencies had been trying for years without result. But she might be able to confirm he'd been here, which would still be useful. Or she might stumble accidentally on some other terrorist, perhaps even a training
camp. Anything like that would be a reasonable result.

After more than an hour of diligent searching, there was still no sign of life, current or recent. She was experienced enough to spot the signs now—the unnatural clearings in the prevailing wilderness, the remains of temporary fortifications, even carelessly strewn rubbish. Sword of Wrath groups kept on the move, so few of their encampments lasted long—except for training camps, which could sometimes stand for months. They often lived in tents, like desert nomads, staying in any one spot for a day or two at most before moving on. If they had reason to think they were being tracked, they worked hard to eliminate signs of their presence. But when they considered themselves safe, they got careless. If you looked closely, you might find a spent cartridge, sometimes signs of a fire, the occasional empty Coke can (Coke got
everywhere
). Once she'd even spotted a half-written letter ornamented with a doodled drawing of a dog.

Of course her previous experience had been with low-level Sword of Wrath cells. If the new intelligence was correct and the Skull really was somewhere in the area, nobody was going to get careless, whether they thought they were being tracked or not.

Whatever the reason, Opal could find nothing. She was on the point of beginning the wider search when
a thought struck her. Everything she'd done so far had been based on the assumption that they'd camped out among the rocks. What if this assumption was wrong? She looked along the face of the mountain and saw the cave at once, high up in the escarpment. There could be a dozen men in there, their ArmaLites at the ready, looking down across the terrain below. Even a single sentry would stop their being taken by surprise. You could send an army after them, and they would have melted away before it moved higher than the foothills.

Opal began to climb.

As she'd been trained, she took her time, moving slowly, alert for any movement. The light was at an angle to the cave mouth, so it was impossible to see more than a foot or so inside. Anything could be in there: terrorists, wild animals, anything. So long as they stood back, no one could see them.

It was silly, but she found she was breathing heavily by the time she reached the level of the cave. Strange how old habits got you, even in situations like this. From her present vantage point she could see a great deal farther into the cavern, and there was still no sign of life. But when she entered it herself, it was clear that someone
had
been here. The signs were in plain sight—the dead ashes of a fire, a scrap of newspaper with Arabic printing, an abandoned plastic container. But all indications
were this was the litter of a single man, two at most. The cave was too small to shelter more. So not the Skull. It was unthinkable that the Sword of Wrath leader would travel alone, or with just one other companion. His survival depended on protection. The last time he'd been positively sighted, he was accompanied by a small army equipped with heavy ordnance and armored cars. What she'd found here might be an overnight for a lesser terrorist, but it could just as easily have been shelter for a goatherd.

She took a last look around, then moved outside again. If the Skull really was somewhere in this vicinity, she needed a better vantage point to find him. She looked up at the sky. There was cloud cover, but it was high, so at five hundred feet she would have a clear view for miles.

Opal launched herself from the mouth of the cave and flew.

O
pal's father was carrying a coffeemaker through the kitchen when his cell phone rang. He flicked it open and glanced at the caller name. Hector—inconvenient as always. He thumbed the green handset icon and said, “Roland.”

“Priory meeting on the fifth,” Hector said without preamble. “Can you make it?”

“Doubtful,” Roland said. “I may be in Malta.”

“Do your best,” Hector said. “There are some peculiar undercurrents running at the moment. They've moved the spear.”

“What? From the
Kunsthistorisches
?”

“No longer on display,” Hector said almost cheerfully, one of his more annoying traits at times of crisis.

“Where's it gone?”

“Hoping you could find out for us,” Hector said. “Since you have the might of MI6 behind you.”

Roland frowned. “I'll do my best.” If Hector was right, this was not good news. “You don't think it's been stolen, do you?”

“Doubt it—there'd have been something in the papers.”

“Have you checked the Austrian papers?”

“Don't speak German,” Hector said without apology.

“I'll have someone take a look,” Roland said. “It might not make the British papers—not sensational enough, even with the Hitler connection.” He sighed. “I'll also make contact with the museum—they may just have taken it off display for a while.”

Hector snorted slightly, his usual prelude to ringing off, but instead he said, “How's the boy working out?”

“Don't know yet,” Roland told him. “I'm not even sure when his first proper operation's scheduled.”

Hector snorted again, a little more loudly, and rang off. Roland hung up, but the phone rang again at once.

This time it was the Project.

“I
s
it the Skull?” Sir Roland asked as George led him into his office and closed the door. He didn't add
this time,
but they both knew what he meant. The agency received perhaps four or five reports of Skull sightings on a daily basis. The CIA got even more. Most of them came from cranks. But George would not have called this one in if it was routine.

George Hanover shrugged. “Mossad seems to think so. We have Opal checking now.”

Roland said, “I gather there was a delay?”

Hanover looked uncomfortable. “Yes. Yes, there was. Because of the intruder.”

“I want the whole story on that,” Roland said. “Was this an attack on the Project?”

“We don't think so. Actually, we're certain it wasn't. I've talked to the boy, and he seems to be just a petty thief. Carradine will investigate fully, of course.”

“Hardly something to shout about, is it, George? A petty thief simply walks into what's supposed to be one of the most secure sites in Britain. A young boy at that.”

Hanover made a helpless gesture with one hand. “There were circumstances.”

“Specifically?”

“The boy broke into the mansion. Low security, as you know: it's designed to look like an ordinary country house. Anyone could walk in and stay for a month without realizing what was going on underneath.”

“
He
worked it out,” Roland said.

“There's an explanation, Roland,” Hanover said. “We had a power failure, hardly long enough to notice, but enough for the backup generators to cut in. Then the mains came back on and the generators turned off again. It was all just a second or two, but the surge affected the computers that run the security system. The result was that one of the elevator doors opened. Just for a second or two, as I said, but as luck would have it, our boy was on the spot at the wrong moment. He got curious and entered the lift. Then the power came back on and it took him down. Million to one chance. Would never happen again, and we caught him within minutes, of course.”

Bloody computers,
Roland thought. Aloud he said,
“No evidence of sabotage?”

Hanover shook his head. “Just bad luck and bad timing.”

What puzzled Roland was that George was acting a shade too relaxed about the whole thing. Roland had known him a long time. Something else had happened—he was sure of it. “So the boy wandered in on Opal's mission?”

Hanover's lazy eye drifted slightly. “He appeared in the doorway, gave her a bit of a surprise, but that's about it. The Michael business—he claims he thought Michael was attacking
him
. Which, of course, he was.”

Roland said, “All right, George. About the boy. Do we have a name yet?”

“Lester Thomas.”

The thing was, George still wasn't looking particularly contrite. Someone had penetrated a top-security project, and the operational head was clearly working hard not to look
pleased.
“How much did he see?”

“Nothing of real importance, Roland,” Hanover said. Then added, “Although it could actually turn out to be
very
important.” Roland waited. Hanover leaned forward in his chair. “I think our boy could be another operative.”

Roland paused. “What are you talking about?”

Hanover was openly excited now. “Frankly, Roland, it's the real reason I called you. I mean, the Skull may be out there somewhere, but we've all been down this road before, and I'd never dream of dragging you away until we had some sort of confirmation.” He tapped Roland lightly on the knee. “The kid told us he saw the bats.”

Roland blinked. “The threshold guardians? Without a helmet?”

Hanover nodded. “Yes.”

“How is that possible?”

“Roland, you're the expert,” Hanover said, grinning. “That's why I called you in. I think you should take a look at this lad. If he can do it without a helmet…”

Roland stared at Hanover as he left the sentence trailing. If Lester Thomas could see the guardians without a helmet, that had to mean a natural talent. Even Opal couldn't do that. The psychology experts always claimed there must be a youngster like that out there, one who could project without the implants, maybe without any artificial help at all—but for all the money spent by the Project, all the covert visits to schools, all the disguised test papers filtered into the exams, none had ever turned up.

Until now, apparently.

“You're right, George,” Roland said. “Perhaps I
should
see young Lester right away.” He stood up. “Cell block, I assume?”

“I'll take you personally,” Hanover offered, grinning smugly.

But when they reached the cell block, Lester Thomas was no longer there.

W
hat the machine did was separate you from your physical body. One minute you were in there, working your arms and your legs. The next, you were floating above it…and you could go anywhere in the world in a blink. But the weird thing was, even though you came out of your body, you still had a second energy body, and you never quite got used to the fact that it felt so utterly, completely
normal.
You could see your hands. You still seemed to be wearing clothes—the same clothes you had on when you left. But more than that, you continued to react to your environment to some extent. So floating high about the mountain peaks, Opal felt cold.

Hot or cold, Lusakistan was the sewer pipe of the universe.

It was like looking at a satellite photograph: a few splashes of green, a rare glint of river water, but mostly gray-brown mountains, gray-brown valleys, rock fields,
and narrow, winding trails. This was not a fertile land. There were no rolling grasslands, no fields of grain, just a wilderness of rock. Life here was brutal in the extreme. Small wonder the country bred such hardy people. The tragedy was that it still housed so many terrorists, despite the American invasion and the overthrow of the old government. That war was supposed to be over, but Opal knew it was still going on. Her father was scathing about the fact that Britain had become involved, even though his job meant he couldn't speak out publicly. All the same, most of the fighting was far to the south. Here she was overlooking what appeared to be a wholly peaceful region of empty, barren wilderness.

The Israelis were probably wrong about the Skull.

She caught a movement on the ground to her left, at the very edge of her field of vision, and swung her body around. For a moment there was nothing, then something moved again. It was so far away, it could have been anything: a sheep or a goat, but also possibly a man. Or actually, no, it couldn't have been any of those things: it was too far away for something so small to show up. The terrain she was staring at was rugged—
all
the terrain was rugged—a mix of foothills and the lower slopes of mountains. She seemed to be looking toward a ridge of some sort. The flicker of movement had appeared briefly above it, but she could see nothing at all beyond.
Anything could be hiding there.

Gross movement follows thought.
To reach somewhere, you had to visualize the details of your target. Opal closed her eyes and soared from her high vantage point toward the distant ridge.