Blood Ransom (27 page)

I arrived in Bergen late in the evening of my third day’s travelling. I wandered out of the ferry terminal, suddenly filled with anxiety.

For a start, I had hardly any money left. That was bad enough, but I was up against far more than that. I was in a country I didn’t know, where they spoke a language I didn’t
understand – and I had no idea where Tromstorm was, let alone how to get to it.

I walked down to the busy main road. Despite the fact that it was nearly midnight, the sky wasn’t properly dark. That was something, I supposed. Cars and lorries were roaring past. No one
gave me a second glance.

Well, I was just going to have to make them.

It was my only option.

I stuck out my thumb and started hitching for a ride.

81

Elijah had been interrogating Amanda Lennox for hours. He’d ordered Milo and me upstairs while they talked in the sun porch. I’d crept onto the landing but
couldn’t hear anything from there and I didn’t dare go any closer, what with Paul making regular patrols round the chalet.

One thought kept going through my head. If Amanda Lennox was connected with RAGE, did that mean the organisation knew where we were?

In the end I gave up trying to work out what was going on and went to bed. I fell asleep surprisingly quickly, but was jolted awake by shouts about an hour later.

I raced to the top of the stairs. Elijah and Amanda Lennox were in the kitchen area below. Elijah was holding Lennox’s brown leather shoulder bag.

‘You can’t
keep
me here,’ Amanda Lennox cried. ‘I came to
help
you.’

‘And I’m grateful for your help, Ms Lennox,’ Elijah said, ‘but I can’t possibly let you go now you know where we are. There’s too much at stake.’

Amanda Lennox blinked rapidly. She looked totally shocked. ‘But I’m offering to destroy all the data.’

What data? I kept my gaze on Elijah. He sounded calm, in control as usual.

‘You are an excellent actress, Ms Lennox,’ he said. ‘However you can’t seriously expect me to believe there are no copies?’

I gripped the banister at the top of the stairs. Copies of
what
?

‘Why should there be copies?’ Lennox protested. ‘I’m the head of RAGE. Everyone there thinks I’m going to the police with that stuff.’ She pointed to the
brown leather bag. ‘No one at RAGE suspects I’ve come here.’

Elijah shook his head. ‘There’s a room upstairs where the guard sleeps during the day. You will stay there tonight. I’ll decide what to do with you in the morning.’

Amanda Lennox rolled her eyes. ‘I came here in
good faith
and—’

‘Maybe.’ Elijah ran his hand through his hair. ‘Maybe you did. But you also betrayed your own organisation and tried to blackmail me with the information in this . . .’
he glanced down at the bag, ‘. . . which makes you fundamentally untrustworthy.’ He smiled. ‘And I am not a trusting man at the best of times.’

My hands tightened round the banister.
Blackmail?
What was Amanda Lennox trying to blackmail Elijah over? Could it have something to do with the Eos protein?

I had to find out.

Elijah called Paul and told him to lock Amanda Lennox in his room. Paul obeyed without speaking. I scuttled into my room as their footsteps sounded on the stairs. Amanda Lennox protested the
whole way.

‘This is outrageous,’ she kept saying. ‘You can’t
do
this.’

I heard the door opposite mine lock, then Paul’s heavy footsteps going back down the stairs. I crept out onto the landing but by the time I could see downstairs there was no sign of either
Elijah or the brown leather bag.

I tiptoed across the landing to the locked room.

‘Hello?’ I whispered, crouching by the door.

There was a short pause, then a scuffling noise.

‘Rachel?’ Lennox’s voice was anxious. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m trying to help Elijah but he won’t listen.’ Lennox launched into a garbled, panicky, self-justifying explanation of her decision to betray RAGE and blackmail Elijah.
‘You have to help get me out of here.
Please
, help me.’

‘What’s in the bag you brought? You said it was data . . . information of some kind?’

‘Yes, it’s the data Elijah left behind on Calla,’ Amanda Lennox said quickly. ‘RAGE took samples from Elijah Lazio’s clinic and office on Calla. They found the hard
drive he’d tried to destroy and managed to hack into his notes. I was tasked with taking them to the police, but I brought them here instead.’

‘RAGE wanted to go to the police?’ I frowned. That didn’t make sense. RAGE were usually more into blowing up Elijah’s work than exposing it.

‘Yes, we realised that whenever we attack Elijah Lazio he just moves on to another location. We know Lazio has some kind of government support for what he’s doing, but until now we
had no idea who was involved. This time we’ve got proof of his business relationship with Don Jamieson . . . which starts a trail that should lead to the really high level collusion. Once the
police arrest the corrupt bastards who’re supporting Lazio, his work will lose its funding and stop.’

I nodded. As a strategy it made sense. In fact, it was the most sensible move I’d ever heard of RAGE making – a way of defeating Elijah without innocent people getting killed.

And now this woman had blown everything. ‘But you were too greedy to let that happen?’ I said, filling up with anger. ‘That’s disgusting.’

There was a short silence inside the room. Then Lennox spoke again – a desperate whisper.

‘I know it sounds bad, but I need the money to help my sister. She’s dying of cancer in the UK but there are treatments in the States that could save her.’ Lennox paused.

Was that true? I hesitated, wondering what I would be prepared to do if Grace were dying. Or Theo.

‘Listen, Rachel,’ Lennox went on. ‘RAGE will get Elijah in the end . . . me selling him back these notes will just be a setback, and . . . and you have to help me, Rachel. Out
of common humanity, if nothing else.’

‘I thought I wasn’t human to you,’ I shot back. ‘I thought I was just a clone.’

‘No,
no
.’ Amanda Lennox insisted. ‘No, we don’t . . . we’re not targeting clones any more . . .’

Yeah, right.
‘Suppose RAGE realised what you were up to and followed you?’ I said, struggling to keep my voice low.

‘There’s no way,’ she said. ‘D’you think they’d be hanging back now if they knew where Elijah was? No, I’m alone.
Please
, I’m begging you,
help me get out of here.’

I stared at the locked door between us. ‘I don’t see how I could do that, even if I wanted to.’

‘You have to try . . . for your own sake.
Please.
I’ve seen Lazio’s notes . . . his files . . . there’s information about the Aphrodite Experiment . . . and the
Eos protein. You’re in terrible danger.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘You know what Elijah’s planning to do with me?’ I said. ‘
Tell me
.’

‘Only if you help me escape,’ Lennox hissed.

I had no idea if I could trust her. Still, I needed to hear what Lennox knew about Elijah’s plans for me. Should I help her?

Before I could make up my mind what to do, there was movement downstairs.

Floorboards creaked and a flurry of cold air whooshed up the stairs. It was either Paul or Elijah – and I didn’t want either of them catching me here.

A heavy footstep sounded on the bottom stair. Someone was coming.

I scuttled into my room just as Paul reached the landing. He paused outside my door. I held my breath, as he turned the key in the lock.

I was locked in.
Oh, God.

Tonight, sleep was never going to come.

82

‘I’m eighteen,’ I lied.

The lorry driver tilted his head to one side.

‘This is dangerous for you,’ he said. ‘Even if you are eighteen.’

‘I know, so will you give me a lift?’

I was on the road just outside the Bergen ferry. Finding someone prepared to take me to Tromstorm hadn’t been easy. I knew, from the other drivers who’d rejected my plea for a lift,
that it was going to take several hours to get there – and the town wasn’t on any of the major roads. I’d been standing on this corner for hours now. It was bleak and cold and,
though I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, I was terrified of every aspect of what I was doing . . . Even if I managed to find my way to wherever Elijah was holding Rachel, I had no idea
how I was going to face him down and rescue her.

The lorry driver pursed his lips. ‘If you were my son . . .’

I looked away. I wasn’t anyone’s son. Not properly. Elijah might have called me Apollo, the son of Zeus (his own code name), but he had never been a real father to me. Anyway, he was
genetically more like my twin, which made
his
father my dad.
That
was a horrific thought. An imagined image of Elijah’s Nazi parents drifted through my mind. I shook myself. I
couldn’t let myself get distracted. I had to think of something to say to persuade this driver to give me a lift. I looked at him, searching for the right words. But nothing came. I could
feel the desperation rising inside me.

The lorry driver’s eyes softened.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I cannot take you all way to Tromstorm, but I take you closer.’

Smiling with relief, I got into the lorry and we set off. The roads were clear and the landscape wide and flat with mountains in the distance. Bizarrely, despite the fact that I’d adjusted
my watch to the local time and it was only two a.m., the sun appeared to be rising. Rolf, my lorry driver, explained.

‘The further north you go, the shorter the night in summer. In winter the night is very long. Only a few hours when the sun shines. Summer is much better.’

How weird was that?

The sun was fully up by the time Rolf dropped me off at some petrol station. I found a local map in the concourse shop and studied it hard, much to the annoyance of the shopkeeper.

I guess I could have bought it, but I didn’t have much money left. Anyway, the map showed that I was just ten miles from Tromstorm. The main roads were clear and the route straightforward.
I decided to walk it.

As I got further north I reached higher ground and, unbelievably – seeing as this was early July – even some snow. At first it was just a sprinkling of white flecks on distant
mountain tops, but pretty soon the air cooled and the snow lay thick all around me.

I zipped my jacket up, pulled the hood over my freezing ears and trudged on.

I arrived in Tromstorm, cold and exhausted, towards the end of the afternoon and immediately started asking if anyone had seen two men meeting Elijah’s and Milo’s descriptions.

It wasn’t a huge town and actually quite pretty – though that may have been all the snow. All the shops were shutting, so I trailed round the bars, noting the names of the streets I
was checking out.

I pretended I was looking for my grandfather and brother who were staying somewhere in the area and who’d arrived by helicopter three evenings ago.

Two hours later I’d exhausted all the bars I could find and had found out nothing. I was on the verge of letting myself give way to panic when I passed a small supermarket. It was open,
with a
24 hr
sign flashing above the door.

I went inside and began my usual conversation. ‘Hi, do you speak English?’

‘Mmm, ja.’The lady behind the counter looked at me suspiciously.

I wondered whether, after all my travelling and that long walk into Tromstorm I was starting to look – and smell – like a homeless person after all.

‘I’m looking for my brother,’ I said. ‘He looks like me, but in a wheelchair?’

The woman shook her head.

‘Or my grandfather? He’s a bit taller than I am . . . greyish hair . . . brown eyes. He speaks English and Spanish and German. They came in a helicopter three days ago and
they’re staying nearby, but I’ve lost the address and phone number.’

‘Mmm, ja,’ the lady said with a sniff.

‘So have you seen them?’ I said, fully expecting the answer to be no.

‘The brother in the wheelchair, no.’ The lady sniffed again. ‘But an older man, ja. He comes twice.’

She told me, in broken English, that Elijah had visited on two occasions in the past three days – once to buy a brand of commercial cleaning fluid and a second time to purchase some sort
of powerful acid, which she said he’d told her was in order to clear his drains.

‘This one is special chemical,’ she said. ‘Ja.’

I didn’t like the sound of that.

‘So do you know where he lives?’ I said. ‘Is it nearby?’

‘Oh, ja,’ she said, with another sniff. ‘It is near. Everyone knows this place. It has a special fence all around the property to stop burglars.’

‘A fence?’ I said.

‘Ja.’ Another sniff. ‘They call it the . . . how would you say? Ja, the death fence.’

83

I’d tossed and turned all night.

I badly wanted to know about Elijah’s plans for me. And yet, why should I trust anyone from RAGE, let alone offer them help? Last year – and in the recent attack on Calla –
RAGE had proved just how brutal they were. And Amanda Lennox was not just the head of that vicious group – she was also a selfish blackmailer who – if she’d been telling the truth
– was putting the needs of her sister ahead of a whole bunch of innocent people. Not that anyone who had anything to do with RAGE truly thought that most people were innocent –
especially clones. I could still remember that guy, Franks, from last year, telling me that I was a freak . . . that I shouldn’t exist . . .

I’d finally fallen asleep at about six a.m., then woken several hours later to find I was still locked in my room. Paul came up with some food and drink, but refused to answer my
questions. There was no sound from the room opposite, where Lennox was being held.

I had no idea what was going on . . . or why I was being treated differently all of a sudden. I could only assume Elijah was trying to keep me and Lennox apart. Which surely meant she
did
have some knowledge about Elijah’s plans for me.