The Power of Five Oblivion (12 page)

Perhaps it was the air-conditioning but Jonas felt a cold shudder rise up between his shoulder blades. He was so glad he was up here, not down there. From as early as he could remember, he had always believed that he had been chosen. It didn’t matter that he was alone, that his mother was always away on the other side of the world. All through his life he’d had the best food to eat, the finest clothes to wear. He had been educated, taken to theatre and opera, encouraged to read. If he became sick, doctors would look after him. He could not imagine scrabbling in the mud like the people he was looking at now. People? It wasn’t even the word for them. They were little more than animals.

“A glass of white wine?”

The chairman had slipped into the office behind him and stood there with a bottle in one hand.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m afraid it’s not quite chilled. Even here in the United Nations, the power is not completely reliable. It goes on and off. Please, take a seat…”

The chairman seemed younger than he had on the stage, as if he had put the effort of his long speech behind him and could now relax. He moved carefully into the room and poured two glasses, then took his place behind the desk. Jonas took a glass and sat on a leather sofa. It occurred to him that he knew nothing at all about the chairman – where he lived, whether he had a family, or even his name.

“Your very good health, sir,” he said.

“No, Jonas. I’m afraid you’re drinking to something that doesn’t exist. I’m old and my body is full of cancer. Fortunately, I have drugs to contain it but the truth is that I may not have more than a year left. Maybe we should drink to the Old Ones. And to the new world that they’re helping to create.”

“Of course.” Jonas sipped his wine. It was excellent. He wondered how many hundreds of dollars the bottle would have cost.

“So what did you make of the conference?” the chairman asked. His face gave nothing away. There were so many folds, so many lines that it was barely more than a leather mask.

“I thought it was amusing,” Jonas replied.

“The other delegates may not have agreed.”

“I’m sure they didn’t.” Jonas paused for a moment, swirling the wine in his glass. “What did you mean by ‘adjusted’ – if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Adjusted?”

“You said that some of them would be adjusted in the training camps.”

“Oh yes.” The chairman sounded uninterested. “They’ll have their hands or their arms cut off and replaced with saws and blades. It’s very hard for a soldier to lose his weapon when he
is
the weapon. Some of them will be disfigured in other ways. Their faces will be altered to make them uglier. You take someone’s lips away, they never stop snarling. They’ll all be branded – name, rank and serial number. It makes them feel they belong. And it terrifies the opposition.”

There was a pause. The two men sipped their wine.

“Does it ever bother you, Jonas?” the chairman asked. “When the Old Ones have finished with you, they’ll probably kill you too.”

Jonas shrugged. “That won’t happen while I’m still useful to them.”

“And do you think you still are?” He paused. “Useful?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, sir.” Jonas leant forward. “I’ll do anything to prove myself. You only have to ask.”

“That’s good.” The chairman set his glass down. His eyes became hard. It was time for business. “You’ll be leaving today for Italy. We have two prisoners for you to deal with. They were captured a couple of weeks ago in the Abbey of San Galgano, just outside the city of Lucca.”

“Two of the Five?”

“Exactly. There was something I didn’t explain back in the conference hall, but you need to understand it as it’ll make sense of your mission. In fact, it’s very important.”

“Please go ahead, sir.”

“Well, it concerns the Five. I said there were five children at the battle ten thousand years ago and five children now – and, as I explained, they’re the same five children. But what I should have added was that, somehow, they have the ability to exist in two different times, simultaneously. More than that, they can replace themselves. Take the girl, for example. If you killed her today, she would be replaced immediately by the girl from ten thousand years ago.”

“So you’d need to kill her a second time.”

“Exactly. But you’d have to find her first and that might not be so easy. You see what I’m getting at, Jonas? If we want to control them, we have to keep them alive. We can lock them up. We can hurt them. But it’s better for us if they don’t die.”

“Is that how they won … the last time?”

“Yes.” The chairman nodded. “There were five armies but they were hopelessly outnumbered. All the forces of the Old Ones – the shape-changers, the fly-soldiers, the monsters and the mutants – were lined up against them. And then, one of the Five, the boy called Sapling, was ambushed and killed at a place called Scathack Hill.

“The Old Ones thought they were safe. What they didn’t realize was that killing Sapling allowed his modern self to travel back in time and replace him. The American boy, Jamie Tyler, went back without anyone noticing and joined with the four others to make five. That was the trick. The Old Ones didn’t see what had happened until it was too late. The circle was formed, the gate opened, and the rest you know.”

Jonas drank a little more of his wine. He wondered where this was all leading. The chairman had announced that he was dying. Well, good riddance to him. But was it possible that he was being groomed to take over Nightrise? His face gave nothing away but the thought of it thrilled him.

“Returning to modern times,” the chairman continued, “the Five came together again very briefly in Hong Kong. It’s extraordinary to think that they were actually in the same room, in a temple in Kowloon. If they had been able to stay together, if they had formed another circle, who knows what might have happened! But the city was being hit by a typhoon. It was falling down all around them. They had to get out fast so they all piled into a magic door, which had been specially built for them inside the temple and which could transport them to safety on the other side of the world.

“There are twenty-five of these doors and they’ve used some of them before. But this time they forgot the one simple rule. They had to know where they were going. Otherwise, they would be sent anywhere. And that’s exactly what happened. They went in together through one door but they came out of different ones. Jamie Tyler, for example, turned up in a village in England and we very nearly captured him. We’re still looking for him now. In a way, you’ve got to laugh. All that effort just to come together and they’ve found themselves scattered all over the globe.

“And there’s something else. The door was blown to pieces even as they went through it. The typhoon destroyed the entire temple … and this caused a gash in the fabric of time. Although the journey only felt like a few seconds for them, it actually took them ten years to arrive at the other end.

“I’m afraid they’ve come back to a world very different from the one they left. Their position is hopeless. They’re alone, scared, weak and divided…”

“And we have taken two of them prisoner.”

“Yes, Jonas. We knew the exact location of seventeen of the twenty-five doors and we have been watching them for ten long years, waiting for the children to appear.”

“So which two are they?”

The chairman waited before answering and Jonas knew that he was toying with him, enjoying the moment. “One is a Peruvian boy. His parents died in a mud-slide in his village and he ended up scavenging and begging in the streets of Lima. His name is Pedro.”

“And the other?”

“Scott Tyler.”

The words were out and Jonas felt a warm glow of satisfaction. Scott and Jamie Tyler had been responsible for the death of his mother in California, ten years ago. One or the other of them – maybe it was both – had turned the hand of an assassin and sent a bullet straight into her head. Jonas had been seventeen at the time. Of course he didn’t care about his mother – but that wasn’t the point. This boy, Scott, had been responsible for her death and that made it personal. It would give Jonas great pleasure to meet up with him. Suddenly the wine tasted sweet.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Pedro is of very little interest to us. He’s weak and he’s loyal and it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to do very much with him. Scott is a different matter. Your mother already spent a certain amount of time with him and almost managed to persuade him of our point of view. She was using drugs and various brainwashing techniques.” The chairman produced a memory stick and handed it to Jonas. “This is her report and there are video files too, which will give you a general idea of what went on. Obviously the process wasn’t completely successful as Scott and his brother were reunited and your mother is dead.

“But it’s still our belief that Scott is the weak link. He may be one of the Five but he’s not really
one
of them, if you know what I mean. He’s an outsider. He’s not popular. From what we know, when the others went travelling to the UK and then to Hong Kong, he got left behind. They didn’t want him. We can play on that. We can do anything, actually, but we want him on our side.”

“And then?” Jonas turned the memory stick in his fingers. It was strange that he might be seeing his mother again soon in the video files.

“We can use him to get Matthew Freeman,” the chairman replied. “That’s what this is all about. It’s like I said when we were in the conference room. Matthew Freeman did the impossible and hurt the King of the Old Ones in the Nazca Desert. For that he has to pay. There is an infinity of pain coming his way, Jonas, and it’s your job to arrange it. You finish your mother’s work and you make Scott one of ours. Scott draws Matt into a trap. And you get your reward.”

“You mean … I end up getting adjusted too?”

The chairman smiled. His skin barely moved but it was there in his eyes. “It could come to that, Jonas. Let’s face it. We’re heading towards the end of the world as we know it. How many hundreds of thousands of people do you think have taken their last breath while you and I have been having this conversation in this nice office with this pleasant glass of wine? That’s how it always was, even before the Old Ones arrived. You can’t think too much about these things because there’s nothing you can do – so why bother? If I were you, I’d take the same attitude to your future. Do as you’re told and don’t worry too much about what’s going to happen. Because one thing is sure, if you fail in this, you’ll be adjusted before you have time to blink!”

“I won’t fail, sir.”

“I know that. It’s why you’ve been chosen.” The chairman finished his drink. “There’s a plane waiting to take you to Italy. Let me know when Scott is ready and I’ll tell you what happens next.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you for this opportunity.”

“You deserve it, Jonas. Enjoy it.”

A few hours later, in the air above New York, Jonas Mortlake saw his mother again. Her face filled the computer screen which rested on the table in front of him.

He had always thought there was something deeply unattractive about her. She looked more like a man than a woman with her hair cut so short – and with those thin shoulders and long neck. As always, she was dressed in black, a trouser suit that didn’t flatter her at all. She’d never worn make-up or very much jewellery. Her face was so washed out that had this been a black-and-white film, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

It was the boy who was with her who fascinated Jonas. He was lying on a bed being fed by some sort of saline drip connected to his arm. He was wearing dark trousers and a black shirt that had been torn open to expose his chest. His feet were bare. He looked dazed as whatever drug was being pumped into him took effect. This was Scott Tyler ten years ago … although, of course, he would be exactly the same now after his little jump in time. He was a very handsome boy, Jonas thought, with that long, dark hair, sculptured features, Native American eyes. Fifteen years old but he had already packed so much into that young life. Jonas had read about his so-called uncle, a man called Don White who wasn’t actually related to him at all. He had exploited the boy’s ability and put him on the stage in Reno, Nevada. Scott had never had much education. He hadn’t really had much of a life.

“It’s always the good people who get pushed around,” Susan Mortlake was saying on the screen. How long had it been since he had heard her voice? “The little people. Do you want to be a little person, Scott, or do you want to be with me? Because, you see, in the world that’s coming, I’m going to be in charge, and you’re going to have to start asking yourself: Which end of the whip do you want to be?”

The camera moved closer and Jonas froze the image. Scott seemed very close now. He reached out and ran a finger down the boy’s chest. It felt good. He was going to enjoy this assignment. Whatever happened to him in the future, it would be worth it.

The plane soared over the clouds, carrying him east to Europe and towards the blood red sun.

BLOOD AND SAND