Escape from Shadow Island (15 page)

But if the overall structure of the room was old, its contents were anything but. Max went to the balustrade and looked down. In the center of the hall below were two chairs—high-tech metal reclining ones like something out of a dentist's surgery. Arranged in a wide circle around them were various monitors, computers, and other pieces of machinery that Max couldn't identify. And at the edges of the room were stainless-steel benches and bits of apparatus that reminded him of the chemistry rooms at his school, only cleaner and newer. It was obviously some kind of scientific research laboratory.

He heard a door open underneath the gallery and immediately moved back from the balustrade. Someone was coming into the hall below. Max stood motionless in the darkest corner of the gallery and watched two men in white laboratory coats walk across to the center of the room. One of the men flicked a power switch, and for the next ten minutes they checked over and tested the electrical apparatus. Screens lit up, machines beeped, graphics and other data scrolled down monitors. The tests completed, the men sat down side by side at what looked like the main control console and waited.
Five minutes later, the door opened again and two armed guards entered the hall. Sandwiched between them was a man in handcuffs. At first Max wondered if it was the prisoner he'd seen being escorted from the motor launch that morning, but this man looked different. He was stripped to the waist and wearing nothing but a pair of white tracksuit bottoms.

The guards forced the man to sit in one of the dentist's chairs. They undid his handcuffs and strapped his wrists to the arms of the chair. Then they fastened his ankles down, too. Finally, they flipped out a couple of short metal arms from the headrest of the chair and clamped them into place around the man's skull. He was now almost completely immobilized. His eyes flicked around the room. He tried desperately to free his arms and legs, but they were secured too tightly. Even from this distance, Max could see that the man was terrified out of his wits.

The man screamed something Max didn't understand. It sounded like Arabic or some other Middle Eastern language. That made sense: He had dark skin and a close-cropped black beard. He shouted again, but the two men in white coats—the scientists or technicians—ignored him. They got up from their seats and attached a series of electrodes and wires to the man's
body—one on either side of his head and several on his chest. Green lines pulsed across the bank of monitors, showing the man's heartbeat, blood pressure, and other bodily functions.

One of the scientists broke open a glass vial of colorless liquid and filled a hypodermic needle. Then he injected the liquid into the man's arm. For half a minute nothing happened, and then the man's eyes began to roll. His arm and shoulder muscles contracted and his whole body began to shake. Sweat broke out all over his chest, the droplets glistening on his skin. Then he arched his back violently and let out a piercing shriek of pain. Max turned away, unable to watch any more.

But as he turned, his left hand brushed against the wall, and the flashlight slipped from his grasp, falling to the floor with a clatter. The technicians and guards spun around and looked up at the gallery.

“It's the boy!” one of the guards shouted in Spanish.

Max scooped up the flashlight and darted back through the door into the office, and from there into the corridor. He guessed that the guards would probably come up the nearest staircase—the one to his left—so he sprinted the other way. He pictured Angel Romero's plan of the fortress in his head as he ran.
The building was basically a square with a courtyard in the middle and a staircase in each of the four corners. If Romero's memory was correct, there should be another staircase at the end of this corridor—and there it was. Max paused for a moment, but there was only one way he could realistically go. He bounded up the stairs two at a time. When he reached the third-floor landing, he kept going up. He was almost at the fourth floor when alarm bells went off all around the fortress. Every guard would be after him now. He needed somewhere to hide.

He turned along the landing and pushed open a door, praying that there was no one inside. There wasn't. It was a small room with a single bed in one corner and posters of supermodels on the walls. From the high, barred window Max guessed that this had once been a cell but had now been converted into living quarters for someone who worked in the fortress. A guard, perhaps? Max liked the irony of that. The guards were scouring the building for him and he was holed up in one of their rooms. He dropped to the floor and slid underneath the bed.

A few minutes later, the alarm bells stopped ringing. And ten minutes after that, Max heard a voice booming out from a loudspeaker in the courtyard, the words
audible in every part of the fortress.

“Max? We know it's you, Max. Come on out.” It was a man's voice, speaking in English with a soft American accent.

“Max,” the man said again. “What's the point in hiding? We'll find you eventually, so why not save time and give yourself up now?”

Max stayed where he was. He wasn't turning himself in. Let them come and get him.

“Max, I have a friend of yours here. Say something to Max, Consuela.”

Consuela's voice came over the loudspeaker. “Max, it's me.” She sounded hesitant, nervous. “Max, don't trust them, they—” Her words were cut off abruptly. Then she screamed, a single cry of pain.

Max rolled out from under the bed and stood up, his fists clenching with anger.

“Did you hear that, Max?” the man said. “I don't want to hurt your friend, but I will if you don't come out now. Do you hear me?”

Consuela gave another cry of pain.

“It's up to you, Max,” the voice continued. “Do you want Consuela to suffer? I'll give you three minutes to show yourself.”

Max knew he had no choice. He couldn't stand by
and let them hurt Consuela. He had to surrender. From his pocket, he took the piece of wire he'd used to pick the lock in the cellars. He wound the wire around his finger a couple of times until it was the size of a wedding ring. He made sure there were no sharp ends sticking out, then put the wire in his mouth and swallowed it.

He opened the door. A window on the other side of the corridor overlooked the courtyard. Max saw a man in a black suit standing there with a microphone in his hand. Consuela was next to him, an armed guard on either side of her. She looked smaller and more vulnerable than Max had ever seen her. The man in the black suit glanced at his watch and raised the microphone to his mouth.

“You have two minutes, Max. Don't keep me waiting,” he said.

Max went down the stairs and out through a door into the courtyard. Consuela saw him coming. She broke away from her guards and ran to him, throwing her arms around him and hugging him tightly.

“Don't worry about me,” she whispered in his ear. “Save yourself, Max. You must get away.”

The guards pulled them apart roughly. Max gave the man in the black suit a look of intense loathing.
“You sadistic creep,” he said fiercely.

The man didn't take offense at the insult. He seemed almost amused by it. He turned to the soldiers. “Take the woman back to her cell and the boy to my office.”

MAX LOOKED AROUND THE ROOM. IT WAS ON the ground floor of the fortress, a big corner office with a desk the size of a table-tennis table, a leather sofa and armchairs at one end, and a lot of artwork on the walls.

The soldiers had put him in a chair facing the desk and taken up positions beside him. When the man in the black suit entered the room, they stepped away from Max, but not far. Max was aware of them watching him, their submachine guns slung across their chests.

The man in the black suit sat in a high-backed swivel chair behind the desk. He was a nondescript person in almost every respect. He was neither tall nor short, fat
nor thin. His hair was a mixture of brown and gray, his complexion was pinkish, and he wore rectangular rimless spectacles over pale-blue eyes that had as much warmth in them as an arctic lake. He was the kind of person you could pass in the street and not notice, or meet and forget about five minutes later. Yet Max realized he must be Julius Clark, the owner of Shadow Island and one of the richest men on earth.

“So you're Max Cassidy,” Clark said. “You look like your father.”

“You met my father?” asked Max.

“I saw his act at Playa d'Oro. He was very good. I understand you're quite an escape artist yourself.” He smiled coldly. “Well, you won't escape from here. Do you know who I am?”

“You're a man who hurts defenseless women and tortures prisoners.”

“So you saw our little experiment in the lab? You're wrong—that wasn't torture.”

“It looked that way to me,” Max said. “Why've you brought Consuela here? What do you want with her?”

“That doesn't concern you.”

“I think it does. What is this place? Who are all the prisoners you're keeping here?”

Clark ignored Max's questions and asked one of his own. “How did you get onto the island?”

“I flew,” Max replied.

“You're a bit of a smart aleck, aren't you? It doesn't matter. We'll get the answer out of you soon enough.”

“What, you'll torture me too?”

“You should've kept away from here, Max. You should've let them send you back to England. You're just a kid.”

“Maybe,” Max said. “But I'm old enough to recognize a psycho when I see one.”

Clark's mouth tightened. His icy blue eyes glared at Max. “You think I'm a psychopath?”

“You do a pretty good impression of one.”

“You're a child, Max. A stupid, ignorant child. You have no idea what I am or what we're doing here.” Clark nodded at the guards. “Search him. Thoroughly.”

The soldiers hauled Max to his feet and went through his pockets. They found the screwdriver and held it up for Clark to see.

“Take your clothes off,” Clark said.

“Get lost,” Max retorted.

“Take them off, or my men will take them off for you.”

Max shot him a hostile look, but he removed his
clothes, stripping down to his boxer shorts. He stood there almost naked, feeling exposed and humiliated, while the guards went through all his clothes, checking them for hidden tools.

“You escaped from the police station in Rio Verde,” Clark said. “We're not as careless here. When we lock someone up, they
stay
locked up. Check his feet and hair.”

The soldiers examined Max's toes and the soles of his feet, then combed through his hair.

“He's clean, Señor Clark,” one of the men said.

“Take away his belt and wristwatch,” Clark ordered. Then, to Max, “Put your clothes back on.”

“My father came here, didn't he?” Max said. “What happened to him?”

Clark didn't answer. He waited until Max was fully dressed, then waved a hand at the guards. “Put him in a cell.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Max asked.

“You want to know what we do here,” Clark replied. “You're going to find out.”

 

The cell was on the third floor of the fortress. It was about the same size as the one in the police station, only the floor was stone flags and there was a proper bed,
metal framed, bolted to the floor, with a thin mattress, blanket, and pillow on it. A rusty metal bucket in the corner must have served as a toilet.

Max paced restlessly around the room, cursing himself for dropping his flashlight on the gallery. That had been stupid, unforgivably careless, and now he was paying the price.

At least he hadn't been put in one of those tiny black holes in the cellars. That was something to be thankful for. His cell had a window of sorts, a small square opening with no glass and three thick steel bars cemented into the stonework around it. If he stood on the bed, he was just tall enough to see through. He was on the outside of the east wing of the fortress, with a view over the sea. He gripped hold of the bars and shook them. They were fixed firmly into the walls. Not that this made any difference. Even if there'd been no bars over the window, it wouldn't have provided an escape route. There was nothing outside except a sheer hundred-thirty-foot drop to the rocks below.

Max had other ideas about how he was going to get out. And he had every intention of doing so. He wasn't going to wait for those men in white coats to strap him into that chair and pump him full of chemicals. Julius Clark had sneered at him, called him a stupid, ignorant
child. Well, he'd show them what a “child” could do.

He went to the middle of the cell and stretched out his arms and shoulders, standing up as straight as he could. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated on working the muscles of his abdomen and alimentary canal. The ring of wire would still be down there in his stomach. It shouldn't be too hard to bring it back up. He felt a slight flutter just below his rib cage and knew that the valve at the top of his stomach was opening, the muscles around it expelling the circle of wire. Slowly, the wire came up past his tonsils and into his mouth.

He pulled it out and unrolled it. It was a crude implement, but he'd studied the door lock carefully when the guards had brought him in. It was old, probably dating back to the 1970s. The piece of wire should be enough to pick it.

But not yet. He had to make himself wait. There might still be guards outside. He'd let things settle down before he went to work on the door.

He lay on the bed and tried to relax a little, but it wasn't easy. He was impatient to get going on the lock.
Give it five or ten minutes,
he said to himself. He attempted to distract himself by thinking about the other people who had been kept prisoner here before
him.
What terrible hardships did they suffer?
he wondered. He thought about the pirates who'd lived on the island four hundred years earlier, and then the political prisoners who'd been locked away by the generals—men like Angel Romero and Luis Lopez-Vega. How many of those prisoners had died on Shadow Island? Did their ghosts still haunt the stairs and passages of the fortress?

“Is there somebody there?”

Max stiffened. Had he imagined the voice?

It came again. “Hello?”

A man's voice with an English accent, calling faintly from somewhere.

Max sat up and looked around. The cell was in darkness. There was a bulb high up in the ceiling, but the guards had switched it off from outside after they'd locked Max in. “Who's that?” he called.

Was the voice outside in the corridor? Max got off the bed and crouched by the door, peering through the keyhole. “Where are you?”

“Over here,” the man said.

Max spun around. “Where?”

“In the corner.”

Max went to the far corner of the cell.

“Low down,” the voice said.

Max felt the wall with his hands. At the very bottom was a crack where the mortar had broken away from between the stones. He knelt down beside it. He could feel a slight draft coming through the gap, but he couldn't see anything.

“Are you next door? In a cell too?” the voice asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where are we?”

“Shadow Island.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It's off the coast of Santo Domingo.”

“Santo Domingo? In Central America?”

“Yes.”

“You sound like a boy.”

“I am, I'm fourteen,” Max said.

“
Fourteen!
Jesus, they've got kids here too? What's your name?”

“Max Cassidy.”

“Nice to meet you, Max. I'm Chris Moncrieffe. I'd shake hands, only it's not exactly possible at the moment. You English?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. How long've you been here?”

“Just a few hours.”

“I only got here today as well.”

“Are you the man in the blue shirt and handcuffs I saw arriving by boat?” Max asked.

“Yeah, that was me. They've taken the handcuffs off now, thank God.”

Max leaned back against the wall. Talking to this stranger in the adjoining cell made him feel better, gave him something to focus his attention on while he waited for the right moment to tackle the door. He liked the sound of Chris Moncrieffe's voice. There was something reassuring about it.

“You know anything about this place?” Chris asked.

“It's an old Spanish fortress,” Max replied. “Owned by a businessman named Julius Clark. Why've they brought you here?”

“That's a good question. I have no idea.”

“Really? You must have done something.”

“I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“What do you mean? What place, what time?”

“The Amazon rainforest. That's where I was when I was abducted.”

“You were kidnapped?” Max said.

“I can't see any other way of putting it.”

“Who by?”

“A company named Rescomin International. You heard of them?”

“No.”

“They're a multinational corporation, very big, fingers in all sorts of pies—minerals, commodities, timber. That's why I was in the Amazon. I was working for an environmental charity named Rainforest Watch. They needed a researcher with jungle experience. I was in the army for ten years, spent plenty of time in the jungle—Borneo, Central America, Brazil. Rainforest Watch wanted someone who knew how to survive out there for long periods. And that's where I've been for most of the past year, surveying the forest, keeping tabs on Rescomin. Rainforest Watch suspected they were illegally chopping down trees and selling the hardwood on the international market.”

“And were they?” Max asked.

“That's exactly what they were doing. Clearing huge areas of forest and shipping out the timber. I watched them for weeks, living undercover in the jungle, taking photographs, making notes about their operations. Then I got careless. I went too close to one of their logging camps. A company security guard caught me. They confiscated my reports and camera and locked me up in a shed for a couple of days. Next thing I
know, they handcuff and blindfold me, put me on a plane, and fly me out of the Amazon. I was kept in a cellar somewhere for a few days, then flown somewhere else, transferred to a boat, and here I am—on ‘Shadow Island,' apparently.”

Max was silent for a few seconds. He was taking in everything Chris had told him. “I can't believe a multinational corporation could do that kind of thing to someone.”

“Well, they did. Crazy, isn't it? They're stripping the Amazon rainforest of trees, probably paying the authorities to turn a blind eye to what they're up to. They're destroying the environment and making a lot of money out of it. And I'm the one who ends up locked in a cell. What makes me even more angry is that I had photos, notes, a ton of evidence to prove they were logging illegally, and now that's all gone.” Chris gave a long sigh. “But that's enough about me. How about you? What's a fourteen-year-old boy doing here?”

Max told him. Chris listened to his story, mostly in silence, though he laughed when Max described escaping from the police station in the back of the car.

When Max had finished, Chris said, “You're one gutsy kid, aren't you? You reckon your dad did come here? That he was kept a prisoner like us?”

“I don't know,” said Max. “But I'm going to find out.”

“Have you seen much of the island? You think we have any chance of escaping?”

“It won't be easy. There are a lot of guards—Julius Clark seems to have some kind of private army—and they're all carrying guns.”

“Could we swim for it—if we can get out of the fortress?”

“The currents are supposed to be dangerous. But I'd be willing to give it a go.”

“Count me in too,” Chris said. “Of course, we have to get out of these cells first. You have any ideas about that?”

“Give me a minute,” Max said.

“What?”

“We'll talk again in a minute.”

Max went to his cell door and listened. He'd waited long enough now. He could hear no sounds of a guard outside. Inserting his piece of wire into the keyhole, he went to work on the lock. One by one the tumblers clicked back. Max pulled open the door and looked out. The corridor was deserted.

In two strides, he was at the door of the adjoining cell, picking the lock. He threw back the door and
stepped inside. Chris Moncrieffe was still sitting on the floor in the corner of the cell, his knees drawn up to his chest.

“I'm sorry,” Max said. “It took me a bit longer than a minute.”

Chris gaped at him. “What the…? How in God's name did you do that?”

Max held up the wire. “It's easy when you know how.”

Chris scrambled to his feet. He was a tall, muscular man with a tanned face, short black hair, and dark stubble along his jaw line. He held out a hand. His grip was firm and unyielding.

“Not bad, Max, not bad at all,” he said dryly. “What now?”

“We rescue Consuela, find out anything we can about my dad, then get the hell out of here,” Max told him.