Lost Worlds (20 page)

‘Those two took the trouble to fake our manifest and a customs exemption form. That shows forethought and planning. They wouldn’t have done anything as stupid as to drive around in a
stolen van. No, this will have been purchased on the quiet, from some small second-hand dealership. It’ll be legitimate. And we won’t need it for more than a few days.’ He glanced
at it appreciatively. ‘Mitsubishi Delica, diesel engine, four-wheel drive. Engine beneath the front passenger seat. Rails so that you can fit anything up to six extra seats in the back, so
they’re surprisingly versatile as well as being powerful. I’ve seen these things used to pull Land Rovers out of mud. They’re nippy, they’re strong and they’re
surprisingly comfortable. I might just keep this thing, if I can work out a way to get it back to England.’ He smiled. ‘And the thieves have packed all but two crates already for us.
That was considerate.’

Gecko still had an uncomfortable feeling in his chest. ‘I would still like to know what they were doing, stealing our equipment.’

‘If I had to make a guess,’ Rhino answered thoughtfully, ‘I’d say that they somehow heard about ARLENE and decided that they wanted to get hold of some semi-secret US
government equipment. They could probably sell it on the black market for millions of dollars. The Chinese or the North Koreans would sell their own honourable ancestors to get hold of
it.’

‘There is another possibility,’ Gecko pointed out.

‘What’s that?’

‘They might have been targeting us, rather than the equipment. They might have found out about the expedition and they are trying to stop us.’

‘Why would anyone want to stop an expedition to find a possible ape-man creature that probably doesn’t exist anyway?’

‘I do not know.’ Gecko shrugged, then caught up with Rhino’s last statement. ‘What, you do not think we’re going to find this Almast thing?’

‘I have to say, it’s possibly the most unlikely thing I’ve heard apart from the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, what are the odds of there being a missing link, a real Neanderthal,
living quietly here in the foothills? Surely someone would have spotted these Almasti creatures before now.’

‘Not if they are avoiding humans. So, if you do not believe in the Almasti, what are you doing here?’

‘I’m earning money, and keeping my head down,’ Rhino replied brutally. ‘What’s your excuse? Are you going along with it because you have a desperate desire to find
new species and expand the frontiers of biology?’

Gecko opened his mouth to answer, then realized that he didn’t know what to say. Did he
really
believe in the Almasti, or was he just going along on the expedition to get away from
the men who wanted him to be their pet thief?

Rhino had been watching Gecko’s face. ‘OK, you’re here because you’re running away from something, not because you believe in Calum Challenger’s cause. Natalie we
already know about – she’s only here because her mother ordered her to come along. So what about Tara? I get the impression that unknown animals aren’t exactly her cup of tea. I
suspect she prefers circuit boards and computer code to mythical ape-men.’

‘She is . . . trying to avoid getting involved with a company that . . . that wants to use her skills,’ Gecko explained haltingly. He wasn’t sure how much Tara would want Rhino
to know about Nemor, or how much she had already told him when they were in America.

‘OK, so she’s been pushed on to the expedition by circumstances, not pulled on by a love of extinct animals and dubious DNA benefits.’ Rhino sighed. ‘So the only person
who really believes in the purpose of this expedition is the one who’s not here. Great.’ He thumped the side of the van. ‘Normally I love a challenge, but this is going too far.
Come on, let’s get back to the others and drive them into town. We still have an expedition to plan and execute, even if nobody actually believes in it.’

Gecko climbed into the passenger seat, shocked by Rhino’s attitude. Maybe he’d been guilty himself of not thinking too much about what the four of them were doing, or how quickly
they had been pulled together by Calum’s enthusiasm, but the thought that none of them actually wanted to be there was surprisingly hurtful.

How, he wondered, could they possibly pull this expedition off successfully if none of them believed in it?

‘W
atch out!’ Natalie shouted.

The taxi driver didn’t seem to hear her. He just headed straight for the cars ahead. He even seemed to accelerate.

Her mother put her hand reassuringly on Natalie’s knee. ‘Don’t worry, darling – he knows what he’s doing.’

‘I don’t care whether he
knows
what he’s doing or not,’ Natalie snapped, hearing the edge of panic in her voice. ‘What he’s doing is going to get us
killed!’

As the car hurtled towards the line of traffic, a gap appeared at the last minute. The driver spun the steering wheel and the car slewed right, slotting neatly into the gap. Matching speeds with
precision, he joined the flow. There wasn’t even a blare of horns to mark his sudden arrival. It seemed as if the other drivers regarded it is something normal.

‘There are only a couple of rules of driving in Georgia, as far as I can tell,’ Gillian Livingstone said calmly. ‘The first is that if there’s a gap, your car can fit
into it. The second is that there’s always a gap, even if you have to make it yourself. Oh, and the third is that nobody has priority at junctions, which means in practice that everyone has
priority, and uses it.’

Natalie shivered. ‘I hate this place.’

‘You hate everywhere that isn’t Los Angeles. And when you’re in Los Angeles you hate it there as well.’

Natalie didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she looked out of the car’s window at the sights of Tbilisi, capital of Georgia.

The city was, she had to admit, striking. It was a riot of bright colours. The buildings were not just painted in different colours, but designed in different styles as well. Some were tall and
thin, some short and wide; some had complicated rooflines and some were flat; some had lots of small windows and some had a handful of big ones. There was no pattern, no uniformity, apart from the
fact that all the buildings had balconies beneath their windows, usually with vases, a cat and some washing. People seemed to have just built what they liked where they liked, but rather than being
a mess the results were surprisingly attractive.

And there were no gaps, Natalie noticed. In New York it seemed as if every big building was separated from its neighbours by sidewalks, alleyways or stretches of grass, but here the buildings
all ran together into a continuous frontage. Looking closer, Natalie could see where there might have
been
gaps, at one time, but someone had come along and built thin buildings in the gaps,
or linked the two sides with a stretch of differently coloured wall with a gateway in it.

It was chaotic, but at the same time it was charming.

‘This city is a mess,’ she said dismissively. After all, she didn’t want to give her mother the idea that she had anything but contempt for the places to which she was
taken.

It was the day after she had arrived with Rhino Gillis, Gecko and Tara. Rhino had managed to get hold of some crummy second-hand van, and they’d had a bumpy half-hour drive into the centre
of Tbilisi, where their hotel was located. It was OK, she supposed. It was more of a managed apartment than a hotel, with four bedrooms leading off a central living room. There was even a small
kitchen area, which had filled Natalie with horror. She hoped that they wouldn’t be expected to cook their own food. If it came to that, she was going to phone out for pizza.

Her mother had called the next morning. She’d arrived on an earlier flight, and was intending to head into the American embassy to chat to the ambassador. And Natalie, of course, was
expected to go with her. Rhino had agreed – not that it was his place to agree. Gillian Livingstone pretty much did what she wanted.

The car swerved out of the flow of traffic and darted across a road towards a side street. The driver parked the car diagonally. ‘Embassy up there,’ he grunted, gesturing along the
side street. It sloped upward, of course. Nothing was ever easy in Natalie’s life, not even short walks.

‘Can’t you get any closer?’ her mother asked.

He shook his head. ‘Security. Best for me to park here and you to walk. Not too far.’

Gillian shrugged. ‘When in Rome . . .’ she murmured. She waited for a moment, expecting the driver to get out and open her door for her. When he didn’t, she opened it herself
and stepped out. ‘Come on, Natalie – it looks like we’re slumming it.’

As the two of them walked uphill, her mother confided, ‘I don’t expect to be in there more than an hour – the ambassador is a busy man. We’ll swap pleasantries,
he’ll offer us a cup of coffee, I’ll talk a little bit about the business meetings I’ve got planned and he’ll try to give me a steer on how to deal with Georgian
businessmen, as if I need it. At the end I’ll just drop in the fact that Rhino Gillis is here with the three of you, and you’re all going to be heading out into the foothills of the
Caucasus Mountains. I’ll mention these stupid Almast creatures, and he’ll laugh. He won’t take it seriously, of course, but he might have heard a rumour, or know someone that you
can talk to. It’s worth asking, and at least we can alert him to your presence, just in case there’s any trouble. Apart from saying “Hello”, “No sugar, thank
you”, and “Goodbye”, I don’t expect you to say anything.’

‘As if.’ Natalie had no intention of adding anything to the conversation between her mother and the ambassador.

‘Actually,’ she said, surprising herself, ‘I don’t think it
is
stupid.’

‘You don’t think
what
is stupid?’

‘This Almast thing.’

Her mother turned to glance at her, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. ‘Don’t tell me that Calum has persuaded you? Look, if there was really a tribe of Neanderthals running around
anywhere in the civilized world, then we would know about it. Given the number of TV documentary teams criss-crossing the world in search of something unique to film, I’d be surprised if
there’s anything larger than a beetle that hasn’t had a zoom lens pointed at it.’

‘Then why did you agree to Calum setting up this expedition? And why are you making me go along with it?’

‘Calum is a . . . unique child,’ Gillian said quietly. ‘He’s fantastically intelligent, but he’s not got much perspective. Because he doesn’t get out much, he
spends a lot of time propping up his own obsessions by hunting around the internet. The trouble is that he’s got access to a large pot of money, and his Great-Aunt Merrily doesn’t pull
as hard on the purse strings as she should. Calum is free to explore those obsessions, and if he’s not carefully controlled then he’ll end up frittering away his inheritance. It’s
my job, as I see it, to keep him relatively sane and focused, and make sure there’s still a comfortable amount of money left in his trust fund when he reaches maturity.’ She sighed.
‘That means I have to sometimes pander to his weird obsessions in order to stop him going mad, but it also means that I get to temper his enthusiasm and make sure he thinks about all those
little things, like, oh, I don’t know, health and safety, and cost-effectiveness.’ She sighed. ‘Look, I’m not saying that the Almasti
don’t
exist. I’m
just saying that it’s unlikely that they do and, even
if
they do, I’m sorry, but three teenagers and a former soldier who can’t adjust to life in the civilian world
aren’t going to be the ones to accidentally stumble across them.’

‘But if we do,’ Natalie said, equally quietly, ‘you want dibs on the intellectual-property rights.’

‘Hey,’ her mother said casually, ‘I’m an entrepreneur. It’s my ability to take advantage of unlikely business opportunities that keeps you in designer
shoes.’

‘The thing is,’ Natalie explained, unsure why she was bothering but somehow knowing that it was important, ‘Calum gave us all some material to read over on the flight. It was
kinda interesting. We think the world’s a really small place, and there’s nothing left to be discovered, but apparently naturalists are finding new species, like, every
day
almost – not just beetles and stuff, but big things, like deer and new types of wild cat. A new type of lizard has only just been discovered on an island off the coast of New Guinea –
it’s been called the bumblebee gecko. There was this naturalist who decided to catalogue the bees and wasps in his back garden in England, and he, like, found that there were things flying
around there that hadn’t been catalogued – ever – by scientists. There’re literally things right under our noses that we haven’t discovered, and when you think that
there’s still sixty per cent of the Earth’s land surface and ninety-nine per cent of the ocean that hasn’t been properly explored, then it makes you think that maybe we
don’t
know it all. Calum told me that there have been two new species a month discovered around deep-sea volcanic vents for the past twenty-five years. That’s over six hundred
new species! There
are
things out there that we haven’t come across yet, and Calum’s right – there may be things that can help with medicine and stuff. After all,
penicillin came from a fungus that was growing on someone’s Petri dish, and aspirin was developed when biologists realized that animals were chewing the bark of willow trees when they were in
pain. There’s so much tropical rainforest out there, with so many unknown plants, that there might be cures for cancer, and tuberculosis, and cholera, and typhoid, and all those diseases that
kill so many babies every year.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘Do you even
know
how many babies die of typhoid every year?’

‘As it happens,’ her mother said, staring at Natalie with a strange expression on her face, ‘I do. But do
you
know how many types of virus or bacteria have been sitting
around in the rainforest for hundreds of thousands of years, infecting the local wildlife with nothing worse than a slight sniffle and a headache, just waiting for humans to come along and act as a
host? HIV, Ebola, haemorrhagic fever . . . When they’re transferred from animals to humans, they suddenly become fatal, and worse – easily transmissible. There are things out there that
should probably be left well alone, Natalie.’ She stopped walking, and Natalie stopped too. ‘You actually care about this, don’t you?’