“Why do you only have one of them?” the chairman asked.
“That’s the bad news, Mr Chairman.” Susan Mortlake paused. “The two boys – Scott and Jamie Tyler – were performing a telepathy act at a theatre in Reno. It was their guardian, who was also the producer of the show, who first brought them to our attention. He was quite happy for us to take them in return for a sum of cash – although, of course, it was always our intention to kill him. This we have done. I arranged a fairly simple operation to pick the boys up but unfortunately something went wrong. It may be that their power is even greater than we had imagined. At any event, they knew we were coming and one of them – Jamie – managed to get away.”
“Where is he now?”
“We have no idea. My agents tell me that he was helped in his escape by a woman, but they were unable to get her registration number. It all happened too quickly and it was dark. However, I believe the situation is now under control.”
“Go on.”
“We shot the producer, a man called Don White. He was living with a woman, Marcie Kelsey. We shot her with the same gun and then used our contacts within the Nevada police to set up a false trail. Jamie Tyler is now wanted for both murders and it can only be a matter of time before he’s tracked down. At which point, we will have him.”
Susan Mortlake sounded confident, but the chairman was unimpressed. “Your agents allowed one of these boys to slip through their fingers. They also failed to track down the car. Have you taken any disciplinary procedures, Mrs Mortlake?”
“No, sir.” The woman looked up defiantly. “It did occur to me that you might be asking for my own resignation.”
The chairman considered, then shook his head. “If you have one of the Gatekeepers, that will be enough,” he said. “We only have to break the circle and we will have won. However, you still need to make redundancies, Mrs Mortlake. We cannot have people letting us down.”
“Of course, Mr Chairman. I thought as much myself.”
“And I want you to deal with Scott Tyler personally. You understand that, generally speaking, it would be better if he were not allowed to die.”
“I understand. But as a matter of fact, we may be able to use him. I’m hoping to bring him round to our point of view.”
“Good.”
The single word was praise indeed. The chairman never complimented his staff on anything. At the Nightrise Corporation, excellence was taken for granted. He spoke again, this time addressing all the executives.
“As I began by saying, this is a critical time. It’s also a very positive time and before we part company, I want to introduce you to an associate whose name will be familiar to you. We have worked together on many occasions and he has very kindly agreed to say a few words to you today.”
There was a fourteenth screen at the far end of the table, opposite the chairman. Until now it had been blank, but it suddenly flickered into life. At first it seemed that there was something wrong with the picture. The head that had appeared simply looked too big for the screen, too heavy for the neck that supported it. Its eyes were very high up, above a nose that seemed to travel a long way to the small and rather babyish mouth below. It was as if the image had been stretched – but in fact there was nothing wrong with the transmission. The man was Diego Salamanda, head of Salamanda News International. He was beaming the signal from his research centre in the town of Ica in Peru. And this was how he really looked.
“Good evening,” he began. The local time was just after seven o’clock. “It is a great pleasure to be able to speak with you. I would like to thank your chairman for inviting me. And I have some excellent news to share with you.
“I have now had a chance to decipher the diary of the mad monk of Cordoba which was unearthed very recently in Spain and passed into my hands. I don’t need to remind you that this is the only written history of the Old Ones and their fight against the five children who came to be known as the Gatekeepers. The Old Ones ruled the Earth about ten thousand years ago. They were all-powerful but they were defeated – according to the diary – by a trick. Sadly, we have no more details. There was a great battle, which the Old Ones lost, and they were banished. Two gates were built to keep them out of our world. Many of us have been working for their return ever since.
“Further examination of the diary has provided me with the answers that I have been looking for and I can tell you that, without a shadow of a doubt, very soon we will have achieved our aims and a new millennium will have begun. Yes, my friends, the Old Ones are about to return to take control of a world that should, in truth, have been theirs all along.”
He stopped to catch his breath, his nostrils flaring. It hurt him to speak. It hurt him to do almost anything, a result of his head having been deliberately mutilated at birth.
“We are now in mid-June,” he went on. “And the twenty-fourth of this month is a sacred day in my country. We call it Inti Raymi, the summer solstice. On that day, the second great gate, built in the desert in Nazca, will open. By carefully examining the diary, I have discovered the means to unlock it and nothing can now prevent me.”
He lifted a hand. Next to his head it looked ridiculous, out of proportion.
“But we have enemies,” he said. “Incredible though it may sound, the five children who defeated us all those years ago have somehow returned. You may have found two of them in America. One of them is on his way here to Peru. My agent encountered him in a church in London.
“This much I can tell you. There have to be five of them. It’s only when they come together that they have the strength to be a danger to us. On their own, they are powerless. And nothing can stop us. On June twenty-fourth, the Old Ones will take what is theirs and all of us will share in the rewards.”
Around the boardroom table the executives began to applaud. They were thousands of miles apart: in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Beijing
… all over the world. It was as if someone had turned up the volume. The noise echoed around the room.
The fourteenth screen went black. Salamanda had broken contact.
“Now you know the stakes,” the chairman said. “Just a few days stand between us and the end of the old world. But let’s not fool ourselves that our work is over. It’s just beginning. A war is coming and our job is to prepare the way. We need a president of the United States who is sympathetic to our aims. Mr Simms, I am relying on you. Mrs Mortlake, see to the child. Make him one of ours. Then find his brother and deal with him too.”
The chairman signalled to one of his two assistants. One of them reached out and flicked a switch. The remaining thirteen screens went black.
In her office in Los Angeles, Susan Mortlake watched the red light on her own webcam blink out and knew that she was no longer transmitting. She also knew that she was very fortunate to be alive. The chairman had briefly considered asking her for her resignation. She had seen it in his eyes.
Even so, he had told her to make redundancies. She leant forward and reached out with a long finger, the nail sharpened to a point. There was an intercom in front of her and she pressed a button. “You can send them in now,” she said.
A few seconds later, the door opened and Colton Banes and Kyle Hovey walked in. There were two chairs opposite her desk and they sat down without being asked. The room was ice cold, the air-conditioning turned up to its highest level, but Susan Mortlake noticed that beads of sweat had broken out on Hovey’s forehead. Banes was looking more relaxed. He didn’t even flinch when she turned and looked at him. Both men knew why they were here. It was inevitable that they would be called to account.