Blood Sun by David Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

temples, figures decorated in plumes of exotic birds.
    Sayid double-clicked another link. “Stand back—genius at work.”
    They had found the correct spelling. Max read the paragraph on the khipu, which described it as an abacus, but then went on to explain that khipu knots might well be arranged in a binary code, which meant they held more information than a simple memory aid.
    “Y’see, I was right,” Sayid said. “Binary. You send an email or anything and what you see is really eight-digit sequences of ones and zeros. Then that gets translated by the computer that received your text.”
    “Then maybe there is a message here somewhere.”
    “Well, you’re good with knots.”
    “I’ve never seen any like these, though. And what’s this got to do with Mum?” Max inadvertently asked the question aloud that echoed around his mind.
    Suddenly, what had been upsetting Max recently was becoming more apparent. “This is about your mum?” Sayid asked carefully.
    Max nodded. He fished out the half-dozen photographs and gave them to Sayid, who thumbed through them.
    “But she was in Central America when she … when she died, wasn’t she? I thought Maguire was doing his field trip in South America,” Sayid said.
    “That’s right,” Max said, taking the pictures back, regretting mentioning his mother. “But there has to be a connection. I’m just not sure what it is.”
    “Do you want to tell me what this is all about?” Sayid asked.
    “I just want to find out more about her, that’s all. I put a thing out on the Net. Danny Maguire said he knew about her.” Max did not want to tell even his best friend about the accusation against his father. That he had left his mother to die alone in the jungle. That in fact even Max did not know exactly how she had died.
    “But your dad must know all that stuff.”
    “But how do I get it out of him? The way he is, I mean.”
    Sayid did not press his friend. It was obvious Max was being cagey, and given his recent unsettled behavior, he did not want to risk pushing any wrong buttons, as Baskins had done earlier. Word had zipped around the few boys left at the school that Max Gordon had lost it big-time.
    “Maguire’s death was suicide,” Sayid said gently.
    Max gave him an “oh yeah?” look.
    Sayid shrugged. “Well, OK. The guys who came here were pretty creepy, and maybe it is a bit of a coincidence. But they thought Maguire was involved in drug smuggling. We don’t know for sure.”
    Max pulled his backpack down and began folding clothes. “I’m going to see my dad. And I need a couple of things.”
    “Like what?”
    “A school letterhead, and Mr. Jackson’s signature.”
    “Max, that’s crazy. It’s impossible.”
    “Nothing’s impossible, Sayid—you should know that. Anyway, that’s the easy bit. I need my passport.”
    “To go where?”
    “I’m not sure yet.”
    “Well, your passport’s in the vault. End of story.” It was a flat statement of finality.
    The vault was 133 steps below Dartmoor High’s granite walls. Each boy had a safe-deposit box, and in each box, which could be opened only by a key that Mr. Jackson held, was that boy’s life. A passport, a legal guardian’s letter, a parent’s last words. If anything fatal happened to any of the boys’ parents, Mr. Jackson would take him down into the gloomy cavern, open the box and hand the boy a prerecorded message on an MP3 player. It was a final act of love from a father and a mother to their child—the last words the boy would hear from his parents.
    The vault gave everyone the creeps—it was as if the dead were waiting.
    Max had almost finished rolling T-shirts, cotton shorts and cargo pants. He pulled the compass cord over his head and let it sit below his sweatshirt.
    “I know. But I have to get it.”
    “Just like that? You get caught and they’ll kick you out.”
    “If we get caught, they’ll kick us out,” Max said, giving Sayid a comforting smile that the other boy