Circle of Flight by John Marsden Read Free Book Online Page B

motivation for them to let Gavin go. The opposite. If they let him go he could give evidence against them.
    ‘Yeah, you come. We swap. Boy for you. And the other one.’
    ‘The other one?’
    ‘The leader. The one cause all trouble. We want him too. We give little boy for you two.’
    My head rang like it had suddenly turned into a bell and someone had just smashed it with a sledgehammer. The Scarlet Pimple? They wanted the Scarlet Pimple? I had never thought of that. Judging by the look on Lee’s face he had never thought of it either.
    ‘But I don’t know who the Scarlet Pimple is,’ I stammered, then thought how stupid the name the Scarlet Pimple sounded. It was just a joke name to us, one we used among ourselves. ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel,’ I corrected myself. ‘The leader.’
    ‘You know,’ the man said.
    ‘I don’t, I don’t,’ I said wildly. Of course it was true, I didn’t know who he was, but I was trying to buy time. I could find out who the Scarlet Pimple was easily enough in a situation like this. Hell, by officially joining Liberation I could find out. But I thought that if I could sound convincing then I might be able to get a bit of breathing space while I – we – absorbed this news.
    ‘They won’t tell me,’ I shouted, trying to sound hysterical. It wasn’t difficult – I had been feeling pretty hysterical for a few days now. ‘I’ve asked a million times. I’ve tried a heap of ways to find out but it’s the biggest secret in Wirrawee. No-one’ll tell me.’
    There was a pause on the other end of the line. I felt triumphant. I knew I’d shaken him. It probably wouldn’t be for very long but it was a tiny victory to me. The first one I’d had since this awful thing started.
    The victory lasted maybe three seconds. Till he said, ‘You find out. You can find out if you want. You make it your business to find out.’
    Then he hung up. I hadn’t expected that. I thought we were in for a fairly long conversation, that he’d start telling me conditions, meeting points, whatever. But I told myself, maybe with more desperation than anything, maybe it was good. It might mean that I had shaken him and left him unable to go on to the next step. I’d wanted to buy time and now it seemed like I had. The only question was what to spend it on.
    The call did give me hope that Gavin was alive. And it turned an unknown force into a slightly more known force. I’d started with an equation that read x=a+b+c, but now I knew c was a positive number, somewhere between 0 and a few million, or whatever the population was across the border, so that was a step forwards. Wasn’t it?
    If I’d shaken him, he’d shaken Lee. Suddenly Lee went crazy. I was about to sit down and talk this through with him and I wanted to do that, desperately needed to do it. The debriefing. My nerves were quivering from the phone call. My body, my emotions, my whole being, craved this conversation. Instead of which Lee bolted over to where the firearms were sitting on the dining-room table and practically threw the rifle at me.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I yelled at him. I thought he must want us both to go careering off to Havelock and find the group of terrorists and shoot the lot of them.
    ‘They’re watching the house,’ he yelled back. ‘They’re out there now.’
    I was mystified, but only for a moment. Then I put together the same clues he had. The police had driven away, abandoning their watch on the house. Five minutes later the kidnappers ring me. What were the odds? Either this was an amazing coincidence or they were waiting till the moment when they could make contact and have no fear of the cops getting in their way. Nevertheless I grabbed Lee’s arm to hold him as he headed for the back door with the shotgun. ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Is this going to help Gavin or make things worse for him?’
    When he paused I added, ‘They wouldn’t have Gavin anywhere near here. So there’ll just be a spy or two,