Ice Claw by David Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

“Do you know what you have just said, young man?”
    Max shook his head. The women looked concerned. The same nurse said, “I am French Basque. That’s my language. Do you speak it?”
    “No,” Max said. “What does it mean?”
    The two women spoke to each other in rapid French. Max couldn’t catch it. The young one eventually shrugged.
    “It means: Trust no one—they will kill you.”
    The hospital team was thorough. Max had been X-rayed, scanned, checked, cleaned up and pronounced uninjured except for bruised ribs and the aftereffects of the cold. He was lucky to be alive, but they insisted he be kept overnight. It had been Bobby Morrell who raised the alarm. When Max had told him he was going back into the mountains, Bobby immediately warned the ski patrols when they heard the avalanche.
    The doctors’ usual questions had to be answered. Where were his parents? Was he on school holidays? How long was he staying in the Pyrenees? Where was he staying? How much money did he have?
    Max explained everything, and someone said something about contacting his father; then they left him in peace. Max lay quietly for an hour or more, watching the image in his mind play over and over again.
    He had been sucked into two startling events: Sophie and the monk. In both cases he had been involved in different, violent attacks by men using the same black-and-white camouflage. He really should tell the police. What would his dad do? He’d think it through and make his own decision about what course of action to take—and then do it. There are times you’re put in a situation that only you are meant to sort out, Max .
    “Where are my things?” Max asked the young nurse when she returned to check his temperature.
    She opened the small wardrobe in which Max’s clothes were hung. From a drawer she pulled out a sealed brown envelope. Inside were his blue nylon Velcro wallet and his green silica Moldavite wristband. His father’s watch was missing, the scratches on Max’s wrist confirming that the terrifying events hadn’t been a dream. A dull ache, a sense of loss about the watch, momentarily distracted his feelings from the nightmare scenario he had recently escaped. He said a silent, Sorry, Dad .
    In addition to Sayid’s misbaha , there were the two items the monk had ripped from his neck and thrown at Max seconds before he died. The first was a rosary and crucifix, its necklace broken, most of the beads now missing, and the second was a leather cord looped and tied through a brass disk, slightly bigger than a ten-pence piece. Four equidistant spokes inside the circumference of this ring secured what looked like a small rounded crystal, floating in the center of the circle.
    Max fingered the disk and curled it into his palm. He suddenly felt very possessive about the dying man’s urgency in giving it to him. Max might have lost his own treasured possession, his father’s watch, but this pendant was so vital to the dying monk, so important, that he had entrusted it to the boy who’d tried to save his life. Trust, that was a huge responsibility, his father had always told him.
    If only his dad were here now. Making the right decision about what to do would be so much easier. Maybe he should phone him and tell him about the last desperate moments of the monk’s life. But his father was in London, recovering from the torture he had suffered in Africa, and still struggling to remember things. The doctors believed he was making slow but definite progress, and because his dad worked for an international agency that sometimes helped the government uncover massive environmental threats, he was being well cared for in a private nursing home. Max couldn’t burden him with any of this. He knew that when the authorities finally got through to the nursing home in England to explain Max’s accident, someone else would take the call. Which bought him time.
    “What is that pendant?” the nurse asked, interrupting his