“Up and down!” he screeched. “Up and down – up and down… that’s the way to do it.”
The rest of them joined in the familiar chant, stamped their feet and flourished their spears.
“That’s the way to do it, that’s the way to do it!”
Lee couldn’t bear it. Hot tears streaked his face. He prayed and he shouted, but there was nothing he could do.
“Aaaaaand… up she goes!” Captain Swazzle shrieked one last time. As the buggy went higher than ever, he let go of the handles and the other Punchinello released the front wheel. The buggy continued sailing through the air. It flew up and over the railings, then down again.
Lee squeezed his eyes tight shut. He heard the splash, followed by the trampling of the guards’ boots as they charged across to watch the buggy sink into the river.
“Oooooh, what a pity,” Captain Swazzle cried, staring down at the cloudy waters where a woollen hat, in the shape of a cupcake, floated on the scum. “Oh, what a pity.”
Lee’s scream ripped across the Thames.
The pain bit deeply into his wrists and he lurched upright.
His face was dripping, drenched in icy sweat that stung his eyes. He wrenched at his arms, but they were still held firm. His despairing yell filled the room.
“Mr Lee Charl,” a calm, female voice soothed. “You fine, you safe, you not worry, please.”
The boy’s frantic, heaving breaths continued and his heart pounded as his eyes stared blankly around. The river was gone. The Punchinellos had disappeared. He was in a dimly lit room with blank walls and no window. A hospital bed was before him, surrounded by monitoring equipment, and four men in smart olive uniforms, armed with AK-47 rifles, were standing impassively on either side. There was a figure on the bed, sitting bolt upright, with wires attached to his forehead. A petite woman, wearing a white lab coat over her army uniform, crossed to the door and snapped on the main light switch. Overhead, a fluorescent strip began to stutter. Lee now saw that the eyes of the patient were wide and the stark, traumatised expression on that face was painful to witness. Then something pink glinted under the clinical light. It was a diamanté stud in the patient’s ear. With a jolt, Lee remembered he was staring at a large mirror covering one entire wall and the pitiful figure on the bed was him.
Repulsed, he looked away and the calmly efficient female doctor consulted his case notes.
“You want sedative, Mr Lee Charl?” she asked with crisp politeness.
“Hell, no,” he answered thickly. “I slept plenty already – and they make the dreams worse.”
“Same dream, please?” she asked, ready to jot his words down.
“Pretty much.”
“Was Ismus in dream?”
“He’s never in them, Doctor Choe. They’re just dreams. It’s not like the other thing. I’m not sneakin’ off and going to Mooncaster, you know that. They’re just bad dreams. I ain’t havin’ no secret cosies with that mad son of a…”
“Detail of dream, please.”
He shook his head. “Laters – I’ll save it for the shrink session.”
“You might forget detail,” she said a little more forcefully, though the smile didn’t slip from her face. “Detail important.”
“Fat chance of that,” he uttered bitterly. “Now can I hit the shower and get me some dry clothes? Feels like I peed in these. Is there hot water today?”
Doctor Choe Soo-jin put the notes down and reached for a syringe.
“First I take bloods,” she told him.
“More? You supportin’ a family of vampires at home or somethin’? You’ve had enough juice outta me since I got here to fill a hot tub.”
“Not so much,” she said through her implacable smile. “We need to test, Mr Lee Charl. Test important.”
“So you says, but I can hardly find a vein no more. My arms are worse than a dead junkie’s. Gimme a break, yeah? If it ain’t the red stuff, you’re moochin’ every other damn thing I got.”
Doctor Choe Soo-jin proceeded to take the sample. Lee gazed around at the four young soldiers flanking the bed. They might have been shop-window dummies for all the expression on their features. None of them spoke English, or at least had never acknowledged that they could. Sometimes he wondered if they listened to what was said when he was in the company of his friends and then reported everything to Doctor Choe, or their commanding officer, afterwards.
Lee cast a piercing glance at the mirrored wall. He was sure it was one of those two-way numbers; probably a video camera behind there taping it all anyway.
He looked back at the two grim-faced men on his left. There were three different sets who ‘nannied’ him in rotation, with a changeover every four hours. He’d given each group a name to amuse himself. This quartet were the Sex and the City women, because his mother used to enjoy that show, and they’d taken over from Take That (minus Robbie) sometime during the night when he was asleep. His grandmother had been a big fan of “that nice Gary Barlow”. Soon it would be the turn of the Spice Girls (minus Geri). He didn’t know anyone who had liked them, but it cracked him up to call these stern guards Sporty, Posh, Baby and Scary.
His eyes dropped to the aluminium chain threaded through their belts. The pair on the right were joined in the same way. Both chains ended in a set of steel handcuffs, locked round Lee’s wrists. He blew on them gently. He’d been pulling on them in his sleep and the skin was raw and broken.
“Just another day chained up in North Korea,” he murmured. “Can my life blow any more? How the hell did it get to this?”
THE SECRET STRONGHOLD in the northern region of the Baekdudaegan Mountains had taken seventeen years to excavate. From the outside there was no evidence of the extensive tunnel system in which 7,500 members of the People’s Army were stationed at any one time. The largest terraces and balconies were built in the style of old temples, with sagging tiled roofs, artificially distressed to appear ancient and neglected, while others were simply cut horizontally into the slope and disguised with camouflage. The two helipads and missile silos were similarly obscured. The single road which zigzagged up to the main, but discreet, entrance was constantly monitored by sniper outposts.
Beneath the pagoda-like roof that sheltered one of the terraces, Maggie rested her elbows on the low wall and pulled the fur-lined collar of the greatcoat round her chin. The biting December air was sharp in the fifteen-year-old’s nostrils and she buried them in her mittened hands. She couldn’t remember ever being warm and, to make it worse, there was no hot water in the showers. The primitive plumbing had broken down again.
The usually breathtaking view was hidden today. Beyond the wall, the grey slopes of the mountain dropped steeply into a thick white mist that filled the valley, blotting out the dark forests and surrounding snowy peaks. It was like staring into a universe of nothing, an endless blank canvas waiting for the first mark or stroke of colour to be applied. It was almost hypnotic and Maggie’s mind drifted.
She thought back to that July night, when they escaped from the prison camp in England – how she and the other aberrant children had crowded into a military helicopter, with no idea where they were being taken. Through the darkness, they were flown across the Channel to a private airstrip in France, where a jet was waiting to whisk them on across the world.
At the time it felt so unreal, like an adventure happening to someone else. They didn’t question anything.