The Real Thing Page 13

  He stayed there, hoping against hope, long after the time passed that Tupai would reasonably have been expected to surface. Despair, blacker than the water around him, crept over him then, and he almost didn’t feel the boat hook that jabbed him in his left shoulder.

  When he turned, though, he saw the pistol.

  THE FAX

  Borkin waited by the fax machine until all the pages had slid out the bottom into the plastic holding tray. There were over a hundred pages, but all the vital information was summarised in a few notes on the very first page. She stayed there, giving the evil eye to anyone else who tried to use the fax, until all the pages were through. Harry Truman and Mohammad Sarrafzadeh were nothing if not thorough.

  Then she telephoned the rest of the board, calling another emergency meeting. It was time to let them know what was going on.

  The mechanical organ grinder in the corner of the room had accusing eyes as she sat and waited, watching their faces as they trooped in. Even now, she thought, there was no trace of concern or guilt on the particular face she was looking at. Maybe he was a very good actor.

  When they were all seated she said, ‘We think we’re close to locating Bingham, Clara, and Ralph.’

  There was a murmuring, but she continued quickly. ‘We don’t yet know if they are alive or dead.’

  That brought an immediate hush. She said, ‘Australian police are closing in on the kidnappers as we speak, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in praying for the safe return of our colleagues. Of immediate concern to me is the fact that one of our own has been largely responsible for the situation we now find ourselves in.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Ricardo blurted out, but her stare told him to shut up and sit back down, and he did.

  ‘It’s not ridiculous, it’s fact. Sad, terrible, almost unbelievable, yes, but fact. Treachery, treason, call it what you will, it is a vile poison.’

  ‘If you’re accusing someone in this room, I hope you have some proof,’ Reginald said with a grandfatherly concern in his voice. ‘This is a very serious accusation.’

  Borkin dumped the fax on the table, all hundred pages of it. ‘I have plenty of proof, all circumstantial, but enough for me to be sure. Included in these documents is a list of the shareholders of Corker Cola Australia. A very good man in New Zealand did some research for me, well, actually he did it for young Fraser Boyd, but he has passed the results on to me.

  ‘There are no employees of Coca-Cola amongst these shareholders. But when you start checking into family records, sons, daughters, wives, especially …’ she paused for effect, ‘wives under their maiden names, then a picture starts to develop. Then we have FBI videotape of a member of this board making a call from a public phone box.’

  ‘That’s no crime,’ Ricardo remonstrated.

  ‘No,’ she conceded, ‘but when the call was traced to Corker Cola Head Office in Sydney, then it looks more than a little suspicious. The FBI certainly think there is enough evidence to lay holding charges.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘And they expect to lay more serious charges once they’ve had a little chat with the kidnappers.’

  There was a long, long silence, during which everyone around the table stared at everyone else around the table, waiting for a sign, hoping against hope that Borkin was wrong.

  ‘Ricardo,’ she turned to the swarthy man, who looked more surprised than anything. There were gasps from around the table. ‘Ricardo, I don’t want to make a scene, so I’ve asked Special Agent Costello and Special Agent Johnson of the FBI to wait outside. Would you please escort Mr Fairweather out to them? They’re expecting him.’

  All the eyes at the table turned from Ricardo to Reginald whose face was frozen. After a moment of indecision, Ricardo went to stand behind him, and, after a few moments of the staring and the silence, the accusing gazes, Vice-President Reginald Fairweather, next in line for the Presidency, stood up, white of face, and with Ricardo’s strong hand guiding his upper arm, left the room without a word.

  Then the commotion really began.

  THE TURN OF THE SCREW

  The world disappeared with an almighty splash and there was only darkness and silence. Not darkness, well, just for a second, for then Tupai became aware of an eerie glow, reflected off a coral reef below and forward of him, shimmering in the light of the ship’s underwater spotlights.

  The wall of the diving platform had felt like a sledgehammer, driving him backwards off the boat with barely enough time to grab a lungful of air before he plummeted into the silent dark.

  Fish darted backwards and forwards in the glare of the underwater lights. Didn’t they sleep? Above the fluorescent ghostly glow of the reef was the black-bottomed hull of the ship. And movement, a slow, lazy, almost hypnotic movement. Around, and around, drawing him towards it. Come here, it seemed to say, come here.

  The shock of the impact wore off then, and the movement crystallised into two huge black shapes revolving rapidly in front of him. Scraps of seaweed were being sucked towards the screws of the ship; as was the trailing rope from the diving platform; as was Tupai White.

  The rope! He scrabbled frantically with his right hand and it mercifully closed on the loose nylon cord.

  The screws were turning faster now and he could feel the water around him suctioning past into their turbulence. His feet were swinging towards the scything danger, closer and closer. He tried to haul himself up the rope, but the drag was too strong, and it was all he could do to hold on to the rope, with both hands now, his body spinning and tumbling like a rag doll, his feet almost touching the whirling slice of the blades.

  Air. He needed air. He had managed a last lungful of precious oxygen before the plunge into the water, but it was not lasting. His throat burned. Why his throat? In adventure books it was always the hero’s lungs that were burning when they were trapped underwater.

  Tupai’s throat burned, his head pounded, his lungs didn’t burn, they felt like they were going to explode. Had to breathe in. Had to breathe in. Couldn’t. All around was just water. Breathe in water and you wouldn’t even be allowed a final scream as you died. Let go of the rope. Let go and it will all be over, quickly, no more burning, no more pounding, no silent watery scream.

  The rope slipped in his grasp, and he jerked even closer to the spinning blades. But something was different now. The blades were still spinning but the pull was less. Less. Then no pull at all.

  He tried to kick with legs made of jelly and made no progress. He tried to pull himself up the rope but his fingers were so tightly locked that he could not prise his own hands open.

  Then, miraculously, came the thrust of water from the screw, pushing him away. We don’t want you any more, it seemed to be saying. Go away!

  His head broke the surface about five metres from the back of the ship and he had time for just one rasping, beautiful, salt-laden breath of air before the rope snagged tight and pulled him back beneath the surface in the wake of the ship.

  He hauled himself up in the water, raising his neck, facing away from the ship and lifting his mouth clear of the ocean. Great heaving gasps now, the sweetest, purest air in all creation. The ship was picking up speed, having found the passage; it was heading for open sea.

  Tupai began to slowly haul himself up the rope towards the ship.

  ‘Who is he?’ Joe snarled again, waving the pistol a few inches from the faces of Messrs Statham, Winkler, and Ms Fogsworth.

  ‘Who are you?’ he turned his attention to Fizzer, not waiting for an answer from the other three.

  ‘Who else is aboard?’ He was full of questions this chap and not polite enough to give you a chance to answer.

  ‘He’s alone,’ Candy said calmly, sitting in an armchair at the front of the lounge and picking at her nails with the end of a letter opener. ‘They’ve searched the ship.’

  ‘I think he’s that kid that Reggie told us about. If so, he had a mate.’

  ‘If he had a mate,’ Candy pointed out, ‘he’s still back on the is
land.’ A thought struck her. ‘Or somewhere out there on the ocean. Or under it.’

  The way she smiled when she spoke cut a shiver to Fizzer’s heart. Or under it. That was exactly where Tupai was.

  ‘So what now?’ Joe asked obtusely. Even Fizzer knew the answer to that question.

  ‘So there’ll be four burials at sea tonight, instead of three.’

  ‘Burials!’ Bing was shocked. ‘You said you were taking us to a new hiding place.’

  ‘So I did,’ Candy smiled sweetly. ‘Well, they won’t find you there now, will they?’

  Joe said, ‘Not with all the lead weights strapped around your wrists.’

  The captain entered then, a surly thin-cheeked man with the nose of an Egyptian.

  ‘We’re clear of the atoll. And we’re picking up a lot of activity on the radar. There are at least two planes in the area, and two fast cutters moving in from the south.’

  ‘Then we’d better get this over with,’ Candy said. ‘Get rid of the evidence.’

  She had once been a pleasant woman, Fizzer decided, but any last vestiges had now gone, sucked into the madness of her bitterness, her disillusionment with life. No sane person could sit there picking her nails and talking about murder with such calmness. Even Joe looked quite sick at the idea, and the captain turned abruptly and left, as if he wanted no further part of what was going on.

  They were marched to the stern of the ship, just above the diving platform; the place where Tupai had disappeared.

  ‘Who’s first?’ Joe asked, waving the gun over the three of them. If the others had been Tupai and Dennis, or Jason and Flea, Fizzer thought, they could have rushed Joe. He’d get one or maybe two of them before they got him. But the others were not fit, young and fast. Quite the opposite. If they tried to rush Joe he’d put a bullet into Fizzer first, then pick off the rest one by one.

  Maybe that would be better, Fizzer thought, than the dreadful, tearing lungs of water that would await them at the bottom of the ocean. Still something held him back, something that he couldn’t explain. And it wasn’t anything mysterious or psychic. It was just the subconscious connection of seemingly unrelated facts, forming a conclusion for which he had no obvious rationale. Maybe it was the rope, he decided much later, or rather the lack of a rope.

  ‘Who’s first?’ Joe repeated. Candy aimed one freshly picked finger at Fizzer.

  ‘Him,’ she spat. ‘He’s the most dangerous, and I don’t like him.’

  Which Fizzer thought was a bit unfair, considering she had only just met him.

  ‘Get down on the platform,’ Joe said, a bit uncertainly, as if he had rehearsed this in his mind, but was a bit more hesitant at putting it into practice.

  ‘Why?’ Fizzer asked. ‘You’re just going to kill me anyway, why should I help you?’

  ‘Get on the damn platform,’ Candy shrieked, then a bit more calmly, ‘and Joe will put a nice, clean bullet in the back of your head before he pushes you over the side. Otherwise,’ she looked at him with a grin that said maybe she preferred this alternative, ‘he’ll shoot you in the knees, and you’ll scream all the way down. But no-one will hear you except a few fish, and maybe some sharks. Get on the platform.’

  Put like that, it seemed like an offer too good to refuse. Fizzer slowly lowered himself on to the platform.

  ‘Put your hands behind your back,’ Joe snarled.

  Heavy handcuffs clamped around his wrists, too heavy. He couldn’t see it but could feel that there was something attached to the chain of the handcuffs. A lead weight perhaps, or a length of chain. When he went over the side, one thing was for certain, he was going straight to the bottom.

  Footsteps on the ladder behind him. Perhaps if he whirled around and head-butted …? Too late. The cold circle of the muzzle of the pistol pressed against the back of his neck.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Candy smirked from up on the deck. Fizzer closed his eyes. And so he didn’t see the huge black arm that reached up out of the depths of the water and gripped Joe’s ankle in a vice before pulling him, pistol and all, into the welcoming embrace of the sea.

  He felt the shove on his chest, though, that flattened him on to the platform, away from the edge, as a monster from the deep spurted from the water and raged up the ladder of the ship. Deckhands came running at Candy’s piercing scream, but Tupai knocked them aside like insects, splashes and shouts erupting as they hit the water off the sides of the boat.

  The captain emerged from the bridge, another pistol in his hand, and he didn’t want to hand it over. Tupai had to break his wrist to take it off him.

  Joe emerged, choking and floundering, from the ocean at the back of the boat, his gun on its way to the bottom, along with the key to the handcuffs.

  It took Tupai nearly an hour to hacksaw through the heavy chain of Fizzer’s handcuffs, while Clara Fogsworth kept the captain’s pistol pointed steadily at Candy, Joe, and the rest of the crew, and, during which time, a Hercules aircraft passed low overhead.

  Shortly afterwards the massive glare of a helicopter ‘Night Sun’ spotlight illuminated the ship from above.

  EPILOGUE

  The rest of the story Fizzer and Tupai told their friends at school, sitting in a circle on the top field. Dennis was there too, and just as well, or they might have thought that Fizzer and Tupai were making parts of it up.

  There were four guards, it turned out, on the island, not counting the two who were dozing against the Jeep. All of them were armed. But Dennis struck like a cobra out of the darkness, and it was all over in a few seconds.

  The guards had had no idea what was going on, or even that there were people living in the sinkhole. Their job was just to guard the airstrip and the perimeter of the island against intruders.

  They were all arrested anyway, but finally let off, and, in a strange twist of events, one eventually got a job as a night watchman at a Coca-Cola warehouse in Perth.

  The captain and the crew of the Turtle Dove were not so lucky. They were parties, however reluctant, to kidnapping and attempted murder, although their sentences were relatively light.

  Candy and Joseph were tried together and treated equally on all charges, despite Fizzer’s testimony that Candy was the ringleader.

  There was silence in the courtroom as the two Americans were sentenced. This judge was not as lenient as the first, and the sort of activities they had undertaken on Australian soil were not to be tolerated.

  Candy will need a few more facelifts when she finally gets out of prison, and the only soap opera Joseph Sturdee will be involved with, is if he starts singing in the prison shower.

  Speaking of singing, they both sang like canaries, and Reginald Fairweather was charged with Accessory to Kidnapping, Fraud, and a whole list of other charges. Many people wondered why he did what he did, but he had waited twenty years for his turn at the top, and had simply tired of waiting. The result was a prison sentence only slightly shorter than that given to Joe and Candy.

  Anastasia Borkin was rewarded with a substantial pay rise for her part in the rescue of the Coca-Cola Three and, a few months later, was promoted to Vice-Chairman of the company, when Bingham Elderoy Statham the Third retired from the position so that he could spend more time with his third wife.

  Corker Cola Aust. Pty Ltd. repeatedly denied knowing anything about the affair, although they admitted receiving a copy of the secret recipe from Candy and Joe.

  They were eventually charged under, of all things, the Privacy of Information laws, a kind of an Industrial Espionage. But it made no difference in the end, as, even in Australia, the fury against Corker Cola was huge, and they were out of business within six months.

  Coca-Cola came clean with the American public and, as Vice-President Borkin had predicted, the backlash against the backlash was immense. The attack that had occurred on an American institution was considered a crime against America itself and, once it was shown that Coca-Cola were the victims not the perpetrators, the public outcry in their support was enor
mous.

  Clara Fogsworth took up bungee jumping and spent quite a lot of time touring the South Island of New Zealand. Sharron Palmer became a bit of a celebrity in the airline industry and eventually retired from flying to spend more time with her young family. She now trains new flight attendants at Qantas headquarters in Sydney and sends Fizzer and Tupai a Christmas card each year.

  Fizzer, Tupai, Jason and Flea just kept kicking around together, grateful that life had returned to normal.

  Tupai and Jason even took up bojutsu, and Jason, who thought he was no good at any sport, found, to his great surprise, that he was good at it. Dennis keeps threatening, though, along with his new wife, Reiko, to take them all on a confidence-building, team-bonding trip in some huge cave down in Waitomo.

  But for some reason Tupai won’t have a bar of it.

  And that, pretty much, was that, except that Harry Truman, the man with the name of the former US President, sent over another carton of Coke for Fizzer and Tupai. There was an envelope inside the carton also, with a cheque, the exact amount of which is a closely guarded secret.

  Not surprisingly it wasn’t a carton of the new flavour that Harry sent (although strangely enough, cans of that short-lived version of Coke became collectors’ items). He waited until production was back to normal and sent a carton of the original recipe.

  The real thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Falkner was born and raised in Auckland. He is the award-winning, best-selling author of several novels for children and young adults, including The Flea Thing, The Real Thing and The Super Freak. His action adventure sci-fi novels The Tomorrow Code and Brainjack were both short-listed for the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children & Young Adults and the Esther Glen Award at the LIANZA Awards, with Brainjack winning the New Zealand Post Book Awards, Children’s Choice Award (Young Adult Fiction category). Brainjack also won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award, Best Young Adult Novel. The Project has also been short-listed on the 2011 Storylines Notable Books List.