Ben had started to shiver when he heard voices. They were distant and muffled. He strained his ears to listen to them. Three voices? Perhaps four? He couldn’t quite tell, but he could tell that they were men and that they were arguing.
The voices came closer. It sounded like they were in the adjoining room, and suddenly a small crack of light surrounded the door frame. Ben jumped up and for a moment had to steady himself because the bump on his head was making him dizzy. He realized he was holding his breath, half out of nervousness and half to block out the sound of his own breathing.
There were definitely three of them, he decided. They were speaking a language he didn’t understand. It sounded different to the Urdu he had heard people speaking at school earlier that day.
He listened. And then, unable to listen any longer, he threw himself at the door once again and thumped his fists against the wood. ‘LET ME OUT!’
The men fell silent. There was a sound of footsteps approaching. Suddenly terrified, Ben backed away. His skin tingled as he heard a key clanking in the lock and the door was pushed slowly open.
Light flooded in, making Ben squint as it pierced his aching head. It was a few seconds before he could look directly at the open doorway. A figure stood there. He was dressed in black, with a black turban and a long black beard — one of the men he had seen outside Raheem’s house, he thought. The skin on his face was dark and weather-beaten and his lips were curled into a sneer. One of his eyes was half closed, thanks to a scar that ran across it. He carried a rifle and looked like he was prepared to use it.
Ben mustered the courage to speak. ‘Where’s Aarya?’ he demanded.
The man’s expression didn’t change and Ben realized he hadn’t understood.
‘Where’s Aarya?’ he repeated, slower this time. But as he spoke, the man stepped backwards into the adjoining room. For a moment Ben took that as an invitation to leave his dark prison. As he stepped forward, though, his captor raised his gun sharply. Ben halted and, with a sickening twist in his stomach, watched as the other two men came into view. They weren’t arguing now, he thought to himself. It was as if the one thing they could agree on was that Ben should stay right there.
‘Let me out,’ he whispered yet again. He knew, though, that they wouldn’t. It was no surprise when the door was shut again and the sound of the lock reached his ears. With a sense of hopelessness, Ben crouched back down on the ground with only his sore body and the scurrying of the rodents in the corner for company.
It was the waiting that was the worst. Ben had been in some nasty situations before and it was always the unknown that was scariest of all.
Control your fear, he told himself. Accept it. Master it. Think clearly. It was difficult in that dark, locked room. He took deep breaths. He tried to think of a plan to get out of there. He thought of Ed, sneering at him while he fought the boys outside the school. He had seen it all happen. When everyone realized that Ben and Aarya had disappeared, he would explain what he’d seen. That would lead the adults to Raheem’s house. And then… But there was nothing he could do while the door was locked, that much was clear. So he’d have to wait for them to come back.
Ben thought it was about an hour later when they returned, but it could have been less. He heard them outside and once more moved away from the door. This time, however, he didn’t step back into the room. He stood to one side of the entrance and prepared to pounce.
The door opened. Light spilled in, casting an unnaturally long shadow on the floor of the room. A moment of silence. Then a figure stepped through the doorway.
Ben launched himself at him. His sore ribs hurt as he smashed against the body of his unknown captor. They scuffled in the dark, but it was no good. Instantly he found himself pinned down on the cold floor by two men, with a third standing over him and pointing a gun directly at his head. The gunman gave a harsh-sounding instruction and Ben was yanked roughly to his feet. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more scared when they pushed him into the adjoining room.
Before he knew it, his hands had been tied and one of the men was wrapping a dirty strip of cloth round his head and between his lips; the gag dug sharply into the corners of his mouth. He was then pulled — one man to each arm — through another door and up a flight of stone stairs, at the top of which was a room that looked very similar to the one in Aarya’s house where they had eaten. Ben didn’t get the chance to examine it very closely, however, because they kept him moving: through a dark hallway and out into the front courtyard of what he now realized was Raheem’s house.
The sky was dark. Everything was dark. There were other figures in the courtyard, but their faces were in shadow. He tried to shout out, but because he was gagged the only sound he made was a weak groan.
The front gates ahead were open. Beyond them, Ben could see a vehicle with its lights on. He was dragged towards it. One of his captors — the man with the scarred eye — opened the back door and pushed him inside before jumping up into the back of the vehicle itself.
There wasn’t much room. The floor was taken up by the object they had seen being loaded up earlier. Ben didn’t pay it much attention: he was too busy looking at the girl who sat alongside it. Her face was bruised and her eyes filled with terror. Although she was not gagged, her hands had been tied behind her back like his. She was shaking with fear.
‘Aarya!’ Ben tried to say her name, but it was just a noise because of the gag. He heard the door shut; seconds later the Land Rover started to move.
‘Ben!’ she hissed back. ‘We must escape. They are…’ She became breathless. ‘They are terrorists, Ben. We must escape.’
Ben couldn’t speak. But had he been able to, he knew what he would have said: We can’t escape. We can’t escape because there is a man aiming a rifle at us. We can’t escape because the truck is moving too quickly now. We’re being taken away at gunpoint and we don’t even know why…
Chapter Six
The truck drove through the darkness. As time passed, the temperature dropped. Ben, who was wearing just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, started to shiver from the cold.
They had been going for an hour, maybe more. Of the three people in the back, nobody had spoken. Ben and Aarya sat side by side. Opposite them was their guard. He looked to Ben like he was holding his weapon expertly, not pointing straight at them, but down and to one side, ready to swing it into action if need be. Now and then he caught Ben’s eye, but Ben read nothing in his face except flat, flinty determination.
The road was bad and the truck shook as it went. It made Ben’s sore body hurt even more. As they drove, he tried to work out what was going on. All they’d been trying to do was get Aarya’s books back. She had seemed nervous about doing even that, but surely this was nothing to do with a schoolyard fight, no matter who it was with. No; something else was going on here. Something more sinister.
He thought back to the moments before they were captured. They’d seen the armed men and had hidden, then watched from their hiding place as the package now at their feet was loaded into the truck. There was something secretive about it. They hadn’t wanted it to be seen. Maybe that was it — maybe Ben and Aarya were being abducted because they had seen it. He glanced down. The object at his feet didn’t look like much. Just a cylindrical suitcase, a bit scuffed and beaten up. Surely not enough to risk kidnapping two people for…