“If you hurry, you can catch the last one.” She looked up. It was a cute guy wearing a uniform identical to her own. He stood below the sign for the Kilimanjaro Safari.
“Ah…yeah,” Willa said. But she tensed as she felt his eyes following her. Did she look old enough to carry an ID badge?
She walked quickly through the empty waiting area, turning and winding her way down to the loading dock, where one of the trucks was waiting. There was an older woman—she had to be nearly thirty—leaning forward from the front bench, coaching the driver. Willa was the only passenger beside the instructor. It was obviously some kind of training run. The truck rumbled off down a path that wound through the jungle.
Willa called out, “I’ll be hopping off at Ituri Forest.”
The instructor, without so much as looking back, lifted her arm and waved.
Willa heaved a sigh of relief and held on as the driver avoided puddles and recited some memorized lines into the radio, “communicating” with other rangers who were searching for the poachers. Willa had taken the safari ride many times and enjoyed the story behind it as well as the animal-watching. But the emptiness of the place at this hour gave her the shivers. The truck rounded a bend and slowed.
“Is here all right?” the instructor called back inquisitively. Suspiciously?
The Ituri Forest, Willa realized.
“Fine!” She hopped the three feet down to the muddy ground, hoping the instructor wouldn’t see that she was wearing running shoes and not the required ranger boots. She slapped the side of the truck, and it lumbered off. The minute it was gone, she regretted getting off.
Alone on the truck route, in the midst of a thick forest of bamboo and sea cane, Willa spotted a pure white ibis as still as a statue. The bird stood on one leg, perfectly balanced.
She unfolded the map Philby had given her, tried to establish her position, and punched through the forest to her left, expecting to come across a feed station within the next thirty yards. It was tough going, the forest thick with vegetation.
Had she looked behind her, she would have seen a lizard following. It was five or six feet long, with a thin tail and little claws on its feet. Not so much a lizard—more like a Chinese dragon.
22
MAYBECK LOST GROUND to the small, agile simian that moved through the jungle’s tight growth in a seamless, fluid motion. He wondered if the monkey was under Maleficent’s control. But if so, then why had it not been ordered to release the bat? His answer came as a slice of first light caught his eyes. Bats were nocturnal; it was sunrise. Releasing the bat was not an option.
Maybeck had to get it back. He smashed into bamboo and rubber trees, baby banyans and mangrove. He sloshed through the flooded jungle floor, quickly gaining on the monkey.
Maybeck’s progress registered on the monkey’s face as wide-eyed terror. It shrieked and exploded into a frenzy, briefly increasing its lead on Maybeck. But only briefly.
Maybeck broke out of the jungle and felt something hard beneath his feet. He looked down: train tracks! The Wildlife Express Train was going through its morning test run. Maybeck jumped out of the way when he heard a blast from the train’s whistle. “You crazy?” the conductor shouted through the open window.
He’d been spotted. As the train passed, he saw the conductor reaching for his radio.
Not good.
The train whistle pierced the morning air, sending a flock of sandhill cranes into the blue sky. Maybeck spotted the monkey. It had been crouched in the center of the birds. He closed the distance to ten yards, then five.
The train had followed a long, sweeping curve of track but was now coming around and catching up to them. It reappeared to Maybeck’s right. The monkey changed directions, going straight for the train. Maybeck skidded to a stop, caught a toe, and went down hard.
He looked up to see the monkey slip beneath a train car, the pillowcase in hand. Maybeck hurried to his feet and ran toward the train. The train conductor hung out of the locomotive, shouting at him. Maybeck squatted in time to see the monkey racing across a short distance of grass toward more jungle. There was no way Maybeck was about to crawl under a moving train. He waited it out impatiently. It seemed to move very slowly. Finally, Maybeck took off toward the end of the train and came around it, once again crossing the tracks.
He found himself next to the Chakranadi Chicken Shop. He came to a halting stop, looked left…right…there! A flash of the white pillowcase was all he caught—just rounding a bend in the path. He took off, heading away from Flights of Wonder. Again, his size and speed overcame the monkey’s efforts.
The monkey sensed its pursuer and skittered back and forth in a zigzag, chattering loudly. It crossed the path and shot straight up a dangling rope toward a concrete tower. It reached the turret, nearly thirty feet off the ground, and briefly disappeared. The next time Maybeck saw it, the monkey—still carrying the pillowcase—hurried across a set of ropes toward a crumbling Asian temple encased in bamboo scaffolding. This was on an island surrounded by a narrow moat.
Maybeck stopped at the concrete tower. The end of the rope the monkey had climbed was frayed as if it had been chewed through. He studied the layout, noticing that the rope bridges connected back to the temple, which meant that the monkeys weren’t supposed to be able to get down off the towers. The moat was meant to prevent their escape from the island. But the monkeys had managed to drop a rope that had yet to be spotted. By doing so, they’d given themselves an escape route.
The monkey disappeared into the red brick temple, dragging the pillowcase behind it, and was gone.
Maybeck, understanding the importance of acting quickly, rolled up his pant legs, pulled off his shoes, and waded into the murky water. A pair of ducks startled and splashed away to the other side of the temple, squawking and quacking.
Maybeck felt the cold mud ooze between his toes. Bubbles rose to the surface all around him, giving off an unpleasant odor.
He faced a wooden door with iron bars over its small, square window. It was the only way into the temple that he could see.
He arrived there in five giant steps and, sloshing out of the water, reached for the door’s handle.
23
WILLA CHECKED PHILBY’S MAP once more: he had marked the location of a feeding station—disguised as a large stump—at the edge of the savannah. Its proximity to a nighttime animal holding pen qualified it as a possible hiding place where Jez could be kept and never discovered. A clock ran off the seconds and minutes in her head—she had several such places to check before the animals were released.
She pushed though the forest, following the map, and reached the edge of the sprawling savannah: a flat plain of low grasses interspersed with trees and rocks and a few small ponds, all of it surrounded by low rolling hills. It glistened in the first golden rays of dawn.
There, quite some distance away, she saw a stump, thinking immediately that it couldn’t possibly be Philby’s stump because it looked so real. But the location was right, so she decided to have a look.
The problem was, there was no way to sneak up toward a stump in the middle of a field without being seen. She had to cross a hundred yards in the open. Not that there was anyone to see her, but another training truck could come by at any minute. She decided rather than run out and look suspicious, she would walk casually—just another day on the job. Hopefully, the ranger uniform would do the rest.
Then, taking in her surroundings, she happened to look back.
At first, she thought it was an alligator. Terror gripped her: alligators ate people. It happened all the time in Florida. She’d heard they could run faster than humans, and when you saw one you didn’t want to run because it teased them into chasing you—and if they chased you, they considered you food. So she continued walking, though slightly faster than before. The stump—or fake stump—rose at least three feet off the ground. If she could only reach it in time…