"Help me inside first," Pitt groaned. "I think they fractured my skull."
The guards lifted Pitt to his feet and slung his arms over their shoulders. They half carried, half dragged him into the security office. Slowly, Pitt moved his arms inward until the guards' necks were in the crooks of his elbows. As they pressed together to pass through the doorway, he took a convulsive step backwards, hooked the guards' necks in a tight grip and exerted every bit of strength in his biceps and shoulder muscles. The sound of their bared heads colliding was an audible thud. They both crashed to the floor, unconscious for at least the next two hours.
Safe from detection, Giordino and Maeve hurried through the opened gate and joined Pitt inside the office. Giordino picked up the guards as if they were straw scarecrows and sat them in chairs around a table facing a row of video monitors. "To anyone walking by," he said, "it'll look like they fell asleep during the movie."
A quick scan of the security system, and Pitt closed down the alarms, while Giordino bound the guards with their own ties and belts. Then Pitt looked at Maeve. "Where's Ferguson's quarters?"
"There are two guest houses in a grove of trees behind the manor. He lives in one of them."
"I don't suppose you know which one?"
She shrugged. "This is the first time I've returned to the island since I ran away to Melbourne and the university. If I remember correctly, he lives in the one nearest the manor."
"Time to repeat our breakin act," said Pitt. "Let's hope we haven't lost our touch."
They moved up the driveway at a steady, unhurried pace. They were too weakened from an inadequate diet and the hardships of the past weeks to run. They reached what Maeve believed was the living quarters of Jack Ferguson, superintendent of Dorsett's mines on Gladiator Island.
The sky was beginning to lighten in the east as they approached the front door. The search was taking too long. With the coming of dawn, their presence would most certainly be discovered. They had to move fast if they wanted to find the boys, reach the yacht and escape in Arthur Dorsett's private helicopter before the remaining darkness was lost.
There was no stealth this time, no slinking quietly into the house. Pitt walked up to the front door, kicked it in with a splintering crunch and walked inside. A quick look around with the flashlight taken from the guards at the cliff told him all he needed to know. Ferguson lived there all right. There was a stack of mail on a desk that was addressed to him and a calendar with notations. Inside a closet, Pitt found neatly pressed men's pants and coats.
"Nobody home," he said. "Jack Ferguson has gone. No sign of suitcases, and half the hangers in the closet are empty."
"He's got to be here," said Maeve in confusion.
"According to dates he's marked on his calendar, Ferguson is on a tour of your father's other mining properties"
She stared at the vacant room in futility and growing despair. "My boys are gone. We're too late. Oh God, we're too late. They're dead."
Pitt put his arm around her. "They're as alive as you and I"
"But John Merchant--"
Giordino stood in the doorway. "Never trust a man with beady eyes."
"No sense in wasting time here," said Pitt, pushing past Giordino. "The boys are in the manor house, always have been, as a matter of fact."
"You couldn't have known Merchant was lying," Maeve challenged Pitt.
He smiled. "Ah, but Merchant didn't lie. You were the one who said the boys lived with Jack Ferguson in a guesthouse. Merchant merely went along with you. He guessed we were suckers enough to buy it. Well, maybe we did, but only for a second."
"You knew?"
"It goes without saying that your father wouldn't harm your sons. He may threaten, but a dime will get you a quarter they're sequestered in your old room, where they've been all along, playing with a room full of toys, courtesy of their old granddad."
Maeve looked at him in confusion. "He didn't force them to work in the mines?"
"Probably not. He turned the screws on your maternal instincts to make you think your babies were suffering so he could make you suffer. The dirty bastard wanted you to go to your death believing he would enslave the twins, place them in the care of a sadistic foreman and work them until they died. Face facts. With Boudicca and Deirdre childless, your boys are the only heirs he's got. With you out of the way, he figured he could raise and mold them into his own image. In your eyes a fate worse than death."
Maeve looked at Pitt for a long moment, her expression turning from disbelief to understanding, then she shivered. "What kind of fool am I?"