Free The Real Thing by Brian Falkner

possibly closer to the northern coast of Australia. Maybe New Zealand, but I don’t think we went that far south.’
    ‘Might as well be Mars,’ harrumphed Ralph.
    ‘Did you give them the correct formula?’ Clara asked.
    Bingham nodded. Ralph grunted, ‘Did we have any choice?’
    She shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, I guess we didn’t.’
    Clara wandered around, inspecting their rocky home, then idly opened a few of the cardboard boxes of stores to find out the contents. The first one she tried contained packets of soup in a variety of flavours. The second contained canned meat.
    She opened a third carton and began, a little tiredly, to laugh. Even here, trapped underground for the rest of her life in a tiny rock-walled prison, she was able to see the humour in the delicious irony of Candy’s final revenge upon her ex-husband.
    Ralph and Bingham crowded around her to see what was so amusing, but they didn’t find it funny at all. Not even slightly.
    The carton was full of cans of Coca-Cola.

STORM RISING
    If all the Coca-Cola ever made was poured into bottles and lined up in a row, it would stretch from the Earth to the Moon over a thousand times. That’s a lot of Coke.
    Every second of every hour of every day, 8000 glasses of Coke gurgle down thirsty throats around the world. That’s also a lot of Coke.
    Coca-Cola was the first soft drink to be drunk in space.
    Even the modern image of Santa Claus was actually invented by The Coca-Cola Company as part of its advertising campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century.
    Tupai and Fizzer had learned all these very interesting facts, and many more, during their guided tour of Coca-Cola World with the acting CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, Reginald Fairweather.
    And all of them, Tupai thought, he would trade in a second for a book on how to pick handcuffs.
    ‘There are two things that worry me,’ Fizzer said slowly, twisting his hands around inside the cuffs to see if there was any way to slide them off. (There wasn’t.)
    ‘Only two things?’ said Tupai a little grimly.
    ‘The first thing is: what are they going to do with us? And the second thing is, how did they know?’
    ‘How did they know what?’
    ‘That we were on the right track.’
    Tupai thought about that for a moment, but it was all a little confusing, so he waited for Fizzer to explain.
    Fizzer did, after a while. ‘I think we know who, so that’s not a question, it’s the same people who kidnapped the three executives. Nothing else makes any sense. And I think we know why. We must have been getting too close to the correct recipe. But, at the moment, the only people who know the correct recipe, we assume, are the kidnappers, who will have wormed it out of the executives by now.’
    ‘Or tortured it out of them,’ Tupai said darkly, which wasn’t like him, but then he’d never been handcuffed and left in a dimly lit room in the middle of heaven-knows-where before.
    ‘But how did the kidnappers know that we were getting close to getting it right?’
    ‘There’s a spy inside The Coca-Cola Company’, Tupai said slowly.
    ‘Yes,’ said Fizzer, ‘and that’s what worries me the most, because, even within Coca-Cola, very few people know what is going on.’
    ‘I think I’m more worried about the first question,’ Tupai shifted his bulky frame around, trying to get comfortable, which was impossible on the hard concrete floor. ‘What are they going to do with us?’
    ‘I imagine they’ll have to kill us,’ Fizzer said, as if solving an algebra equation. ‘Maybe not straight away, but if they let us go, sooner or later I would come up with the recipe, and I have a feeling that they don’t want that to happen.’
    ‘So why not just kill us straight away?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Fizzer ran his fingers through his longish hair. ‘I think the penalty for murder in Georgia is the electric chair. It often is in these southern states.’
    ‘Let me at the kidnappers and I’d save