Evolution of Fear (26 page)

‘
Broer
.’ It was Crowbar. ‘Where are you?’

‘About to go in.’

‘She’s not here.’

Clay’s heart loped. ‘What?’

‘Gone. The place was empty.’

‘Shit.’

‘Go anyway,
bru
. Get her.’

‘If they–’

Crowbar cut him off. ‘You may not get another chance. I’m on my way.’

Clay closed the phone, jammed it into his pocket. If he managed to get Rania out, Zdravko wouldn’t hesitate to kill her aunt. But every minute that passed pushed Rania further towards the edge. How long would Chrisostomedes keep her around? Now that he had Hope’s son, did he still need Rania? Crowbar was right. Clay pulled out the Beretta, stood back, aimed at the door handle.

Just as he was about to pull the trigger, a muffled detonation rang through the house.

Clay stopped dead, listened. The sound of blood pulsing, of air moving through his mouth, inside his head, the wind in the pines, the squeak of twisting wood as the trees swayed in the breeze.

And then, in quick succession, two more bangs, gunshots, coming from inside the house. Clay raised his gun and fired.

The 9mm slug blew the lock to pieces. Clay kicked in the door, swung the red beam of his headlamp around the room. A storeroom: an old lawnmower, shovels, tools, a workbench of sorts, boxes, everything covered in dust. At the far end, a stairway made of rough-cut wood planking. Clay approached the bench, pocketed the Beretta, scanned the tools. He picked up an axe, ran his stump over the dullness of the blade and replaced it on the bench. A hammer, a hand-drill, a power-saw, stacks of old blades. From upstairs, the sound of someone running, a door slamming.

Clay grabbed a steel crowbar and moved quickly up the stairs. At the top, a blade of light shone from under a wooden door. The door was locked. He set the crowbar’s claw to the door frame and pushed. The wood splintered and came away. He flipped the crowbar around and forced the bolt, swung the bar under his left arm, pulled out the handgun, pushed open the door with his foot.

The light hurt his eyes. He was in a corridor, empty white walls, hardwood floor, somewhere on the same level as the main dining room. He started south, towards the front of the house and the main stairway. Another retort, louder this time, close, the distinctive bark of a large-calibre handgun. A second later the alarms went off. Clay started running. The corridor doglegged left, ended. There were doors on both sides. Clay went right, south, and pushed open the door. He emerged into a narrow, dimly lit perimeter of some kind. The outside wall was solid rough-hewn stone that curved away in both directions like the interior of a cave. Towards the inside, a screen of heavy timbers, like looking into the depths of a forest at
dusk, soft, butter-coloured lights shining between the trunks, and beyond, the main entranceway. Clay went left. The underside of the staircase came into view. A gap opened up in the screen work. He set the crowbar on the floor against the wall and emerged into the main gallery.

Ahead, the front door was wide open, the night staring through. Alarms screamed, lights pulsed. Clay reached the base of the staircase. The stairs were still hidden from view by the sweeping wooden balustrade. He looked up to the mezzanine. No one. He swung around to the first step. A face stared up at him, eyes wide, mouth open. The man was sprawled across the bottom four steps as if he’d been trying to slide down head-first on his back. Blood seeped from a hole in his forehead, trickled across the hardwood, dripped to the stone flag floor. It was Spearpoint.

Clay bypassed the body and took the steps three at a time. He worked his way through the upper floor, room by room, moving quickly, the Beretta up, ready, cradled in the partial crook of his left arm. Rania’s room was empty, the bed made, the closet bare. He knew it was hers. He could smell her.

She wasn’t here. Damn it all.

Clay burst from the room, flew down the hall to the mezzanine, the alarms wailing in his ears. As he reached the top of the stairs he saw a man limping across the stone flags towards the front door. A black duffel bag hung from his shoulder. He carried a handgun. It was Zdravko.

Clay raised the Beretta, fired, missed. Zdravko ducked, stumbling out of the door. Clay crashed down the steps, sidestepped Spearpoint’s lifeless body, raced across the gallery and out into the night. Zdravko was halfway across the gravel car park now, silhouetted by the lights of the guardhouse. Clay could see the body of the gate guard lumped dark in the gravel next to a car. His pulse was slow, his breathing calm. He raised the handgun, took aim, fired. Zdravko kept running, that crazy stiff-legged limp. Clay fired again. Zdravko jerked as the bullet clipped his left thigh. He stopped, swayed, spun
around, raised his weapon. Clay rolled away as rounds slammed into the wooden beam behind him. Zdravko was almost to the car, still going, dragging his leg. He reached back with his pistol, fired on the run, blind. Rock chips flew from the wall inches from Clay’s head. Clay crabbed left, stood, planted his feet. Zdravko was opening the car door. He reached back again, the handgun scything wildly, fired twice more. A window to Clay’s right exploded in a shower of glass. Clay steadied himself, sighted down the barrel and unloaded the clip.

Zdravko fell in a heap.

Clay dropped the spent magazine to the ground and loaded a fresh one. He used his mouth, his knees. Just like he’d practised at the cottage. Three seconds. He walked towards the car, weapon ready. Zdravko lay motionless, face down. As Clay approached, he could see the damage. He’d hit him in the neck, the upper shoulder, lower back and the base of the spine. Blood oozed to the ground. Zdravko was dead.

Clay stood looking down at the man who had threatened the woman he loved, who’d murdered his friend, others besides. He watched the blood soak into the gravel, working its way between the stones, the bubbles coming up, bursting thick with plasma. He looked at the weapon in his hand, hot still, impassive, uncaring, ready to continue.

‘Only Allah decides who lives and dies,’ he said aloud. ‘Something a friend said to me once.’ He turned over the body and looked at the face. ‘But in this case, we’ll make an exception.’

Lights flashed through the trees. A car was coming up the drive. Clay reached down and picked up Zdravko’s bag, kicked the dead man’s handgun under the car, then moved to the guardhouse, crouching against the wall.

The car came to a halt outside the gate. Clay heard the engine stop, a door open, close. Footsteps crunching in the gravel, heavy, approaching slowly. Whoever it was would have seen the bodies by now. Clay readied himself. The footsteps stopped. Seconds passed, the alarms screaming still.

‘Straker,’ came a voice.

‘Koevoet,’ he said.

‘Rania?’

‘Negative.’

‘
Kak
.’ Crowbar approached the car and turned Zdravko’s head with his foot. ‘The
poes
who got me with the Dragunov.’ He looked up as Clay joined him. ‘You okay,
seun
?’

Clay nodded and motioned towards the dead guard. ‘He killed him. More inside. He was leaving with this.’

Clay put the bag on the back of Zdravko’s car and unzipped it. Inside were two white towels. Crowbar picked one up and unfolded it. There was something inside, wrapped like a present. He dropped the towel back into the bag, fished a torch from his pocket, turned it on and ran the beam over the object. It was a small painting, more like an engraving, no bigger than a paperback, faded colours on heavy, dark wood. Crowbar tilted it towards the light.

Figures in single file suspended against a gold background climb an invisible ladder. Winged devils hover beneath the ladder, plucking unfortunates from the queue. Many fall. They plummet into a fiery abyss, mouths open in screams of horror, into the waiting jaws of sea monsters, drooling grotesques. A throng mills at the base of the ladder, each supplicant’s eyes raised, waiting to take his turn. At the top right, a larger image, haloed in gold leaf, bearded, holds up the first two fingers of his right hand. He is reaching out to the climbers, calling to them, urging them up.

‘Jesus Christ,’ breathed Clay.

Crowbar looked up at him. ‘What is it?’

‘Like I said: Jesus Christ.’

Crowbar grinned, unwrapped the second towel. It was another icon, identical. ‘Where the hell did he get these?’

‘Chrisostomedes collects them.’

‘Stealing from his employer.’

‘Time-honoured.’

‘Why kill all these people and take only this?’

‘Because this,’ Clay said, picking up the second icon, turning it towards the light, ‘or one of these, is worth more than that house and everything in it. And it’s probably the only thing on the planet that would have convinced Regina Medved to let him live. The Patmos Illumination.’ Zdravko must have planned it from the beginning.

‘So it does exist,’ said Crowbar.

‘Apparently yes, and more than one.’

Clay looked down. Something was dripping on his boot. He reached down, touched it with his finger. ‘Blood,’ he said.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ said Crowbar.

Clay reached down under the rear bumper of Zdravko’s car, catching a drop as it fell. ‘From inside.’

Crowbar stepped back, kicked at the trunk. ‘Won’t open.’ He raised his handgun, aimed it at the lock.

Clay pushed Crowbar’s gun down. ‘Wait.’

Clay ran back inside the house, grabbed the crowbar from where he’d left it and ran back across the gravel. It didn’t take him long to pry open the trunk.

A face he’d seen only once before, four months ago in a café overlooking Lake Geneva, stared up at him with empty, unblinking eyes. Rania’s aunt, Madame Héloïse Debret, gagged with tape, hands bound together behind her back with a plastic zip tie. She’d been shot in the chest.

Crowbar dropped him at Hope’s car and they drove in tandem through the back mountain roads until they emerged in Kakopetria. By the time they saw the first police car, they were already clear of the foothills. They stopped next to a darkened roadside
periptero
under the shadow of a copse of evergreens. Clay joined Crowbar in the Pajero. They watched in silence as first one, then a second police car sped past towards Troodos. For a moment Crowbar’s face lit up blue and red, his jaw hard-set, covered in stubble, his wispy hair draped across his forehead in sweat-glued spines. They sat in the darkness for a long time, watching the lights disappear into the distance.

After a while Crowbar pulled a half-empty bottle from under his seat, unscrewed the cap, swigged.

Clay couldn’t see the label, but he could smell the cheap, duty-free scotch. ‘Chrisostomedes must have taken Rania with him,’ he said.

Crowbar took another swig and capped the bottle. ‘The rally is going ahead as planned. Tomorrow afternoon in Nicosia, down on the Green Line.’

Clay looked out into the black of the trees, the lighter grey of the tired fields beyond. ‘He’s taken Hope’s son.’

Crowbar went quiet. ‘
Fokken
bastard.’

Clay told him about Katia, his suspicion that Dimitriou might know the boy’s whereabouts. ‘We’ve got to find them,
oom
. Both of them. And quick.’

Crowbar nodded, patting the bag on the seat between them. ‘He’ll be wanting these,
ja
.’

‘We’ll offer him a trade.’

Crowbar opened the whisky and took another sip. ‘Do you know how much these are worth,
seun
? Medved’s offering ten million dollars, no questions. I say we kill the bastard, sell the icons to the dowager, then
fokken
retire in the Seychelles.’

‘No,
oom
. We trade. We give him back his icons, he lets Rania go. Rania promises to keep quiet about what happened. We leave the country quietly, vanish.’

‘What about him?’ Crowbar pointed his chin to the back of the Pajero where they’d bundled Zdravko’s body.

‘The Cypriots won’t give a damn about him. We’ve done them a favour. But go after one of their own, a luminary like Chrisostomedes, they’ll call out the army.’

‘What about Medved?’ said Crowbar. ‘You think you can run away with that kind of money tagged to your head? Someone will find you,
ja
. Both of you. Sometime, somewhere.’

‘You said it yourself. She’ll be dead in six months.’

‘That’s what they’ve been saying for the last two years. They keep finding new ways of keeping the old bitch going. But if we give her this thing she wants, we might just be doing ourselves a big favour.’

Clay took the bottle, swigged a mouthful, winced as the whisky found him. Crowbar was right. They had to end it with Medved, one way or another. If she believed in the Illumination’s power enough, she might just eschew medical science and hasten her own death. It was as good as anything else they had, maybe better.

Crowbar took the bottle back. ‘I admire you,
seun
.’ Just the whites of his eyes glistening in the dull half moonlight. ‘Even with Medved off your back, you think you can keep Rania quiet? Get her to run, leave Hope hanging? You’ve always been a dreamer, Straker, a
fokken
idealist. Congratulations. Now you’ve met someone even more stubborn and idealistic than you are.’

Clay looked away. ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do, Koevoet. Run. Then I’m going back.’

Crowbar raised the bottle in his hand as if to look at the label. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m going back to South Africa.’

‘Goddamn, not that again. They’ll arrest you the minute you step off the plane.’

‘New government,
oom
.’

‘That’s what I mean.
Fokken
ANC all legitimate now. A pack of
fokken
terrorists and thieves running the country.’

‘I’m going to testify.’

Crowbar stopped breathing.

‘Desmond Tutu is going to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’m going to apply for amnesty.’

Crowbar was silent a long time, just sat there behind the wheel, staring out into the night. ‘Don’t do it,’ he said finally.

‘I have to. It’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself. It’s killing me,
oom
. I need to tell the truth. This thing they’re doing, it’s my last chance.’

‘Don’t be naïve, Straker. You tell the truth, they’ll throw you in prison till you die. No way in hell they’ll grant you amnesty. No
fokken
way.’

‘I won’t mention names. No one else. Just me.’

‘As soon as you open your mouth, they’ll know we were all lying.’

Clay breathed, worked his lungs. He was back there on the stand all those years ago, facing the military tribunal, his tie too tight around his neck, his collar chafing his skin in the stifling January heat, and that one officer, a colonel with a grey moustache, red, sunburned cheeks and eyes like lead shot, who never seemed to blink or move but sat there for hours staring right through him with the ceiling fan turning overhead and the stenographer coughing and the way his cough would echo through the converted library they were using as a courtroom, the sound echoing off the marble floors and the colonial pillars and vaulted ceilings so that it was a continuous barking, like a pack of wild dogs braying at the scent of fear. And even then, he knew, from the demeanour of the officers, by the questions they asked, by the way they cut him off the moment he began to elaborate, anything more than a yes or no, that they weren’t
interested in the truth, only in the process, that it could be said that the enquiry had run over ten days and had questioned all twenty-one surviving members of the platoon, as well as the crew of the helicopter who’d overflown the village later that day, and the forward artillery observer and his pilot who’d come by two days later, but by then FAPLA had been in, and the jackals and the hyenas had been at the place and there was nothing much left to see.

‘It was war,’ said Crowbar. ‘Not politics. This commission is about politics. It’s the ANC’s way of legitimising
their
atrocities. It’s not for us. You say one word, I guarantee you can kiss Rania and that little baby she’s making for you goodbye. You’ll never see them again.’ Crowbar banged the bottle down onto the dashboard.

‘What we did was wrong, Koevoet.’

‘
Goddamn
, Straker. We don’t have time for this. Let it go.’

‘All those people.’

‘
Fokken
enemy non-combatants. They were harbouring the enemy. They attacked
us
, don’t forget.’

‘Kids, Koevoet. Little children.’

‘
Fok
, Straker. You think you’re the only soldier who has ever had to do something he was ashamed of? What about the concentration camps you English cunts put our women and children into? They starved to death or died of the plague. Thousands of ’em. You going to salve your pussy conscience about that, too?’ Crowbar opened the door, got out, slammed it shut.

Clay got out of the passenger side, walked around the front of the vehicle and faced Crowbar. In the dim light he could see the fury on his face.

‘Look,
oom
, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

‘No. Just
fokken
break your oath to all those men you fought with, let them find out when the man comes knocking at their door.’

‘They won’t…’

‘
Fok
you, Straker.’

‘What is it, Koevoet? In blood stepp’d in so far? Is that it?’

‘Don’t, asshole. I’m warning you.’

‘Too far gone? Is that why you joined the company?’

Crowbar took a step forward, brought his face to within inches of Clay’s. ‘Spare me the psychobabble, Straker.’

‘You think there’s no way back, don’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘You want to know?’ Crowbar was shouting now. ‘You really want to know?’

Clay breathed in the whisky vapour that hung like a cloud around their heads. ‘Go ahead,’ said Clay. ‘Tell me,
bru
. What are you so afraid of?’

Crowbar tensed, clenched his fists at his sides. He was looking up, his lips almost brushing Clay’s chin. ‘Here’s the thing,
seun
. It’s simple.’ He smiled, stared into Clay’s eyes. ‘I like killing people. That’s all. And I’m good at it.’

Clay stepped back, Hope’s words coming to him like certainty. After a while he said: ‘I’m not like you, Koevoet.’

‘Yes, Straker. You are. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.’ Crowbar reached into the car, grabbed the whisky bottle, drank then thrust it into Clay’s hand. ‘Go. I won’t stop you. But it won’t bring those people back. You’ve got to live with it,
seun
. Nothing else you can do.’

Clay emptied the bottle, flung it against the wall.