Evolution of Fear (33 page)

As soon as they arrived he knew something was wrong.

Clay had slipped through the UN wire as planned, shortly after sunset. Crowbar had arranged it all with the base commander, the only stipulations being that Clay make his way back to the egress point in the wire by 0500 hours the next morning, and that he not attract the attention of the Turkish Army. Any later, or any commotion, and he was on his own – the wire would remain closed. The base commander was already treading a dangerous line harbouring them, and Crowbar had been forced to up the inducement, in the form of a cash ‘signing bonus’ as he called it, sourced from Medved’s death money.

Hope’s friend, the old man who had led them inland from the coast that night of the fire, so long ago it now seemed, had met him on the other side of the wire, and together they’d driven north to the coast under a star-strewn sky.

They arrived just before eleven o’clock, left the car hidden on a small track off the main road and walked in overland. Despite the doctor’s additional bandaging and the extra painkillers, Clay’s legs burned with every step. It was as if each of the sixty-seven stitches were tearing out in turn, like a zipper being undone along the back of his legs.

He followed the old man up through a tangled thicket of scrub oak, limping along at half speed with short, stilted strides. When they reached the crest of the ridge, the trees ended. They looked down at the sea across long-denuded fenlands of juniper and wild caper.

About a mile away, set on a rocky spur overlooking the sea, the walls and grounds of Erkan’s mansion glowed like a bonfire. Miles of empty, moon-washed coastline strung away in either direction. Clay could hear the waves foaming on the beach, see the phosphorescent glow of the surf against the cold black of the water. The smell of wild oregano and charred pinewood came strong on the air.

As they approached, they could make out the double layer of security fencing, and beyond, the ancient, walled grounds of the converted monastery. King palms, centuries old, scythed in the night breeze, sending bladed shadows ricocheting from the floodlit monastery walls. Once, this had been a place of peaceful contemplation and spiritual cleansing. Now, red-eyed CCTV cameras swivelled their paranoia from atop steel towers at every bend and crook in the fence-line.

They reached a small pinnacle of boulders that overlooked the main gates and provided a partial view into the gardens and of the main building itself.

Hope’s friend tugged Clay’s sleeve. ‘Look.’

The main gate was wide open. Two cars were stationed at the floodlit entrance. Armed men hovered around the vehicles. Clay counted at least four. And in the ditch at the side of the road, in partial shadow, a pile of what appeared to be animal carcasses.

‘Erkan’s men?’ whispered Clay.

‘Perhaps. I do not know.’

‘Is there another way in?’

‘There is an entrance on the beach side.’

And then, above the gentle shunting of the sea, the sound of gunshots – two, three muffled cracks from somewhere inside the monastery.

Clay pulled out his Beretta.

The old man put his hand on the gun. ‘There is nothing we can do.’

Clay pushed the old man away. ‘I’ll meet you back at the car.’ He was about to start off towards the beach to find the second entrance when he heard the sound of car doors closing, engines starting.

A third car had appeared at the entrance. It had come from inside the compound, and now rolled to a halt. One of the armed men approached the vehicle and spoke to the driver. Moments later all three cars were speeding away along the narrow, gravelled drive towards to the main road.

It was just gone midnight by the time Clay and the old man reached the main entrance. The big steel doors were splayed open. Bullet holes riddled the guard shack and blood stained the white, floodlit gravel. Heaped in the ditch nearby were not the animals he thought he’d seen, but men, five in all, their limbs splayed and entwined to give the appearance of four-legged beasts. Clay checked them each in turn, pulling them free, laying them on the gravel, pushing his fingers into the flesh of their necks, searching for a pulse, knowing already from the cold in their bodies that they were all dead.

The old man was staring at him.

Clay wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘What is it?’

He paused, looked into Clay’s eyes. ‘You frighten me, young man.’

Clay ignored this. ‘I am going to find Erkan.’

The man smiled a sad smile. ‘I will go back and bring the car.’

Clay nodded. ‘
Çok teşekur
,’ he said. Thank you. And then the things he did not say: I do not expect to see you again, but thank you, old man. In bringing me this far you have taken a huge risk. Honour to you.

Clay started towards the monastery.

Floodlit shadows jerked epileptic across the pathway, fell twitching onto the arches and towers and limestone walls. Gravel crunched under his feet, and in his mind the path was fashioned from the smashed and brittle shards of dried bones, femurs and ribs and the concavity of shattered hips. He felt the gun’s weight in his hand, the familiarity of a grafted prosthetic. The blood of strangers on him, too, its smell thick in his nostrils.

He was thirty-four years old. At eighteen he’d gone to war, lost his parents a year later in a car crash. Since then he’d travelled through the world alone, Koevoet the closest thing he’d had to a father, to what
his father had tried to be to him, to what he would now have to be if the baby lives: guide, conscience, uncompromising compass swung on wisdom and courage, impossible to live up to. As an adolescent, Clay had come to see his father as a wizened mystery, with so much of what he’d done unsaid and unshared. Once in a while a story had emerged, almost by accident, as afterthought, like the time he was caught in a mine collapse in one of the deep reef mines near Jo’berg and survived three miles underground for five days and got his men to safety, most of them anyway. And as Clay climbed the stone steps to the arched atrium, he wondered if he would share any of this – these events occurring right now – with his daughter, or if he too would keep it all hidden away, and if he might be around long enough to try.

He found them on the second floor, in a grand room with sweeping views of the sea and the coast, a fire dying in a huge stone fireplace. Two bodyguards lay face-down by the door. Furniture was strewn across the room, upended. Broken glass sharded oriental rugs, shimmered on polished marble tile.

Clay knelt, turned one of the bodyguards over. It was Hum, his face still swollen from Clay’s strike of a few days ago. There was a deep gash over his right eye, fresh, weeping blood, but no other visible wounds. He was still breathing. Clay moved to the other body, a woman: Ho. She groaned as he turned her over. Her jaw was wired up. She opened her eyes a moment, just a flutter, and mumbled something that Clay could not make out. She’d been shot in the thigh. Clay cradled her, examined the gash in the back of her head, the brush-cut hair beaded with blood. Like Hum, she was alive and breathing.

Clay threaded off his pack and pulled out his water bottle. He cut Ho’s trouser leg open and exposed the wound. It was low down, close to the knee, in the fleshy part of the quadricep. Blood leaked from the hole. He couldn’t see an exit wound. Clay irrigated the area then pushed a compress down onto the wound and tied it in place. He was applying a tourniquet to the leg and winding it tight when something hard jabbed into the back of his head.

‘Don’t move.’

He didn’t.

‘Turn around. Slowly.’

It was Erkan. He was bleeding from a deep gash in his lower lip. There were abrasions around both eyes. His nose was swollen to twice its normal size. His right arm hung limp from the shoulder. A .357 Magnum revolver shook in his meaty left hand. ‘
You
,’ he said, voice hollow, constricted. ‘What do you want?’

Clay kept his hand open, in plain view. ‘She’s bleeding.’

Erkan motioned for him to continue.

Clay tied off the tourniquet, laid her down. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said.

‘I already have,’ said Erkan. ‘The police, too.’

Clay stood. He figured he had ten, maybe fifteen minutes until the cops arrived. Assuming the old man hadn’t already fled. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I saw them leave.’

‘You can see very well what happened.’

Clay glanced at Erkan’s shoulder. ‘That’s broken.’

‘Compassion does not suit you.’

‘Let me set it.’

Erkan laughed, waved the pistol at him. It was a good effort at bravado, considering the pain he must be in. ‘What do you want?’

‘How about lowering that gun?’ said Clay.

‘I would rather not, under the circumstances. Say what you have to say and leave.’

Clay filled his lungs, held it then exhaled slowly. ‘We need you to testify at the commission on coastal development.’

Erkan shifted his feet, grimaced in pain. ‘I have already given my answer to the commission.’

‘If you don’t help us, Chrisostomedes is going to walk away blameless from this. He’ll probably win the election, too.’

Erkan shook his head. ‘Help you? Your friend Moulinbecq has spent the last month trying to destroy me. Judging by what she has written, Chrisostomedes is a saint.’

‘Chrisostomedes was coercing her. But that’s over.’

Erkan was quiet a moment. ‘Look around you,’ he said. ‘This was a warning. Even if I wanted to help, I cannot.’

And suddenly, it all made sense: Erkan’s cornering of the illegal market in religious antiquities; his apparent desire to share the Alassou dossier with Rania, ‘off the record’; his chauffeur’s attempt to capture them shortly afterwards; the fiery murders that night in Karpasia; the cable Clay had pulled up with
Flame
’s anchor as they fled, the burns on his face not yet blistered. All of it.

‘Rania – Lise – told me what happened to your wife and son. Those were warnings, too, weren’t they?’

Erkan called over his shoulder. A woman emerged from behind one of the couches that hadn’t been overturned. She was tall and slim, with thick black hair. Her face was horribly disfigured, the skin stretched in angry pink ridges across her lovely cheekbones, the eyes inert, glass.

‘
Gel
,’ he said to her. Come.

The woman approached, found Erkan with her hands and tucked herself in beside him.

‘My wife.’

‘I am very sorry for what happened,’ said Clay.

Erkan’s wife inclined her head.

‘The interview,’ said Clay. ‘You were trying to help us.’

‘The only way I could.’

Erkan’s wife gripped her husband’s arm, put her lips to his ear, whispered something. He patted her arm, continued. ‘They were going to kill Mademoiselle Moulinbecq, after she returned to Cyprus. I tried to warn her. I thought you were…’ He trailed off. ‘I thought you might be one of
hers
.’

‘Medved.’

‘The Devil, Mister Greene. There is no other explanation.’

Clay closed his eyes. You don’t understand, he thought. I didn’t either, for a long time. For years I searched for someone else to blame. But now it is clear. There is no devil. There never was. There are only
people
. ‘That’s why you insisted Rania come alone,’ he said.

‘Yes. But I was betrayed by one of my oldest employees.’

‘The chauffeur.’

‘Never would I have believed it. He had been with me for over twelve years. I haven’t seen him since that day.’ Erkan winced in pain, indicated the two body guards lying on the floor. ‘These, at least, are loyal.’

‘Help us now,’ said Clay. ‘You can make it right.’

‘I didn’t want to do any of it,’ Erkan said. ‘The Greek properties were not ours to take. I tried to tell her, but she insisted. They were the best sites, the best beaches, the most valuable. Regina made it happen. She bribed politicians here in the north, silenced dissenters. That’s how she works. No one is safe. And when the environmentalists started bringing pressure through the EU and the UN to protect the nesting beaches, she developed a plan to make that go away, too.’

‘The poison dosing lines.’

Erkan nodded. ‘And the acoustics.’

‘Are they still in operation at your sites in Karpasia?’

Erkan hung his head. ‘You must understand. This is where I spent summers as a boy. These beaches, the sea,’ he waved the gun in a long arc, ‘all of this. It is God’s holy creation, his perfection. What I have done is a sin, and I will burn for it, I know. But I had no choice.’ There were tears in his eyes.

‘There is always a choice.’ Something Rania said to him once.

‘No, Mister Greene. You are wrong.’ Erkan twisted half around, faced the back of the room. ‘Anastasia, come out.’

A girl appeared from behind the couch. She was wearing a pink-and-blue flowered party dress. Her dark hair was pulled back and tied with pink ribbons. Tears streaked her pre-adolescent face. She had her mother’s beautiful bone structure and light complexion.

‘This is why they were here, Mister Greene, or whatever your name is. They have already taken my son. If I do not continue to serve, they will take my daughter.’

How young she looked, Clay thought, how frightened. ‘Testify,’ he said. ‘Tell the world what Regina’s doing here, doing to your family. The authorities will be forced to act. It’s the only way.’

Erkan raised his chin, Turkish for ‘no’. ‘Impossible.’

‘Help me, and I’ll help you.’

‘How can you possibly help me?’

‘She wants me dead, Mister Erkan. She’s put a price on my head.’

Erkan’s eyes widened.

‘I killed her brother.’

‘Then you are already dead.’

‘Maybe,’ said Clay. ‘But not if I kill her first.’

For just a moment, Clay thought he saw a glimmer in Erkan’s eyes. But then it was gone and Erkan was staring at him, lips pursed, jaw clenched. ‘No, Mister Greene. You cannot help me.’ He raised the pistol. ‘Now, get out of my house.’

This was the price you paid. A cost quoted in options foregone, in freedoms lost, in principles and beliefs abandoned. It would be so easy from here: hire a boat, sail to Turkey or one of the Greek islands, and disappear. He had money, documents, weapons. He knew places where no one would ever find him, not Medved, certainly not the government of Cyprus. But he no longer had a choice, just as Erkan didn’t have a choice. And he could no more fight against it than change his blood type or the colour of his eyes. He had to go back. And he would have to testify.