Java Spider (44 page)

A flicker of alarm spread across Copeland’s face. Sankey leaned in towards the set.

‘
I can assure the House that my government has no knowledge whatsoever of any financial connection between Stephen Bowen and Metroc Minerals
.’

He sat down again. The shadow spokesman leapt to his feet.

‘
But what knowledge does he
personally
have?
’

Copeland flinched, like a man cut by a rapier tip.

‘Fu-uck,’ growled Sankey, convinced more than ever that the story had wings. Gordon’s gut instinct had been right.

‘
Madam speaker, I have no personal knowledge of such a connection
.’

Copeland stuck his chin out.

Sankey looked hard at Copeland’s face. Defiant yet embattled. Arrogant yet guilt-ridden. Cocky, yet fearful. Yes, thought Sankey. He felt it now with utter conviction. The prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was lying to save his skin.

Twenty-one

Kutu

Friday 03.30 hrs

A DARK BLUE
minibus with windows of blackened glass and no registration plates turned out of the Kadama interrogation centre and headed for Piri. The night was inky and moonless, the road empty. Nobody to see the vehicle leave, nobody to watch its arrival at the isolated villa just half a kilometre away. Colonel Widodo was at the wheel, alone in the vehicle apart from his hooded passenger.

Charlie breathed in and out deeply, trying to steady her jerky heartbeat. Her wrists were cuffed to the metal tubing of the seat. She’d guessed it was Widodo from the groping feel of his hands as he’d half lifted, half pushed her into the vehicle. Also, there was now an overpowering smell of garlic in the air.

From the sacking that covered her head, another smell. Cloves.
Kretek
smoke from the last victim, she guessed. Her heart fluttered at the thought that whoever had worn this hood might have died in it. She hunched forward, her stomach spasming with terror and with emptiness. Under the hood she shut her eyes tight and pounded out desperate prayers. For her mother, for her father, for the people of Kutu, for Nick and for herself.

Dear God, I believed in you when I was young. Please. Please don’t let me die
.

A soldier had come to the cell fifteen minutes ago, not
with
the usual terrorising clamour, but silently while Teri and the other woman were asleep. Hustled her down to the courtyard. She’d made a token protest, asking again to speak to the British Embassy. The response was the bag over her head. Rough, black cloth with a hole for the nose.

She’d panicked, convinced they were about to shoot her. There in the yard. A firing squad. Pleaded shamelessly for her life, choking and sobbing. There’d been a chuckle, then the hands lifting her into the van, her shins scuffing against the step.

The vehicle swung abruptly to the left. Unable to support herself Charlie fell sideways and banged her head on the window. Then they stopped with a jerk, the engine off. In the silence of the night she heard the clinking of the radiator cooling. The door slid open. Fetid breath as the man freed her hands. Then she was outside, walking. Up a step. Into a building that smelled clean and fresh. Floor polish. Walking, walking, then a door closing behind her, a key in the lock. Footsteps going away. Rubber squeaking on polished parquet, then silence.

She listened. Just her own shaky breathing. Nobody else’s. The hum of an air-conditioner. Then she smelled food.

‘Hello?’ she ventured. ‘Anybody here?’

Silence. Why was she still hooded? With her freed hands she slid it off and straightened her greasy hair. Looked like a room in a private house. Two single beds with crisp white sheets, a sofa and a small, low table laid with mat, plate and cutlery. Beside it a bowl of the inevitable
nasi goreng
and a plate of fruit.

Disbelieving, she checked she was alone. There was a door open on the far side – a bathroom. Empty. She entered, ran the taps, then splashed water on her face.
Soap
. Clean towels. She gave a little snort. If this was a death cell, they meant her to die in comfort.

She flopped on to the sofa and spooned rice on to the plate. There was a Thermos jug of iced drinking water. She ate and drank carefully, feeling the food ease the knot in her stomach.

It helped her mind too. She began to think rationally again. They
weren’t
going to kill her.
Deport
her more like. Softening her up with food and a bed so she wouldn’t be too critical when she wrote about them …

When she’d eaten enough, she stood up and tried the door. Firmly locked. She knocked on it, then pressed her ear against the varnished wood. Nothing.

She knocked again, convinced she could hear voices.

‘Hello,’ she called, not very loudly. ‘Could somebody please tell me what’s going on?’

Major General Dino Sumoto didn’t hear her. He stood by the open door to a veranda on the other side of the villa. The air was fresher than before, the result of the evening’s rain that had beaten down like shot.

Sumoto’s tall frame seemed to stoop, his shoulders sloping with defeat. More than twelve hours had passed since his oblique but chilling meeting with the president and he was still smarting from it. The ruler’s hard, cold eyes had looked right through him.

The president was a lonely man, with dwindling authority and a family whose hunger for wealth was the reason he still clung to power. A power which was absolute and in Javan tradition could only be taken from him by force. Yet force would tear the country apart, which was why attempts at engineering change had failed. No one had had the guts to see it through before.

Sumoto had known this. Known his scheme had
depended
on building an irresistible head of pressure in the military. Weapons, money and promises should have been enough, if only the kidnap of Stephen Bowen had achieved what he’d planned for it.

The president had treated him with contempt that afternoon. Shown him no mercy. Most generals who’d dissented in the past had been bought off with ambassadorships. Sumoto had been offered nothing but his life – permission to go on living, just so long as what’d he’d done never became public.

How much the president knew, Sumoto had not been able to tell. The conversation had been oblique. A monologue about the undesirability of closer military links with China. No reference to Stephen Bowen, but from the ice crystals in the air Sumoto had known he was under suspicion.

The Australian Dugdale had been the first to be silenced. A loose tongue when drunk – and a foreigner. Throughout his interrogation the bar owner had sworn to Widodo he would never reveal Sumoto’s secret. Sworn it until the end. But they couldn’t take a chance with him. Now there were others to be dealt with.

Sumoto turned from the window. Still wearing the mud-green safari suit that was his second skin, he paced to the middle of the room. The villa had been furnished by his wife in the last months before their separation. Wide, soft armchairs and couches in ivory moquette, all bought at outrageous expense from a catalogue sent from America. Sumoto was a man of simple origins who’d never shaken off his peasant frugality. His wife’s extravagance with his hard-won wealth was what had broken their marriage in the end. He loathed this house now; loathed it because it reminded him of her.

Colonel Widodo watched Sumoto from the corner of the room. It pained him to have backed the wrong horse, but it was too late to switch. Like with the general
himself
, what mattered now was self-preservation.

‘You’re certain you have left no trace of this Cavendish woman at Kadama?’ Sumoto demanded.

‘Certain. Her name’s no longer on the register. I saw to it myself. And the guards are well drilled in not remembering faces.’

‘What about Dugdale’s woman?
She
saw her.’

‘When we have finished with Teri she will be quite ready to deny seeing Miss Cavendish in Kadama,’ Sumoto explained sullenly.

‘And the other journalist? The man – Randall …’

‘Still not found. Alive, we think. I’m almost certain the priest was bringing him to Santa Josef but got wind of my men waiting at the orphanage. Must have dropped him somewhere else.’

‘How much did Dugdale say to Randall? Did he tell him about me?’

‘No. Only what I’d ordered him to say – the rumour about Bowen being seen here. Nothing else. I’m sure of that.’ Dugdale had been a weak man. Easy to break. If he’d said more he would have admitted it.

Sumoto paced back to the window. Who to trust, that was the question that pressed him so painfully. Widodo would stay loyal. And Sugeng. But the men on the boat? And Selina …?
She
had as much power as anyone to destroy him.

He held out his hands and examined the palms. In the sixties they’d been stained with communist blood, but he’d taken no pleasure from those killings. If blood was to be shed this time, he’d resolved that it could be done in his
name
, but not
by
him. A commander’s prerogative, after all. There were plenty of other men who would take pleasure from it.

Selina. Unbearable to have to decide that she too must die.

‘Where is Dugdale’s body?’ Sumoto checked, putting
off
the moment.

‘In the morning, when the mist covers the foothills, they will fly it to Jiwa.’

‘And Miss Cavendish too.’

‘I … I think it better to wait until we have the two of them together,’ Widodo suggested.

‘Find him. Find Randall quickly,’ Sumoto rambled, his mind on the decision that could be delayed no longer.

In the night would be best. While Selina slept. The guard in Menteng could do it.

‘I would like to be alone,’ he murmured. ‘Come back at dawn. Miss Cavendish will not run away.’

Widodo got up, relieved. It was easy to fight for another man’s success, harder to live with his failure.

Sumoto waited until he heard the minibus leave. Then he drifted from the living room to the hardwood-panelled, book-lined study that had also been chosen from a catalogue. He picked up the telephone and dialled his house in Jakarta. After an interminable ringing, the Sundanese houseboy answered, his voice dulled with despair at having to be the giver of bad news.

‘
Bapak
, Selina Sakidin, she gone,’ he whispered. ‘Everybody gone. Run away. Only me here now.’

Very slowly Sumoto took the receiver from his ear and replaced it on its rest.

Defeat stared him in the face. He had let his heart rule his head and now he’d been betrayed.

But he still had a chance, he told himself quickly. Still had friends who could save him. Friends who could silence
her
, if he could get to them in time.

The Kutu Sea

06.05 hrs

The powerboat’s wake lay on the water like a strip of lace. Dead astern the distant crater of Kutu’s Mount Jiwa secured its position on the dawn horizon with a grey-white smudge of smoke.

Dedi had been unsurprised to learn Randall was a police officer – he was used to people not being what they claimed to be. Last night they’d left Piri harbour within minutes of Randall’s call to Maxwell, jolted by his warning that Sumoto was now in Kutu on a killing spree. They’d crossed from the
Morning Glory
to the powerboat alongside, a fifteen-metre craft called
Timini
which Dugdale kept filled with fuel and tinned food. They’d upped anchor and puttered out of Piri Bay without lights.

During the night Dedi had talked to keep himself awake. Rambled about Kutuans he knew who’d been taken by the police and disappeared. And of mountain people seeing helicopters drop bodies into Jiwa’s molten heart.

Myth or truth, Randall had been chilled by his words.
Charlie
was in the hands of these men. The minutes, the hours were ticking past. He hoped to God Maxwell had pulled his finger out in getting wheels turning on her behalf.

To reach Kutu from Bali, the ketch
Berkat Amanat
with the kidnapped minister on board would have to navigate a channel that had been carved through the large island of Manda by an earthquake in a previous millennium. A few hundred metres wide, it was a natural choke-point. And now it lay ahead of them. The ketch, they assumed, was still on the other side of it, heading their way.

Daylight had brought a feverishness to the Kutuan, a restlessness that verged on mania. Dedi sat hunched
over
the helm, staring into the lightening haze, brooding about his sister’s arrest, Brad’s disappearance and his powerlessness to do anything about any of it.

Randall sat next to him on the bridge, locked in his own thoughts. He knew that the mission he’d been given defied common sense. A job for the marines, not a lone, unarmed copper. Saving Bowen would mean getting on board the
Berkat Amanat
unseen or unopposed, then surviving the attention of his captors. Madness, yet he’d been ordered to try.

‘
You must judge
,’ Maxwell had said. ‘
Up to you, old boy. But if it’s possible, then do it
.’

‘Nick!’ Dedi jabbed a finger to port.

‘What is it?’ He saw the outline of a small ship about a mile off.

‘
ABRI
,’ Dedi growled fearfully. ‘Gunboat.’

Pinisi
Berkat Amanat

The British minister of state for foreign affairs lay on his side, left cheek on the floor sticky with sweat. The poison in his blood had taken hold and drained him of the strength to lift his head. The thrumming of the diesels throbbed through his jaw like an abscess. On the other side of his head, the stump of his ear burned beneath a stinking bandage.

For twelve hours he’d drifted in and out of consciousness as the fever took its grip. The scalpel they’d cut him with had been dirty and sepsis had infected his blood. His mouth was paper dry. They’d stopped bringing food or water. In moments of lucidity he knew they meant him to die.

His pulse pounded, his breath rasped. He wanted to scream at that devil Copeland who’d done nothing to
save
him. The bastard was letting him rot. Because of the money.