Old Enemies (36 page)

Harry desperately needed to rest. He had to be sharp and alert in the morning, a danger to others rather than to himself, so he settled back, determined to find sleep, and he thought he was winning the battle until his iPhone came to life yet again. A text message. Even as he opened it, a shard of despair drove itself through the centre of his forehead.

‘
Where were you? Your appointment with PM at nine this evening?
’

From Mary. Oh, sweet Jesus, what day was it? All he could remember was that it was five days to Christmas, five days before the kidnappers’ deadline ran out. That’s how he measured time now, not in dates and diaries. Too many demands, too much pain, too little time.
Five days.
And still he had nothing more than guesswork and gut instinct to say that Ruari was anywhere near Trieste.

Sleep.
Sleep!
He forced his head back onto the pillows, but he couldn’t find it. Wherever he tried to lead his thoughts they ended up in the same place, with Ruari.

As he lay back on the cotton-softest bed in the most indulgent hotel in town, searching desperately for answers, he had no inkling that Ruari and his kidnappers were less than a two-minute walk away.

Chombo snorted, trying to clear his nostrils and his mind, his barrel chest heaving up and down as he massaged his thoughts. He had come once more to his home in the Eastern Highlands with its well-stocked garden of fuchsias and pine trees and reluctant ceiling fans. There was too much bustle in Harare to get his thoughts into line. His Mercedes SUV stood outside, its sides stained with the red, oily mud of the climbing road that had tossed him about, no matter how carefully the driver had negotiated the broken tarmac. But that would soon change. Everything would change.

Yet still Chombo felt uneasy. Even on the verge of victory, his life was in the hands of others, and in particular the Englishman who controlled the diaries. Would he stick to the deal? He wondered, and he worried. It wasn’t his fault that the boy hadn’t been released, Chombo had stuck to his side of the bargain, but would others? He hated the uncertainty, and blamed those who had brought it, whom he held responsible. Takere. It was his fault.

Just a few weeks into the New Year, Chombo would no longer be acting head of state but would be confirmed in his rightful position, and in his mind he was already there, getting on with the glorious task, no longer needing to hesitate or to be patient. He was the President, as good as, and he expected others to respond in the appropriate way, to be respectful, subservient. But Takere wouldn’t. The man had been useful, no denying that, but he had one fatal flaw. He had too much power, power that should be the President’s. And this flaw showed in the way Takere talked, in the way he held himself while in the Presence, almost as though he thought himself an equal, and there was no equal any longer to Moses Chombo.

As he gazed into the darkness outside his window, Chombo saw everything. Takere was not only disrespectful, he was slow. He would not learn. He had made too many mistakes. He was the one who had brought him the two worthless South African thugs, who had stood in this very room, showing all the arrogance of their kind, and who had stolen from him so much money. They had paid for their failure with their lives, as Chombo had paid for it with his money, and Chombo was sure Takere was sitting on a fat slice of that himself. Yes, this monumental fuck-up was all Takere’s fault.

There came a point when a leader had to grow beyond others in order to fulfil his destiny, and that sometimes required things to be done which were unpalatable. Power in Africa was maintained not by reason but by enforcing respect, and nothing squeezes more respect out of a man than fear. You cannot cross the river without getting your feet wet. Yet Takere neither respected nor feared him.

Ah, the river. Chombo’s mind went back to the great Limpopo and the fate of the South African journalist. There had been no point in the wretch simply disappearing, leaving no trace and no story behind. It was important that a message be passed on to any who might be tempted to follow, some picture that would discourage them, like a face that could be identified, washed up on the southern bank of the great, grey, winding river while the rest of what remained of him was sufficiently dismembered and unrecognizable to put fear into everyone who saw. The crocodiles that swept along the banks of the Limpopo, as helpful as they so often were, couldn’t be trusted to perform such delicate work, and Takere had got his hands particularly dirty that night. He had seemed even to enjoy it. And that was the difference between them; Takere took delight in blood while he, Chombo, shed it only with reluctance. It hurt him, deep inside, truly it did – but what was it that Takere himself had said? To be a successful leader, you must learn to be a butcher.

So there it was. It would be his first New Year’s resolution. Chombo would be responsible to Chombo, and to no one else. Takere had to go, his job done, his historic task fulfilled. He would die, as all things must, with his President’s gratitude ringing in his ears.

The Old City. A medieval muddle built upon the ruins of a Roman fishing port, a disorderly quarter so different from the rest of Trieste with its well-ordered outpouring of Austrian pride. It was a place of small squares and claustrophobic alleyways, the haunt of troubadours instead of policemen. Some still called it the Ghetto, where the Jews used to live, which they had done for much of their time in harmony with the rest, until Mussolini, yet it stood only a few paces from Piazza dell’Unità with its Habsburg grandeur and Christmas lights. There could be no greater contrast, stiff civic pride versus the ways of the ghetto. On dark evenings when the piazza was windswept and bleak, with respectable citizens scurrying home pursued by their Christmas muzak, inside the Old City the huddled, youthful masses still gathered, eating pizza and getting drunk. The civic authorities had tried hard to reform and rebuild it; fifteen years earlier the place was a rat run, so large amounts of European money had been poured into its concrete and glass frontages, but all those sackfuls of credit still hadn’t solved the problem. There was no plan, everything was haphazard, very Italian. The rich wouldn’t move in, there weren’t enough young people to fill it, so much of it still stood empty, waiting, with faltering plasterwork and boarded windows, hoping for better things tomorrow.

And this was where the Romanians had brought Ruari.

When Nelu had received Simona’s message warning that the police were about to raid the farmhouse, for a while he and the other kidnappers panicked. De Vries and Grobelaar were already dead, their throats slit by Cosmin’s knife and their bodies dumped in the cellar, for no better reason than to get them out of the way while the Romanians got drunk. Simona’s text had sobered them up remarkably quickly. They had to get out, in a chair-crashing hurry.

That was when the Old City came into its own. The fifth member of the gang, a shy man in his forties with bandy legs and extraordinarily large hands, was named Puiu. Like the others, he had been a conscript but since his discharge he had made his living as an electrician, and until he’d been offered the more lucrative employment of kidnapper he’d been working on the refurbishment of a pair of old town houses at the heart of the Old City, converting them into apartments with the aid of a grant from the city authorities. But the money had run out, the work had come to a halt, the building had been boarded up. So now it stood waiting for Puiu and Cosmin and the others, complete with running water and a temporary electricity supply, and it was even within the footprint of a wi-fi hot spot, as much of the Old City was, which made sending messages so much easier. It also had access to crowded, cosmopolitan streets where their presence would cause no one to lift their heads in curiosity. And Puiu knew how to get access, past the padlocks and flimsy mesh security. Only one drawback, the money tap was about to be turned on once again and the site reopened after Christmas. So they had a new hideout, but they also had a new deadline.

Even as D’Amato had been making his way up the winding road to the Carso, the Romanians had thrown a hood over Ruari’s head and dragged him up the rickety cellar stairs. He’d been terrified, thinking they were going to cut his throat, too, just as they had done to de Vries and Grobelaar, whose bodies had been staring at him from the corner of the cellar for the best part of a day. It was as close as Ruari had come to breaking; he couldn’t stand the thought that his friends the rats might end up doing to him what they had been inflicting these past hours upon the South Africans. So when the gang had thrown him into the boot of a car and he realized they weren’t going to kill him straight away, he remained quiet as they sped along back roads then down, always down, until he could hear the sounds of a different world outside the car. Trieste, although he had no way of knowing it. And there was no disguising the anxiety of his captors as they dragged him back out of the boot and into a new hiding place – a building which, judging by the noise, stood in the heart of the city. They dragged him roughly upstairs, his body scraping over every step, raking his back as he tried to curl and protect his mutilated and still inflamed hand. As dawn broke he found himself high up in an attic room, shackled to a floor joist, with the pale light of a new day creeping through a window that looked out over rooftops to the blue-tiled campanile of a distant church. He could hear the city waking, with traffic, bells, even footsteps. And voices.

Yet although he had survived so far, Ruari now knew these men were going to kill him. He’d seen too much of them, what they were capable of, and seeing it meant he would not be allowed to survive. But here, in the heart of the city, he found reason for hope. There were other people in this new world of his, even if he couldn’t see them and could only hear them through a closed window, people who were more than just sullen, murderous beasts. Perhaps some of these people out there were even looking for him. Perhaps, after all, he had a chance.

In his dreams, Harry was being strafed by machine-gun fire, and Sean was pulling the trigger. He had at last managed to fall off to sleep, weighed down by exhaustion, but it had brought him no peace. His dream was particularly vivid; he was trying to crawl away from the danger, yet he’d got himself tangled on the wire, there was mud in his eyes, his new ear had been torn, and the machine gun was rattling in his ears when it all morphed into a pounding on his door.

‘Who is it?’ he called out, waking and scrabbling for his wits.

‘It’s me, Karim,’ a voice called out. Harry recognized it as the junior concierge who had been so helpful on the previous day and who had received a generous tip for his pains.

‘Come in, damn you.’

A passkey scrabbled at the door and Karim entered. He was a well-presented young man with the dark skin of North Africa and serious eyes that were now downcast. ‘Good morning, Mr Jones. A thousand apologies for disturbing you. We have tried to telephone but there was no answer.’

Harry glanced at the bedside phone. Its red message button was glowing. He was alarmed to see it was already ten. He must have died on that bloody wire.

Karim shuffled uneasily as though his highly polished shoes were several sizes too tight. ‘I have been instructed, Mr Jones, to ask about your plans. To see if we can help you with any travel arrangements, perhaps.’

Plans? Harry had nothing that would pass muster as a plan, except hanging around waiting. ‘Another couple of days, probably,’ he muttered, yawning, feeling every limb creaking in complaint. The car crash had roughed him up more badly than he’d realized.

Karim’s shoes seemed to have shrunk another size. He was hopping in discomfort. ‘I am filled with apology, Mr Jones, but your room is no longer available.’

‘Pity. Very nice. But any room will do.’

‘I am desolate, Mr Jones,’ the young man responded in his quaint and formal English, his head bowing as he tried to remember his lines, ‘but the hotel is full. All rooms are already reserved. The management very much regrets . . .’

Harry was just about to make the blindingly obvious point that the piazza was scarcely swamped by crowds, that most people preferred Christmas in the Caribbean, when his mind slipped into gear. This had nothing to do with the management and its imaginary bookings. This was D’Amato putting on a little heat.