The Other Tree (23 page)

The fact was that concentration didn’t come easily to Emir. It wasn’t that he was slow, but he found it far easier to do something than to think about it. He was in his element when active, letting his body react to the environment, rather than analysing intangible concepts and speculating on the nature of humanity.

He found that, the more you thought about people, the more complicated they became. He could see the appeal of Docker’s view of the world, which Emir privately called the “Schrödinger’s Cat approach”: if you didn’t pay attention to people, they didn’t exist except in the most theoretical of considerations. Life became a case of maths and algorithms, simple cause and effect, rather than a cacophony of disastrously subjective nuances and misinterpreted, half-imagined insinuations. Admittedly, Emir had never quite understood the whole Schrödinger’s Cat concept.

Emir had met a mathematician once, on one of his early assignments to recover some ancient Mayan calendar pottery thing, and the way she had described the beauty of numbers reminded him strangely of parkour. The irrepressible order of pi, an endless stream of perfect numbers that continued through the universe. It seemed to echo the freedom of running—unstoppable, fluid through the world like a phantom.

Maths and running. They made everything so much simpler. They stopped you from dwelling on pointless, petty questions.

Like why she hadn’t called.

Emir snapped open his harpoon gun and began to check the components with precise familiarity, his hands racing quickly across the mechanisms.

Not that he had expected things to stay the same after he’d left uni—after all, people grew apart, and he had travelled a lot over the past few years. But when he
had
seen her again, after such a long separation, she had barely seemed to care whether he was there or not. Not that he had expected her to languish in his absence, and he was genuinely glad to see her happy and healthy, but he had expected perhaps a little more—

Thunk
.

Emir jolted to attention, looking up to see a harpoon sticking out of the couch, next to Roman’s leg.

Roman didn’t look up from her screen.

“That’s why you shouldn’t clean your harpoon gun when distracted,” said Roman.

The jet-lounge intercom beeped.

“Descent in five,” came Docker’s voice.

Emir quickly pulled the harpoon free from the couch with an apologetic grimace, which Roman ignored. Emir packed away his gear and secured the loose baggage as the jet began its landing approach to Massari airport. Through the cabin window, Emir could see the long, dusty airstrip carved from the rocky plain, like a Nazcan line. The desert spread out below them in an endless pan of baked yellow earth, scattered with half-buried boulders and patches of exposed rock.

Touchdown was barely perceptible, and the passing landscape slowed to a standstill. Emir glanced out at the unwelcoming desert—the only sign of life was a solitary black truck pulling away from the airport, trailing a plume of dust.

“Best behaviour,” said Docker, emerging from a side room. “We’re meeting with a valued associate.”

As opposed to the associates we don’t value
, thought Emir. Lord knew there were enough of those.

He missed having Stace around to say these things, but he couldn’t help feeling that Stace would later count his blessings for his early, if ungracious, departure from the mission.

Thank God he never showed me a picture of his fiancée
, thought Emir.

* * *

Hoo boy
, thought Chris. One of those.

Tate had a diver’s build and an orator’s voice, with short, messy, chestnut hair that gave the impression he had just galloped across the dunes on the back of a wild Arabian mare before probably dismounting with an acrobatic leap. He looked to be in his late thirties, and there was something about his face that suggested it would still be compelling at eighty. His teeth were slightly crooked, and his canines exceptionally sharp, but his smile seemed to fill the room with an almost physical force.

Don’t let this be a cult
, thought Luke, his head throbbing.
Not today
.

Tate swivelled on his heel to face Chris.

“Ms. Arlin.”

He turned smartly to Luke.

“Father Estasse.”

Tate leaned towards them, placing a hand on each chair companionably.

“Which part of ‘Stay Away’ was unclear?” asked Tate, his voice a purring baritone.

Chris was bursting with a hundred comebacks, some of which she thought were quite witty, but she grudgingly acknowledged that being tied to a chair in a room full of armed lunatics in the middle of the desert was not the best place to be sassy unless you secretly had a bazooka in your boot. Chris had a pebble in her boot, which she now wished she had removed earlier.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Chris. “We’re just going to head home now.”

Luke’s gaze stayed on Thena, who seemed to be engrossed in a pock mark on the wall. She wasn’t carrying any visible weapons, but she didn’t appear afraid or distressed in the surrounding company.

“So,” said Tate, his voice soft and friendly as he leaned closer. “If we drove you back to the airport, you would get on a plane, fly home, and never come back?”

“Absolutely,” said Chris, looking into Tate’s intense, tawny brown eyes.

“Do you give your word, Ms. Arlin?”

Chris struggled with this one.

“Well…”

Chris was an excellent liar when it came to polite deceptions regarding the size of rear ends, or the taste of inedible but lovingly cooked food, and even the perceived talent of someone’s offspring. But her word—that was a whole different phylum of vertebrates.

“Well, then,” said Tate, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I think we have a problem.”

“Who are you people?” said Luke abruptly, his gaze still fixed on Thena.

Tate pulled back, clapping his hands in mock delight.

“I am so glad you asked,” said Tate with a grin that generated vastly more wattage than the ceiling lights.

He unfurled his arms to encompass the room and possibly the world.

“We are the invisible line,” said Tate, his voice resonant. “We are all that stand between the world’s greatest hidden masterpieces and their utter devastation and exploitation at the hands of the greedy, the ignorant, and the base.”

Tate paused.

“That would be you,” he smiled.

Luke exchanged a quick glance with Chris, who shrugged defensively.

“You plunder, you steal, you destroy, and you ravage,” said Tate, a growl growing in his voice. “You think only of yourselves, your lifetime, and your needs. You’re not worth the flesh you’re made of.”

There was an almost audible clack as several pieces fell into place, images rolling like a slide show through Chris’s mind. The snake bite, the clown spiders, the burning plant, and the wasps.

“You’re cryptozoologists,” said Chris.

Crazy cryptozoologists
, she added mentally.

“Cryptoconservationists!” boomed Tate, flinging his arms wide in another theatrical gesture. “The yeti, the Loch Ness monsters, the Blue Mountains panthers. All creatures that are threatened with exposure and exploitation fall under our protection.”

“Setting them on fire and throwing them through windows is protection?” said Chris.

“It’s ironic,” said Tate. “Like the zookeeper devoured by the tiger. Or the ringmaster crushed by the elephant. Or the animal trainer whose bicycle is stolen by the trained bear.”

Chris’s expression was unforgiving. The burning plant hadn’t been trying to hurt her. It had wanted her to save it.

“You’re using animals and plants to attack people,” said Chris. “Some of them are getting hurt, getting killed, to achieve your objectives. You’re no better than a circus.”

A gasp fluttered through the room.

Chris could almost feel the frost cracking on her skin as Tate fixed her with an icy stare.

“We give power to the voiceless,” said Tate. “We facilitate their anger. And we use environmentally friendly, biodegradable solutions.”

“Like cane toads?” said Chris flatly.

A low “Oooo” hushed through the room.

“I’ll bet not all your followers agree with your methods,” said Chris. “Maybe it started as conservation, but somewhere, it became…something else.”

“Really,” said Tate, his voice soft and measured. “And you want to find the Tree of Life to set up a heritage park? Or to feed its lifeblood to the ravenous, squirming, endlessly multiplying hordes of humanity, who after only ten thousand years of civilisation have managed to reduce most of the world to a hollow crust? Several thousand years ago this—”

“Yes, we know,” said Luke. “Was fertile. Now desert. We get it. Can we move on now?”

Tate turned his attention to Luke. Tate hated dealing with the younger generation, with their attention spans as microscopic as their mobile phones. To them, nature was something you downloaded as wallpaper. The older generation had far greater respect for showmanship.

“Since you insist,” said Tate. “Thena.”

Luke turned to Thena, who seemed to be either undergoing an internal struggle, or suffering from a severe stomach cramp.

“Thena!” said Tate sharply.

Thena walked over to the covered box at the back of the room, crouching beside the burlap.

Oh, don’t let it be bugs
, thought Chris.

Luke’s gaze was still on Thena, his eyes clear and steady.

You have a choice
.

She wouldn’t look at him; her gaze focused on one end of the covered structure. Thena reached beneath the tatty fabric, her muscles straining as she made several complicated movements. There was a noise remarkably like an iron cage door falling open, and Thena quickly backed away towards the door. The other members of the cryptoconservation group were already rushing out with unmistakable anxiety. As the last of them hurried from the room, Tate paused in the doorway dramatically.

“Eden must stay hidden,” said Tate. “Eden will stay buried. As will you.”

The steel door swung shut.

* * *

It was an incongruous building on an uneven street lined with modest brick and clay dwellings. It was technically a mansion, but the word that came to mind was “palatial.” Most of the houses here had one or two bedrooms, with a cramped kitchen facing a dry plot of yard.

This building, however, had four storeys, although it took a few attempts to work this out, since the various layers, protruding balconies, spiralling staircases, split-level sections, overhanging gardens, and Grecian columns made it difficult to tell.

This particular mansion was occupied by the Subara family, and their staff of housekeepers, groundskeepers, cooks, cleaners, and assorted assistants, including a poodler to keep the toy dog collection in order.

The patriarch of the household, Samos Subara, was a businessman of the euphemistic kind. He saw himself as a person who facilitated transactions between other business people, where “transactions” and “business people” were also euphemisms for things which he had since lost track of.

Subara had grown up in a part of town, or rather, a part of the country, where life was hard and staying alive meant making compromises. However, he had quickly learned that there was a beautiful flexibility about rules. He had discovered that there was one set which applied to the general population, and another, very flexible set, which applied to people who could afford toy poodle collections. He had made his decision early on that he would become a part of the second group.

Several decades later, he had acquired a very comfortable existence, although he had noticed an unpleasant correlation between the quantity of possessions you had and the amount of time you spent worrying about having them taken from you. Subara had not been overly enthusiastic about the idea of an extravagantly complex mansion; however, it had been a necessary precaution against running into his extended family too often. He had even asked the architect to put additional kinks in the corridors, to enable quick and subtle evasion. His marriage had been another of life’s necessary compromises.

Standing in front of Subara now was another one, but this was familiar territory, and certainly one of his less unpleasant obligations. One of the more unpleasant ones included having to attend the annual Orphans’ Bagpipe Choir Revue, which he suspected had been set up by one of his rivals specifically to give him an ulcer.

“Please, take a seat,” said Subara, gesturing politely towards several plush chaise lounges.

Subara’s private office was spacious and ornately decorated, themed in blue and gold. One wall opened out onto a marble balcony the size of a neighbouring house. A pair of bayonets was crossed above a decorative fireplace, and a rack of tasselled spears adorned one stucco wall. An array of paintings by local artists was squeezed between the Monet and Michelangelo prints. At least, Emir
assumed
they were prints.

Docker took a seat on a blue velvet lounge, while Roman swept the room with a digital scanner. Emir stood by the balcony, keeping a casual eye on the street below, while Bale took a position by the door, posture perfect and poised.

“You have something for us,” said Docker.

“That’s what I like about you,” said Subara. “Always business.”

In fact, Subara wasn’t sure if there was
anything
he liked about Docker. In fact, he found him slightly creepy and suspected that Docker spent most of his spare time honing some obscure, lethal skill. However, Subara found that people invariably warmed to being told there was something specific he liked about them, although this could sometimes be a struggle. “That’s what I like about you, always wearing hats made of different bears.” That had been a lean day.

Subara crossed the floor and stopped beside a yellow satin cloth draped over something about the size of a standing man. With a flourish, Subara pulled away the sheet to reveal a roughly cut pillar of sandy rock, one side covered with weathered inscriptions. It appeared to be a fragment of a wall carving, perhaps gouged from a larger work. Docker walked over to the carved block and circled it slowly.