Dead in the Water (20 page)

“
She should have stayed here,” he says to Ronaldo, who grunts in acknowledgement. He enjoyed the company of the woman, although she only stayed in Esmerelda for a couple of nights while Dias and da Silva sorted out some local matters. She listened, she was sharp, and she seemed to like being with them – more than most of the foreigners who come down here for their research trips and make their patronising comments about the place, when in truth they find it squalid and boring and what they want is to be comfortably back home. Ronaldo was less impressed; but then he doesn’t like his routines being disturbed.

Chimo glances up as a heavy duty four wheel drive Toyota pick-up truck trundles by on the dirt road outside and stops a few metres further on. Nobody they know. Ronaldo doesn’t look up from the papers. The government always says it wants to encourage local communities, yet they wrap everything up in their legal clauses and their zoning of areas – and here is yet another new set of regulations about special trading quotas for co-operatives established in a national park.

The front door opens and two men walk into the office. Both look Latino, so it comes as a surprise when the thinner of the two speaks English with an American accent: “Hi,” he says, extending a hand in greeting. “Ray Sanders. I’m looking for someone. I’m hoping you can help.”

“
Sure,” says Chimo who usually does the talking when English is needed.

“
Rachel Boyd. You know her? I’m a friend of her dad’s.”

Ronaldo continues with his work on the legal documents. Let Chimo deal with this. Taking a woman into such a remote area was always going to be trouble. She probably screwed up in the village and now they’ve got to bring her back to civilisation. But he keeps his thoughts to himself: if this guy is a friend of her dad’s, he’ll be wealthy and influential. And what you do around money and power is bite your tongue.

Chimo offers them each a beer and the Americano sits down at Chimo’s desk with him. Ronaldo glances up at the other guy, who stands waiting by the door. He’s taller, heavier set and wearing those fashionable modern clothes that are intended to pass off as army fatigues in an urban environment. The Americano’s driver, or minder – or both. He says nothing, declining a beer with an off-hand gesture.

“
Mr Boyd is concerned about her safety. He asked me to come and collect her. Get her out of the country. Her parents, they hear all these bad stories from Caracas, and her mother, she gets worried. She wants her daughter home. Down here it’s a different world. I know that. But they don’t know that. How could they?”

Chimo nods sympathetically – he has experience of worrying about daughters. “OK Mister … OK. I try the phone again.” There’s no connection. The satphone is either not powered up or has a fault. “We try many times. Always the same.”

“
But she’s coming back here? Right?”

Ronaldo looks up. “We don’t know.”

“
So where’d she go if she don’t come here?”

Ronaldo opens his hands in a gesture of defiant ignorance, and repeats, “We don’t know.”

“
Shame.”

“
Yes. It is,” says Ronaldo.

“
Thing of it is, I’m a man of my word. And I told Mr Boyd I’d get her home. So … if that means waiting here for a little while, that’s what we gotta do.”

35
London

Instead of going straight home, Mark takes a taxi to Steve’s place in Hackney. A tall girl with spiky hair, dyed in pink and blonde streaks, answers the door. She looks worried.

“
Hi, I’m Steve Boyd’s dad, Mark.”

“
Right. Yeah. I remember you. He went home for a few days to do some revision. I’ve not seen him since Thursday. Sorry.”

“
I wonder if I could come in, have a look in his room. I am his dad.”

“
I know. You called in before. Dropped him off.”

“
Yes, of course,” says Mark, although he has no recollection of her. Perhaps her hair was different then.

Steve’s room has the
Marie Celeste
feel about it of most student rooms: unmade bed, dirty clothes in a pile in the corner, unwashed coffee cups. Part of him is relieved. Mostly, however, he feels uneasy, furtive and intrusive. He doesn’t want to spy on his own son, yet he feels compelled to turn on the computer. He trawls through his e-mails and recent documents. Trouble is he doesn’t have a clue what he’s looking for; and he can find nothing to suggest that Stephen’s in any kind of trouble, or has been feeling depressed. Before shutting down, he looks at the Internet browsing history. There are links to green groups of every hue, news sites, blogs and one which might once have led to
The Angels of Light
.

Clicking on the link brings up:

Error 404 The page you are trying to load does not exist or has been removed.

There’s nothing here he didn’t already know, except that Stephen is even more obsessed with this stuff than he’d feared.

When he gets back to the apartment he rings Joanna. She’s heard nothing from Stephen or Rachel. And Raggedy Ian’s narrowboat is still empty.

What bothers Mark is that Steve should ring and not leave a message. He’s tried to concoct explanations: that Steve’s phone was stolen and someone else rang by mistake; that he doesn’t have the keypad locked. But he’s grasping at straws. Biting the bullet, he tries the
One World
office, hoping to speak to Bonehead John. If he organises volunteers he must know Steve. There’s no reply. He leaves a message asking Cathy to ring him. What else can he do? Leave his mobile on permanently from now on, even at work, in the hope that Steve will try again. And what else? Nothing. Fucking nothing.

Sitting at his desk in the flat, trying to start on his paper for Mrs W., but with his thoughts running in circles and firing off at tangents, he realises that he’s not yet looked in the post box downstairs today. The mailbox is full of the usual rubbish – and a small padded envelope. He takes these upstairs and dumps them on the kitchen table. He flicks through the bills and junk mail, and is about to open the padded envelope when it registers that there’s no stamp on it. The possibility that it could be a terrorist device freezes him where he is, packet in hand. He knows he should call the police. But the prospect of having to cope with the police and a bomb disposal team and God knows what else until the early hours of the morning is deeply depressing. And anyway, it’s surely too light and too small for a bomb. He puts it carefully down on the table. He clears everything away and fills the sink. Using tongs in one hand to grip the packet and a knife in the other, he slits it open. A car key splashes into the water, followed by a letter. Still using the tongs, he holds the packet at arm’s distance and looks inside; but there’s nothing else. No incendiary device, no electronic timer, no deadly poison. He retrieves the letter and then the key from the sink.

Your faithfully

James Harvey Garages

The key has a registration number tagged to it. He looks out of the bedroom window; and, sure enough, there’s an unfamiliar red car parked in his spot outside. If he were more interested in cars, he might go and take it for a spin, but he can’t be bothered. He’s tired; and relieved that he doesn’t have to chase the garage for incompetence.

He wonders whether it might be a nice idea to invite Daniella Gillman to dinner when he gets his own car back, after the Summit, when things have calmed down a little.

Tomorrow’s meeting with Angela Walker looms large, and he’s hardly started on the paper he promised he’d write for her. He needs to know his own mind – so he reminds himself of it by browsing through a paperback he wrote three years ago, in which he argued the case for a system of personal and corporate carbon allowances, and how the public could be won round to it; the system that was broadly adopted in Walker’s manifesto, and became known as ICAS.

He’d been promising himself an early night, but it’s gone midnight before he gets to bed. And the humidity is unbearable.

Then the light goes out; and the display on the bedside radio vanishes.

His immediate thought is that he’s been targeted –
some bastards have cut the power to the apartment
– but there’s no light coming in from the street, and even the murmurs from the apartment below of Mrs Williams’ old mains radio talking to her through the night has been silenced. He pulls the curtains and looks out of the window. The square is dark; there are no streetlights. The sky is still hazy with an orange glow from the East of the city – but the local area has no power.

Two bright flashes illuminate the distant sky, somewhere south of Hyde Park; then maybe twenty seconds later a dull rumbling sound reaches this blacked out part of London.

36
Amazonas, Venezuela

Darkness has fallen over the forest. By the thin light of the newly risen moon, the warriors lead José and Rachel to the water’s edge, where, concealed beneath overhanging branches, a dugout canoe has been lashed to a tree. Once the canoe is in the water and moored to a tree root with a liana, Spider indicates they should get in. She is initially apprehensive, fearing that that they are going to set off in darkness and knowing how unpredictable the rivers in the high rain forest can be, until she realises that they are at last going to rest. This is where they are to sleep – in the relative security of the canoe. Exhausted, she falls asleep within moments.

She sleeps fast; a sleep unpunctured by dreams or disturbance until Spider wakes them when it gets light. He moves them to the middle of the canoe, where they are to sit as cargo; and then, with a paddle each, Spider at the front, Blue at the back, they set off. Rachel is not sure what she had expected when they left the clearing; but she had never supposed that they might be taken further than the river itself.

At this stage in its life, the small tributary of the Orinoco is a river in late childhood: fast and noisy, with the merest hints of its furious adolescent turmoils ahead. As they enter a steep sided gorge with rocks at the waters edge, Spider, at the front of the canoe, turns to them, puts his paddle down and spreads his fingers, then grabs the sides of the canoe. Sign language instructions. Reminded of airline cabin crew, Rachel smiles wryly. Things are about to get rough. When Spider turns back, she lets go of the canoe to tie the bag containing the satphone and the camera to her leg. José shouts at her to hold on. She looks up. A steep wall of rock looms in front of them. Spider is paddling furiously, keeping the canoe in the centre of the violent current. A change of direction as the river turns to the left and Rachel is almost thrown out. As they round the bend, the growling river roars.

37
La Esmerelda, Venezuela

“
You have a phone?” asks Chimo.

The Americano gives a condescending nod. Stupid question: anyone with half a brain carries a satphone in these wilderness areas.

“
OK then,” says Chimo. “We hear from Rachel Boyd, we telephone you. OK?”

“
No need to phone me. I’m here.”

It has been dark for more than three hours, and they want to shut the office. “You play cards?” asks the Americano. Ronaldo shakes his head. He doesn’t want anything to do with this guy. Chimo gets a deck from a drawer in the desk. People who have money have contacts; and they need contacts. As the larger of the two men joins Chimo and the Americano at the desk, Ronaldo gets up and says to Chimo that he’s going to get his meal.

The Americano shakes his head. “What’s Rachel going to do, she turns up in the middle of the night?”

“
I’ll stay,” says Chimo, sensing a situation. He shuffles the pack.

“
I am going to have my meal. I am going to the hostel where I live,” says Ronaldo in English.

The henchman rolls up his sleeves to reveal arms infested with snake tattoos and a couple of silver bracelets round each wrist.

“
Poker’s a better game with four,” says the Americano.

38
Charallave airport, Caracas

Sullivan runs his business from a newish looking portacabin near the light aircraft maintenance area on the western edge of the airport. It’s more than half a mile from the main terminal building, but Sullivan is well known; the taxi driver knows exactly where to come. A flimsy partition wall divides the building into a reception area and a smaller back room, in front of which there’s a counter with a lift-up hatch at one end. Sullivan is sitting on a tall bar stool, cultivating the impression that the portacabin is as much a clubhouse as an office. “You made it,” he says. “You got the cash?”