Dead Water (45 page)

‘To the left, dad.’ Sabir’s voice is iron-clad. ‘Again. You’re there.’ Nageen brings his wrists down on the coiled metal and running, running round the coil, back and forth, back and forth, adepts of AC, the divine twins, Abhik and Kaneer, eager actors now in the drama they have set in motion, hiss self-laudatory prayers. They flare and flame, releasing him.

Havard’s flight from Doha to Muscat leaves on schedule at 3.15 p.m. Everyone else on the flight is watching a film; Havard has his very own horror-movie on his iPhone.

Almost everyone in Ester’s Facebook album is wearing surfing gear and grinning like an idiot. Every photograph is tagged, date-stamped and geo-tagged. Almost everyone tagged in her photographs has their own Facebook page. There’s one exception. He’s older than the rest and appears in just one shot, alone, standing with his back to the camera. Ester took this photograph when he wasn’t looking. It’s in Dubai. There’s the saillike Burj Al Arab hotel on the skyline and he’s looking towards it, hand raised to shield his eyes, in a suit, for Christ’s sake. Havard knows only one man dandyish enough to wear his suit to the beach. It’s so obvious a clue it’s almost an insult.

Lyndon’s over the moon, of course. ‘I always said David Brooks was a cunt.’

Havard, waiting at the gate for his flight to board, winced and lowered the volume of his phone. ‘You weren’t the first, Lyndon. Tell me something.’

‘Sure.’

‘Your investigating Ester. It was pure spite, wasn’t it?’

‘You send David to Rawai to examine the can and a few weeks later
his daughter
shows up in your bed? Well done with that, by the way.’

Havard said nothing.

‘Come on, Havard, I have a job to do. No one here was particularly gunning for her. All this stuff is just a key-press away. We put about a hundred employees through the same checks.’

‘I can’t afford to know about that.’

‘I’m just telling you.’

The trouble with Lyndon Ferry is he is an enthusiast. He wants to share with people the pleasures of his work.

The plane lands on time. A Land Cruiser is waiting to drive Havard through Muscat’s hilly tangle to his house in Ruwi. Tall hills and crenellated houses. Corner supermarkets. Car dealerships. He unlocks the door and finds Ester slumped on his sofa, surrounded by bags and cases. She has been waiting a long time for someone to knock on this door.

‘Ester.’

Her face is swollen. She’s a mess. She will not look at him. What the hell is she doing here? ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘Ester.’

‘I’m sorry!’

He sits down beside her on the sofa, among his whale bones and his fashion books, his pottery shards, industry awards and photographs. One way or another, he is going to have to explain to her that ‘sorry’ is not going to cut it. He gets out his mobile and calls up the picture Lyndon sent him while he was in the air. ‘We have satellite imagery of the
KaBham
.’ He taps her shoulder with the phone. She averts her head. ‘As you can see, the ship is lying on its side. Chances are it’s already at the bottom of the Indian Ocean by now.’ She will not look. On top of everything else, she is a coward. ‘The
Ka-Bham
had a crew of twelve. The captain’s family was aboard. His wife. His twelve-year-old son.’

Ester puts her hands over her face.

‘Ester. We don’t know yet if there are survivors. Even if there are survivors, we don’t know if there’s a boat can reach them in time. It’s a big ocean.’

Ester slides off the sofa, away from him. Her silly, feathery topknot is quivering. He resists the impulse to touch it. To stroke it. Such a stupid girl. He goes to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. There’s instant coffee in the cupboard. He makes two cupfuls and carries them back into the living room. ‘Here.’ He sets a cup down beside her.

On his mobile he calls up her Facebook page. The photograph is as blurry as hell. He shows it to her. Ester wraps her arms around herself. She is shivering. ‘Ester, if you can tell me where your dad is, I can do something for you. I can help you. We all can. Christ.’ He tries to laugh but it comes out very badly. ‘I mean, we don’t want you in any trouble.’ Havard wants to tell her how much she matters to him now. He wants to tell her how lonely his life has been. It is all too late.

He has his office. He has his colleagues, and many of them are friends. They will have to be enough for him. He will manage. Old fool. ‘We want to keep you out of the papers,’ he says, as brutally as he knows how. She will believe this of him. It is the sort of thing a shipping magnate, a man in business, a moneyed man, would say.

Nothing.

‘Where is David Brooks?’

‘I can’t.’

‘He called you. Warned you. What? He told you to run?’

She nods.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Oh.’ She tries to smile. ‘He spun me a line. The way he does.’

‘He said you were in danger.’

‘Yes.’

‘So why didn’t you run?’

‘From you?’ She hunts for the words. ‘You’re kind.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve been kind to me.’

‘Christ.’

‘What?’

‘What did he tell you about the boat?’

‘That his people were trying to bring it into safe harbour. For the UN. He said when you found out what they were doing, you ordered it sunk.’

Havard runs his hands over his face. ‘Oh, for crying out loud.
Sunk?
With what? My secret fleet of submarines?’

‘There’s no point going over it,’ she says. ‘You know how he hazes people.’ Now, there’s the truth. David’s talents – counter-piracy, counterespionage, government liaison – have never been easy to corral. ‘Where is he?’

She is looking at him, measuring him. She is feeling a little better. ‘How did you get this, anyway?’ she asks, peering at his phone. She is utterly mystified. ‘Only Friends and Family can see this.’ Poor child. She has no idea what privacy is, never mind secrecy. None of her generation have a clue. Theirs is the open-source intelligence upon which men like Lyndon Ferry feed.

‘Ester?’

‘I can’t do this.’

‘But you can let fourteen people drown.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘You didn’t know pirates kill people?’

‘I didn’t know that was what –
I didn’t know
.’

‘You thought your father worked for the United Nations?’

‘Don’t.’

‘That every VDU op in Dubai carries confidential papers around in her cellphone.’

She looks at him.

‘You think that’s what espionage looks like? A man in a vanilla suit and a stick, secretly bettering the world? Ester, espionage is an office in central London that does nothing all day but break into the Facebook pages of people as stupid as you are. How long do you think it took my friend Lyndon to crack your Dropbox account? Your Evernote account? Posterous, iTunes, all the rest of your shit? He’s pulled enough sensitive information out of your cloud to put you in an Emirates prison for life. Tell me about David Brooks. Now.’

‘He said –’

‘What?’

‘He said we were taking contaminated ships off the seas.’ She puts her head in her hands. ‘He made everything so – so plausible. So complicated.’

‘I bet he did. Tell me where he is.’

‘I don’t know. Musandam. He said he was there a day ago. Said he was on a snorkelling trip. He could be anywhere by now.’

‘Where are you meeting him?’

‘I’m not.’ She takes her hands away from her face finally. ‘You’re safe. He’s shutting it down. Whatever it was we were doing. He’s shutting it down.’ She studies her hands. They are shaking.

Can he touch her? Comfort her? Havard lays his hand on her shoulder. She stands up quickly, away from him. He watches her to the door. ‘What about your bags?’

‘Bin them.’

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’m going to have to call people.’

‘Call them.’

‘The police. My office in London.’

‘All right.’

‘They will find you.’

‘No,’ she says, sadly. ‘They won’t.’

They have taken Nageen’s sight, his dignity, most of his hope, his freedom, his mobility, his shoes, his socks, the keys from his pocket – even his small change. What they failed to take is the plastic voucher card he picked up at the New Myoma City Development Supermarket in Sittwe.

With burned and bleeding fingers Nageen eases the card out from the back pocket of his trousers. He wraps his fingers up in the rag that bound his eyes and takes hold of the card between the index and third fingers of his least painful hand. Gingerly, he brings the plastic into contact with the hot coil. Smoke rises. He breathes it in. Toxins swirl the pain in his hands into colours and he pulls his head away, afraid he’ll faint. The colours die behind his eyes and he lifts the card to see. He blinks away his tears. He’s burned a bite out of the card. Too smooth. Too rounded. He tries again. He’s steady now. The smoke rises, smarting his eyes. He studies the card again. It’s smouldering. He tries to summon up his spit but his mouth is full of foam. He drops the card and stamps on it with his bare foot, putting it out. He doesn’t even feel the heat, the burns around his ankles are too fierce, too raw, to allow for more sensation.

He picks up the card. The bite is deeper now, and angled. It will do. He clambers to his feet and hobbles across the slanting floor of the mess towards the door.

The door is locked but it’s only a mess-room door, a stupid internal door. He hunkers down, forces the card into the jamb above the lock and wiggles it down over the bolt. A stupid internal door with a stupid hotelroom lock: it disables the handle but the bolt moves freely. He leans and pulls. The bolt slips and pings back into place. He tries again, only this time he pulls at the handle with his free hand. The bolt pings and the door comes open.

The corridor is empty. He leaves the mess, pulling the door closed behind him. The main generator has died and the auxiliaries are whining. He heads downhill. There is a fire point. The axe is gone from its bracket. The first-aid kit is missing. He reaches the galley, puts his ear to the door and listens. Nothing. He tries the handle. It’s unlocked. He opens the door a crack and peers, then swings the door wide. No one. He leans against the door jamb, breathing hard. He smells meat. The smell is rising from his hands. His stomach turns over and he spits.

Inside the galley, mounted on the wall, there is a first-aid cupboard. He pulls it open and runs his seared hand across the shelf, knocking the contents to the floor. He half-squats, half-falls to the floor, his ankles shooting fire, and fights the zipper round the lip of the sealed green pack. There are scissors in the lid. He palms them and uses the wall to help him back on to his feet. He hobbles into the corridor.

He’s halfway to the mess room when he hears them. Footfalls. Heavy boots. A voice. Behind him.

Back the way he came, at the end of the corridor, there is a stairway. Iron-grille stairs ring out. Nageen hesitates, caught between the mess room and the galley. The scissors fall from his hand.

The voice stops, then picks up again: one half of a conversation. The iron stairs ring and ring and ring. A shadow scuds the wall behind the stairs. Nageen leans forward and starts to run. If you can call it running. Nageen stumbles downhill to the stairs.

Third Officer Waddedar is turning up the final flight, dragging his feet, his heavy boots, up the steps.

Waddedar. The pirates’ plant.

‘Mr Waddedar.’

The young man glances up, eyes dark with sleeplessness, and Nageen bares his teeth, and falls.

The men collapse in a pile at the foot of the stairs. Waddedar’s head rings against the grille-work like the clapper of a bell. Nageen, barking, spitting blood, fights free of Waddedar’s arms. He stares about him, wildeyed. He thinks of water. Boiling water, streaming down on his son.

Waddedar groans. He blinks, cross-eyed and infantile, up at Nageen. Nageen casts around for a weapon. Waddedar has nothing on him. His mobile phone lies in pieces behind his head. Nageen picks up the halfshell of the phone and hammers at Waddedar’s face. Waddedar opens his mouth to scream and Nageen hammers the casing into Waddedar’s mouth. Waddedar gags. Pink spittle rises around the edges of the phone and Nageen’s fingers slip about as he hunts for purchase on the casing. Waddedar bucks against him, boots loud against the grille-work of the stairs. Nageen gets on top of him, puts his hands together and brings his weight to bear. The casing cracks and edges in and blood wells from Waddedar’s mouth. He’s blinking as Nageen climbs off him, and flecks of foam spurt from his nose. Nageen brings his foot down on Waddedar’s nose and feels it crunch under his bare heel.

He takes the stairs. The scissors are where he left them. If he bends for them now he will never get up again. He uses his feet, scraping and dribbling the scissors along the rubber floor to the mess room. He opens the door, clings to the handle and lowers himself down. He picks up the scissors, grips them with his teeth and paddles across the floor to where Sabir is lying. He’s unplugged the coil. The room stinks of charred rubber.

Nageen works the scissors between his son’s wrists and chews the blades down on the cable tie. His hands have no strength. He works and works. The boy’s wrists are bleeding as he strains against the weakening band. It gives suddenly and Sabir cries out. Nageen falls on to his back as Sabir feels for the scissors. He takes them up and works at the tie securing his ankles.