Evolution of Fear (3 page)

Clay walked back across the courtyard, the pain in his arm rising now as the endorphins and adrenaline burned away. The rain had relented and the cloud cover thinned. Moonlight sent shadows twitching across the landscape. He knelt once more beside the dead man and went through his pockets, extracting a wallet, three extra magazines for the MP5, a set of keys with a BMW ring, and a mobile phone, its standby light blinking red. Clay flipped open the phone and thumbed the scroll button. Nothing. The phone was password protected. He pulled out the SIM card and threw the phone over the cliff.

Back inside the cottage, he lit a lamp and inspected his arm. The knife, still lying on the floor, had sliced through the sleeve of his leather jacket and into his deltoid. He walked to the bathroom and opened the big cupboard. Crowbar’s idea of a medical kit resembled a military field hospital. There were giving sets, IV kits, every size and shape of bandage and compress, sutures, tape, morphine, coagulants, antibiotics by the carton, splints and slings. Clay took off the jacket, winced as he pulled the grey hooded sweatshirt over his head and pulled off his shirt. It was a clean slice across the arm, about three inches long, at least a couple of centimetres deep. Not too bad. He’d been lucky.

He stood and watched the blood ooze from the wound. As he’d lunged for Clay, the Boer had slipped on the wet floor and missed his target. Those new city shoes he’d been wearing, the shiny wet leather soles, had probably saved Clay’s life.

Which shoes you put on in the morning.

The side of the helicopter you got out of.

Where you decided to step. Here, or here.

These were the things that determined if you lived or died, whether you ended up in a coma for the rest of your life, lost your legs just above the knees, went home in one piece, physically at least. The brute physics of it – in retrospect always so pure and clear, something you could calculate, but in the causation so utterly unpredictable and, in the end, so spectacularly unfair. And for so long it had been for him the ultimate argument
against
the existence of God, and since he’d met Rania the ultimate argument
for
Him. For without His arbitrage, what possible explanation? What meaning?

One thing was certain. Allah, if he was out there, had a warped conception of justice, but a hell of a sense of humour.

Clay washed and dried the wound, snapped open a vial of disinfectant and doused the upper part of his arm, letting the sting nudge away this pointless philosophy. Soon he had the wound passably sutured and bandaged. He was getting good at working one-handed, much better than the bumbling frustration of the first weeks. He grabbed a box of painkillers, extra sutures, gauze and compresses, more disinfectant, a box of morphine, two clean towels and a box of surgical gloves, carried them into the kitchen and put them on the table.

Time was running. Clay threaded on a clean shirt, a dry hoodie, and hunched into the wet leather jacket. He opened up his bag, stuffed in the extra medical supplies. Then he grabbed the MP5 from the table, cleared the chamber, pulled out the magazine, and slid weapon and ammunition in with the supplies. From the drawer under the sink he fished out a box of .45 shells for the Glock and dropped them in with the other stuff. He walked to the fireplace, opened the flue, reached up and worked loose the blackened brick just above the baffle, pulled out a metal tin and extracted a fold of cash, sterling and euros, and two passports: Marcus Edward, Canadian, from Vancouver; and David Jackson, a Brit born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Both documents contained the same photograph
of Clay, taken two and half months ago, the day after the killings in London, the eyes narrow, the mouth drawn, the hair chopped back. He looked like someone else, someone older. Clay stashed the money and passports in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He glanced at his watch. Just gone seven. Maybe ten and a half hours of good darkness left. He pulled a rain poncho from a hook near the door and pulled it over his head.

Not for the first time he wondered about this place he’d come to know so well. Hints of its recent past were everywhere. The half-used boxes of ammunition under the counter, the shredded railway sleepers in the buttressed shed outside, old copies of the South African
Sunday Times
yellowing in the coal scuttle, cupboards stocked with enough lamb stew and tuna to last a year. And now a dead man outside the front door.

He breathed, closed his eyes a moment. Then he walked to the bookshelf, pulled out an old hardback volume of
Macbeth
, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, killed the lamp and walked out the door for the last time.

Clay set off down the footpath at a run, the wind at his back, the rain gusting in sheets that flayed across the open blufflands, the gorse shivering with each whip of the lash. The car couldn’t be far. He was going to find it and put as much time and distance between himself and this place as he could.

As he ran, the telephone conversation of earlier that day replayed itself in his mind, the words finding cadence with his footfall.

Crowbar had answered first ring.

‘It’s me,
broer
.’

‘I told you to keep quiet,’ Crowbar – Koevoet in Afrikaans – had said. He’d sounded drunk.

Clay switched to the language of his childhood. ‘I haven’t heard from you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Town.’

‘
Kak
, Straker. I
fokken
told you–’

Clay cut him off. ‘Have you heard from Rania?’

Silence, and then: ‘No. No, I haven’t. But there have been–’

‘What, Koevoet? Have been what?’

‘Articles in the paper. Written by Lise Moulinbecq. That’s her alias, isn’t it?’

He’d told her to keep quiet, stay hidden. Irony flooded through him, that particularly brutal nausea. ‘What articles?’

‘Something about Cyprus. Some sort of scam involving stolen antiquities.’

‘Get me out, Koevoet.’

‘Look, Straker.’ Crowbar coughed, deep and bronchial. ‘I have connections in the police. They don’t know who plugged Medved and his two thugs, but they know it happened in your hotel room. They want you for questioning.’

Killing Rex Medved had been the first right thing Clay had done in a long time, the first unselfish thing. But even as he’d pulled the trigger, something inside him had been pulling the other way, that promise he had made to himself a decade ago, after he’d fled the war, the insanity of a country tearing itself apart: no more killing. And then, deep in the wilds of Yemen, just five months ago, his day of reckoning had come. He’d met Rania. And that night when he’d killed Medved, it had been for something that mattered. It had been for her, for all those people in Yemen that Medved had screwed over, the dead kids, all the poisoned villagers whose minutes and hours and years had been chewed up and shit out into the open sewer of exploitation.

‘Be patient,
broer
,’ said Crowbar. ‘It’s going cold.’

‘Cold? A hundred thousand pounds cold?’

Crowbar laughed. ‘Not anymore,
broer
. Medved’s sister raised the reward to a million, just last week. And that’s just for information. She’s offering twice that for the hit,
ja
.’

Two million pounds. Enough to change a life: pay debts, buy freedom, solve problems. It changed everything, for him and for Rania, raised risk to the sixth power.

‘Congratulations, Straker. You’re finally worth something,’ slurred Crowbar. ‘If it wasn’t for this new job in Angola, might even take it on myself.’

After all these years, Crowbar was going back to Africa, this time to fight someone else’s war. As he’d said on the drive down to Cornwall, he didn’t know how to do anything else, and wouldn’t want to if he did. He’d even tried to recruit Clay into ‘The Company’ as he’d called it.

Clay heard Crowbar light a smoke and exhale.

‘This Medved woman is not the kind of person you want to get mixed up with, mind.’ The clink of glass, pouring. ‘Maybe you can just wait her out.’

‘You’re not listening, Koevoet.’

‘She’ll be dead in six months, by all accounts. Some degenerative liver disease. One failed transplant after another. She’s now convinced that the only thing that can save her is this lost icon thing she’s searching for.’

‘Icon?’ he said.

‘The Patmos Illumination, some twelfth-century Eastern Orthodox trinket. They say it was carved out of wood from the cross.’

‘Which cross?’

‘
The
cross, for
fok
’s sake, Straker. They say Christ’s blood soaked in, that you can still see the hole where they drove in the spike for his hand.’

‘Koevoet…’

‘They say it has the power to heal. You know, make the blind see, all that
kak, ja
.’

‘Koevoet.’

‘They say that it vanished, years ago. Wonder if it could help me.’

‘God damn it, Koevoet.’

‘Never been the same since I took that FAPLA bullet.’

‘I don’t have six months, Koevoet. I’m leaving. With your help or without it.’

‘Okay,
seun
. Go back to the cottage. Now. Stay put a while longer.’

‘I’ve got to get off this island, Koevoet. The weather’s killing me.’

Crowbar laughed, the rasp of his cigarette lungs. ‘Look, Straker, it’ll take a while to organise, a week maybe.’

‘A week? No way,
broer
.’

‘For
fok
’s sake, Straker,’ growled Crowbar through the line. ‘For once in your life can you just do what you’re told?’

He had trusted this man with his life so many times. Never had he known anyone cooler under pressure. Clay could see him there now, R4 gripped in one burly hand, massive golden-haired forearms bare in the Ovamboland sun, those blue eyes shining their battle light through the dust and the smoke, striding along the line as if he were on manoeuvres, the rest of them all scared shitless, staring up at him from the bottom of their holes, the metal ripping through the air all around like arcing electricity, him urging them up – return fire lads, steady now – like some old-time Regimental Sergeant Major. If you hadn’t seen it you would never have believed it, understood what courage that took, to expose yourself to that horrible mutilating reality, to see other men fall with shattered limbs and holed, jellied skulls, to will yourself into that cathedral of horrors. And Koevoet had done it repeatedly, routinely, until the men in the platoon came to look upon him as invulnerable, a talisman of sorts, immortal even, as others more careful were killed and maimed all around him.

‘Look,
oom
, I’m serious.’ Clay let the Afrikaans word of respect sink in. Uncle. ‘If they’re after me, they’re after Rania, too. I need to
ontrek
.’

‘Okay, Straker. Two days. Just get back to the safe house. Sit tight,
ja
. I’ll set it up.’

‘Air?’

‘No way,
broer
. You wouldn’t get past check-in. The airports are still being watched.’

‘How then?’

‘I’ll come down to get you. Tell you then.’

‘I’ll set another place for dinner. We can discuss Shakespeare.’

Koevoet grunted. ‘How you liking the place?’

In truth, the solitude of the little cottage had done Clay good. He missed Rania more intensely than he had ever thought possible, none of his defences, the thousand mile deserts, the numb Atlantics of disavowal, the sheer fucking
hate
, able to resist her. And after a while he’d stopped trying to fight it, started to live with it, this thing lodged inside him like some exquisitely jagged trajectile. Thus armed, each day without her became a second chance. He started drinking less, suffering at first, pushing through. He took long walks along the coast, avoiding towns and villages, covering twenty or thirty miles a day over chevron bluffs and shingle beaches, watching the gulls whirling in the breeze, the sun strobing through shot-holed cumulus onto a sheet-metal sea, getting strong again, daring to think about the future. Evenings he pushed makeshift weights, did sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups till his muscles screamed. He practised in the shed with the silenced Glock. He read, hours by the fire, the rain washing the hours and nights away.

But that was finished. And as he ran through the night, he recalled his final words to Crowbar. ‘Two days,’ he’d said. ‘If you don’t show, I’m gone.’

Two days. A lifetime.

He’d done as Crowbar had asked. He’d gone back to the cottage, only to be met by these assassins. And now he was running for his life, half-blind through the gorse. It was raining hard, thick drops that crashed through the hedgerows and streamed from his eyes. Up ahead, a beam of light flashed across the cloud and was gone. The road was close.

He came to a gap in the hedgerow, pushed through and stepped onto a narrow lane, the tarmac sunk deep into the ground, a grassedged rut in the landscape. He stopped and peered through the rain, looking west, but there was only the dark, water-slicked road. He turned east and started walking. He’d covered fifty metres when he saw the outline of a car tucked into a pullout on the laneside. It was facing away from him, a large saloon, wide tyres. A BMW. Clay exhaled, relief surging through him. He took the keys from his
pocket and started towards the car. Plans started forming in his head, destinations, routes. He’d head south to the coast. Find a boat. Try for the continent by sea.

He was within touching distance of the car when a light flared inside the passenger compartment. Clay froze. Then the sound of a window motor, the flick of a red cigarette end. One man, alone in the driver’s seat, waiting.

Clay stood next to the car, the ruts in the road streaming black water, the driving rain heavy in his eyes. Three miles behind him was the cottage on the cliff, which Crowbar had used as a safe house for the last five years of his tenure as chief European operative for the old DCC – South African Military Intelligence’s secret Directorate of Covert Collection. And a metre away, miles from the nearest village or farm, sat this black 500 series BMW with its lone occupant.

Clay pulled the G21 from his waistband, held it close, checked the magazine. The ember of the driver’s cigarette end glowed red inside the car then died. Clay approached at a walk, the Glock pointed to the ground. He didn’t rush. The rain was coming harder now. He could hear the drumming of the raindrops on the car’s roof, see the back of the driver’s head, the green light of the dashboard clock. He tapped on the driver’s side window with his stump.

The driver jumped, whipping his head towards the sound. Through the rain-washed glass, Clay could see the man’s face, the eyes bulging white with surprise, the two-day stubble on his chin, mouth open in a curse. Clay signalled that he should lower the window. The man composed himself, moved his right hand to the control panel and lowered the glass about an inch. A bloom of cigarette smoke wafted out and dissolved in the rain.

Clay leaned towards the gap in the window. ‘Lost, mate?’

The man shrugged, tried an ugly smile and leaned forward. There was a black handgun on the seat next to him.

In that instant, the outline of the Heckler and Koch handgun clearly imprinted on Clay’s retina, the rain running cold down the
back of his neck, the Glock’s trigger safety coming off, a .45 slug sitting dry in its chamber, the firing pin millimetres away, Clay wished that the man was lost, that he’d simply pulled to the side of the road in his expensive car, wipers going, interior lights on, a roadmap spread over his knees, fingers tracing the web of narrow, hedgerowed ruts, that he was late getting home perhaps, was visiting a friend, a mistress even, anything but this. But there was no map. The interior of the car was dark. He wasn’t lost.

They looked at each other, a blink. It took only a fraction of a second. The man knew Clay had seen the weapon. His eyes widened. Clay could see his body tensing, preparing itself for a grab at the gun. Clay pushed the muzzle of the G21 into the gap between the window glass and the frame. The man froze.

‘Move and you die,’ Clay said. And then in Afrikaans: ‘
Verstaan jy?
’ Do you understand?

The man nodded once. Of course he understood.

‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Clay said, again in Afrikaans. ‘Don’t give me a reason.’ Please, don’t give me a reason.

Another nod.

‘Get out of the car.’

The man sat, unmoving.

‘Do it.’

The man nodded again.

Clay was about to step back when the man jerked forward in his seat, pushing his head down towards the door. As he did, the window motor engaged and the glass started coming up. A fraction of a second later the car’s engine gunned. Clay just had time to pull the Glock free and jump back as the car lurched forward. Clay fired. The bullet blew out the side window. The car swerved right, stabilised for a moment then surged away, the engine screaming. It had travelled about fifty metres along the lane when suddenly it jagged hard left and ploughed up into the hedgerow.

Clay ran to the car and peered inside. The driver was unconscious, slumped over the steering wheel. Clay scanned the laneway right and
left. No one, no lights anywhere. He opened the door and dragged the man free. Then he got into the driver’s seat, restarted the engine and backed the car down the lane and into the pullout. The rain had stopped now and faint moonlight shone on the wet tarmac and danced in the rivulets flowing down the gutters. Clay got out and ran back to where the man was lying, grabbed him under one shoulder and levered him up so that he could slide his stump under the other arm. As quickly as he could, he dragged the man back to the car and laid him in the grass of the verge. From here, the car would screen him from anyone who happened to drive past.

Clay dropped his pack, pulled out his torch and ran it over the man’s body. He was thin, wiry, with a closely shaved head. Clay pulled away the man’s jacket and tore away his shirt, exposing the wounds. There was a lot of blood. It looked as if the bullet had passed through the meat of the shoulder and then grazed the side of the neck, not deep enough to hit an artery. The
oke
had been lucky.

Using the supplies from his pack, Clay bandaged the wounds as best he could. It took valuable moments, but by the time he was done he was pretty sure he’d stopped the bleeding. If the man received proper medical attention in the next couple of hours, he’d be okay. Clay checked the man’s pockets but found nothing. He stood by the car, the rain pelting his skull again, running rivulets over his face, and looked down at the man’s motionless body, and he felt it come: the empty horror, the physical pain, the shaking, the buzz. His hand was trembling, his heart rate spiking, irregular. He felt the cold rain snaking down his spine, and the dark chasm between now and then, the infinity that separated one moment from the next, one living and one not.

He threw his pack onto the passenger seat, jumped behind the wheel, reached across the centre console, grabbed the H&K from the passenger-side footwell and stashed it in the glove box. It wouldn’t be long before Medved’s people were notified of the failure. For these
were
Medved’s people, here for the reward. Of that he had no doubt. And soon they would be coming after him.

In Angola he had always been among the hunters, tracking SWAPO through the bush, chasing them across the miles, assaulting them from the air, deep inside the border. Now, he was the prey.

Clay grabbed the steering wheel, closed his eyes, concentrated on his breathing and tried to calm himself. He adjusted the seat, the mirrors, got comfortable. It was a beautiful automobile.

He was about to start towards the A38 when he saw a blinking green light under his feet. He reached down into the footwell and retrieved a mobile phone. It was open, paused in mid dial, active. Clay scrolled through the recent call numbers, but saw nothing familiar. He was about to close the phone when his thumb stopped, hung twitching on its tendons. A string of digits burned in the display, a string whose pattern he recognised. He checked the number again, read it aloud. The London 0207 prefix, the uncanny string of primes. It was the number he’d dialled from the phone box earlier that day. Crowbar’s flat in Kilburn.