The Devil's Breath (19 page)

These were just thoughts. What Max needed was to take action, and if some crazy guy’s vision was distancing the boy who had helped him this far, then Max had to press on alone. All day the Bushmen had gone about their business in the camp, but !Koga had also stayed away from him, keeping to himself, obviously as troubled about the prophecy as Max was confounded by it. So Max had decided he would make his own way from the camp. He only needed a general direction to follow, and the sun’s journey across the sky would give him that. And his watch; without !Koga’s instinctive sense of direction, he would use it to navigate his way onwards. It used to be his father’s and was Max’s prized possession. If Max held it horizontally so that the number 12 pointed towards the sun, then the midpoint between that and the hour hand would give him the north-south line.

He was ready to go. He would steal provisions. He had identified where the women stored water in empty ostrich eggs, and the dried meat hanging in strips would keep him going for a few days. He realized he could not simply wander off; he needed a way out of the camp. For the past couple of
hours he had moved casually through the area, behind the grass huts, near where the children played, and had skirted the hunters, who now slept in the heat of the day. There were two ways he could strike out—the first through the gnarled shepherd’s trees, which were low enough to obscure the upright figure of someone moving away. A hundred meters or so from the camp, the trees were less dense and he would have to sweep around the far edge of the settlement. He caught himself thinking that what he was actually doing was not continuing on his journey but escaping from a threat of death.

There was a second option for a way of escape. The trees behind one of the huts had been cut down to form the framework for its grass coverings, so there was a bare patch of land which he would have to walk across with the stolen provisions; but once he reached the trees, a mound ran almost sixty meters to the right, then fell away into a narrow gully. He could crawl or crouch behind the embankment and then make a run for it when he got into the deeper ground. It would have to be in daylight, probably at the hottest part of the day when everyone was sleeping. He couldn’t be sure if the hunters would go out again, but he wasn’t going to hang around to find out. Moving across the open space would be a bigger risk—but sometimes big risks paid off, provided everything had been taken into account.

He sat with his back against the embankment, letting the mottled shade cool him as he thought through his options. Tomorrow might be too late. He decided to go that night—hoping the gully would run further than he could see. He needed distance. He needed darkness.

His eye caught a movement at the edge of the trees and he froze. !Koga stood ten meters away. Max had been concentrating and had not heard a thing. The boys stared at each other, !Koga stepping quietly, almost cautiously, closer. Max waited. !Koga held his spear, but there was no sense of immediate threat. “Max.” !Koga spoke barely above a whisper as he made a delicate gesture with his hand. “Come here, Max.”

“You following me?” Max smiled, hoping his voice sounded casual enough, but his back muscles tightened. How long had !Koga been there? Why had he followed him into the half-light of the trees? Why was !Koga slowly raising his spear? He was closer now, no more than five meters away, and Max had not moved, mesmerized by the effortless grace of the boy’s walk.

!Koga stared, unblinking, then, like a bird dipping to snatch a grub, his shoulders dropped, turned slightly and the spear cut through the air. Max barely had time to duck; he swiveled, the lethal projectile a few centimeters from his head. He fell, supporting himself with one hand as he hit the sand. The spear thudded into the tree where only seconds before he had leaned, but now a twisting, coiled cobra, fully three meters long, as thick as a man’s arm and with a flared hood the size of an open hand, was pinioned by !Koga’s spear. It must have been seconds away from striking the unsuspecting Max.

“Bloody hell! You gave me a fright,” he managed to splutter. !Koga chopped the snake’s head off, letting the writhing mass squirm in the dirt as he pulled his spear free, still treating the poisoned head with respect.

The unchanging laws of nature allowed Max a moment of gratitude towards the boy who was still his friend; they gave him the few seconds of life where, crystal clear, the etched tree trunks, the bloodied spear and the smiling Bushman froze like a picture snared in a digital frame.

Max grinned, pushed himself out of the sand and felt a sudden hot pain on his wrist. He looked down at the most primitive member of the Arachnidae—scuttling, black and yellow, a fourteen-centimeter scorpion that had just stung him.

He staggered back a pace, more as a natural reaction than any great fear. “It’s OK,” he said. And laughed. After a monster of a cobra had nearly sunk its fangs into him, this was nothing. There was barely a mark on his wrist. No swelling appeared, no inflamed skin. Not initially. Then pain started at the wound site, alerting Max that perhaps this wasn’t something to be laughed off so easily. Acidlike heat burned inside his veins.

!Koga took his arm, looked at the wound, brought the end of his spear down on the scorpion that was scuttling away, and called Max’s name. Max didn’t respond. !Koga broke the shaft, put a piece of the wood in the crook of Max’s elbow, and forced it closed. That would help slow the poison. Max thought he had sweat in his eyes because !Koga was slightly blurred, yet Max’s body felt paper-dry; the sensation that seared his arm and into his chest made him feel sick. Neurotoxins were flooding into his system. Something that felt like a claw wrenched at his stomach muscles and, as a wave of light-headedness swept over him, he sank to his knees. He felt !Koga trying to pull him up, and the boy was
saying something, but he couldn’t hear him. He was going down, further. He could see the grains of sand now, !Koga’s face next to his, slapping him, shouting, mouthing words he could not hear.

Then the boy ran.

Alone, Max heard sounds within his own body. His heart thumped, like a boxer’s glove beating him on the side of his head. He mustn’t stay here, it was too dangerous. He had to move.
Come on, legs, come on, gotta go
, he told himself. But his body wasn’t listening, it was fighting the poison that attacked his vital organs, disabling his central nervous system like a computer virus worming its way deep inside and destroying all essential data.

His throat was closing, the air unable to reach his lungs. He felt a strange sensation. Men were carrying him, honey-colored men with narrow eyes and leathered hands. Tree branches’ shadows fluttered across his eyelids like swarming butterflies, then an old man—where had he seen that old man before?—was pushing his fingers into Max’s mouth. Maybe he was trying to get air inside. Pain knifed through him, putting intolerable torsion into his muscles, closing down his windpipe. If he had been in a city, doctors would have realized that he had had an unusually rapid reaction to the lethal venom and would aim to neutralize the effects of the overstimulation of his autonomic nervous system. They would have put him on an intravenous drip and administered a solution of calcium gluconate over ten to twenty minutes to help decrease the muscle pain and cramps; they would have sedated him for the convulsions that now racked him and put drugs into him to stop his heart failing.

Out here, life was not available by prescription.

Help me
, someone whispered in his darkening mind.
Help me, don’t let me die
, said the disembodied voice.
Mum? Dad? Where are you?

Like a spider touched by fire, his body curled in a final spasm, turning in on itself, his consciousness sending blackness as the only comfort against the indescribable agony.

A final thought, like the devil laughing: by saving his life from the cobra, by making him fall into the sand, !Koga had killed him.

The prophecy was true.

His heart stopped.

His lungs failed.

Max Gordon was dead.

“I know we might be showing our hand, but I think we should do it,” Peterson said into the phone. He listened, frustration biting into his normally controlled manner. “Farentino
must
know more about this whole matter….”

One floor down, six doors along, Sayid watched the sound waves on his computer screen; the spikes of Peterson’s voice rose and fell. Sayid’s dual-core processor computer handled its workload with efficient ease. As Peterson spoke, a digital voice recognition system, which Sayid had downloaded and tweaked, recorded what he said. The software wasn’t state-of-the-art or bidirectional, so Sayid couldn’t hear what the person talking to Peterson was saying, but if Peterson was drawing Farentino more closely into the equation, then Sayid would have to warn him.

“We can’t just let the boy run free out there. I need more help.” Another interruption. Then Peterson sounded
threatening. “I want this boy. You owe me. I need information. I’ll put my own people on to him, but I believe the situation is worsening.” Then, after what was obviously a momentary reply, the line cut dead.

Sayid watched as the peaks and troughs flatlined. A few keystrokes later, thousands of numbers began to spin from top to bottom of the screen as the system searched for the telephone exchange and then the individual number of the person Peterson had called.
Access Denied. Restricted Exchange
. An encipher and decipher process was installed at the other end of Peterson’s conversation. So someone pretty powerful was shutting down any possibility of tracing the call, as well as encoding and decoding whatever Peterson said to them. To hell with that. Nothing was restricted so far as Sayid was concerned. It was going to take a long time, but he would track them down.

Farentino might have been isolated in his own world of specialist publishing, but his instincts were sufficiently honed to know when something was not right. He watched the street for any signs of unusual activity. A flashed warning had pinged on his computer screen from Max’s unknown friend:

Be careful. They might be watching you.

Now he gazed out of the window, glancing at office workers and tourists as they sauntered across and around the square. There was no one who struck him immediately as being out of place but, if they were on to him, then Farentino was already one step ahead. The game was too
important to lose. He had his exit strategy planned. He unwrapped a Montecristo cigar, taking pleasure in its aroma and texture before heating the tip with a match: it was going to be a case of holding his nerve and playing it out until the final moments, before making his escape. It would take at least half an hour to smoke this fine Havana cigar—more than enough time to alert friends—important friends. He just hoped that Max had found his father’s secret before it became necessary to run, because then there was a risk that could suddenly escalate; and if Max was still alive, then an all-out effort would be made to finish him before he discovered the vital information that Tom Gordon’s enemies craved. Farentino gazed out through the window. He blew a smoke ring. They were not on to him yet. There was still time.

Once Kallie had escaped from the docks, she returned to Mike Kapuo’s office as she had told Thandi she would. The senior policeman smiled when he saw her and gestured for her to wait outside the room. A steady stream of officers was coming and going, so she sat patiently until he beckoned her in from the hard bench she was occupying in the hallway. Sitting amid the hubbub of the busy police headquarters gave her time to think things through. Could Shaka Chang, or people who worked for him, be involved in Anton Leopold’s death? Had Leopold been killed while he was with Max’s father at the docks? Maybe not. Leopold saw something he shouldn’t have, then? Max’s father had sent his assistant to Walvis Bay—that was where the letters to
Max were posted. Why? Because Max’s dad was either injured or close to discovering another piece of the jigsaw puzzle, part of which lay at the docks. Yes, that made the best sense, because !Koga’s people had taken the field notes from way up north, and that’s where Tom Gordon was—somewhere. Perhaps Max’s father did not even know that Leopold was dead. If Shaka Chang’s company was doing something illegal in connection with shipping, then he was bringing something into the country that he shouldn’t, and that something might be what this was all about.

“Kallie, come on in,” Kapuo called.

She sat down as he poured coffee for them both and settled himself back into his swivel chair with a sigh of unburdening his feet from the weight they had to carry. “You were out of the house early,” he said casually, watching her over the rim of his cup.

“I can’t sleep in, you know what it’s like once you’ve lived in the bush. Cities don’t agree with me. I had a good walk and looked at the shops when they opened.”

“Uh-huh. You didn’t buy anything, though?”

“No, don’t really need much.”

“First girl I’ve ever heard say that.” He smiled.

“Mike, I’ve been thinking.”

“That’s a bad sign in my household, it usually means I’m going to be dragged into something I don’t want to be dragged into. Go on.”