The Promised One (8 page)

He was soon drenched in sweat as he thrust his way though the giant ferns that covered the forest floor. Everything was wet. Countless drops of water dripped ceaselessly from every twig and branch and an unbelievable variety of lichens and mosses adorned the boles and branches of every tree, whether alive or dead. Exotic tropical flowers were everywhere to be seen, most of which even a botanist such as Richard could not begin to identify. The air was full of noise from insects, birds and monkeys, and giant, spectacularly coloured butterflies
flitted in front of his face as he stumbled across the forest floor. Although the overall impression on the senses of this jungle scene was one of awesome beauty Richard was not deceived by appearances. He had heard the forest described as an ‘emerald mansion’ but he knew that for a lone traveller it was really a green hell: a place where death lurked at every turn – not just from pumas or jaguars or other predators but from snakes, venomous frogs and toads, spiders and centipedes, and parasites and insects whose bites or stings could cause all kinds of loathsome diseases.

He first became aware of the jaguar by a stroke of good fortune; normally the master stalker of the jungle would have been upon him without warning. He stopped to sit on a branch to remove some leeches from his legs and arms when he suddenly saw a large porcupine break cover and, for a normally slow-moving animal, scurry remarkably quickly towards him. Its quills were stiffened in alarm and it passed within a few feet of him before disappearing into the undergrowth. At the same time there were frantic alarm calls from a flock of birds in the trees above the bushes from which the large rodent had emerged, and looking over he just caught a sight of yellow fur in the branches. Even in a brief glimpse the beautiful markings of the jaguar were unmistakable and he knew he was about to face his greatest challenge. There was nowhere he could seek refuge; his stalker was truly in its own element and had Richard completely at its mercy.

Richard knew from his reading that jaguars rarely attacked humans and that even being followed by one was
not necessarily a sign of danger – they sometimes followed villagers through the forest simply out of curiosity. All that book knowledge, however, suddenly gave him no reassurance whatsoever and his worst fears were confirmed when the creature gave a long, low growl, then a series of moaning coughs. It was obviously closing in for the kill. His skin crawled at the thought of those long sharp claws suddenly sinking into his flesh and those jaws closing round his neck. He knew that his remaining life could probably be measured in minutes.

As Richard turned to try to escape he saw, for the first time that day, patchy sunlight straight ahead of him between the bushes. At the same instant he was aware of a rapid movement behind him and he ran headlong towards the light in a panic, filled with the primitive childhood terror of being chased by a deadly foe. He suddenly emerged into brilliant sunlight and plunged headlong down a precipice, to be caught in the branches of a tree growing almost horizontally from a crack in the rock face. He could see other trees jutting out from the crack further down, but the gap to the next one below was impossibly far for him to climb. Looking up he saw the jaguar peering over the edge one hundred feet above him. Its head appeared in different places along the edge as though seeking a way down but eventually it gave up and disappeared. Richard looked round. He was on the side of a cliff, which stretched down below him at a precipitous angle to the floor of a great valley a thousand feet below. The other side of the valley was so far away that it was only
just visible through the tropical haze. A large, strange bird slowly flapped its way across the abyss and muttered a harsh cry, which was answered by another, far away. Turning his attention to his perilous plight he realized with horror that it was impossible even to contemplate climbing back up to the top. Quite apart from the fact that there was a large and hungry cat waiting up there, the near-vertical cliff face was unscalable. He started to disentangle himself from the branches so as to get nearer to the cliff and see if he might make his way down. As soon as he moved, however, the tree, already almost completely dislodged from its tenuous hold on the rocks by Richard’s fall, finally parted from the crack and slid down the cliff at an ever-increasing pace. The last thing Richard remembered was hurtling down, down, down.

A
s soon as Lucy got home from her fortnight at the seaside she talked to Clare about how she should approach the Foreign Office. The principal problem was how she could remain anonymous, for she was terrified of anybody even suspecting her of having unusual powers. As always, Clare gave her sound advice. She suggested that Lucy rang up from a public telephone, not on a mobile or domestic phone from which a call could be traced, that she gave a false name, and that she used Grandma’s idea of saying that the information had come from a penfriend in a remote Amazon village.

The next day they went to a public telephone booth at Waterloo Station in London and Lucy rang the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’d like to inform someone about a problem related to jaguars in Brazil.’ In a few moments she was transferred to someone who obviously dealt with Brazil.

‘Hello, Pauline Fairfax here, how can I help you?’ Lucy faltered – Miss Fairfax sounded rather fierce. Clare gave her a shove.

‘Go on,’ she hissed. ‘Stop being such a wimp. You’re the Promised One – in case you hadn’t remembered?’

Lucy cleared her throat. ‘Er, I’m ringing up to tell you of some serious news affecting jaguars in the Amazon.’ She went on to tell the woman all she knew, but did not give her name or address. The woman sounded very uninterested in the whole thing, especially as Lucy wouldn’t tell her who she was. She obviously thought it was some kind of time-wasting hoax.

‘Oh dear,’ said Lucy to Clare as she put the phone down, ‘I don’t think I did that very well; that horrid woman isn’t going to do anything. She just told me to ring back tomorrow.’ Clare wasn’t so sure. At the woman’s request Lucy had been asked to repeat the exact details of where the campsite was, and Clare thought that this was significant.

‘There’s nothing more to do now,’ she reassured Lucy. ‘Let’s see what she says tomorrow.’

Back at the ministry, the Honourable Edward Tawkin-Tosh, Teddy to his friends, was just arriving in his office. He was the senior civil servant in charge of South American matters and Pauline Fairfax had been his personal assistant for several years. She liked his kindly, easygoing nature and did her best to conceal from others his lamentable ignorance about most subjects.

‘Mornin’, Pauline,’ he said cheerily as he hung his umbrella on the stand. It was 11 a.m.

‘Good morning, sir,’ she replied. ‘You’re bright and early today.’

Her gentle sarcasm was completely wasted on him.

‘Well, I’m going to lunch at the club in an hour or so, so I thought I’d pop in for a coffee first. It’s good for the staff to see me pulling my weight. Anything urgent?’

‘Yes – well, I’m not sure whether it’s important or not. I’ve just had a most unusual call from someone who sounded like a young girl. She has a penfriend in Amazonia and says something terrible is going on there with jaguars.’

‘Amazonia eh? Shouldn’t our Africa chaps get on to that?’ said Tawkin-Tosh.

‘No, the Amazon is a river in Brazil – well, most of it’s in Brazil anyway – and that means it’s in our section.’

‘Most of it?’ Tawkin-Tosh didn’t like anything that sounded complicated and seized upon the possibility that the problem might still not be his responsibility. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’

‘Lots of countries,’ said his PA patiently. ‘Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Guyana and one or two others.’

‘Surely they’re not all in our section, are they?’ Tawkin-Tosh had no idea he looked after so many strange places.

‘Yes sir, they’re all in South America.’

‘Hmm,’ said Tawkin-Tosh thoughtfully. ‘Trouble with jaguars in the Amazon. Well, we can’t interfere in the way in which these blighters treat their own fish. You’d best send a letter to whichever embassy you think. Braziador or Venezilia sound the most promising to me. Just send something off – you know how I like to phrase these tricky memos.’

‘Yes sir,’ she replied.

She knew only too well how he liked to phrase a tricky memo, and would not be sending anything remotely similar to one of his childish compositions.

He consulted his gold watch.

‘Good Lord,’ he exclaimed, ‘doesn’t time fly when you’re under pressure! Mustn’t be late at the club. Toodle-oo, old thing,’ he took his brolly off the stand and walked to the door, ‘and don’t forget that call to Bulimia …’

‘No sir, goodbye sir and enjoy your lunch.’ The door closed behind him.

That afternoon Pauline Fairfax rang the Brazilian embassy and asked to be put through to someone who dealt with Amazon wildlife. Eventually she spoke to a Don-Juan Enganador.

‘Hello, Senhor Enganador,’ she said, ‘I am passing on some information given to us by a young girl. It may just be a hoax but we thought you ought to know what she says in case it fits in with anything else you know about.’

‘It’s kind of you to ring,’ said Mr Enganador; he sounded charming. Miss Fairfax wondered how old he was and decided to look up exactly where the Brazilian embassy was. ‘Please tell me all about it.’

Miss Fairfax told him everything Lucy had said and he listened with what was polite interest until she reached Lucy’s description of the location of the problem; he then became extremely attentive. Miss Fairfax finished off by apologizing for taking up his time with what was probably a frivolous matter.

‘Not at all,’ he said gravely. ‘The location that the young
lady has described to you is in an extremely remote part of the Amazon and the details are very specific. I would very much like to speak to her – is this possible?’

‘She’s going to ring me back tomorrow,’ said Miss Fairfax. She had thought that he would have been dismissive of what she had told him but, on the contrary, he seemed extremely interested.

‘When she rings,’ he said, ‘please give her this number – it’s a private line, not the one you came in on just now – and ask her to call me at once.’

Miss Fairfax took down the number and thanked him. ‘If you’re ever over this way,’ she added, ‘we’d love to show you round our South American section – just give me a call.’

‘Thank you, I will most certainly think about that,’ said Don-Juan, and rang off. He then told his secretary that she could have the rest of the afternoon off and as soon as she had gone he picked up the phone and rang Chopper in Rio. Chopper maintained a network of spies in key positions in the police, the legal system and the government. His government informers included an official in each of the major embassies abroad and his man in London was Don-Juan Enganador. In return for keeping Chopper informed of developments that might affect his illegal timber, drug and mining interests, Enganador received a generous cash reward every week in addition to his regular government salary. Chopper knew that greed did not guarantee loyalty, however, and the brown envelope of cash was not delivered to Don-Juan
personally in London, but was taken every Friday evening to his small home in the suburbs of Brasilia where his wife and two young children lived. It was delivered by two big men who came in a large black car with darkened windows, and Don-Juan was in no doubt whatsoever that if he crossed Chopper in any way his family would soon be receiving a visit of a very different nature from those same two men. He was now through to Chopper.

‘What’s up, Don-Juan? It’d better be good – I’m in the middle of a golf match with the new Chief of Police.’

‘It may be nothing, boss,’ said Don-Juan, ‘but I think you should hear this.’ He recounted Lucy’s story and in particular the location she had described. He knew that Chopper had logging sites at various points along the Amazon, but he knew nothing of Cayman Creek with its captive jaguar colony and its importance to Chopper as a drug-peddling base. His instinct to ring Chopper had been perfectly correct and Chopper dropped all thoughts of golf for the moment. He gesticulated to his fellow player to take his next stroke and quickly moved out of earshot.

‘Well done, Don-Juan,’ he said. ‘Now listen – and listen carefully. The camp the girl mentioned – that exists exactly where she said, but there’s just one little problem. Nobody,
nobody
outside my organization knows about its existence! That means I’ve a traitor in my group. I’ll see to him later …’ Don-Juan shuddered. He wouldn’t change places with that man for a million pounds. ‘And that traitor,’ Chopper continued, ‘has obviously betrayed us to a rival organization. Now they have been clever – very clever.
Without exposing themselves in any way, they are using this girl – either by bribing, or more likely threatening, her family – to draw the attention of the authorities to the existence of our site. When they investigate, we are closed down and the rival organization takes over all our drug deals. Are you following me?’

Don-Juan was following him, and said so.

‘Right, the first thing is that the Brazilian authorities must know nothing about this. That means that all embassy records of your conversation today do not exist. Am I making myself clear?’ Don-Juan thought of his duty to the Ambassador, then thought of his wife and two daughters.

‘Perfectly clear, boss.’

‘Next, I need that girl over here. That will serve two purposes – firstly, if she’s here she can’t blab to anyone else and, secondly, I can …’ there was an almost imperceptible pause, ‘… interrogate her and find out who’s behind all this.’ Don-Juan shuddered again, but said nothing.

‘When’s she due to ring again?’

‘Tomorrow, boss.’

‘Perfect, tell her that you must see her – you can agree that she remains anonymous – before you are able to take any action. Remember, she thinks you are part of the government and can actually do something. Tell me exactly when she is coming – but you must arrange it for Thursday afternoon or early Friday morning so I can arrange to have her snatched as she leaves the embassy. She can come back on Friday’s flight.’

Don-Juan knew all about the flight he referred to. Every
Thursday a private company jet flew from Rio via Grand Canaria to a small club airport near the M25 motorway. The man it carried posed as a businessman, coming to discuss trading problems with experts in the City of London. He actually brought in drugs and returned the following day with a considerable sum in cash from the London dealers.

‘But …’ Don-Juan hesitated.

‘Spit it out, man!’ snarled Chopper. He had made his decision and now he wanted to get back to his golf.

‘What if the girl won’t agree to come and see me?’

There was a brief pause, then Chopper’s voice came over slowly and deliberately.

‘I was reading in the paper this morning that there has been a disturbing increase in family fatalities from suburban houses catching fire. It said that, at present, Brasilia is the least affected city of those in the survey. I do hope those statistics don’t change over the weekend.’

The line went dead as Chopper switched off and returned to his game. Don-Juan looked at the phone and slowly replaced it on the receiver. He was desperately worried but could do nothing until the girl rang. But what if, having rung Miss Fairfax, she didn’t even ring him? That at least he could do something about. He was fully aware of the effect of his Latin charm on Miss Fairfax. He quickly looked her up in the Foreign Office directory and then rang her straight back.

‘Miss Fairfax – or Pauline, if I may,’ he said, ‘I am so sorry to bother you but I have had an idea about your young
mystery caller.’

‘Do go on, Senhor – or can I say Don-Juan?’ Miss Fairfax said coyly.

‘I think it might be best if I actually meet your young girl rather than just speak to her on the phone. There could be a problem though – she may be nervous about coming here alone to see me. Perhaps …?’

‘Yes?’ said Miss Fairfax, a little too eagerly.

‘… perhaps if you were to come with her she might feel happier. You must already have won a degree of trust from her.’

‘Oh, that is so clever of you, Don-Juan,’ she replied in her most gushing voice. ‘Of course I shall suggest that. I’ll contact you after she rings tomorrow.’

After giving her details of how to get to the embassy and what time they should meet, Don-Juan felt he had done everything possible and now could only wait. He tore out the notes he had made on a pad during his conversation with Miss Fairfax and burnt them in the green metal wastepaper basket under his desk. He wondered whether to ring his wife and warn her but decided not to – all calls to his house were almost certainly monitored by Chopper.

The next day was Thursday and Lucy and Clare phoned Miss Fairfax as promised, though this time on her direct line.

The secretary was extremely kind and friendly to Lucy.

‘We are making good progress, my dear,’ she said warmly. ‘I have spoken to a nice man in charge of these things at
the Brazilian embassy. He’s going to help but he needs to see you. I’ll come with you if it would make you feel happier about seeing him.’ Lucy put her hand over the phone and consulted Clare.

‘Seems OK,’ said Clare. ‘They’re both government officials after all and they can’t force your name and address out of you if you don’t want them to. It sounds as if it’s the only way you can get to help your jaguars.’

Lucy nodded and resumed her phone conversation.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘if you promise to not to ask my name, I’ll come.’

‘You must be here early on Friday morning though. He’s squeezing you in as an emergency case and is going to see you before the proper work of the day starts.’ Miss Fairfax then gave Lucy directions and said she would see her on the doorstep of the embassy the following morning.

The next morning Clare waited in a coffee bar near the Brazilian embassy and swotted for her exams while Lucy talked to Don-Juan. The meeting with Miss Fairfax had gone smoothly; she seemed a nice woman and Lucy had taken to her immediately. The sisters had arranged to meet at the coffee bar after Lucy’s visit to the embassy.

After about half an hour Lucy appeared on the other side of the road. She was alone: Don-Juan had not wanted Miss Fairfax to be a witness to the kidnapping and draw any police investigation back to him and, as he had correctly anticipated, she had eagerly accepted his offer for her to stay on at the embassy for coffee after Lucy had left.