To the Lions

by Holly Watt

An hour later, Miranda peered round the door of the room.

  Casey was too excited to stay angry. ‘I think I’ve worked out how Milo was flown down to Algeria.’

  Bit by bit, she walked Miranda through her calculations. The assumptions are always the dangerous part. The lawyers snarled at any hint of ‘I assumed’.

  ‘So who owns the plane?’ Miranda asked at the end.

  ‘I found the sales contract,’ said Casey. ‘It was sent through to Wynford Mortimer to be signed off by the nominee directors. It’s owned by a British Virgin Islands company, something called Mostgrave Limited.’

  The BVI registration was almost completely meaningless, they knew. The small dot in the Caribbean was home to an endless series of letterbox companies, with no office or staff actually present. The nominee directors would sign a sales contract on behalf of the owners, with no more than the quickest of glances. It was quite normal to own the most expensive toys – the jets and the yachts – through offshore companies.

  ‘And who owns Mostgrave?’ Miranda asked.

  ‘It’s issued shares,’ said Casey. ‘Ten per cent of those are owned by a man called Joshua Charlton. Milo’s Charlie, possibly. He apparently lives in a PO Box in Jersey. The others are owned by yet another BVI company, Marakata Green Limited.’

  ‘Mostgrave. Mostgrave. Mass grave? And who are Marakata Green?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Casey. ‘They’re not managed by Wynford Mortimer, so we haven’t got that data.’

  And even if they could get the shareholders of Marakata Green, the beneficial owners – the actual owners of the other 90 per cent of X587J – could be ten companies away, buried behind layers and layers of paperwork.

  ‘Who is this Joshua Charlton character then?’ Miranda tracked back.

  ‘Could be almost anyone,’ said Casey. ‘No one obvious on Google. There are dozens of Joshua Charltons. Hundreds, even. I haven’t got stuck into that Jersey PO Box yet, but I will. There might be something there.’

  The cleaners were starting to clean around the Post’s offices. It was the usual sign they had stayed too late. The night editor, in a pool of light, was the only figure at the news desk. He was watching the wires, the endless stream of information that cascaded carelessly around the world, day and night.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Ed. ‘Roughly.’

  ‘Quite simple so far,’ said Miranda. ‘We go in, we meet up with one of the parties going into Libya, somehow. Then you and Casey go to wherever they go. And find out what they do, and record the conversations, and . . .’

  She trailed off.

  ‘And get the hell out of there,’ Ed filled in.

  Miranda’s eyes met Casey’s over his shoulder, in a split second of silence.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miranda. ‘Then you get the hell out of there.’

  ‘I got something else too.’ Casey pulled out her phone and sent the photograph of Milo in the desert to Miranda’s computer screen.

  ‘I’m sure that this was taken during the trip to Libya last October,’ she said. ‘Milo’s mother says she gave him that shirt last August. She’s going to check receipts. If you look at all the photographs of Milo in his last six months, he was never that tanned again.’

  All three of them examined the photograph. Even blown up on the screen, there were no clues from the rolling dunes behind Milo.

  Casey sighed. ‘Nothing. And what’s worse is that I think that Jessica Miller is on the case.’

  Miranda’s head jerked up.

  ‘Jessie?’ said Miranda, eyes sharpening. ‘Why? How could she possibly know?’

  Casey explained about the call to Adam, trembling in Geneva.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Miranda. ‘Fuck. Right, well, I am not being scooped by Jessie bloody Miller.’

  ‘We’re doing our best,’ Ed laughed at her. ‘And as long as they’re stopped from doing this . . .’

  He caught Miranda’s eye, and went quiet.

  ‘We’ve got to be first,’ said Miranda. ‘First. Now, let’s put together a proper plan. We’ve got to be ready to go.’

  18

  By the next morning, they had built a proposal for Dash. It had been plotted out, in their little room, for hours.

  Dash listened to Casey and Miranda, eyes narrowed. He fiddled with his penknife, which he did when he was thinking.

  ‘I still don’t feel you have enough,’ he said eventually. ‘What do you have, really? A rumour overheard in a club. A plane going to and fro. Some company names you can’t unpick. A couple of passport stamps. The girlfriend saying he’d changed, whatever the hell that means. A suicide that could still be a stumble. An aid worker who saw some injuries that came from a high-velocity bullet, in a country where you can’t move without tripping over a gun. You’ve only got one real source. It all comes from Milo, and from beyond the grave, at that. It’s sketchy.’

  Double-source everything, he’d told Casey once. We only know snapshots. One perspective is half blind. You’ve got to double-source.

  ‘Adam wasn’t lying,’ Casey began. ‘Milo had souvenirs from that trip. Photographs. Clothes. He was there. And the fact that he’s dead . . .’

  ‘He could have just been losing it towards the end,’ said Dash. ‘For any number of reasons. It could all be nonsense.’

  ‘It could.’ Miranda gave what might have been a toreador flourish. ‘But we can see it all on the ground out in Africa. The camp is there, you know. Some fucking huge palace is there with the golden roofs, just as Milo described. Why would some hedge-fund grunt have made that up? Why would some art buff have a passport stamp for Libya?’

  ‘But you’re assuming—’

  ‘It could all be coincidence,’ said Casey. ‘Sure. But we have to chase it.’

  ‘There may have been some big art collection down there,’ Dash theorised. ‘Some dictator’s magpie hoard. You know how they do it. Milo could have gone down there to value it, and things got out of hand one night. It could have been a one-off.’

  ‘Well, why wouldn’t he have told his father about the art collection?’

  ‘Pride. Might have wanted to present it as a done deal. Or maybe he just needed a secret from his father.’

  It was always like this. Archaeologists gazing at a buried emerald, a chip of pottery, the long-lost sparkle of some battered coin. And guessing what it might mean, all of it. They pieced it together from the fragments left behind. A sharpened flint could mean a cook or a doctor, a hunter or a game.

  Or a murder.

  They picked them up, those scraps and those shards, and built their own story. And sometimes, it could be wrong.

  Dash stared over their heads for a long time.

  ‘You could all be killed, you know,’ he said. ‘If you’re right. Seriously.’

  ‘We know that,’ said Miranda.

  ‘I’d probably deny sending you out there in the first place,’ he said. ‘Because by then you’d be history, and so what? You’d be a tragic news-in-brief. Even I know this is a bit close to the line.’

  ‘Anecdotal stuff on something like this would never get past the lawyers,’ said Miranda.

  ‘Only seeing’ – Casey’s voice was quiet – ‘is believing.’

  ‘The Editor would say no, if I asked,’ Dash admitted. ‘He keeps talking about cost-cutting and search optimisation. He doesn’t want this sort of thing. Not any more.’

  ‘Well,’ said Casey cheerfully, ‘you could always point out that if we disappear, there’s a cost saving right there.’

  ‘Be serious,’ said Dash. ‘For once. It would have to be off the books, all this. I could never get it signed off, at the moment. The lawyers would faint. I’d have to magic the budgets around it.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Miranda, because they’d done it before. ‘Need to know only. And almost nobody does.’

  Dash walked to his window. Outside, June was Novembering, people dashing through the rain, and hiding in doorways.

  ‘Has Toby found anything?’ Dash as
ked. ‘In his bag of internet tricks?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Miranda. ‘He can’t if there isn’t anything to find.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘You know what they call the bit at the very top of Everest?’ asked Dash. ‘The death zone. Your body starts shutting down, as soon as you get up there, because there’s so little air. You’ve got to summit and get down before it kills you, just being up there. And if something goes wrong, there’s not a lot anyone can do, even if they wanted to. Everyone is already operating at their limit. You can’t fly a helicopter up there; the air is too thin for that. It’ll be the same for you out there in Libya. The British army won’t come in after you. They won’t risk a dozen soldiers when you’ve chosen this madness, all by yourself. I don’t know anyone insane enough to send in after you. You would be on your own.’

  ‘Jessie Miller’s on the case,’ said Miranda. ‘We can’t let her beat us to this.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Dash, flint in his voice.

  ‘Let’s ask Ross,’ said Casey abruptly.

  ‘You only want to ask Ross because he’ll say yes to anything.’ Dash eyed her.

  ‘Probably,’ Casey shrugged. ‘But because he says yes to anything, if he actually says no, then we know it’s too far.’

  Dash called Ross into the room, and told him in a few words.

  Ross nodded, professionally inscrutable, then grinned.

  ‘I wondered what you idiots were up to.’

  Ross snapped his fingers for a few seconds, thinking for a minute. Then shouted out into the office: ‘Robert.’

  The chief reporter glanced up from his screen, walked over.

  Rob was the heart of the newsroom when the huge stories broke. When terrorism exploded, or a Royal was born, or a prime minister fell, he was at the centre of it all. Safe pair of hands, Ross would say approvingly: high praise indeed.

  ‘Bianca Angelo,’ said Ross. ‘That girl who came in last summer.’

  ‘She was a tricky one,’ Rob remembered slowly. ‘You were on holiday, Dash, or I’d have come to you.’

  ‘Sure,’ Dash nodded.

  ‘She was a ring-in.’ Rob meant the dozens of calls that came into the news desk every day, each one panned for gold. ‘We chatted. Gorgeous girl. She met me at the Costa round the corner.’

  Bizarre, the conversations they’d all had in that Costa, thought Casey. Life, death and brown envelopes sliding over the table, under the venti-latte babble.

  ‘She was very nervous,’ said Rob. ‘They’re always nervous, but you know . . . It stood out. She was an air hostess, working on a private jet. She said she was scared, properly scared. That they were doing something on trips to Algeria. Something terrible.’

  He was mimicking her voice unconsciously as he thought back, a light London accent.

  ‘Did she say what they were doing?’

  ‘She said she’d heard one of them on the plane. An Australian, talking about a manhunt. Killing someone, out in the desert. For fun. He was laughing about it.’

  Rob frowned, trying to remember.

  ‘Anything else?’ Casey asked.

  ‘She was going to tell me more,’ said Rob. ‘The next time. And then she disappeared.’

  ‘We chased her up,’ said Ross. ‘Couldn’t find a Bianca Angelo anywhere. Rob said she was wearing a brunette wig, and a ton of make-up when she came in. Could have been a fake name, and a burner phone too. Fuck knows.’

  ‘It was the level of fear,’ said Rob. ‘Memorable, really.’

  ‘Did she say what plane it was?’ Casey asked.

  ‘No. Just that it was one of the very top-end jets. She poured the drinks and handed out the nuts.’

  There’s always someone doing the photocopying, thought Casey.

  ‘Was she Italian?’ she asked aloud. ‘That name.’

  ‘I asked her about it, for something to chat about. She said no. Always loved Italy, though. Rome, Florence, all that.’

  ‘She ask for money?’ Miranda’s clipped tones.

  ‘No,’ Rob shrugged. ‘She wanted protection.’

  ‘But you couldn’t stand it up.’ Dash’s voice wasn’t accusatory.

  ‘There was very little to go on,’ Rob said. ‘And it was so unlikely, to be honest. Maybe I could have done more, but it was right before the Pearce inquiry, and that had me tied me up for weeks. Why?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Have I missed something?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Dash.

  ‘I should have done more,’ said Rob. But things slipped past, every day. And Rob caught more than most.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Rob stood up, and walked back to tomorrow’s story.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘It’s real,’ said Miranda. ‘It has to be.’

  ‘Fucking brilliant story,’ said Ross.

  ‘We’ve got to get out there,’ said Casey. ‘You know that.’

  Dash stared into the distance for a long time. ‘I suppose you do.’

  ‘We’ll need a point person in the office,’ said Miranda, as if she had always expected him to agree. ‘We’re going to need someone to do the backup stuff from here, and they need to be fucking good. And they’ll need to keep their mouth shut.’

  ‘Who’s free at the moment?’ Dash turned to Ross.

  The two men surveyed the newsroom.

  ‘Julie?’ Dash suggested.

  ‘Christ, no,’ said Ross. ‘Totally useless. We only keep her because no one else can get the photocopier to do anything.’

  ‘They need to be in the office for basically the next two weeks straight, and they need to be fucking good. And if they leak a single word, I’ll sack them on the spot.’

  ‘Hessa,’ said Ross. ‘Although she’s flat-out already.’

  ‘I like her,’ said Miranda. ‘She’s sharp.’

  Casey was fiddling with Dash’s penknife, thinking ahead.

  ‘Send her in,’ said Dash, and then to Casey, ‘Keep that, for luck.’

  Hessa, a tiny girl with a pink scarf around her neck, was at the door in seconds. Clever eyes peered at them.

  ‘Hessa,’ said Miranda. ‘I’m going to take you through a few things . . .’

  19

  Ed and Casey flew first to Algiers. The Algerian police and their spies were notorious, even in northern Africa. Undercover, the usual cry of ‘sahafi, sahafi’ – journalist, journalist – wouldn’t be a pass. They would be lucky, the local stringer warned, to escape the attention of the police on their trek south. Hemmed in by chaos – with Libya to the east, Mali to the south – the Algerian police crunched down on anything suspicious.

  So Ed and Casey flew first to Algiers, and then the short stretch down to the oven heat of Illizi. The last hop south was in a small propeller plane that turned Ed green. A stoned taxi driver took them into the town of Illizi.

  All around the road from the airport, the desert spread out, still and flat, and impossibly vast, baking under a relentless sun. Here and there, huge rock formations stabbed the sky. Battered signposts in Arabic pointed away down vanishing dirt tracks.

  ‘It would be easy to disappear out here,’ said Casey. ‘Too easy.’

  ‘Like the Lady Be Good,’ said Ed. At her blank look, he went on, ‘An American bomber that crashed over in Libya, right in the middle of the Second World War. They were flying back from a raid on Italy, and they got lost in the night, and thought that the desert was sea. Nine of them on board, parachutes floating down into the desert. And then they tried to walk out, but none of them made it. Not one. One of them got hundreds of miles, before dying, out there, all on his own. There are bits of the Sahara where no one returns.’

  Casey looked out over the desert, thinking of those lives snapped like threads, and shuddered. The taxi driver muttered something in Arabic.

  Ed went back to his book. They had decided he should be hunting cave paintings, as part of his cover. There are many caves, down there, on the edge of the desert. And deep into the
ir darkness, man had crept, so carefully. I am here, I am here.

  As they drove, Casey tried to push away Bianca Angelo. Bianca Angelo, the girl who loved Florence and Siena and Rome. Bianca. Bianca . . . White? It was a guess, at first. And Casey had called the recruitment agencies, one by one.

  Ringing from HMRC: naughty, but people always rushed to help.

  We’ve got a glitch in our systems. A girl working as an air hostess, on private jets, I think. The surname’s White? One of her first names is Angela or Angelina or something like that. It’s hard to make out. Appreciate your help. Just for our records, you know.

  And eventually heard the silence. Do you mean Natalie? Natalie Angela White? But Nat, she . . . The growing suspicion. Why do you need to know, who are you, what do you want? She’d put the phone down then.

  It hadn’t taken long, after that. Pretty little air hostess, face smashed to pulp. Found two days after she’d met Rob in that Costa, Casey worked out bleakly. At the bottom of a watery ditch, in a featureless patch of countryside. A hopeless appeal for information, the parents crying under a photograph of big blue eyes and rosebud lips. Blonde, it turned out, under the wig. A detective admitting he was shocked by the level of violence, and glancing down at his hands for a second. Dental records, they’d needed, to be sure.

  No leads, the police admitted, a week later. Not a single one. Justice for Natalie was forgotten in a month.

  Casey hadn’t told the others about Bianca Angelo.

  Not even Ed.

  They had decided to fly to Illizi, the last town to the north of the national park. Rather than straight to Djanet, where they could stumble across the rattlesnake at any time.

  They would need a few days to acclimatise, very slightly, to this wild north African world.

  And X587J had been to Djanet just a few days ago, to fly someone back to Milan. If it followed its normal pattern, it wouldn’t be back for several days. Right now, the Bombardier was sitting on the tarmac in Hong Kong and Hessa was monitoring it, hour by hour.

  They had agreed to bump into Miranda somewhere in Illizi. Meet by coincidence, and gang up as Westerners do. The town was small and dusty, and the locals looked at them in bewilderment. But they collided with Miranda, so casually, in a café. Chatted over a guidebook, pointed out the recommendations and smiled.