In what must have been one of his final acts, it seemed that Helmut had undone Ishiko’s seatbelt for her, so by the time the next bullet slammed into the remains of the windscreen she was already out of its way. She kept her head down as a further pair of bullets hit the driver’s side door and buried themselves into the dashboard above her head. Helmut’s gun hand had fallen back inside and Ishiko was able to locate the Glock on the floor, next to the accelerator pedal when another bullet hit the vehicle, this time the petrol tank. Everything exploded, flames filled the air…
From the moments that followed, there was one vision in particular that stayed with her, as clear as a photograph: through the veil of flames, the two men, standing on the road between the Nissan and the tow truck, laughing, waiting for her to emerge, each with a gun in his hand, on the left the blond-haired driver in jeans and short sleeves and on the right, the skinny man in trousers and a jacket. At the time a thought flashed through her head, why weren’t they worried about the Decagon? Sure it was metal, but even so…
But there’d been no time to pursue this thought. She knew she had a window of seconds. With the gun in her right hand, she pointed it at the driver and with her bare arm in the flames and the smell of her own burning arm hairs filling her nostrils, she fired.
The driver crumpled and stayed down, lifeless, and Ishiko immediately fired a second shot at the skinny man who had jumped far enough to avoid being hit. She fired again and reached over and grabbed her Muji bag on the back seat, pushed herself and her bag over Helmut’s shattered face and out the window, and rolled on the ground, the whole time watching where the skinny man was headed. She fired her fourth round just as he was about to jump into the truck. He was forced to dive into a ditch instead. Ishiko did the same just before he fired back, twice, three times. And for the next couple of minutes they exchanged fire until Ishiko calculated that the skinny man had fired his tenth round. She gambled he was using a ten round Sig Mosquito like the one she’d seen the driver with back at the diamond mine and made her move. As she stood up, one more shot rang out (she must have miscounted!) but it missed and kept going, over the rocks and sand, seemingly never touching the ground and on towards the dry, brown hills in the distance. But then he was out, and when she pointed her Glock at him, the skinny man ran, off into the desert, like the bullet he’d just fired but in the opposite direction. He barely touched the ground either. He didn’t know she only had one round left and she let him run. In no mood for a jog in the desert, and not wanting to risk wasting her final bullet, she walked over to the blond man’s body, took his gun (the correctly identified Sig Mosquito) and fired the remaining five rounds in the skinny man’s direction but he was already too far away. She then threw the Sig away, and walked over to the tow truck, jumped in – the driver had thoughtfully left her the keys – and started it up, all the while keeping an eye on the now stationary form of the skinny man, who was standing in the shimmering heat a couple of hundred metres in the distance, watching her departure like a sad lover on a pier.
With a double judder the truck bounced over the driver’s body, and back onto the highway, passing the smoking wreck of the Nissan X Trail, with Helmut’s charred remains just about visible inside. Despite her painfully burnt right arm, she managed to steer and grind her way through the gears as she headed for Lüderitz airport.
Before she reached the airport turn-off, she realised she’d have to rid herself of any association with the tow truck at the first opportunity, and when she spotted an embankment on the opposite side of the highway, about a kilometre from the airport, she took her chance. She made sure there were no cars coming (she doubted she’d seen more than about three cars all morning) and then slowed right down, got the angle right, steered the truck towards the edge. At the last moment she jumped out, clutching her bag and its precious cargo. Disappointingly, while the truck rolled and the hydraulic boom on the back snapped off like a twig, the vehicle didn’t explode but simply came to rest on its side like a tired elephant. It would have to do.
She started walking – it wasn’t far. She could see a scattering of buildings in the distance… and a plane! She was in luck, and picked up the pace. Knowing as well as anyone that guns and airports didn’t mix, no matter how small the airport, she took the Glock with its one remaining round, found a convenient spot in a roadside ditch, and gave it a shallow grave.
The airport ‘terminal’ – a small, thirty metre long orange brick building with a slate-coloured roof, stark against the bright sands around it – wasn’t far from the turn-off. Maybe a couple of hundred metres. The bitumen approach-road passed through a gate in the middle of a low, bordering fence and ran right up to the side of the building where more fencing, a closed gate and a small sand-drift prevented vehicles from going any further.
There was only one vehicle – a mini-bus – parked nearby. Ishiko dusted herself off as best she could and found a long-sleeved top in her bag to cover the burns to her right forearm. It was painful to wear, but she had little choice.
The aircraft parked on the small square of tarmac closest to the airport building was an Air Namibia Beechcraft 1900 – a twin-engined turboprop aircraft with a passenger capacity of nineteen. After eyeing it in much the same way a starving man might look at a hot meal, she made her way into the building.
There was one official-looking person behind a makeshift check-in counter, and two groups of tourists sitting chatting in low voices on mismatched seating. Ishiko approached the person at the counter who proved to be bored and unhelpful. As it turned out the plane, which had just flown in from Windhoek, was flying on to Orangemund and Cape Town, but even though it wasn’t full, the official told her that she would have to purchase a ticket in town. No amount of pleading was going to help, and the thought did cross her mind she could go back and recover the Glock and make them see things a little differently, but then the pilot walked in – tall, white and blond, and probably South African she thought – and a better plan presented itself.
With a wad of US dollars and, playing a greater role in the transaction, her sweetest smile, she managed to persuade him to take her. In more ways than one as it turned out, although that evening, in the Cape Town hotel room he invited her into, she did manage to retrieve the cash after all had been said and done.
30. 33° 55' 11" S 18° 25' 11" E
(Cape Town)
5.30am South African Standard Time (03:30 UTC)
Saturday, 19 October
It would soon be dawn and the beginning of a new day. The first rays of the sun would illuminate, to begin with, the top of Table Mountain and then the whole of central Cape Town – the City Bowl area, hemmed in by its amphitheatre of mountains – and the sun’s early warmth would caress the pavement below, in Strand Street, easing away the cold of the previous night. And then the hustle and bustle of a city with things to do would start all over again.
But a new day also meant another day. On top of all the others. Two months had gone by and she’d heard nothing. Why hadn’t they contacted her? They were supposed to have got a message to her after a month, either through her hotmail address or her fake Facebook page. The endless – and fruitless – visits to internet cafes had already gone beyond tedious and she’d recently had to invest in an iPad.
Most people would go mad in a hotel like the one she was staying in after a week, let alone two months. Recurring words and phrases which appeared in the customer review section of the hotel’s TripAdvisor entry (ranked # 114 of 120 hotels in Cape Town Central) included “noisy” and “cockroaches” and “worst experience”, but Ishiko didn’t mind it. (Sure there were cockroaches, but so what, and anyway cockroaches were animals too, and why else did most people come to Africa but for the animals?) She was used to hardship, and however many complaints were levelled at this particular hotel, it was hardly the “concentration camp” that one of the guests had accused it of being. It was basic, but there was nothing wrong with basic. Not when you’d grown up an orphan in T
okyo, been mistreated and abused in every way for most of your childhood, had ‘experience’ with one of Japan’s most extreme religious groups and settled on a Ukrainian mafia syndicate as your religion of choice. It was all a matter of managing your expectations: she demanded little more than a roof over her head and a door she could lock. She never expected the perks of her job to rival, for example, those of a girl she once knew, Nagisa, who used to review luxury hotels all around the world. Right up until she was raped and murdered on a Mombasa beach. So no, she had no complaints about the hotel.
Money wasn’t a problem either. She could easily steal some if she needed to, but for the moment she still had more than enough, even though they’d stopped crediting her account for some reason. They were meant to keep paying her until she handed over the Decagon and that was supposed to have been a month ago. What had happened to them? They couldn’t have forgotten about her.
There was one thing that kept her sane (more or less, although she was beginning to have her doubts): ever since her arrival in Cape Town, she’d been making daily trips to the Two Oceans Aquarium. It was a twenty minute brisk walk through a fairly soulless section of Cape Town’s waterfront area, but once there, every time without fail, she’d head straight for the Ocean Basket Kelp Forest exhibit and sit and watch the fish swimming between the towering stalks of kelp – their silvery scales twinkling in the patches of underwater sunlight – and dream for an hour or more.
Once, she hired a car and drove as far south as she could go: she made the two and a half hour journey to Cape Agulhas, the southern-most point on the African continent. At the time she imagined it was as far from Tokyo as she could go as well (although she later found out Cape Town was technically further). And near the lighthouse there, she clambered over the rocks – like a crab – and sat, staring out over the vast, cold expanse of this southern ocean, with its white caps stretching all the way to Antarctica.
It never occurred to her to query whether she was on the right team. Her side – the Ukrainians – were involved in a relentless struggle against Drayle’s people, the Russians, and that was all that mattered. The Decagon was in fact just one tiny piece of the whole puzzle, and yet the finer points of this overarching battle for supremacy held little interest for Ishiko: she felt no need to know any more than the little she already knew. It was all about faith.
She liked being given orders and she liked following them even more. Her instructions had been to book a diving trip aboard the Diamond Moon, wait for the successful recovery of the Isfahan Decagon – in the event it was down there that is, which as it happened, wouldn’t you know it, it was (thus ending an otherwise enjoyable diving holiday) – obtain it “at any cost” (and in this regard, as all crew members were in some way connected to the Russians, they were expendable), make her way to Cape Town and wait to be contacted. That was meant to have happened a month ago, where were they? And what was she supposed to do now? Without further instructions?
This is what she hated more than anything. The state of being without instructions. The state of being “instructionless”.
And now she was worried she was starting to see things, worried she was losing her mind. Three weeks ago she thought she saw the skinny man. In the middle of Cape Town – in Green Market Square, just a five minute walk from the hotel. She didn’t think he’d seen her, but it had worried her so much that she took an hour to get back, just to make sure she’d lost him, in case he was following. And then a week later, she was certain she spotted the yellow tow truck. It was crossing an intersection about fifty metres from where she was standing, surfacing from nowhere like a submarine. It slid past, standing out as clear as day – how could you miss it, it was yellow – covered in dents and scratches from its roll down the embankment and still missing its hydraulic boom. And then it vanished again. But worse was to come.
On the day after the tow truck sighting, she saw Bertrand.
She knew it was impossible, that he was dead (and there hadn’t been any doubt about that, she’d only made that mistake once and it wasn’t a mistake you ever repeated). He was in a fish shop, down on the waterfront, not far from the Two Oceans Aquarium. He was just standing on his own, away from the other customers, staring at one of the fish laid out on the ice. When she saw him she got a shock and even though her head wanted to run, her feet wouldn’t let her. So she just stood there watching him, terrified he would turn around and see her. And then he did. He straightened up and turned and looked directly at her, as if he knew all along she was standing there. There was nothing aggressive about his look, but nothing friendly either. He just looked at her, and then calmly turned away and walked off. It was as if he was telling her that she didn’t matter, even to him. Even to the person she’d killed. She hadn’t wanted to kill him, but how could she not matter to him?
She was too shaken to follow him, but after he’d gone, she went over to look at the fish he’d been staring at. It was a Red Kingklip, she knew it well, a local rock fish, prized for its white meat, eel-like in shape, but the most striking about this one was the look on its face. With its open mouth and wide eyes it looked shocked, like it had just been told something too awful to contemplate. As if it had just been informed of its own death. And next to it was a White Stumpnose, silvery and shaped like a bream, with big, beautiful, sad-looking black eyes, and she had the overwhelming feeling that it was her.
She saw Bertrand twice more, both times in the Aquarium, and always staring at fish before looking around at her and then walking off. Apart from anything else he managed to ruin the Kelp Forest for her and she was going to have to cease her daily visits, which constituted, in the circumstances, a serious setback.
Ishiko knew Bertrand was dead and that she was imagining him, so seeing him wasn’t as worrying, in a way, as seeing the skinny man or the yellow tow truck. And on top of all that, only the day before, she’d been convinced a man in a grey suit had been following her. In a grey suit, like a shark. Not the skinny man this time, but he kept cropping up the whole day and it had taken all of her skills to finally shake him. Drayle had people all over, and something told her this was one of them. They had a thing about grey suits, she was told, but in a city like Cape Town, if you got jumpy every time you saw a grey suit you’d go crazy.
The sky was growing lighter and Ishiko could already see the Table Cloth – the cloud that often formed over Table Mountain, but as far as she was concerned they were all stupid names – the mountain was more like a coffin and the cloud, a burial shroud.
She was determined to do something that very day. Her life needed change – she could no longer visit the aquarium – and she decided the change would happen before she witnessed another dawn. She’d probably fly somewhere. A big city seemed like a good idea, somewhere bigger than Cape Town. Like London. A place you could, in an instant, with a lazy flick of your tail, switch from easily contactable to anonymous and vice versa. Somewhere she could hide, like a fish in coral and somewhere she could find her people if she had to, if she was desperate. Although she could never imagine herself as ever being truly desperate. Either solutions presented themselves, or you were dead, it was that simple.
She picked the Muji bag up off the floor, put it on the bed and unzipped it. And as she gazed at the cause of all upheaval (as she’d done every day for two months) – as she gazed at the Decagon, with its strange geometric patterns, and its hundred shimmering oceans of precious stones – she wondered why everyone wanted it so much. It was pretty enough (but since when did beauty ever get anyone – or anything – anywhere worth getting?). She supposed it was because it was old, but people really had to make up their minds what it is they wanted to worship: one week it was Youth, and the next it was Age. How was that consistent? It just went to show how foolish people were.
31. 26° 38' 59" S 15° 9' 8" E
(Lüderitz, Namibia)
One hour later.
6.30am West Africa Summer Time (04:30 UTC).
Saturday, 19 October
As the full moon was sinking into the Atlantic ocean on the western horizon, the first rays of the sun were, at last, clearing the hills to the east and providing some much needed colour to the drab grey stone of the church walls, lending the building an orange tinge. It was an odd time – and place – for a meeting, here in the town’s old church, but after two months in limbo, ‘underground’ as it were, Gerhard was willing to try anything. It was risky too, but it was a chance he had to take.
He’d been waiting for at least an hour before going inside, told to wait until sunrise proper, until the sunshine was actually hitting the church – strange instructions, and what if it had been cloudy? And anyway, was it even going to be open at this hour? Who goes to church at six thirty in the morning? But he supposed that was the point. The sunshine thing though, that was a real mystery.
The waters of the bay were beginning to take on their familiar indigo colour. The night’s greys and blacks were giving way to the day’s oranges and blues.
Before he attempted to enter, though, he checked himself, and went over it all one more time. Ever since he’d received the anonymous note, he’d been sweating over it: it was written on the back of an old Namibia postcard of a lone baobab tree (and to Gerhard’s mind at least, quite phallic). Written in poor English, in almost childlike writing, it had simply said:
I know why things are that you are running. I can help you. Meet me inside church on the hill ***Felsenkirche*** at sunrise on Saturday morning. but DO NOT ENTER UNTIL SUN’S RAY IS ON THE CHURCH.
Some ships only sail at night. XX
Some ships only sail at night? The kisses were a mystery too, he assumed it was from a woman, which was an enticement in itself. Christ knows how long it’d been since he’d had a woman. Even just for company. Which is exactly why the whole thing could be a trap. Probably was a trap, when he thought about it like that.
Dark Oceans Page 15