Serrato had saved the best for last. At the top of the stairs he pushed open a door and led her inside a set of rooms that could have passed for the Presidential Suite in the world’s most opulent hotel. ‘My humble quarters,’ he said with a glow in his eye. ‘Does the style please you? Be honest with me. I can have the décor remodelled any way you like. After all, one day …’
She caught his meaning and wanted to throw up. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing, Ramon,’ she said, extremely careful with her words.
Serrato’s smile suddenly disappeared. He stepped closer to her, reached out and clasped her arms to draw her towards him. The urge to back away from him was overwhelming, but she knew that to give in to it would be fatal.
‘You are so special to me,’ his voice murmured in her ear as he held her tight. ‘More special than I could ever explain to you.’ He drew back from her so that he could look into her eyes. ‘Do you think, Brooke, that you could ever love me?’
Brooke’s heart was thumping hard. ‘Let’s play it by ear, Ramon. All right? See how it goes.’
‘But you … you like me?’
She could see the dangerous light in his eyes. ‘You’re a very charming man,’ she forced herself to say. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been the kind of woman who …’ She hesitated. ‘Who rushes into things. You know what I’m saying, don’t you?’
‘Yes. You are saying you would refuse me.’
Brooke said nothing.
‘I will give you everything, Brooke. Do anything to please you. But you cannot refuse me. I could not bear that.’
She swallowed hard. ‘I won’t refuse you.’
‘Tonight, I regret to say that you must dine without me. I have some business to attend to. Afterwards, when I return … will you come to me? Here, in my personal quarters?’
‘Tonight?’
‘I will send for you,’ he said. ‘Will you be ready for me then?’
Brooke was suddenly very cold.
‘You and I,’ he whispered, holding her tightly again. ‘You have no idea how much I have longed for it.’
The guards led Brooke back to her room. She leaned against the door, heard the click of the lock sliding home. Footsteps padded away and the guards’ voices faded into the distance.
And only then did all the pent-up tension burst out of her in a sobbing gasp. So this was it. Serrato had finally made his move. That night she’d be summoned to him, like the slave girl to the master. To be claimed. To be made his kept whore.
And if she refused, he’d kill her. There was no doubt whatsoever about that.
Slowly, she peeled herself away from the door and crossed the room. That was when she noticed that the windows looked different. Where before they’d been unopenable, now they had latch handles. She tried one. It glided smoothly open as far as the steel bars would allow, letting the breeze into the room.
Brooke nodded to herself. Her plan couldn’t have started coming together any later now that the clock was truly ticking. But it wasn’t fresh air she was interested in. She went through into the bedroom and saw to her relief that the men who’d fixed the windows had also obeyed their instructions to fit a mosquito net to the four-poster. The translucent micro-netting hung down from the canopy almost to the floor.
Perfect. Now for a small experiment.
In the bathroom, she picked up one of the Chanel perfume bottles. She unscrewed the cap of the spray nozzle and poured a few drops of the liquid into the sink. Then, slipping two fingers into the cup of her bra, she took out the slim lighter she’d stolen from the cigar-smoking guard on the stairs when she’d pretended to stumble. A bra was the only place you could quickly hide anything when you were forced to wear such impractical clothing all the time. As frightened as she’d been that Serrato was going to try to touch her earlier, she’d been even more terrified that he might find the lighter there.
She pressed the little piezo switch and an inch-long tongue of yellow flame darted from the lighter. She lowered it into the sink, touched the flame to the tiny pool of perfume, and drew her hand away quickly as it flared up with a brief but spectacular whoosh. That was what just a few drops of the stuff could produce. There was about a litre of it sitting on her bathroom shelf.
She squirted a load more perfume into the air and then sprayed hairspray all over the place to cover up any smell of burning that might have escaped the bathroom. Then, shaking with nerves now that her plan was finally about to become a reality, she started attending to the rest of her arrangements.
Time passed. Dinner was served to her in her room: a plate of cold meats and salad on a tray together with a half-bottle of chilled wine. She was too anxious to touch any of it. Instead she emptied a pack of cotton makeup-remover pads into the bin in the bathroom and used the empty plastic packaging to wrap up the cold meats.
Then all she could do was wait quietly in the bedroom, going over and over in her mind all that she needed to do. There was no going back any more. The alternative was unthinkable.
It was sometime before midnight when she heard the door unlock. Moments later, Hatchet Face appeared in the bedroom doorway. She was carrying a slim white box like the one Consuela had brought to Brooke’s room on the first night.
Hatchet Face laid the box down on the bed. Her lips drew back into a sly smile, revealing the gaps in her teeth. She reached her big, coarse hands into the box and pulled out a silky garment that she held up for Brooke to see.
The negligee was so insubstantial and transparent that it made the nightdress Serrato had given her before look like something a prude would wear. There was something else in the box: Brooke peered inside and saw the flimsy colour-matched stockings and suspenders.
‘You put on,’ Hatchet Face said. ‘Señor Serrato, he wait for you.’
Chapter Forty-Two
The torrid heat of a South American summer wrapped itself around Ben and Nico like a damp towel as they stepped off the overnight Iberia jet that had left wintry Madrid almost exactly twelve hours earlier, and crossed the tarmac at Jorge Chávez International Airport, Lima, Peru. By the time they’d got into arrivals their shirts were already sticking to them, and it was still early morning.
‘Two days ago I was worried about fucking frostbite,’ Nico muttered, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, going easy with the left one as the arm was bandaged to the elbow and still tender. Underneath the bandage were the dozen stitches that Ben had put into him back in Montefrio, using the little soldier-repair kit that always rattled around in the bottom of his bag. He winced.
‘You’ll live,’ Ben said.
‘You always say that. Question is, how long for?’
They were still a long way from their destination. After long delays in the cloying humidity, during which Ben changed most of his remaining cash for Peruvian nuevo sol, they boarded an internal flight to carry them the four hundred miles northwards to Chachapoyas.
The department of Amazonas was just one of Peru’s twenty-five separate regions, itself divided up into seven provinces and eighty-three districts. Chachapoyas was a city in the clouds, over seven thousand feet above sea level and surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains that made the Spanish Sierra Nevada seem like gentle hill country by comparison. Stretching out all around, the subtropical highlands of Amazonas’ rainforest looked from the air like an endless undulating blanket of green crisscrossed by tiny blue threads – the vast river system that covered thousands of square miles and fed into the mighty Amazon itself.
It was cooler in Chachapoyas, but the humidity was no less oppressive than it had been in Lima. After collecting Ben’s battered old bag, the only luggage the two travellers had between them, they managed to find a taxi to drive them along the desolate single road into the city.
‘I told you it was a backwater,’ Nico said. ‘Now what?’
Every delay, every second that went by without tangible progress was an added torment as Ben kept racing through every aspect and angle of the situation in his min
d. More and more, it was a conflict between the human, emotional and very frightened part of him that wanted desperately to keep moving on, and the cool professional who knew that panic and exhaustion were two of the greatest risks facing him right now. If he didn’t do this right, it would be Brooke who’d pay the price – if she hadn’t already.
He wilfully closed his mind to those kinds of thoughts. ‘First we need to make a base here,’ he told Nico. ‘A cool shower, a hot meal and a bed are our first priority before we make another move.’
All three were available for a handful of nuevo sol at a simple hotel near the centre of the city. As Ben stood under the shower that night, he thought about what was to come. His instinct told him he was entering the final phase of his search, but what lay ahead was still deeply uncertain. He’d stopped caring whether he got out of this in one piece. All that mattered to him was that Brooke did.
Was she really here? Was she still all right? The questions haunted him deep into the night. He wondered whether she had any idea he was looking for her. Or would she be unconscious, drugged by her captors? What, if anything, was he going to find when he got there? After hours of sleepless torment, he got up and went across the dark room to the mini-bar. Only when the floor was littered with empty bottles was he able to crawl back to bed and fall into a fevered sleep.
When he awoke around dawn, he remembered Amal and realised it had been days since he’d made contact. It would be late morning in London. Ben sat on the edge of the bed and dialled the number.
Amal picked up instantly, as if he’d been hovering over the phone the entire time just waiting for Ben to call. His voice sounded croaky and distant, breaking up from the poor reception. ‘Where are you? You sound like you’re thousands of miles away.’
‘I think I know where she is,’ Ben said. ‘There’s a chance she’s still alive and I’m going in to find her.’
There was a speechless pause on the other end, followed by the sound of Amal swallowing hard. ‘Where? Tell me everyth—’ At that point the line went dead. Ben tried dialling once more, but when he couldn’t get through he didn’t try a third time. There was nothing more to say.
Feeling stiff and weary, Ben took another shower, then pulled on the last of the fresh clothes he had in his bag. He went downstairs, asked the guy in the lobby where he could get a map, and followed his directions to a newsagent’s stall down the street.
By the time Ben got back to the hotel, Nico was sitting in the bar waiting for him. He looked sombre. ‘I just tried calling Felipe again. That’s the sixth time since we left Montefrio. Still no reply.’
Ben said nothing. He was certain Morales was dead.
‘I need a coffee,’ Nico said. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’ They ordered the biggest pot the kitchen could brew up, and sat at a corner table where they spread the map out between them. Tracing his finger roughly northeast from Chachapoyas, Nico indicated the rough location of the tiny river village of San Tomás, the nearest settlement to Serrato’s compound. San Tomás itself was too tiny to feature on the map, but Nico was fairly certain of his bearings and in any case, he assured Ben, the region was filled with expert guides who could take them there.
‘We follow the highway out of Chachapoyas sixty, seventy miles,’ Nico said, pointing out the directions on the map, ‘then turn off and cut across towards the Potro River, right here. There’s a river station where you can hire a floatplane pilot to take you the rest of the way to San Tomás. It’s a hell of a quicker way than by road, believe me.’
Ben could easily believe it. He nodded. ‘That’ll do us.’
‘Once we get to San Tomás we’ll need another set of wheels to get us nearer to Serrato. But unless you’re planning on driving right up to his front gates, the final approach has to be on foot, through the jungle. It ain’t exactly a walk in the park. You ever been in jungle country before?’
As a young SAS recruit years earlier, Ben had undergone the inhuman endurance test of jungle training in Belize, where he and his patrol had had to learn to move quickly and silently in near-impossible conditions, testing their navigation and survival skills to the limit. Later he’d seen active service in Sierra Leone in West Africa and a dozen other black-ops jungle combat missions in war zones, official and unofficial, across the planet. ‘A little,’ was all he replied.
‘It’s another world, man. A green hell filled with everything that crawls and bites. Giant spiders, snakes longer than a Chevy Silverado. If those critters don’t get you, the diseases will, and it’s got them all. Yellow fever, malaria, dengue, hepatitis, typhoid, tetanus, cholera, fucking rabies. They say you’ve got to be nuts to go there without inoculations.’
Back in his regiment days the medics had regularly pumped Ben full of more drugs than he cared to count. The proper courses of vaccines took time to administer; anti-typhoid injections alone had to be spaced out over six months for the protection to work. He didn’t have six months to waste, or even six more hours. ‘Yeah, well, the art of living dangerously is just not to catch anything.’
‘Like not catching a bullet, I guess,’ Nico said, looking down at his arm.
‘I told you, you don’t have to come all the way. Just show me where to go.’
‘I’ve come this far, haven’t I?’ Nico said, stung. ‘You think I don’t want to finish it?’
‘Your choice,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not going to be responsible for you. Once we’re there, you slow me down, I’ll walk away. Get lost or hurt, I won’t come back for you. I’m there for one thing and one thing only. Understand?’
‘That’s what I like about you, Capitano – you’re so full of fucking encouragement.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ Ben said. He drained his coffee and stood up.
‘We moving?’
‘We’re moving.’
‘Then let’s get fucking moving,’ Nico said.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Toyota Hilux they rented from the place around the corner from the hotel was more rust than metal and would have been declared unroadworthy anywhere in Europe, but Ben didn’t care as long as it carried them as far as they needed. ‘Now we have some shopping to do,’ he told Nico.
For the next two hours they drove from store to store, from one end of Chachapoyas to the other gathering together the supplies they needed for jungle travel: bottled water, basic food, thick-soled boots and bush hats, heavy-duty torches and batteries, fire-making equipment, insect repellent, malaria tablets, water purifier tablets, a parang machete for chopping vegetation, and finally a pair of compact but powerful binoculars. Everything was stowed into Ben’s bag and a second lightweight rucksack, and cans of spare fuel were thrown into the back of the Toyota.
An hour after that, Chachapoyas was already far behind them as they headed rapidly northeastwards along the highway, passing by landscapes that would have blown anyone’s mind but Ben’s, totally focused as he was on his goal.
Nico seemed to have remembered the route well. After a long stretch of highway that became progressively less busy the further they got from Chachapoyas, Ben turned off onto a series of unsealed roads so potholed that it was like they had suffered artillery bombardment. On one narrow mountain pass, where nothing but the crumbling edge stood between them and a thousand-foot drop to the forest below, the road had been half swept away by an avalanche. Some way further on, as the road dropped in altitude into a verdant valley, they had to thread their way past a broken-down bus. More people than it seemed possible to cram into the dilapidated vehicle were crowding the roadside, many of them barefoot, some in rags, others in brightly-coloured and heavily embroidered tunics and ponchos. They were surrounded by luggage, children, dogs and a pair of noisily braying goats. A horde of excited nut-brown youngsters chased the Toyota as it passed by, looking as though they’d happily clamber on board and cling to the roof.
Ben drove on. The road continued to drop downwards, the mountain scenery long gone behind a screen of thick jungle. Even with the air conditionin
g on full blast the humidity was all-pervasive. The occasional glimpse through the endless green canopy overhead showed that the sky was darkening; clouds were gathering ominously. ‘Should be getting near the river station,’ Nico said, studying the map.
By the time they reached the boat station on the Potro River, the storm that Ben had been expecting for some time had finally been unleashed. The rain was more than torrential. It churned the ground into cascades of mud and lashed the surface of the river and the few sorry-looking craft moored up to the boat station. As they ran along the flimsy boardwalk for the shelter of a row of warped wooden huts, Nico pointed out the red-and-white single-engined floatplane bobbing unsteadily on the water by one of the jetties. ‘That’s our baby,’ he yelled over the downpour, but his words were drowned out by the rolling crash of thunder that made the water-filled air tremble.
They stood under the streaming canvas awning of the boat station and watched as the storm quickly gathered power. A violent lightning display filled the sky. The rain lashed down with ever more incredible force. The brown river water seemed to be rising before their eyes.
‘This can’t go on,’ Nico said.
Ben wasn’t so sure. Neither was the flying boat pilot they talked to half an hour later, who shook his head emphatically at the notion of taking his plane out in this weather and told them in rapid-fire Spanish that he’d lived and worked on this river man and boy and seen these storms go on for days at a stretch.
For a wild moment, Ben seriously considered offering to buy the plane so that he could fly the damn thing himself. There had to be some way to get the funds transferred, even out here, and he’d flown all types of light aircraft in the past. But even as the idea was churning over in his mind, another violent streak of lightning knifed through the clouds and struck the tall trees on the opposite bank just a quarter of a mile downriver with terrible force. He gritted his teeth. It seemed there was little choice but to sit it out.
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