There was a short note. I glanced at it but left it on a cushion while I had a look at the rest of the gear. There was a thing that seemed like a cell phone and fit in the palm of your hand.
I picked it up and Tom said, “The other part of that is stuck under the container. That’s your monitor. You’ll have to configure it. It uses voice recognition and, once you’ve programmed it, it will only respond to you. You switch it on with the word ‘track’ and ‘off’ is off.”
I nodded, put it down on the note and turned to the other stuff. There was a Sig Sauer P226 Tacops 9mm with a threaded barrel and four twenty-round magazines. I tested it. It was nice and comfortable but felt light after my cannon.
Tom said, “A tad more sophisticated than your ‘Big Bertha’. It has night-vision sights, a silencer and it’s made of a carbon polymer that makes it undetectable to border security. You might need that if you go beyond France into North Africa or the Middle East. I shouldn’t think you’ll be hunting rhino, so I suggest you leave your monster here. I can get it to Russell, if you like.”
There was a state-of-the-art hand-held GPS, a pack of water-sterilizing tablets and a small, high-resolution camera. I examined everything and put it back in the kitbag. I took a pull on my whiskey and lit a Camel. I said, “How much do you know?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what I don’t know, so I can’t tell you.”
“Cute.”
“I know enough. I’ve discussed it with Reggie. I know about del Roble.”
“Is he still ahead of us? Are we still playing his game? Or did we just steal a march on him?”
He heaved a deep sigh and studied the whiskey in his glass, like it contained a map of the future. “That’s very hard to tell, Murdoch. I’d say he wants you to follow the container, so, as far as that goes, you’re still playing his game. Does he know we’re involved? Your guess is as good as mine. As a rule of thumb, I’d say, once he starts trying to kill you, you’ll know you’ve stepped out of his game plan.” He glanced at his watch. “Time to board, I think.”
We stepped out into the cool dawn air. Over in the east, the sky was turning a pale, mournful gray. A light drizzle had started. Somewhere in the North Sea a foghorn moaned and overhead a seagull cried out and seemed to laugh. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t see anything to laugh about.
Chapter Fifteen
There was nothing but scorched sand as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t yellow, the way you see it in the movies. It was gray, rust-red and black under a white sky. I was headed south and east into the heart of Algeria. That had been more than ten hours ago. Now I was rattling down a road in my Daemon that I could barely make out in an endless ocean of dirt and dust.
The heat was insane. The rocks, the sand and the chassis of the Land Rover were all too hot to touch. The air con had given up the ghost coming out of the Atlas Mountains, just south of Beni Boussaid, and I had all the windows open and my shirt undone. But it was still scorching and I was running sweat.
In Boulogne I’d waited for the shops to open and bought myself a couple of shirts, some linen pants and some desert boots. I’d had a hunch I’d be needing them. By the time I was done, they had an eight-hour lead on me and the tracking device was telling me the truck was nearing the Pyrenees. It looked like they were aiming to cross into Spain at the eastern end, via Cerbère, which suggested they were making for North Africa via Ceuta. They had a good start on me, but I hadn’t been too worried. I figured if I didn’t rest too much, I’d catch them before they reached Algeciras.
But they’d hammered the truck and had driven, as Tom had suggested, a full twenty-four hours nonstop, and by the time I crossed the mountains, they still had a good lead on me. It had cost me three hundred euros in fines, but by the evening of the second day, I’d closed the gap on them. At three o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled into Algeciras, where my tracker told me they had dropped the container at the docks. I’d caught up with them.
I’d cruised down and parked near the port, climbed out of the TVR then took a walk along the nearest docks. From what I could see, there was an armed cordon around the container parks. In an economy as crippled as Spain’s after its recent civil conflict, it figured that any foreign trade would be heavily protected. Looking at the tracker, I could see roughly the area where the container was. The thought of Maria being so close and kept in those inhumane conditions had made me sick to my stomach, but getting to her in broad daylight, with fifty or sixty armed guards around her, was going to be impossible. I would have to wait till nightfall. Late.
I was ready to drop and would probably have been useless anyway. I’d climbed back in the car and set about searching for a posada where I could eat and sleep. I ended up at the Alborán, just off the main drag and a short walk from the docks. I took my luggage out of the trunk, had a Martini and a steak, a long, hot shower and slept for nearly eight hours solid. By the time I’d got up and showered again, it was midnight. I dressed and went downstairs.
The hotel was pseudo Moroccan tacky in the way only pseudo Moroccan tacky can be. There were lots of eastern arches and cushions that loudly disagreed with each other but weren’t prepared to do anything about it except shout. It managed to be sumptuous without being luxurious and, by the way the receptionist assessed me as I crossed the lobby, I knew the most he could get me on the black market was a ticket to a depressing cabaret involving bored women in nylon veils.
I climbed into the Daemon and drove the short distance to the port. It’s a cliché, but the night was sultry. It was hot and humid and the air was full of possibilities you really didn’t want to happen. Everywhere you looked there was cheap sex on offer among the ruins of recent war. Bombed-out buildings stood like broken teeth in a leer of death. Groups of soldiers—seemingly too frightened and too young to play with guns—patrolled the streets, eyeing the cheap whores who called to them in listless provocation.
The container park at the Algeciras docks is on an island just off the port, which you get to via a long bridge. There was still tight security and, at the entrance to the bridge, an armed sergeant demanded to see my pass and my ID. My ID was my passport and my pass was a fifty euro note I’d accidentally left in the back. He pocketed the fifty, handed back my passport and jerked his head in a move-on gesture. I guessed nobody was expecting an American in a swanky English sports car to start busting open containers. I’d play it along like this as far as I could, then I’d try to lose myself in the shadows.
I crossed the bridge and drove along the north side of the island, where I finally pulled up into a desolate, concrete car park and took the tracker out of my pocket. I hadn’t checked it since four that afternoon. I didn’t give a damn what Russell and Hook expected of me. If Maria was here, I was going to blow the lock and get her out.
But I also knew the container would have a shipping number stenciled onto it. Whether I could get her out or not, I could use that number to find out when it was shipping, with what company and to where. That kind of information could put me—and Russell and Hook—one step ahead of the game instead of playing catch-up all the time.
I switched on the tracker. It took a few seconds to connect to the satellite, then it told me what I didn’t want to know. The container had shipped while I had been sleeping. I swore under my breath. It was halfway across the Alborán Sea, heading toward Morocco. By the looks of it, toward Ceuta. I swore again, more loudly, climbed back into the Daemon and hammered across the bridge. A left at the roundabout took me to the passenger port. Everything was closed. A timetable on a public information board told me the last ferry had gone at eleven p.m. The first in the morning would be at four a.m. If it was going beyond Morocco—and it almost certainly was—the container, with its cargo, would be hundreds of miles away long before I’d had my first coffee.
And that created a whole new problem. The Daemon. On highways and motorways, I could hit the gas and close the gap pretty fast. But I couldn’t take the Daemon into the Sahara. It just w
asn’t built for that kind of terrain. I would need a good 4X4, but that would reduce my speed by two-thirds or more. I was looking at averaging thirty to fifty miles per hour most of the way. I’d be matching their speed, topping it by twenty miles per hour at best. That meant that before I’d caught up with them, the container would deposit its cargo and head back toward London. I’d cross my tracking device on the road, returning, without an exact location for where the girls had been dropped. It was a disaster.
One of the few things I’ve learned in life is that you play the hand you’re dealt, and there is no point worrying about things you can’t fix. So, I found the long-term car park, locked up my TVR then went to look for a restaurant and a whiskey.
Algeciras is one of the ugliest towns on Earth, on the inside and on the outside. Nighttime didn’t make it any less ugly. All that changed was the ugly people who slept through the daylight hours came out in the dark, like geckos, to lurk on the fringes of dull streetlamps, waiting for something weaker than themselves to come along so they could prey on it. I didn’t look weaker than anyone I saw on my way back from the docks, and, if I spotted more than three in a group, I made sure they got a glimpse of the Sig in my belt. When they did, they understood I was the meanest son of a bitch in their particular valley and gave me a wide berth.
I found a late-night joint that didn’t look too bad. I had a steak and two large whiskeys and went to my room for another two hours’ sleep.
* * * *
The ferry pulled into Ceuta just after five as the eastern horizon was turning a dirty, grainy gray. It was already getting warm and there were damp patches showing through my linen shirt. I found a Hertz car rental manned by a guy who seemed determined to grin too much, even though he was already at work at five a.m. I rented a Land Rover Defender, which is the best 4X4 ever built, bought twelve liters of water then climbed into the cab.
When I was behind the wheel, I checked the tracking monitor. They had six hours on me and they had made them count. They were in the Atlas Mountains, approaching the border with Algeria.
Now, ten hours later, I was crashing out of the mountains and hurtling into a broad plain where all I could see was dust, heat-mirages and desiccated emptiness. My head ached, my neck ached, my whole damned body ached, but I couldn’t stop. Ahead of me, to the south and east, I could just make out the black rim of a mountain range on the horizon. The Illizi Highlands. I glanced at the clock on the dash. It was four o’clock. The hottest two hours were ahead. I wiped sweat from my eyes and wondered how much longer I could keep going before I had to rest. I took the tracker from the seat beside me and snapped, “Track!” It told me they were in the Grand Erg Oriental Desert, headed toward the Tassili N’Ajjer Mountains, the black rim I could see to the southeast. The road straightened out ahead of me and I floored the pedal in top gear. The big V8 struggled to eighty miles per hour and stayed there. It was the most it was going to give me.
I kept up that rate for the next two hours. At six o’clock it started to get dark. Night falls real fast in the desert, and by six-ten the west was a blaze of orange and purple, and the east was a deep, midnight blue. My eyes were aching and I was thinking I needed to pull over for an hour to have a sleep, when something caught my eye in the distance, away in the south-east. It was like a flash of silver light, like a distant headlamp, only above the horizon, in the air. I looked again, but it was gone.
I drove another five minutes, trying to eke out every mile I could before resting. Then it hit me—a flash so intense that the desert and the sky disappeared. I hit the brakes and heard the tires scream. The Defender slewed on the sand and dust on the blacktop. There was a loud ‘whoomph’ and next thing the flash had passed and I was staring out into the deepening darkness of the desert. In the sky to my right, I could see a small red light moving slowly. It seemed to stop and hover. Then it began to flash red, yellow, blue and green. I hit the gas and realized the Defender had stalled. I turned the ignition but nothing happened. It was totally dead. I swore under my breath and tried again, keeping an eye on the light.
It seemed to swell and pulse for a moment. Then the flash again, so intense everything vanished and I covered my head with my arms. Again, the sound, ‘whoomph’ and the Land Rover rocked on its suspension. The light vanished. I raised my head. Outside, it was still and dark. No dust had been whipped up by a slipstream. There was nothing, only the stillness of the desert. I tried the ignition. Nothing, not even the choking cough of a dying battery. I climbed out of the cab and stood looking around me. I found it over to the east, winking red and yellow and blue and green, sitting maybe two hundred feet above ground, watching me. I couldn’t tell how far away it was, maybe a mile or two. Maybe more. Then I noticed it had begun to creep closer. A cold prickle of fear skimmed my skin.
Soon I could make out that the colors were a kind of rainbow prism of intense light around a solid object. It was maybe fifty foot across, saucer-shaped and featureless. It was completely silent in its movement and didn’t seem to disturb the air around it. There were no eddies, currents or slipstreams. At three hundred yards, the winking, swirling prism went out and left a dull, silver glow. The object was metallic. I knew what I was looking at was the classic UFO flying saucer that the crazies were always talking about on conspiracy sites. I thought of Russell and Hook and their crazy theories and I felt sick.
Then it was over me, filling the whole sky. Now I could hear a faint humming sound and my skin tingled. My heart was pounding high up in my chest and I was struggling to breathe and keep a cool head. There was another, massive flash of white light and I found myself curled up in the dust with my arms over my head. The sky was empty and completely still, apart from the distant, frozen stars. The dust was chilly under my hands as I pushed myself up. I scanned the sky for the red light. It was gone. I turned to stagger toward the Defender and saw its headlamps were on and the engine was idling.
I clambered into the driver’s seat and fumbled for a Camel. I flipped my Zippo, lit up and sat smoking, staring out of the windshield. Had it happened? Had I had a hallucination brought on by fatigue? I rubbed my face with both hands. That was what I wanted to believe and it was what I chose to believe, but I knew damn well what I’d seen was as real as the Land Rover I was driving. I put the Defender in gear then pulled off the road. I killed the engine and allowed myself two hours’ sleep.
I awoke with a start. It was still dark. Outside there was absolute stillness in the desert. The stars were winking like tiny particles of ice. I was aware they had changed their positions. I was also aware the horizon had changed. The mountains were higher. The lay of the desert was different. The road was in a different place. I looked at the clock. Exactly two hours had passed.
I swore violently, hit the ignition, put the engine into gear and hit the road. While I was driving, I fumbled for the tracker and shouted, “Track!” The container was at rest, maybe a hundred and fifty miles away. I pushed the Land Rover to eighty miles per hour. My headlamps were on full beam and all I could see was the coned funnel of light ahead of me in the blackness. The road was straight and there was a kind of craziness to the way it was rushing at me. A voice in my head kept telling me I had seen a UFO and somehow been transported almost six-hundred miles in two hours. But the thought was too crazy and I pushed it away. What I needed to focus on was that the container had stopped and was within my reach, two hours away. I didn’t know how, but it was, and I had to grab that opportunity with both hands.
I’d been hammering the road maybe ten or fifteen minutes before it turned sharp right. I slowed as much as I could to take the corner and began to accelerate out of the bend when I was blinded by a sudden flood of intense light. A voice in my head swore and said, “Not again!” I slammed on the brakes and shielded my eyes with my left arm. Through the glare, I saw uniformed figures with submachine guns slung across their chests. They were jumping around in front of me, holding up their hands and shouting at me. I screeched to a halt feet away from
their barrier.
I was as mad as a bear with a hornet up his ass and was bellowing at them and punching the wheel. It wasn’t smart. A captain marched up to the driver’s door with two grunts and wrenched it open. He was screaming something at me in Ugly. I shouted back at him but then all three of them were grabbing at me and dragging me onto the road. As I stumbled down, I saw three more grunts training their weapons on me. One of them caught me by the back of the neck and another was twisting my arm. The captain was pointing his pistol at my head, still bellowing at me like an angry fishwife.
Then some future hero of the People’s Revolution smashed me in the kidneys with a rifle butt. I bit back a shout of pain and someone, probably the same SOB, kicked me in the back of the knee and I went down. Then the whole world was a rain of kicks, boots and rifle butts. All I could do in a moment like that was to sacrifice my dignity to the fetal position and hope the beating ended soon. After a bit, the pain stopped being intense and became a generalized, dull ache. I picked up a few bruises on my back and legs but managed to salvage my good looks.
Next thing, two of Algeria’s finest were pulling me to my feet and pushing me toward an open-top Jeep. The captain was still pointing his weapon at me and yelling as he took swipes at my face. They pushed me in the back and the captain climbed in the front and turned to keep his pistol trained on me. I noted it was a Desert Eagle and was glad I was beginning to think and react. I didn’t look at the Land Rover. I didn’t want them thinking it contained anything but my luggage. I really didn’t need them finding the Sig or asking me what the tracking monitor was. But, as we pulled away, I could see two guys climbing in, like they were searching for something.
We drove at speed, heading south. After five minutes, we hit a roundabout and crossed it without pausing. Then the road bore left at a gas plant illuminated by vast spotlights, like a giant football field. A road sign said In Amenas and next thing we were driving through a squalid, desolate town where nightlife was a frightened, timorous crime against authority, and the streetlamps revealed nothing but empty pavements and dark, silent doorways and windows.
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