The Deepest Cut

by Conor Corderoy

  I grabbed my things and slung them into the Audi, closed the smoked windows then drove out of the airbase, like I was heading out for a breath of air. As I turned onto the highway, headed south, I shook free a Camel and lit up, inhaling deeply and gratefully. Then I laughed—a lot and a bit crazily but figured I was justified.

  I drove for half an hour, not knowing where I was going, not checking the tracker, trying to be as random as I could. Eventually I saw a faint glow beyond some sand dunes and took the next dirt track in that direction. After ten minutes, I saw a small, ramshackle town in the distance. I pulled off the road and behind a low hill. I figured I had maybe four hours before first light. I was asleep in seconds, with the Sig on my lap. Any son of a bitch who tried to arrest me that night was going to die.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dawn came at six a.m. The first thing I did was pee in the dirt, make a paste and plaster it on the license plates so they were covered in desert dust and grime. Then I fired up the Audi and made my way into the town.

  It wasn’t much of a place, maybe thirty houses and a couple of tea shops. I noticed the buildings were all new, but there was no factory or plant that I could see, and there were very few plantations of crops. I wondered what the purpose of the town was. I stopped on a dirt esplanade in the shade of a palm tree, where the car’s plates wouldn’t be too visible. Then I climbed out and walked over to an inn that doubled as a tea shop that was just opening. The guy was wearing a djellaba and had a face like a desiccated date. He watched me with caution but no interest, which was odd, because I must have looked as though I’d just gone ten rounds with a grizzly on steroids.

  I smiled as I approached. “You speak English? Coffee?” I made a drinking motion. “Breakfast?” I made an Italian gesture at my open mouth.

  He turned toward the open door and shouted a lot then carried on setting out tables and chairs like I wasn’t there. A few seconds later, a boy of about fourteen came out, wearing a grown man’s moustache.

  He went into a frenzy of grinning and said what sounded like, “I am Habib. You are from Gh’listicor? You would like coffee and breakfast? You are hurt? You want doctor? I can get doctor for you.”

  I said, “Slow down. Coffee and some breakfast sounds good. I don’t need a doc. What is…?” I made a noise like I was trying to remember the name of a Scottish lake and squinted at him.

  He grinned harder, if that were possible, and said, with great deliberation, “Ghal-isti-cor. You are from them?”

  I looked like I suddenly realized what he was saying and nodded. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s right. Bring me a pot of coffee and some ktaif or m’hancha, would you?”

  He went away and I sat searching at the dirt road and the hills, wondering what Ghal-isti-cor might be. Then I got a flash of a hippie VW camper van and the license plate of the truck I was following. Kallisti. The goddess of chaos. The Kallisti Corp.

  The kid Habib came out with a big pot of coffee and a plate with two m’hancha on it—‘snake cakes’. He put them down in front of me and I handed him a months’ wages. His eyes popped.

  I smiled and said, “Listen, Habib, maybe you can help me. I have an important job at the Kallisti Corp. They were expecting me yesterday. But”—I laughed like a stupid Westerner who knows someone as smart as Habib would never do anything this stupid and said—“but I got lost in the desert, and I was mugged.”

  “Muckt?”

  “Some men tried to steal my things.”

  His eyes and his mouth made three perfect Os. I let him catch a glimpse of the Sig and winked. “They didn’t get anything, but I am lost. I need to find the Kallisti Corp. You know where it is?”

  He nodded vigorously and waved his hands about a lot. “Yes! Yes! Many people here working there. Is near!”

  “Tell me.”

  He jumped into the road and made a manic motion like he was throwing a spear in the opposite direction from where I’d come. “You go down, down, down, down…”

  “Okay, I go down the road…”

  Then he started dancing, throwing his arm over to the right, “Then you go, there, there, there…”

  “I turn right.”

  “Yeah, the road turning, turning, turning”—he danced like a baby trying to rock’n’roll—“and, maybe ten minutes, you come.”

  “I come…”

  “Yuh, big fence and soldiers.”

  I thought about it for a minute then nodded. “Okay. Give me a room for the night. I’m going to have a shower and a sleep, then lunch. Okay?”

  He beamed. “Okay, mister!”

  I slept like the dead, only without the decomposition. I awoke at half two, expecting the place to be overrun with soldiers all shouting in Ugly. But it was quiet, except for the sound of the old guy outside sweeping the sand. I guess it made sense to him. That was what my life is all about, trying to get things to make sense.

  I showered, ate a lamb tajin and drank a couple of gallons of sweet mint tea. Then I stepped out into the heat and the dust. I drove along the dust road, going ‘down, down, down, down,’ until I came to a junction. It was the only place on the whole plain where I could turn right, so I took it. The kid had been right. The road became a wide track, winding among sand dunes that grew bigger as I went deeper. I followed the track for seven minutes, driving slowly, trying not to raise too much dust, then pulled off the track and parked behind a couple of dunes. Then I set out on foot.

  The heat was like nothing I had experienced before. It must have been well over fifty Centigrade. There was no smell to the air except the warm odor of toasted dust. The sun burned and the occasional breeze was more of a hot wind that dried your skin and made it feel hotter.

  I struggled over the dust and loose stones, clambering up and down hills and dunes for about five minutes, which in that kind of heat and terrain feels more like half an hour. Then I came on it suddenly. I had reached the top of a hill, and I saw a broad plain stretch out in front of me. It was probably twenty or thirty miles square. The earth was a pale gray, almost white, with sparse, stunted shrubs, but nothing else—save rocks and stones—to relieve the dead tedium of the landscape.

  But in the hot glare of the sun, I noticed something in the middle of the plain that made me drop and crawl to the crest of the hill on my belly. It was probably no more than two or three hundred yards away, and once you knew it was there, it was easy to see. But I figured that from the sky—or to a satellite—it was all but invisible.

  It was a series of twenty-five hangars set out in a series of concentric pentagons. They were painted the same gray-white as the earth, and the space between each concentric set of hangars was draped with a pale-gray camouflage cloth. It was hard at this distance to see what was beneath the cloth, but I thought I’d caught glimpses of green, as though they were crops of some sort. There was a perimeter fence with five watchtowers and barbed wire, and I could see armed soldiers patrolling the area with dogs. I took the tracker from my pocket. The container was there, by the looks of it in one of the outer hangars. But that didn’t tell me where Maria was. She could be anywhere by now.

  I lay there for about twenty minutes, getting heatstroke, and counted a total of twenty guards. There were Jeeps and Toyota trucks. They all had army insignia. This was obviously a joint operation between the Algerian government and the Kallisti Corporation. And that was going to make breaking in hard.

  I scrambled down the hill and made my way back toward the car. I was beginning to hallucinate about frosted tankards of ice cold beer and big chunks of cucumber and watermelon. I knew I was becoming dehydrated and it was time to head back to the inn.

  I switched on the air con as I pulled back onto the track. The circulation helped, but my mouth was dry, like I’d been eating dirt. I made myself focus on what I needed to do next. The engine whined and complained as I bumped onto the track. It was cool inside, but outside the glare was fierce. I told myself I had two clear short-term objectives. I had to get Maria out, and I had to get a mess
age to Russell and Hook, telling them where this place was. We had been really quick to jump in, but we had not thought about an extraction strategy. “Just observe,” Tom had said, but he’d known I couldn’t do that. So had Hook. The million-dollar question I couldn’t answer was whether we were still playing del Roble’s game or whether my arrest had thrown them off. If we were playing del Roble’s game, my cell was being monitored, and if I called Russell or Hook, he would know about it.

  I thought about driving to the nearest town and mugging some random guy to use his phone, but it would take too long. And it was a safe guess all the cells in the village were being monitored, so I couldn’t use any of theirs—if we were still playing his game.

  I turned it over from every angle, but as I pulled back into the village and parked, I was still no nearer a solution. If I got Maria out without a good extraction plan, we were as good as dead—or worse.

  Habib was sweeping when I stepped into the shade of the building. I was about to head up the stairs when, thinking about that ice-cold beer, I said, “Habib, is it possible, for the right price, to get a cold beer?”

  He gave me a big, leering wink and said, “Go up! Go up! I bring! Often I bring bosses at Gh’listicor.”

  I went up. My head was splitting, but the shutters were half-closed against the heat and the room was cool. I threw my clothes on top of the kitbag that was laying on the chest of drawers then stepped into the bathroom for a cold shower. The cool water brought me around and cleared my head and I stood for two whole minutes letting it run over me, thinking of nothing. It was while I was toweling myself dry that I heard Habib knock.

  “Mister? I come in? I bring?”

  I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the bathroom door, calling, “Come on in!”

  He had a six-pack of Carlsberg and a bucket of ice. His hands were full and he was looking around for somewhere to put it all. He spotted my clothes on the chest of drawers and made a beeline for it, babbling as he went. “Oh! Excuse me. I put off and make a room.”

  Before I could stop him, he’d stuck the beer in the bucket and grabbed my clothes and the kitbag and slung them onto the bed. The Sig dropped out at his feet and, next to it, the note from Hook.

  He glanced down at them, grinned at me and said, “Sorry, sorry…” Then he put the bucket on the dresser and went to leave.

  I said, “Wait.” I picked up my pants and pulled out a ten-dinar note. I gave it to him and winked. I said, “Thanks, Habib. You’re a good kid.” He had seen the Sig that morning and it hadn’t fazed him. But it couldn’t do any harm to keep him sweet.

  After Habib left me, I bent down, picked up the note and realized I hadn’t read it yet. Things had moved so fast. I cracked a beer, drained half then sat on the bed. I opened the note and cursed myself for a damned fool for not having read it in the beginning.

  It was brief, with instructions on the use of the tracker and the Sig, all of which Tom had covered back in Dover. What he hadn’t covered was the last, two-line paragraph.

  When you need extracting, call this number. Say something meaningless. We’ll call you back. We will be untraceable. You say nothing. Just listen.

  The number followed. I memorized it, tore the note into small pieces and flushed it down the pan.

  I drained the remains of the beer. Then I opened the shutters and sat with my feet on the wrought-iron railings of the small balcony.

  I dialed the number and an efficient female voice said, “Albion Counsel, how can I help you?”

  I said, “Hey, babe, it’s me. I’m missing you, sweetheart. I want to come home and make sweet love to you tomorrow, but I don’t know if I can.”

  She was good. She wasn’t fazed. She said, “Thank you, caller. We’ll get back to you shortly.”

  I said, “Oh, babe, don’t hang up—” but it was too late. The line was dead.

  I cracked another beer and sat for ten minutes, sipping it, looking at the burned, gray landscape outside. Then the phone rang. I said, “Yeah.”

  It was Hook. He said, “Simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. Understood?”

  “Yup.”

  “Have you got the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Will you have her in the next twenty-four hours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sooner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it look like a research facility?”

  “Yes.”

  “I assume you’re going for her tonight. Take the tracker with you. Switch it on. Be well out of there by o-nine-hundred hours. Is that understood?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Shut up!”

  I was silent.

  He went on, “Steal vehicles. Head west to Morocco. Suggest Igli, Madkha Meski, then north to Meknes and Ceuta. Then Spain. Our man will intercept you. Is that understood?”

  “Yup.”

  The line went dead. I said, “Thanks, doll. I feel better already.”

  I spent the next few hours dozing, rubbing ice cubes over my bruises and drinking beer. At six o’clock there was a knock at the door. I slipped the Sig in my waistband behind my back, put on a shirt then opened the door. I guessed we were still playing del Roble’s game. It was the dame with the triangular face from Llyn Celyn. For some reason, I wasn’t surprised to see her. Before I could speak, she smiled. It was a cute smile, almost apologetic.

  She said, “Hello, Murdoch.”

  I thought about romantic but went for accommodating instead and said, “What do you want?”

  “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

  “I let you in once before, remember?”

  She was short. She ducked under my arm and was inside. I closed the door and turned to face her. Her smile had changed. It was still cute but now it was mischievous instead of apologetic.

  She said, “Are you going to tell me you didn’t enjoy it?”

  “Sure, I enjoyed it. I thought you were somebody else. If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

  She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She said, “We both know you’re lying, Murdoch. You are a decent, honorable man.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “And you are faithful to your lady. But all of that…” She stepped over real close to me, so our bodies were touching, and placed one finger on my temple. “All of that is in your head. Biology will not be denied, Murdoch, and your body wants me. Admit it.”

  I wanted to deny it but I couldn’t because she was rubbing her thigh against the hard evidence while she was talking.

  I held her gaze and thought of Maria, imprisoned in the container, trapped right now in the complex in the desert. I thought of her eyes looking at me, calling for help. The hard evidence wilted. I asked, “What do you want?”

  A flash of anger contracted her face and she stepped away from me toward the French windows. The sky had turned pink outside and somewhere some goats were bleating to a dull bell.

  She said, “Del Roble knows you’re here.”

  “Yeah, I’d got that far on my own, sister. Do I have to ask you again or shall I just throw you over the balcony?”

  She looked back at me over her shoulder. “You need an ally. I can help you.”

  “This is the last time I’m going to ask you. One more bullshit answer and you are going over the balcony. What do you want?”

  She smiled. “Everything they say about you is true.” She walked back to me and placed both her palms on my chest. “I want you to take me with you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I laughed out loud. “How stupid do you and del Roble think I am?” I shook my head. “And how fucking bored are you?”

  “It’s not a ploy, Murdoch. If he knew I was making this offer, he would kill me…”

  “So where the hell does he think you are right now?”

  She appeared irritated, like I was being dense. “You may not have noticed, bright boy, but this is the only place around here you can get a beer. We often come here for a cold
beer when we have time off.”

  It was so weirdly normal it was probably true. I shrugged. “Okay. So?”

  Her eyebrow twitched and she glanced away. “He knows you have to make your move tonight or tomorrow. You can’t risk waiting any longer. He will make it possible for you to get in and, once you are inside, he will close the trap.”

  I said, “Then?”

  She looked at the broken green tiles on the floor. “Then he will do horrific things to you and to Maria. You will be an example.”

  “An example?”

  She walked over and sat on the bed. “Catherine Howard and Sinead escaped. They betrayed him and they escaped. The Brotherhood tried to suppress it, but the rumors got out.” She held my gaze. “Not all of us are happy, Murdoch. Not all of us support their method of doing things. Some of us believe there is another way. But if you betray them…”

  I said, “But Sinead and Mary-Jane escaped…”

  She nodded. “So, you and Maria have to pay the price, to be an example to the rest of us. Especially people like me.”

  There were two beers left in the ice bucket. I cracked them and handed one to her. “People like you?”

  “I’m a hybrid.”

  I took a swig and rested my ass against the chest of drawers. “What does that mean?”

  She stood and walked around so she was sitting on the near side of the bed. I had the window behind me and a cool breeze sent a chill down my back. The desert can drop to freezing during the dark hours.

  She said, “Yes, I’m genetically modified. I’m only part human.”

  I gave a laugh like I didn’t believe her, made as if I checked my cell and looked out of the window while I clicked ‘record’. The dark was closing in fast. I said, “I didn’t believe that crap the first time I heard it. I still don’t believe it now.”