by Nick Louth
They passed a line of houseboats, jerrybuilt structures festooned with house plants, homemade trellis work and washing lines. On one a woman sat in a swimsuit, reading under an umbrella with a cat on her lap, waiting for the sun to break through.
They passed sedately under another hump-backed brick bridge just as a maroon van crossed it, tyres hissing on the rain-greased cobbles.
‘His only other pastime was fitness. It was a secret passion, an obsession. I once watched him through the crack of the door do one hundred one-handed press-ups in two minutes.’
‘One handed! I can manage about one and a half.’
‘He said his ambition was to build himself a floating gym out of an old Rhine barge, so he could be away from everybody.’
‘That might be a clue. Did he ever own a barge?’
‘I don’t think so, but maybe. He hid a lot of his life from me. He had the money, that’s for sure.’
‘Did you meet any of his friends?’
‘Friends, no. People do what Anvil wants through fear, or in my case excitement and fear. For him there is nothing in between, nothing equal enough to be called friendship.’
‘What about you, Lisbeth?’
‘I need friendship, and I need time to heal. In every way.’ She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She held Max’s arm gently. The sun had come out and the captain rolled back the glass boat roof to murmurs of appreciation from the passengers.
They were now heading back towards the jetties. Lisbeth opened her eyes, suddenly gave a little shriek and squeezed Max’s hand.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Get down quick.’ She pulled Max down behind a Korean couple.
‘Anvil,’ Lisbeth said. ‘On the next pier.’
‘Where?’ Max said, peering under the panning video camera of the Korean man ‘Jesus, I wish I knew what he looked like.’
‘Short pale hair and a burn shaped like a dagger on his forehead and nose. But don’t look for him. He’ll spot you easily that way.’
The tour boat moved in slowly, taking a different pier to the one they began on. Passengers jostled to get off. Max and Lisbeth joined the queue, trying to mingle with the others, heads down.
‘How did he know we were here?’ Lisbeth hissed. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Well he’s here and that’s that. Next thing is to figure how we survive the experience.’ Max could feel Lisbeth trembling violently against him.
They stepped out from the boat, and joined the Koreans in a press around the passenger photographs, developed and printed since they had got on the boat. Max paid the exorbitant fee for their print and offered it to Lisbeth. She managed a brief smile, and slipped the picture into her bag.
The pavements and bridges around the marina were open. Max reckoned they could be spotted easily as soon as they moved away from the crowds. But from where they stood it was only a few yards to a line of six tourist buses parked on the Damrak. They couldn’t pass for Koreans, which ruled out the two nearest, but the third vehicle forward had a group of Scandinavians climbing aboard. Max led Lisbeth around the back of the buses, so they were hidden from Anvil, and then slipped round the front of the Scandinavian coach. No-one checked who they were, and they took rear seats. Lisbeth peered out towards the harbour through the green-tinted windows.
‘He’s there.’
This time Max saw him, from behind, fifty yards away. He was tall, maybe six two. The raincoat couldn’t hide the quarterback physique, nor mask the aura of physical capability and strength he exuded. This was the man Max had glimpsed watching Der Ridder burn to the ground. This was the man who wanted to kill them both.
Anvil turned. Max and Lisbeth ducked but still felt the intensity of the gaze as it swept the parked buses like radar.
Everyone on their coach was seated, the engine was idling, but the driver was reading a magazine, and the door stood open. Come on, let’s go. Max willed urgency at the driver, then lifted his head to peek from the window. Anvil was walking slowly along the line of coaches towards them, as if he was somehow smelling them out. Fifteen yards away, then ten, with a hand to his right ear.
Anvil peered in the windscreen of the coach right behind them, then turned and passed right underneath Max’s window, his scarred crew cut head just a foot below him, heading for the open door. Then he stopped. Underneath the raised hand, Max could see a plastic earpiece, and a thin spiral wire going down into the raincoat.
Something told Max that Anvil was going to look up, so he pulled Lisbeth below the level of the window, hardly daring to breathe. The instructions from Alex reverberated in his head. Put metal doors between you…don’t force actions upon him…at less than ten feet say your prayers ‘cos you’re going to heaven.
The only reassuring feeling was his hand shoved deep in his raincoat pocket, gripping the Walther, magazine full, safety catch off.
The driver tossed aside his magazine. With a hiss the door shut, the engine revved, and Max breathed again. He risked a peep through the window as the bus inched forward waiting for a gap in traffic. Two feet away Anvil looked right up at him, eyes widening in anticipation of slow and evil pleasures, an outstretched fist an inch from Max’s heart, beating a funeral march against the metal skin of the coach.
It took Saskia only twenty minutes to race back the thirty kilometres to the hospital. She dumped the car in a disabled parking bay and waited impatiently for the lift to take her up to the intensive care unit on the sixth floor. Waiting by her daughter’s bedside were Professor van Diemen, Paul Jeker, two nurses and an official from the Dutch blood transfusion service.
The AB blood had arrived and the transfusion was about to begin. Saskia watched as blood flowed into her daughter’s right arm. Caroline’s heart rate was stable and her breathing normal but no machine trace can describe a mother’s view. All Saskia could see was how frail and tiny her daughter looked, how pale and vulnerable.
A sudden electronic trilling had each of the medics checking their mobile phones. It was Saskia’s. She walked out of the room into the corridor, so she could better hear what Professor Friederikson had to say.
‘Saskia, it works! The infection dropped six percentage points in less that half an hour. Some blood cells died, but I don’t think the parasite managed to infect any further cells.’
For half a minute Saskia didn’t have the breath to reply. Then she screeched her joy. Now she could dare to hope her daughter would survive. Finally, they had a weapon against the new parasite.
When your world is squeezed into the walls of a cell, it is amazing how much you notice. During the day there are lizards darting on the walls, catching flies and beetles. One lizard I have called Stumpy, because he only has half a tail. There are plenty of fat spiders, weaving thick white orbs in the corners. I have no idea if they are poisonous. In the evening we hear bats squeaking under the eaves, and sometimes up from the latrine pipe will come a toad or frog, looking for cockroaches. They are rarely disappointed.
At night the mosquitoes plague us. They whine across your ear, to see how deeply asleep you are. If you move, they give you fifteen minutes to fall back asleep, then try again. You never feel them land. However much you are attuned for it, waiting. You never feel a thing. Until the next morning. They always seem to go for wrist or ankle, neck or knuckle.
One morning as I woke up I noticed movement in the latrine bottle. It was just a foot from my head, and I could see light reflecting off the surface of the water. Something was disturbing that reflection, fighting the surface tension from below. It was a mosquito larva. It took fifteen minutes to break out, to crawl onto the inside of the bottle, there to dry itself before flying away. How determined, this greatest struggle of its life, programmed inside its very genes. Escaping from one world into another. How I envied it.
(Erica’s Diary 1992)
For me today was the most painful day since we were captured. Amy and Sister Margaret have been taken away in the Land Rover. Crocodile says they ar
e to be released in exchange for some of his soldiers, though we can never be sure this is true. Sister Margaret, acting in character, insisted that Jarman should be released instead of her. But she was bundled out anyway, and we had time for only the briefest of goodbyes.
To be left behind was an agony. Selfishly, I am glad that I am not alone, and I have Jarman to talk to. Jarman’s foot is still not healing, and he found maggots in it yesterday. But in reality I am more worried about Jarman’s mind. He spends long periods in a world of his own, mumbling and sighing. Sometimes in the middle of the night he hooks his arms and good leg through the grille above him, and does frenetic pull-ups. I can hear the anger in the wrenching at the bars and his furious muttering. Sometimes, when he can continue no longer he bursts into tears. There is nothing I can do to comfort him.
For myself I have a more private relief, conducted as silently as I can manage and always with the image of Tomas in my mind. Pleasure is perhaps the wrong word; comfort is closer to the truth. Sometimes I cry afterwards, too.
(Erica’s Diary 1992)
It was a mile before the tour guide came checking names on a clipboard and the coach pulled over to allow Max and Lisbeth to leave. Happy that the coast was clear, they walked away off the main street to a small cobbled square where a medieval bar with wood shavings on the floor boasted a hundred different Belgian beers. The barman was short and jolly, with a musketeer moustache. There were no other customers. After a beer and a bowl of nachos Max even felt safe enough to reach inside his pocket and click the Walther’s safety catch on. He and Lisbeth shared the heady and inane laughter of the recently terrified.
‘Lisbeth, did Anvil do a lot of bodyguard work?’
‘Look, I don’t know his life story. I only screwed him. Why do you ask?’
‘He was wearing one of those earpieces you see on U.S. secret service agents. I thought he was a loner. Who would he be communicating with?’
‘Don’t know, Max. I just know I lived another day and I’m glad enough of it.’
Max shrugged himself off the barstool and jogged up the narrow wooden stairs to the cramped unisex toilet. He bolted the door, took out the mobile phone. He dialled the number in memory one, and left a message for Alex, briefing him on the day. Max had one suggestion: check to see if D’Anville ever made a barge purchase.
He hung up and changed the dressing on his hand. The dog bite was still sore, but healing except between his second and third fingers, so he could use a smaller and less obtrusive dressing. Someone had turned up the music downstairs and now he heard a bang and a squeal, like a beer barrel dragged over wooden boards.
A sixth sense made Max draw the Walther before he flung open the door. He thundered down the stairs and into the bar. There was no-one there. Lisbeth was gone. He looked out into the square. No-one. At the end of the alleyway a middle-aged woman was walking past. Max approached her, gun concealed. She said had not seen a young woman come her way.
Back at the bar Lisbeth’s shoulderbag plus laptop was where it had been left. She couldn’t be far. Max called for the barman, but no-one came.
‘Goddamn,’ he muttered to himself, and fished for the gun. In the Schweppes mirror behind the bar his reflected face looked sprayed in fine crimson. Blood on the mirror. He leaned over the bar. Drips and spatters, and a dark pool still spreading from under a big door behind, dyeing scarlet each pale wood shaving. Max ran behind and pushed at the old wooden door. It opened a few inches then jammed, low down. All he could see was a countertop, baguette on it cut and ready to serve, cheese cubes on a saucer, cold meat neatly arranged on its platter under a flickering light tube. He could hear gurgling, like a sink emptying.
‘Lisbeth!’ Max shouldered the door hard and it gave. Max gasped at what he saw, half in horror and half, to his shame, relief. It was not Lisbeth.
The barman was shaking on his back on the floor of the bar’s tiny kitchen, bubbles of blood still spitting from his slit throat as his lungs gave vent to the last few breaths of his life. The words that he said were all hiss and spray but eloquent enough: please save me.
‘Try to keep calm,’ Max whispered hoarsely. ‘You’re going to be fine. Let’s try to move you a little.’
Max clamped his hand over the torn throat, and propping the man to a sitting position against a cupboard where the head would be held forward to compress the wound. ‘Just try to hang on in there for a few minutes while I get help, okay?’
Once he had cleared the legs, the door drifted closed behind them. Max did not look back at once. He was kneeling in a pool of blood and trying to punch up the emergency services on the mobile phone with one hand while staunching the barman’s profuse bleeding with the other. Before he got through the barman died, a final shudder and snort through the ripped trachea spraying the front of Max’s white shirt crimson. Nausea swept him and he turned away, only to stumble backwards, yelling at the terror of what he saw next.
Lisbeth had been hung on the back of the door like a coat, her cobalt eyes wide open in surprise. Her dead face was blue-white and as beautiful as a porcelain doll, the tip of her tongue protruding, the colour of a ripe plum, the same colour as the bruises around her neck.
She had been strangled.
Max gathered her up in his arms like a sleeping child, crooning her name over and over again. He unhooked the collar from the door, took her through into the bar and laid her gently on an easy chair. He closed the curtains, flipped the bar sign to closed, turned off the music and sat down. The mobile phone was talking sibilantly to itself from the kitchen floor, but when he picked it up he could think of nothing to say to the emergency services. He turned it off.
Max drained his beer, slung the laptop bag over his shoulder and stepped outside, in his bloody hands the photograph taken that afternoon of he and Lisbeth, good friends, smiling in a moment of peace.
Tomas came to me last night. I saw him standing in my cell, not speaking, just watching me. I reached out to him, and called his name. But I could not touch him. Then I noticed he had opened the cell door somehow. He walked out and I followed, my heart pounding. We stood outside under a full moon, on quicksilver grass. He was trying to point out something to me, and I just could not see it. However many times he gestured to the horizon I could not understand what he was trying to show me. Then he dropped his hands and his mouth moved. I could not hear him, but I knew he was saying goodbye. Goodbye for ever.
I woke up in tears. I feel so alone. I just don’t have the strength to continue. Does anybody out there even remember who I am? Can nobody hear my screams? Or can they, like me, hear nothing but the soft wheezing of the generator, building civilization on electricity. And ice for the Brigadier’s drinks.
(Erica’s Diary 1992)
Professor Cornelis van Diemen groaned as the phone awoke him for the second time that night. It was 3 a.m., and he prayed that it wasn’t Betsy Dijkstra again. The Health Minister, now his direct boss in the new Epidemic Task Force, seemed intent on doing his job of coordinating the search for a treatment, as well as her own. Dijkstra’s energy was appalling. She chaired meetings all day then sat up half the night talking to scientists in California, trawling the Internet or reading medical journals. Then she would ring Van Diemen to suggest he try this experimental drug or speak to that scientist. That was the trouble with having a former doctor as a health minister. A little knowledge became a very irritating thing.
Van Diemen picked up the handset and said his name wearily.
‘Friederikson here. You weren’t asleep, Cornelis, surely?’
‘Yes, Jürgen I was.’ Van Diemen trudged into the bathroom dragging the handset on its long lead to avoid further disturbing his wife. ‘And I want to get back to it. Dijkstra woke me an hour ago to tell me I have a 6 a.m. conference call with some Japanese bacteriologists she knows.’
Friederikson laughed. ‘The perils of responsibility. I’m quite glad to be persona non grata with the government. I get to follow my own course.’
&
nbsp; ‘Well they were hardly going to trust you after your escapade with the mosquito jar at the committee. The trouble is they want me to find someone else to do your epidemiological work.’ Van Diemen stared at himself in the mirror. His usually ruddy features were pale and puffy, his eyes bloodshot, and his hair wild. ‘So what is it you want?’
‘Van Diemen fever is defeated, I thought you would like to know.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Van Diemen was every bit as irritated by the term Van Diemen fever as Friederikson had intended.
‘I’ve been treating one of your patients with a new drug.’
‘How dare you! That is preposterous, unethical, interfering and dangerous. How dare you without my permission!’
‘Quite simply, Cornelis, because if I had asked, you would not have given me permission. The drug has no name, no documentation and no test data whatsoever. Would you have allowed me to use it?’
‘Of course not,’ Van Diemen snorted. ‘Is this some herbal concoction you cooked up in your dungeon?’
‘No. It is something which Henry Waterson got hold of, and we have no idea how it works. But work it does.’
‘On whom did you try it?’
‘Saskia’s little daughter, Caroline. Of course I have Saskia’s permission, which I think is more relevant than yours. Caroline’s infection levels have dwindled almost to nothing. If I hadn’t tried it she would now be dead.’
Van Diemen said nothing for a moment. ‘Well, I am delighted of course. Though naturally I should like to see the data for myself. And speak to Waterson.’
‘Of course. There is a major snag, however.’
‘Apart from me taking all the responsibility while you come in and try to steal the glory, you mean?’
‘Yes, quite apart from that,’ Friederikson laughed. ‘The new drug will cost us a thousand dollars per tablet, which is ten thousand dollars per course of ten.’
‘That’s an outrageous sum. Which company is it? I’ll unleash Dijkstra on them. And the European Commission.’