Brandon and Danny high-fived and whooped. They turned and Casey joined them.
‘Just let me get into harbour proper,’ said Reece, unmoved. ‘You can all buy me a drink later.’
Brandon watched the waves roll in behind them as they entered the outer ring of the harbour. To starboard, wave after wave erupted against the high sea defences. He marvelled at how a few feet made the difference between misery and bliss.
At the quayside, a small crowd had formed to watch them dock. Brandon sprang onto the quay from the gently rolling deck, as the Japanese harbour men quickly tied up the boat. The look of relief on their faces was palpable. It wasn’t their boat, of course, but it had sailed in on the wing of a typhoon and they had watched it on the radar as it made its dash for their safe harbour. The boat had navigated a remarkable escape and the harbour men were proud to be part of it. They bowed a lot at the crew and the SEALs bowed back and said, ‘Domo,’ several times.
Brandon sauntered along at the head of the team. He was boiling over with adrenalin and relief, but he knew he had to hold it in so his buddies didn’t see. He glanced back at the serious little Japanese guys and smiled.
They wandered down the jetty as if they had come back from an unremarkable day’s fishing. On one shoulder they carried their diving kit in big nylon holdalls; Brandon had strapped his GI duffel and its golden load to his back.
14
Jim felt as if he had been slammed in the ribs with a sledgehammer. He sat turned to one side in the back of the Mercedes black cab. It wasn’t like the old-style London cabs. It was much bigger, which he had appreciated when he had struggled to climb in, bent in half. The painkillers weren’t helping.
The surgery had taken longer than promised but it had been worth it. He was holding the innards of the gadget that Dr Eric had removed. It was an entire device, about the size of a box of matches. The case looked like it might be platinum or some other non-corroding metal. It had a green LED that flashed every minute. He imagined it flashing in the closed container attached to his rib. It had a functional but sinister appearance, smooth and cold to the touch.
The green light flashed again. Was it sending information, or had it merely reassured its owners before it was fitted that it was functioning? He was going to put it on the shelf at home and then they would think he was sitting there permanently. It would tell them he had become a hermit, forever housebound. Now he could go as he pleased and no one would know where he was. In the Congo that would have been fatal, but he wasn’t aiming to get into any more scrapes. He had had enough adventure for a lifetime already.
The black cab felt like a limo, heading back to Wapping and his riverside mini-palace. It wasn’t like one of Davas’s mansions, historic and huge. It was a modern sanctuary fashioned out of an old warehouse that had once stored produce from all over the world in a pre-modern chaos that would be seen now as quaint and inefficient. In the block, there was an aura of two hundred years’ ground-in sweat and blood lurking below the brick. It gave off an atmosphere of a reality that was just waiting its chance to burst to the surface.
He pressed his side, which ached. He imagined himself opened up, Dr Eric working away with his scalpel and screwdriver. He was amazed that, after a few stitches, a shot of antibiotic, bandages and a dose of painkiller, he could be on his way home. It seemed mildly barbaric.
Still a little dazed, he wondered how he would feel if a limb had been blasted off in some battle. Would he drag himself along, trying to reach safety, or would he just lie there? He felt like a clock, set going at the watchmaker’s behest. To Jim, it seemed that if you could just keep moving, nothing could stop you. His head was spinning. He could do with a lie down.
He gave the cabbie forty pounds. ‘Keep the change.’ The meter looked like it said twenty-eight, but he wasn’t going to hang around to juggle change. He was hunting for keys.
‘You all right, boss?’ said the cabbie, but Jim didn’t hear him as he lunged for his front door.
If he had been thinking, he would have rung the bell and Stafford would have answered, but instead he was trying to extract his keys from his pocket and select the right one without looking. He failed and, leaning against the door, he went through all four before he had the one he needed. He plunged it towards the lock, which admitted it. He turned it and toppled into the hallway, pulling the key out as he went. He tilted back, slamming the door. His side felt heavy. He steadied himself and moved forward. The way ahead was blurred.
There was the shriek of the alarm.
‘Bloody hell.’ He staggered and the floor sagged. There was a loud grinding sound and a metal grille shot up in front of him.
Jim spun round.
There was another prison grille behind him. He was penned in.
He fell to his knees.
Stafford dashed into the hallway. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, typing something into a small white panel in the wall.
Jim wanted to lie down on the carpet – it felt so friendly and warm. The cage ground back into its place.
‘Are you all right?’ asked his butler.
‘Fine.’
‘Let me help you up.’
‘No, I’m OK.’ He concentrated and forced himself to his feet. He smiled unconvincingly at Stafford. ‘I think I need to go to bed.’
‘Please let me help you, sir.’
‘No, I’m fine.’
15
They looked at each other silently over their beers. There was a furious amount of telepathy going down.
‘I can read you like a book,’ said Danny finally, to Reece, ‘but there are so many words I don’t understand.’
Reece produced his lopsided smirk. He let out a groan. ‘So, you want to hear what I think?’
They agreed that they did – silently.
Reece scratched the back of his head, where his right trapezium met the short hair covering his shaven cranium. ‘OK, I think I should take this back to Tokyo and see what reaction I get. Thoughts?’
Brandon didn’t want to cast any doubt but he asked anyway: ‘Do you think a store can pay like hundreds of thousands of dollars for the slab?’
Reece nodded approval. ‘Good question. I don’t know. Those guys paid over fifty Gs like it was small change, but I have no idea about more.’
‘Take it abroad?’ said Casey.
‘Cowboy!’ said Danny. ‘Nice idea, but we might be trafficking, like, antiquities. That would be serious.’
Casey’s head sank into his thick shoulders.
‘That’s a good point, Danny,’ said Reece. ‘The slab is either a nice piece of junk or a super artefact. Either way, we need to act innocent. I reckon I take it to the old man in the first place I went and see what he says.’ Reece was imagining him writing a number. The offer was big, but somehow not so big as to bring the roof crashing in.
‘Maybe we should just hand it over,’ said Brandon.
The three looked at him. ‘What if it’s worth a million dollars?’ said Danny. ‘Would you hand it over then?’
‘It might be the right thing to do.’
‘Yup,’ said Reece, ‘but let me go to Tokyo and see first.’
‘OK.’
Reece stood at the antiques shop door. Nothing had changed since he was there a few weeks back, except that a cigarette stub had blown into the corner of the step. It seemed wrong, so he bent down, picked it up and put it into his pocket. He would throw it away later.
He pulled the door open and went in, ducking under the flagged lintel.
The old man came out from behind the beaded curtain and smiled in recognition.
This time Reece paid more attention to the cabinets as he passed them. There were swords and armour of every era, and he realised that many of the artefacts on display must be far more ancient and precious than he had previously thought. Some items were centuries older than the United States. They had belonged to generations long lost and forgotten, atoms from the past that had somehow survived while everything else
had perished. When he was gone, in a few short years, no one would remember him; nothing would be left. He would be absorbed into the dirt. Yet here there were fragments of a momentous past, preserved like chicken legs in a freezer.
He felt his stomach flutter and the GI duffel sag on his shoulder. He took a deep breath. He felt like a kid on his first date. ‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ said the shopkeeper, smiling and bowing.
Reece sat down in the little chair before the desk and dropped the bag gently to the floor. He unzipped it and lifted the heavy slab onto the counter. ‘Please,’ he said.
The shopkeeper gasped, in an unsettling way, at the sight of it. The old man’s mouth was open. He began to nod fast. ‘May I?’ he said, opening his palms to Reece.
‘Sure,’ said Reece.
The old man ran his right hand over the decorated face. He looked up at Reece in what seemed to be shock. He traced the carving, then ran his index finger around the circumference of the sun. He looked up at Reece again, a tear escaping from his left eye. He was smiling. He was shaking.
‘Would you like to buy?’ said Reece, clumsily.
The old shopkeeper lifted the top of the slab and, magnifying glass in hand, began to study the face. He laid it down carefully and looked at Reece again. He dropped the magnifying glass and stared up at the ceiling as if in thought. He made a throaty gurgling sound. His forehead was suddenly covered with sweat. The colour drained from his face, which faded from pink to white to grey to green. He turned in his seat and pitched stiffly from his stool onto the floor.
‘Jeez!’ said Reece, jumping up. He vaulted the counter. He pressed his finger into the old man’s neck. There was a pulse. The bead curtain moved. The little old lady hobbled over as fast as she could and looked anxiously down at them.
‘Ambaransu,’ he said. ‘Hyu, kuyu, dayo.’
The old man was breathing OK. Reece loosened his belt and put the embroidered cushion from the chair under his head. The old lady was still gazing mournfully at her husband.
‘Ambulance – ambaransu?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Asupirin?’ he said. ‘Mizu!’
She disappeared and came back with a glass of fizzing water. He sipped it quickly – it tasted of Disprin. He fed it to the old man, who was mumbling as he drank it, his eyes closed, his lips quivering. Aspirin would help a little.
Reece monitored the old man’s pulse as he fed him the last of the drink. He seemed to be stable. He looked up at the old lady. ‘He’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘Yoroshii.’ There were sirens.
He stood up, vaulted the counter and put the slab back into the duffel bag. He ran to the door and let the paramedics in, then led them to the old man behind the counter. He put his hand over his own heart. ‘Heart attack,’ he said. ‘Tokkan.’
The paramedics smiled in acknowledgement and went to work.
Reece grabbed the duffel bag. Time to scoot.
16
Jim looked at his email. He was waiting for a message from Jane. It didn’t matter how much he hoped or waited, it never arrived early enough to keep him happy. It was like food to a starving man. She doled out scraps to just below the required calorie count needed to keep him healthy. Didn’t she know he was waiting on every little word from her? Did she do it on purpose? Was she just too busy for him? Was some hunky super-agent lavishing attention on her?
When he got seriously frustrated by it, he would beat up on a stock or currency. He could spot the weak ones, like a lion could spot a calf separated from the herd. He would dive at it and drag it down. A few hundred million thrown against a weak financial instrument would cave it in under his claws. Flawed currencies, bonds or stocks were too lame to survive, and he would push them fast to the edge of extinction. Yet he would pull back from his attacks just before he drove them beyond the point of no return. While he could pile up yet greater profit if he traded them to their logical destruction, he couldn’t help but imagine the faces behind the numbers.
A company might be doomed to bankruptcy from bad management but there were real people behind the stock chart of the dying company, normal folk who had to make their mortgage payment or cover their next credit card bill, thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands, and, like the company, they, too, were clinging on. When he reached the point at which he knew he could tilt the lot of them off the cliff, a point they were doomed to reach some time anyway, he would stop and sigh.
Then he would buy back his stock to cover and consequentially push the price up again. He would make a few millions and roll a few numbers up at the end of his trading account and maybe, just maybe, there would be an email from Jane by the time he had finished.
If he could go back a few years, he would be energised by the fear of failure, motivated by the fight to hold onto his tenuous position. Now that was gone and he was floating in a void of wealth, a shallow but dense pool of anaesthetic.
Stafford brought him a round of toasted Marmite slices and a cup of sugary tea. Why couldn’t she just SMS him ‘Hello’?
17
The little Japanese bar had become their personal haunt. Reece looked at his men. ‘There’s no way we can fence this in Tokyo. This slab is worth way more than the coins, and those antiques stores can’t write that sort of cheque.’ He could see the old man’s eyes rolling back in his head and his complexion turning from healthy red to a deathly pallor. ‘On top of that, we don’t know the laws here, and fishing up a valuable antiquity might just get us sunk. We’ve got to take this thing abroad.’
They all nodded.
‘So, Danny, you look like the one to go,’ he continued.
‘Hey-hey,’ said Danny. He grinned nervously. ‘But where?’
‘Home is too hot,’ said Casey. ‘We don’t want to shit in our own backyard.’
‘Right,’ said Reece. ‘NY would be cool, but if we got busted, it would be game over. That leaves London, as far as I can see. Anyone got a better idea?’
‘Hong Kong?’ Brandon suggested.
No one responded, which meant they thought no.
‘So we’ll go to London, England,’ said Reece.
‘Londonshire,’ said Danny. ‘I like it!’
‘Good job I got our furlough reassigned,’ said Reece, ‘cause meanwhile we’ll go back and keep looking for more of those coins while Danny’s out in England.’
‘Agreed,’ said Casey.
‘You’ve drawn up a plan of attack?’ said Danny.
‘Sure,’ said Reece.
‘So what’s the thing worth?’ asked Danny, for the hundredth time.
Reece gestured at Brandon. ‘What do you think?’
‘A million dollars,’ said Brandon.
‘More,’ said Danny.
‘How much more?’ said Casey.
‘A hell of a lot more,’ said Danny.
‘A million or more,’ said Reece, smiling.
Danny tittered. ‘Reece, you sure you don’t want to go yourself?’
‘Wish I could,’ he said, ‘but after that typhoon I want to be behind the wheel again on our next trip.’
‘OK,’ said Danny, ‘but don’t blame me if I get more than a million for it.’
‘We don’t do blame,’ said Reece.
Danny was happy to stretch his legs. Getting a jump seat on a military transport was not a luxury experience. The seats were made for skinny airmen, not bulky marines like him. Mildenhall was some kind of field in England, and outside it looked like a normal day in Maine. He wasn’t a fan of green and rainy, he liked it hot and brown, like his home town, Austin, Texas. He was going to have to get some freakin’ train to London, but for now he was nervous about clearing the base with a duffel full of ancient gold.
He didn’t have much to worry about. As a SEAL he was pretty much royalty and there was a lot of smiling and nodding as they stamped his papers. For Danny, respect was about the best thing in the world. It was why he had qualified as a doctor. He hadn’t expected to be a medic, but
that was what it had taken for him to become a SEAL, so he had forced himself through the training. It was so much harder than the running and lifting, but to get the respect he craved he’d had to heave his brain through that course in the same way that he’d had to haul his body up and down hills and through water.
It hurt his brain to learn more than it hurt his body to struggle, but he told himself it was just another ache in another muscle; a muscle that had never been his strongest. He liked his brain pumped up. Although he didn’t use it as a first reflex, he knew it had grown strong.
His ‘little guy’ was in charge, a younger self that pulled on three levers: his mind, his body and his emotions. The ‘little guy’ had the last word and always had since the day the dog had attacked his little sister.
They had been walking down a back alley near home when a dog had jumped a fence and gone for them. It was some kind of pit-bull thing, a giant beast to him and the little girl. It had grabbed her face and pushed her to the ground. He had grabbed it by the balls and yanked them as hard as he could. It had turned on him. As it had lunged, its fangs a perfect white, something had gelled inside his soul. The dog had grabbed his arm and pulled him to the ground. He had stuck his thumb into its right eye and pushed until it came out of its socket as the dog shook him. The dog shuddered, but shook him harder.
The pit-bull was going to tear his arm off. He pulled his thumb out of the bloody socket and shifted his grip to press hard on the other eye. The dog let go and sprang back. It yowled, spun backwards and ran a few paces. It stopped, blood running down its muzzle, its right eye hanging gorily.
Danny had jumped up and run to his sister, who sat stunned, her face covered with blood, her cheek torn. He pulled her up and grabbed her around the waist. ‘Fire!’ he had screamed. ‘Fire!’ Everyone said people would come to a fire, but not a murder. He knew no one would come to a crazed dog attack. ‘Fire!’ he cried, and soon they came.
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