by Tim Adler
Kate plunged down the wet, mossy bank, almost losing control, and ran into the trees. Her legs were going so fast, she thought they would fall off. Priest had broken free, too. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Mr Punch scrambling down the bank while Teardrop got into the 4x4. "This way," Kate shouted. She could hit her head on a tree, or a branch might whip her in the face at any moment. Twigs and leaves crunched underfoot. If anything, the fog was getting thicker the deeper they ran. All she was conscious of was heart-clutching fear. Panic choked her as she expected the crack of Mr Punch's automatic handgun behind her, then everything turning white hot inside her head.
There was a clearing and, surreally, a banana-yellow boat stranded in the middle of it. What was a dinghy doing in a forest? Priest and Kate converged on it and hid round the back, landing heavily. The fibreglass hull was dirty and mouldy, but at least it offered protection. "You okay?" Priest panted. They crouched down, watching for Mr Punch to come through the trees. Kate nodded, too winded to speak. She wanted to vomit and shit herself at the same time. Cautiously she scanned the tree line for Mr Punch, aware that she could get her head blown off at any moment. Nobody there.
"We'll find something if we keep going downhill," Priest whispered, hauling himself up. Kate nodded. Dense fog obliterated the trees further down and they set off again, at a jog this time. The fog was clammy and she reached for Priest's hand. Their progress slowed as they sidestepped down the hill. The fog dissolved everything, and she could barely see in front of her. Weird tree shapes loomed out of the void, and Kate felt as if they had crossed into the underworld, the place where everything was dead. It was unearthly quiet.
A cable car station loomed out of the fog, as if somebody had breathed on glass.
It lay on the other side of a road, and a rumble told them it was still working. Thank God. They ran across the road and through an empty children's playground. The swings and roundabout looked forlorn with no one playing on them. This must be some kind of out-of-season tourist attraction, Kate thought. Running past a climbing frame, she looked over her shoulder and glimpsed Mr Punch scrambling down the hill they had just left. Priest grabbed her hand and they ran onto the platform, where a man sat in a glass booth. There was no turnstile, so presumably you paid at the other end. A cable car came barrelling towards them and abruptly slowed to a walking pace as the doors slid open. They both landed on its benches, terrified that Mr Punch was about to appear. The doors took forever to slide shut. Sure enough, the second thug ran into the station as their cable car rattled over a grid and they were launched into space.
Kate was too winded to speak, and she just sat there with her head between her knees. Priest was looking back at the cable car following theirs. Their cabin shook as they went over a pylon. Kate's ears popped because they were so high up.
"What now?" Kate managed to say.
"We go to the police. Maybe we can flag a car down or something."
"What if the other one's waiting for us? The one with the tattoo"
"Somebody at the bottom will help us."
"I tried to escape in a motorway services. They let me use the toilet. I scrawled my name and the licence plate on a wall. Somebody must know we're alive."
"Do you still have the memory card?"
"Yes, I'm sitting on it." The memory card was always there, a not entirely uncomfortable presence. It made her feel full.
Priest did his best to smile, glancing over her shoulder at the next cable car following them inexorably down the mountain.
"He's following us, isn't he?" she said.
"We'll make a run for it at the bottom."
"There's a policeman in Tirana, the one I was telling you about. His name's Poda. He was investigating Paul's death."
"We'll go to him, then."
"Your friends at Europol, can't they help us?"
"All I need is a phone. There's a Europol field agent in Rome who could get us out."
Kate turned and saw the hazy sprawl of Tirana through the graffiti-ed Plexiglas. Their cabin rattled as they went over another pylon. Hundreds of feet below you could hear mooing from a toy-like farm. Kate waggled her jaw from side to side to get rid of the pressure.
Eventually she said, "John, I don't think I can do this."
"You just need to hold on. It's nearly over. Run like hell when we get to the bottom. We'll only have a few seconds."
"What if they're waiting for us?"
Priest had no answer for that. They went over another hill and the bottom cable car station hove into view for the first time. Priest stood up, prepared for a quick getaway. "Ready?" he asked. Kate nodded, slightly deaf with fear. Their cabin slowed abruptly and rocked as it came in to land. The cabin joined the stately procession and the doors slid open. Priest pulled Kate out and they ran towards the turnstile. Priest cleared it easily, while Kate managed as best she could with Priest helping her over. The attendant in the glass booth shouted. She glanced back at Mr Punch's cabin, whose doors were opening.
Outside there was no black 4x4, thank God. Instead, there was a sole taxi driver reading a newspaper. He looked alarmed as Priest tore the door open and they both jumped in. "Police," he said. "Pronto." The taxi driver folded his newspaper achingly slowly as Mr Punch skidded out of the swing doors. "Pronto," Priest repeated, banging the back of the driver's headrest. The driver reversed, the three-dimensional cross covered with Muslim names of God swinging wildly from his rear-view mirror. Kate caught sight of Mr Punch clutching his head as if he couldn't believe what had just happened.
Priest exhaled deeply, releasing a long sigh. Kate let out a happy bark of laughter. They had done it, they had finally got away. She wanted to laugh and cry; she had never felt so grateful to be alive. Priest put his arm round her and he, too, started laughing – the relief was just so overwhelming. It was all over. They were on their way to the police and to freedom.
"My God, I can't believe it. We're free," she said.
"Those bastards are gonna pay. We're going to put them away for years."
"We need to tell the police about Phuong as well."
"Don't you worry, love. Those bastards are going away for a long time."
"Will they know about Zogaj?"
"Oh, they know about him all right. It's a question of whether they can get to him. These people are protected. They make big donations to politicians' election campaigns."
There was so much construction going on, great tower blocks with the inevitable meringue wedding dresses in the shop windows. The road, though, was in a terrible state. It was a rutted brown track with gravel thrown in where the potholes were too deep to drive over. Kate and Priest lurched from side to side as their taxi slowed to a crawl, trying to negotiate its way through. They both had the same unspoken fear, and Priest leaned forward and shook the driver's seat. The driver turned round and glared.
They joined a proper street with a wider road this time as they headed into the capital. There were restaurants and cafés here, although most of them were still closed this early. On their left was what looked like a truly magnificent Roman mansion with stucco columns guarding its entrance and a trio of heroic-looking statues on the roof, which also sprouted an incongruous array of television aerials. Kate looked round for a sign of the 4x4, but they seemed to have given the men the slip.
At that moment, a bomb seemed to go off in their car.
There was a blur of black metal and a horrible grinding noise as the Land Cruiser bore down on them. The street waltzed around. Kate glimpsed Teardrop staring at her with furious hatred through the windscreen.
When she opened her eyes in the sudden stillness, she saw that the taxi driver's airbag had exploded. He was trapped behind the steering wheel. His windscreen had cracked, and there was a smell of smoke and battery acid.
The driver's side of the car had concertinaed, and Kate realised that Priest's leg was trapped in the buckled metal. Priest was pushing her with his free arm, and she dimly understood that he wanted he
r to get out. The problem was that she had gone deaf: all she could hear was a monotone, as if somebody had tapped a tuning fork inside her head.
The taxi's black innards had spewed onto the road, and petrol was snaking along the tarmac. Kate noticed how beautiful its rainbow colours were. Everything felt so unreal. The tuning fork in her head persisted, and she turned away in slow motion towards the Roman villa. Kate winced with pain as she loped along the road. She had done something to her leg, and putting weight on it was like hammering a nail through a bone.
Limping up the steps past the Roman columns, she pushed the swing doors open. An old woman in a housecoat was mopping a tessellated corridor with a greasy institutional smell. The cleaner leaned on her mop and looked at Kate suspiciously with bright currant eyes. "Please. You must help me," Kate said. Her leg was throbbing like a pump. The woman said nothing. Kate limped over the newly washed floor and pulled open the first set of double doors. The cleaner barked at her this time, but Kate didn't care. What she needed to do was get to somewhere safe. It was like one of those old horror movies where the monster keeps coming after you no matter how fast you run; she pictured the corridor canted at a crazy angle with Teardrop bearing down. He was unstoppable.
Kate pushed down on a safety bar and walked into pitch black. She was in some kind of antechamber. She felt for another set of doors and pushed her way into what appeared to be a vast room with cables underfoot. Her hand felt icy scaffolding as she edged along in the darkness. It was colder on this side, wherever she was. What on earth was this place, she wondered, her eyes adjusting to the dark. Kate ducked to avoid clouting herself on an even blacker shape and realised that it was a heavy abandoned television camera. This was a soundstage with what looked like the hull of a spaceship taking up most of the floor surface. A vast cyclorama lay at the back. Now she could dimly make out lights hanging from the ceiling as she trailed her hand along the spacecraft hull, using it as a guide. Her ears strained in the darkness. At least the temporary ear-ringing deafness had gone. There had to be a way out of this place and, sure enough, she spotted another set of double doors up ahead.
Her hand groped for an old-fashioned metal light switch and a series of government-issue overhead lights rippled into life. This corridor felt older and narrower, with rooms running off it and a sharp, musty linseed smell she associated with Albania. It reeked of Soviet-era bureaucracy. Kate hobbled down the thin strip of carpet trying every other door, almost weeping with anxiety. All locked. A door banged somewhere and she froze. Teardrop was definitely coming after her, she could feel it. Panic clamped down on her iron-hard, squeezing the air out of her lungs, and would not let go. A low moan escaped her lips.
She had reached a dead end.
The final door leading outside was locked. There was definitely the sound of doors banging and somebody coming. It was only now that she noticed the glass tank on her left – it was so dirty she hadn't realised what it was at first: a metal tank used for shooting underwater scenes. The glass was greenish-black with algae, and she knew what she had to do.
Steeling herself, Kate clambered up the metal steps and gazed down into the cold darkness. Oh, God, please don't make me do this. She sat down quickly and began lowering herself into the black water. Everything in her protested as the water came up to her waist and then to her chest. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and willed herself under.
The cold was unbelievable, yet somehow she swallowed a scream. The doors opened and she saw Mr Punch stalk into the room, still wearing his sunglasses. She knew she had to keep completely still. Her lungs were starting to burn, and she didn't know how much longer she could hold her breath. As if he had sensed her, Mr Punch's head swung round and he put a hand up to the tank, peering through the glass. Instinctively, she shrank into the gloom. The pressure was building, and she knew she had only seconds to get more air into her lungs or drown. The Albanian's gargoyle face nuzzled the scummy window like some monstrous aquarium fish. Inwardly she was frantic – her lungs were really on fire now – but Mr Punch finally turned and disappeared into the misty wall.
Kate's head broke the surface and she grabbed a great lungful of air, as if she was being reborn. My God, she thought, another few seconds and she would have drowned, imagining the propulsive kick as her lungs filled with water and she sank to the bottom.
Grasping the icy rungs of the ladder, she hauled herself up as water streamed off her body. She couldn't get enough air into her lungs because she was coughing so hard. Goddamn you, breathe. She inhaled as much air as she could before coughing overwhelmed her. Kate clambered back down, water pooling around her onto the floor. She had to get out of these heavy wet clothes before she froze to death.
Her body was shaking as she dragged herself along the corridor, clothes sticking to her like a wet shroud. Frantically she tested every door until, as if by magic, one opened smoothly. Why hadn't she found it before? The smell was even mustier in here, wherever she was, as she groped for the light switch. The light came on and Kate could have cried with joy.
The room was full of old costumes, racks and racks of them jammed on metal clothes rails. There were dusty wicker baskets on the floor. Pulling at the cracked leather straps, Kate threw one open to find old curtains. Thank you, Jesus. She tore off her wet clothes and stood there, pink and trembling, drying herself with the stiff, dirty cloth. It was so cold she couldn't think straight. She must find something warm to get into, she thought, her teeth chattering. One rail was full of old army costumes, and she pulled off a jacket and a pair of woollen trousers in roughly her size. The trousers felt scratchy and the jacket was too big. Another rail was full of military greatcoats, and she lifted one off its hanger. There was nothing she could do about her wet Converse trainers, though, she thought, as pressure built up in her nose and a sneeze exploded.
Kate squelched back down the corridor, pausing before she pulled open the doors to the soundstage. Nothing. Taking a chance, she slopped back along the main corridor, cursing the day she had ever set foot in Albania. She had no money, no passport and only one person she could turn to, the detective inspector investigating Paul's death. All she felt was a hand-wringing despair. Where was Priest, and what had they done to him? Would she ever see him again? The one thing she knew was that she had to get to safety.
The cold was biting when she stepped outside. At this rate, her wet hair would freeze into an icy headdress. Through the railings she could see that the taxi had been moved to the side of the road and the taxi driver was gesticulating to bystanders. There was a mess of plastic and glass shards all over the road. No sign of the 4x4, though. Where were the traffic police? She could throw herself on their mercy, she told herself, but then she remembered what Poda had said about most of his colleagues being corrupt. No, he was the one she needed to see.
Kate was so preoccupied with figuring out what to do next that she didn't register the sound of the engine quickly enough. She glanced up at a convex mirror above the road crossing.
Teardrop's black 4x4 was following at a walking pace down the street.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The fug of the café felt warm and inviting, and all she wanted to do was stay there. She took in the smell of wet wool and bodies, and of steam blasting as the café owner refilled the tea urn. For a moment, Kate allowed herself to be swayed by the idea of warmth and comfort before reality kicked back in and she barged past customers, looking for somewhere to hide. Anywhere. They would be here any second.
There was only one space available in the crowded café, and Kate sat down heavily at the free table. She hid her face in her hands. "Please don't let them find me," she prayed. There was a commotion at the door, and Kate glanced up to see Mr Punch struggling with a fat, overcoated man trying to get out. Neither of them would budge. In another life it might have been comic, but all she felt was heart-stopping dread.
Kate sensed that the man opposite was staring at her, and she glanced at him. She was appalled to real
ise who it was: the bearded dishwasher from the hotel, the one she'd wrongly accused of breaking into their bedroom, even of having murdered Paul.
The dishwasher was sitting over a cup of black tea in an old overcoat. In that split second he must have seen the fear in her eyes, because he looked over his shoulder and then rose to push Kate under the table.
Crouched beneath the Formica, Kate was certain she could hear Mr Punch's oddly high voice – it was girlish and asthmatic, the kind you might hear speaking feebly at a seance about the astral plain and messages from the other side. She certainly recognised his work boots: they were just inches away from her face. Her heart was hammering though her chest. Ba-dunk. Ba-dunk. Ba-dunk. The boots stopped and Kate knew then that it was all over. She had been discovered. Time stood still. She dared not breathe until the boots eventually swivelled and walked off. Kate could feel her heart turning over like a straining, reluctant engine. Baaaaa-dunk, ba-dunk, ba-dunk, ba-dunk.
The moment the dishwasher touched her she thought she would jump out of her skin.
Struggling back up opposite him, Kate saw that Mr Punch had gone. Why would he give up his search so easily? He knew Kate was in there. Of course, they would be waiting outside.
"He gone now. You safe."
"Why did you do that?" She could hear the hysteria in her voice, a panicked kind of gulp.
"That man. I know him. He is pimp." He looked as if he wanted to spit on the floor.
"Those men want to kill me. We must go to the police."
The dishwasher harrumphed, "The police. They no good. Is better you stay with me."
"Surely the police will help me. I'm a British citizen," she cried, which she knew sounded pathetic even as she said it.