by Wilbur Smith
‘We should split up. There are no turnings off this street. It joins the main road at either end. Drop me off at the southern junction and take the bike to the northern one. We’ve got phones. If that truck leaves, one of us will see it, and if you move fast, we’ll be able to follow it. The bike will be much quicker than a truck through traffic.’
It seemed risky – what if I was too slow and we lost him? – but I couldn’t think of a better plan, so we did as Amelia suggested and positioned ourselves at either end of Langdon’s curved street. Amelia had an advertising hoarding to hunker down behind at the southern junction. To the north, where I was waiting, there was a mechanic’s. I parked the bike to one side of the forecourt behind a truck of threadbare tyres, and waited, and waited, and waited. The storm had long gone and now the sun came out. I sheltered in the shade cast by the truck’s cab. The shade moved. I went with it. In time it shrank to nothing on my side of the truck. I waited there sweating as the afternoon wore on towards evening. Just as the light was fading – and my hopes with it – my phone, which I’d had in my hand the whole time, burst into life.
‘This end! Now!’ Amelia said when I picked up.
I didn’t answer, just leaped on the bike and turned the key. The engine spluttered without catching. I yelled, ‘No way!’ so loudly a woman pushing a shopping trolley full of newspapers past the garage turned around. Not knowing what to do, I stuttered the bike forward three angry paces and turned the key fiercely again, hard enough to bend it. I doubt that in itself made any difference, but this time the tired old engine grumbled awake. I let out the clutch instantly, gunned the bike round the woman, missing her trolley by an inch, and fired straight through a gap in the rush-hour traffic, heading Amelia’s way. She was only a couple of hundred of metres up the road. I wove between two slower motorbikes, dipped around a cyclist and sped past a taxi on my way to pick her up. Catching sight of her running towards me on the verge, I cut towards her and hit the brakes. She swung herself up onto the seat hard before the bike had quite stopped, almost knocking me off. But I held it together and opened up the throttle so fiercely she had to clutch my chest to stop herself flying off the back of the bike as we accelerated away, weaving through the traffic again.
All that happened very quickly indeed, but I was still certain we’d lost the truck. A howl rose within me. It had been a stupid plan. Dad would have laughed at it. In that second, the fact of swerving and the smell of the traffic fumes and the sense of Amelia and I accelerating, on the edge of control, turned into a Mark-shaped warning, and just as I backed off Amelia shouted, ‘There!’ pointing frantically ahead of us, at Langdon’s SUV, cruising unhurriedly into the sunset.
Two heads were silhouetted in the cab. I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed a fair bet we were tailing my uncle and his bandy-legged driver. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said to nobody in particular, and dropped back a car or two behind the truck. The job now was not to lose them.
60.
That turned out to be easier than expected, partly because they didn’t go far. We were only travelling for about fifteen minutes. Still, it was time enough for the sun go down. I didn’t turn on the bike’s headlight. This was helpful, since when the truck pulled to a stop in a half-built neighbourhood made up of what looked like factories or warehouses, I was able to drift to a standstill behind a van parked on the other side of the road without attracting attention.
‘Check that out,’ said Amelia.
I was shutting down the bike, rocking it onto its stand. ‘What?’ I said, peering round the back of the van.
‘Them.’
Two men carrying guns had approached the newly parked SUV. When Langdon and his driver stepped down from it, one of the men backed away, an eye on the street, while the other holstered his pistol and stood before my uncle. Langdon’s driver handed something over to the guard with the holstered gun. It was a cooler box. Langdon and the guard talked for a moment, Langdon with his hands on his hips, the guard with his arms respectfully at his sides. I couldn’t hear anything over the hum of the invisible city, not until Langdon threw his head back and laughed. Something in that gesture caught in my throat.
‘Are you thinking what I am?’ I whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ Amelia said, baffled. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Armed guards. A warehouse in a wasteland. Langdon delivering whatever he’s delivering. A cool box. So, food, possibly?’
‘Those aren’t thoughts – they’re observations and guesses.’
‘Adding up to?’
‘The obvious possibility that your parents are in there.’
I turned to her.
‘The important word is possibility,’ she said patiently.
‘I disagree. It’s obvious.’
‘Another of your hunches is what it is.’
She was right, but this hunch was all I had.
Langdon raised a forefinger and wagged it at the guard, then spun on his heel. The wedge of light from the security lamp caught the side of his face. There was an odd shadow across his cheek. A bruise, I realised, as he stepped beyond the light and back to his car. I pulled Amelia behind the van, heard the growl of the SUV starting up again, watched its red tail lights bleed out down the street.
‘What now?’ Amelia asked.
‘I don’t know!’ I said. ‘Let’s watch for a while. See what those guys with the guns do.’
The answer to that was: not much. Occasionally one of the men would amble across the floodlit forecourt, but then he’d simply stroll back to his position on one side of the building’s roller-door entrance, which stayed firmly shut. There was no apparent pattern to these movements. It just looked like two bored guards keeping themselves from falling asleep by making a show of walking around.
‘I want to check the building, see if there’s a rear entrance, or a window I can reach,’ I whispered.
‘Yeah, but to do that you’ve got to cross beneath the light,’ Amelia said. ‘They’ll see you.’
She was right, but there was one solution: put out the light.
‘Reckon you can drive the bike?’ I whispered.
‘I’ve only been watching you and Marcel do it for about a hundred hours. How could I possibly have learned?’
‘OK, OK. When I say, drive it straight to the first junction down there. It’s about four hundred metres away if I remember rightly. Anyone follows you, keep going. If not, wait for me there. OK?’
‘I should be able to manage that. But what are you going to do?’
‘You’ll see. Or rather you won’t. Shut your eyes.’
‘Why?!’ she hissed.
‘Just do it. And keep them shut. It’ll make sense in a minute.’
‘OK.’
We were crouched low on the verge behind the van, on scrubby wasteland. I fingered the dirt blindly in search of a decent-sized stone, thinking, You’ve got one shot. The floodlight was on a pole in the middle of the forecourt. Miss it and the stone, thrown from here, would slam into the front of the warehouse. A guard wouldn’t have to be a genius to work out where it had come from.
So don’t miss.
My hand closed over a solid chunk of something that felt like broken brick. It would do. I couldn’t risk stepping out from the cover of the van. Flinging a rock takes an explosive movement, which the guards might spot. Instead I moved carefully backwards until the security light rose above the top of the van. It looked alien, a one-eyed monster rearing up. I was a good ten metres further from the target back here, putting it at the very limit of my range. Was there a less risky solution to this problem? I couldn’t think of one, didn’t want to think of anything in fact, just took a deep breath and imagined myself in the yard at school, taking aim at the top chimney pot. The trick, at this distance, was to aim well above the target. I had hit that pot before, and I would put this monster’s eye out now, or else.
61.
I rocked on my heels, drew back my arm and uncoiled like a whip. Throwing w
ell is all about timing, unleashing from the feet upwards through the core and back and shoulders, snapping the elbow just so, flicking the wrist. The brick-chunk flew. Too high, I thought at first: I’d never thrown anything with such force. The rock was airborne forever. It sailed above the cone of brightness cast by the security light, black against the night sky. I lost sight of it for an instant. Then there was a crash, as loud as if someone had smashed a wine bottle against a wall, and the light vanished. Night slammed in from all sides, a wave of darkness closing over all of us.
‘Nice!’ whispered Amelia, opening her eyes.
I froze for a moment, not quite believing I’d done it. But I quickly came to my senses. One of the guards was shouting something. I bundled Amelia onto the bike. Her night vision would be sharp instantly. ‘Go, go,’ I urged, turning the key for her. I needn’t have worried; she shot off confidently down the road. In her wake, on soft feet, I slipped through the darkness and round the side of the building. I must have passed within a few metres of the nearest guard, stumbling out into the road after Amelia. He didn’t go far before giving up. In the meantime, I very nearly ran straight into a fence – it clipped my shoulder – but I’d memorised the angle well and I stopped in the darker darkness in the shelter of the warehouse, my eyes already pulling shades of grey from the night now the light was gone.
In fact, I soon discovered I could see too well. Edging round the building I realised another floodlight covered the ground to the rear of it. Worse still, there was another guard. Just the one on this side, but he was also wearing a holster and pacing back and forth. I couldn’t see the floodlight on this side, not without walking onto the guard’s patch, so there was no way I could disable it. And by the time I’d crept back to the front of the warehouse the men standing sentry there had turned on a second light, this one mounted on the building itself, high above the roller-door, and whereas beforehand they’d looked like they couldn’t be bothered, they were now very alert indeed, patrolling the full forecourt in synchronised dog-legs.
I was pinned down, I realised, unable to move either way without being lit up, and at the mercy of any guard who decided to have a good look along this thin strip of darkness squeezed between the side wall and the fence. How had I thought this manoeuvre would pay off in the first place? I wanted to punch myself for taking such a stupid risk. Instead I crouched down low, pressed tight to the corrugated warehouse wall, and wracked my brains for what to do next.
It was then that I heard her. Mum’s raised voice, muffled, distant and yet right there.
‘But there’s no more time!’ she was shouting. ‘No. More. Time!’
It was definitely her. I pressed my ear to the wall, straining to hear more, but nothing more came, and of course I couldn’t yell in reply. Instead, under my breath, I pleaded with her to call out again. The longer she didn’t, the more I began to doubt myself. I’d wait, I decided, wait and listen for more, to prove I wasn’t mad. Where else could I go after all?
Nowhere. For hours. Right through that awful night I was stuck in a trap I’d set for myself, clinging to the memory of what I thought I’d heard, tormented by the clear and present quiet. It was punctured by occasional traffic noise and the rise and fall of city-hum, but nothing else. I waited there, struggling to stay alert, praying for I don’t know what: the guards to go away; Mum and Dad to emerge on their own, unscathed; help to come?
None of those things happened. It was only when the charcoal wall of the warehouse against which I’d pressed my cheek all night began to turn a lighter grey that I realised I had no choice but to help myself. Careful to angle my phone into my chest I texted Amelia three words: ride by slow.
Instantly I received a one letter reply: k.
And within the minute I heard the drone of an engine, low at first but rising. I’d crept up to the front corner of the building, had one eye on the forecourt, was praying for the guards not to be too close. Either way, I had to go for it, hoping that if they did spot me the sight of a person running away would be more confusing than alarming.
Amelia puttered into view, a slow grey blur.
I waited until the very last minute, then made a sprint for it, dashed straight out of the parking lot and jumped up behind her on the slow-moving bike. Sure I could hear footsteps behind us, a man’s voice shouting over the noise of the engine, I squeezed Amelia as hard as I could. She got the message and accelerated. Before we turned the corner I glanced over my shoulder, just in time to see a car shoot off the forecourt and turn our way.
62.
I’ll admit it: I wished I’d been driving. I wasn’t though – Amelia was. She had her left arm threaded through my helmet strap and the bike slowed down as she wriggled to give it to me. ‘Just go!’ I wanted to scream, taking the helmet from her and pulling it on. But I knew better than to yell pointless directions at Amelia. She’d be more likely to call me out for being an idiot than speed up.
I needn’t have worried. Without the awkwardness of the helmet on her arm she let rip. I’ll admit this too: I was amazed how good she was on the bike. It turned out she’d spent the night poring over satellite maps of the area on her phone and immediately she was jinking between buildings, doubling back, bumping us over a railway crossing, and speeding up again onto a dual carriageway. The guards in the car didn’t have a hope in hell of catching us. I was still squeezing her tight, I realised, as much in awe as to keep myself from flying off the back.
‘Where to?’ she hollered.
‘Xander! At a speed that won’t get us pulled over!’
She hadn’t memorised that route, but I worked it out, signalling the way to her as she drove with textbook care through the waking city. We reached the apartment block without incident, parked up outside it and climbed the stairs to the rental. The light was on. Xander, fully dressed, ushered us in. I started to tell him what had happened, but he cut me off: ‘Amelia’s been giving me updates. I know where you’ve been.’
‘Yes, but neither of you know that I heard …’
‘Heard what?’
It seemed so improbable beneath the buzzing strip light in that kitchen-diner, but I forced myself to tell them what I’d heard. Xander’s mouth fell open as I spoke, prompting me to add, ‘I could have been imagining it, I suppose.’
‘Unlikely,’ said Amelia. ‘You’re not delusional in other respects.’ A smile lit up her face. ‘It’s brilliant news, potentially at least.’
‘Look, we still need to get the evidence to the summit,’ I said.
‘Already on it,’ said Xander.
‘How?’
‘I copied the photos from your camera to my laptop yesterday while you were in the shower. Amelia’s idea. She also texted me a thirty-page report full of coordinates, kids’ names, descriptions of them, et cetera, et cetera.’
Amelia shrugged at me. ‘I had time on my hands. It was a long night.’
‘And while you were sneaking about in the dark, we worked out who your parents would have been trying to influence at the summit: the Mining and Conservation Committee. I emailed the entire portfolio of photographs, plus Amelia’s report, to its chairman at four o’clock this morning.’
Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, I collapsed onto one of the spindly kitchen chairs in relief.
‘Only trouble is, he’s not yet replied.’
I checked my phone. It was only a quarter to seven. ‘He’s probably not up yet.’
Xander shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
I turned to Amelia for reassurance and saw that she’d fallen asleep with her head on her arms, right where she was sitting at the kitchen table. I’d been up all night crouching in the shadow of that warehouse; she’d spent the night working on her phone and waiting to pick me up. Xander too had been at the computer through the small hours. I had that burning sensation in the pit of my stomach I get when I’m properly exhausted; they had something similar, I bet. Everything in me wanted to go back to the warehouse with reinforcements – from where, I did
n’t know – but I convinced myself that Mum and Dad had been unharmed there until now, and I’d go straight there once I was sure the evidence was in the right hands. What’s more, I knew that if we tried to keep going that morning without rest we’d get nowhere sensible, so reluctantly suggested we all turn in, just for a couple of hours. Amelia and Xander took a bedroom each. I flopped down in my clothes on the couch and fell into a black hole so deep I didn’t hear my alarm when it went off, partly because my phone had wedged itself down the back of the sofa. When I eventually retrieved it and checked the screen my ‘No!’ was loud enough to pull Xander from his bed.
‘Eh?’ he said, poking his head round the door.
‘It’s eleven fifteen! Quick, see if you’ve had a reply from the committee chair?’
‘His name’s Mukwege,’ said Xander, clicking away at his laptop. After a pause he said, ‘No, nothing. But look, it’s not too late. You can intercept him on the way to the chamber.’
‘How? I don’t even know what he looks like.’
‘You do now,’ said Xander, turning the screen my way. He’d pulled up a photo of the politician. Martin Mukwege looked to be an enormous barrel of a man. In this picture he was dressed in a boring suit, but his hair was wild, a great white afro haloing his enormous head. ‘He’ll be wrapping up the committee meeting at twelve and going to the vote after that. I’ll do some digging and see if I can work out any more detail,’ Xander said.
Amelia had surfaced with the commotion. She also took in Mukwege’s photograph over Xander’s shoulder before washing her face at the kitchen sink. I packed my camera into my backpack and downed two pint glasses of water. I was parched. Hungry as well. Xander had liberated about thirty mini-boxes of cereal from the hotel breakfast bar before he left. Despite having no milk I ate two bowlfuls of cornflakes on the spot. Amelia chose Coco Pops. She didn’t have to say anything for me to know she’d be coming too. I was relieved. Tracking the guy down and convincing him to take me seriously seemed a mountainous task. If – and it was a huge if – we got the chance, I knew Amelia could be more persuasive than me.