‘In times of cheap sensation, Ed,’ said Paul. ‘And plenty of media outlets thrive on it.’ With fascination Paul stared at the pictures of Farah. The girl from the butterfly garden in Kabul had become a Dutch journalist. However big he’d thought his world was, a twist of fate had reduced it and brought them back together again after nearly thirty years.
‘She said she’d be here.’ Edward looked around. ‘Something must have come up. She had a meeting with Lavrov today. We’ve got a brilliant scheme. Lavrov is prepared to contribute to a special art edition.’
‘A bold move,’ Paul said. Meanwhile, he kept half an eye on the screen, which now showed the presenter in the studio talking via a video link to the Dutch Prime Minister, who was about to travel to Russia for a five-day visit, together with Finance Minister Lombard and a bevy of successful businesspeople. ‘Prime Minister, what are you hoping to achieve?’ he heard her booming voice as they walked through the revolving doors.
Outside, in the large plaza, the wind was gathering strength. In the distance, a huge black storm front was approaching.
‘How’s Mum?’ Paul asked.
‘She needs you.’
At that moment, Paul spotted Sandrine at the nearby taxi stand.
‘Just a second, Ed.’
He called her name. She didn’t hear him, but when she saw him trotting towards her she seemed unsure what to do.
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence.’ Paul thought it sounded silly, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘Sure there is,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘It just depends on who orchestrates it.’
‘Can we offer you a lift?’
‘It’s nearly my turn. Thanks, anyway.’
‘Travel safely,’ he intoned a little sadly, at which he promptly turned around and walked away. Looking up, he saw jet-black billows rapidly obscuring the twilit sky.
33
Dimitri must have been out cold for a moment. The searing heat where the bullet had entered brought him to again. He pressed his hand to the bloody wound and crouched down on his knees to search for the Zastava. As soon as he’d found it, he pulled himself up on the car and looked around to see where the woman had gone.
He caught a glimpse of her lurching between the trees. He squeezed his eyes to slits to take aim.
The shot rang out and she fell instantly. As if her legs were snapping twigs. She writhed in the grass. He hobbled towards her and when he stood beside her she looked up and begged him.
‘Please …’
Dimitri hated it when women begged. Begging was like signing a non-existent truce.
He shook with anger as he aimed his Zastava. He had allowed himself to be caught off-guard by her and it infuriated him. Now he had to wait until he was calm again, his emotions frozen. He had to shut himself off from all the distracting noise that was intruding on the moment he would cut short her life. He wanted to kill her in the only proper way: with clinical precision. The way a surgeon removes a growth from an otherwise healthy body.
He heard the monotonous roar of distant traffic, but above all he heard the ominous growl of the approaching storm. Raindrops fell from the jet-black sky like molten lead.
He saw the woman opening her mouth wide. It became a sound hole for the death scream that rose up from her stomach like an unstoppable eruption. Her entire body resonated with the scream.
The silence that fell after he’d emptied the magazine in her was so overwhelming that it felt as if her death had sucked up all the sound.
Dimitri was shaking on his legs, as his finger kept pulling the trigger.
34
As Paul, who’d offered to drive, manoeuvred the Saab from the airport on to the ring road, Edward put Farah on speaker phone. She sounded dejected, but Paul still recognized the proud girl of yesteryear in her voice.
‘Sorry that I’m late,’ he heard her say. ‘It’s already in De Nederlander, Ed.’
‘And it was just on The Headlines Show,’ Edward replied. ‘I see that I’ve got a nymphomaniac journalist with a penchant for singing jihadist battle hymns on my payroll. Good to know for future staff parties.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny, Ed.’
‘Me neither. Marant’s playing a very nasty game here.’
‘But why?’
‘I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.’
A bolt of lightning shot through the sky. Its echo could be heard over the connection with Farah. At the same time Paul spotted a tired-looking Sandrine in the taxi overtaking them.
‘Where are you now?’ Edward asked.
‘Heading towards Schiphol. I was hoping Paul might be delayed. Is he with you?’
‘He’s sitting next to me. Insisted on parking his arse on the driver’s seat of the Saab. And forget what I said about that handsome face of his,’ Edward chuckled. ‘He looks a mess.’
‘Hello, Paul,’ came through the speakers.
Paul took a while to react. ‘Funny to hear your voice again, Farah. After all these years,’ he finally said.
‘Funny? You seem to have the same sense of humour as your uncle.’
Paul sighed. Yup, and she was as stubborn as ever, he thought to himself.
‘How was Lavrov?’ Edward asked impatiently.
‘Bizarre story, Ed. He wants me to go to Moscow.’
‘Moscow?’
A second lightning strike was immediately followed by a loud thunderclap. Paul heard Farah’s startled shriek through the speakers.
All the cars ahead of them switched on their full beams and slowed as a thick sheet of rain reduced visibility. A couple of cars swerved unexpectedly on to the hard shoulder, which only made things worse. Paul turned the windscreen wipers to their fastest setting, but that didn’t help much. With his gaze fixed on the road ahead, he gradually reduced his speed, but carried on driving. If he stopped, the oncoming cars would crash into them.
The connection with Farah appeared to be broken. The noise from the speakers was drowned out by the leaden drops that beat out a deafening crescendo on the car roof.
35
Dimitri had crawled inside the Touareg. The blood that seeped from the wound in his shoulder now covered his entire upper body. It felt as if he had a high fever. Sweat gushed out of his pores. Sharp pains shot through his torso and his head was throbbing so badly he thought it might burst at the temples. Everything he looked at was shrouded in a woolly fog and the tiniest movement, like turning the ignition, caused him almost unbearable pain.
Relying on his instincts, he focused on the narrow, winding road ahead, hoping to end up at the motorway approach.
He had trouble seeing and narrowly missed a tree, but with the Touareg’s windscreen wipers sweeping back and forth he finally arrived at a paved road that took him across a wide concrete bridge from where, to his right, he caught a glimpse of the motorway.
The motorway was a pandemonium of honking cars and blinding headlights that appeared to be heading straight towards him through the rain. Driven by pain, Dimitri pressed down on the accelerator as hard as he could.
Along with the increase in speed and the adrenalin coursing through his veins, his thoughts returned. He’d explain to Uncle Arseni what had happened. That he’d made it. And that’s when he saw the bright light looming up in front of him. As if he’d driven through a tunnel and had now reached the other side, where everything was overwhelmingly, blindingly white.
36
The MICU seemed to have vanished from the earth. Even the coordination centre couldn’t reach the unit. All the lines were dead. Mobiles weren’t answered. But thanks to the vehicle-tracking system aboard, the ambulance could be located. The MICU was driving on the A9 towards Schiphol.
Marouan pushed the Corolla as hard as he could. Within minutes, they shot on to the A9. Bright bolts of electricity sparked in the night sky. The accumulating mass of heavy clouds above them finally broke open. Once they had the MICU in sight, an incredible downpour flooded the ring road
in seconds.
Marouan could just make out a large tanker in front of the MICU suddenly hitting its brakes while trying to pass another vehicle on the right. He heard the impact of a collision and immediately saw a black four-wheel drive sail over the railing. On the other side of the motorway, it plunged into oncoming traffic, and landed on top of a taxi.
The tanker jackknifed and in a sea of sparks smashed through the railing, headed directly for the middle pillar of the flyover. Marouan hit the brakes hard, skidded on to the hard shoulder on the right and shouted at Calvino to duck.
Seconds later he heard the immense crash of the tanker hitting the pillar, immediately followed by the explosion.
When Marouan sat up and looked around, it seemed like a vengeful God had chosen to commence Judgement Day on the Amsterdam ring road.
37
In the oncoming lane of the dual carriageway, Paul saw a large tanker in the process of overtaking another vehicle suddenly start flashing its lights while frantically honking its horn.
Across the barrier on the left, a black Touareg going the wrong way appeared from under the flyover and drove straight at the tanker. Behind the tanker, the blue lights of a large ambulance could be seen.
Paul heard the booming crash as the Touareg hit the tanker head on and was catapulted across the barrier. The tanker began zigzagging as it drove towards the flyover in a sea of sparks. It ploughed into the central pillar.
An explosion followed seconds later.
In the next few minutes, Paul could barely move, but saw everything in crystal-clear detail: the flames shooting out of the tanker, the cars colliding, the passengers crawling out in a daze or staring in shock through their shattered windows while the rain continued to pelt the motorway and everything on it.
He saw it all without hearing the sounds that went with it, as if he was under a glass bell jar. He felt comfortably numb, so he could process everything without panicking. And so he calmly touched the bloodied head of his uncle who was lying unconscious beside him amidst shards of glass. Paul leaned over to see if he was still breathing, undid the seatbelt and checked his pulse.
When Edward opened his eyes, he gazed at Paul with a distant look. Unable to understand what he was trying to say, Paul put his finger on Edwards’s lips and spoke in his ear.
‘Don’t move, Ed, until the ambulance gets here.’
That’s when he became aware of his own body, of his ragged breathing, and felt a rush of panic. Everything that had happened right before the accident came back in flashes.
He remembered the downpour and seeing Sandrine’s taxi passing by as the first lightning struck. And then: the black Touareg flying through the air and landing on top of the taxi.
Suddenly his hearing returned.
Paul opened the car door and ran.
38
The force of the explosion shattered the MICU’s windscreen just after Harold ducked down under his wheel. He saw the flying shards of glass hitting the man beside him in the face, while the pressure of the explosion threw him against the metal rear partition of the cab. The man who’d held him at gunpoint for the past few minutes, demanding that the MICU be driven to Schiphol Airport, was out cold.
Harold immediately grabbed the gun. He yelled into the intercom microphone that the situation was under control again and he steered the MICU backwards on to the hard shoulder, but during that manoeuvre the man with the face peppered with glass began to come to. Harold left the MICU idling, while holding the gun aimed at him.
‘Out!’ Harold shouted above the noise.
The man stared hard at Harold. ‘You, don’t shoot,’ he said, which sounded less like an observation than an order.
‘You, don’t shoot!’
Harold felt the man’s iron grip around his hand and dropped the gun. Immediately after, a fist slammed into his face, throwing him against the door. The man spat Russian expletives at him and kicked him out of the cab.
He couldn’t have been unconscious on the wet tarmac for more than a couple of seconds, but when he opened his eyes he saw the man aiming the barrel of the gun at him.
Harold heard the shot.
He was amazed that dying was so quick and easy.
39
As the torrential rain beat down harder and harder on the car roof, Farah took the first available exit. She decided to park at a carpool location near the flyover until the storm had passed.
In the distance she heard the warning signals of a heavy lorry. Lightning appeared to strike close by the flyover, followed by a fearsome screeching noise like that of a crashing plane. Instinctively she ducked down.
The terrible explosion seemed to bathe everything in broad daylight for a moment.
When she raised her head again she saw towering flames shooting through the rain. She got out of the car and, trembling all over, began walking. With each step closer to the flyover, she could feel the searing heat of the fire and the smell of burning oil. The flames came from a tanker, which had just rammed the central pillar of the flyover.
All hell had broken loose. A black SUV looked like it had plunged from a great height. Only metres away, a taxi had rolled over and landed diagonally on the hard shoulder. The driver of a large ambulance fell out of his vehicle.
She watched it all, cemented to the spot, until she felt the first tremor ripple through the concrete. The flyover shuddered, shook and appeared to collapse on to the motorway.
In the other lane she saw a man with a bandaged face running towards the collapsing flyover as though wishing to be buried underneath. She yelled at him, but he didn’t hear her.
40
Paul was oblivious to any obstacles. As he ran underneath, he didn’t even realize that part of the flyover was crashing down around him. His fear was gone. His whole being was focused on the task at hand.
The taxi’s wheels were spinning in the air. He knelt down in front of one of the windows and, still panting, forced himself to look inside. He saw the mangled body of the man at the wheel.
Then he saw Sandrine. Strapped in her seatbelt, she was dangling from the back seat upside-down and unconscious. As Paul crawled in through the shattered window, shards of glass lacerated his body.
He heard someone yelling something unintelligible. A hand stuck an object through a crushed door. Paul instinctively reached for what the hand was offering him. It was the handle of an opened pocket knife.
He began to cut through the seatbelt holding Sandrine, but the knife felt blunt and he failed to get a grip on the material.
Sandrine’s face lit up fiery red when the Touareg’s petrol tank exploded and caught fire. Small blue flames raced along a trail of leaked petrol, greedily seeking their next target, and reached the taxi within seconds.
That’s when the seatbelt ripped in two.
Sandrine’s head landed on Paul’s stomach. Just then someone began pulling at his legs to get him out. With Sandrine on top of him, it was impossible. The glass cut deeper into his body. Paul howled in pain. He tried to straighten out Sandrine’s body on top of his, so the unconscious woman could be slid out over him.
‘The woman first!’ he yelled. ‘The woman first!’
Her head lay on his chest when he felt her slowly sliding away, out of the car. As Sandrine slid away, so too did his strength. There was no more searing heat, no more dust that made breathing all but impossible, no more people to be rescued. Only a calm, quiet darkness.
41
Marouan sprung out of the Corolla and ran to the MICU, which was about a hundred metres from the flyover – among the other cars with their shattered windows and injured passengers – standing diagonally in the road. The first thing he saw was the driver being thrown from the ambulance and landing dazed on the ground. Then Marouan thought his eyes were deceiving him: Kovalev’s looming shape appeared in the doorway of the vehicle. He was holding a gun.
Marouan didn’t believe in mirages. He immediately knew that this was what he’d always been waiting for.
A way out of all his misery.
His entire life seemed to come together in this single moment. All his suffered defeats and humiliations fused in his body like atoms in a nuclear reactor. Clogged arteries opened wide to let his seething hatred gush through; all his muscles were fired up from years of pent-up resentment.
Marouan was about to free himself from his chains by the simple act of pulling the trigger. He pointed his Walther P5 at the right side of Kovalev’s chest and fired. The impact of the bullet threw Kovalev on to the tarmac like a rag doll. He no longer moved.
42
From the flyover Farah saw how the man with the bandaged head re-emerged from the collapsing concrete on the other side and carried on running. Then, above all the other noise, she heard a gunshot, a sharp cymbal crash amidst the infernal din.
On the far side of the lane she saw Detective Diba with a gun in his hand, leaning over the motionless body of a man. The driver she’d seen tumbling out of the ambulance earlier scrambled to his feet. There was a quick exchange of words between the two. Diba gestured for the driver to get out of the way. A moment later, the ambulance turned on to the hard shoulder and drove off in the opposite direction, weaving its way through the stranded cars.
That’s when Farah spotted Joshua. He was walking on the motorway in a daze. She shouted his name and gesticulated wildly with both arms, but he neither saw nor heard her.
The running man had now reached a taxi and kneeled down to peer inside. He must have seen something or someone, because he frantically tried to squeeze into the wreckage.
Farah didn’t want to just stand there and watch. She wanted to help. She hurried back to her car, drove a couple of hundred metres away from the flyover and made a U-turn.
Keeping the clutch depressed, she put one foot firmly on the brake and pushed the other down hard on the gas. The Carrera’s tachometer was going crazy. Then she released the clutch.
Butterfly on the Storm Page 36