The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  There were five compartments to pass before the end of the carriage. There were lights in none of them, suggesting either they were unoccupied or the passengers inside had already turned in for the night. Two of them at least looked empty, their sliding doors partly or wholly open, the interior in darkness.

  They had passed the second when Marcus heard a muffled thunk, like a fridge door being slammed next to his ear. Simultaneously the muzzle of the gun held against his back canonned into him. He waited for the searing pain of hot lead ripping into his abdomen. Instead he felt the huge weight of the colonel’s body slump against him and caught a sudden stench of cordite. The dark glass of the corridor window blossomed into a messy flower of sticky red blood.

  ‘Run, now. Get off. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘What!’ That accent. The voice. Somehow familiar. Marcus staggered under the weight of the collapsed body, turned and saw the American colonel with a neat round hole in his head, black, smoking and big enough to put a finger into, oozing blood like tomato ketchup. He gagged.

  The Mexican was gawping in stark terror into the silenced barrel of a gun in the hand of a small plump man in dark clothes and a beret. It was the little man who had been so engrossed in his newspaper on the platform, the same little man, Marcus now realised – staring at the red blood oozing from the hole in the Texan’s skull – that he had first noticed filling his face with tripe in tomato sauce in the monastery restaurant in Guadalupe. Now there was something about him that seemed more familiar still. Something in the voice, the accent? The fridge door closed again and a smoking black hole opened up in the forehead of the mouthing Mexican. Nazreem’s scream blended with the piercing howl of an electronic alarm as the train jerked and squealed under the impact of emergency brakes. Their saviour, the unknown assassin had pulled the emergency stop switch, just as the Texan had planned to. The voice behind him, the same brusque yet soft accent, uncannily out of context said: ‘Go. Quick.’

  The little fat man was waving his hand in front of his face with the pistol still in it. From further down the suddenly stopped train, Marcus could hear the commotion of confused, frightened passengers, and approaching feet and voices. He grabbed Nazreem by the arm and dragged her to the end of the corridor, pulled down the window to open the door from the outside and jumped with her almost in his arms onto the rough pebbles of the railway bed. With sore knees and aching limbs but fired by adrenalin they struggled to their feet into the dense forest of silver birch. Fleetingly he glanced back at the yellow light spilling from the open carriage door. But of the strange little assassin on the train there was no sign.

  A clamour of voices rose behind them at the discovery of the bodies and the open door. A torch beam played haphazardly among the trees, a flickering strobe among the pencil-straight birch trunks. If they were not careful they would be the subject of a manhunt. Ahead beyond the edge of the forest, there was the susurrus of car tyres on wet tarmac. They could not be far from a road. Beside him Nazreem was panting, out of breath. And then they came upon a long straight empty strip of black flat-lining into the distance: the road that followed the train tracks through the great swathe of flat reclaimed land all the way up the Bay of Biscay coast.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Nazreem, her voice shaking. ‘Who was that?’

  And all of a sudden Marcus stood stock still by the roadside, gazing back into the barcode forest of pale thin tree trunks and dark spaces in between, as a realisation he had been fighting crystallised in his head:

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, half to himself, ‘I’m really not sure.’ And then, his voice fading away as the hot-wired synapses in his brain made links that didn’t make sense. ‘Maybe it was your fairy godmother.’

  58

  In the black Renault Espace in the depths of the forest, the Reverend Henry Parker was saying his prayers under his breath. His companions were not fond of him uttering them aloud in their presence. For them as much as him, this was an unholy alliance of necessity. But the man in the front seat gave the orders, and his orders were unquestioningly obeyed.

  In fact, Parker had noted, he rarely ever gave orders as such, rather inspired his followers into anticipating them. It was an attribute he was literally in awe of and yet understood; there had been times over the past thirty-six hours when he had almost longed himself for the merest flicker of the bastard’s approbation. It was an awe, he decided, inspired mostly by silences.

  The silence now had been a long one, amplified by the location, deep in this endless wood. They had driven throughout the day while the colonel and José had waited to catch the train from Madrid. The sulking Freddie, his ear bandaged, was wedged in the centre seat between the two Algerians.

  The reverend sat in the rear holding the colonel’s iPhone and fervently wished that he understood the damn thing better. As far as he was concerned, the fact that he could see where a particular human being was on the face of the planet was itself an act little short of blasphemy, no matter how useful. Only God had the right to an all-seeing eye. But the US military had long ago successfully challenged his monopoly. And now the technology was in the public domain. He wondered why the little red dot on the screen had stopped moving. Especially as the man it represented should, if everything had gone according to plan, be in their presence by now. Albeit almost certainly reluctantly.

  The bark from the man in the front seat startled him out of his reverie. It was answered, in the usual tone of military precision laced with deep deference, by the driver. The Arabic sounded harsh and guttural and wholly incomprehensible. When they talked among themselves they made little allowance for his complete and utter lack of understanding of the language of the prophet. But this time they made an exception.

  ‘They are late,’ the man in front said. The reverend had heard the others seem to address him as Saladin – which he thought about as absurd as the colonel styling himself Richard the Lionheart – but, given the position he was in, he was not about to show the man anything other than a grudging respect. ‘What does the device show? Where are they?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh,’ it was only then that it dawned on him that he had been right to be concerned about the red dot’s lack of movement. He was not very good at zooming in on it, getting his fingers to magnify the screen. He was terrified of doing anything that would lose the signal. In a minute the colonel would be back. By then the tracking device would have successfully served its purpose.

  Except that the colonel was late. And the colonel was never late. One of the Algerians had got him to call the colonel on his mobile phone a while ago. He was reluctant to take the iPhone off the GPS programme, even to make a call. The colonel had said everything was on track, that the targets had, as expected, boarded the train at Hendaye. The rendezvous point had been set. Since then there had been silence.

  The man in the front seat barked again and the people-carrier reversed out of the small clearing and onto the main road that ran in a tedious straight line parallel to the railway tracks through the forest-planted, reclaimed swamp that the French called Les Landes.

  The headlights revealed nothing but an endless strip of black tarmac through the grid of vertical silver birch trunks on both sides. He used the Algerian’s mobile to call his own again. It rang and rang, and then suddenly almost to his own surprise, a voice answered. But it was not the deep Texan drawl he knew so well. In fact, it was not even English.

  ‘You have reached him?’ barked the man in front.

  ‘I … I don’t know. It’s … I think it’s in French.’

  A fist thrust back from the seat immediately in front and ordered: ‘Give me.’

  Parker looked apprehensive but the man they called Saladin made up his mind for him: ‘Give it to him. He speaks French.’

  ‘Qui êtes vous?’ the Algerian snapped into the phone. ‘Où est l’Américain?’ He listened for a long moment, asked a question and was obviously asked one in return for he thrust the phone at the little minister in the seat behind hi
m, before rattling off a few sentences in what even to someone who understood nothing of the language was clearly angry Arabic. Then there was another silence, this time interrupted by the Reverend Parker, no longer willing to be treated like a piece of awkward baggage.

  ‘What is it, for God’s sake?’ he could not help himself saying, ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the monosyllabic answer from the front seat.

  ‘What? What’s happened to the colonel? Who was that?’

  ‘Be quiet. There is a problem.’

  It was not the answer Parker wanted to hear. He had not been happy in the first place seeing the colonel go off and leave him with the hard men and the injured, resentful Freddie still barely restraining the simmering rage that had boiled within him since his mutilation in Madrid.

  Ahead of them on either side the headlights played like a stroboscope off the interstices between the trees on a road to nowhere. And then from the edge of the forest two figures emerged, and lurched, almost drunkenly into the road, gesticulating at them to stop.

  For the first time the reverend heard what could only be described as a throaty chuckle from the sombre, sinister man in the front seat, as the car slowed on his command and the headlights picked out the two faces staring blindly into the glare like anxious rabbits.

  ‘Allahu-akhbar,’ he said in a low, deep voice.

  For once the reverend could share his sentiment. Indeed, God was indeed great. Maybe any minute now the colonel would show up and everything would be all right after all.

  59

  Marcus had the distinctly nauseating feeling of having awoken from a nightmare only to find it was really happening. At first sight the approaching headlights had seemed like a blessing, the chance of a lift to the nearest town – Biarritz, he supposed – above all to get away from the stalled train. He supposed the police would be called if the bodies were discovered. But that too was an ‘if’. As they had jumped from the train, he saw their strange unidentified rescuer pushing the bulk of the dead US colonel out of the compartment. Who had saved them, and why he had almost certainly been on their tail since Guadalupe, he had no idea. But this was not time to be challenging the existence of guardian angels. What mattered now was getting out of there, to somewhere safe, where they could catch their breath.

  Hitching a lift seemed the only option. He had prepared their story: they were stranded after a day picnicking in the forest – the French, he assumed, would not query too deeply a young couple’s quest for solitude on a summer afternoon – with a broken-down car and no mobile phone to summon help. All they needed was a lift to somewhere they could get a bed for the night. That much at least was true. He felt both mentally and physically exhausted.

  So it was not so much a surge of adrenalin, but a tidal wave of horrific despondency when from behind the glare of the stopped car’s headlights he saw two hooded figures armed with automatic weapons emerge, and then a tall, bearded man in a long black cloak stepped out of the front passenger seat, and spat out an order to them in no uncertain terms, in a language Marcus had little difficulty in recognising as Arabic. In case he was in any doubt, the man repeated it, in a harsh guttural English: ‘Get in!’

  But it was Nazreem who answered him, taking a step forward and staring up at him with an unbowed, cynical look in her eyes. The tall man looked her up and down in return, scowling at her uncovered head and her figure-hugging jeans with an expression of withering disdain. He wished he had more Arabic than a smattering of phrases, or at least the skill to recognise dialects to know which part of the Arab world this man called home.

  ‘You know what we want, child,’ Nazreem heard him say. ‘We want that which you, if you were a true daughter of your faith should have automatically surrendered to us, even if you were ignorant of its true nature, which I doubt. You have betrayed your faith and your nation.’

  Marcus shot her a glance. He had no idea what had just been said but right now Nazreem’s face conveyed pure hatred for the man in front of her. Any moment, he realised, she was going to leap forward and scratch the man’s eyes out, an action which would lead inevitably and immediately to the two of them kneeling down on the sandy soil beneath their feet to receive a bullet in the back of the head and an unmarked shallow grave in the forest of Les Landes.

  ‘Whatever you want, deal with me,’ Marcus shouted, not so much out of bravado as to defuse the situation, ‘she is only a woman. I’m the one you want.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ came a voice from the inside of the people-carrier, and Marcus wheeled around to see the unwelcome if slightly ridiculous picture of the Reverend Henry Parker climbing out awkwardly across the centre seats. The two armed men moved fractionally forward, but their leader motioned them back.

  ‘Let the American speak to him,’ he said.

  Marcus felt his jaw drop open in shock at the sight of the bespectacled Protestant cleric: ‘You. You’re working with these people? After all you said about Islam? I thought you wanted it wiped out.’

  The tall man shot a glance at the clergyman which clearly disquieted him, but he made a show of dismissal

  ‘I don’t know how you avoided the colonel, but when he gets here, we’ll deal with this properly.’ Marcus noted the flicker of a glance exchanged between one of the armed men and their imperious leader. Somehow they knew what the Reverend Parker did not: that the colonel was not going to get here any time soon. But the American was gloating: ‘You were a means to an end, professor, nothing more, but you may still be yet, if putting a few bullets into the fleshier parts of your anatomy is the only way of persuading your little friend here to reveal where she has hidden her pagan idol.’

  Marcus looked at Nazreem whose face was blank. Somehow everyone but him seemed to believe the supposedly stolen figurine was actually in her possession.

  ‘Why on earth do you think she has it when she was the one who alerted the world to the fact it had been stolen?’ he said.

  ‘So much for no secrets between lovers,’ sneered the little reverend. ‘You mean she really didn’t tell you? What was stolen was the wrong figure – ask our Arab friends here, one of their men was responsible – that’s why our little archaeologist did a sudden runner, not because she was scared for herself but to get her precious idol out of harm’s way. She came running to you, not for your ineffectual help, but to find somewhere to stash the loot. Isn’t that so?’

  Marcus glanced back at Nazreem expecting a look of disbelieving astonishment but saw instead an expression of foiled fury. In an instant he took on board what he simultaneously realised he had subconsciously always suspected:

  ‘Your bag … the books for the museum!’

  Nazreem shot him a lethal look. Instantly Marcus realised what he had done. But Parker was laughing:

  ‘Don’t worry, professor, you haven’t given anything away that we didn’t already know. Mr Saladin here has been on the ball.’

  But the man to whom the name apparently referred was talking Arabic again, looking down on Nazreem like some stern Victorian headmaster on a naughty pupil to whom it was his reluctant but earnest duty to deliver a thrashing.

  The man whom she now realised must be the one they whispered of in the backstreets of Gaza as the Son of Saladin opened his mouth for a second wordlessly, then said to her, in a voice more quiet and measured than she had expected:

  ‘From the moment you first landed in London one of my men was watching you. But you knew, didn’t you, he was clumsy. He followed you as you headed for the museum, and realised that might be your destination, but you spotted him and told your taxi instead to leave you at an Underground station. You were clever; he was stupid. He will not be so again.

  ‘His colleague, however, was also stupid, but lucky. He was told to go to the museum and wait for the other to arrive. When he lost you, his colleague also forgot about him. So the man continued to wait, and was there when you arrived, carrying your precious bag. If he had known more this might all have ended
there – a handbag snatch at a tourist site, it happens all the time. Allah works in mysterious ways. Yet his purpose is revealed in the end.’

  ‘You would do all this, just to destroy a Christian statue?’

  Saladin smiled, if you could call it a smile. ‘Perhaps. But we are not just talking about an archaeological relic, are we? We are talking about a weapon. A weapon that can ignite a global conflict, which only the will of God will resolve, and which, therefore we will win.’

  ‘You’re not making sense.’

  ‘Child,’ he said scowling at her. For a minute Nazreem was uncertain whether he was going to smash the side of his hand across her face or caress her cheek. ‘Only Allah makes sense in the end,’ he said, lowering his hand. ‘And now it is time for us to achieve that end. Get in.’

  Marcus had not understood a word; his mind was still taking in the deception he had almost wilfully failed to recognise. But the threatening gestures of the two men with the automatic weapons made abundantly clear what was expected right now. Only the Reverend Parker seemed nonplussed.

  ‘What about the colonel. And José, I mean Joseph? Freddie and I can’t go on without … wait a minute, where’s Freddie?’

  On the other side of the people-carrier the door had been slid open and a cool breeze was now blowing right through the vehicle from the dark wall of the pine trees beyond. Freddie had done a runner. Marcus could see drops of what looked like blood on the rear seat, where he assumed the Mexican had been sitting. He had no idea what might have happened to Freddie – and he was not inclined to feel much sympathy – but it was clear he was a lot less trusting than the reverend of the intentions of their present company.

  The armed men scanned the dark woodlands around them for a few seconds, before their leader waved them towards the car. Whatever had happened to the Americans’ makeweight Mexican help, he did not seem to be unduly worried. Marcus was bundled into the rear seat of the vehicle, one of the gunmen next to him. For the second time within an hour he had a gun stuck in his ribs. The other thug threw Nazreem into the front passenger seat and then climbed in beside Marcus holding his gun to the back of her head. At least Freddie’s disappearance would make the seating less of a squash: they would have trouble enough squeezing the reverend in.