by Will Adams
Thierry took the stern, from where he could steer. Alphonse sat sideways in the bow, where he raised the mast and set the sail, before furling it back up. Knox and Lucia each sat on one of the thin central slats. There was so little wind that Thierry and Alphonse grabbed a paddle each, went to work. Knox found a third paddle for himself. It was chiselled from heavy wood, but he soon picked up the rhythm, their blades banging like heartbeats against the pirogue’s hull.
He glanced back at the shore. The man in the black shirt was walking along the beach, almost as though keeping pace with them. After Mikhail’s death, Knox had lived in constant fear that some lowlife would learn his identity and that he had a five million euro bounty on his head. But the years had passed without incident, and he’d come to think himself safe. He remembered suddenly the nearness of the man in the alley, the flicker of frustration upon his face, and his old fear returned with such force that he half-missed his next stroke, splashing seawater into Thierry’s midriff. He turned to apologise and sort himself out, and by the time he looked again towards the shore, the man in the black shirt had vanished.
TWELVE
I
The road north from Tulear was even worse than Rebecca remembered. It was just about acceptable for the first twenty kilometres or so, but then it disintegrated into a track of sand, rock and rutted mud that eventually petered out into nothing a little north of Eden. Even making allowances for its wretched state, however, Zanahary drove like a flustered nun, inching across the occasional hazards like they were unexploded ordnance. It grew too much for Rebecca to bear. ‘Let me drive,’ she said.
Zanahary shook his head. ‘Insurance,’ he said.
‘Then let’s at least take a break,’ she said. ‘I need to stretch my legs.’
He pulled over gladly, reaching for his cigarettes even as he threw open his door. She waited till he was out then slid across into his seat, locked the door from the inside, turned on the ignition and pulled away. There were tears in his eyes when she slowed enough for him to catch up and clamber in the passenger side. He stamped on invisible brakes as she sped away along the track, twisting in his seat and muffling shrieks. Perversely, his fear only made Rebecca all the more rash. She came too fast upon an archipelago of rocks, hit one hard with her front right, bounced clear into the air. She cursed out loud; that was an axle gone for sure. It was a nightmare breaking down on these roads; you could wait forever for another vehicle. But somehow they landed between two hummocks and then bounded on to safe, soft sand. It was a dreadful, reckless piece of driving; it braced her and made her careful. But on Zanahary it had the opposite effect. ‘You drive like my brother,’ he said, as though fear was now pointless. ‘He mad too.’
There were cassette tapes on the dashboard. She pushed one into the player. The percussive Malagasy music took her back years. She turned the volume up, nodded to its beat. The wheel felt good in her hand, the driving position gratifyingly high. Navigating these tracks was all about anticipation, about trusting your hands and feet. The forest fell away to their left to reveal the sea, tall wading birds prowling the shallows, sea-grasses painting dark patterns in it, like God’s handwriting. The cassette finished. Silence embraced them. Huge butterflies drifted like perfume across her windscreen. A crested coua fled down the track ahead, swerving aside at the last possible moment. The track bumped and wound through settlement after settlement. Fitsitika. Fiserenamasay. Tsifota. Tsiandamba. The tiny hamlets of her childhood had grown up into villages of thatch huts and tin roofs held down by fifty-kilo sacks of rice refilled with leaking sand.
‘What that song?’
Rebecca glanced sideways at Zanahary. ‘How do you mean?’
‘That song you sing. What song?’
‘I wasn’t singing,’ Rebecca told him, for she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sung in anyone else’s presence. Yet now that he’d mentioned it, she could hear one of her mother’s old lullabies echoing in her mind, and it left her feeling a little uncertain of herself, so she took another cassette from the dashboard, and put it in to play.
II
Knox was beginning to feel blisters on his palms when the first gust of wind shivered the water and then it arrived in force. They all smiled relief at each other as they put down their paddles. The two piroguiers adjusted the rigging and unfurled their sail, and soon they were skimming so fast across the water that Alphonse had to step out on to the outrigger to give them extra stability. His sense of balance was extraordinary, standing on a narrow block of wood as water splashed off his feet like a water-skier, while Thierry clamped a paddle beneath his arm and used it as a rudder, working the rigging with his feet.
Knox opened a bottle of water and a pack of biscuits, offered them around. Lucia arranged her baggage along the bottom of the pirogue to form a makeshift deckchair on which she’d now stretched out and began to snooze, despite the two sides of the hull creaking loudly against each other. Knox devised a similar arrangement for himself, then sat low in the pirogue and watched landmarks grow large and then recede. Ahead were some fishermen, their nets trailing out behind them, sailing in a tightening spiral, like the whorls of a seashell, before beating the water with their paddles to startle fish into their trap. Gulls hung in the air above, and far away to his right, he could just make out the black crescents of a pod of dolphins at play.
Knox took his box-file of Eden project notes from his case, settled it in his lap, began going through them. As long as people had sailed out of sight of land and home, they’d striven for ways to calculate their position. For short distances, a combination of landmarks and directions sufficed: sail one day east to such-and-such an island, then south for a day to your destination. But this was inefficient and of little use to anyone swept off course by storms or unhelpful winds. What was needed was a way to determine position at sea without reference to land.
It was the great Alexandrian Eratosthenes who’d originally devised the concept of latitude and longitude. Latitude drew parallel bands upon the earth, like the equator and the tropics. Longitude, by contrast, divided the globe into segments, like an orange. Latitude was easy enough to calculate, even in open seas, by measuring the sun’s position at its zenith, then checking the result against a table of the sun’s declination for that day. But longitude proved a beast. In theory, it was easy enough: all you needed was to know the time relative to some fixed point, and you could work everything out from there. But keeping sufficiently accurate and reliable time on board ship was an immense challenge. It wasn’t just the rolling motion of the ship that had to be overcome, it was changes in air pressure and the corrosiveness of sea-air too. Most of all, a shipboard clock would somehow have to counter the changes in temperature that shrank or expanded the internal workings of clocks, rendering them inaccurate.
Europe began growing rich on new empires. But as trade boomed, so did shipping losses. A solution was needed urgently. The British instituted a Board of Longitude; the French a Royal Academy. Astronomers looked to the skies for inspiration, trying to use the moons of Jupiter as a universal clock. But in the end it was the obsessive inventor John Harrison who made the breakthrough, designing a bimetallic strip to cope with temperature variations, then crafting timepieces of such precision that one lost a mere five seconds on its maiden test run to Jamaica.
By a cruel irony, however, not every vessel benefited from his breakthrough. The Winterton, a British East Indiaman, had been sailing north up this very channel one night in 1792. Her captain had been justly confident of his position, thanks to his gleaming new Harrison chronometer. Unfortunately for him and his crew, however, the clock-makers had been years ahead of the cartographers, so that his outdated charts placed Madagascar well to the east of its true location. Despite relatively benign conditions, therefore, the Winterton had sailed smack on to the reefs a mile or two south of the Eden Reserve, where she’d lodged upon the coral for three days, despite the crew’s best efforts to refloat her, and had then broken up.
The Winterton wreck-site itself was well-enough known, but the fate of its cargo was less certain. This was a question of more than academic interest, because the Winterton had been carrying three hundred thousand pieces-of-eight, pay for the British armies in India. Several chests of silver had been brought ashore; more had been recovered over the years by divers. But half or more of the silver was still unaccounted for. It was this that the Kirkpatricks had found, and that had brought Emilia to England, and which Knox and his MGS colleagues were going to salvage once they were finished with Ricky and the treasure ship.
He closed the box-file. The sun was low in the sky, and their friendly westerly had turned into an unhelpful southerly that was chopping up the water and forcing them into such sharp tacks that they were barely making any forward progress. He glanced around at Thierry. ‘Eden,’ said Thierry, pointing to a distant headland. ‘But not tonight.’
Knox looked regretfully south. The headland looked frustratingly close. ‘Is it walkable?’ he asked.
Thierry leaned out to discuss it briefly with Alphonse, shook his head. ‘Not at night,’ he said. ‘Too dark. But we make camp here, we start before sunrise, you’ll have breakfast at Eden for sure.’
‘Fine,’ said Knox. ‘Let’s do it.’
III
It was time for Boris to make his first report to Sandro. He watched closely as Davit set up so that he’d be able to do it for himself next time. ‘This is the IP terminal,’ Davit told him, plugging a device the size and shape of a slim black hardback to his laptop. ‘It links to a network of geostationary satellites. The nearest is over Africa; to our north-west.’ He took a compass from the case, set it flat on the table, aimed the terminal until the display told him he’d found the satellite, and then had locked on. He brought up a program on the laptop, waited a few moments, double-clicked the mouse. ‘Okay,’ he said.
‘That’s it?’ asked Boris.
‘That’s it,’ confirmed Davit. ‘You have broadband.’
‘And how do I call Georgia?’
Davit entered the number for him. A switchboard operator answered; they ran through the security protocols. A new box popped up onscreen, Sandro looking irritably to his left before turning to the camera. ‘You got there okay then?’ he said.
Boris turned to Davit. ‘I’ll call you if I need anything.’ He waited until he was gone. ‘It’s him,’ he told Sandro. ‘It’s Knox.’
There was a second or so of delay, then Sandro squinted at the camera. ‘You’re sure? Already?’
‘I was just taking a look at the town. Guess who came walking straight towards me?’
Again that delay. It was only satellite time-lag, Boris knew, yet it was disconcerting nonetheless. ‘How can you be sure it’s him?’ Sandro asked. ‘Did he recognise you?’
‘No. It was just the way he carried himself.’
‘The way he carried himself,’ echoed Sandro. He gave Boris a long, hard look. ‘Listen, I hope you don’t think we’ll pay you for topping some random stranger. We’ll want proof that this is Knox before you do anything.’
‘It’s him. I’m telling you.’
‘Good. Then proof should be easy, shouldn’t it?’
Boris sighed, but he knew better than to argue. ‘Any progress on that gun?’ he asked.
‘Petr’s found some dealer to drive you down a selection. We think he’s okay, but you know how these things are. You might be wise to scout out somewhere neutral for the handover; unless you’re comfortable with him coming to your hotel.’
Boris nodded. ‘I’ll look around in the morning.’
‘Good. Then let’s talk again tomorrow.’ The screen went black. Boris disconnected then dismantled the laptop and terminal, sat there brooding. He’d been Sandro’s head of security for years, had never had his integrity doubted like that before. It rather stung him. But then he wondered if he wasn’t perhaps missing something. Ilya Nergadze had always been quick to anger and hungry for revenge, but Sandro was too pragmatic for such vendettas. As head of security, Boris had often seen Sandro handle his father in such situations. He’d never say no directly. Instead he’d agree enthusiastically that something needed to be done, then work in subtle ways to make sure that nothing happened until Ilya had forgotten about it. Was that what was going on here? Ilya was dying, after all. Taking Knox to the grave with him was all he cared about, consequences be damned. But Sandro wouldn’t be thinking that way, for Knox’s murder was certain to kick off a shit-storm. He’d never openly obstruct his father, not least because Ilya was quite ruthless enough to cut him out of his will. But behind the scenes…
Boris considered alerting Ilya; but only briefly. Sandro would soon be head of the family, and then Boris would be dependent upon his continuing goodwill. He shook his head in frustration. If Sandro wanted proof, Boris would just have to provide it. The only question was how.
THIRTEEN
I
Darkness began to fall around Rebecca. She turned on her headlights. The stars were out by the time they reached the small town of Salary, fires being lit for the evening meals, rice softening in blackened cauldrons as families gathered to trade stories of their day. She stopped in the dusty heart of the village, stepped out. Malagasy music pounded from a cafe on top of a dune, muffled by the low rumble of a generator. A crowd gathered slowly around her, trying to make it look as if they weren’t staring. She recognised one or two from years before, but most were strangers. A man in a glittery blue shirt jogged down a dune, precipitating tiny avalanches of sand. Jean-Luc. He’d always been striking: tall, handsome, confident, better educated and more ambitious than his fellows. He’d put on weight, but it suited him, made him look substantial and prosperous. He took her hands, kissed her on either cheek. ‘Rebecca,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long.’
‘Any news?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No news.’
‘You’ve been looking?’
‘Of course.’ His eyes flickered, however. He tried a smile. ‘You must understand, we have families to feed.’
‘You have families to feed,’ said Rebecca. She put her hands on her hips, looked around from face to face. ‘My father was good to you. He never let you go hungry. Never. My sister was your friend. She nursed you and your children whenever you were sick. But now that they need you, you have families to feed. My father and sister were your family. You think they’d have stayed home if you’d gone missing?’ Heads bowed in shame all around her, a congregation before their brimstone preacher. She dropped the Mitsubishi’s tailboard, dragged out the sack of rice she’d bought in Tulear, let it thump to the earth. Two zebu were tethered to an ancient tree, grazing the meagre grass, flicking their tails and shuddering their muscles to scatter flies. ‘Whose are those?’ she asked Jean-Luc.
‘My father’s. But-’
‘How much?’
‘They’re not for-’
‘How much?’
He sighed. ‘Three million.’
She took out her purse, gave him all her cash. ‘I’ll get you the rest next time I go to town.’ He took it reluctantly, started to say something, then thought better of it. ‘I need a knife,’ she announced. ‘Who has a knife?’
There was scurrying. A young lad with a ragged cleftpalate scar came through the ranks a few moments later holding out a long-bladed knife. She took it from him, tested its point and then its blade with her thumb. Not as sharp as she’d like, nor as clean, but it would have to do. She seized the zebu’s jaw in the vice of her elbow, wrenched its head back and up. It took a couple of faltering steps to adjust its balance, leaned trustingly against her. They were strong creatures, but bred to be docile. She plunged the knife through the tough hide o
f its throat into the softness of the liquid canals inside, felt the puncture of the larynx, holding it there for just a moment before sawing in a jagged, sideways motion, the radiated heat striking her a moment later, and then a geyser of blood spraying everywhere, people shrieking and jumping back, her legs and hands and stomach sticky, and the zebu grunting and trying to buck away too late, crashing to its knees and then on to its side, life-blood pumping in a slackening flow on to the dry brown earth, one eye looking reproachfully up at her. ‘There,’ she told them. ‘That should feed your families. Let me know when you need more.’
Jean-Luc glared at her, aware he’d lost face. She wiped the knife on her shirt, handed it back to the boy, then climbed on to the Mitsubishi’s flatbed. ‘Three million ariary to whoever finds my father,’ she announced, the blood granting her a certain grotesque authority. ‘Five million if he’s alive. The same for my sister. You hear?’ She looked around their faces. Ten million ariary was a life-changing sum for a Malagasy. And the bush telegraph was a wondrous thing. By tomorrow, word would have spread all along the coast. As for the reward money, she’d just have to cross that bridge when she came to it.
II
Alphonse and Thierry unknotted the rigging, lowered the sail and the mast, then the four of them together heaved the pirogue up past the high-tide mark of the beach. Thierry found a section of flat sand and fashioned a makeshift tent from the sail and two paddles, just about big enough for them all. Alphonse collected wood and built a fire on which they boiled rice and grilled fish, before sitting in a line looking out over the sea and eating it with their fingers.