The Eden Legacy dk-4

by Will Adams

  He picked thorns from his clothes as he walked along the beach to the path to Eden. The lodge’s front door was wide open and an oil lamp was flickering inside. He smelled and saw the vomit on the reception floor; more evidence that something extraordinary had happened. He stepped carefully over it, found a mop and bucket to clean it up. Afterwards, however, he felt at something of a loss. The place seemed empty without Rebecca. Hollow. However absurd and reckless her swim had been, he couldn’t help but admire the courage and determination that underlay it, her stoicism under pain. She was a fighter; there was no disputing that. He thought suddenly and guiltily of Gaille. The suddenness of the thought was common enough-little things were always reminding him of her-but the guilt was rarer. He’d gone on several dates this past year, cajoled into them by solicitous colleagues, and he hadn’t once felt a twinge of guilt, only boredom. Yet something about Rebecca gave him a twinge. He didn’t like to think too hard about why that might be.

  He wandered out the front door. He felt bad doing nothing, as if he wasn’t just letting the Kirkpatricks down but Miles and his MGS colleagues too. He turned on the generator, took a proper tour of the lodge. The computer in Adam’s study beckoned, but he couldn’t risk Rebecca catching him snooping. He looked along the shelves instead. Most of the books were academic texts, though there were several on carpentry, plumbing and other DIY topics. He glimpsed the spine of a familiar book, a history of the Winterton he’d given to Emilia himself, because she’d complained about how difficult it was to get the books they needed out here. It amused him to see it sitting here so openly on the shelves, despite Emilia’s insistence on secrecy. A case of hiding it in plain view, no doubt, for the Winterton was a celebrated local wreck. He looked around for the other books he’d given her, the copy of the Nautical Archaeology Society’s guide, a history of the Chinese treasure fleet. Neither of them were there. There were more shelves in the lounge. They weren’t there either. And, now that Knox thought about things that were absent, the Kirkpatricks had shown him photos of piecesof-eight Emilia had recovered from the reef. Where were they? And where was everything else they’d need for the project?

  When Emilia had come to England, she and her father had already concocted a plan to keep the salvage secret. A group called the Landseer Trust organised two or three expeditions out here every year, with volunteers paying serious money to spend a month or six weeks surveying the local reef and forests. No one would suspect a thing if MGS Salvage used one of these expeditions as cover, with all the ‘volunteers’ actually being their own staff and divers, sleeping at Eden and using the Yvette as their dive-boat. Not ideal, but certainly workable and cheap. Yet there was a limit to how far one could pare down an underwater excavation. The Yvette was too small to do much more than ferry the divers and their gear to and from the site, so they’d need a land-base to store surplus equipment like the caesium magnetometer and side-scan sonar, the water-dredges, grids and mapping frames, their drawing boards and pens, their markers and artefact tags, their trowels, rulers, cameras and laptops. And what about their finds? Where would they be stored? Emilia had pestered him with questions about strong rooms and atmospheric controls. She’d assured him that everything would be in place on time, and he’d believed her.

  He found nothing in the lodge or cabins, so he took keys from behind reception and checked out the boathouse too. It was an ugly building, newly built from cemented breezeblocks, very different from the local materials used for the lodge. It smelled pungently of brine inside, and looked unremarkable enough. A wooden table stood against the wall near the door, with chairs for divers to write up their notes. There was a small rowboat next to it, presumably for getting to and from the Yvette’s fixed mooring at high tide, and a couple of long-handled paddles plus some boxes of lead diving weights. Two disassembled sea-fishing rods leaned against the wall, along with a box of hooks and reels of different strength line. A motley assortment of life-jackets, wetsuits, buoyancycontrol devices and other pieces of dive-gear hung from wooden racks, though most of the pegs were empty, presumably for volunteers who brought their own equipment.

  A powerful generator was sitting on the bare concrete against the left-hand wall, next to an air-compressor covered by a sheet of brown sacking to keep the damp off, and fitted with beach-buggy wheels so that it could be trundled across the sand. Fifteen or so well-used scuba tanks stood next to it, along with a big red barrel of water to stop them overheating while they were being filled with air. A second barrel was three-quarters full of fuel for the generator and the Yvette. And there were more hooks against the far wall, for flippers, masks and snorkels, though most of them were empty. And there were various other bits and pieces: underwater pens and boards, metal grids for laying out the dive-site and the like. But he saw nothing to help answer his questions, so he returned dispirited to the lodge.

  III

  Pierre’s front door opened as Rebecca pulled up in the Jeep, and Therese appeared. ‘I think it must be you,’ she beamed. ‘I tell Pierre that-’ But she broke off in shock when she saw all Rebecca’s bandages. ‘What happen?’ she cried.

  ‘I was out on the reef,’ she answered. ‘But it’s fine. I had a friend with me. He fixed me up.’

  ‘He!’ scoffed Therese, shaking her head at the absurdity of entrusting such work to a man. ‘Show me.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ insisted Rebecca. ‘I just need to speak to Pierre.’

  ‘But I-’

  ‘Please, Therese. Come round tomorrow if you like. Change my bandages then. But right now I need to speak to Pierre.’

  She nodded and went inside. Pierre emerged almost at once, as though he’d been standing there listening. He cut a coin-sized slice from a stick of manioc with his penknife, ate it off the stubby blade. ‘We look in the forest this afternoon. Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Of course. Whatever we can do.’

  ‘Listen, Pierre…’ She hesitated, uncertain how to approach this without alerting him to the kidnap. ‘Did you hear that I’ve offered a reward for whoever finds Adam and Emilia?’

  ‘Sure. Everyone has heard.’ He flashed her a grin. ‘Maybe I’ll win it myself, eh?’

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t have that much cash with me. And it’s proving a nightmare to arrange. So I was wondering…’

  ‘You want me to provide it?’ He blanched and put a hand on his chest. ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. I don’t have that kind of money. Truly.’

  ‘It would only be a loan. I’d get it back to you in a couple of days.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If it were possible, yes, of course. But it’s not. It’s just not.’

  She hadn’t expected anything else, but it had been worth asking. She thanked him and took her leave, climbed gingerly back in the Jeep, headed south. Mustafa Habib next, then Delpha. The bumpy track tore at her cuts, forcing her to slow down, allowing her to brood on the kidnap. By a strange twist, one of her first ever programmes had included a segment on hostage taking. Surely if anything was an exclusively human behaviour, kidnapping would be. Yet male baboons under attack had been observed taking their assailants’ offspring hostage: Let me go or the kid gets it. She gave a little shudder at the thought of something similar happening to Emilia. She had to raise this money. But how? And how to repay it? Her credit cards and bank accounts were already stretched beyond their limits. Her house was fully mortgaged and had loans of nearly half a million pounds secured against it.

  Good Christ! What had she become?

  It had started innocuously enough. Years before, an Oxford boyfriend had ridden in point-to-points. She’d hated those afternoons, all those pompous pricks drinking punch, shivering over stale picnics. And she didn’t even have the fun of betting. Her allowance was so pitiful she couldn’t risk even fifty pence each way. One time, Nicholas had offered her a few quid to take a punt, but she’d been too proud and he hadn’t offered again. Or not directly, at least. Instead he’d
put?5 on a horse called Madagascar Pride in the fourth race one afternoon. ‘Madagascar Pride,’ he’d said. ‘I had to place a bet for you.’ Somehow taking the yellow slip from him hadn’t seemed so bad. Madagascar Pride had romped home at 10-1. Fifty-five quid. Fifty-five quid. All the money in the world. After that, Nick had manufactured excuses to bet for her on almost every race. Rather than dreading these point-to-points, she’d begun looking forward to them, had lain in bed afterwards reliving the rush of a close race, the way the tendons in her neck stood out in sympathy with those of her horse.

  She’d studied evolutionary biology, she’d known all about game theory, how players could often skew situations in their favour with seemingly perverse behaviour. But until she’d first gone racing, she hadn’t understood the first thing about gambling. She’d assumed that it was about money. But it wasn’t. It was about getting high. Losses were simply the price you paid for your fix. Her break-up with Nick had put an end to it, however, for she couldn’t afford to risk her own money. But then success had arrived, and she’d taken her whole team out for a big night as thanks. Titch had suggested going on to his casino, had signed them all in. She’d known from the first minute that she was in trouble. Her heart had broken into a pleasant canter even walking between the tables, and she’d tasted the delicious metal at the back of her throat. Get out, she’d told herself. Get out while you can. But it had been too late.

  There’s something comforting about the word ‘addiction’. It’s an admission of defeat in itself, a way to make the problem so big that there’s no point even trying to fight it. Addictions all work in much the same way, usurping your body’s own reward mechanisms, flooding your system with dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, whatever your craving might be. Rebecca’s problem had been boredom; her fix adrenaline. She’d usually start with blackjack; it gave the illusion of pitting wits. She’d set a limit and vow to leave when she’d reached it, but she never really meant it. Sometimes she’d lose so quickly that she would become convinced the croupier was cheating her, yet she wouldn’t even move table; instead she’d become defiant, throwing down her money until it was gone. At other times she’d eke out her defeat, hunching over her chips until the weariness got to her and she’d grow almost eager to lose, before coming to her senses in the cab, nauseous with the knowledge that she had lost-irretrievably lost-another ten, twenty, maybe even fifty thousand pounds. And despite that, despite her disbelief at her own stupidity, she’d already be calculating how to put together her next stake. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds! Rebecca had lost twice that much in the last year alone. She owed her company over a quarter of a million and as much again to her various banks. She had gambled away her father’s and her sister’s lives, and now she had nothing left.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I

  Knox fixed himself something to eat then took another wander round the lodge. There were group photographs of all the previous Landseer Trust expeditions on the walls, volunteers glowing with youth and sunshine. He gave a little snort of amusement as he looked them over, for he and his fellow MGS divers were going to look shop-soiled by comparison. The wall behind the photographs caught his eye, its plaster studded with shells, quartz and other stones, decorative touches presumably harvested from the beach. In the gloom, it was hard to be sure, but there was an inch long, scimitarshaped fragment of what appeared to be pottery, remarkably similar to coarse-ware they’d found on the sea-bed off Morombe. He examined the surrounding walls for several minutes before he found a second shard, then a third; only this one was white with hints of blue. He touched it with his fingertip, wondering how a shard of Ming porcelain could possibly have found its way on to Eden’s beach. And then a startling thought occurred to him.

  Emilia had told him that she and her father had found silver from the Winterton. She’d shown him photographs of dozens of pieces-of-eight recovered from their reef. It was certainly plausible, because of the legend of the Winterton’s lost silver. But what if they’d actually found something else? What if that was why the book on the Winterton was sitting so openly on the shelf yet there was no sign of the one on the Chinese treasure fleets? Those armadas had been huge, and the Mozambique Channel was notoriously prone to terrible cyclones. If such a storm could have swept one ship on to the reefs, then why not two?

  He shook his head at himself. He was being absurd, extrapolating so much from such small shards. Why would Emilia have lied? If she and her father had found a Chinese ship here, surely she’d just have told him. But would she? Her overriding concern had always been secrecy, out of fear that treasure hunters would learn about the wreck and dynamite the coral to get at it. Emilia had known MGS was working with Ricky Cheung; in fact, she and her father had originally heard of them because of all the publicity he’d generated around his Morombe salvage. Maybe she’d feared that they’d let this new discovery slip to Ricky, and that he’d announce it to the world, effectively declaring open season on Eden’s reefs. So why hire MGS at all? Why not simply go to a rival? But marine salvage was hugely expensive. Adam and Emilia were planning on bankrolling this one themselves, in order to keep control. MGS would consequently have been far cheaper to hire than their rivals, partly because they priced themselves competitively anyway, partly because their divers and equipment would already be in Madagascar, saving a fortune on flights and freight, and also because a salvage like this demanded hundreds of man-hours studying the history of the target ship, its materials and cargo. That was work Knox and his colleagues had already done.

  An owl hooted outside. Something rustled. He recalled Emilia sitting across the negotiating table from Miles and Frank, pleading poverty and pointing out how prestigious the salvage of the Winterton would be. Frank had shrugged that it wasn’t such a big deal, not after a treasure ship. And Knox had seen her smile at that, a private, knowing smile that he’d never quite understood.

  Not until now.

  II

  Rebecca double-checked Mustafa Habib’s card to make sure she had the right address. She’d thought him a run-of-the-mill businessman, but he lived in a vast beach-front estate, its perimeter wall topped with broken glass, video-cameras whirring and humming either side of high steel gates. A young man in khaki uniform emerged from a breezeblock guardhouse, lighting one cigarette from its predecessor, then squashing the discarded butt into the dust. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she told him. ‘I’m here to see Mustafa Habib.’

  ‘Is he expecting you?’

  She showed him Mustafa’s card. ‘He’ll know what it’s about.’

  He slouched off into the guardhouse. The gates slid silently open a minute later and he waved her through. She drove past outbuildings down a winding crushed-shell drive to a white hacienda lit up by spotlights and topped by satellites, aerials and masts. Two more uniformed men stood to attention either side of the high double front doors, AK47s leaning against the walls behind them. She parked by a marble fountain and got painfully out.

  The two guards opened the doors and Mustafa emerged, a phone to his ear, a young woman in gorgeous silks a couple of paces behind. He beamed in pleasure at Rebecca as he bounded down the marble steps, but then winced sympathetically at her injuries, though he was too polite to remark directly upon them. ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ he said, a hand over his phone’s mouthpiece. ‘I have to finish this call. Five minutes at the most.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘This is my daughter Ahdaf,’ he said. ‘A zoologist like yourself. Or studying to be one, at least.’ He gestured vaguely at the satellite dishes on his roof as he made his way back up the steps. ‘She watches all your programmes.’

  ‘Is that right?’ asked Rebecca.

  Ahdaf’s eyelashes flickered. ‘I watch your programmes, yes.’

  Rebecca caught her tone at once. ‘You don’t like them,’ she said.

  Ahdaf glanced at her father, waited until he was safely out of earshot. ‘You make humans out to be so sp
ecial,’ she said. ‘We’re just one species among tens of millions.’

  ‘A species that happens to make up my whole audience.’

  ‘Science shouldn’t be about ratings,’ said Ahdaf. ‘If I were doing the programme, man would be treated just like any other animal.’

  I’ll bet they would, thought Rebecca. But she said nothing; she couldn’t risk Mustafa’s goodwill. She reached into her bag for her mobile. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked, gesturing at the masts. ‘Only I’ve been out of signal range for two days now.’ She didn’t wait for an answer, just wandered a little distance off, listened to her messages. She had three from Titch alone, telling her that everyone at work was thinking of her and praying that things were going as well as could be hoped, asking her to call if there was anything he could do. She’d hardly thought of him or the office since leaving London, but his messages did wonders for her spirits, and she found herself dialling his mobile. He picked up almost at once, and his obvious gladness to hear her voice lifted her spirits immensely. She began to talk and then it all came pouring out in an incoherent jumble: her visit to her mother’s tomb, her ordeal on the reef and how Daniel had saved her, even the ransom demand. She was still babbling away when a man cleared his throat behind her and she whipped around to see Mustafa standing there with an embarrassed expression. ‘Got to go,’ she told Titch. ‘I’ll call soon.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Mustafa, holding a hand up in apology. ‘I didn’t mean to overhear.’