‘Yes,’ said Biljana. ‘I am intending to let you go.’
The Captain straightened up as if someone offstage had barked out an order to stand to attention. ‘You’re joking, surely?’
‘No,’ said Biljana. ‘I’m going to give you one final chance. You can take your car with you. Make for the Eritrean border. I will give you the gift of this one night only. Rider and Amira are locked inside the tomb. They cannot get out. Hart and Gersem are up on the plateau. The only way down is by this rope. But I will not let them descend it. If they try I will fire so that they must keep their heads inside the hut. No one else will come. It is night-time. People are frightened of gunfire at night. Look. There have been two shots in the past twenty minutes. But no one is here.’
‘You are really going to let me go?’ said the Captain. ‘Just because you are my daughter?’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘So blood really is thicker than water? Is this what you are telling me?’
‘Yes,’ said Biljana. ‘Our shared blood dictates that I refuse to be responsible for your downfall. You will doubtless manage that yourself in your own sweet time.’
The Captain laughed again. This time it was more of a guffaw. The sort of a guffaw a man will give when he thinks he has the edge on a certifiable lunatic. ‘So you are searching for someone to love? Is that it? Is that what this is all about?’
Biljana shook her head. ‘I don’t love you. I hate you. For everything you have done.’ The end of her rifle twitched. The Captain lurched spasmodically on the spot, in a mirror movement to the rifle’s, as if he expected to be shot at any moment. ‘I hate you for driving my mother to suicide,’ Biljana continued. ‘I hate you for killing my grandfather and my grandmother. For killing my uncle. I hate you for killing Danko. And for all those other innocents whose lives you have ruined along the way.’
‘Then,’ said the Captain, ‘I don’t understand. Why the fuck are you letting me go?’
‘Because I am not Allah,’ said Biljana. ‘Because I will not set myself up in judgement over you. Because I will not have your death on my conscience. Alongside all those other deaths that, by virtue of my tainted blood, I share responsibility for.’
The Captain took a step forwards. He shook his head like a dog attempting to rid itself of fleas. His face was streaked with sweat. Perspiration was leaching through his shirt. ‘There’s one problem with all this,’ he said. ‘And it’s a dilly. I can’t possibly leave all these people alive behind me. You must see that?’ He took another small pace towards her. ‘It wouldn’t sit right with me, you understand? I know their sort. They will never give up pursuing me. While they are still alive, I will need to spend the rest of my life glancing back over my shoulder. And I am not prepared to do that. So I am going to take this rifle…’ The Captain began unhitching his rifle ‘And I am going to walk past you back towards the tomb. Once there I am going to kill the man called Rider and the Eisenberger woman. They are sitting ducks. You have made sure of that. I will make their deaths quick and without pain, I promise you. Then I will stand beneath this cliff, with my rifle pressed to your head, and I will call Hart down. And do you know what? He will come. Because I will offer him a hand-to-hand fight. On the square. Man to man. And when I have killed him, and only then, will I get in my car and drive to Eritrea. At this point you can come with me or not. The choice will be yours.’
‘Don’t free your rifle any more.’ Biljana’s voice was trembling. ‘I will kill you.’
‘No you won’t,’ said the Captain. ‘You won’t kill me because a killer is not what you are. You are better than that. Far better. You’ll maybe find this hard to believe, Biljana, but I am proud of you. Proud of what you have become. Proud of your decency. I’m sorry to have to let you down. But, you see, I am not even a halfway decent man.’ The Captain finished unslinging his rifle and raised it to cover Biljana.
Gersem, fifty metres above the Captain, chose that moment to pick up the rock that had fallen at some previous time down from the ledge above. He had marked the rock for possible use earlier. As something to be shunted towards the edge of the cliff face. Just in case.
The Captain was standing exactly one metre away from the rawhide rope. The rope, Gersem decided, would act as his guideline. Either way, the dropping of the rock was a long shot. But Gersem had picked up the tone of every word that had passed between Biljana and the Captain, even though they were talking in a language that was entirely unfamiliar to him. When the Captain raised his rifle to cover his very own daughter there was no longer any option. Gersem knew that he must act. In Ethiopia it was inconceivable that a man would use a weapon to threaten a member of his own family.
Hart reached out to stop him. The Ethiopian was still in considerable pain from his shoulder. He was unable to both heft the rock and hold it steady at the same time. The unexpected weight was forcing Gersem perilously close to the edge of the cliff face.
Hart grabbed Gersem by his linen gabi and dragged him backwards. ‘The girl, you fool. You could hit the girl. Put the rock down.’
The sudden movement was enough to unsettle Gersem’s left hand and cause him to lose control of the rock.
The rock pitched over the side of the amba and started downwards. Fifteen feet below the lip, it struck an outcropping spur and changed direction.
The Captain heard the angry snap of rock against rock and looked upwards.
Later, Biljana would come to doubt the evidence of her own eyes. The sudden movement her father had made as if he had been intending to protect her.
What she did know for certain was that he had put out his hand and pushed her away. Had he been trying to disarm her? Had he still intended taking her hostage, as he had been threatening? Or was it the unlikely manifestation of a genuine change of heart?
The rock struck the Captain on his left shoulder, a fraction more than six seconds after it had left Gersem’s hands. The Captain pitched to the ground.
Hart threw himself over the lip of the cliff. He scissored his way down the rope, letting the rawhide slide between his hands until his palms were bloody. All the time he was glissading, he could hear Biljana wailing. Each cry was like a knife thrust through his heart.
When he reached the rope’s bottom he ran to her, but she turned from him, her weeping done, her wails transformed into silence.
Hart turned round.
The Captain was lying prone upon the ground. His left arm was partially sheared off. In his right hand he held Danko’s Beretta pistol. It was loosely aimed at Hart. The Captain’s face was pale and wild. The face of a man unexpectedly confronted by his own mortality.
‘Move,’ said the Captain. ‘Move away from the girl.’
‘What?’ said Hart, his damaged hands held flat against his sides. ‘Don’t tell me that you are afraid of a bullet passing through me and hitting her?’ As he talked he watched the blood steadily pulsing from the Captain’s arm onto the rocks surrounding him. It would not be long now. Surely it would not be long.
‘Yes,’ said the Captain. ‘My aim, you know. I sense it will be off. But still. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
The Captain raised the pistol and tightened his finger upon the trigger.
The crack of the assault rifle from behind him caused Hart to spin round as if the bullet had been meant for him, and not for his assailant. He was not certain, immediately, quite what had happened. Had the Captain fired? Had Biljana fired back at the Captain?
Biljana stared at where the Captain was lying, her face bereft.
Hart turned round. The bullet from the assault rifle had taken the Captain full in the chest. It had knocked him at least three feet backwards, so that his right arm, still clutching the pistol, was swept upward as if in a salute. The remnants of the Captain’s left arm lay a foot or so beyond him, thrown there by the force of the bullet’s centrifugal throw-out.
Endeavouring to mask the Captain�
�s body with his own, Hart gently, ever so gently, prised the rifle from Biljana’s hands.
EPILOGUE
It took seven months for Hart to complete the initial part of the formal process of adopting Biljana. First there was the problem of her religion, Muslim. And Hart’s, Church of England. Next there was the fact that he was an unmarried middle-aged man and she was a female teenager. From Macedonia. Via Kosovo. And stations in between.
Hart nearly gave up on countless occasions. For a start, only two per cent of adoptees were between ten and fifteen years old. And only one per cent were over sixteen. He needed to get on with it. But everything seemed to mitigate against him. Heterosexual couples, despite everything he had heard to the contrary, were Social Services’ first choice. Single females were second. Single males were off the damned scale. They figured below lesbians, gay men and transsexuals.
Then the adoption panel wasn’t impressed with his profession. Photojournalist. Frequently in danger spots. Irregular income with vast fluctuations. Hart came close to losing his rag on countless occasions, but Amira, who had agreed to shadow him while he was undergoing the Home Study, somehow kept him in check. He made it through to Matching Panel. It was a miracle he didn’t blow that when one of his interrogators, leafing through his press cuttings, suggested that he suffered from a death wish.
Finally, largely thanks to the kindness of the Macedonian authorities, who were as chalk to cheese compared to the English, the adoption was formalized and Biljana could stay with Hart by legal right, as opposed to by choice. The Macedonians, unlike the British, believed in something called a direct adoption, which entitled the child to reside with the potential adoptee before the actual adoption was finalized. This meant that Biljana was able to live with Hart in both England and in Macedonia, under the proviso of regular visits from both countries’ social services. The fact that Biljana was nearly sixteen by the end of the process undoubtedly helped curtail the red tape. As a fifteen-year-old, Biljana was also consulted as to whether she was willing to let her Macedonian nationality lapse, and she stated that she was. Macedonia meant nothing to her, she told the panel. It was simply the country in which her mother had died.
Last on the agenda was the possible name change. Hart skated around the issue like a man aware that he is hovering on perilously thin ice but, once again, Biljana proved that she knew her own mind better than he did. She would be called, from henceforth, Biljana Andronika Hart.
Later, when all had been said and done, the pair of them returned to Kosovo, and to the Visoki Decˇani Monastery. After seeing the abbot and thanking him, and explaining to Maria what had happened to her great-nephew, they retraced the journey Hart and Biljana’s mother had made sixteen years before.
They never found the rape house where Biljana had been conceived, however, for Hart pretended he had forgotten where to look for it, and Biljana allowed him to imagine that she had been taken in by all his many protestations of ignorance.
Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of eight non-fiction titles and seven novels published in the UK and around the world.
Acknowledgements
I’m very grateful, as always, to my agent, Oli Munson, of A. M. Heath, and to my long-time publisher, Sara O’Keeffe, Editorial Director of Corvus Books. Also to Louise Cullen, who edited me so effectively, and to Michelle O’Connell, who reads my books as I write them and keeps me in line. Finally, to my wife, Claudia, and my granddaughter, Éloise, for riding shotgun so efficiently, and reminding me why I write in the first place.
Published in paperback in Great Britain in 2016 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Mario Reading, 2016
The moral right of Mario Reading to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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OME ISBN: 978 1 78239 924 7
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Also by Mario Reading
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The Nostradamus Prophecies
The Mayan Codex
The Third Antichrist
THE JOHN HART SERIES
The Templar Prophecy
The Templar Inheritance
The Templar Succession
The Templar Succession Page 30