by Ryan, Chris
‘Maybe you should keep one eye open for deadfall yourself, Cruz. When my friends come to get me, you won’t know what’s happening till you’ve been crushed.’
‘I really don’t think so, old friend. I’m afraid you’ve done your last Houdini impression. How did you break out of the warehouse, by the way?’
‘We’ve all got to have some secrets, Cruz,’ Zak barely whispered, unable to keep the fear from his voice. His mind was turning over, trying to get ahead of Cruz, but deep down he knew that somehow his enemy had got the better of him.
Cruz shrugged. ‘If you hadn’t got away, we wouldn’t have needed to go through all this pantomime of getting you here. Though I must say, that would have been a bit of a shame.’ He swung one arm around the brightly lit room. ‘Do you like my little jungle hideaway? It’s been in the family for some time, you know.’
Zak didn’t want to reply, but he knew that the longer he could keep Cruz talking, the better. Because if he was talking, he wasn’t killing.
‘It’s charming,’ he said.
Cruz gave a bland smile. ‘I’d like you to see someone,’ he said. He turned to one of his guys. ‘Bring him in.’
The scar-faced boy left the building. He returned moments later. This time, he had company.
It was Malcolm.
Zak’s companion was also soaking wet. He was trembling. Infection, or terror? His glasses were misted up, but Zak could still make out an expression of utter fear. It wasn’t clear, though, whom he was more scared of: Cruz or Zak. His gaze flitted, terrified, from one to the other.
‘What the . . .’ Zak whispered.
But he didn’t finish his sentence. He had noticed something else. Malcolm’s guard had carried in another gun. Zak recognized it immediately: Gabs’s AK-47 with the Maglite still taped to the body.
He felt unsteady on his feet again. Like he was living in a horrible nightmare, and nothing around him was real.
‘Did you not stop to think, Harry – or should I call you Zak? – that Malcolm managed to locate my flight just a little too easily?’
Zak paused. ‘I know how good he is . . .’ he started to say, but again the words died on his lips as he realized how badly he’d been outmanoeuvred.
Cruz gave a sarcastic sigh. ‘Such loyalty! No, I’m afraid he knew my flight details all the time. I must say, though, that I wasn’t quite convinced that he would be able to send us the signal that you were about to break into the camp. I mean, look at him. He’s not very impressive, is he?’
Zak tried to stay calm. ‘What signal?’ he asked in a level voice.
Cruz pretended to look surprised. ‘Jamming our radios, of course. It needed to be something that you wouldn’t suspect . . .’ His voice trailed off as he looked cruelly at the miserable Malcolm. If he hadn’t been bubbling up with anger, Zak might have felt sorry for his former companion. Malcolm was wringing his hands and he refused to catch Zak’s eye.
‘Why?’ Zak breathed.
No answer.
‘WHY?’ he shouted, all the anger bursting out of him.
‘Shall we show him why, Malcolm?’ Cruz asked.
No reply.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Cruz murmured. He looked over at one of his crew. ‘Bring her in.’
Moments later, the frightened woman with the bobbed hair was dragged back into the room, soaking wet and bedraggled.
‘Malcolm,’ she whispered. She struggled, trying to run towards him, but was held back by her guard.
And then it all clicked in Zak’s brain. He knew where he recognized her from.
The photograph in Malcolm’s house in Jo’burg.
This was Malcolm’s cousin. Matilda. The woman who had looked after him. Perhaps the only person in the world who Malcolm really cared about.
‘This is—’ Cruz started to say.
‘I know who she is,’ Zak interrupted him.
For a moment, Cruz looked surprised. Wrong-footed. But he quickly regained his composure. ‘It took a little while to persuade Malcolm to reveal her whereabouts, didn’t it, Malcolm?’
Malcolm stared, dejected, at the floor.
‘But these East Side Boys can be very persuasive. Once I’d abducted her, I knew our little hacker would do whatever I wanted. By which I mean, Harry: bring you to me.’
The woman was crying. Desperate sobs. Cruz wandered up to her and put one hand lightly on her cheek. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, and Zak struggled to hear him over the noise of the thundering rain. ‘It’s all over now. I have what I want.’ He looked over his shoulder at Malcolm. ‘The other two, the man and the woman. They’re dead?’
Zak felt his stomach twist again. Malcolm didn’t move a muscle.
‘Are they dead?’ Cruz bellowed.
Malcolm looked up. There were tears dripping down his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice wavering as he spoke. ‘I stole their gun and shot them, like you told me to. Both of them. They’re dead.’
It happened so quickly. Just as Zak felt his whole world imploding, Cruz pulled a gun from inside his clothes. Before Zak could even move, he had placed it up against the head of Malcolm’s cousin.
He fired a single shot, the sound of the gunshot making Zak start violently.
The woman’s head exploded in a flurry of blood, bone and brain matter.
Cruz walked out of the building, the gun still in his hand.
And Malcolm shrieked, ‘NO!’
It was a desperate, pitiful sound. Like all the pain in the world was distilled into that one, single word.
13
BURIED
The rain had stopped. It was quiet outside. But in Zak’s head, it was very, very noisy.
Raf and Gabs: dead.
Malcolm’s cousin Matilda: dead.
Malcolm himself was crouched in a far corner of the building, clutching his knees, his head buried in his chest. His whole body shook, as if he was crying. But there was no sound coming from him. He was a silent, quivering wreck. For a moment, Zak felt sorry for him. He had obviously thought he was saving his cousin; he had no idea just how ruthless Cruz could be.
But then Zak remembered the chilling sound of the two gunshots from the rainforest. He pictured Malcolm shooting his Guardian Angels, who had sworn to protect him, and he felt his jaw set firm.
They had bandaged Malcolm’s arm and given him antibiotics. That boded well for Malcolm, kind of. It meant they wanted to keep him alive. Zak was by no means sure that the same was true for him.
Three of Cruz’s scar-faced guards were loitering by the entrance to the building. The bare skin on their arms was glistening with sweat, and they all carried assault rifles. One of them had dragged Matilda’s body out into the camp, and he still had her blood smeared on his hands. It didn’t seem to worry him. He was laughing with his friends, and nodding gently in time to the harsh gangsta rap that had started blaring out from somewhere in the camp, even though it was still night.
Zak looked at his own hands. They were shaking. He was scared. More scared than he’d ever been.
He was angry with himself too. If only he and Raf had listened to Gabs back in Jo’burg. She hadn’t wanted to take Malcolm with them. If they’d followed her advice, if Zak hadn’t been so dead set on fronting up to his nemesis, he wouldn’t be in this situation.
His Guardian Angels would still be alive.
His body shook with nausea at the thought. He remembered Gabs’s farewell hug. The words she had mouthed: Be careful!
Zak tried to bury his fear. He strode up to the guards. ‘You speak English?’ he demanded.
The guards grinned. The one with blood on his hands faced up to Zak. He raised one stained finger, and was about to smear the blood over Zak’s face when Zak quickly knocked the boy’s arm away. The grin instantly fell from the boy’s scarred face. He stepped back and raised his weapon.
It was cocked, and Zak could see that the safety was off . . .
‘Leave him alone.’
Cruz’s voice cam
e from the doorway, where he was half shrouded in darkness. Zak saw indecision in the boy’s face. He was clearly feeling violent, but didn’t dare disobey Cruz’s order. He stepped aside.
‘Harry, come with me. The rest of you, make sure that halfwit in the corner doesn’t move.’
The boys were no longer grinning. Zak felt their hot eyes on him as he walked towards the exit where Cruz was waiting, leaving Malcolm to his thoughts.
‘I have something to show you, Harry,’ Cruz said conversationally, as if they were just two old friends chewing the fat. ‘I hope I can trust that you won’t try to escape. My East Side Boys – that’s what they like to call themselves – are everywhere, and I’ve noticed that they are rather trigger-happy.’
‘They’re not the only ones,’ Zak retorted.
‘You mean Matilda? I confess, she was beginning to annoy me. But she had to die anyway. Malcolm is a useful asset for a man in my position, but he is rather like a puppy. If he receives a mixture of punishments and rewards, he’ll soon learn to obey his new master.’
‘The Cruz I used to know would never have done that.’
Cruz stopped walking. He turned to look at Zak, his eyes dead and dark. ‘The Cruz you used to know died – along with his father, at your hands.’
A pause. Cruz smiled and the darkness in his eyes was suddenly gone.
‘Which reminds me,’ he said. ‘I don’t only have something to show you. I have someone for you to meet. Please, follow me.’
Cruz led Zak across the dark camp. With every step, Zak’s eyes were searching, looking for an escape route. But he knew there was only one: the main gate, which was heavily guarded. And if he did try to run, Cruz’s East Side Boys were everywhere.
Cruz was right. There was no escape.
He led Zak to another building, just slightly smaller than the first, and politely held the door open for him. Zak entered.
There were two people in this building. One was a very young-looking East Side Boy whose facial scars looked as if they had been recently inflicted. They glistened in the artificial light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the skin around the cuts was all puffed up.
The second person was an older man. Black dreadlocks, flecked with grey. Zak recognized him – he had seen him through his scope from the treetop.
Zak looked at the contents of the room. Coffins.
There were perhaps thirty of them, all empty, just piled up at one end. With the exception of one. That was in the middle of the room, and contained a body: Malcolm’s cousin. The man and the boy were lifting a coffin lid, one at each end. As Zak entered, they lowered the lid onto the coffin. It landed with a dull thud.
The man handed the boy a hammer and a bag of nails. He didn’t need to give any instructions – it was clear what the boy had to do. The kid looked sickened. But also terrified. Something told Zak he wasn’t like the other East Side Boys he’d met.
The kid started to hammer nails into the coffin as the man stood over him.
‘I believe the boy’s name is Smiler,’ Cruz said quietly. ‘They call the man Boss. His real name is Sudiq. They say it’s important for a man to know the full name of his enemy, and his is a name the world will soon know very well. Sudiq Al-Tikriti Gomez is an old friend of my family.’
But Zak didn’t care about Cruz’s friends. He cared about the coffins. ‘What’s going on here?’ he breathed.
Cruz stepped further into the room. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t worked it out for yourself, Zak. A clever boy like you. This little camp is where my people stuff drugs into soft toys, so that they can be distributed across Africa. It’s a method that served my father well for a long time. The children are cheap labour, and easy to control.’ Cruz frowned. ‘They do, unfortunately, have a habit of dying on us. If we buried them without coffins, the wild animals in the jungle would soon dig them up. So, unfortunately, I must go to the expense of boxing them up before we dispose of them. But – what is your English phrase? “Every cloud has a silver lining”? Come here, I want to show you something.’
Cruz walked to the far end of the room, where all the coffins were stacked. Zak followed, ignoring the way the man called Sudiq stared at him.
One coffin had no others stacked on top; its lid was resting on it at a slight angle. Cruz stood at the head end and Zak felt his enemy’s eyes on him as he looked down at the lid.
A small brass plaque was screwed to the coffin. Engraved upon it were the words ‘AGENT 21’.
‘I didn’t want you to think,’ Cruz breathed, ‘that your death would go unmarked. Unmourned, perhaps, but not unmarked.’
Nausea coursed through Zak. He felt dizzy. He was vaguely aware that Smiler was edging, terrified, to the side of the hut as Zak himself looked back to the door, on the verge of running towards it. But then he started as he realized that the man called Sudiq – Boss – was standing right behind him. He was broad-shouldered and sturdy. He stank of stale sweat, and Zak saw beads of perspiration on his pockmarked face.
Sudiq grabbed him.
Zak struggled, but strong as he was, he was no match for Sudiq. Cruz kicked the lid from the coffin, while Sudiq wrestled him down into it. In about thirty seconds, Zak found himself lying in the coffin, Sudiq’s booted foot pressing heavily against his ribcage.
And the barrel of a handgun pointing down at him.
Helpless, Zak stopped struggling. He looked up and saw beads of sweat on Sudiq’s face, and his curling sneer displaying yellow teeth. So this is it, he thought. This is the moment it ends. He closed his eyes, wondering if he would even hear the gunshot before it killed him.
‘Shall I do it now?’ Sudiq asked.
‘You hear that, Harry?’ Cruz demanded. ‘He wants to be the one who kills you. I must say, there would be a certain symmetry to that.’
Zak opened his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ he rasped, his voice hoarse and dry.
‘I’m glad you asked,’ Cruz said. ‘Like I told you, Sudiq is an old friend of the family. He worked for my father. Would you like to know what one of the last jobs Sudiq did for him was?’
Zak could barely breathe from the pressure of Sudiq’s foot on his chest. He gasped for air.
‘It was in Nigeria. Lagos. The Intercontinental Hotel, wasn’t it, Sudiq?’
Sudiq grinned.
Zak froze.
The Intercontinental Hotel was where his parents had died.
Where his parents had been murdered.
Cruz was speaking again.
‘There was a man there my father needed to eliminate. It turned out to be simpler to poison everybody around him. It was Sudiq’s idea, and him who carried it out. He’s a genius, don’t you think?’
Zak looked up, into the eyes of the man who had killed his parents. His lip curled.
He saw Sudiq’s fingers twitching around the handgun.
‘So?’ Sudiq asked. ‘Shall I kill him now?’
A moment of silence.
‘No,’ said Cruz. ‘Not yet. A simple bullet in the head would be too easy. Too painless. I want our friend to suffer, Sudiq. I want him to have time to regret the moment he ever set eyes on me. To really regret it. For the rest of his short, pitiful life.’
Cruz looked over at the boy he’d called Smiler.
‘You! Bring me the hammer and nails. Sudiq, give me your gun and replace the coffin lid.’
A nasty grin spread over Sudiq’s face. He passed the gun to Cruz and removed his foot from Zak’s chest. Zak breathed in deeply – it hurt – then tried to sit up in the coffin. Almost immediately he felt a brutal blow to the side of his already bruised face as Sudiq kicked him. He sunk down into the coffin again.
Seconds later he saw the lid descending onto him.
‘Let me out!’ he shouted. ‘You don’t have to do this, Cruz. Let me out!’
Everything was dark. The coffin lid was on top of him. He tried to push up against it, but with no success. It was a heavy weight. He imagined Sudiq sitting on top of the lid.
Bang.
The first nail was being hammered into the lid.
Bang.
The second.
Zak was screaming insanely now. But the banging just continued. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t move. He could barely even breathe . . .
And still the banging continued.
Then, after a couple of minutes, it suddenly stopped.
He heard Cruz’s voice. It sounded as though he was on his knees and speaking close to the coffin.
‘My people will take you to the burial site now, Harry. There’s no point shouting. The East Side Boys will ignore you, and there’s nobody else out here to listen to your screams. I’ll think of you, waiting for the sound of dirt to be shovelled over your tomb. I’ll think of you, buried in the ground, begging for death. It might take a while before that happens. I’m closing down this camp in a few hours. When I do, Latifah and all my little workers will have outlived their usefulness, so they’ll be joining you. The East Side Boys will dump the coffins into one big grave and then, my friend, they and I will move on to bigger and better things. But really, I needn’t bother you with such details. You won’t be alive to see them happen.’
‘Don’t count on it, Cruz.’
‘Oh, I think that this time I will count on it. Goodbye, Harry. I’d say it has been a pleasure knowing you, but we both know that would be a lie.’
Silence.
‘Cruz! Cruz!’
There was no reply. Instead, Zak felt the coffin being lifted up.
‘Let me out! Let me out of here!’
The coffin was moving.
Zak wriggled furiously. Perhaps if he made enough movement, whoever was carrying the coffin would be forced to drop it. He kicked and punched the inside of the box as best he could. He jarred his body up and down.
