The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller

by Peter May

  The Noble Path

  THE NOBLE PATH

  Also By

  Also by Peter May

  FICTION

  The Lewis Trilogy

  The Blackhouse

  The Lewis Man

  The Chessmen

  The China Thrillers

  The Firemaker

  The Fourth Sacrifice

  The Killing Room

  Snakehead

  The Runner

  Chinese Whispers

  The Ghost Marriage: A China Novella

  The Enzo Files

  Extraordinary People

  The Critic

  Blacklight Blue

  Freeze Frame

  Blowback

  Cast Iron

  Stand-alone Novels

  The Man With No Face

  I’ll Keep You Safe

  Entry Island

  Runaway

  Coffin Road

  non-FICTION

  Hebrides (with David Wilson)

  Title

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Piatkus

  This ebook edition first published in 2019 by

  an imprint of

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 1992 Peter May

  The moral right of Peter May to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  PB ISBN 978 1 78747 795 7

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78747 796 4

  Ebook by CC Book Production

  Cover design © 2019 Headdesign.co.uk

  www.riverrunbooks.co.uk

  Dedication

  For Jancie

  Epigraph

  ‘I did not die, and did not remain alive; now

  think for thyself, if thou hast any grain of

  ingenuity, what I became, deprived of both

  life and death.’

  – Dante’s Inferno

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  FOREWORD

  I first had the idea for The Noble Path in the mid nineteen-eighties. I had wanted to explore the idea that in certain circumstances innocence can be a more corrupting influence than evil – simply because it knows not what it does.

  The story itself was a departure from my usual crime/thriller genre, though I suppose it might loosely be described as a thriller. But I see it more as a very human adventure set against the brutal canvas of south-east Asia in the 1970s.

  It takes place in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, when the murderous and anarchic regime established by the Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia systematically annihilated three million people. This was not so much ethnic cleansing, as the eradication of thinking and educated people. The Khmer Rouge saw intelligence, and the expression of ideas, as the biggest threat to their existence.

  Rereading the book nearly thirty years later, I note with some sadness that one of its primary themes – a refugee crisis caused by the mass migration of people trying to escape war and poverty – is with us every bit as much now as it was then. Replace the ‘boat people’ of Vietnam with the sub-Saharan Africans dying in their thousands today, as they try to escape war and poverty by crossing the Mediterranean Sea in dangerously flimsy boats.

  To facilitate the writing of my story I made a trip to Thailand, but was unable to journey into Cambodia, which was still an unstable and dangerous place. And so most of the research that followed was achieved by tracking down and reading copious numbers of books dealing with the recent history of the region. No internet then, or easy access to video footage.

  I was at the time working as a script editor on the Scottish TV soap opera Take The High Road. To write the book I took a two-month sabbatical from the show, bought an old manual typewriter, and drove down to south-west France in my Suzuki Jeep, where I rented a gîte. Every morning I drove into the town of Saint-Céré and established myself in a corner of the Café des Voyageurs, where I wrote around 1,600 words a day using the Pitman’s shorthand I had learned as a journalist. At night I sat alone in my gîte typing up my shorthand, and fighting off the large numbers of brown bugs that somehow managed to crawl in under the door.

  At weekends I generally found myself invited to dinner parties hosted by expat Brits and Americans. It was at one of these that I had the great good fortune to meet a lady called Maud Taillard, then in her sixties. Seated next to her at the dinner table, I soon discovered that she had spent several years living in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. There her late husband had been physician to the King, and she told me of their many adventures, including nightly visits to an opium den in the city.

  I went on to call on her at her impressive home in the thirteenth-century medieval village of Carennac, where she showed me mementos and photographs of her time in Cambodia.

  The daughter of a French father and English mother, Maude be
came the model for one of the book’s characters, La Mère Grace, the madam of a Bangkok brothel. I was concerned when she read the book that she might take offence. I needn’t have worried, as she proudly told anyone who would listen, ‘That’s me, darling!’

  I didn’t finish the book during that time in France, and it wasn’t until I had quit Take The High Road a little over a year later that I had the time to do so.

  I have edited the original manuscript very lightly. The biggest change involved cutting much of the sex that I was told at the time was a prerequisite for a bestseller. Reading it all these years later, I revisited the embarrassment I had felt writing those graphic scenes. Times and tastes change, and I think the book is much the better without them.

  I am proud and happy to republish it now, nearly thirty years on.

  Peter May

  FRANCE 2019

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  Cambodia: April 1975

  There is a seventeenth-century proverb which says, ‘When war begins hell opens.’ In this once lovely country in the heart of Indochina, hell opened when the war ended.

  This, then, was liberation. Sullen youths in black pyjamas and red-chequered scarves cradling AK-47s with all the warmth they could not feel for their fellow human beings. It wasn’t hate in their eyes. It was hell.

  A breeze brushed the faces. The thousands of faces all along Monivong Boulevard. It carried the smell of smoke, a city burning in places.

  It carried the smell of fear. They said the Americans were coming to bomb the city; it would be safer in the countryside. No one believed it.

  It carried the smell of death. They had emptied the hospitals. Broken bodies wheeled out on hospital beds, the tubes and wires of a discarded technology trailing behind, plasma and blood in their wake. Those who could walk leaned on crutches. Those who could not, died. The debris of this once elegant colonial city littered the street; a child screaming, an old man coughing blood on the pavement, the weary shuffling of a million pairs of feet on a dusty road to oblivion.

  There is another proverb: ‘Hell is a city.’ On 17 April 1975, that city was Phnom Penh.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ang Serey was a handsome woman, though you would scarcely have guessed it. Her face was blackened by smoke, and you could not tell if it was sweat or tears that made tracks through the filth. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and afraid to stray to one side or the other lest they betray an emotion. Her feet shuffled in open sandals among all the others. Ahead of her she pushed a cart bearing a few meagre belongings. On either side were the children she dared not look at. ‘Hold on to me so that I can feel you are there,’ she had whispered to them. ‘If anyone speaks to you, say nothing. Let me speak.’

  For days she had worked her hands until they blistered and bled. Digging in the soft earth among the suburban bougainvillea, rubbing the dirt into the sores and blisters till her hands were red raw. She had made her children do it, too. The boy had cried at first, waving his stinging hands in the air. Why did his own mother make him do this? She had struck him when he refused to go on. And when his tears dried they were replaced by a sullen stare of hatred. The girl was older, yet it seemed she understood even less.

  Ang Serey was an intelligent woman. She knew she must use that intelligence to hide itself; the black, peasant pyjamas, the hands of one who worked the land. Somehow she had to make the children understand. For if she couldn’t, their betrayal of the truth meant certain death.

  There had been so little time. Just five days since Yuon had flown out on one of the last helicopters with the American evacuation. Ten days since he had told her, tears streaming down his cheeks, that he had been unable to get a place for her and the children. He had cried most of that night. Her eyes had been dry. She wondered if he expected her sympathy. It would break his heart to leave them, he had said. But still he left. Perhaps they could mend broken hearts in the West.

  She lifted her head slightly towards the clear blue sky and felt the heat of the sun on her skin. They had passed by the smoking cathedral and the railway station, all those shuffling feet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  South Armagh, Northern Ireland, October 1978

  McAlliskey sat on a bench in a darkened corner of the pub, nursing the last of the Guinness in his pint glass, pulling distractedly on a hand-rolled cigarette held loosely between nicotine-stained fingers. The pub was quiet. A small, old-fashioned country pub, its wooden bar worn smooth by years of use. A group of farmers stood in a knot sinking pints and shorts, talking in low voices that rose occasionally in muted laughter. Big men, grimy caps pulled down over leathery faces.

  ‘Jaisus! If the beasts’s going to die anyway, youse are as well pumping the stuff into it yourself and saving the vet’s bill!’

  An old woman behind the bar polished glasses, listening idly to the conversation. From time to time she glanced across at the stranger in the corner. She didn’t know him. She didn’t want to know him. This was bandit country and it was dangerous to know too much, dangerous to ask questions. Curiosity killed.

  McAlliskey had crossed the border from the Republic three days earlier and spent two nights in different safe-houses. He stirred uneasily and flicked a look at the clock behind the bar. O’Neil was late, and he was aware of the woman’s attempts to avoid taking an interest in him. Which meant she would remember him. Where in God’s name had O’Neil got to? If something had gone wrong McAlliskey would be vulnerable here. He had the taste of fear in his mouth – a taste he knew well, had lived with these ten years past. But he could sink a dozen pints and not achieve the high he got from the adrenalin that was pumping through his veins right now.

  A tiny stab of fear pricked his heart as the door opened and a man stepped into the pub, bringing the damp night air with him. O’Neil. Dark eyes set deep in a pale thin face. There was mud on his boots, rain on his collar, death in his eyes. He paused only momentarily, his gaze flickering past McAlliskey to the men at the bar. They seemed not to notice him.

  He nodded to the woman. ‘Twenty Players plain.’

  She reached for a packet from the shelf behind her and put it on the bar. ‘A wee whiskey, sir, to warm you on a cold night?’

  He shook his head and dropped a note and some coins on the counter and glanced again at the little group of farmers. Still they showed no interest. He slipped the cigarettes in his pocket, nodded to the old woman and went out.

  McAlliskey sat on for several minutes before draining his glass and taking a final draw on the remains of his cigarette. He rose from the bench, turning up his collar, and left, aware of the old woman watching him go. Outside, the cold caressed him like the icy fingers of a deceitful lover. A fine drizzle drifted down the main street, making haloes around the feeble yellow of the street lamps. The car was parked fifty yards away. He walked briskly to it, hands in pockets, and slipped into the back seat.

  ‘What the hell kept you!’

  O’Neil looked at him in the driving mirror. ‘Another dud bloody detonator. Where in Christ’s name do you get the stuff?’

  ‘Come the day you need to know, I’ll tell you.’ McAlliskey took a battered tobacco tin from his pocket and started to roll another cigarette. ‘It’s set?’ O’Neil nodded. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  *

  They parked the car at a road end where a dirt track led up through a gate towards the woods above. Below them, the road ran steeply downwards between high hedgerows. To their left, a narrow lane led away around the side of the hill, hugging its contours before dropping down again to feed into the network of roads that fanned out through rolling farmland, south towards the Republic. O’Neil switched off the engine and killed the lights. He took a map from the glove compartment and shone a flashlight for McAlliskey to see. There were three routes traced in red, each an alternative escape to the south. They had been lettered A, B and C with a red marker. ‘To keep o
ur options open,’ he said. ‘If anything goes wrong.’

  McAlliskey nodded. He didn’t much like O’Neil, but he was thorough. And good with explosives.

  They left the car and O’Neil led the way down the hill about two hundred metres. Then he stopped and whistled softly. A faint whistle answered his, somewhere away to their left, and the two men followed the sound, finding a deep-rutted tractor track that led them down to a drystone dyke at the corner of the field. A figure was crouched there, with a holdall tucked in under the wall to keep it dry. He flashed a light briefly in their faces.

  ‘Turn that fucking thing off!’ McAlliskey spoke softly, but his voice carried the authority of rank. The third man doused his light without a word.

  ‘Flaherty,’ O’Neil said.

  McAlliskey crouched down beside him and saw that he was no more than a boy of sixteen or seventeen with fear in his eyes. ‘You should know better, son.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr McAlliskey.’ And there was awe in the boy’s voice. McAlliskey was almost a legend in the organization. The boy wasn’t sure what scared him more – McAlliskey or the bloody business they were about on this dark Irish night.

  ‘How long?’ McAlliskey asked.

  ‘’Bout fifteen minutes, sir.’

  O’Neil opened the holdall and took out a small, hand-held radio transmitter. He extended the aerial and flicked a switch. A red light came on. He glanced at McAlliskey. ‘You sure they’ll be?’

  ‘They’ll be.’

  And they settled back against the wall in silence, listening for the first distinctive sound of the army APC rolling up the lane towards them. From here, they had a perfect line of sight, and would see its lights early – the same lights that would illuminate the white marker O’Neil had planted at the roadside, in line with the twenty pounds of plastic explosive skilfully secreted just below the tarmac. O’Neil wondered how McAlliskey got his information. But he knew better than to ask.

  McAlliskey took out his tobacco tin, leaning forward to keep it safe from the rain, and rolled another cigarette. He struck a match to light it, hands cupped around the box.