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

by Peter May

  She snorted her disgust. ‘Except his life and his freedom.’ She shook her head. ‘Time will mend a broken heart, but does he really believe he can pay for his soul?’

  ‘Frankly, Mrs Ang, I don’t know, and I really don’t care,’ Elliot said. ‘He’s paying me to do a job and I’m doing it.’

  ‘I have already told you,’ she said, ‘that I will not leave without my son.’

  ‘If he is in Phnom Penh then he is lost.’

  ‘No. He will wait for us there.’

  Elliot sighed. ‘So you are going to go to Phnom Penh – on your own?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘And how far do you think you would get?’

  Her smile was serene with a fatalism that a Westerner would find hard to fathom. ‘Not far, perhaps, but I will die rather than leave him.’ She paused. ‘But you must take Ny with you.’

  ‘No!’ Ny turned on her mother, eyes burning, and spoke rapidly in her native tongue. Then she turned to Elliot. ‘I go with my mamma to Phnom Penh.’

  Elliot looked at McCue, who shook his head. ‘What you gonna do, Elliot? Tie them up and carry them to Thailand?’

  A rustle in the undergrowth brought both men sharply back to their present danger. Elliot swung his automatic round as Slattery crawled through the thick bank of ferns overhead to drop down to the river bed beside them. He was breathing hard and sweating. ‘Khmer Rouge,’ he whispered. ‘A dozen, maybe more. Coming this way.’

  ‘Move!’ Elliot hissed, and he pulled Ny roughly to her feet. ‘Which way?’ he asked Slattery.

  Slattery nodded up ahead. ‘Better stick to the river bed.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll follow you.’

  Slattery led them, through patches of dappled moonlight, at a half-run, half-crouch, east along the stony bed of the dry stream, ferns and creepers snagging on clothes and hands and faces. Serey stumbled and fell several times, and McCue half dragged, half carried her for several hundred metres before the strain on his arms began to take its toll. He slumped back against the bank, and damp, crumbling earth showered down over both of them. Beads of sweat left tracks in the dirt on his face. Elliot and Ny caught up and stopped. McCue caught the look on Elliot’s face. ‘Shit, man,’ he gasped. ‘Got to take a breather. The old lady ain’t got the legs for this, and I can’t carry her for ever.’ Elliot nodded and whistled softly into the darkness ahead. After a few moments, Slattery came back along the stream bed to join them.

  ‘What’s up, chief?’

  ‘We’re going to have to lie up for a while. Check our position.’

  Slattery nodded and slipped over the north bank and melted silently away through the trees. Perhaps two kilometres to the west came the distant sound of automatic gunfire. Eight or ten bursts. And Elliot knew that the killing of those left behind had begun.

  Slattery took a wide sweep through the trees, north then west, before crossing to the south side of the dry stream and turning east again to head back towards the others. There was no sign of the soldiers he had seen earlier. Perhaps they had headed west, back towards the commune in an attempt to cut them off. He heard sporadic fire from that direction and felt sick at the thought of those poor shambling creatures, unarmed and defenceless, being cut down as they made their hopeless breaks for freedom. They had not asked to be set free. They had not deserved to be enslaved. Perhaps death was now the only freedom they would ever know, their only possible escape.

  Slattery’s few moments of lapsed concentration were fatal. He missed the shadows that slipped darkly through the trees away to his left. The snap of a twig crashed into his thoughts, through the haze of pain that came from the ache in his gut. But that split-second warning was not enough. He turned just in time to see the flash of an AK-47 and feel the pain of its burst of bullets as they tore through his left thigh and knee, shattering bones and arteries. The leg buckled under him and he fell face-first into the damp earth and humus. And he thought he smelled death in its bitter odour. The pain, at first, was crippling, and he found he could not move. He heard footsteps approach cautiously through the undergrowth. He cursed his careless stupidity, his lack of professionalism. His cancer seemed such a small thing now, and he thought, in that moment, that he loved life more dearly than he had ever done before.

  The initial, all-consuming pain receded now before a wave of warmth that spread upwards through him from his shattered leg. He raised his head a little and saw his automatic lying two feet away, where it had fallen. He reached forward to grasp it, but only in his mind. His body would not respond. He managed to incline his head to his left and saw six or seven figures in black pyjamas approaching, AK-47s held at the ready, dark eyes burning with a triumph fuelled by fear and confusion. They stopped, no more than two or three metres away, and looked at the prone figure on the ground. One of them stepped forward and raised his automatic. Slattery watched the barrel lift to point at him, like the finger of God passing judgement. And the sentence was death. Even in these last seconds it struck him as odd that he should think now of God, when he had not thought of God in all the years of his life. He closed his eyes as the sound of automatic fire exploded in the dark.

  So this was death. He felt confused. It seemed no different from life. The pain, the heat rising in his body, the smell of the forest. He opened his eyes to see four Khmer Rouge soldiers lying dead and bleeding only a few feet away. In his confusion he thought he saw others running away through the trees. Another burst of fire brought two of them crashing down. A third swung around, returning a swift burst, before vanishing into the night.

  A hand pulled Slattery gently over on to his back, and he found himself looking up into Elliot’s grim, smeared face. Slattery grinned feebly. ‘Strewth, chief,’ he whispered, ‘you took your bloody time.’

  *

  Elliot jumped down between McCue and the two women, and lowered the now unconscious Slattery from his shoulder into the bed of the dry stream. ‘Tourniquet, quick!’ There was an urgency in his voice that McCue had not heard before. His face and shirt were dark with Slattery’s blood, and McCue wondered, briefly, if it was tears that glazed his eyes. But the thought did not linger. He unsheathed his knife and expertly cut away the blood-sodden trouser leg above the wounds, peeling it slowly back to reveal the shattered flesh. The full extent of the damage became apparent. He glanced at Elliot, and the look that passed between them left no room for words. He cut a strip of cloth and tied it round Slattery’s upper thigh, tight enough to stop the blood that was still gouting from the wounds. Then he took out a plastic bottle of spirit and several gauze pads from his backpack to wash away the blood and clean out the wounds.

  Serey and Ny watched, transfixed with horror, as McCue clipped and then tied off the severed arteries as best he could, and the fleeting security they had felt with these men evaporated into the night.

  Elliot, working in fevered silence, unravelled a roll of lint and wrapped it tightly around the pads that McCue placed over the wounds. He tore the ends, running one back around the leg to join with the other and tie the bandage in place below the knee. The whole process took less than two minutes, both men ignoring the frequent bursts of gunfire that seemed increasingly nearer. Slattery’s face was chalk white, his breathing shallow.

  Now they could hear voices and many feet tramping through the undergrowth, not more than three or four hundred metres away. Elliot pulled Slattery into a sitting position then heaved him up over his shoulder. McCue lifted his own and Slattery’s backpacks and jerked Serey to her feet. ‘Listen, lady, you’re going to have to run or we’re all dead.’

  ‘I help her,’ Ny said, and she held and squeezed her mother’s hand.

  McCue nodded to Elliot. ‘Go.’ And they started to run, along the bed of the dry stream at first, then up over the bank and through the trees, away from the sounds of the approaching soldiers. Ny put her mother’s arm around her neck and her own arm around her
mother’s waist, and half-dragged her after Elliot. McCue came behind, automatic held in one hand ready for use, frequently turning to glance back, eyes searching the darkness on either side. Elliot’s long strides took him quickly through the forest, bending at the knees, transferring the strain of the extra weight he carried to his thighs. Within a few minutes his shoulder, arm and neck were aching. But there could be no stopping. Pain at a threshold of intensity. If you passed through it, then it became bearable, and you could live with it a little longer. His sweat almost blinded him, salt stinging his eyes. But he found a rhythm, of stride and of breathing, that carried him on for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes before his knees began to buckle and gradually his rhythm was lost, becoming a stuttering, staggering stumble.

  He barely noticed how the trees had grown sparse, and was almost surprised to emerge from the darkness on to a bright moonlit track rutted by cartwheels and pitted by the hooves of many oxen. He lost his footing and dropped to his knees, acid rising in his throat. With leaden arms, he lowered Slattery to the ground, lungs pumping hard to feed oxygen to starved and aching muscles.

  He felt light-headed and sick as he heard Ny and Serey stagger up behind him. Breathless sobs caught in Serey’s throat as she fell down beside him, utterly exhausted, unable to take another step. Ny was pale, her face stained and glistening with tears and sweat. Elliot looked up and saw pain in her eyes, but also courage there. McCue’s whisper seemed to fill the night. ‘We can’t stop here!’

  Elliot nodded. He took a few more seconds to catch his breath. ‘How far behind us are they?’

  McCue shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. We may have lost them – for the moment. But we gotta keep going. I’ll take the Aussie.’ He stooped to heave the dead weight of Slattery on to his shoulder, and visibly buckled under the strain. Elliot dragged himself wearily to his feet, wiping sweat from his eyes, and lifted Slattery’s discarded backpack. He took Serey gently by the arm and raised her upright, slipping an arm round her waist to support her. He looked at Ny, whose face gave no clue as to what was going on behind it. She reached across and took the backpack from his hand and slung it over her shoulder.

  The stricken group stumbled east along the rutted path, at little more than walking pace, for ten to fifteen minutes. The path grew wider, the trees receding on either side, quite suddenly and unexpectedly opening out to reveal a large moon reflected in black water. And from myriad lakes and waterways, awesome and dark, rose the lost temples of Angkor Wat.

  Serey dropped at once to her knees, pressing her palms together and bowing towards the sacred ruins. The sheer scale of the wat filled their eyes and minds, gathering itself in the distance, rising above a long, low-lying portico, its lotus-broken reflection carried on the still waters of the moon-silvered lake. Elliot glanced back through the trees, watching for movement, listening for sounds of pursuit. But he saw nothing, heard nothing. The Khmer Rouge must have assumed they would head north, rather than south towards the Wat and the dead-end shores of the Tonle Sap. The silence was broken only by the mumblings of Ang Serey as she offered prayers to the Lord Buddha. Slattery’s face was a waxen, grey mask shining with sweat. His grin was a grimace as he raised his head to look out across the waters at the temples.

  ‘Shit, chief,’ he said, ‘it don’t hold a candle to the Sydney Opera House.’

  Serey was weeping now. Ny knelt beside her, an arm around her. ‘What is it, Mother?’

  Slowly Serey raised her head, drawing her daughter’s eyes to where a red flag hung limp in the still night air above the temples.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Elongated slats of bloodless light, like the bars of a prison cell, fell across the floor, distorted by the debris that littered it, extending upwards across a wall daubed with revolutionary slogans. They had no substance, these bars. The light of the hidden sun reflected on earth by the moon and casting only shadows. And yet they locked Hau in, as securely as if they were steel. Like fingers reaching through the darkness, they held him in their grip. It was his fear that gave them their power. The power to back him up against the wall, knees pulled into his chin, arms folded around his shins. He pulled his legs in tight as though he might somehow be able to make himself so small as to be invisible.

  The night was hot and humid, but still he shivered. A broken shutter hung down across the window in the breathless dark, swinging slowly back and forth. At first he was puzzled by its motion. There was not a whisper of movement in the air. What magical energy was there at work, what hidden fingers tipping the shutters to and fro on rusted hinges? The breath of what invisible demon stirred the still night air? He wanted to scream. To shatter the fragile peace of the night. But he could raise no sound in his throat. He closed his eyes and felt hunger gnawing at his stomach like some devil eating him from the inside out. The whole room tilted towards him now.

  He had found his old home as dawn broke. A pale misted dawn that allowed the world to etch itself with only a pastel imprecision upon the day. A tracery of cracks had opened up across the suburban streets, grass and weeds poking up through broken kerbstones. Once grand villas, set in secluded grounds, lay dilapidated as the first tendrils of primeval jungle reached up through devastated gardens to reclaim what man had so recently stolen and now abandoned. The house seemed only faintly familiar, a dream of a previous life. Windows and shutters had been smashed, doors ripped off. Everything of value had been taken, everything else destroyed. Every conceivable hiding place had been sought out, floorboards torn up, walls smashed. And then this broken monument to defeated imperialism had been left to rot.

  Hau had shuffled despondently through the rubble, from room to room, trailing his automatic rifle on the floor behind him, hope draining from him with every step. Home – that place he had always held in his memory safe and inviolate, nourished with thoughts of his mother and father and Ny, the one place in the world he could escape to – no longer existed. Home, he realized as he stumbled through the devastation, was not a place. It was the people who filled it. And the emptiness he now found in what had once been his home cut deep into his soul, like the jagged edge of a blunt razor, bringing the searing realization that he had no home, no family, no place to go.

  Now, he opened his eyes in the dark, heart pounding, the room still tilting him this way and that. And he realized that it was not the room that tilted back and forth. Nor the shutter swinging in the still air. It was his own movement as he rocked gently from heel to toe. And, suddenly, it seemed a warm, comforting movement.

  He saw his AK-47 lying abandoned on the floor where he had dropped it. It seemed a strange, hard, metallic thing. A toy in a catalogue. How could such an inanimate object take life? Of course, he knew, it couldn’t. Not on its own. It took him, or anyone with a will, to pull the trigger. It took intent. It took malice or jealousy or fear or greed. And he had had such intent. At once he felt shame and anger and hurt at this knowledge, and he kicked out at the rifle, sending it clattering across the room. But he could still see it in the moonlight, staring back at him, reproachful, accusing.

  He picked up the dusty, threadbare teddy that lay beside him and clutched it to his breast. He’d found it lying torn and broken in a corner of what had once been his bedroom. It brought an instant comfort. It shared all his secrets, all his fears. He buried his face in its fur and immediately smelled something disturbingly familiar. It took him a moment to realize it was himself that he smelled. A smell so familiar it frightened him, unlocking a door on the past, on a lost innocence, on the boy he had once been. Who was he now? He squeezed the teddy tight. Tears sprang from his eyes, salty and stinging, and he wondered how long it would take him to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Four tiny figures moved with the infinitesimal speed of crippled time along a stone causeway flanked at exact intervals by pairs of seven-headed serpents. Above them rose the towers of the wat, the moon casting their shadows long and deep, the still mildewed
lakes spanned by the causeway drowning their reflections. Elliot carried Slattery over his shoulder. He felt blood soaking through his fatigues, life ebbing from the dying weight. Behind him, the smack of bare feet on cool stone, Serey leaning heavily on the arm of her daughter. The gentle clatter of McCue’s webbing as he moved slowly backwards, eyes focused into the dark of the trees whose shelter they had left, seemed to fill the hot damp air. Behind them lay only darkness and silence. Ahead lay the towering emptiness of the wat, and beyond that the watery vastness of the Tonle Sap. The sheer size of everything that lay around them, that was against them, reinforced their sense of smallness.

  ‘We shall be safe in the temple,’ Serey had said. ‘The Lord Buddha will protect us.’ Ny wondered why the Lord Buddha had failed to protect them from the Khmer Rouge for four years.

  But Elliot felt drawn to the temples, felt an unaccountable sadness at the imminent loss of his friend. At the loss of all the lives he had taken. Of all the deaths he had encountered in a life that was more about dying than living. As they at last reached the end of the causeway and mounted the steps into the black and cavernous mouth of the temple, he wondered why he should feel now, for the first time, what he had not felt in all those years. Was it the proximity of death? And yet he had been close to death many times. Perhaps, as the wat swallowed them into its darkness, so hell would swallow him into eternity. And the seductive allure of death stirred somewhere deep inside him. Perhaps all his life had led him to this place only to die.

  In the blanket of darkness that enveloped them, the faintest sound rustled and echoed off invisible surfaces. Elliot eased Slattery gently on to the icy slabs and a soft grunt escaped his lips in a breath. McCue knelt beside him.

  ‘You okay, buddy?’

  ‘No troubles.’

  And McCue heard him grin in the dark.

  Elliot struck the flint of his lighter and held a small flame up above his head. A tiny halo burgeoned into the almost tangible darkness that engulfed the flame and snuffed its light. Elliot’s sweat grew cold on his skin. He shivered, taking several steps into the void, seeking a surface that would reflect his light. Faint grey images flickered back at him. Thick-limbed peasants with coarse, clownish faces; the bodies of the damned trodden underfoot by horsemen and torn by wild beasts; aristocratic faces smiling beatifically from long boats, secure in the knowledge that, sooner or later, they would appear in the honours lists as minor gods. A cockfight seemed to reflect the futility of their own struggle. Elliot stepped closer to run his hand lightly over the cold carved stone and feel its slimy humidity. For a moment, a memory of the tiny engravings on Grace’s silver necklace and bracelet, crafted by Sihanouk’s own silversmith, flickered through his mind. A memory from another world. He put his hand to his neck and found that the thong was broken, the ring she had given him gone – the only part of her that would ever return to the soil of her birth. His fingers found only his own St Christopher.