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

by Peter May

  Between them they half-carried, half-dragged her out of the circle of light. As she passed him, Grace’s eyes met the General’s dark gaze. Her mouth curled in hate as she drew a gob of spittle on to her tongue and spat it into his face. He did not flinch. Blair lifted Lisa into his arms and hurried out of the door and up the corridor towards the lift. Grace lingered for just a moment, before breaking the General’s gaze and darting after him.

  When the door slammed shut on the basement, the General wiped the spittle from his face and took two steps into darkness to stoop and retrieve the fallen revolver. His face darkened by the fury of humiliation, he pushed the others aside and strode to the door. Light rushed towards him from the lift at the far end of the corridor. Blair, the girl supported on his arm, stood under the light, fumbling with the button to set the lift in motion. The silhouette of the retreating Grace had almost reached him, a white shadow in the dark corridor. The pulley motor surged into life, jerking the cables tense and shaking the frame of the lift. Blair glanced up as the General raised his arm to shoot. Grace was no more than two paces away. The shout of warning died on his lips as the gun flashed in the dark and Grace fell forward, lightly, like a wounded bird. Blair fired blind at the figure at the end of the corridor, but the jerk of the lift sent the bullet whining harmlessly off into space. As the lift rose he crouched to his knees and held out his arm in a futile gesture of help. Grace lifted her head, her face dimming in the fading light.

  ‘Tell her . . .’ Her voice, though feeble, still rose above the drone of the motor. ‘Tell her I’m sorry.’ And she vanished in the darkness below as the lift rose into the shaft.

  She heard the steps of many feet before a hand pulled her over and she found herself staring up into hungry eyes intent now on fulfilment. The General’s fat lips spread across white teeth. Blair heard the shots before the lift reached the ground floor, each one like a fist in his solar plexus. He closed his eyes. ‘Jesus God,’ he whispered.

  Grace’s chauffeur stood by the car as Blair emerged from the shadows. Her eyes widened at the sight of the battered and bloodied girl in his arms. ‘Where is La Mère Grace?’

  ‘Dead.’ The finality of that one small word struck him as if for the first time. He laid Lisa carefully in the car, and turned back to the Thai girl who stood small and fixed, eyes brimming. His hands grasped her shoulders and he felt her frailty. ‘You must get us away from here. Fast.’ She nodded mutely. He said, ‘What about the curfew?’

  She shook her head. ‘It is not a problem.’

  As the car pulled away across the cobbles, he saw, in the rearview mirror, the girl’s tears shining wet on her cheeks, and he was glad that someone, at least, would cry for Grace.

  *

  A lamp burned in the dark by the bed. The doctor fluttered over her, nervous and sweating, frameless spectacles magnifying myopic eyes.

  ‘Well?’ Blair’s impatience increased the doctor’s agitation. He would be well paid for this illegal night call, but he was still scared.

  ‘She has a broken nose, concussion. Two, maybe three, broken ribs. It is impossible to say what internal injuries there might be. You must get her to a hospital.’

  ‘Not in Bangkok. Can you give her something to kill the pain?’

  He opened his bag. ‘I can give her some sedatives.’

  ‘I don’t want her falling asleep. She needs to walk out of here.’

  The doctor pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose and turned wide eyes on the big Scotsman. ‘I do not think this would be wise.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to think. I’m asking you to patch her up as best you can.’ Blair’s voice was tight with restraint, clipped short by the rage he fought to control. The stink of dirty socks and sweat in the airless heat of this tiny bedroom was choking him. He went out to the smell of stale curry and cigarette smoke that permeated Sarit’s apartment. Sarit glanced up from the telephone and nodded. After a further exchange he replaced the receiver and turned towards him, the ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his lips.

  ‘Is done, Mistah Blaih. Eight-thirty in morning. First flight to Hong Kong.’

  ‘Hong Kong? Couldn’t you do better than that?’

  Sarit shrugged and mopped the sweat from his brow with a damp handkerchief. ‘Sorry Mistah Blaih. First seats on London flight not before end of week.’ He nodded towards a bag lying near the door. ‘La Mère Grace girl, she bring Miss Lisa’s stuff. You want her get dressed?’

  Blair looked at his watch. It was a little after four a.m. ‘In a couple of hours, when the doctor’s finished.’

  ‘She gonna be alright, Mistah Blaih?’

  ‘I hope so, Sarit. I hope so.’

  *

  The towers and turrets of the Grand Palace caught the rose-coloured light of the early morning sun across the river. In the foreground the concrete and steel constructions of the twentieth century jutted skyward, obscuring the view, until they turned away north, leaving the river behind. The traffic was already brisk: taxis, trams, buses, private cars, samlors – this great south-east Asian metropolis awaking after the dark hours of curfew.

  Blair sat in the back of the taxi behind Sarit, rigid with tension. Beside him Lisa’s glazed eyes gazed out from behind dark glasses at the receding city. Her sense of pain was vague, somewhere far away, as if her body and her mind resided in separate places. She had no clear idea of what was happening. The sights that spooled by the window were like flickering images on a screen, remote and unreal. She had an urgent longing to close her swollen eyes and sleep, but the man who sat beside her seemed ever-present, his fingers closed tightly around her arm, urging her to stay awake, to move with him, walk with him, carry the pain.

  Blair glanced at her and felt the burden of responsibility. ‘I suppose they’ll have found the body by now.’

  Sarit turned and breathed smoke through his yellow teeth. ‘Tuk? His servants will have phone police last night. They look for you for sure.’

  ‘And Grace?’

  Sarit chuckled. ‘Hah! You no worry about her. She never be seen again, that certain.’

  Blair was little comforted. He examined himself in the rearview mirror. At a glance the black hair dye took years off him. But it seemed, too, to emphasize the lines on a face which appeared paler, more drawn. The man who stared back at him made him feel older inside. He felt trapped in his neatly pressed suit, prisoner of an image that was not him. He reached into an inside pocket and took out a British passport in the name of Robert Wilson. The face of the man in the rearview mirror looked back at him from page three. His heart skipped a beat. The glasses! He’d forgotten the glasses. He drew them out from his breast pocket and slipped them on, heavy tortoiseshell-framed spectacles.

  Sarit grinned. ‘No worries, Mistah Blaih. Even I don’t recognize you.’ And he turned around, still chuckling, to face the front, smoke rising as he lit another cigarette.

  The airport terminal was relatively quiet, and the Scotsman cursed the early hour of the flight. Airport security men, carrying small sub-machine guns, cast inscrutable eyes over the comings and goings. Blair knew the girl would attract attention. Her dark glasses could not disguise her bruised and swollen face, and she could barely walk.

  Sarit collected their tickets from the Cathay Pacific reservations desk. He was anxious to pass them on to Blair and be gone. ‘Dangerous to be seen together,’ he said with a little nervous laugh. ‘Goodbye, Mistah Blaih, good luck.’ He hurried away, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke in his wake.

  The girl at the check-in desk took their luggage and gave them two adjacent seats in non-smoking. She looked doubtfully at Lisa. ‘I hope you enjoyed your stay in Bangkok.’

  Blair smiled. ‘Very much.’

  She handed him the boarding cards. ‘Gate five. Boarding in ten minutes.’

  Lisa was rapidly losing her grip on consciousness. Blair held her firmly
round the waist, whispering constant encouragement. They passed through security, where officers insisted on searching her handbag. Blair waited patiently, aware all the time of curious eyes upon them. A stolid middle-aged woman, hair drawn tightly back from her face, scanned each of their passports thoroughly before waving them through immigration without a word. Blair breathed an inner sigh of relief, and looked along the signs for gate five.

  ‘Stop!’ The voice came like a blow to the back of his head. Blair turned to find a blue-uniformed security man advancing towards them. ‘Passports, please.’

  Blair quelled his instinct to react physically – attack or retreat. He forced an even tone.

  ‘We’ve already been through immigration.’

  ‘Passports!’ The security man held out his hand. Blair nodded and took the passports from his inside pocket. The security man took his time, browsing through each of them, checking their faces against the photographs. Finally his gaze rested on Lisa. He reached out and took away her dark glasses. Misted blue eyes squinted at him from the slits that separated the black, bruised swellings above and below. Something like shock registered on his face. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was involved in a motor accident.’ Blair watched keenly for a reaction. He could detect none, and added, ‘We’re going to Hong Kong to see a specialist.’

  For several seconds the Thai continued to stare at her, then he thrust Lisa’s glasses towards Blair. ‘You wait here.’ He turned away.

  Blair protested, ‘But they’re boarding our flight.’

  The Thai stopped and emphasized with a sharp, chopping movement of his hand, ‘Wait!’ He crossed the hall and disappeared through a door.

  Blair felt sick. He glanced each way along the hall, and saw a second security guard watching from a distance, his hand resting on the black leather of his holster. There was no way forward, no way back. He could do nothing but stand and wait.

  A clatter in the doorway jerked his head round to see the guard returning, pushing a wheelchair ahead of him. ‘Is a long way to walk,’ he said, with real concern.

  It wasn’t until the wheelchair had been folded up and taken off the aircraft, and the steward had pulled the door closed, that Blair felt able to relax. The smiling Chinese face of the stewardess loomed over him. ‘Is there anything we can do for her?’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  He watched through the window as the plane taxied away from the terminal building to sit, on hold, at the end of the runway for several minutes, before revving its powerful jet engines and sprinting down the tarmac to swoop up into the pale blue sky. As they climbed steeply, swinging north-east towards Hong Kong and safety, he glanced at Lisa and saw that she was unconscious.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  For three days Elliot hovered between life and death, sometimes consumed by the fire of his fever, sometimes shivering uncontrollably. In flashes of lucidity, between bouts of delirium, he was aware of a young face fluttering over his, a small feminine hand wiping his brow with a cool, damp cloth. He had the impression of being surrounded by countless tiny diamonds of light, a gently curving universe that shone with the fire of a million stars. He floated here, adrift between light and darkness, and dreamt that he heard the slap of water, the dull chug of a small motor, and, once, that he lay in the arms of a naked girl, her soft brown skin burning where it touched his.

  The pain in his chest and shoulder pulsed like a heartbeat. At times it appeared to envelop him, smothering all other awareness so that nothing else existed; a relentless, endless pounding of his brain.

  When, finally, his fever burned itself out, consciousness came like a waking dream. He lay on wooden boards covered with coarse rush mats, swaddled in blankets and bundles of cloth. He gazed up at the familiar diamonds of light. But even as he focused they seemed to fade. The light was dying around him, and yet the air still glowed. For some moments his sense of disorientation flooded his mind with panic. He attempted to raise himself on one elbow, but fell back with the pain that forked through his chest, while the boards beneath him rocked gently from side to side. The slap of water on wood increased his confusion with the realization that he was on a boat. It came to him then, as he gazed upwards, that he lay beneath a canopy of rush matting arched across him. Tiny chinks of fading light shone through the gaps in the woven pattern. This vessel could be no bigger than a sampan.

  He tried again to pull himself up, this time gritting his teeth against the pain, and pressed his face to a slit in the matting to see the sun dipping behind dark, scattered clouds. As it set across a wide expanse of water, its liquid gold seemed to spill out towards him. He fell back on to the mat, breathless and sweating.

  A ragged cloth partition at his feet was suddenly drawn aside, and in the dusk he saw the light of concern in Ny’s young eyes. ‘You hungry, Mistah Elliot?’

  ‘Thirsty.’ His voice creaked in his throat, like a rusty gate.

  ‘How you feel?’

  ‘Dried up. Like a raisin.’

  She disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a cup of water. ‘Mamma boil it. It good.’ She helped raise his head, lifting the rim of the cup to dry, cracked lips. His mouth soaked up the water like a sponge. It caught in his throat and he choked, spilling it to cling in droplets to the thick growth on his chin.

  ‘You been very sick, Mistah Elliot.’

  ‘I guess. How long?’

  ‘Three day.’

  ‘Three days!’ He felt as though a slice of his life had been excised by a surgeon’s scalpel. What had happened in all that time? ‘Where are we?’

  ‘South.’

  ‘South where?’

  ‘Kampuchea. On river Mekong. We tied up till it dark.’ She gave him more water and he felt it track cold down to his stomach. The effort of raising his head exhausted him, and he let it fall back on the bundle of cloth that served as a pillow, confused, uncertain as to whether this was another delirium.

  ‘How?’ he asked. ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘Mamma,’ Ny said. ‘She bring us.’ She paused. ‘Mistah McCue, he go to shoot you, but I tell him ’bout your friend, ’bout his cancer.’

  She leaned over him and dabbed his forehead lightly with a cool cloth. He rolled his head to one side and looked at the bandage on his shoulder. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Me and Mistah McCue. It good. Clean dressing. You been very sick.’

  The murmur of voices came from beyond the cloth partition. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Mamma, she cook rice and fish. Hau catch fish. He very smart.’

  ‘And Mr McCue?’

  ‘He there, too. You hungry?’

  He nodded.

  Nothing had ever tasted so good before. She fed him with chopsticks, morsels that exploded flavour on his tongue. But it was hard work eating – his jaw felt stiff and his throat swollen – and he tired quickly, lying back to drift again into the netherworld that had held him for the past three days.

  He dreamed he heard the cough of an engine, the slow chug-chug of a propeller, water whispering past his ears. Then silence, a sensation of floating through space, followed by darkness and a dreamless oblivion. When next he opened his eyes he could see nothing. He heard the splash of water against the sampan, then smelled smoke – the sweet tang of tobacco. The red end of a cigarette glowed in the dark, and by its light he saw McCue’s face. He was squatted on the boards beside Elliot, smoking in silence.

  ‘Give me a pull at that.’

  Without a word McCue leaned over to hold the cigarette to his lips. He took a deep draw and coughed violently. ‘Better?’ McCue asked.

  ‘Sure.’ The smoke drawn into his lungs made him feel giddy. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Night. Does it matter?’

  Elliot felt irritation rising in his chest. ‘Yes, it matters. Where are we?’

 
McCue’s voice remained calm and even. ‘We crossed the border a couple of hours back.’

  Elliot frowned. ‘What border?’

  ‘Into Vietnam. Just like coming home, eh?’ His voice was edged with irony. ‘We set off just after sunset, then about a mile up river we cut the engine and just drifted over in the dark. Easy as pie. You can see the lights of Chau Doc from here. Ever been to Chau Doc? It’s a shitheap.’ He held the cigarette to Elliot’s lips again. Elliot took a light draw and managed this time not to choke.

  ‘How the hell did we get here?’

  McCue shrugged, as if it had been nothing. ‘She did it. Mamma Serey. She’s quite a lady. Just sort of took over. You were as good as dead. Me, I’d given up. Didn’t see the point no more. She took the kids and her jewellery into town, bartered for food and a sampan. They came back with a cart. We got you on it, then they hid you and me under all kinds of blankets and shit and wheeled us right past the noses of the Vietnamese, down to the docks. The place was crawling with refugees, soldiers. All kindsa stuff was going on. It was chaos. Shit, no one blinked an eye at an old woman and a couple of kids wheeling a cart. We been on the river ever since. Same on the water, too. All kinda boats going up and down, and the gooks not giving a shit. They don’t know what’s happening any more than anyone else. We never even been stopped. Not once.’ He chuckled. ‘Some lady, that Mamma Serey.’

  Elliot lay back, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, trying to block in McCue’s sketch of his lost three days. But his thoughts were as confused as the scenes McCue had described. He could form no picture of a Phnom Penh alive with refugees and soldiers; just empty streets and desolation. Neither could he picture the river, or the sampan in which he now lay; only the wide, empty waters of the Tonle Sap, and the small open boat in which they had so nearly perished. He felt lost in a void. And, for the first time that he could remember, he realized that he was not responsible for his own life. A huge burden had been lifted. He could embrace death with an easy conscience.