by F. G. Cottam
‘When was the last time you went out, Mark?’
‘I took Adam to see the military tattoo in Edinburgh.’
‘That was months ago. When was the last time you went out as a grown-up?’
He laughed. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Make plans for Friday night. I’ll babysit. Go and have an adult conversation in the pub. Grumble about the weather with someone gnarled and local. Have a few beers. It will do you the world of good.’
‘What about your plans for Friday night?’
‘They’re already sorted. I’m babysitting.’ She hung up.
If nothing happens to Adam between now and then.
That had been the unspoken proviso, the precondition that neither of them alluded to, the possibility she knew both of them feared. She prayed that all would remain as it was until Tuesday and the psychiatrist. She felt that once he saw Adam, once he made his sane and fastidious suggestions concerning treatment, all would start to become well. Everything would begin to return to normal. An episode prior to that could be disastrous. It could send Hunter off on his desperate quest to find an ancient witch. What would happen to Adam in his absence? He would be obliged to take the boy with him. But Adam needed calm and comfort and routine, not the chaos of a futile search for some sorceress crone through the empty regions of Latin America.
She thought again about the house. They had lived in a village in Sussex. Then one wintry morning the previous January, the accident had occurred. Lillian Hunter was walking her eight-year-old daughter Kate the half mile to the church hall where her weekly ballet class was held. The car that hit them was being driven too fast on an icy road by a local youth of seventeen who had passed his test only two weeks earlier. The collision happened after his car hit a patch of black ice and went out of control. Lillian and Kate were killed instantly. It was the sort of mundane catastrophe you read about and sighed and shook your head over in the papers in the winter months. And as a consequence, Hunter had left the army and sold up and headed north with his son to escape the past and start afresh without the reminders that would hinder their recovery.
There was nothing wrong with the house. It was isolated, but it was not of itself a sinister or morbid place. It was handsome, picturesque. And in the spring and summer its surrounding countryside was spectacular. Buying it, relocating, was probably the right thing for Hunter in distracting him from his loss. But for Adam? Elizabeth couldn’t help wondering at the emotional cost of taking him away from everything familiar to him at such a distressing time. That was a parental dilemma, though, wasn’t it? Who was she to judge? She did not have any children of her own. At thirty-four she was certainly young enough. But the calendar was not the whole story. She did not think it likely to happen now. She picked up her pen and scribbled a note to herself to talk to the headmistress at Adam’s school. She was Mrs Blyth’s GP. It would be easy enough to do. Bullying should have occurred to her as a possible cause of Adam’s problems much sooner than this. But at least she could establish whether there had been any bullying before Tuesday’s consultation.
The first two hours of her Friday evening child-minding stint passed uneventfully. Then she heard a rumple of sound from above as though Adam had shifted and woken. She stood to go and check on him, alert to further sound, but there was none. A feeling of dread overcame her then. There was nothing obvious to provoke it. But her skin pricked into gooseflesh and her scalp itched coldly, and it took all the willpower and resolution she possessed to make her legs climb the stairs to Adam’s snug little room.
She pushed open the door. Moonlight bathed the scene. It was monochromatic, bleeding the brightness from the pictures on the wall, making a drab shroud of the duvet cover on the bed, turning the water in his bedside carafe a gloomy tainted colour.
He was seated upright on the bed. His mouth was stretched in a pantomimic leer. His long hair had been twisted into two careful plaits and there was a look of cunning and wariness in his eyes so dismaying on the face of a ten-year-old child that her own hand rose to cover her open mouth at the shock of it.
He laughed. It was a snigger, vindictive, high-pitched. ‘Hello,’ he said.
He had addressed her.
She swallowed. She did not reply.
His head jerked to one side as though in some mad impulse of sympathy. ‘Are you still angry with me, pretty doctor?’
The voice coming out of the child spoke English, heavily accented. ‘Boom,’ it said. It paused. ‘The rifle I used was a Barrett Light. A Barrett Light is a sniper’s weapon. It is British. And it is the best in the world.’ Adam’s arms jerked up like someone aiming a gun and one of his eyes closed as he looked along an imaginary sight. His tongue protruded in concentration and was then slowly withdrawn as the smile returned. A finger squeezed a phantom trigger. ‘Boom,’ the voice said. ‘That was all it took, pretty doctor. The range was eight hundred metres. No distance for a Barrett Light. A routine shot. And your boyfriend’s head exploded like a pumpkin under a hammer blow.’
‘Adam?’
‘Busy,’ the voice said. ‘Unavailable.’ The child’s face contrived a lascivious wink and the body reclined on the bed and the sniper closed his eyes and rested.
Later, when she was sure the boy slept, Elizabeth came back to the room and unravelled the plaits in his hair and combed it out. She did not want Mark Hunter to see the physical interference inflicted on his son. Then she went back downstairs and, goaded by her memories and the grief rekindled, she wept. She was still struggling for composure when she heard Hunter’s key in the lock, a few minutes after midnight.
He took off his suit coat and unfastened his tie, then came and sat down in the chair facing hers. He had noticed straight away that something was wrong. He was sober and she was glad of the fact. Probably he had drunk reluctantly, glancing often at his wristwatch, impatient for the time when he could respectably go home. She remembered that she’d felt a stab of pity for him, putting on his tie to go to the local pub. It was a few hours and a lifetime ago. The world had shifted since then. Her sympathies now were engaged with bigger things.
‘Should I go up?’
‘No. He’s sleeping now. He needs a long sleep, I think, or he will wake exhausted.’
‘Something happened?’
‘Another escalation.’ It was ironic, using the terminology of war to describe what had occurred. ‘How many men have you killed, Mark?’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Some would argue there’s a philosophical distinction between the deaths you inflict with your own hands and those you delegate. I would not. The answer to your question is too many.’
‘And now you’re being punished for it, through your son.’
‘Except you don’t believe that, doctor.’
‘Shortly after I qualified, I volunteered with my boyfriend, also just qualified, to do a stint with the Red Cross. We were sent to Chechnya.’
‘Christ.’
‘Where, as you know, things escalated. We were at the siege of Grozny. All was chaos and butchery. We could do nothing. My boyfriend was killed by a sniper bullet. They got me out in the end lashed to a pallet aboard a cargo plane. Tonight, in Adam’s room, I listened as his killer bragged about murdering Peter.’
‘Only the dead can speak through Adam,’ Hunter said quietly. ‘If that is any consolation.’
‘It isn’t.’ She laughed, incredulous at the truth she had witnessed. ‘Your son is possessed.’
‘I’d wondered why someone who looks like you do is single.’
She stared hard at him.
‘It’s my training. I was taught to watch out for the unusual, for anomalies. The hours that you work, the absence of a ring on your finger and the fact that you were available to child-mind on a Friday evening are at odds with how you look, Elizabeth. That’s all.’
‘What did you do, in Bolivia, to incur the wrath of this black magician?’
‘We blundered into something. It was a very confused situa
tion, not something we were prepared for. Not something anyone could be prepared for, I don’t think. But I did something wrong. Not just wrong. I did something bad.’
‘And the white witch? She didn’t feel inclined to lift the curse there and then?’
‘I’ll tell you about it. I’ll tell you everything. I’ve never spoken of it to anyone in all the years since. But you will have to know.’
‘Why did you call me in the first place, Mark, if you thought my skills redundant?’
He looked at her. ‘I hoped I was wrong. The situation has deteriorated with such awful speed.’
‘But it has become clearer. After what I saw tonight, I can explain it in no other way. Something unwelcome and strange has occupied your son, some malevolent force. Adam really is possessed.’
‘I know he is, Elizabeth. And it will get much worse than this. And I must find that old woman and persuade her to come back with me and use her power if I’m to have a chance of saving him.’
‘You had better tell me about what provoked this,’ she said. ‘You had better tell me and tell me truthfully.’
Chapter Two
Everything about the deployment in Bolivia was wrong. But before discussing the flawed reasoning behind the mission, Mark thought it important to impress upon Elizabeth just how strange and unknown a place Bolivia had been twelve years ago. It was still exotic now, of course. It was a place of outlandish beliefs and customs. It was high and remote. There was still a primitive poverty in parts of the country that shocked affluent Europeans. But the fact was that those Europeans were there now in increasing tourist numbers to be shocked. Bolivia had become a backpacker destination of choice. The most dangerous road in the world, which Bolivia could rightfully boast, had become the thrill-seekers’ weblog cliché. The prison in La Paz had been forced to end its Newgate Gaol traditions under the scrutiny of a curious world. The place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had apparently met their bleak deaths was practically a theme park dedicated to the myth of the American outlaws. The shrinking of the world had domesticated aspects and even regions of Bolivia. When Mark had been deployed there as an army captain, not many weeks married, that had yet to become the case.
Any mission was routinely described as business, in the regiment. The more business there was, the better, was the prevailing philosophy. Business meant survival. The lack of it meant perceived obsolescence and inevitable Whitehall-decreed cutbacks in manpower and hardware. Fears entertained by the senior officers had filtered down to the non-coms. Peace was a likely prospect in Northern Ireland, where most of their business was done. Trade was lacklustre in the Province, the market almost exhausted. There was a bit going on in the former Yugoslavia, of course. But it did not add up to much. It was peripheral. The days of their champion, Margaret Thatcher, ecstatic at some piece of stun grenade theatre staged in Hereford, were long gone. Prime Minister John Major was more sanguine about the military and its costs. He might be a patriot. But he had the soul of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he had once been.
The Bolivia incursion was a Whitehall initiative. Mark discovered that at a meeting with his own commander, when he attempted to extricate himself from it. He had endured a gruelling training attachment in Belize prior to his wedding only three weeks before this summons. He was supposed to have earned thirty days of leave. They had allowed him twenty-one. He had been summoned by phone at the newly bought home in Devon that he shared with his new wife. They were in bed when the call woke them. He could see no justification for it. There were plenty of other men as good as he was on active duty and with none of his resentment at having to go.
‘I can think of three,’ Colonel Baxter said over steepled fingers.
‘You flatter me.’
‘No. I don’t.’
Mark wondered who the three were. It didn’t matter. Evidently they were already engaged on other missions. Outside, he could hear the punishing thud of percussion grenades, the adrenaline urgency of screamed commands. It was very hot on the base, in their breeze-block hut. It was July. They had opted for a summer wedding. The reception had been held on an island on the Thames at Kingston, where Lillian was originally from. The water had shimmered on their short crossing to the island under the blue sky of a perfect English day. Rose petals had been strewn on the still surface of the river.
‘Dragging one of our best and brightest from the marital bed is not something I do with any relish, Mark. May I call you Mark?’
Hunter was twisting his beret in his hands. He could feel pinned to it the stubborn sharpness of the badge he had been so proud to earn. ‘You can call me what you like, Sir. You’re my commanding officer.’
‘Please don’t be petulant,’ Colonel Baxter said. His eyes dipped to a document on the desk in front of him. He studied it, biting at his grey moustache with the bottom row of his teeth.
‘I’m sorry, Sir.’
‘And so you fucking well should be.’ Baxter’s eyes rose and met his. ‘It is a great privilege to be called to arms under the standard of this regiment. Never forget that. Infant children have been deprived of fathers who died valiantly serving our colours with nothing but pride.’
There was no arguing with this. It was military fact, the regiment a family, its sacrifices familiar to and painfully borne by every member. ‘I’m sorry, Sir. I am truly and humbly sorry.’
‘Good. Your truculence is forgotten.’ Baxter picked the document up from his desk again. He did not wear glasses. He did not hold the slim stack of papers away from his face to find a range at which their words would come into focus for an ageing man. He must have been fifty, Mark supposed, but his vision was unimpaired. The colonel enjoyed the reputation of a superb rifleman. He could down a moving target at better than half a mile. As he read the short sheaf of papers in front of him, his hands were unnaturally still. Mark was impressed but not surprised. You became accustomed to such accomplishments at Hereford.
A cocaine cartel had established a presence in the north of Bolivia, near the town of Magdalena only a few miles from the border with Brazil. This territory was the Amazon, river tributaries and thick rain forest, a region which did not share the high altitude characteristic of much of the country. But it possessed challenges of its own. It was hot, swampy terrain, difficult to travel through, innately hostile to man. Trained at length in Belize, a man from the regiment would find it all very familiar, Mark thought. He would almost be at home. He did not much like the parasitic insects that burrowed under a man’s skin. But then he did not greatly care for winter nights concealed in a culvert observing a Republican farm building in the freezing bogs of South Armagh. Join the army and see the world. But do so uncomfortably.
Baxter slid a satellite photograph across the desk. Dense forestation was a black blur covering the whole of the print. Rivers and streams were silvery snakes gleaming, uncoiled. A route through the forest was just the faintest of lines, given away by its straightness. Geometrical precision was alien to this wilderness. There should have been no straight lines. Yet there it was. A route, ruler straight, headed north. Mark followed the trail with his finger. It was too faint to record the rampaging progress of loggers, altogether too neat. And it was too delicate to represent a metalled road. Effort had been made to minimise the path, to keep it as narrow and well concealed as its existence allowed.
‘Either they’re environmentally sensitive, or they’re hiding something,’ Mark said.
Colonel Baxter did not answer him.
Faintly, from one of the sets of wooden buildings in the sunshine beyond the hut, Mark heard the cagey, staccato rhythms of a live-fire exercise. They would be rehearsing an ambush in one of the blinds built by the base carpenters, or rescuing hostages from a confusing warren of wooden rooms. His hands were moist in the heat and his tracing forefinger smudged the point where the road ended, the smudge giving more substance to a settlement there than the picture had originally possessed. But it was a settlement, man-made before an attempt at cam
ouflaging it. Again, the geometry gave it away. The small cluster of buildings formed a pattern of rectangles.
‘It doesn’t look much, Sir.’
‘That picture is almost two weeks old. The place could be twice the size by now, heavily fortified and fully operational. You won’t know until you get there.’
‘I’m assuming a Stealth aircraft took this picture. I’m assuming this is an American initiative.’
‘That’s essentially correct.’
‘They’ve got some pretty good special forces operatives of their own. I’ve done joint exercises with them in Germany. You must have done the same in the past, Sir. They’re more than capable of dealing with a jungle stockade full of marching powder and a dozen armed thugs from the cartel guarding it. This is a milk-run for their covert chaps.’
Baxter frowned and stood up. He went over to his window. Mark did not think the view especially compelling. Baxter was concealing something. But that was his prerogative, given his rank. ‘The special relationship has taken a few hits of late, Mark. There are some bruising personality clashes at a level too high for anyone to be comfortable with them. This mission is seen by the PM as one more symbolic means of cementing our long-standing position with our longest-standing allies.’
‘Technically, Sir, our longest-standing allies are the Portuguese.’
‘Your co-leader on this mission is of Portuguese origin, actually. He’s a Major Rodriguez. Rodriguez serves of course in the army and under the flag of the United States. I believe he’s a linguistic specialist.’
