by Wilbur Smith
Zhenia did not hesitate for a second. “I am going,” she said. “It is time that I stopped being a spoiled little girl and became a woman who is worthy to stand alongside all of you. I know all about nasty, violent, abusive men. My father is one of them. Believe me, I can look after myself. And if I can’t, well, I have my big sister to protect me.”
Cross was sorely tempted to pull rank and take Zhenia off the job. He hated the idea of sending the woman who meant more to him with every day and night they spent together into danger. But if he did that, he would show her up in front of the others and brand her as more special to him than them, thereby infuriating her and upsetting the balance of the team. So he went against every one of his protective, alpha-male instincts and said, “Well done. That’s just the attitude we expect at Cross Bow Security.” He saw Zhenia stand just that little bit more proudly and a fractional nod of Nastiya’s head told him that she approved, too.
“You and Nastiya stay here till you get the call from da Cunha. Then wherever he is, fly via Moscow. He probably knows about my connection to Abu Zara by now and Congo certainly does, so any flight from the Gulf will attract suspicion. Once you’re on the move, keep us informed where you are for as long as you can. Once you go silent, we’ll keep tracking your phones. Dave, talk them through the procedure.”
Imbiss explained how there would be a separate tracker app in case da Cunha was smart enough to insist on them disabling Find My Phone. “So, I need to hide it within an app that you would normally have on your phone. You guys got any preferences?”
“Net-a-Porter?” suggested Zhenia.
“That’s my little sister for you, always shopping!” laughed Nastiya.
“I do other things too . . . isn’t that right, Hector?” replied Zhenia, smiling sweetly at him.
Cross rolled his eyes as the others all laughed. He was tempted to call a halt to proceedings. They were supposed to be conducing serious business. People’s lives were at risk. Then he stopped himself. Yes, that’s right. Any one of these people could be dead before the week is out. So let them laugh. There’ll be time enough to be serious before this operation is through.
A day had passed, filled with planning, listing, trying to think of everything, fitting into hours what in an ideal world would take weeks. “It’s like packing for the holidays,” Paddy O’Quinn had blithely remarked. “But with guns.”
Now a new day had dawned and Cross was on his way. Before he got into the cab that would take him to the airport for the flight to Libreville Cross stopped for one last look back up at his apartment. Right now, he knew, Catherine Cayla’s nanny Bonnie would be holding her up to one of the windows that looked down from the penthouse floors of Seascape Mansions. He waved up at the tower, smiling broadly, trying to look jaunty, as if nothing could possibly happen and Daddy would always come back.
For now, though, there was hard, dangerous, bloody work to be done, and Cross set his mind to think of that and nothing else. By the time the cab was pulling away from the curb he was already dialing the Vosloos’ number: again. Normally it was never hard to get hold of them, even if one did have to make oneself heard over the sound of straining engines and passing bursts of anti-aircraft fire. But not this time. His first call had been put straight through to voicemail. So had his second, six hours later. This was his fourth attempt, and once again the only answer he got was a recorded message. “Come on!” he muttered to himself, “Pick up the bloody phone!”
He had to have that Hercules. Without it the mission would be over before it had even begun.
Two hundred feet above her father, Catherine Cayla had recognized him and shrieked with excitement until he disappeared into the cab. Then she cried out, “Daddy going!” and dissolved into bitter tears and a wailing lament of half-formed words that might as well have been Tibetan chants or the hunting songs of an obscure Amazonian tribe for all that anyone other than Bonnie could understand them.
“Daddy coming back soon,” she consoled her charge and took her through to the kitchen to watch her favorite Peppa Pig DVD and eat her dinner. Zhenia, who had been feeling a little tearful herself when Cross had finally extricated himself from her farewell hug, given her one last kiss and gone off to war, came into the kitchen too, to make herself a consoling cup of coffee.
She sat herself down at the table, next to Catherine’s high chair.
“I know how you feel, little one,” she said, smiling sympathetically at the sad little child, who was snuffling in bitter and inconsolable misery.
Zhenia was fascinated by Catherine. She knew that if her relationship with Hector was to have any hope of surviving in the long term, he had to know that his woman and his daughter were friends. So sheer self-interest necessitated Zhenia making an effort to be nice. But more than that, having thought of herself as a daughter and a little sister for so long it fascinated her now to find herself as the big one: not a sister and not yet a stepmother—she was not yet ready even to imagine herself as that—but an adult with a responsibility to care about a child, if not to care for her.
For her part, Catherine was of course still far too young to understand that Zhenia was her father’s girlfriend. But instinct told her that this lady was important to her daddy, and she was fascinated by Zhenia’s big eyes and her soft lips that smiled so nicely. The little girl liked being the object of the young woman’s attention and the woman felt a warm, calming pleasure when she was close to the child. They basked in one another’s company quite happily for a few minutes while Bonnie made Catherine’s porridge and smiled to herself at the relationship being built on the table beside her. Then she placed the bowl on the tray of Catherine Cayla’s high chair and advised Zhenia, “I’d stand back if I were you, dear.”
“I’m sorry . . . ?” said Zhenia, looking up at the nurse with a puzzled expression on her face.
A second later, all was explained. Catherine had made an instant, heroic recovery and was merrily attacking her porridge with all her father’s energy and determination, as if determined to coat herself and everybody else within splashing distance.
“Oh!” cried Zhenia, scrambling to her feet as a large dollop of porridge sailed through the air and straight into her coffee cup, sending an eruption of espresso and skimmed-milk foam across the table.
“I tried to warn you!” laughed Bonnie as Zhenia too collapsed in a fit of the giggles.
The noise attracted Nastiya to the room. “Enough of this nonsense!” she declared, working hard to maintain a suitably severe look on her face. “Come, Zhenia, we have work too!”
“Did you hear that?” Zhenia said to Catherine, who had stopped eating for a moment, distracted by the new arrival in the room. “That is my mean big sister. Isn’t she mean and cruel?”
Nastiya folded her arms, but said nothing. Zhenia looked at her, realized that further resistance was futile and, like a good little sister, followed her back to work.
The Voronova sisters were nothing if not industrious. They arranged accommodation and transport for the men arriving in Libreville, along with a truck to carry the Interceptor from the airport to the water. They liaised between the Abu Zara Foreign Ministry and the authorities in Gabon to ensure the unimpeded passage of the Interceptor and everything about it when it arrived in that country. They cajoled, sweet-talked and begged the shipbroker who was chartering out the Glenallen to get her to sea even more quickly than he had promised. They worked on installing a complete identity, suitable for a top businesswoman’s personal assistant on the smartphone Imbiss had given her. But in the end there came a time when all the calls and emails and texts dealt with, they’d installed everything that was needed on the phone and all they could do was wait for the one call that mattered most of all: the one from Mateus da Cunha.
Hector was on the ground at Addis Ababa airport when he finally got the call from Nella Vosloo. “How’s it going, Heck, you old rogue?” she asked.
“I’m fine, thank you, Nella,” Cross replied. “You have no ide
a how glad I am to hear your voice.”
“Ach, don’t try to woo me with flattery, Heck. Just tell me: how soon do you want us? How far do you want us to go? And how much are you going to pay?”
Cross chuckled at Nella’s unmatched ability to cut straight to the chase. “I want you yesterday. I need you to fly a boat . . . ”
“I fly planes, Hector. For boats you need a sailor.”
He tried again: “All right, then, I need you to stick a boat in your plane and fly that, plus Dave Imbiss, a couple of his men and the boat’s engineer from Abu Zara to Libreville, Gabon. And I’ll pay you less than you want but more than I think you deserve, same as usual.”
“You always were a miser, Heck,” she said, though they both knew that he paid in full, on the nail every time.
“So, where are you right now? And why couldn’t I get through to you?”
“Jordan. We were getting a family of Syrian Christians out of the country, one step ahead of those Islamic State bastards. It got a little hairy.”
“Is the plane in one piece?”
Nella burst out laughing. “You know you’re supposed to ask how your friends are before you inquire about their belongings, right?”
“I know you’re all right just by listening to you,” Cross pointed out. “I know Bernie must be all right because you wouldn’t be talking this way if he wasn’t. What I don’t know is how the Hercules is doing.”
“Oh don’t you worry about that. You know what those militia men are like, couldn’t hit an elephant’s arse at ten paces. Pray and spray, that’s how they shoot.”
“So you can do the job?”
“Give us a night’s sleep and we’ll be on our way in the morning.”
“And the money?”
“Don’t you worry about that, Heck. We’ll send you an invoice when the job’s done.”
The hours dragged by painfully slowly for the Voronova sisters. They played with Catherine Cayla and chatted to Bonnie and when this palled they played fiercely competitive chess, and accused each other of cheating. Then they described to each other in detail the lives they had lived while they had been separated, and agreed that they were infinitely happier now that they had found each other. Nastiya was struck by how many lovers Zhenia claimed to have sampled in so short a space of time, and she accused her little sister of exaggerating, which was the subject of more argument and detailed discussion. They had a lot of lost time to catch up on. Without their menfolk to intervene and distract them they discovered that they actually liked each other more than they had expected to. But mostly they just waited, and waited, and then they waited some more.
Da Cunha had Maria Denisova’s number. He’d said he would get in touch to set up the voyage on his yacht. But no call came.
“I am too old to be sitting by the phone, waiting helplessly for a man to ring,” snapped Nastiya. But she waited nonetheless.
Another day went by. The Vosloo’s Hercules arrived in Abu Zara and the work of loading the Interceptor began. Dave Imbiss called a couple of times, just to let off steam about the frustrations of dealing with Hassan, Prince Abdul’s engineer, who was evidently so terrified of his master’s wrath, should there be even the faintest scratch on the ship’s paintwork, that he was making it almost impossible to get the job done. Imbiss had picked Darko McGrain to be one of the men responsible for helping him transport the Interceptor to Libreville and then crew it once they were on the water. It said a lot for Hassan’s obsessive concern for his boat’s well-being that not even McGrain’s fearsome temper could make him more co-operative.
There was another hold-up with three of Cross’s men who had taken the Turkish Airlines flight to Libreville, which went the scenic route, via Istanbul and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Evidently there was strike action by Turkish air-traffic controllers and they were stuck in Istanbul, even further from their destination than they had been in Abu Zara.
But these seemed like minor inconveniences and no reason to worry. So Nastiya turned to Zhenia, said, “Don’t you hate waiting for a man to call?” and texted da Cunha: “So, when are we going to meet? Maria x.”
He replied within the hour: “Where are you?”
“Moscow.”
“How soon can you leave?”
Well, I have to get to Moscow first, she thought, then replied: “One day. Have work to finish here first.”
“OK. Fly to Accra, Ghana. Give me your flight details. You’ll be met at airport with onward tickets.”
“OK. Cool x”
“Just as long as we don’t end up with Ebola,” Nastiya said, pulling a long face at Zhenia as she sat down at her laptop and started looking at schedules. There was an Aeroflot flight the next morning from Moscow to Accra via Amsterdam. “Thank God! The plane is operated by KLM,” sighed Nastiya who considered herself a patriot, but not when it came to air travel.
They flew overnight to Moscow, they waited for three hours at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow then made the surprisingly short, six-and-a-half hour flight to Kotoka International in Accra.
At the arrivals barrier there was a Ghanaian taxi driver, who spoke only pidgin English holding up a board with Nastiya’s name ingeniously misspelled upon it. He drove them to the Tulip Inn in central Accra. There they found that a reasonably comfortable suite had been pre-booked for them. They fell into bed exhausted by the journey and slept until late the following morning. When they went down to the dining room for lunch there was a message from Mateus da Cunha at the reception alerting them to the fact that the next leg of their journey had been arranged to commence the following day at 9 a.m. But in the meantime they both had appointments booked at the hotel beauty parlor for the afternoon and for the dining room in the evening.
The bill for dinner had been pre-paid and included a bottle of Pol Roger. Zhenia remarked as she sipped the champagne, “Mateus da Cunha may be a crook but he has good taste; you and genuine French champagne.”
“Don’t tell my husband,” Nastiya pleaded.
While they were dining the receptionist came through from the lobby with another message: “A car will pick you up tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”
“Should we send a message to Cross to tell him what is going on?” Zhenia asked.
Nastiya thought aloud. “Can da Cunha monitor our phones? No. Not until we’re on the boat. He’s not the CIA.”
She texted Cross: “In Accra. Pick up at 08:00. Destination unknown.”
A few minutes later came a reply. “In Libreville. Glenallen fine, but no Interceptor and men still stuck in Istanbul. Be careful.”
“What did Hector say?” Zhenia asked as Nastiya read the message.
“Oh, nothing much. He’s in Libreville. He says we have to be careful.”
“The Voronova sisters . . . careful?” Zhenia laughed. “Does he know us at all?”
After dinner, a three-piece band was playing loud jazz in the bar lounge. Nastiya took a table as close to it as possible, and under cover of the music she quietly took Zhenia through their cover story, and the details of the fictitious oligarchs who were reputedly eager to invest in the Cabinda project.
“Oh, we’ve been through this so many times, I’m bored with it. I know the story. You’re my boss. I’m your PA. If anyone asks me a difficult question, I’ll just play the dumb secretary and say, ‘How should I know?’ Now, please, can we have some more champagne. Mateus can afford it.”
“No,” said Nastiya, firmly. “I want you looking sharp and beautiful tomorrow. We must be ready to dodge any surprises that get thrown at us. Now it’s bedtime for you, and eight hours’ sleep.”
Cross went to bed at midnight and was woken an hour later by Dave Imbiss calling from Abu Zara, which was three hours ahead. “We’ve got a problem, boss. The Herky-bird’s here, and being refuelled now. Bernie and Nella are grabbing some shuteye, but they’re basically all systems go. Trouble is we’re not going anywhere because I cannot get this sonovabitch engineer to understand that o
ur mission is (a) time-sensitive, and (b) more important than scratching or denting his damn speedboat.”
Cross could hear children screaming, a woman shouting and a man pleading with all of them to quieten down. “Where the hell are you?” he asked.
“At home with the Hassans. I guess they aren’t happy I woke them all up. Can you have a word with him, make him see the light? Here, I’ll put him onto you . . . ”
“Peace be upon you, Hassan,” Cross said, and was greeted by a torrent of furious Arabic, which even he, who spoke the language, had a hard time following. But the gist was unmistakable: Hassan was not happy about having his beauty sleep disturbed and was now even more determined to be as unco-operative as possible.
Funny how a jobsworth sounds the same in any language, Cross thought to himself. But he had dealt with the type before and had long since realized that there was no point arguing, or not on their terms, at least. So he waited until Hurricane Hassan had blown itself out and then said, “I am going to tell you two things: what is going to happen, and why it is going to happen. And while I am speaking, you will listen to me, as I have listened to you. Do you understand?”
Cross took the resentful grunt that was Hassan’s only response as a form of assent.
“Then understand this, too. His Royal Highness, the Emir Abdul, peace and blessings be upon him, has honored me with the inestimable privilege of his friendship, unworthy though I am. As a token of his esteem he has, with infinite generosity, seen fit to bestow upon me the use of his magnificent boat. Thus, what is going to happen is that you are going to assist my associate Mr. Imbiss and his men to load that boat upon the airplane that is going to carry it to me.”
There was a brief verbal flurry from Hassan, though the tone had turned from furious indignation to a feeble, plaintive whine. He was, it was clear, terrified of the repercussions to him and his family if the boat entrusted to him should suffer any damage in his care.
“I hear your concerns, Hassan,” Cross said, a little more emolliently. “So now I will tell you why you will do as I say, and why it will be to your benefit to do so. You will agree, I am sure, that His Royal Highness places his honor as a prince, a man and a friend above mere trifles such as money and possessions.”
