The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  Smoothly, he slows and edges over to the left. Kat goes to her left. She slows the engine and brakes, throwing red light out behind her.

  He accelerates.

  In the cab, he’s shaking his head at the madness around him at this time of night. And just then, as his concentration is diverted, she brings the bike back into his path. He brakes on instinct, twists the wheel, and the front of the truck hits the bank, tilting it, then bouncing it back heavily on the road.

  Kat jumps the bike, landing roughly on the grass bank, taking the flashlight and tie wire. The truck stops, hazard lights on, cab door open, and the driver leaps out. The Yamaha lies on its side, wheel spinning, engine running. Kat is close, lying down on the bank, legs splayed unnaturally.

  The driver’s flashlight washes over her. He curses in a foreign language. Kat’s breathing is barely detectable.

  She listens to his footsteps on the tarmac, then crunching into the grass. Kat’s ready to make the split-second judgment, to know the moment when pretense will end and she can take him.

  She shifts just enough for him to see movement, drawing him quickly in. The beam goes up and down her body. The driver drops to his knees, flashlight on the grass, head inches from hers. She can smell him.

  Kat uncoils and hits the nerves above the sinus, blacking him out for long enough to knee his groin, then press her own flashlight into his ribs as if it’s a weapon.

  “Not one sound,” she whispers. “Facedown.”

  He rolls onto his front. She pulls his hands behind him and binds them.

  “Move and I’ll kill you,” she says.

  In the cab, searching, eyes half on him, she finds tape in the door side pocket. In a toolbox on the floor of the passenger seat, she sees screw- drivers, pliers, a battery-powered drill, a rotary saw, and a Beretta 38, better than nothing, with a full magazine of 20 rounds. She unclips it, chambers a round, walks back, kneels astride him, and fires once into the ground an inch from his right ear. She unties the wire.

  “Stand up,” she orders. “Keep your back to me.”

  He gets to his feet, obedient but showing no fear. He’s wearing a light blue jacket with RINGSET on the back and light blue pants with a dark stripe down the side. The back of his head, the line down to his neck, the shape of his features are sharp as if carved from rock. With his tanned, taut skin, he’s a man who has worked hard in harsh weather.

  His calmness chills Kat.

  She senses what he’s going to do and what she will do to stop him. She can only guess what’ll make him do it. Maybe it’s a condition of the job. Maybe he can’t afford the shame. Maybe he comes from someplace he can’t go back to.

  Why does anyone risk his life?

  A sky heavy with stars hangs above them. Droplets of sweat gather at the edges of Kat’s lips. “Take off your jacket. Drop it to the ground,” she says.

  Kat lets the Beretta’s butt settle in her hand. With a 38 it might take two, even three rounds to drop him.

  A tilt of the head, hand on each side of the jacket, midway down, drawing it apart, smooth movements, doing all she ordered, but her insides are turning to ice.

  As he drops the right side of the jacket, his hand hesitates. He shifts weight again. His fingers slide toward an inside pocket. Something’s in there, but Kat can’t be sure, although if it’s a weapon, he’ll be faster than her.

  “Stop,” shouts Kat.

  He doesn’t. She can’t see what he’s doing. Her finger’s tight across the trigger, yet she can’t pull it.

  I do know you are not a natural killer. Mercedes’ voice is in her head.

  By the time she sees it’s a gun, it’s too late to do anything except throw herself to the ground. Move, for God’s sake! Move, damn it, don’t you know how difficult it is to hit a moving human being! she screams silently to herself.

  The gunshot explodes through the quiet. In a blur, she knows she’s not hit. His feet are rock-steady in firing position, not a muscle moving, and as Kat rolls onto her back, she catches his eyes, not focused on her, but at her as a target.

  Kat fires four times, both hands clasped around the pistol butt to steady the recoil. He’s down, face blown away like Suzy’s, but the RingSet uniform unscathed except for green smudges of grass on the knees where he fell, which, if Kat cares to think hard about it, is exactly how she planned it when she pulled the trigger.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Friday, 1:06 a.m., BST

  His name was Marcel Lancaric. His relaxed face stares out at her from the ID card taped to the dashboard. Another picture’s of a woman, blond bobbed hair, red overcoat, and silver gray stole, bundled-up baby in her arms, and a boy, four or five years old, in a Batman outfit, holding her hand and hugging a football.

  Head in her hands, Kat focuses on the embossed Volvo symbol in the middle of the steering wheel, breathing in the metal and plastic smells of a new vehicle, swallowing to stop nausea from overwhelming her, and ordering herself to start driving.

  The engine’s running. The lights are on. FM radio plays easy-listening jazz. Fresh cigarette smoke hangs in the air, the butt stubbed out in an ashtray near where the Beretta was. Kat has two guns now, the Beretta 38 with 16 rounds left and his weapon, a smaller Beretta 21 with 5.

  Kat’s wearing the driver’s blue RingSet baseball cap and overalls, has transferred all her stuff into the pockets, and has checked the SIM card taped to her back. When she pulls out, she doesn’t look back. He’s lying there, the same way Suzy was left lying in the marshes, except it’s the back of his head that is unmarked and the front that is demolished.

  She’s been through his pockets for his ID and swipe cards to get into the base. She’s searched the cab, the front bench seat, the sleeping bunk at the back. She’s done other things, too, which she’ll never be able to let rest. How, now, can she ever challenge anyone who’s been involved in a killing, judge what they did with the corpse? How does she know that what she’s done is right? A Mercedes-like answer floats into her consciousness: Killing happens when two people believe in what they do. It’s as simple as that.

  If Lancaric’s daughter turns up one day to blow Kat’s head away, Kat would understand, but still might end up killing her.

  She turns the radio up loud, lets the truck pick up speed, follows the curve of the road, and soon she’s on the straight road, running parallel to the fence of the base, where she sees a plane taxiing and the silhouette of a man signaling it to its stand. A drizzle starts. Wipers smear across the windshield.

  She turns into the gate, lights flashing, late, needing to get in. She slows under a yellowish glow from the camp lamps, glad for the inclement weather. A single barrier is down across the road, with a guardhouse set back, two figures inside, breaking off from watching a soccer match. A spotlight shines onto the license plate. A scanner descends, jerks, and stops outside her side window.

  She curls her fingers around a cloth soaked with Lancaric’s now-cold blood. She peels it back, checking that the hand itself is unmarked. She swallows to stop herself from retching, keeps her eyes on what she’s doing, and feels the stickiness of blood, not yet clotted, running into her sleeve.

  She lifts the right hand, which was shockingly easy to sever with the man’s own rotary saw, and holds it against the window glass, pushing it flat, until she hears a beep and sees the barrier shake and then rise.

  She brings the hand down slowly, shaking, covers it with the cloth, and rests it on her lap as she drives slowly into the base.

  Floodlights are on the plane she saw taxiing. She heads away from it, straight up toward low-rise huts, dimly lit, no activity, where she saw the trucks go before. A whistle blasts across the tarmac. Kat looks around, keeps going.

  The whistle again. Kat glances to her right. The guard’s so far away and looks so small against the front wheel of the plane, lights skittering around him, orange ones rotating on the top of airfield vehicles, straight beams from the aircraft wings, engineers’ flashlights flickering around the
underbelly, the fuselage lit up inside and on the ladder, where people are climbing up to get in.

  He’s waving at her, beckoning her over, and in her rearview mirror, she’s being flashed by a jeep’s headlights. Kat brings the truck around, dropping Lancaric’s hand to the floor and pushing it under the seat with her free foot. She pulls the baseball cap further over her face, keeps the 38 on her lap, and stuffs the smaller Beretta into a side pocket.

  The man at the plane’s front wheel waves her in with a paddle, telling her to stop near the step, but she does it wrong. He yells at her, slapping his hand on the roller door at the back of the truck. “Back up. Back up. We need it close.”

  It’s a Boeing 767, steps going up front and back, fuel truck parked under a wing, hydraulic platform with roped crate whining up toward the cargo hatch. Another slap on the back of the truck tells Kat she’s close enough.

  They have the key to the back. The roller door comes up, and there’s movement behind her, making the truck shake. She’s so far inside the airfield that she can’t make out the perimeter fence, only the awkward shapes of trees outside in fields lit by flits of moonlight and darkened by rain clouds.

  The reek of Lancaric’s blood fills the cab. She shakes her head to clear the thought and looks in the side mirror. A line of men unloads boxes from the back of the truck. Rain splatters on the mirror and blurs the shapes. She lowers the window, wiping it clear, and she gulps fresh, damp air deep into her lungs like an injection of ice.

  A hand slaps the side of the truck. The back door is rolled down.

  “Okay, take her away.”

  The loaders are prisoners who hold their arms out in front of them while two men walk down the line, cuffing them.

  Kat drives off. She’s inside the perimeter fence, and she’s not going to leave. No one seems to be checking, but that might change when she tries to get on the plane. And what about the truck? They’ve logged it in. When will they expect to log it out? Or does it have a parking bay on the base?

  She drives into the moonlight shadow spread by an aircraft hangar and reverses into an unmarked bay, between two vans.

  A splash of lightning brightens the sky. No one’s watching her; she sees no cameras. She takes a nail from the truck’s toolbox, crouches between the hangar and the truck, and lets air out of a rear tire.

  Fifty yards along the wall, she sees a Dumpster. She finds the truck’s jack beneath the chassis at the back, plans to jack it up, but changes her mind. The jack’s covered in blue cloth. She unfurls it, puts the jack back, takes Lancaric’s severed hand, and wraps it in the cloth. On a scrap of paper from the glove compartment, she writes, “Flat. Fixed in thirty minutes,” and props it in the windshield with Lancaric’s photo ID.

  Kat walks along the hangar wall, drops Lancaric’s hand into the Dumpster, then heads toward the aircraft.

  Just about everyone working on the base seems to be armed. RingSet looks like it’s run on the careless arrogance of gun culture. With its weapons, RingSet is unassailable, and anyone this deep inside the airfield is secure.

  The 38 rests comfortably in her hand. Kat walks out swinging it like it’s a fashion accessory. She picks not the back but the front steps, and takes them two at a time.

  Kat counts only seven other passengers in the Club Class cabin. Three have RingSet overalls on like her. One is a woman. Two men are in jeans and loafers. Two other men are in jackets, pants, and open-neck shirts.

  Kat takes a blanket from the overhead compartment, drops into a window seat, and pretends to sleep, careful to keep her gun and blood-flecked hands under the blanket.

  “Do we have to go through customs?” mutters one of the men in jackets. He’s sitting directly in front of Kat, hair curled down to the top of his collar, a black leather briefcase in his right hand, his left fidgeting in his pants pocket.

  “Not here,” says an older man next to him, an American with a southern accent. “Anyone who gets this far, they know who you are, and places like this you don’t want to go around asking anyone’s business.”

  A curtain hangs down, but not enough to cover the view toward the back, where the center seats have been fitted with shackle rings for each prisoner. They are led in, handcuffs unlocked, then locked again to the seats. None sit together. Each is in a middle seat of three, with powerful overhead bulbs shining in their faces.

  The engines start up.

  “Ammunition must be removed from weapons for the duration of the flight,” instructs a woman attendant, moving down the aisle. Kat takes the magazine out of the 38, closes her eyes, sees Lancaric’s and Suzy’s faces melded into one, and hears the thud and hiss of the fuselage door closing.

  SIXTY

  Friday, 6:59 a.m., BST/1:59 p.m., Voz Island

  She’s been in the air for six hours, and Kat wakes to the trembling of turbulence, the sound of the seat belt alert, and the casual southern drawl of the pilot.

  “Don’t know how many of you folks have been to this part of the world before, but it’s susceptible to a strange kind of dust storm. Think of a tornado that runs horizontal instead of vertical. And not just one; they come like tidal waves, one after another, gathering dust like rolling up a big carpet. The locals call it boo-run, which means ‘strong wind,’ but on the flight deck, we like to think of it as bad weather. We plan to get you on the ground before it hits, but once there, you might wish you were up in the skies again with us.”

  As they come in to land, white dust blows across a colorless landscape, which stretches beyond the runway, low huts, and fences toward a treeless horizon. Layers of heat rise up from the ground, creating a low haze everywhere.

  The plane taxis to a stop, and the attendant opens the door. A blast of hot air rushes in.

  A gust buffets the aircraft, and a guard in blue RingSet overalls, his face covered with a red scarf, stumbles into the cabin and rests his M16 automatic rifle against the bathroom door.

  Through the window, Kat’s been able to make out an airfield built in exactly the same style as the one at Byford, as if RingSet makes its camps the way McDonald’s makes its restaurants. Perimeter fences with watch- towers run at right angles to each other. Just ahead is a control tower, and near the plane, a bulldozer equipped with a V-shaped plow pushes aside the white-brown dust that’s blown around since the plane landed.

  Between the plane and the fence are clusters of small, single-story buildings with sloping, eaved roofs, all coated in dust. People dotting the endless landscape have their heads lowered against the weather. There are no paths or roads that Kat can see, except for one being cleared by another bulldozer, at the end of which is a long, flat-roofed, whitewashed building, windows grimed up and dark doors facing out like motel rooms.

  The pilot, in a white, short-sleeved uniform shirt, comes out from the cockpit, glancing disdainfully at the guard’s weapon.

  “We got you down safely,” he says to no one in particular. “Now we’ve got to get back up again.”

  He gives the guard a sheet of paper and returns to the cockpit. The guard picks up his gun, rests it over his forearm. He walks farther back into the cabin, ignoring Kat and the passengers in her section, and begins checking the prisoners, holding a counter in his hand.

  As if that is a signal to move, the passenger in front of Kat stands up, unclips the overhead compartment, and brings down a briefcase.

  Shielding her lap from view, she clips the magazine back into the 38 and slides her hand into her pants pocket to put a round into the chamber of the Beretta 21 and secure the safety. Midflight, she also managed to wash her hands of Lancaric’s blood. She eases herself into the aisle, eyes lowered; this is an atmosphere where personal space is not violated.

  The passenger with the soft southern accent brings a scarf out of his briefcase and wraps it around his face, covering his mouth and nose. He heads to the top of the steps.

  Kat is behind him. The sun is high in a cloudless, blue sky. She touches her face, thinking she’s got an insect bite
. It takes a moment to realize that her exposed skin is being stung by blowing dust particles.

  “Better watch out,” he warns her. “This used to be the Aral Sea. But the Soviets drained the water to irrigate cotton fields. It’s now a wasteland of salt, sand, and crushed seashells that cut your face in the wind.”

  Kat follows him down the stairs toward four waiting jeeps, just like the ones in the picture: a driver, an armed guard, and the backseat for the passengers, with the RingSet logo of a bird of prey on the door.

  Kat has memorized the map, and she has the cell number: F-10689.

  A siren starts up. Two trucks with hydraulic ramps pull up underneath each of the plane’s engines. The pilot’s at the aircraft door, shouting, pointing out toward the weather. “Close the goddamn door!” he shouts. “Now!”

  A dozen prisoners are walking down the steps. The aircraft doors shut behind them.

  Loud, simultaneous commands come from the jeeps, guards slapping the doors to make the point. A jeep engine revs up. Somewhere in the distance, the wind whips up surface dust. The land seems to be rolling onto itself, threads of brown and white, gathering more and more, like a tidal wave.

  The first jeep pulls away. Guards on the other two wrap their weapons. Kat’s never seen weather like it, but from what people are doing, it looks like it happens often. In an instant, the buildings around her disappear from view.

  Kat drops back. She’s treading on half an inch of dust. It’s scratching inside and hot through the soles of her shoes. She’s under the wing, eyes half closed against the sting, mouth shut tight, hand feeling the way like a blind person.

  One second, she’s stepping through the storm’s debris like mud, the next it’s been blown away and she’s hard on the tarmac. She touches the airplane’s tire and feels its heat. A light from the wing shows up the dust, but the beam goes nowhere, as if it’s shining point blank into a wall.