Evolution of Fear

by Paul E. Hardisty

  They sat out on the balcony and watched the moon rise over the Bosphorus.

  ‘I should get you to a doctor,’ said Clay.

  Crowbar shook his head. ‘We have to leave,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Koevoet? Tell me.’

  ‘Looking after you, broer. Like you asked me to.’

  ‘Looking after me? Is that what you call it? Fuck you, Koevoet. You sold me out.’

  Crowbar took a swig of whisky, put his feet up on the railing and lit a cigarette. ‘Let me tell you something, Straker. After you were demobbed, when I was still up in Angola fighting the commies, fokken kaffirs broke into my house back home in Jo’Berg. Killed my wife and baby boy. Gang-raped her and cut her to pieces, ja. They were after the TV.’ His voice was steady, calm, a professional delivering a radio sitrep under fire. He filled his lungs with smoke and poured it back out through his nostrils. ‘Everything I fought for all those years, gone. Vrek. You can’t bring anything back.’

  Clay stood, grasped the railing and watched the disc of the moon rise blood red behind the Sultan Selim mosque. ‘Jesus, Koevoet. I’m sorry.’ He felt faint.

  ‘Don’t be. I tracked them down. Killed them all.’

  Clay said nothing, watched the moon go from crimson to chlorine.

  ‘I don’t sell out, Straker. Ever. So fok you, too.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t send those men to kill me?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I am telling you.’

  Clay glanced over at Crowbar then looked back out over the city. Rania must have left minutes after he’d stormed out. Stupid. He hammered his head with his fist. Stupid. Selfish. She was in love with someone else, and she was doing what she knew she needed to do. And she was out there somewhere. He blinked off into the distance. ‘How did you find me?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been tracking the people who are tracking you.’ Crowbar glanced over his shoulder at the bodies sprawled in the room, tipped the bottle to his lips then passed it to Clay.

  Clay emptied the bottle. The whisky burned his throat. ‘Medved.’

  ‘At first, no.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘After word about the price on your head hit the street, I went to see Regina Medved, in Moscow.’

  Clay’s stomach burned. It wasn’t the whisky.

  ‘I wanted to find out what it was about, what they knew. See if the two million was for real. Played it like I was interested in the job.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Ja, definitely. It was for real. But they didn’t know who the killer was. They didn’t have a target. Rex Medved had a lot of enemies. They wanted proof, and the head. Then they’d pay.’

  ‘So those guys who came to the cottage, they were working for Medved?’

  ‘Not as far as I can see it, bru. Not directly anyway.’

  ‘Jesus, Koevoet. So who was it?’

  ‘The tall one, the one you killed, Rutgersan, was ex 32-Bat. The one I found in the hedgerow was Kluesner, also Buffalo Battalion.’

  Clay exhaled through his teeth. ‘Your number was in Kluesner’s phone. He called you just before they came to the cottage.’

  Crowbar nodded. ‘He was fishing for information. As soon as he called, I knew they were coming for you.’

  ‘There was a third one. I clipped him, but he followed me to Falmouth.’

  ‘Van der Plaas. Always works with the other two. A real nutter. No scruples.’

  ‘So they weren’t with the company.’

  ‘No way, broer. We have standards. But Van der Plaas was with us in DCC for a while a few years back. So he knew about the cottage.’ Crowbar hauled himself to his feet, swayed a moment, and walked back into the room. He picked up the bedside phone and rang down for another bottle of Johnny Walker and a complete dinner for two: kebabs, bread, dolmades, dessert, the whole affair. Then he put down the telephone and came back out to the balcony.

  ‘I left London right after the call from Kluesner. Must have reached the cottage not long after you left. I found Rutgersan dead on the front welcome mat. Kluesner was still in the hedgerow, unconscious, but bandaged up – was that you?’

  Clay nodded.

  ‘I cleaned up the place, got someone to get rid of the body. Then I drove to the coast looking for you. I knew you’d try to get out by sea.’

  Clay’s mind raced back. ‘The helicopter?’

  ‘There was a storm coming. The pressure was off. I’d tipped off the cops, given them van der Plaas’s description, told them he was armed. Set him up. I have friends, Straker. I wanted to warn you, let you know you had time.’

  ‘So Regina Medved doesn’t know I murdered her brother.’

  Crowbar looked back into the room. ‘Those are dead Russians on your floor, broer. They came for you. She didn’t know before, but she sure as hell does now.’

  Clay swallowed. His larynx felt as if it would crack. ‘LeClerc. He knew the whole story. He was there that day at the capital-raising event, he knew Rania, knew about her cover.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘And they tortured it out of him.’

  Crowbar inspected the bandage around his arm. It was already stained with blood, but seemed to be doing the job. ‘I heard.’

  ‘Then they killed him. That was revenge for publishing Rania’s story – the one that derailed their oil operations in Yemen. Cost them millions.’ Clay dropped his head to his knees, the alcohol swimming in his blood. It had been Rania’s story, and Clay’s, a lot of other people’s too, most of them now dead. Including LeClerc. Clay shuddered.

  ‘Makes sense,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘So who was van der Plaas working for?’ Clay said. ‘Who killed Eben? Who was threatening Rania before Regina Medved had even connected me to her brother’s murder?’

  He told Crowbar about Rania’s investigations in Cyprus, the threats to her life, her disappearance a few hours ago from this very room.

  Crowbar pulled a Beretta 9mm automatic from his waistband and handed it to Clay. ‘Look, broer, I’m not sure of anything. But one thing I can tell you: the guy who was tracking you before LeClerc spilled it to Medved was Bulgarian, arms dealer type.’

  Clay froze. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Zdravko Todorov. I watched him massacre twelve unarmed civilians in Yemen, gave evidence to the French government that led to his indictment. I also put a bullet in his knee, left him as a hostage with some Yemeni friends of mine.’

  Crowbar was silent for a moment, that word hanging in the air between them like bad blood: massacre. ‘Good reason to go after someone,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘Todorov is here? In Istanbul?’

  ‘Ja, definitely. But I haven’t seen him for almost twenty-four hours.’

  Clay pushed the Beretta into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back. ‘Here’s the irony, broer. Todorov did an arms deal with the Medveds during the civil war in Yemen. But the deal went bad. He stiffed them out of twenty million dollars. Regina Medved has a hit out on him, too.’ He pointed at the two dead men on the floor. ‘So if these guys are Medved’s, then they sure as hell weren’t working with Todorov.’

  Crowbar laughed, lit another cigarette. ‘Beauty.’

  There was a knock at the door. Room service.

  Crowbar stepped over the bodies of the two dead Russians and looked back over his shoulder. ‘If we’re going to find your bokkie, Straker, we’re going to have to get rid of these kills, clean up this mess and get the fok out of Turkey before the police invite us to stay in one of their very nice luxury prisons. Hungry?’

  24

  A Few Miles from Deep Water

  There was something about all that blood. The wet, ferric smell of it in his nostrils, in the back of his throat. The way it seeped into the gaps between the wood and held tight, organic bonding to polar organic. That unexpectedly slippery viscosity.

  On his knees, Clay towelled up the rich arterial flui
d as best he could, suppressing the urge to gag. After a while he stood, stared at his arms, red to the elbows. Crowbar was stripping the sheets off the bed. He gathered them up and set to work mummifying the two Russians, winding the bundles tight with the rest of Clay’s medical tape. They squeezed the bodies onto the lower shelf of the dinner trolley. With the two leaves of the table folded down, the tablecloth hung down and covered the lower shelf. Only the corpses’ feet, wound in the white bedsheets, protruded. It would have to do.

  They wiped down every surface as best they could, gathered up the bloody towels and stashed them in the trolley with the bodies. Clay looked at his watch. Almost midnight.

  ‘I’ll bring the car around,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘Go to the back of the hotel,’ said Clay, sliding Rania’s Koran into his bag with Erkan’s file. ‘There’s a delivery bay. I’ll use the service lift, bring down the trolley, meet you there.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ said Crowbar, slipping out into the hallway.

  Clay took an envelope and some hotel stationery, wrote a brief note to the proprietor thanking him for all his help, regretting they hadn’t been able to have that drink together. Clay stuffed the envelope with twenty-five one-hundred-dollar bills, more than enough to cover the bill and leave the proprietor with a healthy tip, one that would ensure silence and a determined cleaning of the room. He sealed and addressed the envelope, left it on the desk, took one last look around the room and started pushing the trolley towards the door.

  The hallway was quiet, the lights turned low for evening. The service lift was at the far end of the corridor, near the fire escape. Clay leaned into the trolley, started to push. The casters groaned as he got the thing moving. It wasn’t built for this kind of load. Its wooden frame flexed as the small, vulcanised rubber wheels caught on the carpets, dug into the floor boards, ground against their metal axles. It sounded like a freight train coming round a long bend, screaming on its rails. Some freight.

  He kept pushing, past one door, then another, praying the other guests were sound sleepers. Finally he reached the service lift, pressed the call button and pushed the trolley into the car. Halfway down the lift stopped and the doors opened.

  A young night porter was standing in the corridor, finger on the lift call button. ‘May I help you, Beyfendi?’ he said.

  Clay flipped down the edge of the table cloth. ‘No, thank you,’ he said in Turkish, trying a smile.

  The boy made to step onto the lift, but the trolley was blocking the entrance. ‘Please, Beyfendi, no need for you to do that. Allow me.’ He reached in, took hold of the edge of the trolley and pulled.

  Clay held firm. ‘Thank you,’ he said in Turkish. ‘No need. I wanted to speak to the chef anyway.’

  The porter didn’t budge. ‘The kitchen is closed, sir.’

  ‘No matter. I’ll take this down, then perhaps go for a walk.’

  ‘Please, sir. I will take it for you.’

  Clay breathed deep, fixed the boy with a parade ground stare. ‘Stand back, son.’

  The porter stood a moment, unsure. Then he shrugged his shoulders, stepped away. The doors closed.

  Seconds later, Clay pushed the trolley out into a dimly lit basement service area, concrete floors, stacks of crates and boxes, steel-framed laundry hampers, a forklift truck parked against the far wall. Just ahead was a ramp leading up to the loading bay with a wind-down metal door, closed up. Clay started pushing the trolley towards the ramp, double time. He was half-way there when something gave way. The trolley collapsed with a crack. The bodies spilled half onto the floor. Clay ran to the service door, cracked it open, looked outside. Crowbar was there with the car, a battered old Mercedes. The laneway was empty. Clay found the chain for the main door and cranked it up plate by plate.

  Crowbar backed the car in, jumped out, and stared. Bodies, splintered wood, blood. ‘Kak, Straker. What a mess.’

  They manhandled the bodies into the trunk of the Merc. Clay stripped the linen from the trolley, bundled it up with the towels and dropped it all on top of the corpses. Crowbar closed the trunk.

  In the car, neither spoke. They both knew they’d left behind a hell of a mess.

  Crowbar kept to Istanbul’s labyrinth of backstreets. Once clear of the city, they found the motorway and struck east into Asia Minor, then south towards the Turkish Aegean coast.

  Three hours and three hundred kilometres later, Crowbar brought the Mercedes to a stop at the quayside of a small seaside village. Clay got out, stretched his legs, felt the night air cool on his skin, heard the gentle lap of waves against the seawall. A dozen fishing boats bobbed in the starlit keyhole harbour.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Crowbar, disappearing up a stone stairway.

  Clay walked to the edge of the quay, stared up at the stars strobing in black emptiness. Ever since leaving the hotel, the last sentence of Rania’s note had been puzzling him: Hope you’ll understand. She hoped he’d understand. Of course he didn’t bloody well understand. How could she have walked away like that and have expected him to understand? It made no sense. None at all.

  Because that wasn’t what she’d meant. She hoped he’d understand the message itself. Hope. It was obvious. Hope Bachmann. Rania was telling him to go to Cyprus. It is no good, she’d written. So she hadn’t left willingly. She’d been forced, coerced. Whoever had done it had probably sat there and watched her write it. But why would her assailants allow her such a courtesy, when they would have known they only had a matter of minutes? Did they need her acquiescence? Or was it to mollify her, reassure her, keep her docile while they spirited her out of the hotel. He had indulged his anger and self-pity on the streets of Istanbul when he should have been there, protecting her. Go home. She knew he didn’t have one. But she did, one that had been destroyed only days before. Another reference? Do not try to find me. That part was clear. She was in trouble. She needed him. Find me. That’s what it meant.

  Clay stood looking out across the harbour, the Beretta’s grip jabbing into the small of his back, the creep of guilt black like murder up his vertebrae. He walked back to the car and reached into his bag. Rania’s Koran was there. He weighed it in his hand and ran his index finger along the spine, over the long, curling Arabic embossments, these ancient words that Rania so cherished, these words he’d read and tried in vain to understand, for her, for himself. Now he saw. Clarity came, a shred, a dull sliver. That was what Crowbar had meant when he’d told him about his wife and child. It was right here, in these gilded pages. Slay not life which Allah has made sacred, save in the course of justice.

  Thirteen years ago they had violated all that was sacred, and there had been no justice to be found anywhere. But the taste of retribution was sweet like mountain water, there still in his mouth from the moment the .45 slug he’d fired had pierced Medved’s frontal lobe, blown the occipital all over the hotel carpet. Whatever happened now, and however long it took, he would track down the people who’d done this – taken Rania, murdered Eben, tortured and killed LeClerc – and he’d slay every last one of them. And thus, inshallah, would he be forgiven.

  Ten minutes later, Crowbar appeared on the quay, accompanied by a stocky Turk in a woollen jumper and flat cap. The man’s moustache draped around the filter of a Maltepe cigarette. It didn’t surprise Clay that Crowbar knew someone here. For seven years he’d worked Europe and the Middle East for the DCC, buying arms and equipment, navigating the international embargo against South Africa, keeping the matériel and information flowing back to the homeland. And now, for the company, he just kept doing what he was good at. Hiring a vessel for an anonymous Mediterranean crossing was routine in Crowbar’s world.

  Soon they were on their way, motoring across the black surface of the Med under a moonless, cloud-brushed sky. Clay stood on the open bridge and watched the Turkish coast recede, a few scattered lights strung out along the horizon.

  ‘Cyprus,’ he said. ‘That’s where she is, Koevoet.’

  Crowbar considered this a
moment, nodded, leaned over and said something to the captain. Clay looked down into the vessel’s car deck. It was a small vehicle-landing craft with straight sides, a retractable front ramp, space for about four cars. Crowbar’s Mercedes, sitting low on its rear suspension, was the only cargo tonight. The first tinge of blue paled in the eastern sky, dawn perhaps an hour away.

  Crowbar leaned close, shouted above the roar of the engines. ‘We’re only a few miles from deep water. Then we head for Cyprus. Don’t worry, broer,’ he said, putting a frying-pan hand on Clay’s shoulder. ‘We’ll find her.’

  Crowbar and the captain retreated into the wheelhouse, leaving Clay alone on the open bridge. Ahead, the darkness of the sea, the ship moving steady through the water, night air flowing cool over his face; behind, the dark coastline fading away, the last lights disappearing below the horizon. Two dead men in the car on the deck below; and above, a universe of dying stars. And in these directions there was no solidity, nothing to hold.

  An hour later, the captain killed the vessel’s running lights and shut down the engines. Quiet smothered them, then the breath of a light southerly, the smells of Egypt there, Lebanon, the Bekka Valley, and the pat pat pat pat of water on steel – wet, playful almost, like fucking. The ship rocked in a calm sea, a hint of dawn painting the horizon.

  Clay followed Crowbar and the ship’s captain down to the car deck. The captain clanked across the steel plate of the deck and started winding down the front ramp. Crowbar opened the Mercedes’ driver-side door, put the car into neutral and let off the handbrake. The front ramp was horizontal now; a rush of wet air blew over them. The sea beckoned. Clay put his shoulder to the car’s trunk, started pushing it towards the ramp.