Evolution of Fear

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘Straker,’ came a voice.

  ‘Koevoet,’ he said.

  ‘Rania?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Kak.’ Crowbar approached the car and turned Zdravko’s head with his foot. ‘The poes who got me with the Dragunov.’ He looked up as Clay joined him. ‘You okay, seun?’

  Clay nodded and motioned towards the dead guard. ‘He killed him. More inside. He was leaving with this.’

  Clay put the bag on the back of Zdravko’s car and unzipped it. Inside were two white towels. Crowbar picked one up and unfolded it. There was something inside, wrapped like a present. He dropped the towel back into the bag, fished a torch from his pocket, turned it on and ran the beam over the object. It was a small painting, more like an engraving, no bigger than a paperback, faded colours on heavy, dark wood. Crowbar tilted it towards the light.

  Figures in single file suspended against a gold background climb an invisible ladder. Winged devils hover beneath the ladder, plucking unfortunates from the queue. Many fall. They plummet into a fiery abyss, mouths open in screams of horror, into the waiting jaws of sea monsters, drooling grotesques. A throng mills at the base of the ladder, each supplicant’s eyes raised, waiting to take his turn. At the top right, a larger image, haloed in gold leaf, bearded, holds up the first two fingers of his right hand. He is reaching out to the climbers, calling to them, urging them up.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ breathed Clay.

  Crowbar looked up at him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Like I said: Jesus Christ.’

  Crowbar grinned, unwrapped the second towel. It was another icon, identical. ‘Where the hell did he get these?’

  ‘Chrisostomedes collects them.’

  ‘Stealing from his employer.’

  ‘Time-honoured.’

  ‘Why kill all these people and take only this?’

  ‘Because this,’ Clay said, picking up the second icon, turning it towards the light, ‘or one of these, is worth more than that house and everything in it. And it’s probably the only thing on the planet that would have convinced Regina Medved to let him live. The Patmos Illumination.’ Zdravko must have planned it from the beginning.

  ‘So it does exist,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘Apparently yes, and more than one.’

  Clay looked down. Something was dripping on his boot. He reached down, touched it with his finger. ‘Blood,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’ said Crowbar.

  Clay reached down under the rear bumper of Zdravko’s car, catching a drop as it fell. ‘From inside.’

  Crowbar stepped back, kicked at the trunk. ‘Won’t open.’ He raised his handgun, aimed it at the lock.

  Clay pushed Crowbar’s gun down. ‘Wait.’

  Clay ran back inside the house, grabbed the crowbar from where he’d left it and ran back across the gravel. It didn’t take him long to pry open the trunk.

  A face he’d seen only once before, four months ago in a café overlooking Lake Geneva, stared up at him with empty, unblinking eyes. Rania’s aunt, Madame Héloïse Debret, gagged with tape, hands bound together behind her back with a plastic zip tie. She’d been shot in the chest.

  41

  As Good as Anything Else

  Crowbar dropped him at Hope’s car and they drove in tandem through the back mountain roads until they emerged in Kakopetria. By the time they saw the first police car, they were already clear of the foothills. They stopped next to a darkened roadside periptero under the shadow of a copse of evergreens. Clay joined Crowbar in the Pajero. They watched in silence as first one, then a second police car sped past towards Troodos. For a moment Crowbar’s face lit up blue and red, his jaw hard-set, covered in stubble, his wispy hair draped across his forehead in sweat-glued spines. They sat in the darkness for a long time, watching the lights disappear into the distance.

  After a while Crowbar pulled a half-empty bottle from under his seat, unscrewed the cap, swigged.

  Clay couldn’t see the label, but he could smell the cheap, duty-free scotch. ‘Chrisostomedes must have taken Rania with him,’ he said.

  Crowbar took another swig and capped the bottle. ‘The rally is going ahead as planned. Tomorrow afternoon in Nicosia, down on the Green Line.’

  Clay looked out into the black of the trees, the lighter grey of the tired fields beyond. ‘He’s taken Hope’s son.’

  Crowbar went quiet. ‘Fokken bastard.’

  Clay told him about Katia, his suspicion that Dimitriou might know the boy’s whereabouts. ‘We’ve got to find them, oom. Both of them. And quick.’

  Crowbar nodded, patting the bag on the seat between them. ‘He’ll be wanting these, ja.’

  ‘We’ll offer him a trade.’

  Crowbar opened the whisky and took another sip. ‘Do you know how much these are worth, seun? Medved’s offering ten million dollars, no questions. I say we kill the bastard, sell the icons to the dowager, then fokken retire in the Seychelles.’

  ‘No, oom. We trade. We give him back his icons, he lets Rania go. Rania promises to keep quiet about what happened. We leave the country quietly, vanish.’

  ‘What about him?’ Crowbar pointed his chin to the back of the Pajero where they’d bundled Zdravko’s body.

  ‘The Cypriots won’t give a damn about him. We’ve done them a favour. But go after one of their own, a luminary like Chrisostomedes, they’ll call out the army.’

  ‘What about Medved?’ said Crowbar. ‘You think you can run away with that kind of money tagged to your head? Someone will find you, ja. Both of you. Sometime, somewhere.’

  ‘You said it yourself. She’ll be dead in six months.’

  ‘That’s what they’ve been saying for the last two years. They keep finding new ways of keeping the old bitch going. But if we give her this thing she wants, we might just be doing ourselves a big favour.’

  Clay took the bottle, swigged a mouthful, winced as the whisky found him. Crowbar was right. They had to end it with Medved, one way or another. If she believed in the Illumination’s power enough, she might just eschew medical science and hasten her own death. It was as good as anything else they had, maybe better.

  Crowbar took the bottle back. ‘I admire you, seun.’ Just the whites of his eyes glistening in the dull half moonlight. ‘Even with Medved off your back, you think you can keep Rania quiet? Get her to run, leave Hope hanging? You’ve always been a dreamer, Straker, a fokken idealist. Congratulations. Now you’ve met someone even more stubborn and idealistic than you are.’

  Clay looked away. ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do, Koevoet. Run. Then I’m going back.’

  Crowbar raised the bottle in his hand as if to look at the label. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’m going back to South Africa.’

  ‘Goddamn, not that again. They’ll arrest you the minute you step off the plane.’

  ‘New government, oom.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Fokken ANC all legitimate now. A pack of fokken terrorists and thieves running the country.’

  ‘I’m going to testify.’

  Crowbar stopped breathing.

  ‘Desmond Tutu is going to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’m going to apply for amnesty.’

  Crowbar was silent a long time, just sat there behind the wheel, staring out into the night. ‘Don’t do it,’ he said finally.

  ‘I have to. It’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself. It’s killing me, oom. I need to tell the truth. This thing they’re doing, it’s my last chance.’

  ‘Don’t be naïve, Straker. You tell the truth, they’ll throw you in prison till you die. No way in hell they’ll grant you amnesty. No fokken way.’

  ‘I won’t mention names. No one else. Just me.’

  ‘As soon as you open your mouth, they’ll know we were all lying.’

  Clay breathed, worked his lungs. He was back there on the stand all those years ago, facing the military tribunal, his tie too tight around his neck, his c
ollar chafing his skin in the stifling January heat, and that one officer, a colonel with a grey moustache, red, sunburned cheeks and eyes like lead shot, who never seemed to blink or move but sat there for hours staring right through him with the ceiling fan turning overhead and the stenographer coughing and the way his cough would echo through the converted library they were using as a courtroom, the sound echoing off the marble floors and the colonial pillars and vaulted ceilings so that it was a continuous barking, like a pack of wild dogs braying at the scent of fear. And even then, he knew, from the demeanour of the officers, by the questions they asked, by the way they cut him off the moment he began to elaborate, anything more than a yes or no, that they weren’t interested in the truth, only in the process, that it could be said that the enquiry had run over ten days and had questioned all twenty-one surviving members of the platoon, as well as the crew of the helicopter who’d overflown the village later that day, and the forward artillery observer and his pilot who’d come by two days later, but by then FAPLA had been in, and the jackals and the hyenas had been at the place and there was nothing much left to see.

  ‘It was war,’ said Crowbar. ‘Not politics. This commission is about politics. It’s the ANC’s way of legitimising their atrocities. It’s not for us. You say one word, I guarantee you can kiss Rania and that little baby she’s making for you goodbye. You’ll never see them again.’ Crowbar banged the bottle down onto the dashboard.

  ‘What we did was wrong, Koevoet.’

  ‘Goddamn, Straker. We don’t have time for this. Let it go.’

  ‘All those people.’

  ‘Fokken enemy non-combatants. They were harbouring the enemy. They attacked us, don’t forget.’

  ‘Kids, Koevoet. Little children.’

  ‘Fok, Straker. You think you’re the only soldier who has ever had to do something he was ashamed of? What about the concentration camps you English cunts put our women and children into? They starved to death or died of the plague. Thousands of ’em. You going to salve your pussy conscience about that, too?’ Crowbar opened the door, got out, slammed it shut.

  Clay got out of the passenger side, walked around the front of the vehicle and faced Crowbar. In the dim light he could see the fury on his face.

  ‘Look, oom, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

  ‘No. Just fokken break your oath to all those men you fought with, let them find out when the man comes knocking at their door.’

  ‘They won’t…’

  ‘Fok you, Straker.’

  ‘What is it, Koevoet? In blood stepp’d in so far? Is that it?’

  ‘Don’t, asshole. I’m warning you.’

  ‘Too far gone? Is that why you joined the company?’

  Crowbar took a step forward, brought his face to within inches of Clay’s. ‘Spare me the psychobabble, Straker.’

  ‘You think there’s no way back, don’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘You want to know?’ Crowbar was shouting now. ‘You really want to know?’

  Clay breathed in the whisky vapour that hung like a cloud around their heads. ‘Go ahead,’ said Clay. ‘Tell me, bru. What are you so afraid of?’

  Crowbar tensed, clenched his fists at his sides. He was looking up, his lips almost brushing Clay’s chin. ‘Here’s the thing, seun. It’s simple.’ He smiled, stared into Clay’s eyes. ‘I like killing people. That’s all. And I’m good at it.’

  Clay stepped back, Hope’s words coming to him like certainty. After a while he said: ‘I’m not like you, Koevoet.’

  ‘Yes, Straker. You are. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.’ Crowbar reached into the car, grabbed the whisky bottle, drank then thrust it into Clay’s hand. ‘Go. I won’t stop you. But it won’t bring those people back. You’ve got to live with it, seun. Nothing else you can do.’

  Clay emptied the bottle, flung it against the wall.

  42

  Playing House

  They left Hope’s car in a side road outside the village and continued on in Crowbar’s Pajero. It was well past midnight when they rolled past Dimitriou’s place.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Clay. ‘Number five.’

  The house was set back from the street within a lush, floodlit garden, surrounded by a ten-foot perimeter fence lipped with razor-wire. Lights were still burning in the upstairs rooms. Crowbar did a circuit of the neighbourhood then pulled the vehicle up at the end of the street, just beyond a small bridge, and killed the lights.

  ‘No guards that I can see,’ said Crowbar. ‘CCTV at the front gate, over there at the corner. Probably motion sensors around the place. Pretty basic.’

  ‘I only need a few minutes,’ said Clay.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid, broer.’

  Clay nodded.

  Crowbar pointed back towards the bridge. ‘Go in along the riverbed, around back. Plenty of cover. If the boy’s there, get him and get out fast. Exfil the same way. I’ll be waiting here.’

  Clay nodded.

  Crowbar handed Clay a balaclava hood, a pair of leather gloves and a pair of wire cutters. ‘I’ll look after the security system,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Go in ten.’

  It didn’t take Clay long to find the back wall of the property. Using wire cutters one-handed was more difficult than he had anticipated. Luckily the wire here was sparse, poorly anchored. At the appointed time, he dropped into the back garden and made his way to the house. The rear patio door was unlocked. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him. A thin moonlight frosted the walls, the kitchen countertops. Clay moved towards the front of the house, aware now of the smell of the place, detergent and tonight’s dinner, cigar smoke, cat. He emerged into a marble-floored entranceway, the main staircase on his left, lights burning upstairs. He stopped, inhaled deep and listened. The sound of a toilet flushing upstairs, water running, the squeak and clunk of a door closing.

  He started up the stairs.

  That feeling deep in his stomach. Being somewhere you don’t belong. Crossing a border into another’s territory.

  The main landing. A hallway. A kid’s nightlight glowing. A door, closed, papered with cartoons – flowers, rainbows, smiling cartoon people, unicorns. Hushed voices from the end of the hallway, a half-open door, a wedge of yellow light.

  Clay breathed in, out, started walking.

  Dimitriou was sitting up in bed, a book in his hand, a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. His wife lay next to him, also reading, her hair in some kind of net. They looked up as Clay entered the room.

  Before they had a chance to react, Clay grabbed Dimitriou by the shirt front and hauled him out of bed. Books and a bedside lamp clattered to the floor. The wife screamed, pulled the covers up over herself. Clay slammed Dimitriou up hard against the wall.

  ‘What do you want?’ spluttered Dimitriou.

  ‘Where is the boy?’

  ‘Who?’ Recovering now.

  His wife screamed in Greek, reached for the phone on her bedside table.

  Clay tightened down on Dimitriou’s throat. ‘Tell her to shut up and put down the phone.’

  Instant compliance. The wife sobbed quietly.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  Clay let go of Dimitriou’s neck and jammed his stump up under the man’s chin. He pulled out his switchblade and popped the blade so Dimitriou could see. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I … I…’ Definitely scared now. The wife, too.

  Clay placed the sharp point of the blade against Dimitriou’s cheek so he could feel the coldness of it. ‘I can start here, show you how this thing works.’

  Dimitriou was shaking. ‘He’s … not here. Oh God, please don’t.’

  Clay pulled back the blade. ‘Tell me, and I’ll leave. No one gets hurt.’

  Dimitriou nodded quickly. ‘Chrisostomedes has him,’ he managed. ‘I told him not to, I told him. Please.’ Fear swam cold and fast in his eyes.

  ‘Where?’


  ‘I don’t know. Please believe me.’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Here in Nicosia. I don’t know where.’

  Clay disengaged, stepped back. ‘You tell him, he touches that boy, one scratch, you’ll both regret it. Understood?’

  Dimitriou nodded.

  Then he looked at Dmitriou’s wife. ‘You may want to ask your husband about the boy he’s kidnapped, and about that Russian mistress he keeps. I suggest you both think twice before you call the police.’

  Her eyes were already widening as Clay closed the knife and put it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Enjoy your evening, Minister.’

  It was fifty-fifty whether Dimitriou was going to call the cops. They needed to move fast.

  Crowbar slipped the Pajero into the underground parking garage at Hope’s Nicosia apartment. The streets were still quiet, dawn coming. They’d seen no more police cars. Clay grabbed his bag and they walked up the four flights of stairs to her flat. He tapped on the door twice. She opened immediately and closed the door behind them.

  She kissed Clay on the cheek, touched his arm that way she did. Then she threw her arms around Crowbar’s neck, buried her face in his chest and held him a long time.

  Clay dropped his bag to the floor and stood there watching them. Next to Crowbar, she seemed small and frail. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. After a while she pushed herself away from him. She looked as if she’d spent the night staring into a nightmare.

  ‘What took you so long?’ she said, her voice hoarse, cracking. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose.

  ‘Any news?’ said Clay.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about the cops?’ said Crowbar.

  ‘They’ve put out an alert for him. Otherwise, nothing.’

  ‘And Pavlos?’

  ‘He told the police that I was hiding Alexi, that I was going to try to leave the country with him. So far, though, they haven’t pressed charges against me.’

  Clay shook his head. ‘Someone must have seen him.’