Evolution of Fear

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘At Toxeflora Beach,’ said Crowbar. ‘They’ve shared them with the newspapers, apparently.’

  Clay said nothing.

  Hope blanched, continued. ‘And today Dimitriou testified that you had threatened to kill him if he didn’t support my plan to develop Toxeflora. My plan, Clay. Can you believe it? He said he had witnesses, CCTV footage.’

  Clay swallowed hard. ‘He does.’

  Hope opened her mouth a moment as if to speak, closed it.

  ‘I needed to find out where they were holding Alexi.’

  Hope slumped. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Why would a Turkish agent be helping to push development on their own land?’ said Crowbar. ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Hope. ‘If the development went ahead, it would prove that Greek Cypriots are actively stealing Turkish-owned land in the south. That would directly and negatively affect the south’s application for EU membership, something the Turks bitterly oppose.’

  ‘And something Chrisostomedes opposes,’ said Clay.

  ‘Exactly,’ continued Hope. ‘And it would provide the Turks with justification for accelerating their own illegal confiscations of Greek-owned land in the north. That’s what Chrisostomedes is claiming, anyway. The bastard’s been reading out excerpts from Rania’s articles to support his case. And my fellow commissioners are buying it, warped though it is.’

  ‘Then he still thinks Rania’s dead,’ said Clay.

  Crowbar nodded.

  Clay pointed to the dossier on Hope’s lap. ‘Get that to the press and Chrisostomedes’ bid for the Presidency is ruined.’

  Hope shook her head. ‘Alone, it’s not enough. We need testimony to back it up, Clay – yours or Erkan’s.’

  ‘Not a great position,’ said Crowbar. ‘Erkan has refused to testify, and if Straker testifies he goes to jail.’

  ‘We could run,’ said Clay. ‘All four of us. Cut out through the north.’

  ‘I know some good places,’ said Crowbar. ‘We have money.’

  Clay shifted up onto his elbows. ‘Of course, if we do run, Chrisostomedes gets his way, probably becomes President, and Medved keeps jerking the strings. They’ll come after us. We’ll be running for a long time.’

  Hope folded her arms across her chest. ‘Does either of you honestly think that you will be able to convince Rania to run away from this? Do you think I’d abandon my own son, for god’s sake? You can run if you like. But I’m going to stay and find a way to bring these assholes down.’

  Hope’s words settled over them like an attack order, each contemplating his or her impending role and what fate might bring.

  Crowbar was silent, back to the wall.

  ‘What if we could get Erkan to testify?’ said Clay. ‘Is he still on the island?’

  Hope nodded. ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’ said Crowbar.

  ‘Convince him.’

  Hope leaned forward in her chair. ‘If we don’t come up with some credible evidence in the next two days, the commission is going to wrap up proceedings. We won’t get another chance to expose what Chrisostomedes is doing, especially if he wins the election.’

  ‘Erkan’s just as guilty as Chrisostomedes,’ said Crowbar. ‘Why would he willingly expose himself?’

  Clay pointed at the dossier. ‘He was going to share this with Rania. At least that’s what he told her.’

  ‘Did Rania believe him?’ asked Hope.

  ‘I think so, yes. She was determined to find out.’

  ‘Erkan was adamant,’ said Hope. ‘He will not testify.’

  Clay thought back to the last time he’d seen Erkan in Istanbul. ‘He’s terrified, Hope. If I can find out why, there’s a chance I can convince him. I have to try.’

  ‘There’s isn’t much time,’ said Hope.

  ‘I’ll go tonight.’

  ‘Jesus, Clay. You can hardly walk.’

  ‘Better I go,’ said Crowbar, predictably.

  ‘No, Koevoet. I was with Rania when she interviewed Erkan. I was the one who took the dossier. He knows me, if nothing else. Maybe I can get through to him. Rania certainly thought she could.’

  Crowbar coughed. ‘I hate to break it to you, broer, but you’re not Rania. I’ve seen more diplomatic creatures cleaning a day-old buffalo carcass.’

  Clay ignored this. ‘Look, the UN airport wire is unguarded on the Turkish side, like here. If your friend in the north can meet me with a car, Hope, we can drive to Erkan’s place in Karpasia, pay him a visit.’

  Crowbar nodded. ‘And if you can’t convince him?’

  ‘Then I’ll testify. Do the time.’

  Crowbar turned to Hope. ‘What do you think, bokkie?’

  ‘We don’t have a lot of options,’ she answered.

  ‘Okay, Straker, you go north,’ said Crowbar. ‘I’ll find Maria.’

  Hope hung her head. ‘I still can’t believe that she betrayed us.’

  Crowbar put his bear paw on her shoulder. ‘Blood is thick, bokkie. Nothing you can do.’

  ‘I’ll arrange it with my friend in the north,’ said Hope, taking Crowbar’s hand. ‘We’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning, Clay, and go straight to the hearing.’

  ‘And I’ll speak to the base commander,’ said Crowbar. ‘Until then, sit tight, seun.’

  Clay switched to Afrikaans. ‘Last time you said that, three guys came to kill me.’

  Crowbar reached into his briefcase. ‘Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat. Regina Medved is very pissed off right now, by all accounts. She’s kept her dialysis machine off and spends all day talking to the illumination.’ He produced a clean Beretta and handed it to Clay. ‘I doubt even she’d be crazy enough to come after you here, but you never know, especially now.’

  Hope glanced at the handgun, frowned. ‘What was Rania saying, Clay, just before they took her in?’

  ‘It was something from the Koran, I think. In Arabic. I don’t know what it meant. A promise she wanted me to make.’

  ‘Talion,’ said Crowbar. ‘It’s not Arabic, it’s Latin.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘She wants you to apply the law of talion, Clay.’

  Clay and Hope looked up at him.

  ‘Legal retribution. An eye for an eye.’

  After Hope and Crowbar had gone, the orderly checked Clay’s bandages and administered another dose of anaesthetic. Clay stared out across the derelict airport. He wondered about Rania, about the new person inside her, about how strange that was, how foreign to him, the creation of life. A vision of his parents came to him, a distant memory, camping in the Cedarburg mountains when he was young, nine or ten, hiking up to a waterfall, his mother tall and athletic with her long, pale legs and high-veldt hair and the way her long braid swung back and forth like a cheetah’s tail as she walked, his father surging ahead as always, broad-shouldered, invincible. It took them a long time to reach the top. The waterfall thundered from the cliffs above, fed by recent rains. The rocks were slippery. Looking down you knew that if you fell you would fall a long time, have time to think about what was coming as the rocks rose up to meet you. He’d taken off his shoes, walked right up to the edge, stood with his toes curled over the lip of the rock. He’d wondered if he would be brave enough to keep his eyes open all the way down, or if he’d close them before he hit. His mother and father had taken off their shoes, too, had come and stood beside him, one on each side, there on the edge looking down into the chasm. A rainbow cradled them as they stood in the spray, the three of them alone on that mountainside with the whole world and all of the future spread out before them.

  54

  The Price You Paid

  As soon as they arrived he knew something was wrong.

  Clay had slipped through the UN wire as planned, shortly after sunset. Crowbar had arranged it all with the base commander, the only stipulations being that Clay make his way back to the egress point in the wire by 0500 hours the next morning, and that he not attra
ct the attention of the Turkish Army. Any later, or any commotion, and he was on his own – the wire would remain closed. The base commander was already treading a dangerous line harbouring them, and Crowbar had been forced to up the inducement, in the form of a cash ‘signing bonus’ as he called it, sourced from Medved’s death money.

  Hope’s friend, the old man who had led them inland from the coast that night of the fire, so long ago it now seemed, had met him on the other side of the wire, and together they’d driven north to the coast under a star-strewn sky.

  They arrived just before eleven o’clock, left the car hidden on a small track off the main road and walked in overland. Despite the doctor’s additional bandaging and the extra painkillers, Clay’s legs burned with every step. It was as if each of the sixty-seven stitches were tearing out in turn, like a zipper being undone along the back of his legs.

  He followed the old man up through a tangled thicket of scrub oak, limping along at half speed with short, stilted strides. When they reached the crest of the ridge, the trees ended. They looked down at the sea across long-denuded fenlands of juniper and wild caper.

  About a mile away, set on a rocky spur overlooking the sea, the walls and grounds of Erkan’s mansion glowed like a bonfire. Miles of empty, moon-washed coastline strung away in either direction. Clay could hear the waves foaming on the beach, see the phosphorescent glow of the surf against the cold black of the water. The smell of wild oregano and charred pinewood came strong on the air.

  As they approached, they could make out the double layer of security fencing, and beyond, the ancient, walled grounds of the converted monastery. King palms, centuries old, scythed in the night breeze, sending bladed shadows ricocheting from the floodlit monastery walls. Once, this had been a place of peaceful contemplation and spiritual cleansing. Now, red-eyed CCTV cameras swivelled their paranoia from atop steel towers at every bend and crook in the fence-line.

  They reached a small pinnacle of boulders that overlooked the main gates and provided a partial view into the gardens and of the main building itself.

  Hope’s friend tugged Clay’s sleeve. ‘Look.’

  The main gate was wide open. Two cars were stationed at the floodlit entrance. Armed men hovered around the vehicles. Clay counted at least four. And in the ditch at the side of the road, in partial shadow, a pile of what appeared to be animal carcasses.

  ‘Erkan’s men?’ whispered Clay.

  ‘Perhaps. I do not know.’

  ‘Is there another way in?’

  ‘There is an entrance on the beach side.’

  And then, above the gentle shunting of the sea, the sound of gunshots – two, three muffled cracks from somewhere inside the monastery.

  Clay pulled out his Beretta.

  The old man put his hand on the gun. ‘There is nothing we can do.’

  Clay pushed the old man away. ‘I’ll meet you back at the car.’ He was about to start off towards the beach to find the second entrance when he heard the sound of car doors closing, engines starting.

  A third car had appeared at the entrance. It had come from inside the compound, and now rolled to a halt. One of the armed men approached the vehicle and spoke to the driver. Moments later all three cars were speeding away along the narrow, gravelled drive towards to the main road.

  It was just gone midnight by the time Clay and the old man reached the main entrance. The big steel doors were splayed open. Bullet holes riddled the guard shack and blood stained the white, floodlit gravel. Heaped in the ditch nearby were not the animals he thought he’d seen, but men, five in all, their limbs splayed and entwined to give the appearance of four-legged beasts. Clay checked them each in turn, pulling them free, laying them on the gravel, pushing his fingers into the flesh of their necks, searching for a pulse, knowing already from the cold in their bodies that they were all dead.

  The old man was staring at him.

  Clay wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘What is it?’

  He paused, looked into Clay’s eyes. ‘You frighten me, young man.’

  Clay ignored this. ‘I am going to find Erkan.’

  The man smiled a sad smile. ‘I will go back and bring the car.’

  Clay nodded. ‘Çok teşekur,’ he said. Thank you. And then the things he did not say: I do not expect to see you again, but thank you, old man. In bringing me this far you have taken a huge risk. Honour to you.

  Clay started towards the monastery.

  Floodlit shadows jerked epileptic across the pathway, fell twitching onto the arches and towers and limestone walls. Gravel crunched under his feet, and in his mind the path was fashioned from the smashed and brittle shards of dried bones, femurs and ribs and the concavity of shattered hips. He felt the gun’s weight in his hand, the familiarity of a grafted prosthetic. The blood of strangers on him, too, its smell thick in his nostrils.

  He was thirty-four years old. At eighteen he’d gone to war, lost his parents a year later in a car crash. Since then he’d travelled through the world alone, Koevoet the closest thing he’d had to a father, to what his father had tried to be to him, to what he would now have to be if the baby lives: guide, conscience, uncompromising compass swung on wisdom and courage, impossible to live up to. As an adolescent, Clay had come to see his father as a wizened mystery, with so much of what he’d done unsaid and unshared. Once in a while a story had emerged, almost by accident, as afterthought, like the time he was caught in a mine collapse in one of the deep reef mines near Jo’berg and survived three miles underground for five days and got his men to safety, most of them anyway. And as Clay climbed the stone steps to the arched atrium, he wondered if he would share any of this – these events occurring right now – with his daughter, or if he too would keep it all hidden away, and if he might be around long enough to try.

  He found them on the second floor, in a grand room with sweeping views of the sea and the coast, a fire dying in a huge stone fireplace. Two bodyguards lay face-down by the door. Furniture was strewn across the room, upended. Broken glass sharded oriental rugs, shimmered on polished marble tile.

  Clay knelt, turned one of the bodyguards over. It was Hum, his face still swollen from Clay’s strike of a few days ago. There was a deep gash over his right eye, fresh, weeping blood, but no other visible wounds. He was still breathing. Clay moved to the other body, a woman: Ho. She groaned as he turned her over. Her jaw was wired up. She opened her eyes a moment, just a flutter, and mumbled something that Clay could not make out. She’d been shot in the thigh. Clay cradled her, examined the gash in the back of her head, the brush-cut hair beaded with blood. Like Hum, she was alive and breathing.

  Clay threaded off his pack and pulled out his water bottle. He cut Ho’s trouser leg open and exposed the wound. It was low down, close to the knee, in the fleshy part of the quadricep. Blood leaked from the hole. He couldn’t see an exit wound. Clay irrigated the area then pushed a compress down onto the wound and tied it in place. He was applying a tourniquet to the leg and winding it tight when something hard jabbed into the back of his head.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  He didn’t.

  ‘Turn around. Slowly.’

  It was Erkan. He was bleeding from a deep gash in his lower lip. There were abrasions around both eyes. His nose was swollen to twice its normal size. His right arm hung limp from the shoulder. A .357 Magnum revolver shook in his meaty left hand. ‘You,’ he said, voice hollow, constricted. ‘What do you want?’

  Clay kept his hand open, in plain view. ‘She’s bleeding.’

  Erkan motioned for him to continue.

  Clay tied off the tourniquet, laid her down. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said.

  ‘I already have,’ said Erkan. ‘The police, too.’

  Clay stood. He figured he had ten, maybe fifteen minutes until the cops arrived. Assuming the old man hadn’t already fled. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I saw them leave.’

  ‘You can see very well what happened.’

  Clay glanced at
Erkan’s shoulder. ‘That’s broken.’

  ‘Compassion does not suit you.’

  ‘Let me set it.’

  Erkan laughed, waved the pistol at him. It was a good effort at bravado, considering the pain he must be in. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘How about lowering that gun?’ said Clay.

  ‘I would rather not, under the circumstances. Say what you have to say and leave.’

  Clay filled his lungs, held it then exhaled slowly. ‘We need you to testify at the commission on coastal development.’

  Erkan shifted his feet, grimaced in pain. ‘I have already given my answer to the commission.’

  ‘If you don’t help us, Chrisostomedes is going to walk away blameless from this. He’ll probably win the election, too.’

  Erkan shook his head. ‘Help you? Your friend Moulinbecq has spent the last month trying to destroy me. Judging by what she has written, Chrisostomedes is a saint.’

  ‘Chrisostomedes was coercing her. But that’s over.’

  Erkan was quiet a moment. ‘Look around you,’ he said. ‘This was a warning. Even if I wanted to help, I cannot.’

  And suddenly, it all made sense: Erkan’s cornering of the illegal market in religious antiquities; his apparent desire to share the Alassou dossier with Rania, ‘off the record’; his chauffeur’s attempt to capture them shortly afterwards; the fiery murders that night in Karpasia; the cable Clay had pulled up with Flame’s anchor as they fled, the burns on his face not yet blistered. All of it.

  ‘Rania – Lise – told me what happened to your wife and son. Those were warnings, too, weren’t they?’

  Erkan called over his shoulder. A woman emerged from behind one of the couches that hadn’t been overturned. She was tall and slim, with thick black hair. Her face was horribly disfigured, the skin stretched in angry pink ridges across her lovely cheekbones, the eyes inert, glass.

  ‘Gel,’ he said to her. Come.

  The woman approached, found Erkan with her hands and tucked herself in beside him.

  ‘My wife.’