by Tim Weaver
I shrugged.
‘Don’t shrug at me.’
‘I don’t know.’
A pause. ‘I’m guessing that little mess at the church was yours.’
I didn’t answer; didn’t want to admit I’d been through Michael’s stuff.
‘Breaking and entering is a crime,’ he said.
‘What the fuck do you call this?’
The man laughed. ‘Difference is, you don’t know who I am. I know who you are. I know all about you.’
He pressed the gun in against my cheek, and I could feel the outline of the muzzle.
‘Was the address for the church in that box?’
I paused. The box. He knew about the box.
‘David.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘On the back of a birthday card.’
‘What else was in there?’
I thought of the picture I’d given to Cary. ‘Nothing. Just photos.’
‘Just photos?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m not.’
His hand dropped away, the gun with it.
‘Okay, let me tell you something. The reason you’re here and not sitting with your feet up by the fire at home is because you’re standing on the outside of a circle, and you’ve caught a glimpse of what’s on the inside.’ The smell of boiled sweets again. ‘Unfortunately for you, once you’ve caught a glimpse of the inside, you can’t just walk away again — which is why you’re freezing to death in the middle of this fucking hole.’
I was starting to drift in and out of consciousness.
‘I know about you, David,’ he continued. ‘I know about your background, where you come from, what you do. It’s my job to know all that, because it’s my job to ensure people like you don’t fuck up what I’ve built. And you know what? Reading about you made me wonder: this quest of yours, is it about the kid — or is it about your wife?’
I looked up, turned, and he held up a hand. Grabbed the side of my face. Forced it back down, further this time, until my head was almost between my knees.
I felt blood rise in my throat.
‘You’re a big man, David,’ he said, ‘but her death makes you easy to control. When people die, it hurts. It sucks you dry. You feel so hollow inside, you wonder if you’re ever going to be normal again. But when people die, you’ve got to let them go, because they’re not coming back. They’re gone. Your wife, the kid you’re trying to find, they’re gone.’
‘If he was gone, I wouldn’t be here,’ I said.
He yanked my head towards him and moved in next to my ear, his lips brushing against the side of my face. ‘You want to die, David — is that it?’
I felt his fingers wriggle at either side of my head, like he was trying to get a better grip before he reached round and put the gun in my mouth. Then — lightning fast — he punched me in the side of the face — so hard it was like being hit by a freight train. I tipped sideways, the chair going with me, hitting the ground head first.
Darkness.
* * *
I opened my eyes. My head was being pressed down between my legs. All I could see were my feet, flat against the floor, my toes in a puddle of melted snow. His hand was around the back of my neck, his fingers locked in place behind my ear. A trickle of blood broke free from my hairline. It ran down across my forehead and into my eye.
‘What else do you know?’ he said.
I twitched, tried to shake the blood away from my eye, but his hand pressed harder against my head. Forced me down even further between my knees.
‘What else?’ he said again.
‘You recruit people.’
‘Is that what Jade told you?’
I nodded.
‘What do you mean, “recruit”?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you lying to me again, David?’
‘No.’
‘Okay. What else?’
‘Some of you are supposed to be dead.’ I paused, tasting the blood in my mouth. He pushed down on my neck again — he wanted me to continue. ‘You’ve got a flat registered to a company that doesn’t exist, and a pub you’re using as a way to make money. A front. Full of your people, who rotate when questions start getting asked. When a hole starts to appear, you shift them somewhere else and the hole closes up.’
‘What else?’
‘That’s all I know.’
‘Bullshit. What else?’
I stopped, tried to think. That was pretty much it. When he’d told me I was on the outside of the circle looking in, he was right. I’d caught a glimpse of something on the inside; I knew something wasn’t right, that something was up — that Alex could actually be alive. But I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why.
‘What else?’ He forced my head down again, and something clicked. A bone in my neck. I felt a shooting pain arrow along my spine, up into my skull.
He thought I knew more, and — as I tried to form a plan — I realized I could play on that. Maybe it would be the only way out. Pretend I knew more than I did and he’d have to find out what. See how far I’d dug my way in.
‘You think whatever you’re doing is a mission from God.’
He released his grip ever so slightly, and leaned in closer to my ear.
‘What did you say?’
‘You think it’s a mission from God.’
‘I think?’
I felt him shift his weight. He was pinning me down with one hand and reaching for something else.
‘You know, David, I’m not a fan of politics. All it’s ended up teaching me is that power corrupts. You give weak men absolute power and you only breed more weakness.’
Prickles of fear rippled across my skin. My heart felt like it was swelling up. He’d given up asking me questions. We’d got to the end of the line.
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘But something sticks in my mind. Something Josef Stalin once said. I don’t admire the man — I just happen to agree with his sentiments.’
‘Wait a minute, I haven’t told you everything I—’
‘Do you know what he said, David? He said: “Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.”’
I heard a beep and then a ringing sound. He was using a phone.
‘Zack, it’s me. You can take him now.’ A pause. Silence. ‘And make sure you bury him where no one will find him.’
27
I came to as they pulled me out of a car. It was still dark and freezing cold — probably three or four in the morning. I was dressed only in my jeans and T-shirt. No top. No coat. No shoes.
Someone pushed me against the car and turned me around. It was the black guy from the house in Bristol. He had a knife in his hands. He stabbed it down through the duct tape they’d used to bind my wrists, and pulled my hands apart. I looked around me. We were on a country lane, muddy and black, trees looming overhead on both sides. It was quiet. We must have been miles from the nearest main road.
Behind me, the passenger door opened and closed, and from my left came a second man: Jason, the man I’d chased at the apartment in Eagle Heights. He moved around to the front of the car, a gun in one hand, a torch in the other, and zipped his coat up to his chin. He looked at me. A half-smile broke out on his face, as if he’d figured out what I was thinking: They’re going to kill me, and no one’s ever going to find my body.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said to them.
Jason pulled me away from the car and along the path. I shuffled forward, pain in my legs, staring ahead into the darkness. When I looked at the ground in front of the trees, full of dead leaves and disturbed earth, an image came back to me of Derryn standing next to her grave, looking down into the darkness herself.
I’d always wanted to be close to her when it happened; to be thinking of her at the end. I’d thought about my own mortality a lot since she’d died, and I wasn’t scared of facing it down. But here, a hundred miles from the
pictures I had of her, the memories, the reminders of what she once was to me, I realized — as she must have done — that all I would feel at the end was pain.
Suddenly, we veered off the path, into the woodland on the right-hand side. Jason’s hand tightened around my arm as the ground gently started to rise, sloping upwards through snow-covered undergrowth. I looked back over my shoulder at him.
‘Why do you have to do this?’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
Behind him the guy from the house was scanning the woodland. His torch was sweeping from side to side, illuminating a dense clutch of trees to his right.
‘Jason,’ he said from behind me. ‘Wait a sec.’
Jason told me to stop, and then looked back at his partner. Further up the slope, deeper into the forest, moonlight carved down through irregular gaps in the canopy, forming pale tubes of light. Where it couldn’t penetrate the foliage, the woods were black as oil. Between my toes I could feel grass, and hard, uneven ground — the sort of ground you could break an ankle running across.
I looked back.
Jason was closer to the other guy now, whispering. It was incredibly still; so still their voices carried across the night: ‘You know what he told us. Take him to the usual spot. Come on, Zack, you know how it plays out.’
The black guy was Zack.
‘This is a better spot,’ Zack said.
‘It’s right on the fucking road.’
‘Look how dense it is there.’
‘Who gives a shit?’ Jason said, his voice rising. Then he quietened again as Zack stared at him in silence. Zack was the senior partner. Jason nodded his apology and leaned in closer. ‘All I’m saying is, I don’t really wanna piss him off. He told us to take him up to the top and do it there. That’s where we put the others.’
The others. There were more like me. More that had got too close. My heart tightened and a feeling of dread snaked along my back and down my legs: the anticipation of being put in the ground, of lying there in the freezing cold praying the end would come. I turned to face the darkness in front of me.
Run.
My face burnt, even in the cold.
You have to run.
I looked up the slope, then back to them.
They were still talking. Jason was gripping the gun tightly, his finger moving at the trigger. Zack glanced at me, his eyes narrowing, as if he sensed I might be on the cusp of doing something stupid.
Run.
I scanned the woodland in front of me again. They knew the terrain. They knew the path. They’d know where to force me to go, and where to head me off. But then I thought of the alternative: the two of them leading me through a maze of trees to a dumping ground full of skeletons. Making me beg for my life. Putting a bullet in my chest.
Watching me die in the snow.
Do it now.
I looked back once more — right into Zack’s eyes.
And then I made a break for it.
I almost fell before I’d started, my toes grazing a tree stump. But then I was away, pushing through the darkness, heading for a pool of light about twenty yards up the slope.
‘Hey!’ Zack’s voice. It echoed after me, suppressed by the canopy of the trees, bouncing off the bark. Then I heard him say, ‘I’ll take the road.’
Something punctured the underside of my foot — a stone, maybe even a sliver of glass — but I didn’t stop. I tried to make my strides as long as possible, tried to swallow up as much ground as I could. Huge trees lurched out of the night and knocked me off balance. I arced further right, deeper into the forest. Then I finally stole a look behind me: Jason was about forty feet further down — concentrating on where his feet were landing — but he looked up, once. Our eyes met. He lifted the gun and lost his footing, adjusting himself almost instantly. He was quick and fit. Used to running. I knew that from before. He was probably closing on me already.
I passed through one pool of light, and headed for the next. As I did, I tried to up the pace, every bone in my body aching, every nerve prickling, and saw that the foliage thickened about twenty feet ahead. It got dense quickly, most of it hidden from the moonlight. It would make for a difficult chase. I headed for it, ducking down. Thorny branches scratched my skin, and snow flecked against my face. Darkness set in around me. I moved through the foliage as fast as I could. Beyond the noise of the branches cracking and splintering against me, I expected to hear Jason follow me — but there was no other sound. He was no longer chasing me. He’d gone a different route.
I stopped and dropped to the floor.
All I could hear was blood being pumped around my body, a thumping baseline so loud it felt like it was echoing through the forest.
Something cracked to my right, as I faced up the hill. I turned, narrowed my eyes, willing myself to see into the darkness. They’d both had torches — but they’d both switched them off. There was no light close to me now, and I realized, in some ways, that was worse: they knew this area. They knew the hiding places, the holes. They could be right on top of me and I wouldn’t even see them.
I reached down, slowly, and felt around for something to use as a weapon. The ground was covered in a layer of snow, hard and crystallized, and all I could feel were thick tangles of thorn bushes. In the silence, I started to notice the pain in my feet: it felt like there were deep cuts on the balls and arches of my left foot, and I’d bruised the ankle on my right. I felt blood slowly trickle down from my hairline again, but I didn’t wipe it away this time. Because, over to my right, I saw a flash of colour: pale blue, the colour of Jason’s jacket, catching in the moonlight close to where he was standing.
My heart was punching against my skin so hard — so fast — it felt like it was about to explode. Another flash of pale blue. Moving up the slope, but maintaining the same distance from me. No sound came with it — not even the faintest crunch of snow. He was lithe and quick, every foot landing where it was supposed to. More blood broke free of my hairline; this time it ran down the centre of my forehead, over the bridge of my nose and down to the corner of my mouth.
Then I made him out against the night.
He was about ten feet to my right, up the slope from me, coming around the edges of the thorns. The jacket had been a bad idea. If he’d taken it off, he could have been standing next to me and I wouldn’t have even seen him. But, instead, the jacket was reflecting back what little light there was. He turned where he was, then swung back round in my direction, the gun out in front of him, and stared straight at me. I gazed back, looking at him, frozen to the spot. But then his head swivelled to face further up the slope, and he took a step up.
I could wait him out, wait for him to pass and move further up into the forest. Then I could make a break for it, back in the direction of the bottom road. But there was another problem: Zack. I had no idea where he was. He said he was going to take the road, so presumably it wrapped around the forest, and came back again at the top in a rough semi-circle. But I didn’t know how close the road was. It could be a way off. Perhaps if I waited for Jason to disappear up the slope, and then ran, Zack would be even further behind me. Or maybe the road was nearby above me and, when I got up to run, they’d both be standing side by side and put a bullet in my back.
Either way you don’t know where the fuck you are.
Whether Zack was close or not, I’d still be running blind. The best I could hope for would be to get back to the car and head down the road the way we’d come in. Eventually it would lead somewhere.
I turned as quietly and slowly as I could and saw Jason continuing to climb. He was about fifteen feet up, at a diagonal from me, but slowly coming back around in my direction. He stopped. Looked down the slope again. Then something flashed — a blue light — and I saw him take a mobile phone out. He had it on silent. He looked at the screen, then back towards my spot. They were communicating by text now. I glanced back in the other direction. Had Zack spotted me? Was he telling Jason where I was?
Jason�
�s eyes were fixed on my position now, the gun in one hand, the phone in the other. I held my breath as he took a step closer. Then another. Coming down the slope towards my position.
He can see me.
He stopped, dropped the phone back into his pocket, and put both hands on the gun.
He can really see me.
He edged even closer, padding across the forest floor, until he was about three feet from me, looking across the tangle of bushes I was hiding in. The gun drifted across my face.
He gazed across the top of my head, his eyes fixed on something beyond, and then raised a hand and pointed at himself. He was signalling.
Zack.
Jason was in front of me, up the slope.
Zack was behind, below.
Surrounded.
Jason scanned the forest, left, right, into the darkness of what was around him. He didn’t move, just stood there, listening to the sounds: the movement of the leaves, the creaking of the earth, the faint drip, drip, drip of water. A thought came back to me then of my dad, standing in the middle of the woods close to the farm, doing exactly the same thing. Dad had been an amateur tracker. He listened to the noises, took in the smells, knew what footprint belonged to what animal. But Jason was the real thing: confident enough to separate the sounds of nature from the sounds of what had encroached upon it. He knew I was close by. I couldn’t have got clear of him in the time available to me. He knew that. Now it was just a question of pinpointing my position.
A waiting game.
The smallest of noises. I turned an inch. From the darkness behind me, side-lit by a pale shaft of moonlight further down, came Zack. He looked up at Jason, Jason at him. Jason placed a finger against his lips. I watched them: they were communicating with only the barest minimum of movements. Zack nodded up the slope; Jason shook his head. They looked back down the slope, over my head. Jason made a circle motion with his hand: He’s in this area somewhere. He’d seen me go into the undergrowth and hadn’t seen me come back out. The undergrowth was thick and wild, but I hadn’t lost them. I wouldn’t lose them now. They were sure I was here — and they’d only leave again with my body.
