Hard Rain - 03

by David Rollins

Two large women wearing floppy hats and clear disposable raincoats over their walking clothes came in puffing, recovering from the climb up the stairs. They smiled politely at Masters and began pointing at various items of interest, twittering in German at each other.

  ‘I must go,’ Fedai said.

  Two other tourists entered the rapidly shrinking room.

  ‘You need to give us a forwarding address,’ Masters informed him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said, interpreting.

  ‘I tell you already. The mountains. I have done all that I can. There are people who will kill for what I have given you. For this, they kill Mr Portman.’

  ‘Do you know who killed him?’ Masters asked.

  ‘You do not know?’ said Fedai. ‘It was Mossad, of course.’

  Twenty-nine

  We gave Fedai a five-minute start before heading back up the hill to the rental, but a few moments was really all the guy needed to disappear completely, melting into one of the many tour groups.

  ‘Mossad?’ Masters asked, the clouds starting to get serious about raining on us.

  ‘So he said.’

  ‘You’re not so sure?’

  ‘Last I heard, Mossad was supposed to be – loosely speaking, of course – on our side. It’s a stretch to believe the Israeli intelligence service cut up Portman and Bremmel, fed Ten Pin to the F-16, shot the master of the Onur and then sank it with all hands. And let’s not forget planting one on your kisser.’

  ‘No, actually, let’s really try to forget about that. And in the meantime, thanks for reminding me,’ she said.

  The light faded fast as the rain fell harder, the rental coming into view in the parking lot. We put our heads down and broke into a run.

  Masters took the driver’s seat while I locked the USB stick and sample bottle in the glove compartment. ‘We’re going to have to go to Kumayt,’ I told her. ‘Retrace Portman’s steps.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Masters as she performed a one-eighty and hunted for the gate, the rain now a solid wall of water.

  ‘Mossad is Israeli, and the explosives used on the Attaché’s safe were sent to Israel,’ I said absently as I tried to read the report in the dim glow provided by the cabin light.

  ‘The coincidence hadn’t escaped me. And yeah, I know – you don’t believe in coincidences.’

  I flicked back and forward through the first couple of pages. ‘What’s uranyl fluoride?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but anything with uranium in it is bound to be unhealthy.’

  ‘Maybe it makes your teeth hard and glow in the dark.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Whatever, looks like they found plenty of it in that sample.’

  ‘Vin, you’re going to have to douse the light,’ Masters said, distracted. ‘I can’t see where I’m going.’

  The access road to Izmir snaked through hills that rose a thousand feet above the plain. They were covered mostly by plantations of slash pine. I remembered this because on the way up I noticed that some of the drop-aways were getting close to vertical, yet someone had still managed to plant trees in the ravines. I also remembered figuring the road would be treacherous in the rain. I was recalling these earlier thoughts as we came around a hairpin and saw a tour bus sitting astride most of both lanes, its front end hanging in midair over the edge and its hazard lights flashing. The driver was scratching his head, shining a torch on the tyres, the rain hammering down, small rivulets of water washing across the cambered surface and dropping off the edge of the asphalt. There was nowhere to pull over. I didn’t have to suggest to Masters that she should go around it and find someplace further down the road to park.

  Aside from the driver, the bus appeared empty. It was a big one, with a double-bogey rear end. As we motored slowly past, I saw what had left the driver dumbfounded, caught in the beam of his flashlight. All eight sets of tyres had blown at once. A length of road spikes was mangled up with the rear-most set. Masters, looking where the headlights swept the hillside, said, ‘Hey, guys with guns.’

  ‘Drive!’ I shouted.

  ‘What?’ said Masters.

  ‘Step on it! Now!’

  Masters pushed the pedal to the floor. The engine coughed then caught, jack-knifing us forward, the rental skidding sideways as the back end hunted for traction.

  I turned to look at the vehicle receding behind us, swallowed by the night and the rain. I was about to tell Masters about those road spikes when we hit a bump and all four of our tyres suddenly blew out. The rental slithered across the road, Masters tapped the brakes and fought the wheel, spinning it from one lock to the other. The car had a mind of its own. It kept going straight ahead as the road swung hard right. We left the asphalt and for a few long seconds everything went quiet. Our headlights played across pine trees. It saw their trunks. Radioactive contamination. Then the rocky ground between them. Surface-water contaminants. Nothing we could do. Becquerels. The nose dipped steeply as the ground fell away. And then . . . we slammed into something, bounced, hammered into the ground so violently that my seatbelt winded me. We rolled end over end. The roof deformed behind our heads. The vehicle came apart. And then we hit some –

  Flashlight beams. Machine-gun stock. Blinding light. Even more blinding headache.

  ‘This one is okay,’ said the voice belonging to the MP5 beside my face. He slapped me around to make sure of it.

  ‘Hey, don’t do that – he will stop your heart.’

  I heard laughter.

  Whoever it was that was enjoying himself so much slapping me slapped me some more. I managed to look into the guy’s face. The slapping stopped.

  ‘And the woman. She has survived too,’ someone called out not far away.

  I was relieved to hear that. Hands began turning out my pockets. I had a pain across my chest, in a different spot from the one occupied by the cracked rib. I figured it was where my seatbelt had done its job. If it hadn’t, I’d have left half my face on the windscreen.

  A couple of guys hauled me to my feet. There was blood in my mouth, but not too much. My lip was cut. I licked it. The cut wasn’t a bad one. Several pairs of hands half pushed, half carried me up the hill, through the trees. The roadway was surprisingly close by. Eight silhouettes were waiting for me in the headlight beams of a vehicle parked in the middle of the road. The eight shadows became four when my eyes brought them into focus. My headache was subsiding to a dull throb.

  Masters was pushed into the headlight beams. She stood upright. The crash had messed up her hair some. I doubted she’d broken a nail. A gloved hand under my chin lifted my head and I looked into a familiar face. It was the guy with the silver toothpick from the park in Istanbul. He was still sucking on it. His sunglasses were pushed back on his head. ‘You have something we want,’ he said.

  My brain must still have been bouncing around in my skull, because I wasn’t sure what he was after. But whatever it was, I wasn’t going to cough up. ‘Fuck you,’ I said, giving him my opening bid.

  ‘Tell them nothing,’ Masters spat.

  I could feel the guy’s tension. He was wound tight. Something snapped. He grabbed me by the throat, stuck a fat black pistol barrel in my mouth and pulled the trigger. Click. Click. Click. Just like that. My heart thumped, bounced off my ribs like they were turnbuckles in a boxing ring. Then he removed the weapon, slammed a magazine into the handle. ‘Next time . . .’ He fired up into the trees. BANG! The sound echoed through the ravine. ‘The sample and the memory stick,’ he shouted, driving the muzzle of the weapon hard into my cheek. ‘Tell us! Where are they?’

  Now I remembered. The glove compartment . . .

  ‘You have searched them? What about their car?’ The voice rang a bell. It was the sort of bell the village lookout rings just before the bad guys ride over the hill and begin an orgy of indiscriminate killing. In this instance, the bad guys were a single woman by the name of Yafa. I hoped she’d left home without her brass knuckles.

  ‘We have gone throug
h their pockets,’ replied a male voice. Again, I recognised the owner; it was the man we knew of as the interpreter from our visit to Ocirik’s. ‘We should kill them. They killed Ben and Jonah.’

  ‘There’s time for that,’ Yafa said, nice and cool. ‘What about their car?’

  ‘Yes, it is being done now,’ the voice answered.

  ‘So, you found Fedai,’ Yafa said, speaking to us now. ‘I congratulate you. Or perhaps he found you. But unfortunately you are too late to do him or yourselves any good.’

  The shock of the crash was wearing off a little. My vision was clearing. And so was the weather. I was aware that the rain had subsided to a light sprinkle. I could smell the wet pines, smell the slick road surface. A timid half moon peeked out from behind the clouds. I don’t know why it bothered – the light it threw was sick and grey. I breathed in deep. It helped. I forced myself to stand up straight. Something in my lower back begged for mercy, maybe my spinal cord. Masters was pushed in beside me. She bounced off my shoulder. ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She gave me a tight smile, which I took for yes, she was okay.

  ‘Why is Mossad running an assassination squad?’ I asked, Yafa’s Ferrari-red lips close, her breath warm and smelling of coffee.

  ‘You think we are Mossad?’ scoffed Yafa. She clicked her fingers and made a dismissive pff sound, like Mossad were a bunch of featherweights.

  The toothpick guy spoke again: ‘It does not matter who you think we are.’

  A young guy with close-cropped black hair and a five o’clock shadow ran up and handed Yafa the specimen bottle, USB stick and the printed report. ‘In the glovebox,’ he added. ‘They also had luggage.’ He dropped a couple of overnight bags on the ground at my feet.

  ‘So, you and your partner were now going to a hotel room to make love, as you Americans say?’

  I had to admit, in other circumstances it would have been a good idea, but I kept that to myself.

  ‘You Americans are so hung up. It’s just sex.’ Yafa took the pistol from the guy with the toothpick and pushed the muzzle into the hollow beneath Masters’ ear. I felt Masters go rigid.

  ‘Would you like to fuck this woman?’ she asked, addressing the question to me. She asked pleasantly, like a waitress enquiring about whether I’d like the dessert menu now.

  I caught a couple of grins from the men around us. Yafa was putting on a show and they were enjoying it.

  ‘I would like to fuck her,’ said Yafa, nodding then jabbing the gun harder into the side of Masters’ neck so that she pushed her head over. ‘This one is beautiful, no?’

  The question received unanimous nods.

  ‘Do you think I am beautiful?’ Yafa asked Masters. ‘Would you like to fuck me?’ She grabbed Masters’ hand, put it between her legs. ‘Have you ever had a woman?’ she whispered. ‘You would enjoy it, I think. A woman knows what a woman wants, and how a woman wants it.’ She let Masters’ hand go, but only so that she could unzip my partner’s jacket and pull it back off her shoulders. The cold froze Masters’ nipples. They were hard and erect beneath the fabric of her bra. Yafa worked her hand inside Masters’ shirt, tore away her bra and cupped her breast.

  ‘Okay, that’s assault, lady,’ I said, snapping out of it. I tried to move, step between her and Masters. A weight crashed into the back of my head. I saw red balls behind my eyes that floated briefly before exploding like fruit hit with a baseball bat. I staggered to the ground. As I pulled myself up, I saw a piece of my scalp with hair on it stuck to the butt of an MP5.

  The guy holding the gun smiled. No doubt about it, they were a happy bunch.

  Yafa ignored me completely. ‘Do not try to fight this yearning,’ she said to Masters, her breath shortening and her voice now husky with lust. Masters’ shirt was ripped and her breasts were exposed to the cold, her bra pushed down and hanging loose around her waist. Through it all, Masters stared straight ahead, unblinking. The lights were on but she’d checked out.

  ‘Yafa, we have no time for this bullshit,’ said the guy with the toothpick, still wound tight, pacing back and forth. As if to confirm this, down the road a flashlight was waving back and forth – a signal.

  Yafa got herself under control, cleared her throat, smoothed her clothes. ‘Such a pity,’ she said to Masters, walking behind us both.

  I couldn’t see her, keep track of her. That made me nervous. The asshole with the gun in my back pushed it harder into the base of my spine. Something was coming.

  Beside me, Yafa suddenly grabbed Masters from behind and smothered her mouth and nose with a cloth pad. Masters’ vacant eyes instantly rolled back and her knees buckled. The air was filled with a smell that reminded me of combat hospitals in the field, of hurried amputations, seeping wounds and operations performed under fire. And then I knew what that smell was.

  A sudden pressure over my nose and mouth, dragging me back. Fire in my throat. A wave of white noise wrapping me in its folds.

  Thirty

  The light was soft and grey. I heard Masters’ voice, but couldn’t hold on to the words. They slipped away like a failing handhold on a cliff face.

  I was thirsty. My tongue had swollen in my mouth. My teeth crunched. Masters hovered over me. ‘Vin . . .’

  ‘Wa’er . . .’ I garbled. The back of my throat felt raw, skinned. I’d swallowed some earth. Maybe that explained the thirst and the rawness, and maybe not. The sand crunched between my teeth like glass.

  The water I asked for arrived in my own boot. That’s when I knew we were in trouble. I drank from Masters’ shoe next. And then from a soaked shirt wrung in such a way that the water dribbled down Masters’ thumb and into my mouth. The sound of dripping water echoed, disorienting. There was a small crack of sparkling white light in the ceiling and a cold gloom everywhere else. I felt Masters lay my head down and I looked up into her face haloed with that light. Yafa was right – Masters was beautiful. I asked myself who Yafa was and found I couldn’t put a face to the name. Maybe Yafa wasn’t a who, but a what. The question drifted into the awareness that the floor beneath my back was rough and hard, rock-strewn. I drifted off again without realising it, unable to keep my eyes open.

  The count I’d been down for was so long the arena had emptied, everyone had gone home, and I was still on the canvas. I either had a hatchet buried in my forehead, or a bad headache. The jury was out on which. I was familiar enough with the symptoms of concussion to know I had it.

  Masters was standing with her back to me, hands on her hips, looking up at the patch of light twelve-to-fifteen feet above her head, contemplating it the way a caged animal contemplates the bars.

  ‘Hey,’ I said in a voice that sounded like it was someone else’s.

  Masters turned. ‘Hey, yourself. How you feeling?’

  ‘Not sure yet,’ I replied as I grunted, struggling up onto an elbow to get a better angle on things. ‘I’ll let you know after you tell me where we are.’ The suspicion I had was that we were in a place known as The Deep Shit. My throat still felt flayed and the taste of copper – blood – was in my mouth. My head hurt, my ribs and chest hurt, and the arm in the cast had gone to sleep and hung heavy and useless by my side.

  ‘I think we’re in a cistern,’ she said. Frogs started up, a steady chorus of croaking.

  ‘Isn’t that another word for a toilet?’ Maybe I was more on the ball than I thought.

  ‘A cistern is what the Romans called a water storage tank.’

  ‘The Romans . . . ?’ My eyes were adjusting to the twilight. We were in a rectangular room around ten yards long and six wide. Columns of various heights and thicknesses kept the vaulted roof in place. One had collapsed near the centre and a small chunk of the roof had come down with it, accounting for the light source. There’d been another collapse in the corner to my right, a pile-up of rock and earth. There was something scattered across it. I peered into the murk. ‘Those things over there,’ I said. ‘They what I think they are?’

  ‘Depends on whether you
think they’re human bones.’

  Masters came over and helped me to my feet. Once I’d steadied myself, she checked my pupils for dilation. ‘You’ll live. And sorry for kneeing you in the head,’ she said.

  ‘Did I do anything to deserve it?’

  ‘No. For once. They threw us down that hole,’ she explained, giving the light source a nod. ‘When I came to, I was lying on top of you.’

  ‘See, even unconscious I’m irresistible.’

  ‘Okay, now you deserve it.’

  I ran my hand over my skull. There were more lumps than a sugar bowl. There was also a large, crusty patch of dried blood. My feet were cold. I looked down at them. They were white, naked and soaking in a pool of icy water. I wriggled my numb toes.

  ‘Oh yeah, and I’ve put our footwear to better use,’ Masters said, gesturing at a far corner of our tomb where a tree root had broken through a crack in the rock facing. Water dripped steadily from the roof’s spidery fingers into Masters’ Nikes. My boots were off to one side, full to the brim. I remembered drinking from them in a half-forgotten dream.

  ‘If your dentist tells you you’ve got athlete’s foot,’ I remarked, ‘don’t blame me.’

  ‘Deal.’ She gave me a smile, but it didn’t last long. ‘Vin, we’re not going to survive very long down here. We need to find a way out.’ Worry had etched itself into the lines on Masters’ face, and this partner of mine was not easily spooked.

  I took an unsteady walk around the cistern’s perimeter. ‘The stuff that bitch used on us was chloroform.’ I said. ‘Kinda closes the loop on our murders in a circumstantial way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘And we’re the only people who know about it.’

  One column had come down and the hole in the roof was the result. So what about taking out another column or two? I checked the condition of the ones still standing. A quick inspection told me all seven were in pretty good shape, and all were marble. Three were identical, having probably been pilfered from the same building. These were constructed from five sections apiece and still had that just-quarried look. The four remaining columns were single-piece jobs, each a work of art. And they weren’t going anywhere either. Damn Romans. Subsidence had brought down the one, single-piece column, same as the minor wall collapse.