‘Shit . . .’ said Masters with a cough, clearing the dust from her lungs.
‘Yeah, shit,’ I repeated, looking up. There was a third option I hadn’t considered: that the column would come down without any apparent effect on the roof whatsoever.
I crouched against the wall as the light was sucked from the cistern like someone had flicked a switch. Heavy cloud. It was barely 09:00, a whole day before sunset. The fingers in my cast were throbbing, providing a hint. Snowflakes began drifting down through the hole.
Skinned, rat looked like rabbit, but it tasted gamy. As I thought, like rat. After a couple of goes at it, Masters managed to hold the meat down with minimal gagging, raw hunger having finally overcome her revulsion. She gnawed on a thigh, stripping the tiny bone clean, overcoming her fear by eating it.
The two remaining survivors were out there, lying low, hugging the shadows, doing the rat version of drawing lots. It was better to keep the food supply fresh by letting it run around on the hoof – free range.
I’d made a knife out of one of the dead guy’s ulnas, splintering it and then sharpening one of the larger pieces on a block of granite. The bone held an edge keen enough to cut and gut. So, sharp enough. To skin the rat, I’d made an incision just above its shoulders, and secured the carcass by tying a shoelace around its neck and looping the ends around the back of a heavy granite block; I then dug my thumbs under its skin and simply pulled it off like a tight-fitting sock.
Day five. Lucky we had water. With water, we could survive a long time down here on a diet that also included cockroach, frog’s legs and tree root. In fact, the beard-like tendrils that also collected and focused the water into our footwear were tender and filling. With a little imagination you could think of it as salad. Okay, a lot of imagination.
Despite this smorgasbord, I’d lost half-a-dozen pounds at least. Masters was looking like a thirty-day contestant on Survivor, minus the plastic boobs. With the dank cold, pneumonia would eventually get us. It was just a matter of time.
So staying warm was the biggest challenge. I put it to Masters that we should have sex, purely for survival reasons, of course. It helped pass the time, and it was a hell of a lot more fun than running on the spot. Her counter was that as a survival technique, sex wasn’t so smart, speculating that it burned up too much fuel. Spooning was as far as she was prepared to take it.
What helped most was reviewing the current case, piece by piece, fact by fact, recalling crime scenes, forensic reports, interviews. Yafa and the guy with the toothpick were the killers captured on the surveillance TV footage in the Hilton parking lot – same build, same team, same loopy-nutcase thing going on. They probably did Portman too, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d high-fived each other while they cut away. We killed their Incirlik team – Ben and Jonah – as the interpreter guy had told us. That slip of the tongue confirmed the hit-squad theory. The fact that they were preoccupied with Fedai convinced us that we were right about the other killings being diversions to throw us off the track. In Yafa’s case, maybe they were also recreation.
So, we were solid on the ‘who’. The ‘why’ was the mystery. It had something to do with radioactive water at the south-eastern Iraqi town of Kumayt. But what it had to do with Emmet Portman was the point at which we started scratching our heads.
Masters dropped her lunch scraps in the water – titbits for tomorrow’s dinner to munch on. Something wet had found its way inside my cast, next to my skin. I took the sharpened bone and reached down inside the cast to have a good scratch, shift the spiders around some. And suddenly I saw it, like a set of instructions had just been pinned on the noticeboard inside my head: the way out. ‘Jesus, Anna . . . give me a hand here.’
‘To do what?’
My plan contained a slight hitch, namely, blinding pain. ‘You’re going to have to do something unpleasant if you want to get out of here.’
‘Vin, we’ve already talked about that and the answer’s no.’
‘Funny.’
‘Then what?’
I rested the cast on a piece of marble column. ‘You need to get a block of granite.’
‘Why a block of granite?’
‘You’ll need it to break my hand.’
A couple of minutes later, I was biting down on a chunk of root, the block in Masters’ hands poised about a foot above my hand. ‘Here we go,’ she said.
I closed my eyes, flinched, and waited for the explosion of hurt.
‘On three. One, two, three . . .’
I felt the pressure of the strike but the rock just bounced off the cast. I spat out the root. ‘Jesus, Anna . . .’
‘All right, all right.’
‘You need to put your shoulder behind it, goddamn it.’
‘Okay, this isn’t so easy, you know.’
I felt sorry for her, but sorrier for me, which cancelled out my sorrow for her. ‘Do it, for Christ’s sake!’
She held the block over her head this time. I bit down on the root and watched with morbid fascination now as it smashed down onto the cast.
‘JESUS CHRIST!’ I got up and walked around, the pain in those knuckles of mine on the wrong side of blinding.
‘You okay?’ said Masters. ‘Was that too hard?’
I did a circuit of the cistern walls, my knuckles throbbing, feeling like a bunch of smashed eggs. The fibres of the cast around my fingers were shattered. I closed my eyes tight and hoped this dumb-ass plan of mine worked. I made my way back to where Masters was sitting.
‘Ready for step two?’ she asked.
I nodded, biting my lip, and sat down opposite her. I picked up some mud off the ground and smeared it around my fingers – lubricant. What we were about to do would probably hurt more than step one.
Masters hooked her fingers inside the cast up around my forearm and buried a foot in my armpit. ‘You want me to apply steady pressure or give it one big tug?’
‘Steady pressure,’ I grunted.
Her heel dug into the cracked rib, the worst possible spot. I felt something push into my lung. The cast squeezed against the newly broken knuckles, the bones sliding and grinding over each other with the pressure. ‘Do it!’ I said, groaning, on the edge of passing out.
‘I’m doing it, for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t want to come free.’
‘Pull . . .’
Masters dug her foot into my side and kicked out.
‘Agghh!’
The cast suddenly flew off and sailed across the cistern, landing in the water.
‘Oh, god,’ I said, breathing hard, lying back on the ground, sweat beading my forehead. ‘That hurt.’
Masters retrieved the cast.
‘You’re going to have to do the rest,’ I told her, nursing my unfortunate hand, cradling it carefully in the other.
‘I know what to do,’ she replied, collecting the dead guy’s bones.
I watched her go to work, feeding a femur into each end of the cast. She wedged them in place with smaller bones, hammering them in with a chunk of granite. Mud was then packed into the spaces that remained between the bones and cast so that nothing moved. Finally, Masters took her belt and slipped it around the cast.
‘You’ll have to test it,’ I said.
She found a gap between two blocks, set the contraption between them so that it formed a bridge, stepped up onto the cast and bounced up and down.
Nothing broke.
On the cistern floor directly beneath the hole was a mound raised from mud and stone. Masters, standing on my shoulders Barnum & Bailey– like, pushed the cast-and-bone contraption up through the hole in the roof using a fork made from the dead guy’s ribs and tree roots tied together with shoelaces. Once it was through the hole, she simply turned the cast ninety degrees and lowered it. The ends of the femurs were now wider in this axis than the hole, and the end of her belt dangled within reach of her fingertips. If I’d had a paperclip I’d have made escalators.
I stood and stared at the tria
ngle of light in the roof, at the belt hanging down. Somehow Masters had found the strength to pull herself up that belt, hand over hand, determined not to fail.
That was thirty minutes ago. Thirty minutes was a long time – too long. Maybe Yafa and co. were still out there. Maybe they’d recaptured her. Killed her.
My knuckles throbbed. My ribs whined almost as much as the shoulder Masters had nearly dislocated when she removed my cast. It wouldn’t be long before all these complaints became a chorus and reminded me of my ex-wife’s legal team.
‘Hey, you down there! You okay?’ came Masters’ voice from above, her face again haloed by the white light suddenly appearing in the hole. A length of cable came down.
Thirty-two
I woke as we flew into Istanbul, the Turkish Airlines 737 sweeping low over the Bosphorus. The city felt like an old acquaintance. I took in the view out the window as we broke through the sparse cloud. I could spot all the great monuments – the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, the home of Doctor Aysun Merkit.
Barely a day later, the five days we’d spent in the cistern almost seemed unreal. Masters had come across a four-by-four belonging to some forestry workers parked amongst the pines, miles from anywhere. The keys were left in the ignition. Conveniently, it also had a winch and a hundred feet of steel cable mounted on the front fender. An hour later, we left it where she’d found it – the owners none the wiser – hiked down to the road snaking through the trees and waited for a tourist bus. The newspapers would be all over the discovery of the cistern hidden between two small hills, so we decided to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. We had a little strategic advantage up our sleeves; be a shame to give it away instantly. Better to let Yafa continue to believe for a while longer that her lust for Masters would remain unfulfilled.
Codeine forte was taking the edge off the pain in my knuckles, which had been wrapped up temporarily by a quack back at Izmir. The guy had wanted to reset and recast them properly, only he first had to duck out and geld a horse for a neighbour. I decided to wait, get more specialised medical help at the consulate-general, preferably from someone whose patients walked mostly on two legs.
The 737 landed, taxied, and pulled up with a jolt before shutting down. I saw that the terminal was across the ramp, way over on the other side of the airport. A buzz of concern rippled through the cabin at this, so I gathered parking halfway to Greece wasn’t normal practice.
‘Please remain seated,’ said a woman in Turkish, followed by English, followed by a language that sounded like she had a sticky fly caught in the back of her throat.
The doors at the front of the aircraft and down the back opened simultaneously. And suddenly there was a rush of black. An anti-terror team swarmed aboard. They raced down the aisle in the familiar hunched crouch, MP5s raised to their eye goggles.
‘Shit, it’s –’ Masters was suddenly jerked from her seat and dragged to the floor. All nice and efficient.
I got the same treatment an instant later. They pulled and pushed until I was on the floor, nose flattened against the carpet. Expert hands patted me down, took my wallet. Handcuffs came next, steel jaws around my wrists. We were then hauled to our feet and shoved forward past the terrified passengers to the front hatch.
Arrayed around the front of the plane were assorted marked and unmarked Istanbul police vehicles, their lights all flashing now the job was done. I was lifted down the stairs towards a couple of guys I was getting to know quite well, Detective Sergeants Karli and Iyaz.
‘You are under arrest,’ said Karli, his pants riding especially high.
‘Hey, Detective,’ I said, keeping it light. ‘I see you’ve dressed to the right today. What’s the occasion?’
‘You will be quiet.’
‘What’s the charge?’ Masters asked.
‘We arrest you for the murder of Adem Fedai.’
*
They had taken my belt and shoelaces, the bandages off my hand and chest – anything I might use to stretch my neck if I was so inclined. Standard practice. I sat on the cot and listened to a guy in a cell two down from mine try to knock himself out by diving off his cot head first. The jailers hadn’t thought about confiscating gravity. I was surprised how many attempts it took him to succeed. They carried him out cuffed to a gurney, his face looking like bolognese sauce.
I invoked Ambassador Burnbaum’s name and got nowhere. We didn’t kill Fedai, but I had a fair idea who did. I thought we’d have been released with a brace of apologies within an hour. But seven hours later – thousands more of those listless seconds later – I was still sitting on the cot consoling my knuckles. Karli and Iyaz eventually strolled into my cell, unaccompanied by any US officials.
‘I want to speak to someone at the United States Embassy,’ I informed them.
‘When we are ready and not before,’ said Karli, which made me think perhaps the embassy wasn’t even aware of our detention.
‘Where is Special Agent Masters?’
‘We are holding her also.’
‘If you’re going to charge us, get on with it so as we can post bail, or however you run it here.’
‘Yes, it is different here. This is not the United States – you have the rights we are prepared to give you.’
‘If you like, we could make it worse for you,’ Iyaz added.
‘You’re gonna sing?’ I asked.
‘We found your rental car five days ago at the town of Kusadasi, near Izmir,’ said Iyaz, ignoring me. ‘Adem Fedai was found dead inside the car. He had been beaten and shot through the ear. We found your DNA in the car, and your partner’s. Also, we have many eyewitness who saw you and Special Agent Masters with the deceased at Ephesus.’
‘You find anyone else’s DNA lying around inside the vehicle?’ I knew it was a dumb question the moment I asked it.
‘Of course, it was a rental car,’ said Iyaz.
‘Don’t you think that also accounts for the presence of our DNA?’
Both detectives were implacable.
‘So tell me, do I look a little thinner than the last time you saw me? And Masters, too?’ I asked, trying a different tack. Karli and Iyaz looked at each other. ‘We’ve been on a rat diet for the past week. Karli, you ought to try it. Makes Atkins look like a glutton. Incidentally, your killer is a woman named Yafa. She’s around thirty-two years old, height five eight, 125 pounds, dark complexion, great figure and sado-lesbian tendencies. She has a partner: male, dark, same age, five nine, 190 pounds. Has an appetite for silver toothpicks. They travel with a bunch of thugs I’d loosely describe as deadshits. But you know all that, because I gave you their descriptions well over a week ago.’ Stringer had said that involving the Turkish police was a tick in the box. Now I was pleased I’d done the ticking. ‘When you find them,’ I continued, ‘you should also ask them about the murders of Portman, Bremmel, and a guy called Denzel Nogart, otherwise known as Ten Pin, down at Incirlik Air Base. And while you’re at it, you could drill them about the entire crew of the good ship Onur.’
‘So you do not deny that you met with Adem Fedai at Ephesus?’ Karli enquired, getting back to something he could deal with.
‘Of course not. He chose the venue. He knew we were investigating his boss’s murder. He wanted to tell us what he knew about the night Portman was killed.’
‘What did he tell you?’ Iyaz asked.
‘That he wasn’t the one who did it,’ I replied.
‘And that is all?’ Karli asked.
‘Pretty much.’ I wondered whether Masters had been interviewed first, and if she had, what she might have told them. I gambled on as little as possible. ‘Fedai gave us a rundown on what he saw, what time he came to work that morning, the time he left – the details. It all tallied, by the way.’
‘What about the safe?’ said Iyaz.
‘He said he opened it but there was nothing inside.’
‘Nothing?’
I shook my head and added a shrug, the disappointing
-but-there-you-have-it combination.
‘Did he see Portman’s murderers?’
‘No.’
‘He told you nothing else?’
‘He said he wanted us to leave him alone, that he believed people were trying to kill him – Yafa and the folks I just described to you – and that he would only feel safe back at his home in the mountains somewhere in northern Iraq. Seems his fears were justified.’
Iyaz’s arms were folded. He was buying this. ‘Adem Fedai made you go all the way to Ephesus to tell you nothing?’
‘Like I said, the guy was scared. He saw what happened to his boss. And after the little adventure Masters and I have just had, neither of us feels all that secure around here either. Maybe once you let us out, we might head for those mountains too . . . Seriously, you guys need to put some manpower onto finding this hit squad running around your neighbourhood.’
Iyaz and Karli shared another glance.
‘Tell us what happened to you and Special Agent Masters,’ Iyaz said, leaning against the basin, making himself at home.
I began with the meeting at Ephesus in the rain, leaving out – as I hoped Masters had also done – any mention of a USB stick, water-quality report, radioactivity, the words ‘uranyl fluoride’ and the town of Kumayt. I then moved on to the shredded bus tyres, road spikes, our subsequent off-road detour, the moonlight meeting with Yafa and her buddies, us waking up in the cistern and, finally, a rundown on our escape. When I’d finished, Karli came in for a close-up on my knuckles. They were badly swollen with fluid, the pale skin marbled with dark bruising.
The two detectives talked amongst themselves for a moment. There was plenty of nodding. Karli said, ‘The tourist bus you saw with tyres blown. It was stolen. We found it in the valley near Ephesus, burnt out.’
‘What about the Michelins on the rental?’ I asked.
‘They were all new. One was the wrong type – it did not match the others.’
‘So maybe the folks I’ve been telling you about had difficulty locating a new identical set of four.’ And maybe Yafa and her team were starting to make all sorts of mistakes – and I counted not shooting Masters and me dead amongst them – that were going to snowball and run right over them.
Hard Rain - 03 Page 29
