by Will Adams
‘But you did?’
‘You cannot know how glad this news makes me. If it’s true.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘They sent me a photograph. Photographs are easy enough to fake.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But you intend to prepare as if it is for real?’
‘I have to.’
‘And you’re here for my help?’
Rebecca said defensively: ‘You said if you could do anything… And it’s not as if I can’t raise the money myself. Just not by nine a.m. on Monday.’
Mustafa frowned. ‘This Monday? But that’s crazy!’
‘Exactly. They’re not giving me a chance.’
‘Where?’
‘Independence Square, Tulear.’
‘How much?’
‘Five hundred million ariary.’
He grimaced, but in a way that suggested it could have been worse. ‘Who knows about this?’
‘Only my business partner. That was him just now. I had to tell someone.’
‘Of course. But not the police?’
‘No.’
Mustafa nodded seriously. ‘You must please keep it that way. Understand, what our police know, everyone knows. You can see for yourself that I already take absurd precautions to keep my family safe. If people think that I pay ransoms-’
‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear. But is it possible? To raise the money? I’ll pay you interest.’
‘Interest!’ sighed Mustafa. ‘How can you talk about interest? Your father is my friend; my interest is getting him and your sister safely home. Listen: I do not keep such sums sitting in my safe. I will have to borrow it myself. The people from whom I borrow will doubtless charge me interest and impose various conditions. What they ask of me, I will ask of you. But no more.’
Rebecca’s eyes watered. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘It will not be easy,’ cautioned Mustafa. ‘Even for me, this is a large sum to raise so quickly. But one way or another we will do this. You have my word.’ He smiled, gestured flamboyantly. ‘Ask anyone: when Mustafa Habib gives his word, he keeps it. But you must promise me one thing in return…’
‘Yes?’
‘You are hurt, you are exhausted. You must be fresh for this battle. So you will go home and rest and get your strength up. And on Monday morning you will be back here at eight o’clock, and I will have your money for you. You have my word on this. And, God willing, together we will bring back Adam and Emilia.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
I
Knox woke in the early hours to engine noise and headlights sweeping up towards the lodge. He pulled on trousers and a shirt, hurried outside as Rebecca climbed in obvious distress from the driver’s door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, going to help her.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him. But her grimaces belied her words.
He put his arm around her waist, took as much of her weight as he could. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘Have you had news about Adam and Emilia?’
She looked sharply at him. ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘You left so suddenly.’
‘It was nothing to do with them. It was something else.’
It was pretty obvious she wasn’t levelling with him, but he let it go. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’
‘I could do with some aspirin.’
He helped her to her camp-bed, fetched some painkillers and a glass of water. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what happened earlier. If you don’t want to tell me, fine, I trust your judgement. But I can still be useful. Just tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it, okay? No questions asked.’
Her eyes moistened, he thought she was about to crumble. But then she caught herself and her expression hardened, as though he’d been trying to trick her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Sleep well.’ He returned to his bed, lay there listening to her bitten-off cries as she readied herself for bed. It distressed him to hear her pain, to not be allowed to help. He struggled for sleep, turning this way and that on the thin mattress without ever quite finding repose. It grew less dark outside. He tiptoed quietly through the gloom to the washroom, dressed and went out. The sun wasn’t yet up, leaving the morning grey and cool. Down on the beach, he kicked off his shoes. The thin, cold crust of sand crunched satisfyingly beneath his tread, like the dried bark of a rotted tree. He bowed his head as he walked, searching the beach for fragments of pottery.
He stopped, crouched, picked up a white shard; but it was only a piece of eggshell. From the size of it, it had to have belonged to an aepyornis, a one-time Madagascar endemic, and the largest bird ever to have lived, taking advantage of the island’s lack of large predators to become the bully on the block. But then the first settlers had arrived and they’d eventually hunted them to extinction-for their meat, of course, but also for their eggs. The damned things had been the size of rugby balls, so that an aepyornis omelette would feed a family for a week. The birds had become well known in the ancient world. Marco Polo had immortalised them as the rukh or roc, capable of carrying off elephants in their claws and then dropping them like bombs from a great height; though actually the aepyornis had been as flightless as ostriches.
There’d always been a bit of a question mark as to how Marco Polo knew about the birds. He’d never visited the island himself. In fact, he’d actually confused it with Mogadishu, a corruption of which had given Madagascar its name. Most likely he’d heard of them from Arab merchants, who’d certainly been familiar with the place. They’d called it the Island of the Moon, and they’d believed it to be a point of no return for the southern ocean; that he who sailed beyond it was lost. Yet people undoubtedly had sailed beyond it. A Chinese map completed in around 1390 in honour of the first Ming emperor showed the world in traditional fashion, with a swollen China at its heart, shrunken apologies for Africa and Mediterranean Europe to the west. But what was most remarkable about the map was that it got the shape of Africa broadly right, including its southern and western coasts, even though the Chinese had never explored it themselves.
Whatever their sources had been, Zheng He and his admirals would have known it to be perfectly possible to reach and even round the Cape of Good Hope. Sailing along unfamiliar coasts had been a painfully slow business, however. If you stayed in sight of land, you increased exponentially your risk of running aground, so you had to go slow, take constant soundings, find a new safe harbour every afternoon, because sailing at night that close to land was suicide. If a Chinese treasure fleet had crawled in this manner all the way down Africa’s eastern coast, the crew would doubtless have been restless for home and impatient of a slow retracement of their route, so it was entirely plausible that their navigators would have set a course directly for China. Draw a line between the Cape and Beijing, and it would run pretty much straight through these reefs here. Just as easy for the coral to snag two ships as one.
Ahead of him, mangroves were being slowly ducked by the incoming tide, like a village of elders undergoing baptism. Knox turned and headed back along the beach, past the Yvette and Eden and on to Pierre’s cabins and beyond, still searching the shore as he went. The sand became infested with tiny flies; he set off blizzards of them with every step, cascading ahead of him down the beach. He went down to the sea’s edge to avoid them, small waves splashing timidly around his ankles before withdrawing like unctuous servants, his feet leaving shallow imprints that quickly filled with water and then faded into nothing. It was there in the wash that he saw the shard of porcelain. He crouched to pick it up. It was perhaps an inch long, its edges abraded smooth, white with just a trace of blue upon it, the exact same shade he’d seen on the porcelain fragments on the Morombe sea-bed. He tossed it up and caught it, thinking through what it might mean. Then he tucked it away in his pocket and headed back to Eden.
II
Rebecca’s cuts had healed enough overnight that every small movement
was an agony when she woke. She didn’t intend to waste her morning feeling sorry for herself, however, so she gritted her teeth and swung out her legs and used gravity to help herself up, then hobbled through to her father’s office, hoping to guilt Daniel into making coffee and breakfast. He was already up and gone, however, but at least that gave her the opportunity for a more methodical search of her father’s desk than she’d been able to give it when rummaging around for the Yvette’s insurance documentation.
His desk had filing-cabinet-style drawers, with multicoloured hanging folders inside, each tagged with the name of a bank, insurance company, tax authority, stockbroker or friend. One of the tags bore her own name. She pulled a thin sheaf of letters from it, read through them with growing dismay, so obvious was it how absent her heart had been from her words. There were two postcards of London landmarks that she didn’t remember sending. She turned them over and with a jolt recognised Emilia’s handwriting. She must have gone ahead with her forestry training course after all.
– You came anyway? You didn’t tell me?
– You didn’t want me there.
– No! Don’t say that!
– You’d moved beyond me.
– Never! I made one mistake. How could you ‘Is something wrong?’ She looked up to see Daniel at the door. She feared her voice would sound strained if she spoke, so she shook her head instead. He came inside the room. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Better, thanks.’
‘You want me to change your bandages?’
‘It’s okay. Therese is coming by.’
‘How about some breakfast, then?’
‘That would be wonderful.’
He nodded and went out. She returned her letters and her sister’s postcards to the folder, began on Adam’s finances instead. They proved astonishing. She’d known he had money in England, for he’d paid her Oxford allowance from an English bank account. But he’d always been so careful, she’d assumed it had been a constant struggle. He’d built the Yvette himself, for example, and the Jeep was decades old. Yet these folders told a completely different story.
Daniel reappeared with a tray of coffee and fruit salad, toast and jam, set it upon the desk. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘What about searching the reefs?’
She smiled and showed him her bandages. ‘I can’t exactly go diving, not like this. And I’m hopeless at doing boat things.’
‘Then maybe I could take the Yvette out, see if I can’t find something.’
‘By yourself? Is that safe?’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘Then thanks. That’s really kind.’
‘No problem.’ He shouldered one of his bags. ‘See you later, then.’
Rebecca watched him leave, feeling bad about shutting him out like this when he so clearly just wanted to help. But it wasn’t only the kidnappers who’d insisted on her silence; Mustafa had, too. She resumed totting up her father’s assets. Without even taking Eden into account, he had over three-quarters of a million pounds invested in British bank and share accounts, and he still owned a house near Oxford. He had more income than she’d expected too, and not just from rent, dividends and interest. The Landseer Trust ran at least two expeditions a year here, each made up of twelve to twenty volunteers paying through their noses for the privilege of collecting data from the reefs and forest. He’d also written several journal articles, had conducted field trials on a new GPS tracker system, had acted as an agent for local craftspeople, selling their works to dealers in London and Munich. And now that tourists had started visiting this coast in greater numbers, he’d begun taking in paying guests too, offering day-trips on the Yvette, even the occasional deep-sea fishing expedition. Everything was scrupulously documented and declared, kept here in these drawers. And it occurred to her then that anyone with access to the lodge could easily have found out about her father’s wealth; and that would have made him a very tempting target indeed.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I
Boris sat bolt upright in his bed as he remembered last night’s gunfight. It wasn’t remorse for the two men that had pricked him, but the belated memory of a mistake he’d made. He’d gutted that tomato with his knife before the Raging Bull had taken his face off, but then he’d wiped off his knife and put it back in its sheath and taken it away with him. How could he have been so stupid? The Malagasy police wouldn’t be up to much, from what little he’d seen of them, but even they would have to wonder where the knife had disappeared to. And that would surely lead them to conclude there’d been someone else at the scene.
He threw back his sheet, pulled on trousers, went over to Davit’s cabin. The big man was still fast asleep, Claudia snuggled against him, holding hands like teenage lovers. He gave their bed an extra-hard kick.
‘What time is it?’ grunted Davit.
‘Time we got shifting.’
They dragged the boat down to the sea’s edge, stowed their camping gear, food and other supplies, fixed the outboard. Davit helped Claudia to her seat, then he and Boris pushed it out beyond the breakers and clambered aboard either side to make sure it didn’t capsize. With all that weight, however, it sank low in the choppy water.
‘Maybe we should leave Claudia behind,’ suggested Davit.
‘Maybe we should leave you behind,’ grunted Boris.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘It was a joke,’ he sighed. ‘Look at the size of you two.’
‘We’ll see how it goes,’ said Davit. ‘We’ll just have to take it slow and stick close to shore in case anything goes wrong.’
‘And if it does?’
The big man shrugged. ‘Then we’ll just have to try something else.’
II
Knox waded out to the Yvette, then spent a few minutes studying the chart of the Eden reefs pinned to the cork-board. Nothing he’d learned so far had given much support to his hunch that Adam and Emilia’s disappearance was connected to their upcoming salvage; but nothing had disproved it either. And, rather than simply search the sea at random, he might as well look for the wreck-site too, if only to ease his conscience about Miles.
Emilia had been secretive about its precise location, but she’d let slip a few clues all the same. He knew, for example, that it lay a little over thirty metres deep. That cut out all of Eden’s lagoon, which was twenty-five metres at its deepest, as well as everything beyond the pelagic boundary. She’d also told him that she and her father had found it during a routine coral check. This involved visiting particular sections of the reef month after month, year after year, to examine them for bleaching and other symptoms of ill health. While their secrecy about the wreck would surely have precluded them from marking its location, this chart appeared several years old, so it seemed probable that the coral they’d gone to check that day would have been marked upon it. But which mark? There were three or four hundred of them on the chart, and he didn’t even know which ones represented corals.
He unpinned the chart, looked at its reverse for a key. Nothing. He turned to the map-stand instead, pulled out and checked the other charts in turn, again without success. He did, however, find another old chart rolled up at the bottom. He hadn’t noticed it before because it was shorter than the others, and shorter than the top of the stand. It was a vaguely familiar reproduction of an ancient world map, but of very poor quality, blurred black-and-white printouts cut into a collage and glued to a backing sheet. He took it out into the sunshine for a better look, which was when he realised why he was having trouble recognising it. He was holding it upside down.
It was a commonplace, these days, to blame Western arrogance for the orientation of maps with north on top and Europe at the heart. But Knox had little truck with that view. Apart from anything else, it would be perverse to expect a map-maker to place their home anywhere but at the centre. As for putting north on top, that was less to do w
ith arrogance than with rivers. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had based their lives around the Nile. The Nile had flowed from south to north; water flows downhill; it had followed that the south had been Upper Egypt, and the north Lower. Claudius Ptolemy, on whose great work Geography modern maps are indirectly based, had lived in Alexandria, and so he might easily have adopted the Egyptian style. But he was also Greek, and the Greeks put north on top. For many centuries after the schism that split Rome from Constantinople, however, Ptolemy fell into obscurity in Europe. And when medieval Christians started making maps of their own, they put east at the top, not north, for they had seen the world as a cosmic metaphor for Christ, in which the rising sun represented his haloed head. The Arabs, meanwhile, put south at the top of their maps; and, because they were the great seafarers of the age, the many cartographers who borrowed from them did likewise. One of these was a Venetian monk called Fra Mauro, and it was a copy of his 1459 map that Knox was holding now.
The map wasn’t just notable for being upside down, however. Fra Mauro had written notes to accompany his creation, even crediting his sources, though often leaving them unnamed. According to one of these, a huge ship had arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the east in around 1420, then had sailed off westwards for two thousand miles or so before giving up and coming back. It was hard to be sure from the terse description, but it certainly could have been a treasure ship, especially as the dates tallied so perfectly with Zheng He’s sixth voyage. If so, it was the only recorded sighting of a treasure ship that far south, that far east. And it had been on its own.
Knox’s working assumption had been that, if Adam and Emilia had really found a Chinese ship on these reefs, then it had been a second ship from the same fleet as the one Cheung had found further north. But the presence of the Fra Mauro map suggested that the Kirkpatricks, at least, had considered a simpler explanation: that there was only one ship, the very same one that had been seen twice at the Cape of Good Hope.
