by Will Adams
A colleague of Pizarro’s called Pedro de Cieza de Leon had written a vivid account of that first contact. It had always struck Knox as curious. Dozens of men had paddled balsa-wood rafts out to Pizarro’s ship, bringing fresh fruit, fish and llama meat to trade. Once on board, they’d exclaimed excitedly over the crowing of a rooster, the beards of the Spanish men, the blackness of the slaves. That is to say, it hadn’t been this great foreign ship in itself that had so amazed them, but the detail of it. Pizarro was the first European to venture so far south; and though Magellan and his fleet had already passed Tierra del Fuego on their circumnavigation, they’d left the coast behind far further south. Maybe word had already reached the Chimu about these strange people from across the seas, but, if so, they’d been impressively relaxed about it, for the Spanish had taken death and disease and the brutal pursuit of gold with them wherever they’d gone. So maybe, just maybe, other strange visitors had arrived in great ships before. Visitors without beards or black skins.
Knox was an archaeologist. He enjoyed a good speculation as much as the next man, but he liked evidence he could see and touch before taking it seriously. Aside from the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, there were just a few bare scraps of evidence of pre-Columbian contact with the New World. A Roman-style terracotta head had been discovered in the foundations of a pre-Columbian Mexican house. Carved Olmec heads appeared to reflect African features; a Malinese fleet was known to have sailed westwards across the Atlantic; and Columbus himself had been told by the natives of Hispaniola of previous visitors with black skins. There was evidence from the plant kingdom too. The sweet potato, an American endemic, had spread across Polynesia long before Columbus. The resin in Peruvian mummifications came from New Guinea trees. African gourds had been found in Central America, and there were claims of cocaine and tobacco in ancient Egyptian contexts. American peppers had been described by Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, and there was a pineapple in a Pompeii mosaic. Chicken bones carbon-dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century had been found on the Chilean coast, far to the south of Tumbez, even though chickens were supposedly introduced by Europeans. But, when all was said and done, it was a fairly meagre catalogue of evidence, especially as every scrap of it could be explained away by natural causes, fraud or coincidence. Extraordinary theories needed extraordinary proof, after all.
And maybe he’d just found it.
II
Rebecca took a moment to calm herself before she took the phone. ‘This is Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she said.
‘You have the money?’ A man’s voice, but the signal was too weak and the crackle too loud for her to tell much more than that.
‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes I do.’
‘You have one hour. There is-’
‘I want to speak to my father.’
‘You have one hour. There is a sheet-’
‘I speak to my father or you get nothing,’ she yelled. She ended the call and stood there clutching the phone in trembling hands, waiting for it to ring again, praying for it to ring. The phone’s owner reached tentatively to take it from her. She held up a palm to fend him off. They’d call back. For five hundred million ariary, they’d call back. If they didn’t call, it meant they didn’t have Adam and Emilia, it had all been a sham. She’d go straight to Andriama and tell The phone jumped suddenly in her hand. She almost spilled it. ‘Do that again,’ said the man, when she answered, ‘and we kill them both. You understand?’
‘I want to speak with-’
Another man’s voice came on. ‘Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Rebecca, my darling.’
The sound of his voice transfixed her. She’d have recognised it anywhere. ‘Dad!’ she wailed. ‘Dad.’
‘Please, Rebecca. Do as they ask. We’re both well but-’
There was the sound of scuffling and then the kidnapper came back on. ‘You have one hour,’ he told her curtly. ‘There’s a map beneath your windscreen wiper. Follow its directions to the place marked. Travel alone. We will be watching. You understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘You will find a yellow bag there. Put the money in the bag then return to Tulear. Tell no one. If the money is all there, we will release your father and sister. If not-’ The phone went dead. Rebecca stared at it dumbly. The trader took it back from her, asked apologetically for money. She reached into her bag and thrust some banknotes at him. She couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t think of anything but the echo of her father’s voice. Rebecca, my darling! He’d never called her that before! Yvette had always been his one and only darling. She felt euphoric, drunk and terrified all at once. Rebecca, my darling! He was alive. Emilia was alive. She was going to get them back. She walked unsteadily to the Jeep. A map. The man had said something about a map. But where? She couldn’t remember. She searched anxiously until she found it tucked beneath her wiper.
‘Hey!’
Rebecca turned to see Andriama hurrying towards her. She threw the map on to her passenger seat, climbed in and roared away. Andriama chased her for a few paces before giving up and waving down a taxi. She swung left at the first opportunity, left again, hiding herself in the maze of streets. She looked in her rear-view, couldn’t see anyone following. She unfolded the crude map on her steering wheel as she drove, but it was difficult to read, what with her eyes blurred and the roads bumpy and her hands shaking wildly. She pulled to the side. It directed her to take Route Nationale 7 through Andranohinaly, past an orange road-side stall and then down a track to her right. Andranohinaly was on the way to Ilakaka, the same road Mustafa would currently be driving along in the other direction. A stroke of luck at last! She took out his card and dialled his mobile. It rang and rang but nobody answered. She called his home instead and made Ahdaf describe her father’s car: a blue Mercedes 4x4 with tinted windows. She was putting her phone back in her bag when she noticed the GPS transmitter. She’d forgotten all about it, but now she switched it on and put it in her pocket, set off again for the Ilakaka road.
Traffic was mercifully thin, but she’d only driven about eight miles when the Jeep began to limp and then she heard the distinctive flapping of a flat tyre. She gave a cry and pulled to the side. The Jeep’s tyres had been popping forever; she’d changed them often in the distant past. She fetched the spare and kit. The bolts felt welded on. She had to stamp down with her foot on the very end of the spanner to get them loose. And the ground was so soft that her jack kept giving a little under the Jeep’s weight. Haste and the trembles caused her to fumble and drop the spanner and the nuts, but at last she was done. Half an hour wasted. Half an hour! She tossed everything in the back and raced away, still scanning the road for Mustafa’s blue Mercedes. When finally she saw it, she flashed her lights and tooted until he pulled to the side. She parked across the road from him, jumped out, ran across. ‘The money?’ she cried. ‘Have you got the money?’
‘Of course,’ he said, getting out and going around to his boot. ‘I gave you my word.’
‘I’m late. I’m dreadfully late.’
‘Calm down. Please. You must be-’
‘Calm? Don’t tell me to be calm! Andriama knows. He’s on to us.’
Mustafa’s face fell. ‘But you promised to say nothing.’
‘It’s not my fault. He heard you’d been raising money.’
‘Oh.’ He stroked his chin, shook his head. ‘If that is all he knows, then he knows nothing.’ He threw open his boot, unzipped and pulled open the mouth of a black holdall, stuffed with thick bundles of banknotes. ‘Count,’ he told her.
‘There’s no time.’
‘You must count,’ he insisted.
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, tipped the money out, stacked up the bundles. She kept glancing down the road, expecting the police at any second. There were fifty bundles in all, five piles of ten. She tested two at random. Each comprised ten wads of twenty brandnew 50,000 ariary notes stapled together. It took her a few moments to do the arithmetic, then she nodded at Mustafa. ‘G
ood,’ he said. ‘Now you remember what I told you about interest?’
A knot of stress tightened in Rebecca’s nape. ‘Can’t we sort this out later?’
‘I had to sign a contract to get this money,’ he told her. He took two sets of papers from his jacket pocket, rested them on the side window. ‘That is what took me so long, because my lawyer had to make sure-’
‘For heaven’s sake!’
He said apologetically: ‘Please. You must understand my situation. This is a great deal of money. I had to give certain undertakings before I could borrow it. I need to secure myself against any loss, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’d take advantage of you. If you read then sign each of the pages, as I’ve already done, then we can-’
‘I don’t have the time.’
Mustafa spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry, but I must have some form of receipt. Surely you can see that.’
Rebecca put a hand to her forehead. ‘What does it say? Tell me what it says.’
‘Certainly.’ He took one of the contracts and began to read it aloud.
‘No!’ she cried. ‘How much interest?’
‘Ah. Let me see.’ He leafed through the pages. ‘Yes. Here it is. Five per cent, with two weeks to repay. But if it goes over two weeks, there are certain penalties.’
‘What penalties?’
‘Give me a moment,’ he said, shuffling through the pages.
Rebecca shook her head in dismay. She had no time for this. ‘Your pen,’ she said.
‘But you should read this before you-’
‘Give me your fucking pen!’ She peeled the bandage from her right palm, signed the pages of both contracts, stuffed one copy in her holdall. The fresh air felt sharp and good upon her lacerated but healing palm, so she tore the bandages from her left hand too, then packed the money back in the holdall. It was so heavy she had to heft it across to the Jeep. She threw it on the passenger seat, ran round to the driver’s door. Mustafa came across. ‘Thank you,’ she told him.
He waved it away. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘They told me to go there alone. They said they’d be watching.’
‘Good luck, then.’
She nodded and sped away, horribly aware that she was already late, praying that the kidnappers would cut her a little slack.
THIRTY-FIVE
I
There was still no sign of Rebecca at the lodge. Knox unlocked its front door then went in search of Michel’s medical records. When he entered the clinic, however, he noticed the handheld GPS tracker on the examination table, pinning down a folded handwritten note that Rebecca must have left for Therese. He knew he shouldn’t read it, but he did so anyway. He went a little numb at her dry account of receiving the ransom note, of everything she’d done since. He read through her plans for the day, her request that Therese get the GPS handset to Chief of Police Andriama in Tulear if she didn’t reappear.
If she didn’t reappear…
His heart clenched; he felt sick. What was she thinking, taking this on all by herself? He needed to help her. Michel would just have to wait. He turned on the GPS handset, checked for recent transmissions. Nothing since last night, presumably when Rebecca had tested the equipment. He checked his watch. Damn. It was past ten already. He’d used up half the morning in the boathouse. He went out, locked up behind him, pushed Adam’s track-bike over to the generator building, filled it with fuel, straddled it and kicked it into life. Then he swung it around in a tight circle, opened up its throttle and roared away along the track towards Tulear.
II
Many of the villages Rebecca passed were too small and straggling to have name signs. She had to stop every few miles to ask for Andranohinaly, only to be pointed further down the road. Eventually she reached it, however, and set about looking for the orange wayside stall. She passed a broken-down, one-room shack. In the hazy midday sun it looked nut-brown, but she could imagine it might look orange at sunset. She pulled in. Several planks bore peeling flecks of orange paint. If this was it, there should be a turning to the right immediately afterwards. Sure enough, a thin track led off the road fifty metres further along, but it was rutted and narrow, more footpath than proper road.
She pulled into its mouth, sat there clutching her steering wheel for the best part of a minute before deciding it couldn’t be right. She pulled back out on to the main road, drove on for another four kilometres before cursing out loud, swinging around and driving back to the track. She lurched along it to the base of a wooded hill, then snaked upwards in increasingly steep hairpins. Her doubts grew stronger and stronger, but she was too late to secondguess herself again. The surface kept deteriorating; the vegetation grew thicker, branches reaching out at her, thorns screeching on the Jeep’s flanks like fingernails on a blackboard. This couldn’t be it. It just couldn’t. She wanted to turn around but the track was too narrow; and the hillside was too steep and the corners too sharp to make reversing practicable. She pressed on in increasing dismay until she reached a heap of broken rock and loose debris left across the track by a small landslide. She crossed it at crawling speed, leaning almost sideways in her seat. Her relief at making it safely to the other side lasted only to the next hairpin when the track turned back on itself and she reached the place from which the landslide had fallen. The surface was completely gone. There was no possible way forwards. She was trapped.
She gave a yell of frustration. Her cry echoed forlornly. A wild dog barked. Her father and sister were depending upon her, and she was already grotesquely late. She needed to get back to the main road right now. With no way to turn, she had no choice but to try reversing. Negotiating the hairpin backwards was a nightmare. She kept hauling on the hand-brake and leaning out the window to check her wheels weren’t over the edge. Even after she’d successfully made it, she still had the buttress of rock to cross. It had been difficult enough going forwards. In reverse it was unbearable. Pebbles cascaded from beneath her wheels, clattering down the steep hillside until they were netted by the undergrowth. Each time she heard another miniature avalanche, her heart leapt. The Jeep was tilted so far over by now that she was pressed against the driver door, could see nothing in her mirrors.
And then, perhaps inevitably, the steady trickle of earth turned to a cascade, and the ground simply sheared away beneath her, and the Jeep began sliding down the hill like a ship launched sideways into the sea.
THIRTY-SIX
I
Knox sped south as fast as the track would allow him, the bike’s balding tyres slithering on the dust, forcing him every so often to throw out a foot to save himself. But he reached Tulear in good time, stopped to check the GPS handset. Rebecca had turned on the transmitter at last; and though the tracker’s map of Madagascar was rudimentary, it was evident she’d taken the Ilakaka road. He followed signs for it, passed out of the suburbs. The road grew better; he opened the throttle wide. It didn’t take him long to reach the place from where the most recent signal had been sent, but there was no sign of her. According to her note, she’d set the transmissions for once every hour. He’d just have to wait. With nothing else to do, he turned on his mobile. It found a signal, notified him of messages. Most were from Miles, sounding increasingly strained, wondering what had happened to him, begging him to get in touch as soon as he could.
‘About bloody time!’ he erupted, when Knox complied. ‘Are you on your way back?’
‘Not yet,’ said Knox.
‘Things are turning ugly here,’ said Miles. ‘We’ve found jack shit, our new tests have come back negative and the Chinese have sniffed something. They’re sending a delegation.’
‘Christ! When?’
‘The day after tomorrow. And I need you here. No excuses. We’re going to have to blind them with science and archaeology. I can do the science, but I need you for the archaeology.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Knox promised him. ‘But listen: I think I’m on to something.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘I need your word first. You’re not to tell Cheung or anyone else. Not yet.’
‘Whatever you say. Now spill.’
He gave Miles a digest of what he’d been up to since he’d left the Maritsa. The shards in Eden’s wall; Adam’s interest in medieval charts; the boathouse basement and the Chinese artefacts. He outlined his theory about the treasure ship floating itself off the reef and sailing down to Eden’s waters; and why the Kirkpatricks might have lied about it.
Miles was silent for a second or two after he’d finished, as though struggling to take it all in. ‘Any chance you can get us proof?’ he asked. ‘Something to show the Chinese?’
Knox thought of the blue-and-white porcelain bowl, the enamelled flask. ‘I’ll need to clear it with one of the Kirkpatricks first.’
‘And when will you be able to do that?’
He checked the GPS tracker again. A new signal had just come in, about ten miles to his east. ‘With any luck,’ he said, ‘maybe pretty soon.’
II
Once the ground started to give way beneath Rebecca, everything became reflexive, something she couldn’t stop, only manage. She sat up straight and buckled her seatbelt. Her rear-end cannoned a tree and the impact turned the Jeep face-on to the slope. She stamped hard on the brake and clutch, thrust her gear-stick into reverse, but something snapped and then the Jeep was bounding down the steep gradient, wheels barely in contact with the earth, punching a way through the thin vegetation, branches and tendrils slapping the windscreen. A baobab loomed. She wrenched the steering wheel around but it had no effect. She braced her feet against the floor and threw up her forearms to protect her head. The front left hit hard. She heard the crunch of metal and the tinkle of a headlight. The Jeep flew up on to two wheels and then fell back. The brush opened up in front of her; the hillside simply dropped away. The Jeep plunged down an embankment and smashed nose-first into the compacted earth of the track which had wended back on itself. The bonnet buckled like a concertina against her knees. The windscreen and side windows shattered. Pebbles of glass spat everywhere. She slammed against her seat-belt, her head flew forward and she felt her left shoulder dislocate. The Jeep tumbled over itself before settling on its passenger door. It rocked for a few moments and then was still.
