The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  At last she had been able to do something to make up for her stupidity back at the motel. At last she had been able to do something to make Hart proud of her.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  ‘Now what do we do?’ said Rider. ‘Head back to bloody England? Looks like we’ve blown it big time.’

  There was a period of silence while everyone digested what had just happened.

  ‘No. Too late for that. We continue following them,’ said Hart. ‘Just like before. But this time we get as close as we can. It won’t take the Captain long to figure out we’ve planted a tracker in his car. He’ll find and destroy it and then we’ll have to rely on keeping him in range visually.’

  ‘What a result,’ said Rider. ‘Good guys zero, bad guys one. How many guns did you say you saw on the bed? Before you had to hightail it back home?’

  Hart gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘Three pistols, an assault rifle and a sawn-off.’

  ‘So why don’t we simply bring in the Ethiopian police then? It can’t be legal to drive around with an arsenal like that in your boot.’

  Amira, who had been holding her fire while the men snapped at each other, chose that moment to cut in. ‘Because they’d be massacred, that’s why. This isn’t Addis Ababa, Rider. This is the bloody countryside. The police out here aren’t even armed. They carry batons. And maybe a can of pepper spray if they’re lucky, and the budget runs to it. We can’t afford to put Biljana’s life at risk because some local cop over faces himself running up against a man like the Captain. No. Whatever we are going to do to save Biljana, we’ll have to do it ourselves.’

  Rider flicked a finger at his computer. ‘Well, lookie here. The tracker’s still working.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. If the Captain suspects we planted one. Well, like Hart says, surely he’d have winkled it out by now?’

  ‘Where did you hide it exactly?’ said Hart.

  Rider grimaced. He knew what was coming. ‘Underneath the passenger seat.’

  ‘Great,’ said Hart. ‘What a masterstroke. That’s the last place anyone would look.’

  ‘There wasn’t much time for niceties,’ said Rider. ‘Or have you forgotten?’

  They were silent for the next hour.

  ‘No change,’ said Rider at last. ‘The tracker’s still online. Incredibly. It tells me he’s turned right at A¯wash. Towards the Aledeghi Wildlife Reserve. You don’t think he’s being cute and has hooked the tracker onto the underside of a tourist bus, do you? And we’re shadowing a Women’s Institute outing?’

  ‘No,’ said Hart. ‘I don’t. He’s not that smart. He must think we were following the second car and got to him that way.’

  Rider tapped a few coordinates onto his laptop. ‘So if it’s true, and it really is him, it means he’s no longer heading for Addis. He’s heading from south to north up the country.’ He lowered his head until it was nearly touching the glass. ‘Maybe he knows about the tracker and he’s using it to lure us somewhere isolated? Maybe he intends to bushwhack us? That’s what I’d do in his place.’

  Hart hitched his chin in Rider’s direction. ‘What’s ahead if he keeps on going as he is?’

  Rider shrugged. ‘If he keeps on going far enough he’ll hit Eritrea. But he’d be shooting himself in the foot if he did that. The Eritreans and the Ethiopians don’t see eye to eye. They waged a vicious war from 1998 to 2000, which cost more than seventy thousand lives. If he tries to cross the border from Ethiopia into Eritrea, the Eritreans will boil him alive in a hot kettle. Biljana too.’

  ‘So where does that leave us in the general scheme of things?’ said Hart, rolling his eyes. ‘Anyone care to sum up our position for the record?’

  ‘I’d say that was pretty clear,’ said Amira. ‘Bad news first. Three rank amateurs, armed only with blunt machetes, are facing two heavily armed and highly trained professional soldiers who are holding as hostage a young woman that the amateurs feel personally responsible for. The amateurs have inadvertently revealed themselves to the enemy, forfeiting any small advantage they might previously have possessed. All clear so far?’ Amira put on a fake smile. ‘Now do you want to hear the good news?’

  Hart grimaced. ‘Okay. Tell me the good news?’

  ‘The amateurs outnumber the enemy by fifty per cent.’

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  The Captain wriggled out from underneath the Renegade and stood up. He brushed absent-mindedly at his clothes, but it was clear that all his attention was focused on the road behind them. ‘There’s no tracker here. Inside the car or out. It must have been concealed in your car, Danko. This vehicle is clean as a nurse’s snatch.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Danko. ‘Why would they place a tracker in my car and not yours?’

  ‘Because they were being cute,’ said the Captain. ‘They knew it’s the last place we’d ever look. Plus they’d never have suspected that we’d sacrifice your car as our contribution to the Ethiopian black economy.’

  Danko gave an emphatic shake of the head. ‘I don’t go for it. Couldn’t they have been following us conventionally?’

  The Captain eased the knots from his body. He glanced across at Biljana, who was propped up against a tree with her hands tied in front of her. ‘No. I was on the lookout all the time. They’d have needed an armada of different vehicles at their disposal to hoodwink me. Which I suspect they didn’t or they’d have pulled me over back in Djibouti. Same reason we weren’t stopped at the border crossing. They couldn’t get their act together in time.’ He chucked his chin at Danko. ‘How about you, though? Were you wise to every car that followed you? Were you on the lookout for a tail?’

  Danko made a face. Finally, after giving it serious thought, he shook his head. ‘No. I wasn’t. So I could have been followed, I suppose. I could have led them to you. But I don’t reckon I did.’

  ‘Nobody ever does,’ said Captain. ‘That’s the beauty of it. None of us ever think we’re that significant. But we’ve got the girl. And as far as Hart is concerned, I’m the guy who raped his girlfriend and then tried to shoot him. So he’s got a pretty strong motive for revenge.’

  ‘His girlfriend?’ said Danko.

  ‘I’m not saying she was his girlfriend when I raped her. But afterwards? Who knows. Women are renewable fixtures. And stranger things have happened on this earth.’ The Captain glanced again towards Biljana. ‘Then she ups and goes and kills herself. So who’s he going to come looking for, heh?’

  Danko shrugged. ‘You believe what the girl says then? You think the mother really did kill herself?’

  ‘I know she did,’ said the Captain. ‘I’ve still got connections back home. People who served with me and didn’t get picked up after the war. Before I phoned you and set this whole thing on the road, I got a friend to check the Macedonian death registrations for June/July. It’s easily done. It only takes a phone call. Lumnije Dardan killed herself end June. Drowned herself in Lake Ohrid. They called it “death by misadventure” on the certificate. But I don’t believe that for an instant. The Dardan woman was a Muslim. They don’t go much for suicide within that culture. So whoever filled in the records cut her some slack so she could be legally buried. That’s my theory at least.’

  ‘Muslims not going for suicide? You’ve got to be kidding me. What about the Daesh suicide bombers? What do they call it over there? Istishhad?’

  The Captain hawked and spat. ‘That’s bullshit, and you know it. As in every culture, the priests and the imams say exactly what suits them at a precise moment in time and then justify it later. When suicide bombing suits them, the imams find examples from the Hadith that support that. If it doesn’t, they don’t. When in doubt, they know they can always use donkeys to carry the bombs. That won’t offend anybody but the British.’

  ‘God, you’re a cynic,’ said Danko. But he couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ T
he Captain cleaned his hands on a rag. ‘Now untie the girl and shove her back inside the car. We’ve got some serious driving to do.’

  Danko did as he was told. All through the process, though, he was aware that the girl was no longer looking him directly in the eyes. She had obviously changed her mind about him since hearing the details of his wartime exploits from the Captain. This wounded Danko.

  For in the years directly following the end of the Kosovo War, Danko had changed his manner of thinking entirely. He now sincerely regretted many of the things he had done as a young man. At heart he believed himself to be a fundamentally good person. A man who missed his family and his country and the closeness of relational ties. Hell, hadn’t the Legion cashiered him when he had tried to sneak back into Serbia illegally to see his wife and children? Would a mass murderer have done a thing like that? Risked everything like that? Danko desperately wanted Biljana to understand that he had changed. That he was no longer the man he had once been. And he wanted to see this understanding reflected in her gaze.

  Okay, he had done some of those things the Captain had boasted to Biljana about. He had behaved dishonourably on occasion. But he had been eighteen years old when he had shot the old man with the sniper rifle. And raped all the women. Couldn’t a leopard change its spots? Wasn’t it possible to regret what you had done in your early youth and make some sort of amends?

  But he hadn’t made amends yet, had he? He’d simply closed the door on his past like a coward, and buried his head in the sand.

  Danko found himself thinking how he might make amends now. How he might turn things around.

  Could he help the girl in some way maybe? Nobody’s daughter deserved to be treated the way the Captain treated Biljana. It was almost as though the Captain blamed her for being his flesh and blood. Blamed her for reminding him of the sins of his past.

  Danko glanced across at the Captain. He sighed inwardly. God forbid, but the man was relentless. He wouldn’t be easy to trick. And if Danko somehow contrived to let the girl escape, he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that the Captain would kill him.

  Was the risk worth it? Would it serve to give him closure on all the evil memories that proximity to the Captain had summoned up?

  Only time would tell.

  SIXTY-NINE

  ‘I don’t get this,’ said Rider. ‘I don’t get it at bloody all.’

  Amira was taking her turn driving. Rider was in the front seat fiddling with his laptop. Hart was in the rear opening and shutting his window depending on the quantity of passing cars and the amount of dust they raised.

  ‘What don’t you get?’ he said.

  Rider sniffed. ‘We’re three miles behind them. And they are twenty miles or so short of Gewanē.’

  ‘So what?’

  Rider tapped some more instructions into his laptop. ‘Gewanē is the town at the entrance to the Yangudi Rassa National Park.’

  ‘And?’

  Rider shrugged. ‘I’ve knocked about Ethiopia a bit in my time. I covered the police massacres in 1995, for instance, and the subsequent riots. The tail end of the Eritrean war in 2000. I may never have been to the Yangudi Rassa National Park, in other words, but I got to visit Simien, which is smaller but otherwise much of a muchness. And one thing I know for sure. They don’t just let you drive into these places. You have to register before you go in at park headquarters. And you have to de-register when you leave. If you don’t, they won’t let you in past the turnstile.’

  ‘So what?’ said Hart. ‘Are you saying we descend on the three of them while they’re busy filling in their entry forms?’

  ‘No,’ said Rider. ‘But a strange thing happened when we went to Simien.’

  ‘Which I’m sure you’re going to tell us,’ said Hart.

  Rider looked up from what he was doing. He gave Hart his most engaging grin. ‘Yes. Because they insisted each separate car take an armed guard with us all the time we were in the park.’ He nodded a few times like a man revisiting past accomplishments in his mind. ‘Didn’t cost us much. And the guy more than earned his tip collecting wood and making himself useful about the place. But he sat with us all the way through our visit, clutching his rifle to his chest. Never let the thing out of his sight. I suspect he was only there to frighten off the baboons if they got too curious.’ Rider allowed his grin to slip. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that Yangudi Rassa is twenty times the size of Simien. And it marks the split in the territory of two tribes, the Afars and the Issas, who hate each other’s guts with a vengeance. My guess is that they’ll have much the same system here. You register to go into the park, and you get your guard. And you don’t lose him again till you leave.’ He shrugged. ‘Do you reckon the Captain will know this? Because I don’t. It came as a total surprise to me when we entered Simien. Nobody warned me. Nobody said anything about it before it became a fait accompli. Truth to tell, it didn’t bother us any. But it’ll bother the hell out of the Captain and his chum. Even if the guard is a congenital idiot, he must realize that something is very wrong indeed with their set-up. That the girl is there under duress. They won’t want that.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we can use the armed guard for our own purposes?’ said Hart. ‘Pounce down on them and get him to do our dirty work?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Rider seemed almost irritated. ‘Our guard in Simien was about seventy years of age and half blind with it. I reckon the park authorities only use the position to pension off their grandfathers. No. I think when the Captain finds out about it, he’ll just refuse, turn round and head back the way he came in.’

  ‘Right into our laps, you mean?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Rider didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  ‘So what the hell do we do?’ said Hart. ‘Ram him? Like in the Battle of Actium?’

  Rider made a face. ‘Sounds like a plan. Anyone have any more bright ideas?’

  Amira shook her head. ‘I think you’re wrong, Rider. I don’t think he’ll turn round. I think he knows exactly where he’s going.’

  ‘How bloody come?’

  ‘Because when we smoked him out from the motel at Dire Dawa, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. He drove straight to A¯wash and hung a right. And even a cursory glance at the map shows that Ethiopia isn’t chock-full of alternatives. Once you’re on a road, you’re on it. Highway 1, which we’re following now, is the only main road in the whole area. Highway 2 is fifty miles to the west of us, with not a single road leading to it from Highway 1 until you get to Mile, eighty miles ahead of us inside the park. And down to the east of us there’s sweet fuck all for three hundred straight miles until you reach the Somali border. Unless you go back on your tracks, as you suggested, and follow the road we came in on.’

  ‘So?’ said Rider.

  ‘So my reading of the Captain tells me he’s heading north because he means to,’ said Amira. ‘Straight through the National Park. And guess what? Plum in the middle of the park you get to Mile, as I just said. And a few miles before you get to Mile you are presented with a choice. You either take Highway 1 back to Kombolcha, which is the only sensible way to get back to Addis should that happen to be your inclination, or you head on a few miles and hang a left west to Chifra, which will eventually take you back to Highway 2 and the road north. Straight towards the Eritrean border.’

  ‘But we’ve already discussed Eritrea,’ said Hart. ‘Only a maniac would head there. Didn’t Rider say something about being boiled alive in a hot kettle?’

  ‘Rider,’ said Amira, looking directly at Rider, ‘will say anything at all to get a reaction. He’s hard-wired that way. Like a kid perpetually asking his parents Why this? Why that? Why the other?’

  Rider gave a grunt. But he didn’t put up a fight.

  ‘So you think they’re headed for Eritrea after all?’ said Hart.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Amira. ‘The Eritreans are just
as corrupt as the Ethiopians. Maybe more so. And the Captain must surely have twigged that we’re journalists by now. We know for certain that he recognized you back at the motel because he made the pistol sign at you – that was recognition if ever I saw it. Pure hate. It wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together after that. And my guess is that Biljana will have had the good sense to feed him whatever information he wants about us as she must know it no longer matters worth a damn anyway. He’s already on his guard and he will remain so.’ Amira lit her second cigarette in as many minutes and blew a controlled stream of smoke out of the car window. ‘Added to which he has to think that we might benefit from a certain amount of pull in Addis thanks to the newspaper we work for. That if he goes anywhere near the capital he will risk being picked up. Out here, in the boondocks, he’s safe as houses. We’re hardly likely to fly in Delta Force to apprehend him, are we? And the local police clearly aren’t worth a damn. If he gets to Eritrea and manages to bribe his way across the border he’s home free. He and his chum can make for the coast and blag their way aboard a boat to the Yemen. The world’s his oyster after that.’

  ‘And Biljana?’ said Hart.

  ‘That’s obvious,’ said Amira. ‘She’ll be surplus to requirements.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that unless he’s bonded with her in some obscure way – surprised himself, and us, by a sudden unexpected surge of paternal feelings – he’ll act just like he’s always acted and get rid of her.’

  ‘Kill her, you mean?’ said Hart.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ said Amira. ‘As you say, she’s his daughter. Even if she’s one of possibly many. No. He’s made his contribution to the Serbian gene pool, and that’s as far as it probably goes with him. My guess is that he’ll simply dump her somewhere convenient when he has no more use for her. Most likely in Eritrea. And Christ alone knows where she’ll end up after that. She’s fifteen. And scared. And she’s female. Do I need to draw you a diagram?’ Amira twisted round in her seat. ‘You’re all that girl’s got in the world, John. No one else gives a damn. If you don’t reach her before he offloads her, no one will.’