by Claire North
Then a voice speaks, and its French is heavily accented, and even through the language barrier I recognise that sound, and against the fire I recognise that shape, that height, that build, and the voice says, “We can’t stay here. Do we take him?”
And the voice is known, because it was once my own, a comforting heaviness as I twisted it round Turkish, Serbian and German, before shoving a sock in its mouth and leaving it handcuffed in silence to a radiator in Zehlendorf, all those faces ago, and the voice is that of Nathan Coyle, murderer, assassin, fanatic and, quite possibly, salvation.
His boss replies, “Take him,”
And this they proceed to do.
I sat, hands tied, head covered, in the back of a van in the middle of nowhere, and I prayed.
It had been a long, long time since I’d prayed.
I rocked, and in breathless Arabic I gabbled my imprecations to the All-Merciful, the All-Seeing, the Compassionate and Mighty, and when I’d run out of clichés, I babbled a few more things besides, until finally someone nearby shouted, “Will you please shut him up?!”
A gloved hand pulled the bag from my head, caught me by the chin, tugged my face round hard. I stared into eyes which had for so long regarded me with contempt from the bathroom mirror and heard a familiar voice proclaim in soft, poor French, “Quiet now. Or we’ll shut you up, understand?”
And for a moment I felt almost hurt that he didn’t recognise me, as if there might be something in my eyes, in a twitch of iris and a contraction of pupil which whispered, Hello, stranger.
“Please,” I whispered. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Coyle pulled the bag back over my head.
We slowed.
We stopped.
Hands pulled me from the vehicle. Through the cloth across my face I saw nothing, not even the glow of the moon.
A voice called, Kestrel, help me!
Arms linked arms with mine, one on either side, led me along tarmac, then gravel, then soil going steeply downhill. A rough path which slipped beneath my feet as I stumbled in the darkness. The sound of a stream rushing below, the cracking of twigs, stir of an engine growing distant. In the darkness a bird shrieked, its midnight rest disrupted by the intruders, and mud became pebble, became wet rounded stones, became a damp riverbed where I was pushed to my knees.
“Please don’t hurt me!” I wailed, in French, then Arabic, then French again. “I am Samir Chayet. I have a mother, I have a sister; please, I never did anything!”
Two – three at the most – bodies moved around me. They have taken me here to die.
“Please,” I sobbed, shaking in my bonds. “Please don’t hurt me.”
It’s OK to piss yourself in these circumstances. It’s only a physical thing.
The click of a gun near my head. This was not how I planned on things ending.
Janus.
Do you like what you see?
“Galileo.”
The word slipped from my lips, a bare breath in the dark, and instantly hands were there, grabbing me by the throat, pulling my head back and up, and though I couldn’t see him, I could feel Coyle’s body against mine, his hands wrenching me up. “What did you say?” he hissed. “What did you say?”
“Step back,” barked another, the man in charge, the man who, if I had to speculate, was going to do the killing.
“Galileo!” Coyle pulled the hood off my head and stared into my eyes, shook me and roared, “What do you know of Galileo?”
I stared up into his face and whispered, a bare breath in the cold night, “He lives.”
A shot in the dark, the single snap of a silenced pistol. I jerked, trying to work out where it had gone in. The hands that held me let go; I fell to my knees. So did Coyle. His face hovered an inch from mine, eyes wide, mouth shaping an O of surprise. I looked down at myself and saw no bullet wound. I looked up at him, and there was a shininess to his jacket, a growing patch of darkness that caught the torchlight and reflected it back crimson.
The crunch of the gunman’s boots behind me, and there’s only one him, it seems, just one man sent to kill two birds.
He looked past me into Coyle’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, raising the gun. “I have to follow orders.”
Overhead the clouds have cleared and the sky is sprawled with a thousand stars framing cliffs dug out by this busy little gorge. In daylight the place might have been beautiful: black stones washed with silver water. By torchlight strapped to the end of a silenced pistol it is a lonely place to die.
Coyle moved. In the dark I didn’t see his hand close around the gun, but I felt the movement, saw torchlight twist and turn, heard the double crack-crack of pistols firing, the ground briefly illuminated chemical-yellow, heard the smack of lead against bone. I looked up and saw the gunman, weapon held to fire. He took a step, and his foot slipped on the rocks. Took another, and his legs went out beneath him. He fell, head cracking open on the stony ground, arm slapping into the flow of the river.
Coyle fell. First onto his belly, then his face; twisted to one side, bounced on the wet stones.
The headlights of the van were high above us, and no one shouted, no one cried foul murder, no one came.
“Coyle!” I hissed, and he tried to raise his head at the name. “Cut me loose!” His head sank back on to the stones. “I can help you, I can help you! Cut me loose!”
I shuffled like an infant on my knees towards him, saw the light glisten on the blood where it was beginning to seep through his shirt. “Coyle!” His eyes were open, and he made no answer. I bent down towards his face. Only a thin pale line showed around his eyes, all other parts of his skin protected by layers of fabric, plastic and tape. But it was enough, so I bent down and kissed him on the softness of his eyes
pain
I bit back on a scream, stuffed my arm into my mouth to hold it in, shaking, shuddering pain rocking through my body. It ran through the tight muscles of my neck, through my locked-up belly, down to my knees and exited through the throbbing soles of my feet. It originated from a bullet, low calibre and slowed by a silencer, but still a bullet, wedged in my right shoulder, in a bundle of nerves that shrieked their distress, shredding thought and blurring all other sense. In front of me Samir Chayet swayed, blinking in the dark. I pushed myself up on my left arm, heard blood roar behind my ears as Samir began to whisper the usual refrain of what, where, how, his voice rising as the panic began to bite. I slid on to my knees, fumbled at my chest, my trousers, my belt, until I found a small blade. “Wait,” I whispered, and my voice was cracked, and as Samir spotted the rapidly cooling corpse to his left he began to shout, to cry out, to lament without much direction or sense.
“Wait,” I hissed again, pulling the balaclava from my face. “Stay still.”
He gasped in air as I rested the blade against his back, managed to pull down a sob. I turned the knife against the cable ties that bound his wrists and, with a jerk that nearly took me to the ground again, cut him free. He fell on to his hands and knees, shaking, and I rested the blade against his throat.
He froze, an animal locked in place. “Listen,” I hissed, first in Arabic, then in French, remembering that the Samir I had played was not the Samir I had been. “I’m losing a lot of blood here. Touch my skin.”
Terror, incomprehension in his eyes. I turned the knife a little with my wrist, letting him feel the scrape of it against his skin. “Touch my skin.”
I let the blade track his throat as he leaned into me, hands shaking, and as his skin brushed against the side of my face I threw the knife into the darkness of the river and
switched.
My heart was racing, piss in my pants, sweat on my back, eyes burning with tears wanting to be shed, but blessed relief! With a cry Coyle fell back on the ground, clutching the hole in his shoulder, and I rubbed blood back into my hands and hissed, “Coyle!” I scrambled over to him, felt the blood hot on his shirt. “Do you carry medical supplies?”
“The van,” he repl
ied. “In the van.”
“How far are we from a town?”
“Four miles, five – five!” His face twisted, legs kicked back against nothing as he writhed beneath me. Sometimes people writhe to get away from a thing that scares them, sometimes to remind themselves that they have a body beyond the pain. This was both.
“I can help you! I can get you away from here. Your own people have betrayed you – are you listening to me?”
A half-nod, a wheeze of broken bloody breath.
“I can get you out of here, get you medical attention, but you need to trust me.”
“Kepler?” Not much of a question, but he asked it anyway.
“I can help you, but you need to give me your call sign.” A half-laugh that quickly dissolved into the pain. “Coyle!” I snarled. “Kestrel – whatever your name is – they are going to kill you. I can keep you alive. Tell me.”
“Aurelius,” he wheezed. “My… call sign is Aurelius.”
I pressed my bare hand against his cheek. “If you’re lying,” I whispered, “we’re both dead.”
“You find out.”
“I need your clothes,” I said, reaching for his belt. His bloody hand pressed against my own, stopping it before I could undo the buckle. “I’ve seen it all before.” His hand didn’t move. “I need to hide my face.”
His hand fell away, and I pulled his trousers free one leg at a time. His shirt crackled like Velcro as I peeled it away from him. Beneath it he wore blue Lycra, the blood glistening, moving like a living thing as it filled the fibres. His trousers were too short, his jacket too tight, and I felt almost surprised. I slipped his balaclava over my face, smelt his sweat within it. I picked up his gun, checked the magazine, pressed my own discarded shirt against his wound, felt him flinch.
“You’ll be OK,” I murmured, and was surprised at how level my own voice seemed. “You’re going to make it.”
“You don’t know that,” he replied.
I pulled the magazine from my gun, threw it aside, buried my hands in my pockets so that no man might see the bare skin. I began to climb back up the muddy path, the crooked riverside made more treacherous by the rain, towards the light of the truck on the road above.
Chapter 72
I had counted eleven men who went to Saint-Guillaume to kill a cripple by the name of Janus.
Only three were waiting by the truck, parked on the roadside above a stream, its headlights burning white. Two of them had even begun to relax, their balaclavas off to reveal one man, one woman, cigarettes glowing between their bare fingers. Hard to strike a light when your fingers are muffled by wool and silk; harder still to enjoy a gasp when your face is hidden from view.
Perhaps they didn’t know the events by the river.
Perhaps they were to have been told that Coyle’s death was accident, not execution.
Perhaps they were only following orders.
My hands were in my pockets, and my face was covered by wool, and I was a familiar shape on a darkened night, and I was alone.
The man by the van turned as I approached, called out, “Herodotus?”
“Aurelius,” I replied, brisk and businesslike, then, “I think we’re going to need a hammer.”
Curiosity flickered on the face of the woman, but my words had been enough to carry me from the lip of the road to the back door of the van, an arm’s reach from the nearest man, and so, without further ado, I pulled my hands from my pockets, and before he could even register my bare flesh, pressed them against his exposed face and jumped.
An aluminium coffee mug fell to the ground, bouncing along the road and into the overflowing gutter; Samir Chayet staggered and blinked, hands rising to the unfamiliar balaclava against his skin, and I drew the gun off my hip and put one bullet in the thigh of the woman and another into the belly of the man who stood beside her. As they fell, I stepped forward, pulled their guns from their respective holsters and, having nothing better to do with them, tossed them down the ravine, listening to them clatter away in the dark. My weapon still raised, I shuffled round to the driver’s side of the van, and seeing no one inside, turned again to find Samir frozen in place, the balaclava limp in his hands.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re a nurse, yes? There’s a man down by the stream in a Lycra suit. I’d like you to get him for me. He’s been shot. These two have also been shot, though only time will tell if fatally. I’ll kill you, them and anyone else who passes by if you don’t do as I say, understand?”
He understood perfectly.
“Terrific,” I exclaimed with forced brightness. “I think I saw a torch in the driver’s compartment. I’ll watch for your light.”
Time moves more slowly in the dark.
A cheap plastic watch on my wrist glowed green, declaring the hour unsanitary for any reasonable thing. The sky’s enthusiasm for the night’s rain was fading to a thick sleepy mist that obscured the line where black cliff met starlight. I stood away from the headlights of the van, gun in pocket, torch in hand, and watched the tiny bubble of Samir’s light moving by the stream far below.
Of the two individuals I’d shot, the man with the belly wound had lost consciousness, a mercy, I felt, for all concerned. The woman was awake, her hands pressed over her thigh, her breath fast and ragged, eyes full of pain. The blood through her fingers and the blood on the tarmac was bright and thin where torchlight touched it, black and endless when the light turned away. I’d missed her femoral artery, as her continued ability to breathe demonstrated, though she seemed unwilling to thank me for this.
I leaned against the side of the van and finished their coffee.
No one felt the urge to communicate.
Samir’s light began to ascend. I waited, torch turned towards the top of the path, for the two muddy figures to emerge. Coyle had one arm across Samir’s back, the other curled into his own shoulder where the blood still burned between his fingers. He looked, in the unforgiving beam of my torch, pale and grey, a blueish tinge to his lips. Samir’s face was bursting red, teeth locked together with effort, lips peeled back like a horse ready to bolt.
“Put him inside,” I said, gesturing to the back of the truck.
“What did you do?” Coyle breathed, his gaze skimming over the two fallen figures.
“Their boss shot you. I wasn’t about to to ask for company policy.”
Coyle didn’t cry out as Samir eased him on to the vehicle floor, which I took for a bad sign. “You’re a nurse – do something.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
When I’d asked the same question, I’d done so in shaking Arabic, but now I heard Samir speak, his voice was clear confident French with a thick southern accent. In a way I felt the performance of Samir I’d given suited his features more than the reality he now presented. “I give you my word that if you patch this man up I will let you live. And if you run I’ll kill you and everyone here. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know you.” I felt a flicker of admiration. Shaking, frozen Samir Chayet, who’d woken in the dark with his hands tied, was standing his ground in the middle of the night.
“Nor do you understand what happened, how you came to be here. Yet the simple fact is you can take a risk and run, or you can take a risk and stay, and with only the bare minimum of information available you must decide which is the greater.”
He weighed up his options and chose the wiser.
Five minutes later, he said, “This man needs blood.”
“Know your type?” I asked Coyle.
“Sure,” he growled from the floor of the van. “You know yours?”
“My friend is such a wag,” I confided to Samir. “He tries to cultivate this dry manly wit.”
“Nonetheless,” said the nurse, “he needs blood, or I can’t promise what will happen.”
“I’ll get right on that. Keep the first-aid kit; the two folk bleeding outside the van are probably going to want it. One of them might have a mobile phone. I suggest you call the police
– only the police – just as soon as we’re gone.”
Chapter 73
Samir Chayet was a black silhouette in the rear-view mirror as I drove away. For less than eight hours I’d worn him, and his life would never be the same.
Coyle lay on the floor of the van behind me, one hand pressed to the dressing against his shoulder, his breath ragged, his skin grey. I’d put his jacket back around his shoulders, a blanket round his legs, and still he shivered, teeth clattering as he said, “What now?”
“Ditch the van. Get you to a doctor.”
“Am I your hostage?”
“That sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Why would you help me?”
“Help myself. Always. You going to stay awake?”
“You going to sedate me?”
“No.”
“Then I’m staying awake.”
I drove north, following the largest signs to the biggest roads. Judging from the water-carved crevices and black pines of the hills, I guessed I was heading deeper into the Massif Central, hunting out the lone motorway that had been forged across dry plateaux and sodden valleys of volcanic black. A phone rang on the passenger seat beside me; I ignored it. A few minutes later it rang again.
“You going to answer that?”
Coyle’s voice, a bare shimmer from the back.
“Nope.”
Sodium lighting announced the advent of the motorway. The signage promised turnings to ancient castles and towns of skilled artisans. The towns of skilled artisans offered medieval walls, Cathar monuments, Templar secrets, Hospitaller coats of arms, tourist shops in whose darkened windows hung swords, shields and ancient sigils, and perhaps drugs.
The phone rang again.
I ignored it.
Rang again.
Ignored it.
On the edge of a town I pulled into an empty supermarket car park.
