Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  Brooke looked up at Ben with a gasp. ‘It’s him. The man I punched. One of the kidnappers.’

  ‘Shame the silly bastard forced us to kill him,’ Ben said. ‘He might have been useful.’

  ‘What would you have done with him afterwards?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be as bad as what I’d have done to him,’ she said. And Ben could believe it. He gathered up the fallen guns, then quickly searched the other bodies. None of the dead men was carrying anything like a wallet, but he found two phones which he tossed in his bag along with the weapons. ‘For future reference,’ he said. ‘As in, right now it’s time we got the hell out of here.’

  ‘I agree.’

  The loud gunshots must have resonated all through the building, because the landings and stairways all the way down to the ground floor were deserted and empty, and not a single face dared to peep out from behind a door to see what was going on. Ben and Brooke made it out into the street unchallenged. If anyone had called the cops, they were still a long way off, and that suited Ben fine. The car was just a short distance away. ‘Walk, don’t run,’ he said to Brooke. ‘Don’t act like you just shot four men.’

  ‘You’re the one who shot them,’ she said.

  ‘Think I overreacted?’

  ‘They were lucky.’

  Chapter 39

  Ben and Brooke were halfway to the car when the skies finally opened and the rain came sheeting down, bouncing hard off the pavements and almost instantly burbling in rivulets through the gutter. In which case it was okay to run the rest of the way, since that was what everyone else was doing as they fled for cover, prostitutes and drug dealers included. They jumped into the Jaguar and took off, heading in no particular direction.

  Ben cut randomly through the streets of northern Delhi at an even but brisk pace for twelve minutes, long enough to put plenty of distance between themselves and the crime scene. In any Western city they would have left a CCTV trail a blind man could follow. If there was anything good about the chronic backwardness of India’s capital, it was that the tentacles of Big Brother electronic surveillance had yet to start encroaching on its citizens.

  He found a quiet street flanked by dark buildings that looked too derelict to be habitable, though he was sure they were filled with twenty people to a room like every other possible living space in Delhi. Signs and awnings hung all over the street. By day the place was probably heaving with traffic and bustling crowds and all the usual stalls and music and colour and noise, but now it was still and empty as a ghost town, slicked by the torrential rain. He pulled up at the kerbside and killed the engine, lights and wipers. Water cascaded down the windows, blurring the outside world. It was like being in a car wash.

  ‘We still have to get to Rakhigarhi,’ Brooke said. ‘But not without the map. We’ll have to try getting it from the house, Ben. It’s got to be worth the risk. Or else we do without the map altogether.’

  Ben said nothing. His first priority was organising the small arsenal of weapons he’d collected. He reached behind him for his bag and spent a few moments reloading the Webley revolver, which he then passed to Brooke. The pipsqueak .32 automatic and their newly-acquired .38 snubby would each fit her hand better, but he wanted to be sure she’d knock down what she fired at, instead of just tickling it. Nothing like a big-bore hand cannon for that job. ‘You know how to work this thing?’

  ‘It’s not rocket science. Point and squeeze. I’ve seen what it can do. Do you think I’ll need it, or is that a silly question?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not. But I’ll feel better.’

  Then Ben inspected Haani’s Browning. Still fully loaded, thirteen in the mag, one in the chamber. Plus enough spare ammo to start a small war. He stuck the Browning in his belt. It felt comfortable and familiar there. Back in business.

  ‘What about Rakhigarhi?’ she asked.

  ‘First let’s see what we’ve got,’ he said.

  He reached into his bag for the two phones they’d taken from the dead attackers. One was a Xiaomi, the other a Samsung, both of the cheap pay-as-you-go variety, likely bought for cash, no names, no contracts, zero traceability. Not the best start, but you had to work with what you had. He gave the Samsung to Brooke, and they sat in silence as they started scrolling through the menus in search of information. The only sound was the drum of rain on the car roof and the light tick-tick of Brooke’s fingernails on phone keys.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if it’s been used much,’ Brooke said after a few moments. ‘Message inbox and outbox are both empty. So’s the contact list.’

  ‘Same with this one,’ Ben said. He checked the call record and found nothing there either, either incoming or outgoing. Either the phone was virgin new and completely unused, or the deceased former owner had been in the habit of routinely erasing everything for the sake of operational security. The deleted items could probably be retrieved from the device’s backup memory, but Ben was damned if he knew how.

  So far, not so good.

  Then Brooke said, ‘Wait, here we go. I have numbers.’ She held the phone up to show him. Ben peered at the tiny lit-up screen in the darkness. She said, ‘Actually, just the one number. From another mobile. It comes up in the sent menu seven times and in the call inbox nine times.’

  ‘So, someone he’s in regular contact with.’

  Brooke shrugged. ‘Doesn’t have to mean anything. It could be his mother.’

  ‘Then again, it could be the boss of the whole kidnap and murder operation.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘We can’t trace it,’ Ben said. ‘So there’s only one thing we can do. Call it.’ He took out his own phone. ‘From this one, so they don’t recognise the number.’

  ‘And say what?’

  ‘What’s a really common surname in India?’ he asked.

  Brooke replied, ‘The most common is Singh. There are about thirty-six million of them. Followed by Kumar. Just over thirty million of those, if I remember rightly.’

  Ben looked at her. ‘Why would you even know that?’

  She shrugged. ‘I married an Indian guy. I wanted to learn about the culture.’

  ‘Fair enough. Then ask to talk to Mr Singh. With a bit of luck they’ll say, “Sorry, wrong number, this is Mr Such-and-such.”’

  Brooke looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know. Would that work?’

  ‘It’s worked for me,’ Ben said. ‘Just the one time, about eight years ago.’

  ‘Long shot,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing to lose.’ He gave her the phone.

  She flinched. ‘What, you want me to do it?’

  ‘Better coming from a woman,’ he said. ‘A man is more likely to open up to you. It’s a guy thing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re the psychologist,’ he said. ‘You tell me.’

  Brooke took a deep breath, then started dialling the number into Ben’s phone. She suddenly paused. ‘What if his name actually is Singh?’

  ‘Then we’ll know something about him,’ Ben said. ‘It’s called gathering intelligence.’

  ‘One out of thirty-six million people with the same surname. That’ll really narrow it down.’

  ‘Just do it,’ he said.

  Brooke keyed in the rest of the number, then thumbed the call key and flicked back her hair and tentatively held the phone to her ear. She closed her eyes, waiting. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed nervously. Ben heard the faint beeps of the dial tone muted against her skin. Then the sound of a voice answering the call. A man’s voice.

  Brooke tensed as she went to speak, then closed her mouth and said nothing. The man’s voice went on talking, and Ben realised that the call had gone to voicemail. He said, ‘Hang up, we’ll try again later.’

  But Brooke didn’t hang up. She was clenching the phone tightly against her ear. Her whole body rigid as she listened to the answerphone message. She was staring at the rain-washed windscreen as if she’d seen a cobra coming at her
through the glass.

  Ben said, ‘What?’

  She shushed him. When the message had finished playing, she ended the call before the beep and then hit redial to listen to it again.

  Ben could tell something was up. ‘What?’ he repeated.

  She shushed him again, more impatiently. She listened to the message to the end a second time, then did the same thing and redialled the number to play it back a third time.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, holding the phone out to him. Her voice was strangled and urgent.

  ‘Just tell me,’ Ben said.

  ‘Oh, Ben, please will you shut up and listen,’ she hissed at him.

  So Ben took his phone back from her, and put it to his own ear, and listened.

  The answerphone message said:

  ‘Hello, you have reached the voicemail of Prem Sharma. I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you would like to leave your name and number after the beep I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’

  Chapter 40

  Ben ended the call and laid the phone on the dash. He said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting.’

  Brooke was staring at him in the darkness. The rain was drumming harder than ever on the car roof and cascading down the windows.

  She said, ‘But what on earth does it mean?’

  ‘It means that the bad guy with the broken tooth who kidnapped your husband made seven phone calls to the guy who works for the Ray family. And received nine from the same person. Which amounts to quite a correspondence. And tells us that your friend Prem Sharma isn’t quite who he appears to be.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Ben fired up the car. The engine roared, the headlamps stabbed rainy searchlight beams deep into the night and the wipers slapped a torrent of water clear of the glass. He replied, ‘Slight change of plan. Rakhigarhi will have to wait. We’re going to go back to the house and pay a visit to Prem.’

  ‘I’ll shoot him,’ Brooke said.

  ‘First he needs to tell us how he’s mixed up in this, and what’s going on. Then you can shoot him.’

  ‘Right between the eyes. If any harm has come to Amal. And even if it hasn’t. I swear, Ben, I will.’

  ‘One step at a time,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

  Neither of them spoke again for a while, as Ben sliced diagonally south-east back across the city towards the Ray residence. The rain was falling even harder now, cannoning off the windscreen like hail, the wipers working full tilt. Brooke rummaged in the glove box, found a small cable with a jack plug on one end and a USB connector on the other and used it to hook Ben’s phone up to the car’s audio system so they could both hear. Then she tried calling Prem’s number again, but it was still engaged. She sat back in the passenger seat, seething with rage.

  The revelation of Prem’s involvement in the situation was a weird, baffling twist that Ben couldn’t figure out at all, so rather than burn his brain out trying to understand, he kept his mind blank and focused on driving them there as fast as he could through the downpour. Brooke’s presence next to him felt like a volcano ready to erupt. He knew her thoughts were boiling, but the fact that she stayed silent made it clear that she had no more of a clue what this was about than he did.

  Meanwhile, the character of the city morphed radically in front of their eyes as they left the poverty and the squalor far behind them and neared the suburban havens where the other half lived. The closer they got to the Ray residence, the more Ben could feel Brooke tensing up in anticipation. She had her ethnic embroidered handbag on her lap with the loaded revolver in it, and a determined set to her jaw. To face an angry Brooke was a daunting prospect, as Ben knew from personal experience. He wouldn’t have wanted to be in Prem’s shoes for anything, once they reached the house.

  But they didn’t get as far as the house.

  Three blocks before the security checkpoint, a small two-seater Audi roadster Ben had seen before darted out of the junction fifty metres ahead, gave a momentary rear-end wobble as its wheels lost traction on the rain-slicked road and accelerated smartly away from them, its tail-lights receding fast into the night. Moving at an urgent pace.

  ‘That’s Prem’s car,’ Brooke said, pointing after it.

  ‘Going off in an awful hurry,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe that’s why he’s not answering his phone. Something on his mind?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ she said.

  ‘You bet. Hold onto your hat.’

  The Audi was definitely in a hurry, and it had a head start on them. But Ben had no intention of letting Prem get away. He put his foot down hard and the eight-speed automatic gearbox dropped a few notches and the supercharged engine rocketed the car like a spurred horse, pressing them back in their seats. Fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five. The shrinking tail-lights of the Audi started growing larger, but then the difference levelled out and the Audi matched their pace. Ben needed to keep Prem in his sights without drawing attention to himself, which wasn’t such an easy thing on the quiet, near-empty roads of a wealthy suburb at night. A couple of junctions later, they were heading into thicker traffic and Ben became less worried about Prem noticing the Jaguar’s headlights in the mirror.

  Then, without warning, the Audi darted into a sharp turn; then another, then up a slipway that took them onto the city’s inner ring road. Ben followed and watched as Prem forced himself into the three lanes of cars and trucks and motorbikes that were ploughing doggedly through the pelting rain, a slow-moving, meandering, two-way river of light, red in one direction, white in the other. But Prem wasn’t slowing down for anything. Foot to the floor, he carved a weaving slalom through the sluggish traffic as though it was standing still.

  Ben had no choice but to keep up with him. Trees and barriers and light posts zipped past in a blur. The Audi’s tail-lights were just smudges of red through a veil of rainwater spray thrown up in its wake. Eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five. Twice, then three times, then four times, the Audi came within a hair-raising inch of colliding with another vehicle as it went screaming by them. The Jaguar was just getting warmed up, but how long this could go on without the police jumping on their tail or Prem causing a massive pile-up, Ben couldn’t say.

  ‘He’s crazy,’ Brooke said. She was clutching the grab handle above her window and braced in her seat.

  ‘Or scared half to death,’ Ben said. ‘But of what?’

  ‘You think he’s spotted us?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Whatever’s got him rattled up like this, it’s not what’s behind him. He’s way too preoccupied to even know we’re here.’

  ‘Let’s see.’ With her free hand she tried his phone again, turning up the car stereo volume to be heard over the engine noise. Like before, the engaged tone came loud and clear through the speakers. ‘I can’t believe he’s talking on the phone while driving like that. He’ll kill himself.’

  ‘He might not be. Could just be trying to get through to someone.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Just a feeling,’ Ben said. ‘He’s clearly in a hell of a panic.’

  Moments later, they got a phone call that proved Ben’s feeling right. It came from the Xiaomi, one of the phones that they’d taken from the dead men at Haani’s apartment building. Brooke quickly unplugged Ben’s phone from the car audio system and connected the Xiaomi in its place, then hit reply. She glanced at Ben, as if to ask, ‘What do I say?’ Ben took a hand off the wheel and put his finger to his lips. Say nothing.

  Brooke stayed quiet as the call connected. The caller hesitated and said nothing either, obviously taken aback by the strange silence on the line. In the background they could hear the ambient noise of the inside of a vehicle moving at speed and the slap of wipers working full pelt. No great mystery where the call was coming from.

  Ben half expected the caller to hang up. But then the person on the other end broke the silence, and there was no question that the voice they could hear on the other end of the line, amplified in crisp, ri
ch, deep tones and filling the Jaguar’s cockpit, was Prem’s. But not the calm, confident Prem who’d picked Ben up from the airport and shown him around the Ray residence. This Prem was babbling as fast as he could get the words out and sounded agitated to the point of wildness.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Sanjay, is that you? I’ve been trying to get through to you, man. And Vijay, and Dhruv, and Ramesh. Where the fuck is everybody? I’ve got to talk to someone. Takshak called me earlier and now he won’t pick up my calls. What’s happening?’

  Brooke glanced at Ben. Ben put his finger back to his lips. Don’t answer him.

  Prem waited a beat for a reply, then said, ‘Hello? Sanjay? Speak to me. Hello?’

  Ben took the finger from his lips and drew it across his throat in a slicing motion, like a knife blade. Cut him off.

  Brooke shut down the call and turned to him. Up ahead, Prem was driving more crazily and erratically than ever. She said, ‘You were right. He’s in total panic, trying to get through to these people.’

  ‘And Sanjay, Vijay, Dhruv and Ramesh are members of the crew,’ Ben said. ‘Or were. Four names, four dead men we left behind at Haani’s building tonight.’

  ‘Plus a fifth. Takshak. Strange name.’

  ‘Because it’s not a real name,’ Ben said, recalling it from the dim and distant past of his student days. ‘Takshak was one of the Nagaraja in Hindu mythology. The most venomous and feared of the snake gods.’

  ‘Only you would remember something like that at a time like this.’

  ‘It sounds like the snake guy is the leader of the gang. And it sounds like Prem’s having some trouble with him.’

  ‘But why’s he even involved with them? What the hell’s going on?’

  Ben replied, ‘I reckon we’ll find out soon enough.’