Dictator (30 page)

Forget it. Carver had unfinished business of his own. As long as Mabeki was alive, he and Zalika would never be safe. Killing him was simply a matter of self-defence.

Carver drove past the Happy Valley race track where vast crowds gathered to watch the horses and, far more importantly to a population obsessed by gambling, wager huge sums on the results. Then the road dipped down into another tunnel that ran beneath the hills of the Aberdeen Country Park towards Aberdeen Harbour itself. That made sense. If you looked as horrifically recognizable as Moses Mabeki it was safer to quit Hong Kong on a fishing boat or even one of the speedboats that bobbed on the waters of the Aberdeen Marina than risk the multiple security procedures of an airport.

As Carver emerged from the tunnel and headed into Aberdeen, the Rolls-Royce came into view once again. Mabeki was swinging off the raised highway down a ramp that seemed to lead right into the heart of the great clusters of apartment buildings where the boat people of old had been resettled. From up on the raised highway, Carver could see that the towers were grouped in huge semi-circles and X-shapes, like fortified villages in the sky. He followed Mabeki down the off-ramp and saw his silver quarry up ahead, turning left into a side road. It wouldn’t be long now, Carver was sure of it.

Then he, too, turned left into the shadow of the towers.

71

The street was crowded with cars and people: a few white tourists who’d ventured inland from the scenic harbour-front, but mostly locals bustling purposefully to and fro, or standing in groups, talking and gesticulating with a vehemence and energy that belied the clichéd image of Chinese inscrutability.

Mabeki had parked the Rolls-Royce on the left-hand side of the road, about fifty yards ahead. He was standing by it, watching Carver’s Honda crawl towards him, hemmed in by cars and trucks, taunting Carver, challenging him to make the next move.

Carver pulled over to the left, double-parking and ignoring the horn-blasts and shouts from the drivers now half-trapped behind him as he got out of the car and tried to push his way through the crowds towards the Rolls-Royce. Mabeki stood quite still, just staring in Carver’s direction until he’d caught his eye. Then he raised a hand, waved mockingly and walked away, heedless of the fact that he was turning his back on an armed enemy, his tall, twisted figure towering over most of the people around him.

And he walked away alone.

The question ripped through Carver’s mind, driving every other thought from his head: what had Mabeki done with Zalika?

The Rolls-Royce was just ahead of him now, its boot pointing at him. Mabeki had left it unlocked so that it had opened a fraction. If Zalika was in there, she could get out, so why hadn’t she?

He ran through the possible reasons. She was bound and immobile. She was unconscious or even dead. And then it struck him that Mabeki had left him an invitation. ‘Open me,’ the boot seemed to be saying. ‘Open me and see what happens next.’

It would have been so easy for Mabeki to set a booby trap. Carver flashed back to the memory of Justus’s prized VW van: the nylon line and the hand-grenade that had blown when the door was opened. Was that what Mabeki had in store for him now? Or was his real aim simply to buy a little time?

The longer Carver stood around wondering what to do, the further away Mabeki would get.

‘Zalika,’ he called out, ‘are you there? You OK?’

There was no reply.

Carver moved closer to the boot, bent down and peered at the narrow opening, trying to spot any sign of a trap. Oh the hell with it. He’d had enough pussyfooting around. He grabbed the boot, swung it open with one swift movement …

And nothing happened. There was no explosion, no trap … and no Zalika.

But that was impossible. Carver had tracked the signal from her phone all the way from the Gushungos’ house. Mabeki hadn’t stopped at any point in the journey, apart from the delay at the tollbooth by the Western Harbour Tunnel. So where was the girl?

Frantically, irrationally, Carver opened the driver’s door of the Rolls, leaned in and peered into the interior as if there was some faint chance that Zalika might be sitting there. She wasn’t.

But her phone was sitting on the passenger seat. And it was ringing.

Carver picked it up. He pulled himself back out of the car, stood up again and looked down the street, searching for Mabeki, knowing that it would be his voice he heard as he pressed the ‘receive’ button and held the phone to his ear.

‘Goodbye, Reverend,’ said Mabeki. ‘Or rather, goodbye, Mr Carver. You will not see me or Miss Stratten again.’

The phone went dead. Carver hurled it to the ground, anger and frustration getting the better of him. Then he looked up again and the anger was replaced by the chilly realization of imminent danger. There were five men walking abreast across the pavement, barging people out of their way as they made their way towards the Rolls-Royce. But it didn’t take a genius to work out that it wasn’t the car they were aiming for. Mabeki had indeed set a trap for him. And it had just been sprung.

72

Just across the road, Carver saw a grocery store. It was about as basic as a shop could get – a single room, open to the street, with steel shutters at the front that could be drawn across like garage doors at the end of the day. He made his way smartly towards it, aware that he was being followed, the men fanning out behind him to block any possible attempt to run his way out of trouble. The man giving the orders was walking in the middle of the line. He sported a scraggly goatee beard and moustache and was wearing an old olive-green army shirt, unbuttoned over a black vest. He was about thirty yards away now. At a steady walking pace, that gave Carver around fifteen seconds’ start.

As he got closer to the store, Carver saw that a grey-haired old boy was sitting on a white plastic garden-chair to one side of the entrance. In front of him was a waist-high wooden counter. Cardboard boxes were piled up against the counter and along the side walls. Most of them were still taped shut, but the ones on the top row had been opened to reveal their contents. In the ones nearest him, Carver spotted a random collection of eggs – some regular, some pale blue, some covered in what looked like green mould – dried mushrooms, abalone and starfish, long-leaf Chinese lettuces in clear plastic bags, cooking sauces in glass bottles and folded cotton dishcloths. Above these boxes was an equally disordered collection of vegetables, dried goods and even sweets hung in plastic bags from hooks whose top ends were attached to metal rails suspended from the ceiling.

Behind the shopkeeper’s head, so that he could not look in it without turning round and craning his neck, was a mirror in which it was possible to see almost the whole interior of the shop. Two narrow lines of bare metal shelves – dirt-cheap free-standing units, rising above head-height – stretched about fifteen feet back to front through the store, creating three very narrow aisles, one by each of the two side walls and the third down the centre. There was a door in the far wall, opposite the centre aisle. Carver was counting on that leading to a rear exit from the building. Without it, he had no way out.

He walked into the store and started assembling his weapons. He picked up three of the sauce bottles, placed them on top of one of the dishcloths, then closed the corners of the cloth over them and twisted the ends so that the bottles were tightly trapped in the cloth. Now he had a crude but effective club. Keeping it tightly clasped in his left hand, he reached up with his right and unhooked a large net filled with bulbs of garlic. Carver removed the net and was left holding the hook in his right hand.

The only other customers in the store were a couple of middle-aged women a few feet away, who were chattering over a display of dried chillis arrayed by the side wall of the shop. Without any warning, making the change in his demeanour as extreme as possible, Carver took two paces towards them, raised the hook menacingly and shouted, ‘Bad men coming! Get out! Get out now!’

They glared defiantly at him and did not budge. One of them started shouting at him in Chinese. He got the feeling she wasn’t exactly passing the time of day. Carver didn’t have time to argue. He swept the hook along the shelf to his right, sending glass jars filled with something that looked like white testicles floating in brine crashing to the floor at the women’s feet. The one who’d been shouting shut up. The other one gave a little scream. Carver raised his hook at them again and this time they took the hint, hurrying past him, neither of them even as tall as his shoulder, out into the street.

As he watched them go, he could see that the five men were closing in on the shop. They were barely five yards away, walking with the steady, purposeful gait of professionals going about their business. Carver saw the shopkeeper catch sight of them, too, glance back at him, then dive beneath the countertop. Very sensible, Carver thought. Now it was his turn to save his skin.

He backed away to his left, into the aisle furthest away from the shopkeeper’s counter, letting the men come towards him. The aisle was so narrow, there would only be room for one man at a time to attack him.

Unless, of course, they came from two different directions at once.

The man in the army shirt pointed down the centre aisle and two men stepped towards it. They were going to try to outflank him. The leading man was dressed in jeans and a pale-grey hoodie top. The one behind him had on a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans from which a chain hung loosely. Wherever Carver went in the world, the punks always seemed to look the same.

Two more men stepped into the aisle where Carver was standing: a gaudy, short-sleeved floral shirt and a camouflage T-shirt. The one in the camo had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His pal wore metal-framed aviator shades.

Carver backed away from them.

As he went, he glanced up into the mirror. The two men in the centre aisle, the hoodie and the black T-shirt, were almost level with him.

Carver kept moving back. The men in his aisle kept pace with him, not closing the gap, waiting for the trap to close behind him.

Out of the corner of his right eye, Carver was looking at the goods on the shelves beside him. There were jars of herbs; more jars of some indeterminate bits of beige gristle with a picture of a snarling shark stuck to the glass; tins of vegetables … none of this was of any use to Carver. He was being backed all the way to the end of the aisle. He didn’t have any room for manoeuvre.

Then he saw packets of tea, racked from top to bottom.

Carver glanced back up at the mirror, stopped walking backwards and moved closer to the shelf till his right shoulder was almost touching the packets of tea. Then, still holding on to the hook, he smashed his right hand through the tea and out the far side of the shelf. He swung it forward and felt the impact as the end of the hook drove into the soft flesh at the base of the hoodie’s neck. He heard a gurgling yelp of pain and pulled the hook hard back towards him, slamming the hoodie into the far side of the shelf.

One down.

Carver let go of the hook, switched the bundled-up sauce jars to his right hand and in the same movement swung his right arm like a tennis backhand at the ponytailed punk in the camouflage T-shirt. The guy swayed back, but not enough to evade the blow entirely, and Carver hit him just above the right eye, drawing blood and making him stagger backwards. Carver drew back his arm and swung again, in a brutal downward chopping motion, hitting the forearm the man raised to protect himself, hearing the crack of a bone and then driving the heel of his left hand into the side of his face.

That was another man downed, for now at least. But it was also the end of the good news.

Carver felt a throat-tightening, nauseating shock of pain on the point of his left shoulder and realized that he wasn’t the only one smart enough to use a weapon. The dandy in the floral shirt and shades had flung one of the shark jars at him and was reaching for another.

Carver dived forward, rugby-tackling the dandy to the ground, then reaching out to grab his head and smash it into the shop’s tiled floor.

Behind him, he could hear scuffling as the fourth man rounded the far end of the shelf and came dashing towards him. Carver rolled on to his back and kicked out, catching an oncoming knee with his heel. The man in the black T-shirt staggered back a couple of paces, giving Carver the fractional amount of space and time he needed to spring to his feet and leap upwards to catch the suspended rail above his head, swing forward and hit Mr Black T-shirt smack in the face with both feet, sending him careering into several boxes of iced seafood lined up along the back wall.

Carver kept moving, allowing the momentum of the swing to pull his legs forward and up, letting go of the rail and executing a backward somersault, like a gymnast dismounting a high bar. A gymnast, of course, aims to land in a perfect upright position, with his feet close together. Carver, however, stumbled when his feet hit the floor and fell forward.

That was what saved his life.

The fifth man, the leader of the group in the army shirt, had evidently tired of the low-tech approach. If he couldn’t take Carver alive, he would have to take him dead. He’d reached round to the back of his trousers, pulled out the gun shoved inside the waistband and fired two shots that missed Carver’s head by inches and instead hit his pal in the black T-shirt, who had just been extracting himself from the seafood display and was staggering to his feet.

The group leader didn’t seem to care. He fired again, and Carver had to fling himself forward and scramble on all fours round the end of the aisle as bullets smashed into jars, ricocheted off the metal shelving and dug craters in the floor tiles. He got to his feet, came round the far side of the shelving, almost slipping on the blood that had spurted from his first victim’s neck wound, then hurled himself against the nearest shelf-unit with all his strength, pumping his legs to overcome the dead weight of all the goods stacked upon it until finally it toppled over, deluging the man in the army shirt in a hail of jars, cans and cardboard packets.