Evolution of Fear (13 page)

She’d stormed from the room, locked herself in the bathroom. She was in there a long time. When she finally opened the door she pushed past him without a word, went straight to the desk, started writing.

He lay on the bed, watching her work.

After a while he went and stood behind her, took her hair in his hand.

‘I am finishing this story,’ she said, not looking up. ‘And then I am going back to Cyprus.’

It took him a long time to reply. ‘Cyprus is the worst place you could go,’ he said finally. ‘You heard what that asshole Erkan said.’

‘I will not be intimidated, Claymore.’

‘We pissed a lot of people off with what we did in Yemen, what we did to Medved. And I’m telling you they want us dead. Both of us. There’s a two-million-pound hit out on me, Rania. Do you understand what that means? Every hired gun for a thousand miles is looking for me, looking for
us
. I was followed from the airport. You were followed yesterday. We were almost taken just now. It’s only a matter of time till they find us.’

She turned to face him. She looked scared. Good.

‘I must go to Cyprus,’ she said.

He put his hand on hers, tried to be gentle. ‘I’m known there, Ra. So are you now, by the sounds of it.’

‘Can you not see how important this is?’

‘This thing you’re getting mixed up in, this feud between Erkan and Chrisostomedes, there’s no high ground, Rania. Let them go and
screw each other. They’ll do fine without any help from you. It’s not worth risking your life for.’

She looked down, closed her eyes, dark lashes trembling. ‘I promised, Claymore.’

‘Promised who?’

She tried to spin away, but he held her fast.

‘Who, Rania? Who did you promise?’

‘Hope,’ she said. ‘I gave my word that I would help her, Claymore. She is all alone, fighting for the survival of a species, a whole race of creatures who have lived here for hundreds of millions of years.’

‘They’ve had their run, then,’ said Clay. ‘That’s a hell of a lot longer than we’ll have, I reckon.’

‘Do not say that, Claymore. It is not worthy of you. What else matters, if not life?’

‘Jesus, Rania. They’re only fucking turtles.’ He regretted it as soon as he said it.

Rania jerked her head up, eyes blazing. She whipped her free hand up and open palmed him across the face, snapping his neck back.

Clay stumbled back, put a knee down, raised his stump to his cheek. ‘Jesus. What was that for?’

‘For everything,’ she hissed. ‘For not trying hard enough.’ Her gaze ripped into him.

Clay said nothing, just stared back at her, trying to understand.

‘
Good
, Claymore. That’s what this is about: good.’

He wanted to ask her exactly what this obscure notion of good actually was. A decade ago, he was told that dead SWAPO terrorists made the world a better place, and he was rewarded for killing them. For a while, he’d even believed it. Then, in his work, he’d helped the clearing of forests to feed the multitudes, justified the dredging of reefs for new marinas, helped permit factories that made near-new junk, which was chucked into landfills within weeks of being produced, which meant more factories producing even better replacements, keeping thousands of people busy. It was all ‘good’. But he did not say any of it. The streets outside ran a current of steel.
The air was thick with a haze of ozone and diesel that seemed to dematerialise buildings only car-lengths away. The sun’s disc, faint and forlorn in what should have been a blue sky, fought to pierce the blanket that strangled the city. All of this, but he said nothing.

‘It was you who did this, Clay. You.’ She jammed her free hand into his chest, tried again to push him away. ‘And you were right. I know now what my life is for, why I have been put on this earth. You helped me see it, even if you seem to have forgotten.’

‘For God’s sake, Rania. The Greeks and Turks have been killing each other for centuries. Do you really think you’re going to change anything?’

She was crying now, tears falling from her eyes like broken glass, hard and angular. ‘Do you remember what you said to me, when we were piecing the Yemen story together?’ She moved her face closer to his, inches only between their lips. ‘You said, “
this matters
”. I can see it as clearly as if it was now, sitting together on that rock overlooking the glacier.’

Clay stared into the depths of her eyes, the swirling nebula.

‘Well
this
matters, Claymore. And because this matters, so do I. Do you understand? Good is rewarded ten-fold. It is in the
Al- Anaam
, Claymore. I have repeated it since I was a little girl, but I had never really understood what it meant. You showed me. And I will always love you for it. Even if you don’t.’ She pulled her hand away, turned back to her desk.

Clay walked out to the balcony, breathed in a lungful of Istanbul smog, watched the sun starting to slant long across the Bosphorus, Asia Minor falling into darkness. The call to prayer drifted across the Golden Horn, a hundred voices raised to God. Clay wondered if He was listening.

After a while he heard her pick up the phone, dial. She asked for Hamour. A moment of quiet, car horns complaining from the street below.

Perhaps they could send Hamour to have a look at the documents. He was the senior AFP person in the country, after all. Then
they could hire a car, drive overland into Greece, take a ferry to Cyprus or get someone to deliver
Flame
to Athens, then sail to Egypt and through the canal. And then? Suddenly the world seemed a very small place. He could hear her describing the outline of the story now, that newspaper language she spoke so well. She was excited, knew she was on to something, a crusader. Then, mid-sentence, she stopped. He heard her gasp, the distorted voice on the other end of the line speaking rapidly. He turned. She was sitting at the desk, the receiver clamped to her ear, her mouth agape, shock in her eyes, confusion. Her lower lip started to tremble. She raised her hand to her mouth and shut her eyes. Then she mumbled something into the phone and placed it gently in its cradle, sat staring at it.

Clay stepped forward. ‘What is it, Rania? What’s wrong?’

She looked up at him as if she wasn’t sure who he was.

‘LeClerc,’ she mumbled.

Clay said nothing, waited for her to continue.

‘He is dead, Claymore. Murdered. They found in him in a flat in Paris this morning, castrated, disfigured. Oh,
mon dieu
.’ She buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

Clay stood a moment watching her cry. Then he walked to the armoire, pulled out Rania’s case, opened the bureau and started packing her things.

Rania looked up. ‘What are you doing?’ she managed through her tears.

‘We’re leaving. Now.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Africa.’

‘No. Cyprus.’

‘We’ll find a place. Get married.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Yes you can.’

No answer.

He stopped packing and turned to look at her. ‘Understand, Rania. Please. They burnt your house down. God knows what’s
become of your friend Debret. Now they’ve killed LeClerc. You’re next. That’s what they wrote on the wall, in Eben’s blood, with a fucking brush for God’s sake:
she’s next
.’

Her eyes widened a moment, fixed him with a stare full of realization, horror. Then she turned away. ‘She is not my friend, Claymore.’

‘Who?’ he stumbled. ‘Who isn’t?’

‘Héloïse. Madame Debret.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She is my aunt, Clay. My father’s sister.’

Clay paused for a moment, thinking back. ‘All the more reason to go.’

‘I have to go back to Cyprus. There are things … things you do not know.’

Clay looked down at his feet on the Turkish carpet, back into those eyes. ‘Jesus, Ra, you could fill a planet with them.’

‘I am serious, Clay. I should have told you sooner, but…’ She looked out of the open windows.

‘What is it, Rania? Tell me.’

She picked up the telephone, looked at it a moment as if not quite sure that it was working, that the message it had delivered was real, then replaced it. She sat on the end of the bed. ‘When you were away, when I was in Cyprus, I met someone,’ she said, her voice flat, as if she’d given up on something.

Clay’s insides turned to calcite. This, then, was the ‘too much’.

‘I was lonely. I was angry. I did not plan it. It just happened. I should have ended it, right then, after that first time, but,’ she sobbed, wiped her eyes, ‘but I did not. I had convinced myself that it was over between you and me, that there was nothing for us, Claymore, no future.’ She lay on the bed and curled up on her side, foetal, her hands covering her face.

Clay stood looking down at her, calculating, trying to wrap logic around something that had no substance, no boundary conditions. Finally he said, hard: ‘Is it over now?’

She sobbed. ‘No.’

‘Do you love him?’

She lay crying, didn’t answer. Then she mumbled, ‘There is something else.’

‘Answer me.’

She lowered her hands, looked at him through eyes streaked black with mascara. ‘Not him, Clay,’ she whispered. ‘Her.’

Clay stared down at the woman on the bed, this woman he thought he knew, unable to process the information being shunted through the war-torn pathways to his brain. Eben dead, Medved and Crowbar closing in, LeClerc tortured to death, Rania's aunt missing. And this. This dagger. Jesus Christ. He clasped his hands behind his head, no, his hand, put the stump over it, flexed his arms, took a deep breath, fought for control.

The telephone rang.

It was the hotel proprietor, Clay's friend. ‘Mister Clay,
Efendi
. Please can you come down to the lobby? Something has just occurred which I … I am unsure of … but…' He sounded shaken, spooked.

Clay put down the phone. ‘I'm going down to the lobby,' he said, his tone harsher than he wanted, stained with hurt. ‘Stay here. Lock the door.'

She looked up at him from the bed, through tears. ‘What is it, Claymore?'

‘I don't know. Just pack and get ready to leave. I'll be back in a minute.'

He left her curled up on the bed, closed the door behind him, walked down the creaking hardwood corridor to the wide, carpeted stairway, down four flights, watching the steel counterweights and cablework of the lift hissing through the stairwell's hollow core.

The proprietor was waiting for him in the lobby. His hair – normally perfectly parted – was a mess, his tie askew, buttons missing from his jacket.

‘What the hell happened?' Clay said in Turkish.

The proprietor did not answer, led him instead behind the main desk, past an equally frightened looking clerk and into his office. He closed the door, sat behind his desk. His face was pale, moist. He looked up at Clay, straightened his tie and swept his dark hair back out of his eyes. ‘A man came into the hotel a few minutes ago,
Efendi
. He was asking for a Mister Greene. Declan Greene. He had a gun.'

The proprietor fumbled a cigarette out his pack, put it between his lips, struck his lighter once, twice, and held a trembling flame to it. ‘He showed me a photo of you,
Efendi
,' he said, letting the smoke stream back out through his nostrils. ‘He asked if I had seen you, if you had been in the hotel.'

‘I didn't want to involve you in this, my friend,' said Clay. ‘I'm sorry.'

The proprietor waved this away. ‘Of course, I said I'd never seen or heard of this person. But then he became angry. He came behind the desk and pushed me into the wall, told me that if I saw you I should call him immediately. He threatened my family.' The proprietor slid a card across the desk. ‘He gave me this.'

Clay picked up the card. Just a plain piece of white card with a handwritten string of digits. ‘What did he look like?'

‘He was well built, tall.
Çirkin
. Ugly. Foreign, by his accent.' The proprietor pointed towards the front door. ‘He turned left, walking towards the bridge, no more than five minutes ago.'

‘Thank you my friend,' said Clay. ‘I promise you won't have any more trouble.'

‘
Beyfendi
, please, there is something else. I have telephoned some of my colleagues. It seems this man has been making similar visits to other hotels in Tepebaşi.'

Clay turned the card over in his fingers and handed it back to the proprietor. ‘He doesn't know where we are. Not yet, anyway. He's guessing. Can I ask you for one last favour, please,
arkadaşım?
'

The proprietor exhaled smoke. ‘Not, I hope, the last. It is my business after all.'

Clay smiled. ‘Of course.
Teşekur
.'

‘You will be careful, yes?'

‘Of course. Please can you phone one of the hotels nearby, one that he's just been to, a friend you can trust. Ask him to call the guy, tell him he's seen me, that I'm there now wanting to book a room.'

The proprietor picked up the telephone. It was an old-style rotary model with a built-in cradle, black, heavy. He dialled, spoke, listened. Then he replaced the receiver.

‘An old friend,' he said. ‘The Erdoğan hotel. On Tepebaşi Street, towards the bridge. Not far. He's making the call now.'

Clay took his friend's hand and clasped it. Looked into his eyes. ‘
Teşekur
,' he said. Thanks. ‘
Çok
.' Much.

Outside the air was cool, benzene fresh. Clay pulled his cap down low over his eyes, pushed up his collar and started towards the bridge. Whoever was tracking them was getting close. The proprietor had deflected them, but for how long? Clay needed to know who was hunting them and why, and he was going to find out. And then they were going to leave.

Cars rolled past. Shop lights flickered, pulsed. He scanned the street, people moving along the pavements, a businessman swinging a folded umbrella, a couple of Turkish teenagers dressed like American kids, Keds sneakers and jeans. He kept to the shadows, moving quickly.

She. Hope. Hope Bachmann. It was obvious. Not that it made much difference who it was. The hole inside would feel just as rawsided, just as big. The Erdoğan hotel was close now, its blue neon sign glowing up ahead. He quickened his pace as he passed a string of shops dug into the grey granite bases of nineteenth-century monoliths and soon came to the wall of a mosque. He stopped there, in the shadow of the wall, the minarets soaring above him, lay back a moment against the headstone cold surface and tried to focus on the street, the people coming in and out of the hotel. All of the buried loss, the forlorn hope that had shadowed him like a wild dog over days and years crystallised before him. That feeling of being so close to something, almost able to reach out and touch it, and then to
watch it disappear and there's not a thing you can do about it. Lights blurred. The street began to warp and distend, a flexing chainmail of interlocking plates. He rocked, steadied. Jesus. He had no right to this, this indulgence. No right to her. Any part of her. Or her forgiveness. What a
dof
he'd been. Fucking idiot. Putting himself into a situation like this, breaking the rule he'd given himself all those years ago, the promise he'd broken in Yemen, broken for her:
don't care, and it can't hurt you
. Vertigo came. He bent double, tried to breathe, to steady himself. A thousand screaming voices rose in his head, pierced its thin, insufficiently evolved shell of bone, burst into the air around him like shrapnel.

His hand found the rough cutwork of the wall. He breathed deep, pushed his back into the stone, clawed at it, fighting to hold on to its solidity. This way he rode the storm, bore its phases like the habits of an old friend. The first few years after the war, young still, each episode had been a new experience in isolation, confusion and fear. It had taken him years to learn how to cope. It hadn't been till much later, in London, that he'd sought medical help, been formally diagnosed. PTSD the doctors had labelled it, back then something that medical science was only just starting to understand.

You could run and keep on running. But for how long? At some point you had to turn and face up, fight. That was what Rania was doing. She'd decided to stand up, put herself between evil and its consequences. He'd seen the determination in her, felt it strong like an ocean current, couldn't help but admire it, didn't even want to try to swim against it. And in that thought he realised that he'd already forgiven her, that he'd never had to forgive her because there was nothing to forgive. Can you love someone you hardly know, truly, with madness? And if so, can you love more than one?

He shook his head, trying to obliterate the gentle violence of this speculation. He propped his hands on his knees, looked up, blinked and watched his vision clear. An old woman walked past him, close on the pavement. She glanced at him sidelong, pulled her shawl close around her shoulders and hurried away. About a hundred metres
along, just beyond the hotel, a man stood outside a pastry shop, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a dark leather jacket. He was staring through the traffic, as if searching for someone. Their eyes met.

It was Spearpoint.

Without averting his gaze, Spearpoint pulled a mobile phone from his pocket, flipped it open and put it to his ear.

A battle jolt of adrenaline shot through Clay's body. Within seconds he was in full stride, darting between moving cars, bearing down on the man. He was twenty metres away now, sprinting along the pavement, coming straight at him. Spearpoint dropped the phone to his side, looked left and right, turned his back, took a couple of steps and disappeared into a side-street. Clay reached the corner a few seconds later, breathing hard. He stopped and peered along the crowded market lane. The place was choked with people, cluttered with produce stalls, fire-escapes, aging awnings with bent poles, food stands. Heads twisted and turned, mouths opened, hands offered and received, coins clattered to the ground, bills were counted, folded. Painted electric bulbs swung from bare cables strung between the close-pressed buildings, bathing everything in movie-reel flicker. One head, taller than the others, bobbed above the cobble of multicoloured crowns. Spearpoint. Clay pushed after him, gained ground, got caught up in the crowd, ploughed his way past dowdy Turkish matrons and grey-suited shopkeepers, and finally reached an intersection. Market stalls strung away in both directions, the banks of a river swollen with people. Spearpoint was gone.

Clay looked at his watch. He'd left the hotel no more than ten minutes ago. He turned back, shouldering through the crowd until he reached the main road, then set off at a sprint. Five minutes later he burst into the lobby of the Pera Palas.

The proprietor looked up at him from behind the front desk. ‘Is everything all right, Mister Clay?'

‘Has anyone else come into the hotel since I left?'

‘No, my friend. I have been here the whole time.'

Clay's pulse slowed. He wiped the sweat from his temples, the back of his neck. ‘
Teşekur
,' he said. ‘We will be leaving now, my friend. Quietly. Thank you again for your hospitality.'

The proprietor bowed formally.

Clay took the stairs two at a time. That was it, he thought. Spearpoint had seen him, had called it in. They knew where he was. He'd carry Rania out if he had to.

The corridor was quiet. He knocked on the door to their room, stood listening. Silence. He knocked again, tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. The room was as he'd left it. He called her name, closed the door behind him and bolted it. The bed was empty, just the depression where she'd lain, the dark stains of her tears still visible on the bedspread.

The desk where she'd been working was clear of papers. He opened the bathroom door, peered inside. Empty.

Rania was gone.