Mambo (31 page)

Falk touched the side of his skull with the bloodied handkerchief. “We ought to be long gone by the time the police arrive and start looking for eye witnesses. I suggest we get the hell out of here now.”

Neither Hurt nor Perry hesitated. The room was filling up with vile, rubbery smoke that drifted across the street from the ruined limousine. As Hurt walked toward the door behind Falk, he considered the question: who
knew
? Who the hell
knew
that he and Perry were travelling in that particular vehicle?

On the staircase down he was struck by a thought that would make some sense to him later:
Perry. Perry knew
.

13

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Honduras

Tomas Fuentes was in his tent when he heard the stale air around him vibrate, at first quietly and steadily, as if the evening sky were filled with the drone of a million batwings. He stepped outside and stood with his hands on his hips, listening. The sound, which originated close to the sea, had the texture of a natural force, a tornado gathering strength, say, or an earthquake forcing open a fissure on the bed of the ocean.

Roger Bosanquet emerged from the tent pitched next to Tommy's. The sound grew more profound. Among the trees yellow kerosene lights illuminated pathways between the large marquees in which the army slept. It was Tent City here.

Tommy Fuentes scanned the heavens, but saw nothing moving. Still the sound grew in intensity, a rumbling suggestive of thunder now. Tommy thought the ground under his feet had begun to tremble, but it was only his imagination. This landscape seemed to trap and amplify sounds. It was like being imprisoned inside a loudspeaker.

“There she is,” Bosanquet said and pointed to the sky.

At first pinheads of light, nothing more. Then the shape of the craft could be seen as it lost altitude and dropped so low that spray rose up from the surface of the water into the lights.

Fuentes and the Englishman walked down the slope toward the airstrip. Blue electric lamps, surrounded by agitated mosquitoes, burned the length of the runway. The plane appeared over the trees, the noise so terrible now that Fuentes and Bosanquet covered their ears. They watched the craft roar down towards the strip. It seemed for a moment to stall in the air, but then it was down with a final scream, lunging across the runway, skidding slightly before coming to a halt about twenty feet from where the concrete ended in a clump of trees.

Just before the two men reached the runway, Bosanquet mentioned the message he'd received some fifteen minutes ago by radio from Harry Hurt.

“A kid?” Fuentes asked. “There's a kid on the plane?”

“Apparently.”

“I don't want the blood of any kid on my hands,” Fuentes said.

“It's Ruhr's responsibility, I would say.” Bosanquet, forever calm, nodded toward the big plane, where a door was already opening. “Your hands will be clean, Tommy.”

Bosanquet looked at the light in the open doorway of the C-130, where Ruhr stood framed in perfect silhouette. The plane's endless rocking during the flight had made Stephanie Brough queasy. All she'd had to eat was some dry fruit Ruhr had given her from a plastic bag. Ruhr, who was never very far from her, had watched her continually. His eyes had seemed to her like the lenses of some scanning instrument beneath which she was being dissected and scrutinised. She wished he'd turn away, look elsewhere, leave her alone. So long as she was the object of his brooding fascination, she was reminded of the danger he represented.

She still had no idea where she was and hadn't been able to eavesdrop on any conversations because of her earplugs. The two men, Trevaskis and Zapino, who sat together some feet away, didn't look like they communicated much and Ruhr didn't speak, so there was probably nothing to hear anyway.

Ruhr opened the door. The night air was scented in a way that was unknown to Steffie Brough, whose world had always been circumscribed by Norfolk and the Fenlands. She smelled ancient moss and lichen and something else, something bittersweet she couldn't identify but which made her think of carcasses. She took the plugs out of her ears and was assailed at once by noises completely alien to her, bird sounds she'd heard only in zoos, a great clacking and squawking that echoed on and on.

Ruhr turned from the doorway. “Do you know where you are?”

She shook her head.

“This is Honduras.”

She tried to remember atlases, maps, but her sense of geography wasn't strong. The Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico came to mind, but she couldn't quite place Honduras. Wasn't it close to Nicaragua? She wasn't sure, and this lack of certainty caused her despair. Wherever Honduras was, it was a very long way from anything familiar. And how could she even think of escape? If she got a chance to run from Ruhr, where would she go? She pictured jungles and headhunters, snakes and tarantulas.

She was aware of her crumpled skirt and soiled blouse and some oil stains on her maroon blazer. She needed a bath badly, but she'd come to think that defiance was more important than fresh clothes; not outward defiance, but another form of resistance – in the mind, the heart. Outwardly, she would try to comply with Ruhr if she possibly could. But inside, where it mattered, she'd stay hard and cold and distant. It was an antidote against falling completely apart. She had to be bloody strong, that was all. No weepy moods. No moaning. Given just half a chance, she'd get through this somehow.

Still, she hated the way his hand lay against her lower back as he led her towards the door and the rope ladder that dropped to the ground. An insufferable intimacy; she remembered how he'd undone her bra back at the farmhouse – oh God, the farmhouse was such a long time ago – and blood rose to her head. She couldn't stand his skin against hers, but she'd have to. If she wanted to survive she'd have to do everything he told her.

Just so long as she was untouchable on the inside
.

She swung in mid-air, holding the ladder as it shifted with her weight. Ruhr was just above her. She looked up, seeing under the cuffs of his jeans. Around one ankle he had strapped a sheathed knife. She had an image of the dead policeman at the old farmhouse, his body half-covered with leaves and the strange empty way he stared up at the sky. She remembered how his eyes were filled with rainwater and how slicks, overflowing his lashes, ran down his face. It was pointless to remember that sort of thing. She had to survive, and survival meant thinking ahead, not back.

There were men on the ground below. In the distance, yellow and blue lights burned and a faint aroma of paraffin and scorched meat drifted through the dark. Steffie was light-headed. She gripped the rope, fought the sensation away. Then she was down, and the ground felt good beneath her feet. Ruhr came after, and then the other men from the craft, and suddenly there was confusion, men greeting one another, languages she didn't understand, handshakes. For one tense moment, when she realised nobody was paying her any attention, she considered the possibility of flight.

Dense trees, tents pitched here and there among the lamps, shadowy figures moving back and forth, guitar music, a voice singing a Spanish song in the distance – there was nowhere to run. If she did escape, which was unlikely, she'd certainly get lost and die out there. She looked at Ruhr, who was involved in a conversation with the two men who'd met the plane. The voices were low, but Steffie could tell they were angry. Her parents argued in exactly the same muted way when they didn't want her to overhear.

Ruhr broke away from the two men – one of whom wore a Panama hat – and stepped toward her.

“Come with me.”

She followed him across the concrete strip. An olive-coloured tent, pitched two hundred yards from the runway, stood within a thicket of trees. Ruhr opened the flap and Steffie stepped inside the tent. He struck a match, lit a lamp. An odd bluish glow threw misshapen shadows on the canvas walls.

“Sit down.”

A sagging camp bed was located in a corner. She sat, knees together, hands clasped in her lap. Ruhr stepped in front of the smoky lamp, eclipsing it with his shadow.

“They want me to kill you.”

Her throat was very dry. “Why?”

“You have seen too much and now you are to be discarded. Permanently. It's simple.”

Steffie was quiet for a long time. She had an image of herself dead – a pale white corpse in a mahogany box, white lace ruffles, a gown, an array of soft candles illuminating her delicate features. But it wouldn't be like that, would it? She'd be shot and dumped in the jungle, where she'd rot. And there was nothing poetic or romantic about that kind of death.

“I don't want to die,” she said in a composed way; she was determined to hide her terror.

Ruhr had no problem with the concept of killing the child. What he resented was the idea of being
ordered
to do it. Nobody controlled him. Nobody told him what to do and when to do it. Fuentes would soon discover that Ruhr was very much his own man. He didn't trust Fuentes or the quiet Englishman called Bosanquet; they had something furtive about them, as if they knew something Ruhr did not. But he knew how to protect himself from them, how to guarantee his own future. Besides, he had not yet finished with this girl; he'd barely begun. And if he was going to kill her he wasn't going to do it the way any cheap assassin would. A shot in the back of the skull, impersonal and fast, wasn't his style. No. He'd been observing her the whole trip, and the more he studied her the more impatient he became.

He would have her. In his own inimitable way, he would have her.

He watched how lamplight shone on her legs. She had smooth skin, unblemished, perfect as only young skin can be. He reached out with his deformed hand and slid it under her skirt, the palm flat against her inner thigh. It was as flawless as any flesh could be.

The contrast enthralled him. The idea of his imperfect hand touching this child's perfect thigh filled him with wonder. The ugly and the beautiful welded together, the alignment of opposites, thrilled him. Gunther Ruhr, superior to most people despite being unattractive and crippled, a fugitive despised for his history of destruction, could do anything he liked with this lovely child. Anything. He had the power.

He kissed her on the mouth. She drew her face away. Ruhr smiled. She didn't understand the nature of the game, that was all. She was not permitted to resist. He slid his hand further up, stopping just before he reached the top of her legs where she radiated a mysterious warmth. There was a loveliness here he hadn't encountered before: an innocence. He'd known whores all his life. He'd known the child whores of Saigon and Mexico City and Manila, hardened ten- and eleven-year-old girls with sad eyes and tiny breasts who performed with mechanical exactitude. But what he'd never known was real innocence. Until now. She was fresh and new, unused.

He kissed her again. This time, with lips tight, she didn't turn away from him. She didn't yield to the kiss, she merely tolerated it.

“I will not kill you,” he whispered. “I will not let anyone harm you.”

He put his good hand below her chin and turned her face up, forcing her to look directly into his eyes. He could smell the fear on her. He gazed at her slender neck and he remembered her school scarf in the back of the Range Rover. He wondered whether Pagan had read the sign. He was surely at a loss by this time; even if he'd discovered the abduction of the child – and it didn't take a genius to get that far – he had no way of knowing where she'd been taken. Frantic Pagan. Ruhr revelled in the idea of the policeman's anxiety. The abduction of the girl was tantamount to driving a nail into the Englishman's heart.

He caught her shoulders, pushed her down on the narrow bed. She lay mute, looking past him at the lamp, which flickered monstrously and cast enormous distended shadows inside the tent. With a finger of the deformed hand he touched her mouth, forced her lips apart, caused a frozen smile to appear. He inserted the finger between her teeth, along the surface of the tongue, the gums. He drew the finger back and forth, in and out. He could feel the child's body go rigid.

And still she wouldn't look at him. She had closed her eyes. He took her hand and led it toward his groin. She made a noise, shook her head from side to side in protest, then bit the finger still inserted in her mouth. Ruhr, pained, drew away from her. There were teeth marks in his flesh.

He slapped her across the cheek with the deformed hand. She turned her face to the wall silently, hearing the slap echo in her head.

“You must do what I want,” he said. His voice was quiet, hushed, kind. If you didn't know it was Gunther Ruhr speaking, you might think it the persuasive voice of a therapist. It was one of the many voices Ruhr assumed.

“I don't want to touch you,” she whispered.

“What choice do you have, little girl?”

She tried to free herself but it was useless to struggle against Ruhr's strength. She shut her eyes, seeking a secret room in the mind, sanctuary. If she concentrated hard she could reach it, unlock the door, go inside. Safe from Ruhr. Safe from harm. She thought:
Somebody must be searching for me. Somebody has to be looking for me
. Be realistic, Steffie. How could anybody ever find you?

She felt Ruhr's ugly hand cross the flat of her stomach, like a crab moving on her skin.

“My sweet girl,” he kept saying. His breathing was different now, harder, louder. “I will not hurt you. I promise you. You will come to no harm.”

He stroked her breasts, unconscious of the girl's discomfort, unaware of the tautness in her body. To Ruhr, the girl's pale flesh was a soft, white, marvellous world for him to explore and finally exploit. He was a discoverer, a pioneer, creating a new map of engrossing territory. And, like any colonialist, he would inevitably corrupt the terrain he had conquered.

A sound came from the doorway of the tent. The flap was pushed aside. A shadow fell across Steffie's face. She saw the man from the plane, the skinny one called Trevaskis. The pressure from Ruhr's body lifted as he turned his face around quickly, angrily.