The Third Antichrist (39 page)

Sighetu, Romania
Friday, 5 February 2010

61

Abi glanced into the rear-view mirror. His two sisters were dozing. Dakini had her chin on her chest, with her mouth partly open, and Nawal was hunched against the side window, her head rocking in tempo with the car.

He looked at Rudra.

Rudra was watching him with busy eyes, like a man following the vagaries of a computer game. ‘What are you hatching, Abi? I know that predatory look of yours.’

Abi gave a half-grin. ‘Nothing, really. I was fantasizing about what I would do to Sabir when I finally got my hands on him.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Isn’t that enough? Oh, and I was hatching a plan to burgle Fort Knox. And steal the British Crown Jewels. And I intend to raid the French Exchequer, too, when I have the time.’

‘Don’t you have enough money already?’

‘Nobody has enough money.’

‘Madame, our mother, has.’

Abi’s grin transformed into a smirk. ‘But that’s hers, not ours, Rudi. Fingers off, little brother.’

Rudra laughed. ‘You have a point.’ He glanced back at his sisters. ‘What
are
our plans, by the way?’

‘It’s simple. We spend the night in Sighetu. Then, first thing tomorrow morning, we go to Brara. But we take it easy. We don’t blunder in. We don’t know what the situation is there. There could even be a police presence. This guy Catalin sounds confident, but he’s only twenty years shy of the Communist era inside his head. My experience is that people like that have a certain mindset. They’ve been schooled to take no for an answer. If something costs a bit of extra effort, they simply won’t do it. The bastard’s even got his cell phone switched off.’

‘So you don’t think his people got the Dufontaine girl and her baby after all?’

‘I should be stunned if they did. It would be way too neat. But we’ll get a lead from them. Then we can go ahead and do the job ourselves. This Catalin person doesn’t have the motivation we do.’

‘Revenge, you mean?’

‘Don’t you want revenge, Rudi?’

‘Sure. I want revenge. But with you I’m not so sure. You never cared for any of us. That much was clear, Abi, right from when we were little children. You seemed detached from the rest of us.’

‘Oh, really? What about Vau?’

Rudra shrugged. ‘Did you really give a damn about what happened to him? Be honest.’

Abi had half his attention on the road ahead. It was nearly time. But he didn’t dare unlock his seat belt or the beeper would sound.

‘Did you hear me, Abi?’

Abi gave an impatient nod. ‘Yes, I gave a damn about Vau. I loved him. He was my twin brother.’

‘But he was thick as two short planks. Christ, Abi, he was almost autistic.’

Abi felt like reaching across and cuffing Rudra on the side of the head, but he held himself in. Now was not the time. But it made what he was about to do considerably easier. ‘Vau was marginal Asperger’s. There’s a world of difference between that and autism.’

‘Marginal? That’s a laugh.’

Abi turned to Rudra. ‘Are you trying to bate me? If so, Rudi, I have to tell you that you’re succeeding.’

‘Bate you? Me? Now why should I do that? After all, it’s not as if you left us all to die in a corpse-polluted sinkhole in deepest Mexico, is it?’

Abi blew out his cheeks. ‘Christ.’

‘Yeah, Christ. I told you I wouldn’t forget it, and I haven’t. I meant what I said when I promised you we’d have a reckoning at the end of all this.’

‘And we’ve reached the end of all this, have we? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’ Abi put a sneer in his voice. ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it the end. I’d call it pretty near the fucking beginning.’

‘I’m not suggesting we hammer it out here and now.’

‘Oh, really? That’s big of you. When would you like to do it? Shall we set a date? December 21st 2012 sounds pretty neat to me. Let’s agree to have it out then. On the day our little Maya friends have allocated for the Great Change. Is it a deal?’

‘Sure.’ Rudra held out his hand.

Abi wrenched the steering wheel to the left, slewing the vehicle across the opposing lane. As he did so, he released the clasp of his seat belt.

Rudra was rocked violently to the right.

Abi threw the wheel in the opposite direction. As the car hit the nearside kerb he unlatched the driver’s door and tumbled out of the car, clutching his overnight bag to his stomach. He went straight into a forward aikido roll, curled up like a parachutist, his chin tucked into his chest, his head protected by his arms. He had counted on the thick snow to deaden and slow his fall, and this proved to be the case. He rolled three times, then straightened his legs, converting his momentum into a lumbering run.

The car, meanwhile, continued on its original trajectory, its speed increasing with the angle of the gradient. It bumped across the verge and then careered down a steep meadow towards the gorge that Abi had been following with his eyes all the time he spoke to Rudra.

Would it be deep enough? If it wasn’t, he knew that he would have to go down there and finish the job himself. But what was he worrying about? He would need to visit the car anyway to transfer Rudra from the passenger seat across to the driving one.

He had made damned sure of one thing, though. At no point in the proceedings had anyone witnessed four people together in the car. Three people had hired it, and three people had set out from the airport car park in it. Abi had made it very clear, too, when he had bought his sibling’s plane tickets, that he was making the booking for a party of three. His own ticket had been bought on a separate day, and through a separate agency. And in a name that was not his own.

He squatted in the snow and brushed himself off, checking the road in both directions while he did it. It was empty as the overflow from hell. Which wasn’t surprising, for he had made a point of waiting until he had seen no car for at least five minutes in either direction before making his move. If a car did come past, it was hardly likely that they would notice the fresh tracks leading off from what was, after all, only a minor road. At the rate the snow was cascading down, there would be no sign of anything at all in twenty minutes.

Abi rummaged in his bag and brought out a waterproof jacket and a pair of over-trousers. He put them on over his damp clothes. Leaving the bag behind him, he jogged to the edge of the gorge and peered over the side. The four-by-four was lying on its roof, parallel to a slow-running creek maybe thirty feet below him. Its wheels were still spinning. Its one remaining light cut a swathe down the line of the river.

Abi eased himself across the overhang and scrambled down the slope. He was aware of a visceral sense of excitement in the pit of his stomach. One part of him was tempted to stop and howl like a wolf in triumph.

He reached the car and looked inside. There was movement. ‘It’s all right. I’m here. I’ll get you out.’ He threw open the back door.

Nawal tumbled half out. She turned her face up to him. Her mouth was crushed, and part of her cheekbone had been pushed through one eye socket.

Abi freed the telescopic fighting baton from his sleeve. He extended the baton, then bent at the waist and swung it as hard as he was able against her open wound – it was best to use the injuries that were available to him, and not create any fresh traumas that couldn’t be explained away by the accident. He crouched down and peered through to where Dakini was lying. She’d clearly broken her neck. No extra prinking needed there.

He dragged Nawal’s body completely out of the car, and eased the back door shut. Then he went round to the passenger side at the front.

Rudra was still alive. Just. This, too, he would enjoy.

Later, when it was all over, he unhooked Rudra’s seat belt and dragged him across to the driver’s seat. He attached the new belt and wiped his own prints off the steering wheel and gearshift. Then he rubbed Rudra’s hands over anything a driver might have touched, making sure to get clear prints on the horn section and the rear-view mirror.

When he was done, he dragged Nawal’s body into the passenger seat and attached her there. Both front air bags had deployed, and were now partially deflated, so he smeared Rudra’s and Nawal’s faces against the fabric. The side and torso airbags had also deployed, so he shunted all three of the corpses around a little to equalize things on that front.

‘Fucking useless tat,’ he muttered to himself.

It was clear that in any real accident the airbags wouldn’t have kept anybody alive. The extent of Nawal’s injuries had made her as good as dead anyway, and Rudra had been completely out of it when Abi gave him the
coup de grâce
, so there had been no fun there. Abi decided that, on the whole, he could live with the disappointment, given the prevailing circumstances.

When he had tidied up to his satisfaction, he moved to the bank of the creek and rinsed his hands and the smeared fighting baton of all traces of blood. The snow was coming down even harder now. There would be no giveaway tracks come morning – just an easily explainable accident on a minor country road in post-blizzard conditions.

Abi scrambled back up the hill to his overnight bag. Inside he had a sheepskin balaclava, hand warmers, double gloves, chocolate bars, and water. He put on the balaclava, got the hand warmers fired up, and ate one of the chocolate bars. By his calculations, Sighetu was about three kilometres away across the hills. He had originally intended to go cross-country, but with the way the weather was shaping up, hardly anyone was out on the roads anyway, so why make life anymore difficult for himself than he needed to? Plus he would see any approaching headlights from miles away, and have ample time to hide.

He swung the bag over his shoulder and began to walk.

62

It was eight in the evening when Abi reached the outskirts of Sighetu. He straightaway began the search for a suitable vehicle to take him on to Brara. He had spent the past couple of hours working out exactly what he would say to Madame, his mother, when she got the news about the death, in a car accident, of three out of four of her remaining children, and he was happy with the upshot of his lucubrations.

His
coup de théâtre
on the airplane would come in handy there, for certain. He would explain to the Countess about his stomach – how he had been afflicted with diarrhoea, nausea, the works – and about his decision to stop over for the night at Satu Mare until things settled down again. His foresight about the extra suitcase, and the fact that none of the belongings found in the car would be his, would further back up his claim, which was that he had merely sent the rest of his siblings on to Brara to check up on things there, and they had agreed either to return for him, or to phone and tell him where to meet them, depending on the circumstances they found in situ. It was hardly his fault that Mihael Catalin had shut down his lines of communications and gone to ground, forcing the Corpus to undertake their own investigation of his claims.

During the course of his two-hour walk, Abi played out every possible eventuality in his head, including that of flight. He knew that Milouins and Madame Mastigou would be suspicious of him, but that Madame, his mother, given the quality of their recent relationship, might conceivably extend him the benefit of the doubt. What would he say when she questioned him as to his theories about the accident? That Rudi was a useless driver at the best of times, and that they had all been exhausted after their two delayed flights? That the snow conditions had been execrable and the airports all but closed down? That he had tried to persuade his siblings to put off their investigations until the morning, but that they had overruled him? Something to do with their resentment at what had happened in Mexico, no doubt. As he approached Sighetu, Abi had to consciously force himself to stop dwelling on the might-bes of the situation, and focus on the here-and-nows.