‘Back off, you fucking idiot. I’ll explain it all. Just back off.’
The woman was fighting and kicking, but he held her firm, one hand around her collar, the other jamming her right arm tight up behind her back. He pushed her twenty metres, then forced her down again, driving her into the ground. Khalifa was back on his feet.
Stumbling up behind Ben-Roi, he shoved the muzzle of his Glock hard into the nape of his neck.
‘Get off her!’ he snarled. ‘You hear me? Get off her or so help me God, I’ll shoot!’
‘She’s not what you think she is, Khalifa!’
‘Get off her!’
‘She’s working for Barren!’
Beneath him the woman was bucking and lashing.
‘Kill him!’ she choked. ‘For God’s sake. He’ll give us away!’
‘I’m not warning you again, Ben-Roi!’
‘Listen to me!’ hissed the Israeli. ‘She’s duped everybody! You, the Nemesis people . . . she’s a plant. She’s Barren’s person on the inside!’
‘He’s fucking crazy!’
She heaved furiously, trying to free herself. Ben-Roi was too strong. Leaning his full weight to hold her flat, breathing hard, he cranked his face round. The Glock’s muzzle trailed along the line of his jaw as it turned, coming to rest on the tip of his chin. His eyes burned in the darkness.
‘We’ve been here before, Khalifa,’ he growled. ‘Remember? Germany? You were going to kill me then too. And who was right that time?’ He glared up at the Egyptian. ‘Hear me out. That’s all I ask. Hear me out for one minute. Because you need to know what she is.
Who
she is. If you want to shoot me after that, go right ahead.’
Khalifa’s hand was trembling. He made no move to pull the gun away, but neither did he push it harder into Ben-Roi’s face. He didn’t trust the Israeli, didn’t trust him an inch. He’d dropped the investigation, taken a bribe to step away. At the same time there was something in his tone, in the expression on that craggy, out-of-proportion face that gave him pause. And he
had
called it right before. There was a silence, the three of them locked together as though they had been freeze-framed – Ben-Roi holding the woman, Khalifa covering Ben-Roi. Then, with the faintest of nods, Khalifa indicated he would listen.
‘It’s all about families, you see,’ began Ben-Roi, looking down and up again. ‘Thing is, I’ve been barking up the wrong family tree. I got it in my head she was Rivka Kleinberg’s daughter. Took a better detective than I’ll ever be to find out the truth. Turns out she’s not her daughter at all. She’s Rivka Kleinberg’s
god-daughter
. Isn’t that the case, eh,
Rachel
?’
He gave her a shove, again emphasizing the name, his eyes never leaving Khalifa.
‘Her mother and Kleinberg were best friends. Did their national service together. Stayed in touch. Even when her mother got a job abroad. At the Israeli Embassy. In Washington. Cultural Affairs department. Which is how she caught the eye of a certain billionaire American industrialist. A rather unpleasant man by the name of –’ he let it hang a beat – ‘Nathaniel Barren.’
Beneath him the woman tensed, then went limp. Khalifa stood with his finger tight around the trigger, mind whirring, trying to compute what he’d just heard.
‘She’s . . .’
‘Exactly. Barren’s daughter. Rachel Ann Barren, to give her her full name, although like her brother she was schooled under a pseudonym, kept well out of the limelight. Still a Barren, though. The dutiful daughter. And like all dutiful daughters, it seems she’s been looking out for family interests.’
The woman’s fists, Khalifa noticed, were knotted tight as flints.
‘Is this true?’ he croaked.
No answer. Which was all the answer he needed. Suddenly his throat was very dry. His finger eased off the trigger. Ben-Roi gave the gun a shunt with his chin, moving it away from his face. Khalifa allowed him to do it. The roar and clang of the dockyard seemed to fade as though a door had been eased shut between them.
‘It’s a curious thing, don’t you think?’ continued the Israeli, addressing himself as much to the woman as to Khalifa. ‘All those dodgy multinationals the Nemesis Agenda’s exposed over the years, all those high-tech hacking attacks, all those daring guerrilla raids, and the one company they’ve never once managed to dig any dirt on is Barren Corporation. Why do you think that is? Not because there isn’t any dirt to dig, we know that for sure. So why? How come Barren’s the one company that always comes up smelling of roses? Has always managed to keep itself one step ahead?’
No response. It was like there were three actors on stage and two of them had forgotten their lines.
‘OK, here’s another one for you,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘How did Barren find out Rivka Kleinberg was on to them? It’s something that’s been bugging me for a while now. She didn’t contact Barren, she was keeping a low profile, gathering her evidence on the quiet. Only two people knew she was starting to make the connections. One was the pimp I told you about, Genady Kremenko, and he swears blind he didn’t say anything. Which given that he had a gun halfway down his throat at the time, I’m inclined to believe. Which just leaves—’ he gave the figure beneath him another shove. ‘She’s in it up to her neck, Khalifa. I haven’t joined all the dots yet, haven’t worked out the full story, but somehow Barren have got her into the Nemesis Agenda, and she’s been protecting the company from the inside ever since. That’s why she was so keen to meet up with you. That’s why she wanted you to bring Samuel Pinsker’s notebook. Because without you and the notebook no one’s ever going to know where the mine is. And without the mine no one’s ever going to know what Barren have been doing down there. She was going to waste you, Khalifa. Just like she wasted her own godmother. Isn’t that true, Rachel? You killed her. You killed Rivka Kleinberg.’
On the ground the woman somehow managed to crane her head round so that she was half looking up at him.
‘You really are a fucking idiot,’ she spat. ‘Even more of an idiot than I thought you were. When they killed Rivka I was two and a half thousand miles away in the middle of the Congo. And if I’d wanted to kill him –’ she jerked a shoulder towards Khalifa – ‘I could have done it any time in the last three hours. Just as I could have put a bullet through
your
head back in Mitzpe Ramon. No wonder companies like Barren get away with it when the best the law can throw at them is fuckwits like you.’
Above her, a transient flicker of doubt passed across Ben-Roi’s face. Shaking it away, he hauled her back on to her feet.
‘Like I said, I haven’t got all the answers. The answers can wait. For the moment, we’re getting out of here. And you’re coming—’
He was cut short by a sudden burst of static from the walkie-talkie they’d left lying on the crates. There was what sounded like a crack of gunfire, and then a voice. A female voice. Frantic, hoarse with alarm.
‘Get out, Dinah! It’s a trap. They were waiting for us! Get out! Get out! They know we’re—’
The voice was swallowed by another crackle of gunfire. Startled, uncertain what was going on, Ben-Roi’s grip momentarily slackened. It was enough. His prisoner’s foot kicked viciously back into his ankle while in the same movement she squirmed from his grasp. Swinging round, she slammed a knee up into his crotch, doubling him, then smashed the base of her palm hard into the underside of his jaw, snapping his head back, knocking him off his feet. Khalifa started to reach for her, but she was already running, back down the alley towards the crates at the end.
‘Shoot her,’ choked Ben-Roi, clawing himself up on to his knees, blood pumping from his mouth. ‘Shoot the bitch!’
Instinctively Khalifa brought the Glock up, clasping his right wrist with his left hand to steady his aim. It was an easy shot despite the shadows, the sides of the warehouses narrowing her range of movement, the dock illumination back-lighting her to provide a clear target. He sighted down the barrel, tracking her, finger curled round the trigger. He couldn’t bring himself to pull it. She reached the mouth of the alley, snatched up her Glock from the ground where Ben-Roi had thrown it, leapt up the crates as though hopping a set of stairs. At the top she stopped and turned. For a brief instant her eyes met Khalifa’s. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought she shook her head, although what it signified if she did he couldn’t say. Then, scooping up the walkie-talkie and the camcorder, she jumped off the crates and was gone. He lowered the gun.
Beside him, Ben-Roi was back on his feet.
‘Why the fuck didn’t you shoot her?’ he coughed, his voice thick and mushy, as though someone had stuffed a wet sponge in his mouth.
‘Couldn’t,’ Khalifa mumbled. ‘Not a woman. Not in the back.’
For several seconds he stood there, too dazed to move, his mind churning. Then there was another crack of gunfire, behind them this time, out by the perimeter fence, and he felt the Israeli’s hand on his shoulder.
‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
Khalifa turned. He had no idea what was going on, who was shooting, why they were shooting, whether Ben-Roi was right about the woman or not. What he did know was that the Israeli had come a long way and put himself in a lot of danger to help him, and that at least deserved some acknowledgement. He started to say something, broke off, unable to find the words he wanted. Instead, lifting his arm, he dabbed a sleeve against the big man’s bloodied mouth.
‘You look a mess, you arrogant Jew bastard.’
Ben-Roi grunted. ‘And you look exactly what you are – a cheeky Muslim cunt.’
They nodded at each other, clasped hands and started down the alley away from the dock. They’d only gone a few metres when dark figures suddenly loomed in front of them. An explosion of bullets chewed up the ground at their feet. ‘Gun down and hands on heads!’ ordered a gruff voice. American accent. ‘I’ll only tell you once.’
The gun went down and the hands went up.
They were pushed along the back of the warehouse and round on to the dock.
The fog had come in noticeably over the past twenty minutes. In front of them the ship was now shrouded in a dense veil of white, rendering its outline blurred and indistinct, as if 60,000 tons of steel were in the process of slowly dematerializing. Wafts of vapour were rolling across the surface of the dock like dry-ice; the giant squares of the gantry cranes were receding into obscurity. It lent the whole scene a strangely unreal, dreamlike feel. A feel that was amplified when a klaxon sounded and the unloading work suddenly stopped. Engines died, dock workers melted away, lights dimmed. Everything became eerily silent and still.
Ben-Roi and Khalifa glanced at each other, but didn’t say anything.
They were led across the dock to the ship’s stern. A large black limousine was parked there at the foot of the boarding gangway. Beside it stood three muscular, stern-faced figures dressed similarly to the ones who were guarding the detectives: jeans, desert boots, flak jackets. They were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s and Sig Sauer handguns. Their faces registered no discernible interest as the detectives were pushed past them on to the ship’s gangway.
They climbed up the side of the vessel, the metal steps clanking beneath their feet. At the top they issued on to a narrow corridor of deck running round the ship’s bridge tower. The mist was much denser up here, as though they had climbed into a cloud, and the top of the tower was lost in the murk above them. Somewhere overhead they could hear voices talking in a language they didn’t understand.
Russian
, thought Ben-Roi. He felt something brush across his face, realized it was cigarette ash raining down. He didn’t bother voicing a complaint.
With a wave of their guns, their captors motioned the two detectives to the right, around the base of the tower to its forward side. Sitting there, right at the back of the deck, was a rectangular storage container. The one Vosgi and those other poor girls must have been trafficked in, thought Ben-Roi. Its steel doors were open. It was too dark to see much of the interior beyond some foam mattresses laid on the floor. There was a sharp smell of urine and rusting metal.
They were waved up against the side of the container, into a dim pool of light thrown by a lamp on the tower above. In front of them a narrow gantry ran away into the mist, providing a walkway across the open cargo holds. The guards stepped back, covering them with their Hecklers.
A couple of minutes passed, the guards just standing there, Khalifa and Ben-Roi exchanging the occasional look, but otherwise silent, uncertain what was going on. Then, suddenly, they tensed. There was a sound. Faint, but audible. In front of them. Somewhere in the mist along the gantry. A sort of ghostly, rhythmic squeak. Instinctively their fists clenched, eyes straining into the gloom, trying to work out what was causing it. The sound continued, drawing closer. There was something unsettling about it, malevolent, the way it echoed out of the gloom as though something predatory was creeping towards them, snuffling its way along the gantry with evil intent.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ murmured Khalifa, pressing himself back against the side of the container.
‘You don’t say,’ was Ben-Roi’s response.
Closer and closer came the sound, louder and louder. It was accompanied by footsteps now – slow slaps thudding on the latticed metal of the walkway. And, also, a shape. An indistinct blur of shadow looming within the mist. It bulged and deepened, as if forming itself before their eyes, its outline slowly solidifying until eventually it had resolved itself into the figure of a man. A huge, grizzled, overweight man shuffling along behind a three-wheeled walking frame.
Nathaniel Barren.
He came forward into the circle of light.
‘Good evening to you, gentlemen.’
His voice was a deep, rasping growl. There was a pause as he eyed them up, then:
‘She’s a mighty impressive ship, don’t you think? Just been for a turn along the deck. Need to get this wheel looked at.’ He indicated one of the frame’s castors. ‘Little bit of oil should do the job.’
He grunted and lifted a hand, motioning the guards back. They retreated to the edge of the mist – far enough to take them out of the scene, near enough to keep the prisoners covered with their Hecklers.