‘Normally we leave security matters to our Egyptian colleagues,’ said the old man, adjusting his weight on the walking frame, ‘but for tonight I thought it best to bring in some of our own people as well. Just to beef things up a bit. And a very good job they’re doing.’
He gave an approving nod. A plastic mask was hanging on a cord around his neck. A thin tube dropped from it to an oxygen cylinder nestling in a sling below the walking frame.
‘I was due out in Egypt anyway,’ he went on, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at his mouth. ‘Got this damned museum opening tomorrow night down in Luxor. Seemed reasonable to stop by here as well. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.’
In front of him Khalifa and Ben-Roi were backed up against the side of the shipping container. Khalifa’s eyes were locked on Barren, alight with hatred. Ben-Roi’s expression was more quizzical. Inside his head cogs were turning, trying to weave together all the strands, work out exactly what was going on.
‘We just met your daughter,’ he said, touching a hand to his swollen mouth.
‘Did you now?’ Barren smiled. ‘An extraordinary young lady, don’t you think?’
‘She was working for you all along?’
The smile widened. ‘Like I say, an extraordinary young lady. And a gutsy one. I’m very proud of her.’
‘She set all this up?’ asked Khalifa, his face white, his voice curiously blank. ‘Brought Nemesis out here so you could kill them?’
Barren shuffled his feet and rolled his shoulders, adjusting his weight on the walking frame.
‘Let’s just say it’s a great comfort to know that when I’m gone both the family and the company will be in safe hands.’
He chuckled, a dry, unpleasant sound, like a dog panting. Dabbing at his mouth again, he pocketed the handkerchief. Inside Ben-Roi’s mind the cogs were still turning. Somehow the strands weren’t quite weaving. There were dangling ends. Things that didn’t fit.
‘These people . . . they were only a part of it,’ he said. ‘A splinter group, a cell. The Nemesis Agenda still exists. You haven’t got rid of it.’
Another chuckle.
‘Bit by bit, Detective. Step by step. Trust me: we’re on top of the situation.’
‘And what about Rivka Kleinberg?’ Ben-Roi thought he might as well get as much of the picture as he could before the inevitable happened. ‘Who killed her? Rachel?’
Barren waved the question away. ‘Someone who has the company’s best interests at heart,’ he said. ‘In the circumstances I don’t think there’s much point in being any more specific than that. Although credit where credit’s due – you worked the rest of it out pretty well. I saw a copy of the report you wrote. A very fine piece of detective work.’
He lifted a swollen, liver-spotted hand and tipped Ben-Roi an ironic salute.
‘Like you surmised, we stumbled on the mine when we were prospecting in that part of the world. Didn’t really think a great deal of it at the time. It was only when we landed the Drăgeş, concession that it struck us we had a ready-made storage facility for some of the waste we were being obliged to ship.’
A gust of wind came up, momentarily blurring his huge pumpkin face behind a veil of mist.
‘That was the only major detail you got wrong,’ he continued as the mist cleared. ‘We’re not actually dumping
all
the waste. Only about a quarter of it. The rest of the stuff does indeed go back to the US for reprocessing and landfill. Damned expensive business, as I told you when we spoke the other night. Cuts our margins way down. Even offloading just twenty-five per cent of it is saving us hundreds of millions of dollars. Which is to say,
making
us hundreds of millions of dollars. And ultimately that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Increasing the margins. Making money.’
His bushy grey eyebrows arched as if he was expecting Ben-Roi and Khalifa to express their agreement with this analysis. They didn’t, just stood there in silence. Barren didn’t seem especially put out by the lack of response.
‘I met her a few times, by the way,’ he added. ‘The Kleinberg woman. She was a friend of my dear departed wife. Can’t say I ever took to her. Don’t think she did to me either. Funny, the little coincidences life throws up.’
He grinned, the expression almost immediately crumpling as he broke into a fit of coughing. His shoulders heaved, his rheumy eyeballs bulged as his lungs contorted, fighting for air. In front of him, Ben-Roi’s eyes were flicking towards the guards as he tried to figure their chances of overpowering them. Slim, he decided. Very slim.
‘So what now?’ he asked when Barren had finally recovered himself.
‘Now?’ The old man’s hands opened and closed around the walker’s rubber grips. ‘Now I believe we’re going to wait for this mist to lift and finish the unloading. And then Captain Kremenko and his crew are going to start making amends for all the trouble they’ve caused with their little whore-smuggling operation by taking you gentlemen out into the middle of the ocean, chopping you up into bits and throwing you to the fish. Same with the bodies of those Nemesis hoodlums, which I believe are being gathered even as we speak. Them I can’t say I’ll be shedding any tears for, but if it’s any consolation, killing policemen has never been something that sits easy with my conscience. But what can I do?’
He gave a helpless shrug, as if the whole thing had somehow been forced upon him.
‘You should have taken the bribe, Detective. Primary rule of business: if you’re offered a good deal, leap on it.’
He broke into a renewed fit of coughing. Beside Ben-Roi, Khalifa too was weighing the chances of rushing the guards. Like the Israeli, he was figuring them to be slim bordering on non-existent. In front of him, just a few metres away, stood the man he considered responsible for his son’s death. The centre of the wheel on which his entire world had been broken. And he couldn’t get to him. His chest felt hollow with the frustration of it.
‘Anyway, gentlemen,’ resumed Barren eventually. ‘Enough talking. I’m a straight-down-the-line sort of guy, and I wanted to stand here in front of you and look you in the eye, clear up any questions you might have. Now that I’ve done that, I see little point in prolonging the meeting, so if you wouldn’t mind . . .’
He tipped his head towards the guards. They came forward a couple of steps, Hecklers levelled, faces robotically impassive. With a sweep of their guns they motioned the two detectives into the shipping container.
‘I’ve never been a great one for theatre,’ said Barren as they stepped into the foetid interior and turned, ‘but you have to admit there’s a certain . . . what’s the word? . . . synchronicity to the whole thing. Our problems started with this container, and that’s exactly where they’re going to end. If nothing else, it appeals to my sense of neatness.’
He smiled and signalled the guards. They started to close the container. Khalifa put out a foot, blocking one of the doors, holding it open.
‘You killed my son,’ he said, staring out at Barren. ‘You killed my son, and I’m going to kill you.’
The old man’s jaw pushed out. ‘Are you now? Well –’ he lifted his arm and examined his watch – ‘you’ve got about four hours to do it. After which you’re going to be way down on the bottom of the ocean with crabs chewing at your eyes. So if I were you I’d get a move on.’
Another of those wheezing chuckles, and Khalifa was shoved backwards and the container door slammed shut in his face. There was a metallic clunk as a padlock was secured – the second time in twenty-four hours he’d found himself trapped in impenetrable blackness – and the squeak of Barren’s walker as he shuffled away along the deck. After a few seconds it stopped. There was a silence, then:
‘Hello, Daddy. It’s been a long time.’
Clenching a fist, Khalifa slammed it against the inside of the door.
‘Liar!’ he cried. ‘Liar, liar, liar!’
R
ACHEL
The moment she’d heard Tamar’s screams on the walkie-talkie – ‘Get out! It’s a trap!’ – she’d known he was there at the dock. She couldn’t explain it, she couldn’t rationalize it. She’d just known. Had suddenly felt his presence. Inside her bones, way down deep in the pit of her stomach. Inside her insides. Just as she’d used to feel it as a child. Brooding in his library up at the top of the mansion; approaching like a storm cloud along the dimly lit corridors. All these years and now he was close again. Daddy dearest. Come to fetch his little girl. As she’d always known he would. The family always gathers up its own. The Labyrinth always draws you back into its heart.
She’d dealt with the Israeli cop, got herself over the crates, started sprinting down the dock, ignoring the shouts of the longshoremen, brandishing the gun at anyone who came too close. It was like she’d tumbled into a dream – everything vague and indeterminate from the mist, the way all the motors had suddenly stopped and silence descended. She’d called into the walkie-talkie, over and over, shouting their names – ‘Gidi! Tamar! Faz!’ – but she knew it was pointless and eventually she’d cast the handset aside. The camcorder too. She didn’t even know why she’d bothered picking it up. Didn’t know anything except that the others were dead and she was running and Daddy was here and it had all finally caught up with her, just as she’d been waiting for it to catch up these last eleven years. There’s only so long you can hold the past at bay; only so much of yourself you can bury.
Keep me hidden, let no one see.
And now the past had become present. It was all unravelling.
Twice men had appeared from nowhere and seized her, twice she’d heard voices ordering her release.
‘That’s the one. Let her go.’
You’re the one, Rachel. You’ve always been the one.
She’d shoved them away, kept on running.
At the end of the dock the fog was thick as milk. She’d clambered off the concrete down on to the rocks below, fumbled around where Tamar and Gidi had set up their camera, searching for them. There was nothing she could do to change what had happened, but she needed to see it with her own eyes. At least try to say goodbye before she went to find him. Particularly to Tamar. With Tamar she’d broken the golden rule. Got close. Just as she’d broken it with Rivka. And her mother too. And always when you broke the rule bad things happened.
‘It’s not my fault,’ she choked. ‘It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.’
Although deep down, even after all these years, there was still a part of her that wondered if maybe it
was
her fault. If she could have done more to resist. If Rachel really was a whore.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
She’d fumbled a while. Then an engine had started up somewhere ahead and to her right, away from the river. A truck engine. Lights through the mist. She’d stumbled towards them, found herself on gravelly sand, some sort of track. None of it seemed real. The fog had torn. In front of her, five metres away, the back of a pick-up truck. Two men sitting on the sides, dressed like the ones who had seized her up on the dock – jeans, desert boots, flak jackets. And lying at their feet in the truck’s bed, like hunting trophies, three bodies. Two male, one female. Eyes open. A lot of blood. She’d heard screaming, had taken a moment to realize it was coming from her own mouth. She’d reached out but the truck was already moving away. One of the men had chopped a hand back towards the ship, mouthed something that might have been, ‘He’s there.’ And then the fog had gathered again and the truck was gone.
She was alone. Like she’d always been. Alone in the mist. The murk of her own shame.
On autopilot, she had retraced her steps. Back across the rocks, back on to the dock, back towards the ship, the Glock still dangling in her hand. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, like she was a character in a film spooling at half speed. She’d reached the gangway at the prow of the vessel, climbed on to the deck, followed the gantry down the middle of the ship, cargo holds gaping to either side like black pools.
Stronger, his presence had grown stronger with every step. A dark gravity inexorably drawing her in.
And then, suddenly, there he was in front of her. Shuffling along on a walker past the end of a large shipping container. A bloated, lumbering shadow looming through the mist. Just as she remembered him.
He must have felt her too, because he’d stopped and turned. Their eyes had met. The grizzled, ursine face had broken into a smile. As it did so the film cranked up to regular speed and it was no longer like a dream. Suddenly it was all very immediate and very real. Her heart had lurched, her stomach clenched. That ache between her legs again.
‘Hello, Daddy. It’s been a long time.’
To Ben-Roi and Khalifa it sounded like the greeting of a loving daughter. The return of the prodigal.
What they couldn’t see – locked in the darkness of the container, separated by a wall of steel – was the expression on her face.
The expression of pure, unadulterated loathing. A loathing bordering on the demented, as if she was confronting something so disgusting, so utterly abhorrent, it was as much as she could do not to drop to her knees and vomit.
For a moment she stood there, frozen, the deck echoing to the pounding of fists from within the container, the cries of ‘Liar!’ Then, finger tight round the Glock’s trigger, she came forward a couple of steps, into the circle of light. In front of her Barren shuffled the walker around and also came forward, waving the guards off the deck so that it was just the two of them standing there. Face to face. Father and daughter. After all this time.
‘Hello, my darling Rachel.’ His rheumy eyes were moist and twinkling, his mouth curved into an adoring smile. ‘It has indeed been a long time. I’ve missed you. More than I can possibly say.’
He extended a trembling hand, reaching for her. She didn’t move. All these years and the horror was as intense as it had ever been.
‘You look wonderful,’ he wheezed, his gaze moving admiringly up and down. ‘All grown up. A beautiful woman now. I see your mother in you. A lot of your mother. You make me so proud.’
He made to shuffle forward some more, but she lifted the gun.
‘Don’t.’