Eden Legacy (21 page)

An owl hooted outside. Something rustled. He recalled Emilia sitting across the negotiating table from Miles and Frank, pleading poverty and pointing out how prestigious the salvage of the
Winterton
would be. Frank had shrugged that it wasn’t such a big deal, not after a treasure ship. And Knox had seen her smile at that, a private, knowing smile that he’d never quite understood.

Not until now.

Rebecca double-checked Mustafa Habib’s card to make sure she had the right address. She’d thought him a run-of-the-mill businessman, but he lived in a vast beach-front estate, its perimeter wall topped with broken glass, video-cameras whirring and humming either side of high steel gates. A young man in khaki uniform emerged from a breezeblock guardhouse, lighting one cigarette from its predecessor, then squashing the discarded butt into the dust. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘I’m Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she told him. ‘I’m here to see Mustafa Habib.’

‘Is he expecting you?’

She showed him Mustafa’s card. ‘He’ll know what it’s about.’

He slouched off into the guardhouse. The gates slid silently open a minute later and he waved her through. She drove past outbuildings down a winding crushed-shell drive to a white hacienda lit up by spotlights and topped by satellites, aerials and masts. Two more uniformed men stood to attention either side of the high double front doors, AK47s leaning against the walls behind them. She parked by a marble fountain and got painfully out.

The two guards opened the doors and Mustafa emerged, a phone to his ear, a young woman in gorgeous silks a couple of paces behind. He beamed in pleasure
at Rebecca as he bounded down the marble steps, but then winced sympathetically at her injuries, though he was too polite to remark directly upon them. ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ he said, a hand over his phone’s mouthpiece. ‘I have to finish this call. Five minutes at the most.’

‘No problem.’

‘This is my daughter Ahdaf,’ he said. ‘A zoologist like yourself. Or studying to be one, at least.’ He gestured vaguely at the satellite dishes on his roof as he made his way back up the steps. ‘She watches
all
your programmes.’

‘Is that right?’ asked Rebecca.

Ahdaf’s eyelashes flickered. ‘I watch your programmes, yes.’

Rebecca caught her tone at once. ‘You don’t like them,’ she said.

Ahdaf glanced at her father, waited until he was safely out of earshot. ‘You make humans out to be so special,’ she said. ‘We’re just one species among tens of millions.’

‘A species that happens to make up my whole audience.’

‘Science shouldn’t be about ratings,’ said Ahdaf. ‘If
I
were doing the programme, man would be treated just like any other animal.’

I’ll bet they would,
thought Rebecca. But she said nothing; she couldn’t risk Mustafa’s goodwill. She reached into her bag for her mobile. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked, gesturing at the masts. ‘Only I’ve been out of
signal range for two days now.’ She didn’t wait for an answer, just wandered a little distance off, listened to her messages. She had three from Titch alone, telling her that everyone at work was thinking of her and praying that things were going as well as could be hoped, asking her to call if there was anything he could do. She’d hardly thought of him or the office since leaving London, but his messages did wonders for her spirits, and she found herself dialling his mobile. He picked up almost at once, and his obvious gladness to hear her voice lifted her spirits immensely. She began to talk and then it all came pouring out in an incoherent jumble: her visit to her mother’s tomb, her ordeal on the reef and how Daniel had saved her, even the ransom demand. She was still babbling away when a man cleared his throat behind her and she whipped around to see Mustafa standing there with an embarrassed expression. ‘Got to go,’ she told Titch. ‘I’ll call soon.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Mustafa, holding a hand up in apology. ‘I didn’t mean to overhear.’

‘But you did?’

‘You cannot know how glad this news makes me. If it’s true.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘They sent me a photograph. Photographs are easy enough to fake.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But you intend to prepare as if it is for real?’

‘I have to.’

‘And you’re here for my help?’

Rebecca said defensively: ‘You said if you could do anything … And it’s not as if I can’t raise the money myself. Just not by nine a.m. on Monday.’

Mustafa frowned.
‘This
Monday? But that’s crazy!’

‘Exactly. They’re not giving me a chance.’

‘Where?’

‘Independence Square, Tulear.’

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred million ariary.’

He grimaced, but in a way that suggested it could have been worse. ‘Who knows about this?’

‘Only my business partner. That was him just now. I had to tell someone.’

‘Of course. But not the police?’

‘No.’

Mustafa nodded seriously. ‘You must please keep it that way. Understand, what our police know, everyone knows. You can see for yourself that I already take absurd precautions to keep my family safe. If people think that I pay ransoms—’

‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear. But is it possible? To raise the money? I’ll pay you interest.’

‘Interest!’ sighed Mustafa. ‘How can you talk about interest? Your father is my friend; my interest is getting him and your sister safely home. Listen: I do not keep
such sums sitting in my safe. I will have to borrow it myself. The people from whom I borrow will doubtless charge me interest and impose various conditions. What they ask of me, I will ask of you. But no more.’

Rebecca’s eyes watered. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘It will not be easy,’ cautioned Mustafa. ‘Even for me, this is a large sum to raise so quickly. But one way or another we will do this. You have my word.’ He smiled, gestured flamboyantly. ‘Ask anyone: when Mustafa Habib gives his word, he keeps it. But you must promise me one thing in return …’

‘Yes?’

‘You are hurt, you are exhausted. You must be fresh for this battle. So you will go home and rest and get your strength up. And on Monday morning you will be back here at eight o’clock, and I will have your money for you. You have my word on this. And, God willing, together we will bring back Adam and Emilia.’

Knox woke in the early hours to engine noise and headlights sweeping up towards the lodge. He pulled on trousers and a shirt, hurried outside as Rebecca climbed in obvious distress from the driver’s door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, going to help her.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. But her grimaces belied her words.

He put his arm around her waist, took as much of her weight as he could. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘Have you had news about Adam and Emilia?’

She looked sharply at him. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘You left so suddenly.’

‘It was nothing to do with them. It was something else.’

It was pretty obvious she wasn’t levelling with him, but he let it go. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’

‘I could do with some aspirin.’

He helped her to her camp-bed, fetched some painkillers and a glass of water. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what happened earlier. If you don’t want to tell me, fine, I trust your judgement. But I can still be useful. Just tell me what needs doing, and I’ll do it, okay? No questions asked.’

Her eyes moistened, he thought she was about to crumble. But then she caught herself and her expression hardened, as though he’d been trying to trick her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Sleep well.’ He returned to his bed, lay there listening to her bitten-off cries as she readied herself for bed. It distressed him to hear her pain, to not be allowed to help. He struggled for sleep, turning this way and that on the thin mattress without ever quite finding repose. It grew less dark outside. He tiptoed quietly through the gloom to the washroom, dressed and went out. The sun wasn’t yet up, leaving the morning grey and cool. Down on the beach, he kicked off his shoes. The thin, cold crust of sand crunched satisfyingly beneath his tread, like the dried bark of a rotted tree. He bowed his head as he walked, searching the beach for fragments of pottery.

He stopped, crouched, picked up a white shard; but it was only a piece of eggshell. From the size of it, it had to have belonged to an
aepyornis,
a one-time Madagascar endemic, and the largest bird ever to have lived, taking advantage of the island’s lack of large predators to become the bully on the block. But then the first settlers had arrived and they’d eventually hunted them to extinction—for their meat, of course, but also for their eggs. The damned things had been the size of rugby balls, so that an
aepyornis
omelette would feed a family for a week. The birds had become well known in the ancient world. Marco Polo had immortalised them as the
rukh
or roc, capable of carrying off elephants in their claws and then dropping them like bombs from a great height; though actually the
aepyornis
had been as flightless as ostriches.

There’d always been a bit of a question mark as to how Marco Polo knew about the birds. He’d never visited the island himself. In fact, he’d actually confused it with Mogadishu, a corruption of which had given Madagascar its name. Most likely he’d heard of them from Arab merchants, who’d certainly been familiar with the place. They’d called it the Island of the Moon, and they’d believed it to be a point of no return for the southern ocean; that he who sailed beyond it was lost. Yet people undoubtedly had sailed beyond it. A Chinese map completed in around 1390 in honour of the first Ming emperor showed the world in traditional fashion, with
a swollen China at its heart, shrunken apologies for Africa and Mediterranean Europe to the west. But what was most remarkable about the map was that it got the shape of Africa broadly right, including its southern and western coasts, even though the Chinese had never explored it themselves.

Whatever their sources had been, Zheng He and his admirals would have known it to be perfectly possible to reach and even round the Cape of Good Hope. Sailing along unfamiliar coasts had been a painfully slow business, however. If you stayed in sight of land, you increased exponentially your risk of running aground, so you had to go slow, take constant soundings, find a new safe harbour every afternoon, because sailing at night that close to land was suicide. If a Chinese treasure fleet had crawled in this manner all the way down Africa’s eastern coast, the crew would doubtless have been restless for home and impatient of a slow retracement of their route, so it was entirely plausible that their navigators would have set a course directly for China. Draw a line between the Cape and Beijing, and it would run pretty much straight through these reefs here. Just as easy for the coral to snag two ships as one.

Ahead of him, mangroves were being slowly ducked by the incoming tide, like a village of elders undergoing baptism. Knox turned and headed back along the beach, past the
Yvette
and Eden and on to Pierre’s cabins and
beyond, still searching the shore as he went. The sand became infested with tiny flies; he set off blizzards of them with every step, cascading ahead of him down the beach. He went down to the sea’s edge to avoid them, small waves splashing timidly around his ankles before withdrawing like unctuous servants, his feet leaving shallow imprints that quickly filled with water and then faded into nothing. It was there in the wash that he saw the shard of porcelain. He crouched to pick it up. It was perhaps an inch long, its edges abraded smooth, white with just a trace of blue upon it, the exact same shade he’d seen on the porcelain fragments on the Morombe sea-bed. He tossed it up and caught it, thinking through what it might mean. Then he tucked it away in his pocket and headed back to Eden.

Rebecca’s cuts had healed enough overnight that every small movement was an agony when she woke. She didn’t intend to waste her morning feeling sorry for herself, however, so she gritted her teeth and swung out her legs and used gravity to help herself up, then hobbled through to her father’s office, hoping to guilt Daniel into making coffee and breakfast. He was already up and gone, however, but at least that gave her the opportunity for
a more methodical search of her father’s desk than she’d been able to give it when rummaging around for the
Yvette’s
insurance documentation.

His desk had filing-cabinet-style drawers, with multicoloured hanging folders inside, each tagged with the name of a bank, insurance company, tax authority, stockbroker or friend. One of the tags bore her own name. She pulled a thin sheaf of letters from it, read through them with growing dismay, so obvious was it how absent her heart had been from her words. There were two postcards of London landmarks that she didn’t remember sending. She turned them over and with a jolt recognised Emilia’s handwriting. She must have gone ahead with her forestry training course after all.

—You came anyway? You didn’t tell me?

—You didn’t want me there.

—No! Don’t say that!

—You’d moved beyond me.

—Never! I made one mistake. How could you—

‘Is something wrong?’ She looked up to see Daniel at the door. She feared her voice would sound strained if she spoke, so she shook her head instead. He came inside the room. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better, thanks.’

‘You want me to change your bandages?’

‘It’s okay. Therese is coming by.’

‘How about some breakfast, then?’

‘That would be wonderful.’

He nodded and went out. She returned her letters and her sister’s postcards to the folder, began on Adam’s finances instead. They proved astonishing. She’d known he had money in England, for he’d paid her Oxford allowance from an English bank account. But he’d always been so careful, she’d assumed it had been a constant struggle. He’d built the
Yvette
himself, for example, and the Jeep was decades old. Yet these folders told a completely different story.