Glow (14 page)

After they pulled up to the gate of the police station in Khairpur they were directed around to the car park at the back of the building, and the prisoner was brought out to them in a blindfold and handcuffs by two policemen. He did look as if he might be Burmese, but Martin could still hardly believe that this was the man that Lacebark had gone to all this effort to scoop up. You wouldn’t need three trained security men to hold him captive, you’d just need a length of fishing twine knotted around his ankle. He might have been as young as twenty-five, but he was as shrunken as the Indus, with a rime of red sores on his lips, and he stumbled along as if he were on the point of dropping to his hands and knees. Even so, Martin’s bodyguards jumped down out of the van, took the man from the policemen after a short parley, and loaded him into the back. Then they drove to a hotel around the corner, where Martin, improvising as best he could, pretending it was a creative leadership exercise, dismissed the Pakistani driver and told his bodyguards to organise themselves into eight-hour shifts until Bezant arrived: one resting, one in the hotel keeping Martin safe, and one guarding the magical mystery bus and tending occasionally to the prisoner. It wasn’t until Martin had sat down on the bed that he had a chance to think about how strange it was that at dinner parties he often refused to explain his job to people because he found it so boring and now here he was, apparently participating in some sort of covert operation. Had the scrofulous Burmese guy really committed a crime, he wondered? And if he had, how might its contribution to the net total of human misery compare to Dylan’s porn site if you could analyse them on a spreadsheet? It was probably much worse, Martin guessed, but of course he couldn’t be certain.

For nearly two days they heard nothing from Lacebark. Martin fell asleep around lunchtime on the first afternoon, which didn’t make sense even according to GMT, and woke up at dusk, if you could really call it waking up, to the sound of the fifth call to prayer. He’d read once that some Muslims got over jet lag faster because they were used to going to bed at odd times during Ramadan, but he didn’t find it plausible that a religion with circadian rhythms built into its compulsory schedule of worship could loosen you up in that respect. After sending his current sentry out for kebabs and bottled water, he called his wife and she told him that Dylan had come home with her from the police station, but, predictably, was refusing to get on the phone. She wasn’t crying so much any more but he still felt monstrous when he had to tell her that he didn’t know yet when he’d be back. For the rest of the night he worked on his laptop and napped at random, and the next morning he was so sick of the room that he went out, accompanied, to get a shave from one of the barbers who worked in the square at the end of the street. As he was being towelled off he watched a donkey cart trundle past with a huge cumulus cloud of empty plastic milk jugs lashed behind the driver, but then one cartwheel slotted into a pothole, the cart tipped, a rope broke, and the avalanche buried the donkey up to his cartoonishly perky ears.

Finally, as the bodyguards were starting their sixth uneventful shift, he got a call from his boss. ‘Bezant’s landing in Sukkur in half an hour. Drive back up there and meet him for the handover.’

Before they left, Martin opened the back of the van to check on the Burmese guy, which he regretted at once: the prisoner lay there on his side in the shadows, warm debris, twitching a little, smelling of piss, and Martin knew he’d never be able to tell his wife what had happened on this trip. But what would a good man, that notional creature, have done? Or an upright stepfather? Just let the guy walk free – limp free – having no idea who he was? Even if he’d tried, the Lacebark bodyguards wouldn’t have let him, and if he’d defied them he would have been imperilling not only his job but also his only means of safe transport back to Europe. Perhaps in other circumstances he might still have been capable of taking a moral stand. But not submerged in his jet lag. So instead he just told the bodyguards to put the handcuffs back on the prisoner and lock up the back of the van.

They met Bezant at a dusty margin of vacant land between the Airport Road and the canal, shaded on one side by palm trees. Above, the sky was lithium white; the naked sun hadn’t shown itself since Martin landed in Sukkur. The Australian arrived in a dented tan rental car but he showed no bemusement at the lurid van. Even compared to the three big bodyguards this man was a pillar of tungsten and steaks, and he would have made any normal product of the human genotype feel like a fiddly new model that had been miniaturised by some clever Japanese company to fit better into the handbags of teenage girls.

‘Let’s have a look, then.’

Martin took the keys from one of the bodyguards. He unlocked the van, swung open the doors, and braced himself for his third sight of the prisoner.

But there was no one in the back of the van. The prisoner was gone.

‘Right, so where have you put him?’ said Bezant. Then he saw the horrified expression on Martin’s face. ‘Are you telling me he was in here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this a joke?’

‘No.’

A puff of small pinkish pigeons leaped up from a telephone wire beside the canal. ‘When did you last set eyes on the cunt?’ said Bezant.

‘Before we set off from Khairpur.’

‘Have you stopped since?’

‘No. Not even in traffic.’

‘There was nothing in the back of the van? No tools? No handy set of screwdrivers?’

‘No,’ said Martin. He’d seen that for himself.

‘I assume someone had the common dog fuck to give him a cavity search?’

One of the bodyguards nodded. ‘They tell us they give him one at the police station. We give him another one anyhow.’

Bezant turned back to Martin. ‘How long were they alone with him at a stretch?’

‘Eight hours.’

‘I was looking for something along the lines of “six minutes”. Eight hours at a stretch? Whose brilliant idea was that?’

‘He looked so frail, I didn’t think . . .’

‘Didn’t anyone bother to warn you who this wanker was?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Of course they didn’t.’ Bezant ran a hand over his shaven scalp and spat contemplatively on the ground. ‘What has happened here, to the best of my estimation, is that our man in the van talked one of these oxygen thieves into slipping him some sort of widget, and on your drive over here he used it to get out of his handcuffs and then out of the door. The reason I say this is because it’s happened before. He’s got a very special tongue on him.’

‘I didn’t even know he spoke English,’ said Martin.

‘He speaks enough. Which one of them was it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve spent the last few days with the Three Musketeers over there. If you had to take a punt, which one would you say has the benevolent heart?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Martin without even thinking about it. Because how could he know?

But then he glanced at Riquinho, the tallest of the three bodyguards, a loose-limbed Brazilian. (A lot of the Lacebark security corps were Brazilian, Ecuadorian, Fijian, Nigerian, Jordanian, Serbian. If they came from countries like that you didn’t have to pay them so much.) On the plane, Riquinho had carried on watching the sun rise over the mountains long after the other two had lost interest; and in the van, he’d welded himself to the window as soon as the driver mentioned the dolphins; and in the square, he’d flinched as if he’d wanted to rush over to help the donkey, though it wasn’t even hurt. He seemed far more porous than the other two, more open to the surge of the world. In 2006 there had been a damaging leak to a journalist from the American
Harper’s
about some bribes that Lacebark had supposedly attempted to pass to government officials in Bolivia (which had millions of tons of lithium under the salt flats). Martin’s boss, ruling him out straight away, had asked him to write short loyalty evaluations on all his colleagues in the department. He enjoyed the task enormously, and he felt more powerful around the office for months afterwards, as if he had a dagger at his hip, even though no one else knew he was writing the reports and the culprit was never actually identified. That was how he felt now, thinking about Riquinho.

‘Come on,’ said Bezant. ‘I can tell you’ve got an opinion. Spit it out. Which one?’

But it was also possible, thought Martin, that the recent vindication of his suspicions about Dylan’s criminality had made him overconfident. His ‘evidence’ here was ineffable even compared to a trickle of light under a bedroom door. Who wouldn’t want to see some dolphins? In any case, he didn’t know quite what use Bezant would make of his answer, but he assumed it would be unpleasant. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know,’ he said.

Now Bezant and all three of the bodyguards were staring at Martin and he could feel a cold sweat kissing the back of his neck. When his phone vibrated in his pocket it made his whole leg spasm. His wife was calling. As he fumbled to turn it off Bezant screamed, ‘Which fucking one?’

The phone slipped from Martin’s hands. ‘Riquinho,’ he blurted, pointing.

Bezant walked right up to Riquinho and stared him in the face for a while. Then he said, ‘I think you might be right.’

‘I didn’t say a word to the
cuzão
!’ said Riquinho.

‘Fair enough,’ said Bezant. ‘We’ll establish that one way or another. You two: cuff him.’

The other two bodyguards didn’t hesitate. ‘No! Fuck this!’ shouted Riquinho.

‘Wait – it was just a guess,’ said Martin, who didn’t want to be responsible for trapping a second human being in the back of that van.

‘You should learn to trust your judgement, mate,’ said Bezant. As Riquinho was hauled inside the van the heels of his boots knocked half a dozen tin stars from the rim of the number plate.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ said Martin.

‘Not your problem. Anyway, you can take my car back to the airport. The plane’s waiting.’

This was enough to distract Martin from the fate of Riquinho for a moment, although at this point he felt as if he couldn’t even bend down to pick up his phone without asking for permission. ‘You mean I can go back to London?’ he said.

Bezant smiled. ‘Probably better. You’ll want to be seeing your kid, eh? Big time in a boy’s life. First visit from the blue heelers.’

7.03 p.m.

‘How did he know about your stepson and the police?’ says Raf.

‘Bezant always seems to know everything,’ says Martin. ‘Anyway, I think he stayed in Pakistan for a while after that to see if he could track down the Burmese guy we lost. And I don’t know whether he caught him in Karachi or whether the trail went cold or what, but when he got back to London, he called me. He said Riquinho had confessed to slipping the Burmese guy a pin or something so he could pick his handcuffs. I’d been right, and I think Bezant was impressed. And somehow he’d got hold of those reports I wrote about the leak in 2006. He told me they were some of the most detailed he’d ever seen and I had an aptitude for sniffing people out and I was wasted in lithium and he had a gap on his team here. He didn’t really give me a choice. And at least this job keeps me in London – well, not that they ever would’ve sent me back to Khairpur, most of it’s underwater at the moment. So my wife’s happy, even though I have to lie to her about what I’m doing.’

By now the climbing gym is starting to empty out, although there are still quite a few parents and nannies watching kids who move over the walls like spiders because of their weight-to-muscle ratios. Martin has been talking for so long that Fourpetal has bought him a box of apple juice from the vending machine. Nearby is a vacuum unit with a sign that says ‘please do not block the chalk eater’, thick foam filters worn away to raggedness like aeolian caves.

‘And what are you doing really?’ says Raf.

‘Technically I’m in personnel. But it’s a kind of counter-intelligence. Bezant has me looking for security leaks.’

‘Isn’t that ironic?’ says Fourpetal.

‘And what were you up to just now?’

‘Mostly I work with Lacebark security men. But also sometimes with the Burmese who Bezant is paying. Those two guys from earlier – they think I’m just another liaison from Lacebark – but actually I’m supposed to tell Bezant whether he can trust them.’

‘What about Cherish?’ says Raf.

‘The girl? Oh, she’s solid,’ says Martin, and Raf’s heart sinks. He’d still been holding out some hope that they might have got everything backwards. If Cherish was working for Lacebark, maybe that was the real reason she didn’t take that nasty fake glow he gave her. If only Raf had been so careful about what he was willing to swallow from a stranger he met in a club. On Friday, after Cherish vanished, he had felt so sure that she was under guard in a white van or a warehouse somewhere, and he realises now that he was probably right about that. He was just wrong about the details.

‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ says Fourpetal, ‘I hoped you might be candid but I never expected you to be this candid.’

Martin kneads his cheek with the heel of his hand. ‘A few weeks ago, Bezant said he wanted to try me on something new. He said I could be good at interrogations. They do a lot of those. I went to a warehouse and inside they had a guy in a cell with a hood over his head. They had all these different ways of disorienting him. They’d keep the lights on for thirty-six hours and then turn them off for four hours and feed him in the dark and then feed him again forty minutes later and then put the lights on for ten hours and then leave them off again for twenty hours without feeding him and then finally feed him again and so on and so on, so he never had any idea how much time had passed or when he was supposed to sleep. And they had the floor of the cell on springs and they blasted him with all these low-frequency sound waves to make him feel sick.’ Raf remembers the speaker cable on the floor of that warehouse. ‘I had to watch while they questioned him. I can’t even make myself talk about what I saw them do. And I don’t know what they wanted from him but I think he’s probably dead now. I never asked to be part of that. I had to tell Bezant I didn’t have the constitution for it. He laughed at me. You know, I’ve heard stories about him from the soldiers. In the Niger Delta there’s a cult called the Egbesu Boys. They fight the oil companies in the name of the local god of war. They say Egbesu gives them special powers. In particular, they like to brag that they can drink battery acid. Well, when Bezant was still down there working for Cantabrian, he once caught this kid who’d shot a few of his men in the swamp. The kid was defiant. He told Bezant all about Egbesu. And apparently Bezant told the kid to “prove it”. He made him drink battery acid. Made him do shots of it like tequila. With lemon and salt.’