They had been walking through a thicket of trees and bushes. At its far end, they emerged into a small open space, perhaps thirty feet across, that stood at the foot of a low cliff. Straight ahead of them, the cliff was bisected by a narrow gully that cut into the rock, rising as it went. At the base of the cliff, by the mouth of the gully, lay a scattered pile of large boulders – the result, presumably, of some long-ago rock fall. They made a perfect defensive position. This, Carver decided, was where he would make his stand.
He stopped and turned to face Justus and Zalika. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘You two go on to the border. It’s only a few hundred yards now, just the far side of this hill. All you have to do is keep going, and no matter what happens, or what you hear, don’t turn back.’
‘No!’ cried Zalika. ‘You can’t do that. Come with us.’
‘No point. They’ll just get all of us.’
‘Then leave me behind,’ said Justus. ‘I am the one slowing you down. I should stay.’
‘No,’ said Carver firmly. ‘I promised I’d get you back to your kids. I’m not breaking that promise. Just give me your spare magazines and I’ll be fine. Mabeki can’t have many men with him. The chopper wasn’t big enough. But they’re coming this way. So go. Go now. And don’t look back.’
Zalika stepped forward, as if to embrace him, but Carver pushed her away. ‘No time for goodbyes. Just go.’
The two hesitated for a moment, then left.
Carver settled down behind one of the rocks. He wasn’t too concerned. He had a decent amount of ammunition. His position offered him plenty of cover and would force his enemies to come at him across an open, moonlit clearing. Unless Mabeki had suddenly rustled up an entire platoon in the middle of the African bush it shouldn’t be too hard to hold them off for long enough to let Zalika and Justus escape. After that he just had to find a way to disengage from the firefight and sneak away before anyone noticed he was gone. It was tricky, but not impossible. First, though, he had to cover the others’ retreat. He reckoned he still had two or three minutes before Mabeki and his men arrived.
The first shots came much sooner than that. Two rounds, pistol fire, reverberating around the rocks – from behind his position. Christ, had they got behind him? Were the other two under attack?
Carver twisted round and peered back down the gully. There was something moving there, a deeper shadow in the darkness. It grew bigger and more defined until Carver could make out a figure carrying a handgun with arms extended, ready to fire, walking towards him. His finger tightened on the trigger.
And then he realized it was Zalika. He exhaled slowly, closing his eyes for a second as he contemplated how close he had come to shooting her. As he lowered the M4, he took his left hand off the forward grip and made a downward, pressing gesture with it, indicating that she should get down, under cover of the rock.
She kept walking.
‘Zalika!’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing? Where’s Justus?’
She did not bother to whisper, but in a calm, steady voice said, ‘Put your gun down. Put it down, or I shoot.’
98
Carver did nothing. It wasn’t out of any kind of bravado. He simply couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.
‘Put the gun down,’ Zalika repeated. ‘On the ground. Now.’
Very slowly, calmly, keeping his eyes on hers, he did as he was told.
‘Now kick it away from you.’
Again Carver obeyed her. He could make out every detail of her face in the clear moonlight as she stood over him, pointing the gun down at his chest, the threat of the bullet pinning him to the spot like a butterfly on a pin. Now it was his turn to repeat himself: ‘What are you doing? Where’s Justus?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said, so flatly, with such impersonal detachment, that he hardly recognized it as her voice at all. And then: ‘I shot him.’
The information was so unexpected, so wrong, that Carver could not make sense of it. ‘What do you mean, you shot him? Why the hell did you do that?’
Zalika looked almost surprised that it was not obvious to him. ‘Why do you think? Because I had to stop him getting to the border. Just like I’m going to stop you.’
Still the words she spoke made no sense to him. ‘Are you mad? We’ve got to get to the border. Mabeki’s going to be here any minute. That’s the only way of escaping him.’
‘But I don’t want to escape him,’ she said, her voice beginning to rise as she taunted him. ‘Don’t you get it? All this time, you’ve been thinking he’s the kidnapper. But he’s not. You are. Those men back there, the ones you killed, they weren’t there to keep me in. They were there to keep you out. I wasn’t a prisoner. I wanted to be there, to be with Moses at last after all these years. That was why I had no clothes on when you found me. I was waiting for him.’
Carver had sleepwalked into a looking-glass world, where up was down, wrong was right and all his hopes turned out to be delusions. It seemed now that everything she had ever said to him was a lie that had meant the exact opposite of what he had believed. Everything she had done had been for totally different reasons to the ones he had assumed. He’d been fool enough to care about Zalika Stratten. He’d risked his life to save her. Had she really not wanted to be saved?
He made one last effort to try to preserve his own view of reality.
‘Mabeki abducted you when we were in Hong Kong. He held a gun to your head. I saw him do it.’
‘And I let him,’ she said. ‘Then, when we’d got outside, I ran to the van he had waiting, and they drove me away. I’d wanted to stay at the house, so that we could kill you together, Moses and me. But he said that was too risky. He wanted to be sure I was all right. And he’d already worked out a plan for dealing with you. All the time I was in that van I just prayed that he would get away from you safely, so that he could join me. And I prayed that you were dead, Sam. I prayed for that with all my heart.’
‘And everything between us, that was…’
‘Just a way of getting you to Hong Kong, so that you would kill the Gushungos, and then we would kill you.’
‘So it was you all along, selling us out, telling Mabeki everything.’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. ‘And it was him all along, telling me about the Gushungos. There were no old ladies at that church in Hong Kong. I didn’t have to spend hours checking out their house. Anything I ever wanted to know, Moses just told me. We never met. But we talked on the phone, sent emails. He’s even my Facebook friend. Fake name and picture, of course.’ She laughed at the deceitful absurdity. ‘It’s been going for years. Did Wendell ever tell you how he got his bright idea to get rid of the Gushungos?’
‘No.’
‘Then I will. I went up to him one day and said, “I want revenge” in my best blank, moody, kidnap-victim voice. That got him thinking, just like Moses said it would. After that, all I had to do was drop the occasional hint and… well, here we are.’
Carver had a limited appetite for self-pity. The pain he felt was rapidly mutating into a cold, detached anger. ‘Well I hope you’re pleased with yourself. This country’s lost the chance to be free. And your uncle’s dead. Shot in the back. Did you know that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And it doesn’t bother you? Wendell Klerk rescued you, gave you a home… the guy loved you like a daughter, and this is how you repay him?’
‘Loved me? Is that what you think? He loved money. All I was to him was a way of keeping his precious business alive when he was gone. He only paid you to come after me in Mozambique because it was cheaper than paying the ransom.’
‘That’s not true. I know it’s not. And how can you say you want to be with Moses Mabeki? The man’s a psychopath. He killed your family. He tried to rape you. I saw him in that room, by your bed, half-undressed…’