“No!” King shouted at him. He pushed out of his seat but, with his feet still tied, all he succeeded in doing was falling forward, reaching desperately towards his girlfriend.
“I can find the map! I can find it! I know how to find it!” he roared at the mercenary. His heart thundered inside his rib cage as he watched the knife lightly slice across Sid’s cheek, drawing a slither of blood. She squealed at the pain but could not move away.
“No! You bastard! I’ll kill you if you hurt her! I’ll—”
“Enough of the threats, Ben,” Bill scolded. Throughout the entire exchange, the calm tone of his voice had never wavered. He wiped the blood off the metal blade and left Sid shivering in her seat, unable to even probe the wound on her cheek. Then Bill picked King up and threw him back against his own seat, re-sheathing his knife.
“If you lie to me again, Ben,” he promised, “I will cover your girlfriend’s lovely, lovely body with hundreds of little cuts, just like that one. It will be agonising and, even if I then decided, merciful as I am, to let her live, she would be so disfigured, so heinous and abhorrent, that even Quasi-goddamn-modo wouldn’t want to screw her. Got it?”
King studied the other man’s emotionless grey eyes, sickened to the core by what he saw there. It wasn’t just evil. No, evil was something he could understand, something he could quantify and hate. But Bill’s eyes were simply cold, as lifeless and as dead as a corpse.
He nodded weakly and got to work.
The V-22 Osprey thundered south over the Andes, its powerful turboprops chewing into the mountainous air and propelling it at almost three hundred miles per hour. Unlike most planes, however, the V-22’s rotors were able to be tilted up and down, giving it the ability to take off and land vertically or to hover just like a helicopter. This tilt-rotor design had made it the ideal choice for Gibbs’ team upon learning of the likely terrain of their destination. Much of the Patagonian region of Argentina and Chile was occupied by mountains, glaciers and tiny archipelago islands, making it almost impossible to land an ordinary airplane should their destination be as remote as they feared. Yet, worrying that they were already lagging behind their prey, the speed of a fixed-wing aircraft was essential.
Using their borrowed Bell 407 Jamaican coastguard helicopter, the team had flown to a rendezvous point in Belize where a hastily assembled Sea King, on loan from Britain’s Royal Navy, had been waiting. They had used the Sea King to head south to a Peruvian airbase where they were supposed to meet up with the tilt-rotor which had been sent from a U.S. Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific. The well organised logistical operation had fallen apart due to confusion between the Peruvian authorities and the U.N. and had delayed the mission by over an hour.
Fearing they had fallen behind the mercenary plane, they now pushed the Osprey to its limits even as, inside its hold, Raine and Nadia tried to pinpoint their ultimate destination.
“We need to track down the descendants of Abubakar,” he told the Russian woman. Despite the events of the last hours, Nadia still managed to look remarkably sexy, her black clothing clinging to the curved contours of her body. Her eyes were as intense and focussed as ever, though, as she studied the laptop computer perched on her legs.
“What makes you think he has any?” she asked.
“Because if he doesn’t, we’re screwed. And so are Benny and Sid.”
She fixed him with a hard stare but he could see the genuine concern in her eyes. She wanted to find her missing friends as much as he did.
With startling proficiency, she linked the laptop via satellite signal onto the World Wide Web. The system wasn’t dissimilar to the link-up the computers had used back at Sarisariñama, allowing a fast, flaw-free flow of information from just about anywhere in the world, even high above the Andes.
“Where do you even start?” West asked, his Brooklyn accent strong. He sat between Gibbs and O’Rourke who both dozed on the opposite side of the cabin. Garcia sat beside Raine while Murray occupied the co-pilot seat in the cockpit along with Lake.
“At the beginning,” Nadia replied automatically, not really listening to anyone else as she navigated into a powerful search engine which had been developed by DARPA. In a matter of seconds she had a list of websites which claimed to hold census data for Argentina dating back to the mid sixteenth century. She quickly weeded out the obvious commercial sites that had sprouted up in recent years since the boom in interest in plotting out family trees. She clicked on a link that ended in ‘.gov.ar’ which opened onto the homepage of the Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina’s General Archive of the Nation. Raine, fluent in Spanish, took the computer off her lap and scanned through the text.
Established in 1821, Archivo General de la Nación absorbed dozens of historical archives, libraries, church and provincial records, amassing them all into one place. Raine quickly navigated through the website.
“I presume we do not have a second name for this ‘Abubakar?’” Nadia asked.
“Afraid not,” Raine replied. “But I’m guessing that the child of an Egyptian and a Selk’nam Indian wouldn’t go unnoticed.”
Across the hold, Gibbs stirred and opened his eyes. Bleary for a second, they suddenly snapped onto the laptop on Raine’s knees.
“What the hell!” he snapped. “I told you, no com equipment! West, you’re supposed to be watching him!”
“Sorry boss,” West grumbled.
Raine held up his hands in surrender. “Whoa, keep your panty-hoes on Gibbsy,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at Playboy or—”
“Give the computer back to the Rusky,” Gibbs said firmly. Raine saw his hand drift to his sidearm and a flare of rebellion made him want to hold on to the machine just to piss the man off. But causing trouble wasn’t going to help King and Sid so he slowly placed it back on Nadia’s lap.
“Sorry,” he said insincerely. “I just figured that doing something more than taking a cat-nap might be useful.” The dig at Gibbs was obvious and his face twisted in fury but Nadia cut him off.
Her hands had been running across the keypad at incredible speed, almost a blur, ignoring the exchange and finishing Raine’s search, but in a flourish, she jabbed the return key and announced: “Shakir Adjo.”
“Shakir Adjo,” King read the name off the computer embedded into the bulkhead opposite him. Bill operated it under the archaeologist’s direction to prevent him from trying to use the internet to call for help.
King’s hunch had paid off. Accessing Argentina’s Archivo General de la Nación, he had pulled up the files for settlements in the Patagonian region from the year that, according to the Kernewek Diary, Abubakar had returned to the area. From Emily Hamilton’s descriptions, Abubakar and his wife, Kénos, sounded as if they were head-over-heals in love with one another. Even though their wedding, he could only assume, had been a bizarre conglomeration of Muslim and local customs and therefore most likely not recorded, the strong presence of Christian missionaries in the area would have seen to it that even pagan and heathen births were recorded.
He had then scanned through a list of recorded births from the period he had surmised the Egyptian had returned to Patagonia, from around 1713 onwards. Most of the names were heavily influenced by the predominant Spanish settlers. Except for one. Shakir Adjo.
“It doesn’t list the name of the parents,” Bill said accusingly. “And you said the diary doesn’t mention Abubakar’s second name. How can you be so sure that this is his child?”