Knox was an archaeologist. He enjoyed a good speculation as much as the next man, but he liked evidence he could see and touch before taking it seriously. Aside from the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, there were just a few bare scraps of evidence of pre-Columbian contact with the New World. A Roman-style terracotta head had been discovered in the foundations of a pre-Columbian Mexican house. Carved Olmec heads appeared to reflect African features; a Malinese fleet was known to have sailed westwards across the Atlantic; and Columbus himself had been told by the natives of Hispaniola of previous visitors with black skins. There was evidence from the plant kingdom too. The sweet potato, an American endemic, had spread across Polynesia long before Columbus. The resin in Peruvian mummifications came from New Guinea trees. African gourds had been found in Central America, and there were claims of cocaine and tobacco in ancient Egyptian contexts. American peppers had been described by Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, and there was a pineapple in a Pompeii mosaic. Chicken bones carbon-dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century had been found on the Chilean coast, far to the south of Tumbez, even though chickens were supposedly introduced by Europeans. But, when all was said and done, it was a fairly meagre catalogue of evidence, especially as every scrap of it could be explained away by natural causes, fraud or coincidence. Extraordinary theories needed extraordinary proof, after all.
And maybe he’d just found it.
II
Rebecca took a moment to calm herself before she took the phone. ‘This is Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she said.
‘You have the money?’ A man’s voice, but the signal was too weak and the crackle too loud for her to tell much more than that.
‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes I do.’
‘You have one hour. There is-’
‘I want to speak to my father.’
‘You have one hour. There is a sheet-’
‘I speak to my father or you get nothing,’ she yelled. She ended the call and stood there clutching the phone in trembling hands, waiting for it to ring again, praying for it to ring. The phone’s owner reached tentatively to take it from her. She held up a palm to fend him off. They’d call back. For five hundred million ariary, they’d call back. If they didn’t call, it meant they didn’t have Adam and Emilia, it had all been a sham. She’d go straight to Andriama and tell The phone jumped suddenly in her hand. She almost spilled it. ‘Do that again,’ said the man, when she answered, ‘and we kill them both. You understand?’
‘I want to speak with-’
Another man’s voice came on. ‘Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Rebecca, my darling.’
The sound of his voice transfixed her. She’d have recognised it anywhere. ‘Dad!’ she wailed. ‘Dad.’
‘Please, Rebecca. Do as they ask. We’re both well but-’
There was the sound of scuffling and then the kidnapper came back on. ‘You have one hour,’ he told her curtly. ‘There’s a map beneath your windscreen wiper. Follow its directions to the place marked. Travel alone. We will be watching. You understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘You will find a yellow bag there. Put the money in the bag then return to Tulear. Tell no one. If the money is all there, we will release your father and sister. If not-’ The phone went dead. Rebecca stared at it dumbly. The trader took it back from her, asked apologetically for money. She reached into her bag and thrust some banknotes at him. She couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t think of anything but the echo of her father’s voice. Rebecca, my darling! He’d never called her that before! Yvette had always been his one and only darling. She felt euphoric, drunk and terrified all at once. Rebecca, my darling! He was alive. Emilia was alive. She was going to get them back. She walked unsteadily to the Jeep. A map. The man had said something about a map. But where? She couldn’t remember. She searched anxiously until she found it tucked beneath her wiper.
‘Hey!’
Rebecca turned to see Andriama hurrying towards her. She threw the map on to her passenger seat, climbed in and roared away. Andriama chased her for a few paces before giving up and waving down a taxi. She swung left at the first opportunity, left again, hiding herself in the maze of streets. She looked in her rear-view, couldn’t see anyone following. She unfolded the crude map on her steering wheel as she drove, but it was difficult to read, what with her eyes blurred and the roads bumpy and her hands shaking wildly. She pulled to the side. It directed her to take Route Nationale 7 through Andranohinaly, past an orange road-side stall and then down a track to her right. Andranohinaly was on the way to Ilakaka, the same road Mustafa would currently be driving along in the other direction. A stroke of luck at last! She took out his card and dialled his mobile. It rang and rang but nobody answered. She called his home instead and made Ahdaf describe her father’s car: a blue Mercedes 4x4 with tinted windows. She was putting her phone back in her bag when she noticed the GPS transmitter. She’d forgotten all about it, but now she switched it on and put it in her pocket, set off again for the Ilakaka road.
Traffic was mercifully thin, but she’d only driven about eight miles when the Jeep began to limp and then she heard the distinctive flapping of a flat tyre. She gave a cry and pulled to the side. The Jeep’s tyres had been popping forever; she’d changed them often in the distant past. She fetched the spare and kit. The bolts felt welded on. She had to stamp down with her foot on the very end of the spanner to get them loose. And the ground was so soft that her jack kept giving a little under the Jeep’s weight. Haste and the trembles caused her to fumble and drop the spanner and the nuts, but at last she was done. Half an hour wasted. Half an hour! She tossed everything in the back and raced away, still scanning the road for Mustafa’s blue Mercedes. When finally she saw it, she flashed her lights and tooted until he pulled to the side. She parked across the road from him, jumped out, ran across. ‘The money?’ she cried. ‘Have you got the money?’
‘Of course,’ he said, getting out and going around to his boot. ‘I gave you my word.’
‘I’m late. I’m dreadfully late.’
‘Calm down. Please. You must be-’
‘Calm? Don’t tell me to be calm! Andriama knows. He’s on to us.’
Mustafa’s face fell. ‘But you promised to say nothing.’
‘It’s not my fault. He heard you’d been raising money.’
‘Oh.’ He stroked his chin, shook his head. ‘If that is all he knows, then he knows nothing.’ He threw open his boot, unzipped and pulled open the mouth of a black holdall, stuffed with thick bundles of banknotes. ‘Count,’ he told her.
‘There’s no time.’
‘You must count,’ he insisted.
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, tipped the money out, stacked up the bundles. She kept glancing down the road, expecting the police at any second. There were fifty bundles in all, five piles of ten. She tested two at random. Each comprised ten wads of twenty brandnew 50,000 ariary notes stapled together. It took her a few moments to do the arithmetic, then she nodded at Mustafa. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you remember what I told you about interest?’