Ivory Nation, Andy Maslen [e manga reader .txt] 📗

He screamed as his right shoulder dislocated, then again as the ligaments in his right knee parted in a series of pops he felt rather than heard.

The Hilux screeched its way past the Corolla’s rear bumper, dragging it off its mounts. He fell to the road, clothes ripped from his body. Something hurt deep inside his abdomen and the right half of his field of vision had disappeared.

They’d stopped again. And he knew why.

He had a spare magazine in the front pocket of his trousers. They hung from his belt in shreds, but the lining was intact and he could feel the hard rectangle of metal jammed against the top of his thigh.

He tried to straighten enough to insert two fingers into the pocket and retrieve the magazine. A dark, bad feeling uncoiled like a snake from the region of his kidneys. He gasped with the pain.

Time slowed down. His ears were ringing.

The magazine came free. Somehow he’d maintained his hold on the Colt, even as the bitch driving the Hilux had crushed him half to death. His hand was trembling so violently it took him three tries to drop out the empty magazine.

With shaking fingers, he upended the pistol and tried to feed the magazine into the grip.

It was hard with only half his sight. His hand kept disappearing into the vanished sector. Finally it slid home. He pushed it hard to seat it, ignoring the snake and its needle-pointed fangs that dug into his side.

He raised the Colt in the direction of the Hilux.

Then it flew from his grasp. He couldn’t understand how. When the driver’s second kick landed, he realised.

She loomed over him, a half-woman, wearing a half-expression of fury. In her half-hand, a half-revolver. A tiny thing. Chromed. Little more than a toy.

She squatted in front of him.

‘You’re bleeding badly and it looks like you’ve got an internal haemorrhage as well,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die unless we take you to a hospital. Who are you? Where are you from?’

He’d spent his adulthood taking the lives of others. Now death had come calling, he realised he wanted to save his own.

‘My name is Nazir Aboud al-Javari. I am Syrian.’

‘You’re not a journalist, are you?’

He shook his head and the world lurched. He swallowed against his rising gorge.

‘I am an assassin,’ he whispered. ‘I need a hospital. Take me and I will pay you whatever you ask.’

The other woman, the cop, got to her knees in front of him. Half a face looked at him. The visible eye was narrowed with concern. She was holding something up to his face. Something black. Shiny. A bright white light dazzled him. He squinted into the light.

‘You…illed…rincess…dn’t you?’ she asked.

Her voice warbled, dropping out like a bad short-wave radio connection. He nodded, then retched as the snake surged halfway up his throat.

‘Who hired you?’ she shouted. ‘Who? The Israelis?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not…them.’

He turned to one side and vomited blood onto the road. When he looked back at her, the visible half of her face began to shrink, a receding pale oval. And he was a boy again, at the National Museum of Damascus on Shukri al-Quwatli Street with his father. In the little auditorium, they sat with half a dozen other people watching a speeded-up film of the phases of the moon. The dark half grew larger and the shining silver oval shrank, first to an ellipse, then a crescent, then a sliver like a curved knife blade and then, finally, like an eye closing, it winked out. All dark now.

His father spoke in the blackness of the auditorium, fragrant with cigarette smoke.

‘Come, Nazir. Time to go home.’

‘I want to watch again, Father. From the beginning.’

His father held him gently by the elbow.

‘No. Your mother is waiting, she —’

Stella stuck two fingers under the man’s jaw, probing for the artery, then held them there while she searched for a pulse. She closed her eyes. Nothing.

She prised the Colt from his grip and stuck the pistol in her waistband. She stood up.

‘Dead?’ Eli asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Shit!’

Stella shrugged.

‘It’s actually not so bad. I recorded his confession.’

‘Will that be enough?’

‘Should be. Deathbed confessions are pretty solid in terms of the law of testimony. No further reason to lie.’

‘How did you know he wasn’t a journalist?’

Stella shrugged.

‘Partly, he just didn’t look right to me. There was something off about his body language. His accent was all wrong, too. BBC journalists haven’t spoken like that for decades.’ She paused, winked. ‘Plus, Don told me the BBC’s only African bureau is in Johannesburg.’

Eli’s eyes widened.

‘You really had me going there! I thought you’d been taking tips from Gabe and all his Oriental mind-control shit.’

Stella grinned.

‘Me? Nope. Just a hardworking copper who knows how to ask the right questions. Now, shall we stay here with another dead body, or get going?’

Eli looked around. Despite the racket they’d created, the street was still dark. Nobody had come out from one of the shacks to see what was going on. In an area like this, residents would know better than to investigate the sound of gunfire or automotive accidents in the middle of the night.

She nodded.

‘Come on.’

Together they ran back to the Hilux. The assassin they left for whoever reached him first, the cops, or the hyenas.

Back at the resort, Eli texted Gabriel a short summary of the day’s events.

The following morning she drove the Hilux out to the Kagosi Group compound and returned the materiel to Taylor, plus one Smith & Wesson Airweight Model .38. One of his men drove her back to the resort, dropping her off at reception with a smile and a wave as he floored the throttle to swerve the pickup round in a tight, rubber-burning circle on the tarmac.

She and Stella checked out, drove the rental Merc to the airport and, after a little research on the part of the sales clerk, bought two one-way tickets to Vientiane. They paid for access to one