It wasn’t Miguel. David felt absurd relief, as he and Amy stretched to see through the scratched car window. But what were they looking for?
At first there was nothing. And then he saw: a horse, thin and solitary and loping across the dirt road. Then David saw more – dozens, then hundreds. Curvetting and playing in the sandy heat-haze.
Angus was rhapsodizing.
‘The wild horses of the Namib. I love these animals. They’re the last remnants of the Schutztruppe – the German colonial army. The horses escaped and turned feral.’ He gazed, almost serene, at the dreamlike spectacle. ‘Now they are the only wild desert horses in the world – becoming a new species, specially adapted to dryness.’ Angus sat back. ‘I always think they look like the souls of horses, roaming free in the afterlife…That’s why this place is so hard to leave. Things like that. But here’s the airport. Just past the dunes.’
The car prowled around the last of the soft Barchan dunes. They were slowing onto a wide flat space. The driver stopped at the perimeter of a surreally bleak airstrip.
A small plane and two helicopters sat on some asphalt amidst acres of sun-scorched dust. One of the choppers had Kellerman Namcorp inscribed on the side. Its propellers were already turning.
David turned to Angus and said: ‘But where are we going?’
‘Amsterdam –’
‘Yes, but then?’
‘Zbiroh! An SS castle. Bohemia! I’ll explain later – mate, we gotta hurry, Miguel is still out there –’
They ran across the flatness. A man with a low slung sub-machine gun was standing by the helicopter, he stared at them, astonished, as they ducked under the whumping blades.
‘Angus?’
‘Roger!’
The black man smiled.
‘Angus my man!’
Angus was shouting above the loud churn of the spinning chopper blades. Something passed between them. Something from the black velvet pouch? David guessed it was diamonds. Maybe. Roger did a nodding salute.
‘Get in!’ said Angus. Roger was shouting at all of them, gesturing them into the chopper. Quickly!
David and Amy climbed in, and sat on the first seats they could find. Angus joined them, his face strained and exhausted. They strapped up, and even as their safety belts clicked, the chopper lifted up.
They were flying.
David stared down. Roger was a small figure now. Looking up at them with a hand to shield his eyes from the sand. David blinked and looked a kilometre south. A wild horse was cantering across the wasteland.
Then the clouds of dust intervened, and all was blank.
45
2.58, 2.59. 3.00.
There was no sign of him. David glanced warily at the station clock.
3.02, 3.03, 3.04.
Angus was by his side, saying nothing – for once. The tension evident in his face. Amy looked pensive to the point of depression.
What did she know? She had been noticeably different since they landed in Amsterdam and made their way across Germany, to Nuremburg Station where they had agreed to meet Simon. Why? Maybe she now suspected he was Cagot, or maybe she was merely reacting to his changed mood, his sudden intense anxiety. His distant chilliness, his violent moodswings, as he ransacked himself for answers or solace or quiescence.
He’d stopped making love to her. He couldn’t do it any more. Once they had been rough, playful, sharply passionate. And now? He could see himself biting her, that white female flesh, and drawing blood.
It was an abyss, and he had to look into it, he had to reach far inside his soul, to get a hold of his essential self. Because he needed his last reserves of equanimity, for the crucial hours ahead. The crucial days, the crucial minutes.
3.07, 3.08, 3.09.
Maybe Simon wasn’t coming. They had sent one email from Amsterdam, and had got one quickly in return: Yes.
There had also been one other email in David’s inbox, a very surprising email – from Frank Antonescu. His granddad’s old lawyer in Phoenix had been doing some research of his own, and, through a contact at the IRS – who apparently owed him a favour – had eventually, ‘after a lot of grafting and grifting!’ worked out where the money came from.
The Catholic church.
The money was, Antonescu wrote, ‘Paid not just to your grandfather but to a number of people immediately after the war. It was known as “Gurs money”. I have no idea why. The fellow at the IRS was similarly mystified.’
So that was another joist of an answer – in the rising structure of a solution. But the full edifice would only be revealed when they got to Zbiroh. And found the Fischer results.