The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,12

in the display, a string whose pattern he recognised. He checked the number again, read it aloud. The London 0207 prefix, the uncanny string of primes. It was the number he’d dialled from the phone box earlier that day. Crowbar’s flat in Kilburn.

5

Their Glorious Youth

The BMW was fast and smooth, the roads empty.

Crowbar’s words came to him in a flash: might even take it on myself.

Jesus Christ Almighty. Crowbar had betrayed him. He’d tried to use his own guys to collect Regina Medved’s three-million-pound reward. The tip-off and the hit. Clay could not bring himself to believe it, would literally have wagered his life against it. In so many ways, he already had. But there they were, lying dead and injured in the gorse, Boers like Koevoet, bloody Natal farm boys, lately of the DCC or 32 Battalion or some such outfit, guns for hire, mercenaries, using their years of experience to fight other people’s wars now that their country no longer wanted them.

Clay turned on the stereo, an expensive Blaukpunt. A CD loaded. He eased back the seat and settled in, the night air buffeting cold through the empty side window. A tinkling synthesised intro filled the car, building, mournful, that long single chord lasting and lasting in the background, and it made sense, really, that the men he had just killed would have been listening to this on the way here, anticipating perhaps the payoff and all it would bring. All of them of the same era, fighting that same race war. Now they were fighting each other. And then that haunting guitar and those four notes that always seemed to be asking him: where are you now? All of it always reminding him of Eben and that cheap tape deck and the Wish You Were Here cassette he played over and over in their tent at the Kunene River encampment, and the way Koevoet always came round and told Eben to turn it off, threatened to shoot the thing, run it over with a Buffel, give them all extra guard duty, and the way Eben always laughed and turned it right back up as soon as the old man had gone, and those long nights on standby, sitting by the fire, screaming the lyrics they were living out into the night with all the strength of their glorious youth: caught in the crossfire, blown on the steel breeze. Then, like now, none of it real, somehow. As he gazed through the trembling tunnel of light, the confused shadows of his memory twinned then trebled, the embers from the fire spinning skyward then blurring, come on you target, dissolving in the rain until they were gone and he was no longer sure that they had ever existed. He drove on through the night, sang it out at the top of his lungs until his already bruised throat ached. How I wish you were here.

The rain had intensified now and was falling in a continuous sheet. Dark hedgerows flew past, road spray hissing from the wheels and past the open window. He passed the first farmhouse, a distant light across the fen, and joined the B road for Launceston. Soon he was trundling along with the evening traffic, a light rain falling, the lights of the cars swimming across the wet pavement. He stopped at a newsagent and picked up a fifty-pound phone card, paying cash.

A few miles down the road he pulled into the carpark of a Tesco supermarket on the edge of town. The place was busy with afterwork shoppers, the lot almost full. Outside the main entrance was a bank of public telephones. He searched the eaves of the building. A single CCTV camera watched the automatic doors. Another was perched atop a lamppost at the far end of the lot. Clay pulled up his hood, wandered to the opposite end of the carpark and circled back towards the phones, avoiding the cameras’ eyes.

Closing the phonebox door, Clay brushed the rain from his jacket then cradled the receiver between his shoulder and ear and dialled the number. The line clicked, fuzzed and finally rang. Clay imagined the telephone on the little pinewood table next to the kitchen window, her walking from the lounge, looking out across the valley, the Dents du Midi towering in the distance, perhaps in cloud now, early snow falling at altitude. She was safe there, he told himself, veiled by a new name, a new identity, a place to live free from