neck. Clay arched his back, lined up the man’s head, and with every joule of energy he could summon, whipped his neck forward.
Clay’s forehead made contact with the man’s nose. The cartilage collapsed as if it were raw cauliflower. He could hear the crunch. Clay rolled away, twisting the MP5 on its strap and sending his attacker crashing to the floor. Clay gasped for air, fumbled for the MP5’s grip. By now the Boer was up, blood streaming black over his lips and chin. He stood a moment, frozen. A stab of moonlight flicked across the room. The man was fair-haired, with big, pale eyes set in anxious sockets and a heavy, farm jaw, a goddamned voortrekker if he’d ever seen one. Clay raised the MP5. The Boer’s eyes widened.
‘Wat julle gestuur het?’ said Clay. Who sent you?
The Boer blinked twice. ‘Fok jou.’
‘Who sent you, damn it?’
The Boer glanced towards the open door, the gale howling outside. Then he looked back at Clay and smiled through the blood. ‘Mandela het my gestuur,’ he slurred. Mandela sent me.
Clay pulled the trigger. Nothing. A jam. Or out of ammunition. He dropped the MP5, reached for the Glock in his waistband. And then the light was gone, and so was the Boer.
Clay scrambled to his feet, Glock out, the MP5 flapping about his neck, and staggered to the door. The man was already across the courtyard. Clay raised the G21, took aim through the slanting rain. The Boer hurdled the low wall and stumbled into the gorse just as Clay fired. Clay ran across the courtyard to the wall. A dark shape was lurching towards the cliff edge, about thirty metres away now, barely silhouetted against the sea. Clay steadied himself, raised his weapon. The Boer stopped, turned. He was right there, the abyss before him. Clay fired. The Boer pitched back and was gone.
3
A Talisman of Sorts
Clay walked back across the courtyard, the pain in his arm rising now as the endorphins and adrenaline burned away. The rain had relented and the cloud cover thinned. Moonlight sent shadows twitching across the landscape. He knelt once more beside the dead man and went through his pockets, extracting a wallet, three extra magazines for the MP5, a set of keys with a BMW ring, and a mobile phone, its standby light blinking red. Clay flipped open the phone and thumbed the scroll button. Nothing. The phone was password protected. He pulled out the SIM card and threw the phone over the cliff.
Back inside the cottage, he lit a lamp and inspected his arm. The knife, still lying on the floor, had sliced through the sleeve of his leather jacket and into his deltoid. He walked to the bathroom and opened the big cupboard. Crowbar’s idea of a medical kit resembled a military field hospital. There were giving sets, IV kits, every size and shape of bandage and compress, sutures, tape, morphine, coagulants, antibiotics by the carton, splints and slings. Clay took off the jacket, winced as he pulled the grey hooded sweatshirt over his head and pulled off his shirt. It was a clean slice across the arm, about three inches long, at least a couple of centimetres deep. Not too bad. He’d been lucky.
He stood and watched the blood ooze from the wound. As he’d lunged for Clay, the Boer had slipped on the wet floor and missed his target. Those new city shoes he’d been wearing, the shiny wet leather soles, had probably saved Clay’s life.
Which shoes you put on in the morning.
The side of the helicopter you got out of.
Where you decided to step. Here, or here.
These were the things that determined if you lived or died, whether you ended up in a coma for the rest of your life, lost your legs just above the knees, went home in one piece, physically at least. The brute physics of it – in retrospect always so pure and clear, something you could calculate, but in the causation so utterly unpredictable and, in the end, so spectacularly unfair. And for so long it had been for him the ultimate argument against the existence of God, and since he’d met Rania the ultimate argument for Him. For without His arbitrage, what possible explanation? What meaning?
One thing was certain. Allah, if he was out there, had a warped conception of justice, but a hell of a sense of humour.
Clay washed and dried the wound, snapped open a vial of disinfectant and doused the upper part