The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,8

of his arm, letting the sting nudge away this pointless philosophy. Soon he had the wound passably sutured and bandaged. He was getting good at working one-handed, much better than the bumbling frustration of the first weeks. He grabbed a box of painkillers, extra sutures, gauze and compresses, more disinfectant, a box of morphine, two clean towels and a box of surgical gloves, carried them into the kitchen and put them on the table.

Time was running. Clay threaded on a clean shirt, a dry hoodie, and hunched into the wet leather jacket. He opened up his bag, stuffed in the extra medical supplies. Then he grabbed the MP5 from the table, cleared the chamber, pulled out the magazine, and slid weapon and ammunition in with the supplies. From the drawer under the sink he fished out a box of .45 shells for the Glock and dropped them in with the other stuff. He walked to the fireplace, opened the flue, reached up and worked loose the blackened brick just above the baffle, pulled out a metal tin and extracted a fold of cash, sterling and euros, and two passports: Marcus Edward, Canadian, from Vancouver; and David Jackson, a Brit born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Both documents contained the same photograph of Clay, taken two and half months ago, the day after the killings in London, the eyes narrow, the mouth drawn, the hair chopped back. He looked like someone else, someone older. Clay stashed the money and passports in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He glanced at his watch. Just gone seven. Maybe ten and a half hours of good darkness left. He pulled a rain poncho from a hook near the door and pulled it over his head.

Not for the first time he wondered about this place he’d come to know so well. Hints of its recent past were everywhere. The half-used boxes of ammunition under the counter, the shredded railway sleepers in the buttressed shed outside, old copies of the South African Sunday Times yellowing in the coal scuttle, cupboards stocked with enough lamb stew and tuna to last a year. And now a dead man outside the front door.

He breathed, closed his eyes a moment. Then he walked to the bookshelf, pulled out an old hardback volume of Macbeth, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, killed the lamp and walked out the door for the last time.

Clay set off down the footpath at a run, the wind at his back, the rain gusting in sheets that flayed across the open blufflands, the gorse shivering with each whip of the lash. The car couldn’t be far. He was going to find it and put as much time and distance between himself and this place as he could.

As he ran, the telephone conversation of earlier that day replayed itself in his mind, the words finding cadence with his footfall.

Crowbar had answered first ring.

‘It’s me, broer.’

‘I told you to keep quiet,’ Crowbar – Koevoet in Afrikaans – had said. He’d sounded drunk.

Clay switched to the language of his childhood. ‘I haven’t heard from you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Town.’

‘Kak, Straker. I fokken told you–’

Clay cut him off. ‘Have you heard from Rania?’

Silence, and then: ‘No. No, I haven’t. But there have been–’

‘What, Koevoet? Have been what?’

‘Articles in the paper. Written by Lise Moulinbecq. That’s her alias, isn’t it?’

He’d told her to keep quiet, stay hidden. Irony flooded through him, that particularly brutal nausea. ‘What articles?’

‘Something about Cyprus. Some sort of scam involving stolen antiquities.’

‘Get me out, Koevoet.’

‘Look, Straker.’ Crowbar coughed, deep and bronchial. ‘I have connections in the police. They don’t know who plugged Medved and his two thugs, but they know it happened in your hotel room. They want you for questioning.’

Killing Rex Medved had been the first right thing Clay had done in a long time, the first unselfish thing. But even as he’d pulled the trigger, something inside him had been pulling the other way, that promise he had made to himself a decade ago, after he’d fled the war, the insanity of a country tearing itself apart: no more killing. And then, deep in the wilds of Yemen, just five months ago, his day of reckoning had come. He’d met Rania. And that night when he’d killed Medved, it had been for something that mattered. It had been for her, for all those people in Yemen that Medved had screwed over, the dead kids, all the poisoned villagers whose minutes and hours and years had been chewed