The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Page 30

  Hau could still feel the burn of his mother’s lips on his cheek, the fingers that trembled on his shoulders as she told him to be careful. He had shrugged free of her embrace, embarrassed by her show of affection in the presence of the tall foreigners. He was no longer a child. He was a soldier, a man. As his sister had stepped forward to kiss him, he had taken a step back, maintaining a distance, and made a little solemn bow. And with a nod to the tall ones, he had turned and led them into the dark suburban night, Kalashnikov clutched tight to his chest.

  He led them through a maze of empty streets that were as familiar to him as they were unfamiliar to them. He felt good knowing that they were so completely dependent upon him. He took long, loping strides, moving easily through the humid night air, glancing back from time to time to make sure they were still there. And each time he was struck anew, almost shocked, by Elliot’s height. To him he seemed huge; a round-eyed giant with strange, pale skin.

  He had only the haziest recollection of the Americans who had once moved freely about the streets of Phnom Penh, and regretted that he had not been old enough to learn to speak their language. What little French he had known was gone for ever. He had felt jealous of his mother and sister, how they could speak to these men. He knew they had saved their lives, and he had been puzzled by his mother’s hostility towards them. Surely they were to be admired: tough, strong, seemingly invincible, like the soldiers in the American movies he had seen before his life had been torn up by the roots. He felt both proud and safe in their company, and he enjoyed the respect with which they treated him. They had saved his family from the Khmer Rouge. It was his duty to save them from the Vietnamese.

  It took them nearly an hour, skirting the campfires around the fringes of the city centre, to reach the highway that would take them south-west towards the deep-water port of Kompong Som. They lay in wait for more than fifteen minutes watching a convoy of trucks heading out along the highway, before an unnatural silence fell upon the west of the city. The sky had clouded over, virtually obliterating the moon. You could very nearly touch the darkness. They crouched, huddled together, behind the wall of a derelict factory, creeper growing up all around them where it had broken through the cracked pavings. The only sounds the creaking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes.

  Hau could feel the heat from the bodies of the two men, could smell their sweat, see it glistening on their faces. He wished he was going with them, that he did not have to go back. After all, what was there to go back to? But he had a sense of duty, too, towards his mother and sister. He was the man. It was up to him to look after them. He felt the hand of the American slip into his and grasp it firmly. ‘Thanks, kid.’ And for some unaccountable reason Hau felt tears well in his eyes and he was glad it was dark. His sense of safety was slipping away, and he felt less like the man and soldier he wanted to be, and more like the small boy he was.

  The taller of the two soldiers, the one his mother had called English – a concept of which Hau had no grasp – pressed something small and hard into his hand. He looked down to see the tiny figure of St Christopher, bowed by the load on its back, and looked up quickly to find the Englishman’s eyes hidden in shadow. He clutched it tightly in his hand and felt strangely moved. The big man ruffled his hair and both men moved out from the cover of the wall and off into the night, silent shadows quickly swallowed by the dark.

  A voice called out somewhere away to the right, a high-pitched voice, nasal and shrill. An engine roared loudly in the dark, and lights flooded the road beyond the wall. Hau pressed his back against the brick, and heard the clatter of hard soles on tarmac. Almost immediately the night erupted in a blaze of fire and noise. Giants in silhouette flickered across the factory’s flaking wall, crouched and running. The whine of mosquitoes was replaced by the whine of bullets pinging off concrete surfaces. To Hau, pressed in sudden terror against the brick, the shadows on the factory wall seemed to grow massively in size, huge dark spirits advancing through the night towards him. He watched, transfixed in horror, as their definition melted at the last, diverging and vanishing. The footsteps ran clattering off to the left and right. The harsh rattle of automatic fire fibrillated in the still night air: five, six, seven bursts that seemed to come from all around, echoing back off the factory wall. Above the roar Hau thought he heard the grunt of a human voice, the thud of a body on tarmac.

  Then the shooting stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, the chatter of guns replaced by a chatter of frightened, excited voices, before silence returned. The only sound was the erratic splutter of an idling engine.

  Hau felt his heart beating in his throat, heard the roar of blood in his ears. His knuckles burned white as he clutched his Kalashnikov in fear. He took a deep breath and ran silently along the length of the wall, bent double, stopping just short of a breach in the brickwork. His breath came in short trembling bursts, and for a moment he could not move. He relaxed his grip on the AK-47 and realized that he was still clutching the St Christopher, its fine silver chain dangling from between his fingers. Carefully he laid his weapon on the ground and slipped the chain around his neck. The bowed figure seemed to burn against his chest. Creeping forward, then, on his knees, he peered cautiously through the shattered brickwork.

  The road lay bathed in the sulphurous light of a jeep’s headlamps. Beyond their haloes of brightness, dark figures moved stealthily among the shadows of the darker buildings rising behind. Far away, to his right, Hau saw another figure crouched behind the skeleton of a rusted saloon car that lay at an odd angle, half on the road, half on the pavement, caught in the full glare of the headlamps. The figure was tense and motionless, and Hau realized that the other figures moving beyond the lights were slowly but surely encircling it.

  Closer, sprawled awkwardly across the camber of the road, a man lay face-down in the gutter, a pool of blood spreading through the dusty, broken surface. His automatic rifle lay near the faded centre line, casting a long shadow across the ground, reaching out towards his lifeless hand.

  With a shock like a fist in the gut, Hau recognized the Englishman. His hand rose instinctively to the medallion that hung around his neck, and he was overwhelmed by guilt. But it was anger that fuelled his sudden, foolish bravery as he snatched the Kalashnikov, stepping out from the cover of the wall and swinging it wildly in the direction of the jeep across the street. Bullets spat from its muzzle in quick succession, hot metal burning his hands, smoke and the acrid stink of cordite flashing up into his face. The front grille of the jeep seemed to dissolve under the sustained burst of fire, bullets ploughing through glass and engine cowling and rubber. Shattered headlamps extinguished the glare, and dark fell across the street like blindness.

  Hau was only vaguely aware of the chatter of McCue’s M16, away to his right, and the startled shouts of the Vietnamese. He stumbled through the dark, almost tripping over the prostrate figure of Elliot. Don’t be dead, he whispered to himself again and again. But Elliot’s body seemed lifeless and leaden as he tried to turn it over. Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead! A hand pulled him roughly aside and, briefly, he felt McCue’s sour, rasping breath on his face. Automatic fire seemed to rattle all around them, punctuated by shrill Vietnamese voices and the sound of running feet. A radio crackled somewhere nearby. But in the darkness there was confusion, and in confusion, safety.

  McCue grunted as he strained to lift the dead weight of Elliot on to his shoulder. Hau saw the faintest grim outline of his face, and as the American made for the hole in the wall, Hau scampered across the road to retrieve Elliot’s M16. A burst of fire whispered past his face, bullets splintering the brick behind him. Something sharp caught his forehead, just above the right brow, slicing like a razor across the bone. He hardly felt it, but was blinded almost immediately by the blood that ran into his eye. He slung the Kalashnikov across his shoulder and raised the M16, emptying its magazine in wide sweeping arcs of fire across the street. He heard a man sc
ream above the roar of the weapon, before the mechanism jammed on an empty chamber, and he turned and sprinted for the wall, throwing himself through the gap after McCue. Behind him, AK-47s chattered in the dark, but carried no threat now as he ran breathless down the narrow canyons, between towering derelict buildings.

  Beyond the far wall that marked the boundary of the former factory, a tiny street led steeply down between old apartment blocks, opening up at the foot into what had once been a small park, now overgrown and threatening to swallow up the streets around it. He stopped to listen. There were no sounds of pursuit. The air was filled with the sweet scent of jasmine blossom, and somewhere far away he heard the distant roar of an engine. A break in the thick cloud overhead opened up on an unexpected glimpse of the moon, and a ghostly light washed the park. McCue was kneeling by a tree, head bowed, gasping for breath that caught in his throat. It was a dry, hacking sound. With a brief backward glance, Hau ran across to join him.

  Elliot lay on his back, his chest and arm soaked darkly in blood. His face was chalk pale in the moonlight, and Hau thought he recognized death in its waxen pallor. He placed the tips of his fingers on the Englishman’s neck, just below the line of the jaw, and felt the faintest pulse. McCue turned, his face a mask of blood, and for a horrified second Hau wasn’t sure whether it was his or Elliot’s. Perhaps McCue saw the horror in the young eyes, for he ran the back of his hand across his face to smear the blood away. He looked at it for a moment, then back at the boy, and was surprised to see his face wet with silent tears.

  *

  The two women sat huddled in the dark, embracing their unspoken fear. Time was marked only by the sporadic appearances of the moon as it tracked its way across the south-east Asian sky behind thick layers of broken cloud. It was hard to say how long Hau had been gone. Each minute seemed as eternal as the night itself.

  At first, Ny heard nothing, but she felt Serey’s grip tighten around her arm and tensed. Then sudden fear gripped them both as the front door crashed open and heavy footsteps staggered up the hall. A gross, misshapen shadow loomed in the doorway. For a moment it stood quite still before lurching forward and falling to the floor, unfolding and dividing as it did so, into two. One half hit the floor with a sickening thud. The other remained crouched, heaving and issuing a sound like the bark of torn bellows. A smaller figure appeared in the door behind them. Serey let out a gasp and rushed to pull the boy to her breast. There was no drawing away this time, no standing on masculine dignity. It was a child’s sobs that she felt tearing at the young chest.

  ‘What happened?’ Ny stood in uncertain isolation in the centre of the room.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Hau sobbed. ‘All my fault.’

  ‘No.’ Serey tightened her grip on him, but he pulled away.

  ‘I took his luck. He gave me his luck and they killed him,’ he wailed.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, someone get the fire going! I can’t see a goddam thing!’ McCue was ripping the blood-soaked clothing from Elliot’s chest.

  The first flames sent their shadows dancing around the walls. Elliot’s white skin was touched with blue. The bullet had torn through his chest just below the left shoulder, miraculously missing bone, and coming out cleanly through his armpit. But that had left a mess of torn muscle and flesh. McCue shook his head.

  ‘He’s lost too much blood. And a wound like this won’t stay clean for long.’ He slumped back against the wall and took out a crushed pack of cigarettes with shaking hands.

  ‘What you going do?’ Ny asked, her eyes burning with fear and concern.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Serey said, ‘We must dress the wound.’

  ‘No point, lady! He’s a dead man.’

  ‘He will be if you don’ do nothing!’ Ny’s voice rose in pitch.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ McCue threw his cigarettes on the floor. ‘He’s going to die! Sometimes you just have to accept it! He would. He knows.’ He pulled himself up on to his knees and drew out his pistol. There was something close to hysteria in his voice as he pressed the barrel against Elliot’s temple. ‘He’d do it. I mean, you saw him. He didn’t give a shit, why should I?’ He tensed, his face a mask, as he squeezed on the trigger with a trembling finger.

  Hau’s confusion and consternation propelled him towards the figure kneeling as if in prayer, but Ny held his arm. ‘Your friend had . . .’ she searched desperately in her memory for the word ‘. . . cancer.’ It seemed strange on her tongue, innocuous, just a word. Yet the effect on McCue was electrifying. He turned wild eyes on her.

  ‘What kind of shit is that?’

  She nodded towards Elliot. ‘He tell me. Mistah Slattery come here to die. He had something bad inside him. Growing. A sickness.’ She fought to recall Elliot’s words, words spoken on a dark night on the Great Lake that might now save his life. ‘He going to die anyway, even if no one shoot him.’

  The fire in McCue’s eyes seemed suddenly extinguished, his finger relaxed on the trigger and he allowed his hand to drop, the pistol trailing loosely at his side. But he remained kneeling, limp and exhausted, like a man whose prayers for release have not been answered, and whose faith in God is shaken.

  Hau unclipped the chain at his neck and knelt beside McCue, leaning forward across the prone figure of Elliot to return the St Christopher to its rightful place. He looked up at his mother.

  ‘If I give him back his luck, maybe he won’t die.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sarit hovered nervously near the arrivals door. Half a dozen cigarette ends lay about his feet, his crumpled white suit grey from the ash of countless others. He dabbed with a grubby yellow handkerchief at the sweat running down his brown face, gathering in the wrinkles and dripping from the ends of his meagre moustache. The evening flight was half an hour late, and his agitation had been increased five minutes earlier by the arrival of two uniformed police officers who stood now smoking and chatting idly by the door

  When at length he spotted the face he had been waiting for among the passengers off the London flight, it was with a mixture of relief and trepidation.

  ‘Mistah Blaih. So pleased to see you again.’ He smiled effusively and shook the big Scotsman’s hand. ‘I got car waiting.’ And he steered the conspicuously European face quickly out to the taxi rank, and the anonymity of the night.

  ‘Sorry if you’ve been waiting long, Sarit. The bloody flight was late, then there was all that palaver coming through customs. You got the gear?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Best there is.’ Sarit opened the door of the taxi. ‘Where to?’ He slipped in beside Blair.

  ‘Just take us into the city. We’ll drive about for a bit.’

  Sarit gave clipped instructions to the driver.

  ‘What about the girl? What did you find out?’

  Sarit mopped his face and sat back. ‘Difficult, Mistah Blaih, very difficult. Bangkok dangerous place since Tuk running things.’

  Blair found his wallet and slipped out a few notes. ‘Course it is, Sarit. Better, though, to eat half a loaf in fear than have no bread at all, eh?’

  Sarit spread thin lips across nicotine-stained teeth, in what he imagined was a smile. ‘Sure, Mistah Blaih, sure.’ He took the notes and rubbed them gently between his fingers, as if he thought they might be printed on rice paper and crumble before he could spend them.

  ‘So?’

  ‘They say he tried to have Mistah Elliot killed. But nobody know if he succeed.’ Blair felt the skin stretch tightly across his face, but he held his anger somewhere deep inside.

  ‘And his daughter?’

  ‘Don’t know who she is, but he got some white girl. La Mère Grace selling her for big bucks. You know, rich European like Thai girl. Rich Thai like white girl.’

  The acid of his anger burned now in Blair’s gut. ‘What did you get me?’

  Sarit drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle fr
om under his jacket. ‘Colt point four-five, Mistah Blaih. M-nineteen, eleven A-1.’

  Blair unwrapped the automatic pistol and weighed it in his hand. It came in at just over a kilo, and had an effective range of about fifty metres. Loading from a seven-round box magazine, it had considerable stopping power. ‘Ammo?’

  Sarit produced two magazines from each pocket. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mistah Blaih, I was pretty damn nervous waiting around airport with this stuff on me.’ He paused for an apprehensive moment. Then, ‘What you planning, Mistah Blaih?’

  ‘Don’t know yet, Sarit.’ He snapped a magazine into place and flipped the forward safety catch off, then on again. He nodded towards the driver. ‘This guy to be trusted?’

  ‘Sure, Mistah Blaih. He like eat frighten half-loaf, too.’

  Blair grinned. ‘You’re a greedy bastard, Sarit.’ He paused. ‘I might need you later. Tell him to drop me at the end of Sukhumvit Road.’

  *

  Tuk’s villa lay in darkness behind its high walls. A single light twinkled through the leaves that fluttered in the hot night breeze. The gates were locked. Blair pressed the buzzer and waited. A female voice crackled across the intercom. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell Mr Tuk that Sam Blair is here to see him.’

  ‘You wait.’

  Blair glanced at his watch. Almost eleven-twenty. The curfew would be in force in a little over forty minutes. He ran a hand quickly over the bulge beneath his jacket, an instinctive act of reassurance. A high-pitched electronic whine preceded a dull clunk, and the gates swung open.

  A girl in a yellow dress opened the door to him and he stepped into the large, air-conditioned entrance hall. The hard glare of electric light reflecting off cold tiles momentarily hurt his eyes.

  ‘This way, please.’ She led him into Tuk’s study, where the light was gentler, lying in soft pools beneath occasional lamps. Tuk rose from behind his desk, looking fresh and cool in a neatly pressed white shirt. But his smile could not disguise his tension. He held out his hand.