WILL ADAMS

The Eden Legacy

To Max, Oscar and Rose

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE EDEN LEGACY

Also by Will Adams

Copyright

About The Publisher

PROLOGUE

The Mozambique Channel, 1424

Mei Hua was with the admiral in his private quarters when the great ship struck the reef. It started with a low scraping noise that made them glance a little anxiously at each other; but a storm was blowing outside, and you were forever hearing new noises on board, even after three years. The scraping died away and they smiled at each other, amused by their own nerves, and carried on with their separate tasks: she making tea; he writing instructions for his beloved globe so that the enamellers could finish it before they reached home. But suddenly there was a thunderous crash and the bow rode upwards and they came to such a shuddering halt that it sent them both tumbling in a tangle across the floor.

A moment of silence, as though the ship itself, and all on board, couldn’t take in what had just happened. But then the noises started, timbers groaning like a dying giant, men yelling and a terrible splintering noise right above their heads as one of their masts toppled and crashed upon the deck.

Mei Hua looked around, in shock as much as fear. The porcelain tea service and the oil lamps had all broken, but their spilled oil had formed islands of blue flame upon the floor that were already catching on the scattered silk bedclothes and hangings. She got to her feet and began stamping them out before they could take hold. The door flew open and three bodyguards rushed in, one with a great gash in his scalp, a whole side of his face gleaming with fresh blood. They joined her stamping out the fires, like a troupe of comic dancers. Then the men helped the admiral to his feet and swept him away to take command of this disaster, leaving Mei Hua on her own.

The rules of the ship were clear and uncompromising. As the admiral’s favourite, she wasn’t allowed unescorted out of the harem or the admiral’s private quarters. If a crewman should so much as see her, both she and he would be put immediately to death. But there were no eunuchs here, no guards either, and she had to get to her infant son, make sure he was safe. She went to the door, peeked out. The passageway was dark and abandoned.A terrible shudder ran the length of the ship. It felt like the end had come, but then it just died away again; and it made her realise that the old rules meant nothing any more.

She covered her face with a scarf, made her way to the steps. Two officers came charging breathlessly up, desperate not to be trapped below when the ship sank. She let them pass then hurried on down. The ship lurched slightly to the side; she had to put her hands against the wall to keep her feet. A man limped towards her, whimpering and cradling his arm. Another man was crying out for help from inside his quarters, his door broken and blocked. She tried to open it for him but it was no good, and her son wouldn’t wait any longer. She hardened her heart and left him.

Down more stairs, the air thick with incense from the sticks they burned to mitigate the stench of a boat too long at sea. Water splashed around her ankles. A soldier was lying face-down in it, his arms above his head, prostrating himself to the gods he’d just gone to meet. She took a thin-bladed knife from his belt, stepped over him and on. The water grew deeper, splashing around her knees and then her thighs. Lamp-light flickered ahead; she could hear the shrieking of her fellow concubines. She reached the harem’s antechamber to see that fat monster Chung Hu and two other eunuchs on guard outside the barred door, following their orders to the letter, keeping the women and children confined even as they drowned.

Chung Hu saw her and bellowed in anger. He’d always hated women, as though he blamed them for cutting off his balls, taking his vengeance with countless small cruelties. She turned and fled, fighting through the water. Chung Hu came after her, yelling to his comrades to follow. The water grew less deep, making progress easier, but for Chung Hu too. He grabbed her shoulder; she turned and stabbed him with her knife, its thin blade sliding sweetly through the jelly of his eye into the malignant grey mass behind. He fell with a grunt face-down into the water. His two subordinates stared at her almost in awe, as though they’d thought Chung Hu invulnerable; but then a great wave of water washed by them and reminded them of their peril. They fled past her to the steps, taking the oil lamps with them.

The water was waist deep by the time Mei Hua made it back to the antechamber, the concubines still shrieking in terror and despair. She felt out the two wooden bars and lifted them free. Sheer weight of water pushed the door open, allowing all her friends and their children to spill out, wailing in relief. In the darkness, she had to shout for her son. Li Wei had him. Mei Hua took him gratefully, clasped him against her chest, ran with the others for the steps. Water was flooding down from above; they had to fight to reach topside. The open deck was crowded, not just with crew and soldiers and other passengers, but with livestock too: piglets, dogs, oxen and chickens that had got free from their pens and now were running loose.

The concubines scattered in all directions, each intent on saving herself. Mei Hua went in search of the admiral. Bao Zhi was his son, after all, even if he refused to recognise him. A splintered spar swung down from high above and speared the belly of an old man in astronomer’s robes, hoisted him up again into his beloved stars. Old men were fighting like furies for the lifeboats; she begged one or other of them to take her child, but they were only interested in saving themselves. She offered the admiral’s jewellery as payment, but what use were gems in a shipwreck? An officer grabbed her ruby necklace anyway, pushed her down and swung his club at her. She turned and took the blow upon her backside, then scuttled away, hugging her wailing son against her breast, stroking his hair and whispering reassurance.

A sheet of lightning lit up the sky. She could see rain and spume that she hadn’t even noticed until now. She was almost at the prow, she realised. She’d never been this far forward before. A second sheet of lightning showed the great dragon figurehead rearing up above her, its wings spread either side as though in flight, Mei Hua riding upon its back as it soared above the world. The things they’d seen, these last few years! The places they’d visited! Yet what did that count for now? She suffered a sudden and exquisite longing to see her mother just one more time, to show off Bao Zhi to her sisters. And so close, too. Just yesterday, the admiral had shown her on his globe how far they’d already journeyed, how few weeks remained to home and their heroes’ welcome.

Another great shudder ran through the ship. Another mast toppled. Everywhere on deck, people were screaming. Mei Hua sobbed with fear and hugged Bao Zhi against her. Six nights before, she’d dreamed of a woman in red walking towards her across the water, beckoning to her, holding out her arms. Tianfei, the Celestial Consort, come to welcome her home.

But not like this.

Not like this.

ONE
I

A coral reef, the west coast of Madagascar

Sixty-three metres underwater, even brilliant sunlight becomes feeble, and the glorious pageantry of the reef and its fish is reduced to bureaucratic greys and blacks. Effort put into bright liveries down here was effort wasted, and nature abhorred such waste almost as fiercely as she abhorred vacuums. The only real brightness, therefore, came from the white sand that covered so much of the sea-bed; but even that was diminished by the litter of dead sea-grass and coral, by the scattering of darker stones, shells and gnarled black rock, and fogged by the clouds of sediment that Daniel Knox and his fellow divers had kicked up during the two hours they’d already spent at the bottom.

A tap upon his arm. He turned to see Miles, his boss and dive-buddy, stopping his filming for a moment, pointing up and to his left. It took Knox a moment to see what had caught his eye: a big fish, perhaps twenty metres away, though it was hard to gauge distances underwater. A shark of some kind, to judge from its distinctive silhouette and the easy menace of its movement, though too far away for him to be sure which. Bulls, tigers, makos, white-tips, black-tips and even the occasional great white were common enough along Madagascar’s west coast, particularly on the exterior of these reefs, where food was plentiful and the water was hyper-oxygenated from constantly being crashed against the coral. But they were none of them as dangerous as their reputations, so long as you kept your nerve and did nothing stupid. That was why they alerted each other whenever they saw one, so that they wouldn’t be panicked into a rushed ascent or some other mistake should it suddenly come close.

He nodded to let Miles know he’d seen it, checked his equipment. He touched his dive-knife first: it was reassuring just to have, even if it wasn’t there to defend against a shark attack so much as for cutting through the mesh of discarded nets that so often plagued reefs like these. He checked his gauges next. His oxygen partial pressure looked a fraction high, and his spare gave the same reading, so he adjusted his feed accordingly. Hyperoxia was an easy trap to fall into when diving on a closed-circuit re-breather, as he’d discovered off the Azores the year before. But the modest extra risk was more than compensated for by the fact that the re-breather could scrub carbon dioxide from his exhaled air, then add more oxygen, allowing him to stay underwater almost indefinitely.

A cold current swept him sideways. He let himself be taken by it, then reoriented himself and resumed his exploration, making sure that Miles was filming away, both to provide footage for their documentary and to enable their shipboard project crew to follow along. Not that they’d had that much to film so far, despite it being such a perfect-looking wreck mound, nearly eighty metres long, covered in deep sand studded by rocks, dead coral and a scatter-pattern of artefacts. It lay at the foot of a steep rock shelf that rose sharply from the sea-bed like a gigantic underwater podium on which corals had grown over the centuries to within a foot or two of the surface at low tide, a real hazard for the ships of old, navigating by their crude charts and rough reckoning, on prayer and sacrifices to the gods.

The shark had circled around and now passed close enough by that he could see the ugly pale yellow of its underbelly, the dark spots and stripes on its blue-grey back. A tiger, ten to twelve feet long. He shared a glance with Miles. They were notoriously unpredictable creatures: they’d take a bite out of you just from curiosity. But there was little to be done about it. Sharks liked to attack from underneath; ending the dive and beginning their ascent now would be far more dangerous than staying put. He turned back to the sea-bed. They’d already recovered the two Chinese cannons that they’d known about before they’d arrived. They’d also found a number of early Ming coins and several shards of fifteenth-century porcelain, plus broken coarse-ware, nails and ironwork that were harder to attribute, but which all presumably came from the same wreck. But what wreck? Everything they could date pointed to early fifteenth-century Chinese, which made it overwhelmingly likely that this ship had once been a part of one of Zheng He’s famed treasure fleets, which had sailed near this channel around that time. But those vast armadas had been made up of all kinds of vessels, and most of them had been ordinary junks and supply ships. Magnificent finds, of course, and historically significant. But not what they were after.

Another current swept him towards the tiger. He grabbed instinctively for the sea-bed, fingers raking the sand before hooking something solid. He held it till the current had relented, looked down. It was reddish-brown and scabbed, and it protruded in too smooth a curve from the sea-bed to be natural. He brushed away sand to reveal the top of a rusted iron ring, perhaps a foot in diameter. He checked to make sure that Miles was filming, then beckoned Klaus to bring over one of their water-dredges. The fat grey pipe quickly sucked away the sand and sediment until he’d completely exposed an iron doughnut at one end of a fat long metal rod, like the eye at the top of an impossibly large needle.

The second dive-team arrived with a second dredge, set to work in parallel. The iron shaft grew longer and longer. It could surely only be an anchor. Knox felt his excitement build. Just as it was possible to make an educated guess at a person’s height from the length of their stride, so it was possible to estimate a ship’s size from certain of its component parts. The Chinese treasure ships had reputedly been equipped with anchors eight feet long, fitted with iron flukes to hook on to rocks or dig into sand, and so hold the ship in position. Knox had to remind himself to keep breathing steadily as they exposed a good six feet of shaft. Eight feet. Ten feet and still going. Twelve. And finally they found the first fluke. Knox glanced around at Miles, still filming like the professional he was, but pumping his free fist in triumph; and the exultation of all the others was magnified by the strange distortion of their goggles. For it was surely undeniable now. They’d found what they’d come looking for.

They’d found a Chinese treasure ship.

II

The Nergadze estate, Georgian Black Sea Coast

It was the first time in two years that Boris Dekanosidze had laid eyes on Ilya Nergadze, and what he saw shocked him. The great man was a frail shell of himself, shrunken, pale and bald, lying huddled beneath thick blankets on his medical bed despite the cloying warmth of the room. He had a translucent oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, sensors and tubes on his arms and throat, banks of monitors and other medical equipment on either side, while a disturbingly androgynous male nurse in a starched white uniform sat on a high chair overlooking him, like an umpire at a tennis match.

So the rumours were true, then: Old Man Ilya was dying.

Ilya’s bed was mechanised, allowing him to raise himself almost to a sitting position as Boris walked towards him. With a weak and trembling hand, he clawed down his breathing mask so that it hung around his throat like a grotesque medallion. ‘Good to see you, Boris,’ he croaked, raising his head so that Boris could kiss him respectfully on both cheeks.

‘Good to see you too, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Ilya. But even that much conversation seemed to exhaust him. He let his head drop into his pillow, pulled his breathing mask back up.

Sandro Nergadze, Ilya’s son and heir apparent, had followed Boris to the bed. Now he cleared his throat to gain the nurse’s attention. ‘A few moments, please,’ he said.

‘Five minutes,’ said the nurse primly. ‘Your father must have his rest.’

‘Five minutes,’ agreed Sandro, with a tight smile. He was courteous for a Nergadze, but that didn’t mean he liked taking orders from the help. He rested his briefcase on the bedside table, then accompanied the nurse to the door, closing it emphatically behind him before returning to his father’s bed and standing across it from Boris, so that his father could follow their conversation with his eyes, even if he was too tired to take part in it himself.

‘Well?’ asked Boris. ‘What can I do for you?’

Sandro pursed his lips before replying. ‘You know as well as anyone, Boris, that our family has its fair share of enemies.’

Boris nodded. He’d been Sandro’s head of security until everything had gone to shit, after all. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Things have grown even worse since our Greek … setback.’

Our Greek setback, thought Boris. Is that what they’re calling it these days? Some two years before, during Ilya Nergadze’s ill-fated run at the presidency of the Republic of Georgia, the campaign team had got a tip that their nation’s greatest lost treasure, the golden fleece, had been rediscovered in Greece. But their efforts to bring it back here and so boost Ilya’s flagging popularity had backfired spectacularly, culminating in the death of Ilya’s grandson Mikhail and the destruction of the family’s business empire and political aspirations. ‘I can imagine.’

‘It’s not merely that we have more enemies now,’ continued Sandro. ‘It’s also that they’ve grown bolder, less respectful. People no longer fear us as they did. We’ve introduced extra security, as you no doubt noticed. We’ve also been compelled to start a programme of active threat monitoring.’

‘Active threat monitoring, sir?’

Sandro gestured towards the French windows, the fine view over treetops down to the Black Sea. ‘It’s the damned Internet,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, these days, for our enemies to learn about us. They download satellite photographs of our estates. They check for our names at public events. They search the archives of local newspapers. They gossip about what cars we drive, what planes and yachts we own. All from the comfort and safety of their living rooms.’ He turned back to face Boris. ‘But it works both ways, particularly if you hire the right people.’

Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had never begrudged spending money on their own safety. ‘As you have, no doubt.’

‘We’ve set up various websites and chat rooms,’ said Sandro. ‘We’ve seeded them with the kind of confidential information that our enemies would dearly love to know. Some of it’s even true. We make these sites hard to find, so that only our more dedicated … followers can find them. Then we monitor them, particularly for return visitors. Mostly these prove to be journalists or business rivals. Nuisances, not menaces.’

‘But not always?’ suggested Boris.

Sandro opened his briefcase, drew out a single folded sheet of paper. ‘One of the most persistent comes from a British marine salvage company calledMGS,’ he said. ‘Quite small. Just fifteen full-time employees, though they add subcontractors for certain projects. They’re scheduled to run a month-long survey of the eastern Black Sea this autumn.’

‘Ah,’ said Boris, glancing towards the French windows.

‘This is a printout of their Who We Are page,’ said Sandro, passing Boris the sheet. ‘Recognise anyone?’

Boris unfolded the page, eight thumbnails of young and middle-aged men, presumably senior staff. But the portraits were too small for him to tell much about them; and the names and job titles meant nothing either. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Bottom row,’ prompted Sandro. ‘Second from right.’

Boris looked again. A man called Matthew Richardson. His photo wasn’t just small, it was blurred, too, as though taken on the move. And now that it had his attention,there was something faintly familiar about him, though he couldn’t at first work out what. But then he realised who Sandro and Ilya thought it was, if only because they’d never have summoned him here otherwise. He flinched from an unpleasant memory like flesh from a flame, shook his head. ‘Daniel Knox is dead,’ he said emphatically. ‘He had kidney failure from the burns he took when he and Mikhail …’ He trailed off, not wanting to finish the thought.

‘That’s what they told us,’ agreed Sandro.

‘Why would they have lied?’ asked Boris. But he realised the answer even as he spoke. They’d have lied to protect Knox from the five million euro bounty that Ilya Nergadze had put on his head in retribution for killing his grandson during the golden fleece fiasco. Boris breathed in deep before he looked again at the photo. There was a superficial resemblance; he couldn’t deny it. And the man in the photo had shaven his scalp and grown a thin beard, much as you’d expect from someone trying to change their look. But he also had higher cheekbones than he remembered Knox having, the bridge of his nose was broader, and he looked darker, older, angrier and altogether more formidable. He shook his head as he looked back up at Sandro. ‘It’s not him,’ he said.

‘Are you certain?’ asked Sandro. ‘Bear in mind you might not be the only one who’s had plastic surgery.’

‘Then how can you possibly expect me to identify him from this?’ protested Boris. ‘I’d need to be able to get up close to him, see how he walks, hear his voice and how …’ He broke off as he realised belatedly where this was going. ‘No way,’ he said flatly. ‘The Europeans have my biometrics. They have my DNA. They’d grab me the moment I landed. I’d never get out this time.’

‘Relax,’ said Sandro. ‘We’re not suggesting you go back to Europe. As you say, it was hard enough for us to get you out last time.’ He allowed a little time to pass, presumably to let Boris reflect on the fact that he’d still be in his Greek hellhole prison if the Nergadzes hadn’t had him sprung. ‘But this man isn’t in England at the moment. Or even in Europe. That’s why we brought you here so urgently. We only learned of it ourselves this morning.’

‘Where, then?’

‘On a salvage project,’ said Sandro, opening his briefcase again, taking out a bulky white envelope that he offered across. ‘Off the west coast of Madagascar.’

The envelope’s flap was tucked inside itself. The edge of the stiff paper cut Boris’s thumb as he released it, coaxing out a thin line of blood that left a series of smudged red partials on the contents as he spread them on the bedside table: ten thousand euros in several bundles of banknotes; a sheaf of press-cuttings about some Chinese shipwreck; a first-class ticket in his new name, flying via Istanbul and Johannesburg to the Madagascan capital Antananarivo; a separate ticket on to some provincial airport he’d never heard of called Morombe. ‘And what do you expect me to do when I get to this place?’

‘We want you to track down this man Richardson,’ replied Sandro. ‘We want you to determine whether or not he is really Daniel Knox.’

‘And if he is?’ asked Boris.

Sandro glanced down at the floor, his discomfort evident. But a noise to Boris’s left startled him. He’d almost forgotten that Ilya was there. The old man clawed his mask down once more so that he could speak; his mouth and eyes were cruel and fierce, though his voice was so weak that Boris had to lean in closer to him to make out the words.

‘I want you to kill him,’ he said.

TWO
I

The tiger shark reappeared while Knox and the rest of his dive-team were at three metres, finishing their decompression. It circled several times, looking unnervingly interested, but then the inflatable arrived to pick them up, and the noise and churn of its outboard seemed to deter it, for it turned and swam away.

The Maritsa was chugging slowly towards them as they surfaced. It usually stayed well clear of the wrecksite, partly from respect for the nearby reefs, made doubly dangerous by the freak waves that sometimes came out of nowhere along this coast, but mostly to make it hard for anyone watching to mark the site of the wreck with a notional X. But the stern crane was the easiest way to recover artefacts the size of the anchor, which meant positioning directly above it.

As an archaeologist, Knox was accustomed to taking plenty of time examining artefacts in their context before recovering them; but that wasn’t possible here. They only had the Maritsa for six weeks, and once they were done they couldn’t lock this site up as they could on land, put a fence around it and hire security guards until the following year. It would be open season for any unscrupulous treasure hunter with some scuba gear or even an industrial dredge, so they needed to recover what they could, while they could.

They climbed the starboard gangway, stripped off on the stern deck, hosed themselves down with fresh water. A door banged open on the strengthening wind, and Ricky Cheung emerged from the conference room, puffing at one of his evil roll-ups. Ricky was the head of this salvage operation, an overweight Chinese American in his mid-fifties with perpetually tired eyes, as though he’d just woken. He waited a moment for a fair-haired woman in outsized sunglasses and a baseball cap to follow him outside, with Maddow the Shadow, his personal cameraman, bringing up the rear. Ricky spotted Knox and waved cheerfully, then led his small party over. ‘The hero of the hour,’ he beamed. ‘Great job down there.’

‘Thanks,’ said Knox.

Ricky nodded, turned to the fair-haired woman. ‘This is the one I was telling you about, Lucia,’ he said. ‘Matthew Richardson. Though everyone calls him Danny for some reason.’ He turned to Knox with a frown. ‘Why is that, actually?’

‘My father was Matthew too,’ said Knox, with practised ease. ‘Calling me Daniel saved confusion.’ In truth, he’d been such a mess for the first few months after Athens, especially from Mikhail Nergadze’s brutal murder of his fiancée Gaille, that he’d often not responded when people called him by his new name. At work one time, Miles—one of the few people who knew the truth about his past—had grown so exasperated by this that he’d yelled out his real name instead, provoking the obvious questions from his new colleagues, forcing him to come up with an explanation on the hoof. His handlers at MI5 had been admirably understanding about it, retrospectively tweaking his new identity to make Daniel his middle name; and he’d been Daniel ever since, except in interviews and other formal contexts.

‘Must have been one hell of a thrill,’ said Ricky. ‘Finding that anchor, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Knox.

‘Most archaeologists go their whole career without ever making a find like that.’

‘Quite.’

Ricky’s expression clouded briefly, as though he suspected Knox was making fun of him; but he quickly brightened again. ‘Lucia is here to write an article about me,’ he said.

‘About the salvage, actually.’ She removed her sunglasses, showing off striking blue eyes. She was in her mid-forties, at a guess, with an attractive, open face and the kind of pale freckled skin that needed protection from the Madagascan sun.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Knox.

‘I’ll leave you two together, if I may,’ said Ricky. ‘All those questions you had about history and archaeology, Danny Boy’s your man.’ He nodded cordially to them both, then walked briskly over to the stern crane, where the hoisting of the anchor was just getting underway, and barked out redundant orders for Maddow the Shadow to capture for posterity.

‘What a wretch!’ scowled Lucia. ‘That’s your triumph he’s stealing.’

‘He’s been working towards this for thirty years,’ said Knox. ‘I’ve been here less than a week.’

‘I’ve never met a man who talked about himself so much,’ she said. ‘I thought he must be a flamenco singer. You know: aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.’

Knox smiled politely. He knew better than to give a journalist easy copy about dissension in the ranks. ‘You have some questions for me?’ he suggested.

‘Yes.’ She gave him a warm smile, calibrated to win his sympathy. ‘I’m a travel writer really, you see. It’s how I pay for my holidays. I come to a place like this for a month with lots of ideas for possible features, but I’m never quite sure which will pan out and which won’t.’

‘I understand.’

‘I was supposed to be heading down to the Eden Nature Reserve today.’

‘The Kirkpatricks’ place?’

‘You know them?’

Knox gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘They’re pretty wellknown along this coast.’

‘They were supposed to have left a message letting me know when would be a good time to visit. But there was nothing at my hotel, and so I wanted to bag another story, just in case. My concierge suggested I come out here, and even arranged it for me, which was terrific of him; but of course I never had the chance to do any background reading, and your boss is a hard man to interrupt once he gets going. All that stuff about China and the treasure fleets—honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about half the time.’

Knox nodded. Ricky was notorious for giving lectures rather than interviews. ‘So you’d like a little background?’

‘That would be wonderful. Yes.’

‘Okay,’ said Knox. ‘Then let’s head on back to thirteenth-century China.’

II

Sandro Nergadze was walking Boris out to the courtyard when he touched his elbow and drew him to one side, out of earshot of staff and bodyguards. ‘A question,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘How do you feel about Davit Kipshidze?’

Blood rushed to Boris’s cheeks; anger clenched his heart. Davit was a former rugby lock he’d used a few times for strong-arm work, because the man was a giant and just having him standing beside you prevented a whole heap of trouble. But the moment their Greek enterprise had turned to shit, he’d broken like a little girl and blabbed his mouth off. He said bitterly: ‘You should have left him in Athens to rot.’

‘And have him reveal our secrets in open court?’ asked Sandro rhetorically. ‘Besides, he’s one of us. His father did some excellent work for us; his sister is married to my cousin. And a lot of our people like him. They say what happened in Athens wasn’t his fault, that he should never have been on that kind of a job in the first place.’

Boris bridled. He’d picked Boris for that mission himself, as Sandro knew full well. ‘He’d always done okay before.’

‘Of course,’ said Sandro smoothly. ‘It’s just that I’m hearing more and more that we should give him another chance.’

For the second time that day, Boris realised he’d been slow to see where Sandro was steering the conversation. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking him with me. What if he gets spotted at the airport? He’ll take me down for sure.’

‘Relax. We’d send him on a later flight. You’d only meet up again in Madagascar.’

‘I don’t trust him. I won’t trust him. He wouldn’t do it anyway. He’s too much of a do-gooder.’

‘He might, if he didn’t know your real purpose.’ Sandro nodded through the front door to the courtyard, where a white van with tinted windows was parked on the cobblestones. ‘All he knows so far is that we’ve a possible job for him. What if we were to tell him only that Knox may still be alive, and that we want you both to go see if it really is him; and if so, to persuade him to a truce?’

‘He’s not that stupid.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Sandro. ‘Men like Davit always assume the best about their fellow men. That’s why people like him. Besides, he wants to believe it. This is his opportunity to redeem himself for Athens.’

‘It’ll take more than this,’ snorted Boris.

‘And he’ll be useful to you. He’s the only other person we have who knows what Knox looks like, after all. He’s strong as a bull and he’s good with equipment too. Remember that computer business he tried to start?’

‘So?’

‘My father is taking a personal interest in this matter, as you’ve seen. We’ll therefore be supplying you with a satellite videophone.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ scowled Boris. ‘You want me to top Knox live on TV? What if those bastards in Tbilisi are watching?

‘You think we’re idiots?’ asked Sandro. ‘All our equipment is fitted with our own encryption software. We use it all the time for our more … controversial businesses.’

Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had made their original fortune smuggling arms for heroin. If Sandro was confident that a communications link was secure, it was secure. ‘Okay,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Good. It’ll make it much easier for us to communicate and provide the necessary … logistical support.’

‘Logistical support,’ snorted Boris. Sandro did love his euphemisms. What he meant was that they’d have to get him a gun once he arrived in Madagascar, because there was no way to take one on board a plane, not these days. ‘And what will Davit think about that?’

‘I don’t imagine we’ll be having that conversation in his presence,’ said Sandro. ‘Do you?’

‘Okay,’ said Boris. ‘But I’m not doing this for free. Not on camera, for Christ’s sake. You offered five million euros for Knox’s head. I assume that’s still good.’

‘We retracted that offer once we learned Knox was dead.’

‘But he’s not dead.’

‘We’ll pay you one hundred thousand euros for the identification, whether it’s him or not,’ said Sandro. ‘If it is him, my father has authorised another four hundred thousand for … for carrying out his wishes.’

Boris nodded. Five hundred grand was proper money, and there’d surely be opportunities for more. The Nergadzes’ reputation and business empire had been badly hit by the fallout from the Greek debacle, but Ilya was still richer than God, and he clearly craved this revenge before he croaked. And revenge was like champagne: the more it cost, the better it tasted. ‘What about Davit?’ he asked. ‘You don’t expect me to split my money with him, do you?’

‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘I’ll make a separate agreement with Davit. Your money will be yours. His will be his. Agreed?’

‘Fine,’ said Boris. ‘Agreed.’

‘Good,’ said Sandro, nodding at the van. ‘Then let’s go talk to him.’

III

Lucia took a microcassette recorder from her bag. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ said Knox.

She nodded at the crane, the metal beginning to groan and shriek a little as it took the weight of the anchor and began lifting it from the sea-bed. ‘And maybe we could go somewhere quieter?’

He led her up a gangway and past the ship’s decompression chamber, leaned against the starboard rail. The wind had picked up; the sea was getting frisky. The ship’s dynamic positioning system had been turned on, however, and its GPS sensors, gyroscopes and thrusters were keeping them impressively steady, a vital capability for using a crane on a sea-bed sixty metres deep. A large wave swept past them to break against the reef. On its far side, he could see the white cotton sails of several fishing pirogues in the lagoon, all of them heading for shore. ‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Perfect,’ said Lucia. ‘You were about to sweep me off to thirteenth-century China.’

‘The time of the Mongol Khans,’ said Knox. ‘Genghis was a conqueror. He rampaged through Russia and China and put the fear of God into Europeans.’ Literally, as it had happened: Christians had feared he and his armies were the end-times prophecy of Gog and Magog made flesh. ‘But his successors were different, particularly his grandson Kublai.’

‘In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a sacred pleasure dome decree,’ suggested Lucia.

‘That’s the guy,’ agreed Knox. ‘He saw himself as a ruler more than a general, and China was the jewel in his crown. He established a new capital at Beijing, tried to win over his new Chinese subjects by appointing them to key positions. But it never really took. The Han and the Mongols each considered the other inferior. And these were tough times anyway. China was hit by the black death almost as badly as Europe, and there was massive flooding, hyperinflation, poverty and famine. The Han began to rebel, as did other ethnic groups. The first uprisings were quashed but each new one weakened the Mongols’ grip a little more until the empire finally collapsed in 1368. One of the rebel leaders, a Han called Zhu Yuanzhang, seized the Dragon Throne and proclaimed himself first emperor of the Great Ming.’

‘That being the start of the Ming Dynasty, presumably?’

‘Yes. Zhu Yuanzhang held power for thirty years or so, but his succession proved a problem. His eldest son, the Crown Prince, died before him, forcing him to pick between his own most capable surviving son—a man called Zhu Di—or to skip a generation and appoint his grandson Zhu Yunwen instead. He went for his grandson.’

‘Don’t tell me: Zhu Di got mad.’

‘It depends on who you believe,’ Knox told her. ‘We know that Zhu Yunwen was worried sick about rivals. After his ascension, he barred Zhu Di from even paying respects to his dead father—a major humiliation—then stripped his supporters of rank, effectively forcing him to give up or fight back. He chose to fight back. Skirmishes with the imperial army turned into a lowlevel civil war. In 1402, Zhu Di marched on Nanjing, China’s new capital, and his nephew fled. Then he declared himself the Yongle Emperor. Emperor of eternal happiness.’

Lucia smiled. ‘No worries about raising expectations, then.’

‘He didn’t do too badly, all in all. He excised his nephew from the history books and purged his supporters; but that was pretty standard. He fought off the Mongols and the Vietnamese, introduced land reclamation and other successful agricultural policies, rebuilt the Grand Canal and moved his capital back to Beijing. He also commissioned a series of magnificent armadas.’

‘Ah. Our famous treasure fleets.’

‘This was unprecedented. The Han Chinese were Confucians; only China mattered. If the barbarian world had business with China, it had to make the journey itself. But Zhu Di didn’t think that way. He wanted to show off, and maybe let it be known around the region that he wasn’t a man to mess with. His nephew was rumoured still to be alive, after all, so the last thing he’d have wanted was any lingering questions about his legitimacy. Whatever his reasons, he ordered a man called Zheng He to build a vast fleet then sail around the China Seas to establish diplomatic and trading links, suppress any unrest in China’s overseas territories, that kind of thing.’

‘Zheng He. This would be the eunuch, right?’

‘Yes. He was actually a Chinese Muslim whose family had fought with the Mongols, and he was taken captive and then castrated when still just a boy. It happened a lot back then. But he made a name for himself, become one of Zhu Di’s favourites.’ Lucia raised an eyebrow, making Knox laugh. ‘Not in that sense,’ he assured her. ‘Zhu Di liked the ladies. Koreans, for choice. But that was precisely why he trusted eunuchs: they wouldn’t cause mischief in his harem, and they had no dynastic ambitions of their own.’

‘Okay. So Mr Eternal Happiness commissions his favourite eunuch to go sailing. And there were multiple voyages, right?’

‘Seven in all, though the final one was much later, more an afterthought than anything. Mostly they visited the places you’d expect: Sumatra and Java and the other main Indonesian islands. Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaya, India. Places which were pretty well known to the Chinese. Their fourth voyage made it to Arabia and East Africa, but it’s the sixth that’s the most intriguing. Zheng He didn’t actually go very far himself, but various of his vice-admirals each led a contingent of their own, and we’re not entirely sure where they went, not least because there was a great fire in Beijing shortly after they set out, which the emperor interpreted as a divine admonishment against his treasure fleets, so all records of the voyage were destroyed.’

‘And this anchor of yours would have come from this sixth voyage, right?’

‘Most likely,’ agreed Knox. ‘Though Chinese ships were hopeless at sailing against the wind: they pretty much had to go wherever the weather took them. That was fine, most of the time, because the trade winds are very reliable between Africa and China. But if some Chinese ship from one of the other fleets had been blown off course at the wrong time, it might have had little choice except to end up here. And these armadas were huge. There were supposed to be three hundred and seventeen ships in the first voyage alone, carrying over twenty-eight thousand people. Even allowing for some exaggeration, that’s pretty damned impressive. The demand for wood was so intense that they deforested whole regions of China. Most of the ships were supply boats, troop transports, that kind of thing. Others were for cargo, for these were trading missions too, swapping Chinese silks and porcelain for highly prized goods like pearls, ivory and exotic woods. But each fleet also included a number of what were known as treasure ships. These were floating palaces, really; or perhaps more accurately embassies, designed specifically to impress and intimidate foreign powers. They were reputed to be over four hundred feet long and a hundred and eighty feet wide. That’s like floating a football stadium out to sea. This was ninety-odd years before Columbus, yet these beasts were more than twice as wide as the Santa Maria was long. They had nine masts, the tallest of which was said to have stood over three hundred feet high.’

‘Three hundred feet?’ Lucia pulled a face. ‘Is that even possible?’

‘A lot of historians and shipbuilders think not. They say the treasure ships were more likely to have been sixmasters, only about two hundred foot long.’ He gave a little grin, nodded over the side of the ship down towards the sea-bed. ‘But that’s what makes all this so exciting: we won’t know one way or the other until we—’ Cheers and hoots erupted at the stern. He looked around to see that the anchor had just breached the surface of the water, like some great whale coming up for air, streams of seawater cascading from it and the steel cable and the hoist straps at either end as it was slowly raised higher and higher.

‘Wow!’ murmured Lucia, producing a camera from her bag.

‘You want to go closer?’ asked Knox. She nodded eagerly, so he led her back down. The crane arm began to turn, bringing the black and rust-red anchor around over the deck, its cables and straps creaking loudly from the stress, everyone standing well clear. When the anchor was above the open hatches of the hold, the crane operator stopped it and gave it a few moments to come to rest. Crewmen gathered on every side, holding their hands out to stop the anchor from swinging, buffer it from banging against the sides as it was lowered into the hold, where the project’s conservators were already waiting.

‘It truly is something,’ said Lucia, snapping away. ‘I hadn’t imagined it would be—’ She jumped visibly at a loud bang from behind her, as though something electrical had blown. They all looked around. The ship listed a little to port, and the anchor began to swing again, like a gigantic pendulum nudged by a celestial finger. Knox glanced over at Miles and saw the anxiety on his face that he knew would be mirrored on his own.

One of their dynamic positioning thrusters had blown. And that meant trouble.

THREE
I

Kirkpatrick Films’ Head Office, Covent Garden, London

Rebecca Kirkpatrick was doing her best to concentrate on what Titch Osmond, her Chief Financial Officer, was telling her, but it was hard, what with Nicola’s scribbled note in her lap. She glanced surreptitiously down at it yet again.

Pierre Demullin (???) called. From Madagascar (!?!). Will call back later.

All those exclamation and question marks; they’d got beneath her skin. She was constantly getting calls from all over the world, and it was hardly a secret that her mother had been Malagasy, if only because of her own mix of Polynesian, African and European looks. So what about this particular message had made all those exclamation marks necessary? She breathed in deep, trying to maintain her calm. It wasn’t that surprising that Pierre should call. He was her childhood neighbour and her father’s closest friend, as well as her sister Emilia’s lover and the father of her infant son Michel. Yet Rebecca hadn’t spoken to him in eleven years, and the truth was she couldn’t imagine what would have prompted him to call her, not out of the blue like this.

‘Your mind’s not on it,’ said Titch. ‘Shall we do this later?’

Rebecca smiled with artificial brightness. It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do before Pierre rang back, after all. ‘It’s fine,’ she assured him. ‘You were telling me about our cash-flow.’

‘Yes,’ said Titch, flipping on through his ring-binder. ‘We need another sixty-seven to see us through to July.’

‘Sixty-seven?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Is that all?’

He gave a wry laugh. ‘Sixty-seven’s not nothing, you know.’

‘Can’t we borrow?’ She glanced down at Nicola’s note again. It wasn’t quite true that she couldn’t imagine why Pierre might call. That was the thing that was unnerving her. He’d certainly be the person to contact her in an emergency if neither Adam nor Emilia could get to a phone.

‘You think I haven’t tried?’ frowned Titch, as though she’d cast a slur upon his character. ‘No one will lend us any more.’

‘Why not? We’re profitable, aren’t we?’

‘On paper, yes.’ He looked up and momentarily caught her eye before hurriedly looking away again, his cheeks flaming. A couple of months before, out at a working dinner, he’d seized her hand in both of his and declared undying love. She’d put it down at the time to alcohol and the recent break-up of his marriage, but little moments like this made her wonder if it wasn’t more serious than that. She devoutly hoped not. She was deeply fond of Titch, and valued him highly, yet she felt nothing remotely romantic for him. He bowed his head and turned another leaf in his ring-binder. ‘But we have no assets to speak of,’ he continued, ‘and we keep hitting these cash-flow problems, and those two together are like a big flashing red light to the banks.’

‘So what do you recommend?’ The question was, what kind of emergency would keep both Adam and Emilia from the phone?

‘Well,’ said Titch. ‘We have three main avenues. I’m talking as the company here, you understand. The first thing we can do is, we can go after the people who owe us money.’

‘You mean me, I suppose?’

He twisted his pen around in his hands. ‘Mostly, yes.’

‘How much is it now?’

‘Two hundred and eighty. A little over. And our loan arrangement did specify repayment within—’

‘And the second option?’ If anything had happened to Emilia, her father would have been the one to call. If anything had happened to her father, it would be Emilia. She closed her eyes for a moment, not willing to pursue her logic further.

‘We’ve been expanding really quickly lately. Taking on staff. But most of our projects are costing us a lot more than they’re bringing in.’

‘You want me to fire people?’

‘You asked me to outline our options. That’s one of them.’

‘What else?’

‘This is a fine business you’re building, Rebecca,’ said Titch. ‘We’ve already had unsolicited approaches from several companies. They’d pay top dollar.’

‘No,’ she bridled. ‘This is my company.’

‘Please, Rebecca. At least think about it. You’re a great presenter. I mean, a great presenter. But you’re not a businesswoman. You’re not here often enough, for one thing. You’re always off filming. And your heart’s not in it, not really, not if you’re honest with yourself.’

‘I won’t take orders.’

‘No one would give you orders,’ laughed Titch ruefully. ‘They wouldn’t dare, frankly. If you left, there’d hardly be a company any more.’

He was stroking her ego, she knew, yet it worked all the same. ‘There must be some alternative,’ she said. ‘Can’t we ride it out until America comes in?’

‘There’s no guarantee America will come in,’ Titch told her. ‘And, anyway, we won’t know for weeks at least; and we won’t see any real revenue for months after that. In the meantime we have our salaries and rent to pay, our suppliers to—’

A double rap on the door. Nicola poked in her head, smiled brightly. ‘You said to let you know when that Frenchman called back,’ she said.

Rebecca’s mouth went dry and her heart started thumping hard. ‘Pierre?’

‘He’s on hold right now.’

‘Okay. Put him through.’

‘Will do.’

‘You couldn’t give me a moment, please,’ Rebecca asked Titch. ‘I really have to take this.’

‘Of course.’ He rose to his feet. ‘We’ll finish this later.’

She nodded and took a deep breath, wiped her palms upon her trousers. On her desk, her phone began to ring.

II

The Maritsa lurched into another wave valley, sending the anchor swinging back across the open hatch like a wrecking ball. Knox crouched down and waved to the two conservators in the hold to get clear. Another wave passed beneath them. The Maritsa rolled harder; the anchor gained momentum. Klaus put out both hands in an effort to stop it, but it simply pushed him backwards until he tripped over a davit and fell on to his backside. It should have been funny, but no one was laughing. Something this heavy could do untold damage. It swung towards Lucia; she dithered about which way to evade it for so long that Knox had to push her clear, sending her sprawling across the deck.

The crane operator glanced overboard, clearly thinking of dumping the anchor back at sea; but there was a team of divers still underwater, and it would put them at fearful risk. Knox waited for the anchor to reach the end of its next swing, grabbed hold of its end and hauled himself up, then began using his weight to work against the roll of the boat, like a child slowing a playground swing. Miles saw what he was doing and clambered up too, and together they calmed the anchor enough for the crane operator to lower it safely through the open hatch. The moment it passed beneath deck level, they leapt free, allowing the other crew to close the hatch, cutting down the anchor’s room to swing, its ability to cause damage. They heard it thump hard into the hold floor then roll briefly until it found its angle of repose. They opened the hatch back up. The conservators were already on either side of the anchor, releasing it from its straps. Ricky had somehow got down there already, shouting out his usual orders for Maddow’s camera. Knox looked around. No one appeared badly hurt, though Lucia was still on her backside, looking a little pale. ‘Sorry about that,’ said Knox, helping her up.

‘Christ!’ she muttered. ‘The size of that thing! I’d have been jam.’ She brushed herself down, gave him a dry smile. ‘You’re not planning to bring everything up this way, I hope?’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he assured her. ‘One of our thrusters broke at a bad time, that’s all. We’ve got spares. And we’re unlikely to find anything else that size.’

‘If you say so.’

Movement out on the water caught his eye: Garry at the helm of their Bayliner, bringing Dieter Holm for his presentation. He leaned over the gunwale to watch the motorboat slapping inelegantly through the rising sea, shipping far more water than was prudent. ‘Were you planning on getting back to Morombe tonight?’ he asked.

‘Uh-oh,’ said Lucia. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘This weather’s not great,’ he said. ‘If it doesn’t improve soon …’

‘Would there be somewhere for me to sleep?’

‘Of course. And it probably won’t come to that.’

‘Then I’ll keep my fingers crossed. In the meantime, is it okay if I ask another question?’

‘Sure. Fire away.’

She gave him a slightly crooked smile, as if to apologise in advance. ‘It’s just that your boss was telling me about some family folklore of his.’

‘Ah,’ said Knox.

‘Apparently one of his great, great ancestors originally arrived in California on some huge boat from China. He assured me this was at least five hundred years ago, more like six, a good century before any Europeans got there.’

‘It’s perfectly plausible,’ said Knox. ‘The Spanish discovered the Philippines in 1520, and it kicked off a pretty substantial trade between Manila and Mexico. Some Chinese certainly came over to the Americas then. Maybe Ricky’s ancestor was among them.’

‘That’s not what he’s claiming.’

‘I know it’s not,’ said Knox. Ricky was convinced that his ancestors had arrived in America on one of Zheng He’s treasure ships, long before Columbus and the Spanish: that the Chinese, therefore, were the first true discoverers and settlers of America.

‘So? Do you think he’s a crank?’

‘People called Schliemann a crank,’ replied Knox. ‘He discovered Troy. And plenty thought Columbus a crank. He discovered the New World.’

‘And you’d put your boss in their class, would you?’

‘Sometimes people make important discoveries because they stick to unorthodox beliefs even when the world’s laughing at them. Most people would have given up long ago, but Ricky’s kept at it, and I admire him immensely for that.’ It was true enough. Thirty years ago, Ricky had set about proving that his family tradition was for real, scouring America’s western seaboard for evidence of fifteenth-century Chinese ships. When he’d come up dry, he’d searched the east coast instead, before working his way south through Latin and South America, combing beaches, talking to local museums and amateur historians, following up each and every promising lead. When he’d run out of American coastline, he’d turned his attention to Atlantic and Pacific islands instead, then Africa. In all, he’d announced the discovery of a treasure ship no fewer than seven times. The first six had led only to his public humiliation, yet still he’d carried on. And finally he’d come to Madagascar, where he’d seen a rusted cannon in the grounds of a tourist hotel here in Morombe. No one had thought much of it until then, because cannons were common on this coast, from the vast number of ships sunk over the centuries doing the run from Europe to the Indies. But Ricky had recognised instantly that this cannon was different. This cannon had been fifteenth-century Chinese.

‘So do you agree with him?’ asked Lucia. ‘That a treasure ship could have made it all the way to America, I mean?’

‘I’m a scientist,’ he told her. ‘I go where the evidence takes me.’

‘And where would that be?’

Knox nodded at Dieter Holm, arriving at that moment at the top of the gangway steps, laptop slung over his shoulder, carrying a box of comb-bound folders. ‘That’s exactly what we’re about to find out.’

FOUR
I

Rebecca’s heart was in her mouth as she picked up the receiver. ‘This is Rebecca,’ she said.

‘Rebecca? Cherie? C’est Pierre ici. Pierre Desmoulins.’

‘Pierre. What is it? What’s happened?’

‘Please.’ His voice sounded strained, thin, far away. ‘You’re not to panic. We know nothing for sure yet.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Cherie, they find your father’s boat out at sea. Personne à bord.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. But no one see your father or your sister since yesterday morning.’

‘Emilia?’ Rebecca’s heart plunged. ‘Not Emilia too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Pierre. ‘But you mustn’t give up hope.’

‘What about Michel?’ Michel was Emilia’s infant son.

‘He’s safe,’ said Pierre. ‘Emilia leave him with Therese before she go out.’

‘Are you searching for them now?’

‘Not me myself; not yet. I’m in Antananarivo for a conference. I only just learned of this myself. I wanted to tell you as soon as possible. But sure, everyone is looking, of course they are.’

‘I’m flying out,’ said Rebecca. Now that the worst had been confirmed, she felt detached yet strangely calm. ‘I’ll be on the first flight.’

‘Good. I think that is wise. And I’ll make sure to—’ But then the line went dead.

‘Pierre?’ she called out. ‘Pierre?’ But now there was only dial-tone. Connections with Madagascar were always precarious. She put the phone down, stared at it dazedly, half-expecting Pierre to ring back. Her door banged open before he could, however, and Titch walked in, looking anxious, as though he’d overheard enough to alarm him. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. She repeated numbly what Pierre had told her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Titch, appalled. ‘What can we do?’

‘I need to get to Madagascar,’ said Rebecca. ‘As soon as possible. Now. This afternoon.’

Titch nodded. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

A sudden vision of her father the last time Rebecca had seen him, a little bowed by loss, his hair white and his eyes permanently moistening; and then of her sister Emilia, three years her junior, just a headstrong teenage girl back then, effervescent with ideas that came too quickly for her mouth to keep pace, but now a woman with an infant son. A black cavern opened inside Rebecca; she suffered a moment of terrible vertigo. Her door opened again and Nicola bustled in, her eyes down, concentrating on not spilling her plate of ginger snaps and frothy mug of hot chocolate. She set them down on the walnut desk, touched her shoulder sympathetically. Rebecca took the mug in both hands, savouring the sharp comfort of its heat, staring blankly down at the film of dark skin that thickened and wrinkled upon its cooling surface. Out in the main office, she could hear her staff working their phones, checking visa requirements, moving meetings, cancelling appearances, swept up by the drama of someone else’s tragedy. Ken shouted out that the first flight left Heathrow later that afternoon, flying to Antananarivo via Paris, only business class available. Three thousand five hundred and twenty-eight quid. Should he take it? If so, how should he pay? There was a beat of silence in the office. Rebecca’s breath caught in her throat. She took one hand off her hot chocolate and clenched it beneath the table, only too well aware that her own credit cards would never take such a hit.

‘Company account,’ said Titch.

‘But I thought we weren’t allowed to—’

‘Company account,’ repeated Titch, more firmly. ‘We’ll sort it out later.’

Nicola began reading out a list of prevalent diseases, Lindsay checking them against Rebecca’s vaccination record. Bilharzia, meningitis, rabies, intestinal worms, dengue haemorrhagic fever. Rebecca felt dismay as the list went on. Cholera, filariasis, TB, yellow fever, typhus, hepatitis. She’d lived in Madagascar eighteen years, remembered none of this. A high-risk malignant malarial region with chloroquine and fansidar resistance. Lariam gave her nightmares, doxycycline turned her skin orange; she’d need Malarone instead. They’d a month’s worth in the storeroom. Titch brought in a box, along with a thick sheaf of euros that he slipped clandestinely into her bag. Then he sank to his haunches and spoke slowly and clearly. Everything was in hand. A taxi was on its way to take her home to pack and then on to the airport. Her ticket to Antananarivo was bought and paid for, as was her ongoing flight from Antananarivo to Tulear, the airport nearest her home. They were still working on a driver to meet her at Tulear Airport with a hire car; he’d text her the details the moment he had them. In the meantime, she was to forget about their earlier conversation; he’d handle everything until she got back. She took and squeezed his hand in gratitude. Their eyes met; he seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then thought better of it. The buzzer sounded. Her taxi was already downstairs. She packed up her laptop, her international power adapter and spare fuse, was hurrying to the door when she glanced back, saw her staff gathered in a rough semicircle, their faces solemn and troubled, like mourners at a graveside, as though they’d already accepted the worst.

She stopped and took a pace back towards them. ‘They’re not dead,’ she said defiantly. ‘You hear me? They’re not dead.’

Titch came over and took her in his arms, squeezed her so tight that she could feel their hearts banging. ‘They’re not dead,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll find them. If anyone can, you can.’

II

Knox arrived in the conference room for Holm’s presentation to find only Miles already there, his feet up on the conference table, scrunching up sheets of paper from his pad, trying to score three-pointers in the waste-paper basket, and not doing very well to judge from the mess he’d made of the floor. ‘Just us?’ he asked.

‘That’s how Ricky wants it,’ said Miles. ‘We’ll brief the others later.’

Knox nodded. The conservators had their hands full with the anchor; the crew with fixing the thrusters and checking hull damage from the anchor. And their MGS colleagues, while expert divers, were mostly veterans of the armed forces or the oil industry, with limited interest in the science or archaeology of the site. Besides, half of them were still on the afternoon dive, and would need to be briefed this evening anyway.

He took a chair, but found it difficult to keep still, so was soon up again, pacing the room. Their first job here had been to take scans and sediment samples. Dieter Holm and his team had been working round the clock to analyse this new data and build a three-dimensional profile of the wreck-mound from it, so that they’d have a better idea of how to go in. Tonight, therefore, was the start of the salvage proper, and Knox felt a peculiar kind of excitement he hadn’t felt in a good two years.

This room was where most of the press and TV interviews were given, so Ricky had hung the walls with props: portraits of Zheng He, artists’ impressions of his fleet, photographs of artefacts on the sea-bed and reproductions of medieval world maps. Knox stopped before one of these now. It was known, rather optimistically, as the Zheng He map, and it showed both hemispheres of the world, with Asia, Africa and Europe in one, America in the other. Though it dated from the eighteenth century, Ricky and many others were convinced it was a copy of an earlier map, made by Zheng He himself in around 1420; and that it therefore provided compelling evidence that the Chinese had found and mapped America. Knox might have been more open to this dating had it not been for the use of Mercator projections a hundred years before Mercator had even devised them, and the presence of the word ‘America’ thirty years before Amerigo Vespucci had been born.

‘Ron’s threatening us with another bloody curry tonight,’ said Miles, scrunching up a fresh sheet of paper.

‘Hell,’ said Knox. ‘I only just got my stomach back from last time.’ He moved along to a photograph of the wreck-mound. It was extraordinary the progress marine archaeology had made these past few decades, but it hadn’t all been good. The arrival of deep-sea technologies had enabled enterprising treasure hunters to track down and then plunder the richest wrecks, indifferent to their historic value. A backlash had started and international agreement had been reached, forcing modern salvagers to pay far more care and attention to the wrecks themselves, not just their cargoes. As a consequence, the basic processes of wreck-site formation were now pretty well understood. This wreck, for example: it was a fair bet that it had sustained a hull breach on the nearby reef. It would have had to have been severe, because the Chinese had used sophisticated watertight bulkheads to limit damage. Hull breaches typically sank ships in one of two ways. Either the weight of water would put such extra stress on the hull that the stern would simply snap off from the bow; or, more commonly, the water would wash from side to side, making the ship roll ever more violently on the waves, until finally it would reach its tipping point and so capsize. Artefacts would spill from its deck as it sank, leaving a scatter-pattern on the seabed, just like the one they’d found here; while the ship itself would be pinned to the bottom by its ballast, ironwork and cargo. Prevailing currents would push sediment up against it, like snowdrifts against a wall. They’d also ratchet up the stress on the hull’s caulked timbers until they snapped, exposing their unprotected innards. Barnacles, wood-boring molluscs, soft-rot fungi and cavitation bacteria would go to work. In seas this warm and fecund, the hull would quickly rot, as would any textiles, food, human and animal tissue and other organic material, leaving behind the merest traces of themselves. And, as the walls separating the internal holds and compartments rotted away, all the metal and stone artefacts would tumble together into one vast undifferentiated heap, like the grave goods of some warrior king buried beneath a great tumulus of sand, precisely like the one pictured right here, sixty metres beneath the sea.

The door opened abruptly and Dieter Holm strode in. He didn’t say a word, simply set down his cardboard box on the table, then turned on his laptop. He was short and slight, with gelled-back silver hair, gold-rimmed halfmoon spectacles and a sharply pointed white beard that suggested he rather fancied himself a bit of a devil. He had an outstanding reputation as a marine scientist, and Knox had been eager to meet him; but he’d barely arrived aboard the Maritsa before throwing a dreadful tantrum about his quarters and the constricted lab space. Knox didn’t altogether blame him, for Ricky had promised a state-of-the-art salvage ship, and the Maritsa was hardly that; but his reaction had still been pathetically over the top, leading his team straight back to Morombe, where they’d taken over a villa and set up shop.

The door opened again, and Ricky came in, followed by Maddow the Shadow. Knox couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been lurking outside, for he had a remarkable knack of being the last to arrive at any meeting. ‘Great,’ he said, taking a chair. ‘You’re all here. Then let’s get straight down to it.’

‘As you wish,’ said Holm. He took three comb-bound folders from his box, slid them across the polished tabletop. ‘These contain my analysis of the latest data,’ he said. ‘But essentially I can summarise the key finding in just three words.’

‘And?’ asked Ricky.

Holm’s smile grew thin yet somehow triumphant. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said.

FIVE
I

Ricky had folded his hands loosely in his lap. When he heard Holm’s pronouncement, he clenched them into fists. ‘Nothing here?’ he demanded. ‘What do you mean, nothing here?’

‘I mean exactly that,’ answered Holm. ‘There’s no shipwreck here. There never was. And, by extension, there is no buried cargo.’

‘How can you say that?’ protested Ricky furiously. ‘What about all the artefacts we’ve found? The cannons? The anchors?’

‘Who knows?’ shrugged Holm. ‘Perhaps they spilled overboard during a storm. Perhaps one of your Chinese ships was threatened by pirates, and its crew jettisoned them for speed.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Ricky.

‘Or perhaps someone bought them on the Chinese black market, then scattered them around the sea-bed.’

‘How dare you?’ erupted Ricky, jumping to his feet. ‘How fucking dare you?’

‘I’m not suggesting it was you.’

‘Of course you are!’

‘What about the sonar anomalies in the wreck mound?’ asked Knox.

‘Rock formations,’ said Holm.

‘They can’t all be,’ protested Ricky.

‘They can all be,’ retorted Holm. ‘And they all are. I admit some of the original readings were highly suggestive; but the latest data are incontrovertible.’ He touched one of the folders. ‘Check for yourself, if you don’t believe me. And even if the sonar scans and magnetic imaging weren’t conclusive, which they are, our sediment analysis would be. If a treasure ship was buried here, the sand on top of it would be rich with traces of wood from its hull, of jute and tung oil from its caulking; we’d have found flecks of rust from nails, from anchors and other ironwork; we’d have found the residue of gunpowder. We haven’t. Barely a whisper, not in any of the samples you took. No traces, ergo no wreck. What you announced as a shipwreck mound is essentially just one long ridge of rock covered by sand.’

The silence in the stateroom was so complete that Knox could hear the hum of the fan in Holm’s laptop, the soft reproach of a wave as it slapped their hull. But then Ricky pointed at Holm. ‘You’re out,’ he told him.

‘That won’t change the truth about—’

‘I said you’re out. Get off my boat. Get off.’

‘As you wish.’ Holm primly closed his laptop, slung it over his shoulder, walked to the door.

‘You signed confidentiality agreements, remember?’ shouted Ricky, following him. ‘Not one word of this better get out.’

‘How do you plan to stop it?’

‘I’ll sue your fucking arse off,’ said Ricky. ‘You’ll never work in this industry again.’ He slammed the door behind him, turned around. ‘And turn that fucking camera off,’ he bawled at Maddow the Shadow.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Maddow, dropping it from his shoulder.

‘And get out.’ He opened the door again, waited for Maddow to leave, then slammed it only slightly less forcefully. ‘Jesus!’ he said, coming back to the table. But his demeanour changed even as they watched, from anger and disbelief through anxiety to a real and palpable panic. He sat down heavily, put his head in his hands, began breathing fast and shallow.

‘What is it?’ asked Knox.

He looked up, still breathing hard. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’re not just disappointed by this news. You’re scared.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Ricky.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Miles.

A look of self-pity twisted Ricky’s face. ‘You guys don’t know how hard it was raising money,’ he said.

Knox frowned. ‘I thought you got it from Beijing.’

‘I did. But then there was that damned coup.’

Knox glanced at Miles. This salvage had originally been scheduled for the previous year, but an unexpected coup had seen off Madagascar’s former president, and the new guy had appointed his own people to the various ministries, forcing them to postpone. But this was the first they’d heard that it had affected their Chinese government funding. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘It was the financial crisis,’ said Ricky. ‘My people in Beijing suddenly had more urgent uses for their money. But they recommended me to a guild instead.’ He gave a bright false smile. ‘A commercial and industrial guild. Very big in Nanjing, which is where the treasure fleet was built; and also in Guangdong, where a lot of the ironwork was done. That’s why they were so keen to be a part of this.’

‘A commercial and industrial guild?’ frowned Miles, who’d spent several years salvaging wrecks in the South China Seas. ‘Which one exactly?’

‘I forget their name. The guild of peace and righteousness. Something like that.’

‘The New Righteousness and Peace Guild?’ suggested Miles.

‘Yes,’ said Ricky uneasily. ‘I think that may have been it.’

‘You’re telling me that we’re in business with the Sun Yee On?’

Ricky didn’t reply, other than for his smile to grow a little grislier. But that was enough for Knox. ‘The who?’ he asked Miles.

‘They’re triads,’ said Miles, in a matter-of-fact tone that accentuated rather than concealed his underlying cold fury. ‘I came across them quite a bit in Macao. They’ve been trying to clean up their image and reputation recently. Lots of joint ventures with the police and local party officials, that kind of thing. Buying political goodwill with patriotic projects like this. But they’re still triads.’

‘They were recommended by the culture ministry,’ protested Ricky. ‘How bad can they be?’

‘They’re fucking triads!’ yelled Miles. ‘How could you be so stupid?’ He shook his head in dismay. ‘Jesus! I can’t believe this. We’re screwed.’

‘He’s screwed,’ said Knox, nodding at Ricky.

‘No. We’re screwed.’ Miles glared furiously at Ricky. ‘He only ever hired us because he’d already used up all his own credibility, so he needed ours. Frank and me flew out here ourselves, remember? We talked to the fisherman who found the first cannon. We dived the site ourselves and took the sonar readings. Without our endorsement, he’d never have raised the money, not even from scum like the Sun Yee On. So they’re not just going to blame him when they find out the truth. They’re going to blame us too. And, trust me on this, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of these people.’

‘Hell,’ muttered Knox.

Ricky gave a ghastly smile then got to his feet and went to the sideboard for a bottle of whisky and some glasses. ‘We rather seem to be in the same boat,’ he said, as he splashed out shots for them all with a slightly trembling hand. ‘So what do you say we put our heads together and see if we can’t come up with some kind of solution?’

II

Rebecca was in her bedroom packing for Madagascar when she suffered a stomach cramp so severe that she had to crouch down and bite her finger not to yell out. She’d been trying to avoid the memory ever since her conversation with Pierre, but it was no use, she couldn’t suppress it any longer.

Some eighteen months ago, her sister Emilia had called to let her know that she was thinking of attending a forestry fieldwork course in southern England. Though she’d said it casually enough, they’d both known it was a big deal. Rebecca had left home many years before after a rift with her father of such bitterness that she’d never been back since, hadn’t so much as set eyes on her father or sister. Emilia had been working diligently towards a reconciliation, and this had been her boldest effort yet. But the timing had been awful. Rebecca’s programmes had made her an overnight sensation, in great demand on the chat-show circuit. Her Madagascan upbringing was so exotic that she was constantly being asked about it. The truth had been too difficult for her to face, so she’d sidestepped these questions by fabricating a false idyll of her childhood. But should Emilia come to town, she was terrified the whole story would worm its way out, and she hadn’t been ready for that. ‘I’m not sure where I’ll be,’ she’d blurted out. ‘I may be away filming.’

‘Of course,’ Emilia had said woodenly. ‘Maybe some other time.’

But there’d never been another time. And now there never would be. She breathed in deep, then quashed that treacherous thought. She was going to get Emilia and her father back alive. That was all there was to it. She zipped up her bags, carried them downstairs, handed them to her taxi-driver to pack away in his boot. ‘We off, then?’ he asked.

‘Five minutes,’ she told him. ‘I need to lock up.’

‘You’re the boss.’

She went back inside, was about to record a new message for her answer-phone when she realised she didn’t know how long she’d be away. She had ten days at the most in Madagascar, for her first series was about to debut on American cable and she’d booked a gruelling promotional tour to give it its best shot. She left the message as it was, then she went through her house room by room, turning off appliances at the wall, looking for anything she might have forgotten. It seemed to take forever; all these rooms she never used. She’d bought the house from a City couple with four young children, another on the way. Her viewings had been chaotic, toys everywhere, broken furniture and crayon daubs upon the wall, yet the pervasive joy and life and companionship had intoxicated her. She’d somehow convinced herself that she’d be buying all that along with the house; but all she’d actually bought was more emptiness.

She turned on her conservatory lights, looked out over her small garden. Her first night here, she’d heard a baby crying. Her heart had stopped on her; she’d imagined for a moment that the previous owners must have left one of their brood behind. But when she’d hurried outside, it had only been a black cat. Its mewing had sounded so like an infant in distress that it had made her wonder whether it was deliberately taking advantage of maternal heartstrings. Nature was ingenious at finding such weaknesses to exploit. She’d made a documentary on the subject, featuring similar cases such as cuckoos, those brood parasites that laid their eggs in the nests of other birds to pass on the cost of child-rearing, taking advantage of a glitch in the mental software of some songbirds that made parents give most of their food to the biggest and most aggressive of their nestlings, so as not to waste resources on sickly offspring. They did this irrespective of what their nestlings actually looked like, so they’d end up feeding cuckoo chicks larger than themselves, while their true offspring starved.

Rebecca had always revelled in such uncomfortable truths. She loved to cause consternation, to jolt people into contemplation of their darker nature, hurry them past their mirrors. Exploring such behaviour wasn’t just her career, it was how she now understood the world. Whenever she saw people doing the most mundane things, queuing at the supermarket, holding a door open for somebody, walking their dog … she’d wonder why they were doing it, what the payoff was. And the deeper she’d dug into evolutionary psychology, the more uncompromising her view of the world had become. We were carbon-based breeding machines, that was all. Our consciousness was merely the hum and glow of organic computers at work. Reasoning and emotion were chemically induced. Virtue and vice were survival strategies; free will an illusion. Her work had had a subtle impact on her own life, as though a psychological uncertainty principle was at work, allowing her either to experience or to understand a particular emotion, but not both simultaneously. Whenever she felt any unusual emotion, she’d examine herself like a specimen. Is this envy? she’d wonder. Is this greed? Is this what other people feel? Am I a freak? And whenever any new man tried to get close to her, she’d scrutinise them with almost scientific zeal, examining their conversation and behaviour in minute detail, sometimes even deliberately provoking them with outrageous comments and actions simply to see their response, until invariably she’d drive them away. She did this even though she’d bought herself a house large enough for a family, and yet lived in it alone.

A bang upon her front door. ‘You okay in there, love?’ called out her driver. ‘Only if you want to catch your plane …’

‘Coming.’ She switched off her conservatory lights and turned to go.

SIX
I

‘We’ve leased the Maritsa for six weeks, right?’ asked Knox. ‘All the equipment too?’

Ricky knocked back his whisky, pulled a sour face. ‘So?’

‘So we won’t be saving your Chinese friends much of anything by calling the project off now.’

Miles shook his head. ‘You don’t know these people. If they find out that we knew this was a bust and didn’t tell them—’

‘But we don’t know it’s a bust,’ countered Knox. ‘Not for sure. We have a sea-bed studded with Chinese artefacts, remember, not to mention a very compelling sonar reading.’

‘Which has been refuted by a more recent one,’ pointed out Miles. ‘And by the magnetic imaging.’

‘Yes. And by the sediment samples too. But what if someone had tampered with those readings and those samples?’

‘What?’ asked Ricky. ‘Who?’

‘Don’t get ahead of me,’ said Knox. ‘I’m just asking: isn’t it possible? I mean, how hard would it have been for someone to have switched our samples with sediment from elsewhere?’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘To trick us into giving up the site, of course, so that they can come back later and plunder it at their leisure. I mean, if we’re right about there being a treasure ship here, its cargo could be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Wouldn’t that be worth switching some samples for?’

‘Holm!’ spat Ricky. ‘I never trusted that bastard.’

‘Calm down,’ said Knox. ‘I’m only suggesting it’s a possibility. And if so, shouldn’t we make certain, one way or the other, before we call off the expedition? Wouldn’t our most prudent and responsible course be to take new tests and samples, but this time make sure they can’t be interfered with, maybe even fly some duplicate samples back to Europe for checking. Who knows, maybe we’ll get different results. But, even if not, it’ll buy us another week in which to start managing the expectations of your friends back in China. And we’ve also got Miles and me and fourteen other professional divers on board, we’ve got a motor-boat and two inflatables and all the survey equipment we could wish for. Maybe the wreck isn’t where we thought, maybe it’s five hundred metres west, or a kilometre south. Let’s use our extra time to find it.’

‘You’re right,’ said Miles. ‘We’ll survey the whole damned sea-floor.’

Knox stood and went to the window. The sea was still too rough for the motorboat, and it was getting dark. No way would it be heading back to Morombe tonight. He turned to Ricky. ‘I’ll bet Holm’s still on board,’ he said. ‘He could really screw us if he wants to. Might be worth trying to smooth things out with him.’

‘Leave him to me,’ said Ricky. ‘What about you two?’

‘We need to brief the guys, thrash out a new schedule.’ He looked at them both for approval. ‘Agreed?’

‘Yes,’ said Miles.

‘Yes,’ said Ricky.

‘Good,’ nodded Knox. ‘Then let’s go do it.’

II

Boris felt a mild euphoria as the plane took off on the first leg of his journey to Madagascar, pressing him gently back into his seat. Part of it was simple relief: he’d had to show his passport three times already, and not a sniff of trouble. The Nergadzes knew better than to skimp on such things, of course, but he was an old enough hand never to trust equipment until he’d used it in the field. And it felt good simply to be working again. He was by nature a man of action, and these past few months had chafed badly. But he was buzzing for another reason too.

Fifteen months he’d spent in his various Greek hellholes before the Nergadzes had finally sprung him. Fifteen months. Boris had always fancied himself tough enough to handle serious time. It hadn’t proved that way. Prison had ripped him apart. Part of it had been simply a consequence of being abroad, unfamiliar with the language and the ropes. Another part of it had come from not backing down from a fight with the wrong person on his third day, and being punished for it thereafter in unspeakable ways. But it had been more than that. The Athens fiasco had ruined his whole life. Even after getting out, it had been nothing but shit. As head of security for Sandro Nergadze, he’d been powerful and feared. Now he was nothing. People who’d once cowered from him pushed past him as if he wasn’t there. This world was all about respect. He needed to earn that back. And the best way of doing that was by making someone else pay full price for it, and so let the world know he wasn’t to be messed with. And who better a victim than Daniel Knox, the man who’d caused him all this grief?

The seat-belt warning pinged off. A stewardess came flouncing down the aisle as if it was her personal catwalk. ‘Champagne?’ she asked.

‘Wine,’ he told her. ‘Red.’

He watched approvingly as she walked away, then closed his eyes and recalled that afternoon at Athens Airport when Knox had delivered him and Davit straight into the hands of the Greek police, despite swearing upon his girlfriend’s life that he’d take them to the golden fleece. His heart clenched a little at the memory. But when he thought about what he’d do to that man in revenge, and that he’d be well paid for it too, it soothed him wonderfully.

The stewardess returned with a balloon glass half-filled with dark red wine. He took a good mouthful. It tasted pleasantly raw and bold. Five hundred thousand euros! he thought. It had better damned well be Knox out there. But then he remembered that Sandro and Ilya had commissioned him to make precisely that determination himself. They’d believe whatever he told them. He laughed out loud and toasted himself in the faint reflection of his window.

Yes. Things were definitely looking up.

SEVEN
I

It was late by the time Knox made it to bed. He was worn out from his day, yet sleep eluded him. He’d been an archaeologist long enough to take his lows with his highs, so while he was disappointed by Holm’s bombshell announcement, he’d get over it just fine. But the longer the evening had gone on, the more he’d realised what a financial and reputational disaster it threatened to be for Miles and his brother Frank, his co-founder of MGS, currently holding the fort back in Hove. The two men had been good to Knox, giving him this job after Gaille died, sticking by him through his first year, though he’d done precious little to warrant such loyalty. He felt bad for their troubles, anxious to help.

Madagascar was barely a blur against the pre-dawn sky when he rose. He brewed coffee and took a cup to the control room, started revising the dive plan along the lines he and Miles had discussed with their divers the night before. He logged on as he worked. Internet access was via a local mobile phone network, and consequently expensive, sporadic and slow, but it was fine for email. His in-box was all routine, except for one message from Braddock at the Landseer Trust.

Dear Mr Richardson,

Just heard some troubling news and wanted to let you know asap. The Kirkpatricks’ sailboat has been found drifting, and Adam and Emilia are missing. Don’t get too alarmed—they often vanish into the forest for days at a time—but I thought it best to alert you at once as you may want to defer decisions on flights etc. I will, of course, update you when I hear anything more.

All best,

Braddock Lightman

He remembered Lucia’s remark the afternoon before, how she’d been trying to get hold of the Kirkpatricks, but had failed. No wonder. He tried to put the news aside as he worked on his schedules. He already had plenty to occupy him. But it nagged at him all the same. People vanished into the forest, sure, but not from boats, not unless something terrible had happened. A sudden vivid memory of Emilia Kirkpatrick on the afternoon some fourteen months before when she’d burst so suddenly into his life, jolting him from the malaise he’d been in since Mikhail Nergadze had murdered Gaille while he’d looked helplessly on. He owed her an incalculable debt for that. He couldn’t just ignore it.

Something else troubled him too. Their Eden project was only a few weeks away. Was it possible that the Kirkpatricks’ disappearance was connected to it in some way? It was another five minutes before he gave in. He printed off the email and took it to Miles’s cabin, banged on his door to wake him, then went inside and flipped on his light. ‘Read this,’ he said.

‘Oh, Christ,’ muttered Miles. ‘Those poor people.’ His heart wasn’t in his words, however, partly because he’d never got to know Emilia anything like as well as Knox had, partly because he had enough worries of his own. But then he realised why Knox had woken him, and he sat up abruptly. ‘No, mate,’ he said. ‘I need you here.’

‘Not as badly as she needs me there.’

‘There’ll already be a huge search going on. People who know the area. How much difference will you make?’

‘Maybe quite a lot, if it has something to do with the Winterton.’

‘How could it?’ frowned Miles. ‘No one else knows about that.’

‘Someone must. They got us our licences, remember? So people in the government must know. Anyway, it’s only thirty-odd metres deep. Some fisherman or diver could easily have found it by accident. And if they have, and that’s why Adam and Emilia have vanished, what chance will the police have?’

‘The Kirkpatricks wouldn’t want you telling the police,’ said Miles. ‘Not unless there was no choice. Don’t you remember how adamant Emilia was about secrecy?’

‘But that’s precisely why I need to go down there myself,’ said Knox. ‘If it’s got nothing to do with the Winterton, fine, I’ll come straight back. But if it does …’ He realised this wasn’t enough. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘She’s a friend. I owe her more than you realise. I’ll get the new schedules finished before I leave, and you don’t really need me otherwise, not really, not for a sea-bed search like this. You’ve got plenty of better divers than me.’

Miles shook his head, but in concession rather than disagreement. He looked wryly up at Knox. ‘We were going to fire you, you know,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Knox.

‘It wasn’t just that you weren’t pulling your weight—though you weren’t. You were so damn morose all the time; you were bringing everyone else down.’

‘I know.’

‘Morale matters in small businesses like ours.’

‘Yes, it does,’ acknowledged Knox. ‘Frankly, I could never figure out why you kept me on so long.’

Miles gave a dry laugh. ‘I guess we felt bad for you after … what happened. We figured you just needed time. And then she turned up.’ He squinted at Knox. ‘You never did tell us what happened that weekend.’

‘No,’ agreed Knox.

‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Go check into it. Bring her and her father back, if you possibly can. But, whatever you may think, I need you here too. I’ve come to rely on you more than you realise. So I want your word you’ll shift your arse back here as soon as humanly possible.’

‘You’ve got it,’ vowed Knox. ‘And thanks.’

II

Rebecca landed midmorning at Antananarivo’s Ivato Airport, and emerged into the crowded, dingy arrivals hall to find Pierre himself waiting for her. He was easy to spot, standing nearly a head taller than most of the Malagasy thronging around him, and looking like some latter-day pirate, with his bulging goitre of black beard, his vast dark eyes and his gold hoop earring. He saw her at the same time, bulled his way through the crowd to her, took her shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks,then reached around her and hugged her, his beard tickling her cheek. She was still holding her luggage, so she had to wriggle her shoulders to make him let go. ‘Any news?’ she asked.

He shook his head as he stepped back, brushed a finger beneath his eye. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘My little Becca.’

‘Please, Pierre. I need to know what’s going on.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ he shrugged. ‘I speak to the police in Tulear earlier; there’s no sign of them.’ And he took her bags from her, led the way towards the terminal doors.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘My car’s outside.’

‘Your car?’

‘If we leave now, we can be in Tulear tonight.’

‘I’m flying,’ she told him. ‘That way I’ll be in Tulear this afternoon. Why don’t you come with me?’

‘I can’t. I have my car.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said.

‘You want me to leave it?’

‘I want you to do whatever it takes to find my father and sister,’ she told him. ‘Emilia’s your lover, Pierre. She’s the mother of your child. My father’s been your closest friend for over thirty years. And you’re worried about your damned car?’ She shook her head at him. ‘What the hell are you still doing here? Why aren’t you back home already, leading the search?’

Pierre went a little red. ‘I wanted to be here for you,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear for you to arrive home with no one to greet you, not after all these years, not to news like this. And I think maybe you’ll need someone to drive you.’

‘I told you. I’m flying.’

‘Yes. But I didn’t know that.’

She shook her head at him, still indignant, yet finding it hard to justify. They were close enough to the automatic glass doors that they kept opening and then closing again, offering brief glimpses of bright sunshine. She turned and walked out through them. The newly laid tarmac in the car park was glistening from a recent shower, and the moisture had coaxed out a cocktail of pungent smells: from the brown-grey zebu pats, like amputated elephants’ feet, scattered as fertiliser on the grass verges; from the sweat-stiffened clothes of the porters, labourers and touts; from the choking silver-black exhaust fumes spewed by the ramshackle taxis, buses and trucks. Yet, deep beneath those, she could detect hints of gentler scents, of frangipani, vanilla and hibiscus. She breathed in deep. Smell was the most evocative of the senses, they said. Eleven years! Eleven years! Yet still it seemed instantly like home, oppressive with memory. For a moment she felt eighteen again, insecure and terrified, about to leave behind everything she’d ever known. She shivered as though a ghost had walked through her.

Madagascar: the Great Red Island, the Eighth Continent, land of her birth.

III

The Bayliner was already crowded by the time Knox heaved his dive-bag and overnight bag down the gangway and aboard. Garry was at the wheel, with Dieter Holm behind him, looking thunderous, alongside Ron, their ship’s steward, off into Morombe for fresh supplies, and Lucia on the cushioned rear seat. He added his bags to the general pile, went to sit beside her. ‘What’s this, then?’ she smiled. ‘Deserting the sinking ship?’

He debated a moment, decided he might as well tell her. She was headed to Eden too, after all, and was bound to find out eventually. ‘You know how you couldn’t get hold of the Kirkpatricks?’ he said. ‘Turns out they’ve gone missing. I’m going down to help with the search.’

‘I thought you didn’t know them.’

‘I didn’t say that. I only said that they were pretty well known along this coast.’

She threw him an amused look. ‘So should I now doubt everything you told me yesterday?’ But there was no sting in her voice. She was a journalist; she knew how the world worked. ‘So how do you know them?’

‘I only really know Emilia. She spent a few days in England a little while back. I met her then.’

‘Ah. Like that, is it?’

Garry opened the throttle up at that moment, and the roaring engine spared him from having to answer. But Lucia’s question set him thinking. It had been a difficult time for Knox, struggling wretchedly to find a way to live without Gaille. Before losing her, he hadn’t fully understood how completely their lives had become conjoined, how dependent on her he’d become. The days had been manageable, thanks to his job at MGS, but his nights had been soul-destroying, unbearable. Miles and Frank had done their best to cajole him from his funk. They’d invited him to the pub, to their homes for dinner. But the forced jollity of those evenings had been awful; he’d come to dread them not simply for themselves, but also because he’d brought everyone else down, and he’d hated that. So he’d started saying no, returning instead to his one-bedroom rental, where he’d lain on his couch eating pizza and drinking himself to sleep in front of the TV. His self-discipline had dribbled away. He’d started turning up at work hung-over, unkempt and smelling of last night’s booze; and though he’d known his dismissal was surely imminent, he hadn’t cared one jot.

That was when Emilia Kirkpatrick had come into his life.

It had been late one Friday afternoon, during a particularly cold snap. She’d had an appointment with Frank that morning, but a flight delay had screwed that up, and Frank had headed off to Harwich to look over a boat. They’d all been locking up for the weekend when she’d arrived, and as everyone else had had plans for the evening, it had been left by default for Knox to deal with her. He’d told her to come back on Monday, when Frank would be able to see her; but she’d flown in from Madagascar for this, and she simply refused to leave, so he finally agreed to hear her out over a drink at a local wine bar. One glass had led to a second; a third had led to dinner. And, suddenly, perhaps as a result of being out for the evening with an attractive and sympathetic woman, his grief for Gaille had overwhelmed him, he’d started pouring out his heart, even weeping a little at the table, causing such consternation amongst his neighbours that he’d felt compelled to leave. Emilia had helped him to a taxi, had escorted him back to his flat, then had taken him to bed, where she’d kept him for much of the weekend, listening to him with extraordinary tenderness and patience now that the logjam had finally broken in his heart, allowing all his hurt to tumble out.

And on the Monday morning, when he’d driven her into MGS to make plans for the Winterton salvage, he’d realised to his surprise that he’d actually been looking forward to the day. For the first time since losing Gaille, he’d felt some glimmer of gladness to be alive. And so, yes, as he’d told Miles, he did owe Emilia. Without her intervention, he’d almost certainly have been out of a job by now, drinking himself to death in a one-bedroom tip somewhere on the outskirts of Hove.

EIGHT
I

Boris had to wait over an hour at Antananarivo Airport for Davit. The arrivals board was broken, and he began to fret they’d miss their connection to Morombe. But the big man finally showed. ‘Hey, boss,’ he said, looking rumpled and weary from his flight, yet nonetheless cheerful.

Boris nodded sourly to let Davit know he hadn’t forgotten Greece. ‘We need to get moving,’ he said.

The plane to Morombe was an antique Twin Otter. It reeked of fumes and was so cramped that Boris had to duck his head to walk down the aisle to his seat, while Davit had to bend almost double, then sit sideways. It struggled to make it off the ground, its engines straining for altitude before faltering altogether, allowing the aircraft to plunge back towards earth, causing several passengers to scream out and making even Boris grip his armrests, before they picked up again.

He looked out and down. Madagascar’s capital was hemmed in by lush green paddyfields that shrank quickly behind him. They crossed mountains, forests and lakes. Though they were quite low, Boris couldn’t see a single road. Turbulence tumbled and jolted them. Through the threadbare curtain separating the cabin from the cockpit, he saw the pilot thump one of his dials with the heel of his hand. The fumes grew worse. Across the aisle, an old woman opened a sick bag and vomited into it with impressive decorum, like she was clearing her throat. Afterwards, she rolled up the top of the bag and held it clenched in her lap like a packed lunch, but the smell leaked out even so, making Boris feel nauseous himself. It was an immense relief, therefore, when they bounced across Morombe’s bumpy runway and then the door opened and the steps arrived and they climbed down on to the sun-baked concrete, and he could stretch his back and arms. ‘That was fun,’ he muttered.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Davit.

They collected their bags, went to find a taxi. There were just two of them, battered and yellow, but neither driver spoke English. They all looked at each other in dismay. ‘Hotel speak English?’ asked Davit.

The taller of the drivers grinned and gave them the thumbs up. They climbed into his cab, bumped along a potholed road into town. Young Malagasy men stared sullenly through the windows, assessing them for wealth. They pulled up outside a compound protected by high wooden palisades. ‘Hotel speak English,’ said the driver.

They paid him off, went inside. Two windsurfer boards and an outboard engine were lying on reception’s red-tiled floor, but there was no one in sight. Boris called out impatiently. An elderly man appeared, rubbing sleep from his eyes. ‘You speak English?’ asked Boris.

The man shook his head. ‘Claudia!’ he yelled. ‘Claudia!’ An attractive young Malagasy woman with milk-coffee skin and braided shoulder-length hair arrived through dappled shadows. The man gestured at them. ‘English,’ he said.

She nodded and smiled warmly. ‘You want a room?’

‘Two rooms,’ said Boris.

‘I show you our very best.’ They followed her along a sandy path. Furled sunshades leaned against stacked loungers. Mopeds and beach-buggies were coated with bird-lime and dust. A small wooden boat was turned turtle on the sand. There was no sign of any other guests here at all. Business looked dire. They reached a pair of cabins raised a foot or so above the ground, their porches offering fine views of the beach and sea. Claudia removed the padlock and led them in. It was gloomy inside, even after she’d opened the tattered curtains. ‘Is nice, yes?’ she beamed.

The double bed sagged, the mosquito net was torn and mended with safety pins, the toilet was missing its seat, and the shower area had no shower any more, just a huge plastic tub three-quarters filled with water. But they weren’t here on holiday, and having an English speaker mattered more than comfort. Besides, Claudia was undeniably charming, a perfect way to kill any downtime before they completed their mission. He nodded and set down his bags, ushered them both out, closed his door, stripped and doused himself in a couple of buckets of cool water. Then he dried himself off, put on a fresh black shirt, shorts and Ray-Bans, and went to check out the town.

II

Garry cut the Bayliner’s engine and let momentum take them into Morombe beach. A crowd of Malagasy women waded out with trays and bowls filled with snappers, octopus and sardines for Ron to choose between, as well as with the papayas, manioc and onions they’d farmed from their small gardens. Knox jumped overboard, grabbed his bags and dumped them on the beach before returning to help Lucia, asking about transport on the way. The coastal track didn’t go all the way to Eden; besides, a bridge just south of town had been brought down by the recent cyclone and it hadn’t yet been repaired. The only way to reach Eden was by fishing pirogue.

He explained this to Lucia, who took it in her stride; she’d been planning on taking a pirogue anyway, so that she could write an article about the experience. They agreed to share a pirogue as far as Eden; after that, she’d take it on by herself south to Tulear, from where she was flying out in two days time. They each had things to do in town, Knox to change money, Lucia to check out of her hotel, but they decided to head along the beach and hire a pirogue now, so that they could leave their bags behind. As they trudged along, their feet plunging deep into the powdery sand, Knox wished he hadn’t packed quite so much. But Adam and Emilia had disappeared at sea, so he needed his dive-gear; and he couldn’t exactly turn up without a change of clothes.

The piroguiers sitting by their boats sniffed business; they jumped up and hurried to meet them. The dearth of tourists caused by Madagascar’s coup was evidently biting hard. Knox outlined their plans, asked the price, sparking a Dutch auction in which the young men underbid each other to win the work. Two of them reached the same price, but only one spoke decent French, making their decision easy. The young man’s name was Thierry. He led them over to his pirogue, where his brother and partner, Alphonse, was mending nets. Knox gave the pirogue a once-over. Its thin, canoe-like hull had been chiselled from a single trunk, then fitted with slat seats and a weighty torpedo of an outrigger to make it more stable. It looked fine to him, as did the mast and sail lying on the sand alongside.

‘Any chance of making Eden tonight?’ he asked.

Thierry gave the universal sailor’s shrug. ‘It depends on the wind,’ he said. ‘But it’s not a problem. My brother lives at Ambatomilo. Or we can make a tent and sleep upon the beach.’

‘Sounds perfect,’ smiled Lucia. ‘I love a night on the beach.’

‘Can you look after our bags?’ asked Knox. ‘We need to go into town.’

‘Of course,’ said Thierry. ‘We wait for you here.’

‘Great,’ said Knox. ‘See you later, then.’

III

A black dog took a liking to Boris as he walked down Morombe high street, sniffing at his heels and looking hungrily up at him. He scowled at it and aimed a boot at its ribs, but still it kept following. It was an appropriate enough companion: he’d rarely ever visited a more depressing place. The road was so badly broken that the few cars treated it like an obstacle course, weaving cautiously around islands of tarmac. There was litter everywhere, squashed packs of Boston cigarettes, lemonade bottles and the like. A young diabetic beggar with a swollen and ulcerated foot strummed a homemade mandolin, while a dispirited woman sold napkins and sweet potatoes from a tray, and children raced cars they’d made from sardine cans around her feet.

He passed a camping store with cooking utensils and hunting knives in one window, foreign-language guidebooks and maps in the other. Hard to know how it made enough money to stay open, for he’d still seen no tourists. He bought a guidebook and a map of the coast from Morondava down to Tulear that he flapped open and studied as he walked. According to the press-cuttings Sandro had given him, the Maritsa was anchored on the far side of the reef, several miles offshore. Even getting close enough to this man Matthew Richardson to see if he was Knox or not would be hard, though the man in charge of the salvage certainly seemed to enjoy his publicity, so maybe Boris could claim to be a journalist or something, request an interview. But better by far if he could somehow coax Richardson ashore, away from the sanctuary of his friends.

He was musing on ways to achieve this when he looked up to see the man himself strolling along the pavement towards him.

NINE
I

A young man in baggy basketball shorts and a tattered Black Sabbath T-shirt was waiting for Rebecca at Tulear Airport, holding up the torn-off side of a cardboard box with her name crudely scrawled in black marker-pen upon it. He looked disconcertingly young, despite his affectations of maturity: the thin moustache, the soft-pack of cigarettes and lighter tucked into his upturned sleeve, the cheap mirror sunglasses pushed up over his long brown hair like an Alice band. Maybe he realised the impression he gave, because he’d barely introduced himself as Zanahary before launching into a manic explanation of what he was doing there: his elder brother had twisted his ankle jumping from the roof of their house and had sent him in his place. He was a very experienced driver, he assured her; very safe. Too weary to make an issue of it, Rebecca retrieved her luggage then led the way out into the sunshine.

The hire car, a gleaming dark-blue and silver Mitsubishi pickup with four spotlights on its roof, at least looked in good shape. It would need to be. She had some business in Tulear to take care of first, but after that it was still a good three hours drive north to the Eden Reserve, over a broken-up sand, mud and rock track. She checked the tyres for tread, then made sure there were spares in the back, along with canisters of fuel, oil and water. Then she opened the passenger door, to be greeted by a blast of hot air. The air-conditioning fans had been ripped out and the dashboard was covered with promotional stickers half-peeled off, leaving ugly strips of white pith everywhere. It stank of cigarette smoke, its ashtrays too bulging to close, and the seats were covered with tacky protective plastic, so that the backs of her legs glued to them at once. Zanahary climbed jauntily in the driver’s side, tapped a cigarette from his soft-pack and raised it to his lips with 1950s chic, elbow high and folded, as though it were an expensive piece of jewellery he wanted to bring casually to her attention.

Rebecca shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him.

‘But—’

‘Not in the car.’

It was just fifteen minutes drive into Tulear. They stopped at a general store for a sack of rice and some other provisions for which she had plans, then drove on to the offices of her father’s long-time lawyer Delpha. He’d been a regular visitor to Eden during her childhood, bringing bags of sweets and wooden dolls he’d carved himself. She’d been intensely fond of him, yet eleven years had passed, and she was apprehensive of her welcome. The receptionist beamed vacantly when she gave her name. Monsieur Delpha was busy at this moment. If madame would please take a seat … But he must have heard her voice, for his office door opened and there he was, older and frailer than she remembered, his hair glowing white, his dark-brown skin sprinkled with fat black freckles. ‘Rebecca?’ he asked, squinting uncertainly across the gloomy reception area. ‘C’est vraiment vows?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

His face cracked; tears sprang into his eyes. She hugged him for a little while, giving him time to compose himself. He stepped back and dried his eyes. ‘I thought you’d never come home.’ But then his face fell. ‘I only wish the circumstances—’

‘Yes,’ said Rebecca.

‘If there’s anything I can do …’

‘There is, actually.’ She glanced at his receptionist, reluctant to discuss family matters in front of someone she didn’t know. He nodded and led her into his office. The walls were warm with leather-bound books, the half-drawn curtains on the high windows giving it a rather somnolent feel. She sat down, ordered her thoughts. ‘I need help,’ she told him. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know what help. I’ve been away too long. I don’t know anything any more. I mean, is there even a proper search going on? If not, how can I get one started? Who should I talk to? Who can I trust? Who should I bribe? Who should I yell at? Maybe I’ll need a boat for the search. Where’s my father’s? Can I just take it? What about Eden? What about Michel? And those are just the questions I know to ask.’ She shrugged to express how far out of her depth she felt. ‘So I need help.’

Delpha had jotted down notes as she was talking. He glanced over them now, then nodded and leaned back in his chair. ‘You must speak to Andriama about the search and investigation. He is our chief of police here in Tulear.’

‘And can I trust him?’

Delpha considered a moment. ‘I have always found him honest myself. But there are rumours. There are always rumours, you understand. About everybody. About me, too, no doubt. Andriama talks loudly about rooting out corruption in Tulear, yet corruption persists, and every year he adds another room to his house. Maybe these rumours are nothing but envy, or his enemies wishing him harm. He certainly has those. He is not afraid of powerful people.’ Delpha glanced down, then up again. ‘As for your father’s boat, you know it was found drifting by some South African yachtsmen?’

‘Pierre told me.’

‘They’ve claimed salvage rights. Under international maritime law, that entitles them to half the value of the boat. There’ll be other bills to pay too, before the Port Captain will authorise the boat’s release. Customs, immigration, police, that kind of thing. But don’t be alarmed. Your father was insured against all such eventualities. I know; I organised it myself. But the paperwork is at Eden. Bring it to me, and I can have the boat released to you at once.’

‘Thanks.’

He consulted his notes again, then adopted a more sombre look, to let her know he had a difficult subject to broach. ‘You must excuse me for what I am about to say. I mean no ill. I hope and pray your father and sister are alive—’

‘They are alive,’ said Rebecca.

‘… but you must also plan for all eventualities. Your father would expect it.’

‘Yes.’

‘You realise that, as your father’s and your sister’s lawyer, I am forbidden from discussing their affairs with you, at least until they’re—’

‘I understand,’ Rebecca assured him. Delpha’s scrupulousness about such matters was one reason her father had trusted him so completely.

‘But I can discuss hypothetical situations. Imagine a wealthy man, if you will. A man who elects to divide his money equally between those of his children who survive him. One of his sons, Rupert, let’s say, is childless. But the other, Etienne, has a young daughter who will be his beneficiary when he dies. You are with me?’

‘Yes.’ Rupert was clearly Rebecca herself; Etienne Emilia.

‘Good. Now imagine two different courses of events. In the first, the father dies. His wealth is divided between Rupert and Etienne. Then Etienne dies a few days later. The law is clear: Etienne’s share in his father’s wealth passes to his daughter. But now imagine a second course of events, in which Etienne dies before or at the same time as his father. In this instance, all the money will pass straight to the father’s sole surviving son. Etienne’s daughter will inherit nothing.’

Rebecca frowned. It almost seemed that Delpha was advising her how to cheat Michel out of his rightful inheritance; but she knew him too well to believe that. ‘What are you getting at?’ she asked.

‘I am just outlining a legal situation,’ he said. ‘You see, under Malagasy law, if a person’s assets pass on to a child when that child is too young to administer those assets himself, then they will in effect pass in trust to that child’s legal guardian. Typically, their surviving parent.’

‘Ah,’ murmured Rebecca. ‘Pierre.’

‘Of course,’ continued Delpha, ‘if that parent has the child’s best interests at heart, then there is no problem.’

‘And Pierre doesn’t have Michel’s best interests at heart?’

‘That’s not what I said at all,’ said Delpha. ‘I was merely outlining a hypothetical situation.’

Rebecca nodded to let him know she’d got the message. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

II

Boris raised his map to conceal his face until the man had passed him by. He walked on a few paces before glancing around, saw him hurry up the broken front steps of a local bank. It was Knox; Boris was sure of it. The jaunty athleticism of his walk, the set of his jaw, his hairline. More than that, it was a gift from the gods. It might be days or even weeks before he got another chance this good.

But how to take advantage of it without getting caught?

There was no time to fetch Davit—not that he’d be any help at this kind of work anyway. He checked his pocket to make sure he’d brought his camera-phone with him, for he’d need to take some footage to keep Ilya happy, then he hurried back to the camping store, concocting a plan on the hoof. He bought a six-inch hunting knife with a serrated blade, a day-pack, a baseball cap and the groundsheet for a tent. He packed his book and map into the day-pack, slung it on his back. He removed the groundsheet from its packaging, flapped it out and draped it over his left shoulder, the quicker to deploy. He checked his reflection in a shop window, tugged the peak of his baseball cap down over his eyes as he walked across the street to lean against a wall from which he could monitor the bank’s front doors.

Then he set himself to wait for Knox to come back out.

TEN
I

There had been times, these past few months, when Davit Kipshidze had seriously considered killing himself. Perversely, he’d been okay in jail in Greece. Back then, he’d had hope. After all, the Nergadzes had vowed to spring him and bring him home. Since they’d made good on their promise, however, he’d slowly come to realise that his old life was forever lost to him, and he hated the one that had taken its place. He was a gregarious man by nature, he needed friends and family around. But the police were watching his friends and family in case he showed up, so he couldn’t risk seeing them any more, for their sake as much as his. He therefore sat alone for days on end in his cramped first-floor apartment, watching TV and listening nervously to cars and the chatter of pedestrians passing by outside.

Lounging on the porch of his beach hut, he stared out over shimmering white sand down to the gentle breakers of the sea. How good sunshine felt after a long winter. How good it felt not to fear the knock upon his door.

Claudia appeared around the edge of his cabin, carrying clean sheets and a broom. She smiled at him as she went inside to strip and change his bed. He stood and went to watch. The view of the sea was nice, but it couldn’t compete with a young and pretty woman. ‘So how come you speak such good English?’ he asked.

She looked around. ‘I live with nice American family,’ she beamed. She held up her right hand, splayed her fingers. ‘Five years.’

‘In America?’ he frowned.

‘In Tulear,’ she told him. ‘A big town south of here. They have this big, big house there for all the children who have no mothers and fathers.’

‘An orphanage?’

‘Yes. An orphanage.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her.

‘Why sorry?’ she frowned. ‘It nice there. They church people, they very kind, they always have food.’ She nodded at happy memories. ‘I like it there very much.’

‘So why leave?’

She pulled a mock-sad face. ‘I grow old. Many children need a home, not enough beds.’ She looked a little guilelessly up at him. ‘Now everything is work, work, work.’

‘Is that right?’ he laughed.

She laughed too, stuck her tongue out. She had slightly crooked upper front teeth, he noticed, that overlapped just fractionally, like the ankles of a coy bride on her wedding night. His chest went a little warm. He’d missed it sorely, these past two years, the company of a pretty woman.

She finished making his bed then picked up her broom and began to sweep out the cabin. She flicked a little sand at his feet, then again, harder, giving him another of her enchanting smiles, so that he couldn’t possibly take offence. He played along, holding up his hands in mock surrender as he retreated before her assault. She followed him out on to the porch, flicking more sand as she came. He broke into a jig, like in the movies when the baddie with the six-shooter makes the hapless victim dance. It made her laugh so hard that she had to cover her mouth with her hand. She leant forward to sweep beneath the porch bench. Her singlet drooped as she did so, revealing the tattered bra within, tantalising glimpses of flesh and shadow. She looked up and caught him staring, grinned happily.

‘Claudia,’ called out the old man from the hotel compound. ‘Claudia!’

‘I go now,’ she said. ‘I see you later, yes?’

‘I hope so.’ He leaned on the porch rail to watch her leave, and was glad to see her put a little extra swish in her stride, just for him.

II

Knox jogged down the bank’s front steps, exasperated by the absurd paperwork required just to change some euros. But it was done at last. Now for some supplies. He walked across town to a small but lively market, a riot of colourful clothing and sparkling costume jewellery, with produce spread out on rickety wooden tables: yellow-brown bananas, orange-green mandarins, plum tomatoes not quite ripe, clumps of garlic and onions, stubby carrots, creamy white manioc, coconuts both hairy and husked, clutched fists of lettuce, pumpkins, papaya, glistening steel bowls of rice and beans.

The brilliant sun in the unpolluted sky gave the slightly eerie impression of being underwater. Greasy tables of zebu steaks buzzed with fat sapphire-and-emerald flies. Salted sardines glittered like spilled chests of silver coins. A crone sat astride two wicker baskets of orange-red crabs, thrusting her bamboo cane into the writhing intestinal mass, irritating pincers until they snapped and clenched the cane so tightly she could lift them out and shake them off into a bucket. He bought fish, rice and other supplies to eat that night in case they didn’t reach Eden by sunset, added some biscuits and bottled water.

Time to get back to the pirogue. He took a moment to get his bearings. He could see a line of palm trees above some shacks to his right, their fronds swept back like hippies walking into the wind. That had to mark the shore. He set off towards them before catching a glimpse of the beach down the far end of a narrow alley between two lines of huts. He turned and ambled along it, utterly oblivious of the man following a dozen paces behind.

ELEVEN
I

Tulear’s Commissariat Centrale de Police was a yellow two-storey building near the centre of town, its front pockmarked like a war zone. Rebecca asked for Chief of Police Andriama at the desk, and a young man in jeans and a brilliant white short-sleeved shirt took her upstairs to his office and grandly threw open the door. A breeze from the open windows riffled loose papers on the desk, forcing Andriama to slap them down before they scattered. He noticed Rebecca at the same moment, however, and seemed to forget about his papers, springing to his feet and coming over to welcome her, taking her hand in both of his, stroking it like a pet hamster. ‘At your service, madame,’ he beamed, exposing blackened stubs of teeth rotted almost down to the gums. ‘How may I help?’

‘I’m Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she told him. ‘I’m here about my father and sister.’

‘Ah. Yes. Of course.’ He instantly let go of her hand, assumed a more sober expression. ‘Such terrible news. Sit. Please sit.’ Like so many Malagasy, he was a cocktail of races: short and wiry like a Polynesian, dark-skinned as an East African, yet with the satin black hair of a Chinese. ‘Such a good man, your father,’ he sighed. ‘Such a good friend to Madagascar. And your sister, too. So young. So pretty. Such a terrible loss.’

‘Loss?’ Rebecca’s heart clenched.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But surely you appreciate the situation—’

‘Are you giving up already?’

‘Certainly not. We’re doing all we can.’

‘And that is?’

‘My officers have been to your father’s house and the local villages. They have spoken to many, many people, including two fishermen who saw your father’s boat outside the reefs.’ He pulled a face. ‘At least, that’s what they say, but you know the people up there, they’ll say anything to please. After that, nothing until evening when the South Africans found your father’s boat drifting and abandoned. I have copies of their statements, if you want to see?’

‘Please.’

He rummaged through his drawers, produced some poor-quality photocopies of several hand-written pages that she flicked through while he talked. ‘There were some traces of blood on the guard rail and on the deck,’ he said. ‘The university is testing it at this moment. Most likely your father’s or your sister’s, but unless we can check it somehow to make sure …’ He drifted meaningfully to a halt.

She squinted at him. ‘You want me to get you their blood-type information?’

‘Your father and sister run a clinic up at Eden, don’t they? I’m sure they’ll have records.’

‘I’ll have a look. In the meantime, perhaps you could continue telling me about your search. The helicopters. The boats.’

He smiled politely. ‘You must understand something, Miss Kirkpatrick. Madagascar is a poor country. Tulear is its poorest region. Even at the best of times, our resources are strained. This is far from the best of times. Besides, whatever has happened to your father and sister, it is almost certainly not a police matter.’

There was a knock on the door at that moment, and a middle-aged man with lustrous black hair poked in his head. His face lit up when he saw Rebecca. He was Mustafa Habib, he told her, advancing uninvited into the room, an excellent friend of her father’s. Rebecca wouldn’t remember him herself, but he’d known her as a child. She did remember him, as it happened; an import–export trader who’d procured obscure equipment for her father. When she told him so, his eyes gleamed with pleasure. He took a card from his wallet. ‘If there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.’ He coughed diffidently. ‘I know this is indelicate, but I must say it all the same. Unfortunate personal experience taught me how painful it can be to arrange … sensitive matters in foreign countries. If you should need any help at all, it would be a privilege. Your family has done so much for our country.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have transport? A driver?’

‘Yes.’

‘A place to stay? My own home is of course humble, but you would honour us with your—’

‘I’ll be staying at Pierre’s.’ There was little she could achieve in Eden tonight, and she was anxious to meet her nephew, make sure he was safe. ‘Then home tomorrow.’

‘Of course.’

She turned back to Andriama. ‘You were telling me how my father’s disappearance wasn’t of interest to you.’

Andriama sighed. ‘All I said was that it’s probably not a police matter. Our coast here is treacherous, all these tides and currents and reefs. When you were younger, you must have seen for yourself the occasional freak wave. They can come out of even the calmest seas and catch the most experienced fishermen by surprise. Why not your father and your sister?’

‘So you’re not even considering kidnap or robbery?’

‘Of course we consider such things. But your father was not wealthy enough to kidnap, and sensible kidnappers would surely have taken hostage either your father or your sister, so that the other could be free to put the ransom together. Anyway, wouldn’t we have had a demand by now? As for robbery, your father and sister were well known and loved along the coast. Everybody knew they’d share what they had for the asking. It would have been fady to rob them. You know fady? Forbidden.’

‘I know fady.’

‘Besides, what kind of thieves would let a valuable boat simply drift away? No. Robbery makes no sense. It was an accident. A tragic accident.’

‘You’ve given up,’ she said.

‘I’m being realistic.’

‘They’re not dead.’

Andriama assumed an expression of sadness. ‘I pray that you are right,’ he told her. ‘Truly, I do. But I fear the evidence is—’

Rebecca patted her heart. ‘They’re not dead,’ she told him. ‘And I’m going to find them.’

II

Boris popped the buckle of his new knife’s sheath as he followed Knox down the alley, gripped it firmly by its hilt. The feel of it brought back vividly his first time, nearly twenty years ago now, as a young farm-worker seeking general vengeance for the rape and murder of his mother, one of the many atrocities of Georgia’s brutal civil war, but the only one that had mattered to him. They’d been waiting in ambush beneath a thin line of trees for an approaching patrol. He remembered still lining his man up in his sights, the way he’d fallen in the snow, the inhuman sounds he’d made as he’d struggled against his fate, reaching out a beseeching arm for the comrades who’d already turned and fled. Bullets had been too precious to waste, so Boris had drawn his knife as he advanced upon his man. It had been so obvious that he was dying, however, that he’d just stood there watching with his companions until it was over; and, afterwards, he’d been struck most by his own detachment, his lack of feeling anything at all.

Some fence-posts had collapsed ahead, brought down by the weight of a makeshift fly-tip that had spilled out into the alley, stinking and buzzing with flies. Boris couldn’t have asked for anything better. Getting this kind of operation right depended on knowing exactly what you intended to do. He therefore rehearsed it in his mind like a high-jumper before starting his run-up: left hand over Knox’s mouth to keep him quiet, right hand sawing through his throat. Then heave him up and over the flytip, take some pictures with his camera-phone before covering him with his groundsheet, kicking rubbish over him. With luck, even if his disappearance provoked a search, it would be a day or more before he was found. Plenty of time to fetch Davit and make their escape.

He quickened his pace, turned the knife around in his hand, the better to carve through Knox’s throat. He was just two paces behind him when a pair of girls playing tag ran shrieking into the end of the alley ahead. They saw Knox and Boris, shrieked gleefully some more, turned and fled. Knox must have seen the flicker in their eyes; he glanced around and saw Boris so close behind that it made him start. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you were there.’

Just for a moment, Boris considered going for it anyway, but then he remembered that this man had bested Mikhail Nergadze in single combat—Mikhail Nergadze, the only person who’d ever truly put the fear of God into Boris. He hesitated just a blink, but it was enough, his opportunity was gone. He hid his knife against his wrist, offered an apologetic smile, then walked on by, out on to the beach, cursing his bad luck, wondering when next he’d have so good a chance to take his revenge and make himself rich.

III

Knox arrived back at the pirogue still brooding on the man in the black shirt. There’d been something familiar and unsettling about him. But then Lucia arrived, and the activity of departure pushed it from his mind. They all dragged the boat down to the sea’s edge, stowed their luggage and helped Lucia to her place. Then Knox, Alphonse and Thierry pushed the pirogue out through the gentle breakers and vaulted aboard.

Thierry took the stern, from where he could steer. Alphonse sat sideways in the bow, where he raised the mast and set the sail, before furling it back up. Knox and Lucia each sat on one of the thin central slats. There was so little wind that Thierry and Alphonse grabbed a paddle each, went to work. Knox found a third paddle for himself. It was chiselled from heavy wood, but he soon picked up the rhythm, their blades banging like heartbeats against the pirogue’s hull.

He glanced back at the shore. The man in the black shirt was walking along the beach, almost as though keeping pace with them. After Mikhail’s death, Knox had lived in constant fear that some lowlife would learn his identity and that he had a five million euro bounty on his head. But the years had passed without incident, and he’d come to think himself safe. He remembered suddenly the nearness of the man in the alley, the flicker of frustration upon his face, and his old fear returned with such force that he half-missed his next stroke, splashing seawater into Thierry’s midriff. He turned to apologise and sort himself out, and by the time he looked again towards the shore, the man in the black shirt had vanished.

TWELVE
I

The road north from Tulear was even worse than Rebecca remembered. It was just about acceptable for the first twenty kilometres or so, but then it disintegrated into a track of sand, rock and rutted mud that eventually petered out into nothing a little north of Eden. Even making allowances for its wretched state, however, Zanahary drove like a flustered nun, inching across the occasional hazards like they were unexploded ordnance. It grew too much for Rebecca to bear. ‘Let me drive,’ she said.

Zanahary shook his head. ‘Insurance,’ he said.

‘Then let’s at least take a break,’ she said. ‘I need to stretch my legs.’

He pulled over gladly, reaching for his cigarettes even as he threw open his door. She waited till he was out then slid across into his seat, locked the door from the inside, turned on the ignition and pulled away. There were tears in his eyes when she slowed enough for him to catch up and clamber in the passenger side. He stamped on invisible brakes as she sped away along the track, twisting in his seat and muffling shrieks. Perversely, his fear only made Rebecca all the more rash. She came too fast upon an archipelago of rocks, hit one hard with her front right, bounced clear into the air. She cursed out loud; that was an axle gone for sure. It was a nightmare breaking down on these roads; you could wait forever for another vehicle. But somehow they landed between two hummocks and then bounded on to safe, soft sand. It was a dreadful, reckless piece of driving; it braced her and made her careful. But on Zanahary it had the opposite effect. ‘You drive like my brother,’ he said, as though fear was now pointless. ‘He mad too.’

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