echoed deafeningly around the metal cell; everyone shrank from the ricochet.
Except Adam. He was staring in terror at the fish. It had fallen from Marco’s hand on to his leg. And now it lay there, wriggling, on his bared thigh. Right beside the open wound. It was sucking at his skin, urgently seeking the way in, trying to find the entrance into his body, where it could feed, and live, and grow.
Men were clattering down the ladder, he could hear them. They were in the room, snapping the shackles on the others; but Adam just stared, transfixed, at the fish: it had found the edge of the wound, and now it slipped inside. It was burrowing into his skin. He could see the shape of it. Adam screamed.
A knife flashed down, into the wound, and speared the fish, scooping it out of his thigh with a deft and practised movement. Like a gourmet skewering some buttery crabmeat. The fish wriggled at the end of the knife, then the fish was crushed under a military boot.
Adam looked up, faint with shock. He had been saved. But who were these men? The shackles on his wrists were cut by huge pliers; some wadding was applied to the wound in his leg, and it was wordlessly and hastily bandaged. He stood, unsteadily, then ran for the stairs and ran up and out, following Nina and Jessica on to the deck of the barge.
On the metal deck, in the hot sun, five more of these strange men gazed back at them. Implacable. Quite unsmiling. And very disciplined. It was the police. It had worked: Jessica’s phone call had worked. Adam turned in elation to Jessica but he saw she was staring in horror at something. The men. And their hands, clutching their guns.
All the men had dark black T-shirts and toned muscles and pressed jeans, like off-duty soldiers or elite police.
And they all had skulls tattooed on their hands.
Catrina.
50
Riverplane, Ucayali, Peru
They were given just five minutes to pack a few items from their rucksacks, then they were loaded, at gunpoint, on to a speedboat. The Catrina cartelistas remained silent. The boat curved the river for several minutes, until it reached a broader stretch.
Adam stared. On the water ahead was a riverplane. Dirty and white and impressively large. They were forced on board the plane and most of the cartelistas followed, wordless. Proficient. Tattooed. Muscled.
The propellers of the plane turned, shivering the wavelets beneath, then they sped across the grey-brown waters and ascended over the infinity of green forest. Strapped in his seat, Adam could just see the first rise of the blue Andes, so distant they looked like clouds. His mind drifted in despair. A little boat unanchored, heading for the terrible sea.
Is that where the true ulluchu was, then? The Andes? Is that where Archibald McLintock ended up, in some little mountain village, with shepherds in scarlet ponchos and trousers?
Or maybe it was in the high puna, the arid, bitter moorlands of Peru. He’d read about these windswept desolations, where the cold and mist and blowing rain was constant, where espeletia daisies grew tall and sad with bright yellow flowers. Like the ulluchu?
They were never going to find out. Who had betrayed them to Catrina? Nina? No, of course not. Jessica…? She was ill, she was sad, she was ambitious, but she was not a traitor. Boris? Possibly. He wanted to sell ulluchu on, if they found it; and maybe word had reached Catrina or the Zetas or both. Then of course, there was the captain, the drunken captain, was someone paying him? If so he’d paid the final price in return, along with his deckhands.
But then again, maybe no one had betrayed them: perhaps Catrina had simply followed the logic and traced them. Quite possibly Catrina had been watching the whole show, waiting for their moment.
But why had they been kidnapped? Did Catrina hope they had information? Would they try to torture it out of them? But they had no information to give, they had nothing to offer, even if they were allowed to bargain. Which wouldn’t happen. Catrina were known to be even crueller than the Zetas.
Nina reached out and held his hand. He squeezed it tight. The air was turbulent as they headed for the mountains. Maybe they would crash. Maybe they wouldn’t. Did it matter? He squeezed her hand again and said nothing. No words were needed.
A man came down the aisle of the buffeted plane, armed and blank-faced. He opened up his palm, revealing a dozen green capsules.
Adam recognized the pills from his days in Sydney, with Alicia. These were Roofies. Rohypnol; the date-rape drug. Two of these would knock out a grown man for ten hours.
The Catrina man grunted. ‘Four. Each.’
They obeyed — with a certain bleak eagerness. Oblivion seemed welcome, certainly preferable to thinking about what lay ahead, because nothing lay ahead but more suffering and pain. Adam swallowed his pills with water. Then he watched as Jessica took her pills, too, across the aisle.
She turned and looked him and shook her head, as if to say, It is Over. And of course it was. Everything was over.
Jessica swallowed. Adam turned. She looked at him, and smiled a strange smile; and then she swallowed. Gute nacht, meine kindern.
He gazed instead at Nina. She seemed almost happy as she put her head back. Happy?
Confusion surged through him, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Rohypnol hit him like a hammer thirty-seven minutes later.
When he woke they were on a different plane. A jet. Flying in the darkness. He groped to remember a vague dream about airports, hoods, or blindfolds, half-dream/half-reality. Everyone else was asleep on the plane, even some of the Catrina men. Nina and Jessica were sitting together. Strapped tightly in, and handcuffed.
Adam looked down: a handcuff jangled on his wrist. He motioned to the man guarding them. Jerking his head to the back of the plane. ‘Toilet?’
The man nodded. He unlocked the shackle and Adam stepped unsteadily down the aisle. He stared in the mirror of the tiny washroom as he zipped up. His face was dirty with river mud, and a patch of red rust. Red rust? Of course, from where he had pressed his cheek to the rusting steel of the barge, to listen to the Zetas.
A vague groping of an idea entered his head. Los Zetas. The bitter rivals.
Back in his seat he was given a sandwich and some water. He ate and drank, trying not to think. Then he was reshackled and the cartelista opened his palm. ‘Four. Each.’
Soon, the blackness of Rohypnol enveloped him again.
The second time he woke he was being unloaded from a vehicle. He was hooded; but he could hear sounds. The distinct sounds of a very busy city, Hispanic music, people, but echoey, and distanced, as if they were down a side street.
This was his chance. He yelled, desperately, into the blackness of his hood. ‘Zetas! This is Catrina! Help us! Catrina have got us, police, anyone, policia! ’
The thud of a rifle butt or a pistol butt on the side of his head felt like a hammer blow. He slumped to his knees. But he yelled again, more weakly. ‘Catrina, the Catrina cartel have got us! Policia! Los Zet-’
Someone lifted the hood for a moment and shoved something in his mouth, a rubber ball maybe; he almost choked. Another vicious blow to his head sent him semi-conscious. They were being moved into the back of another vehicle, and forced to lie down. Adam gagged on the rubber ball. Would his desperate plan work? He had little hope, but it was their only hope. The two gangs were fighting over the drug, neither of them had enough of it, they were still trying to find the source. They were at war. And that war was the only leverage he and Nina and Jessica had.
Yet it seemed a ludicrous hope as he lay here on the floor of a van, bound and gagged and pathetic. Adam could sense Nina and Jessica, hear their desperate panting.
For a few kilometres, the traffic noise was intense. This was a big big city. Lima? Rio? Bogota? Mexico City? Adam’s eyes burned to see but all he could see was blackness. Then the van stopped. The hood was whipped
