recruited you,” he muttered. “Alan Blunt doesn’t miss a trick. And then, when you wound up in Australia! But I still wish you hadn’t come on this mission, Alex. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“A bit late now, Ash.”
The lights in the cabin came back on. The stewardesses began to move up the aisle. At the same time, Alex felt his stomach lurch as they began to come down.
They had arrived in Jakarta, the next step on their way.
The end of the pipeline was in sight.
13
U N W I N T O Y S
SO M E T I M E S A L E X W O N D E R E D I F all the airports in the world hadn’t been designed by the same architect: someone with a love of shops and corridors, plate-glass windows and potted plants. Here he was at Soekarno-Hatta, the international airport of Jakarta, but it might just as well have been Perth or Bangkok. The floors might be more polished and the ceilings higher. And every other shop seemed to be selling rattan furniture or the colorful printed cloth known as batik. But otherwise he could have been right back where he started.
They came through passport control quickly. The official in his glass-fronted booth barely glanced at the forged documents before stamping them, and without a word being spoken, they were in. Nor did they have to wait at baggage claim. They had just one suitcase between them, and Ash had carried it on and off the plane.
Alex was tired. It was as if the events of the last five days in Bangkok had finally caught up with him, and all he wanted to do was sleep—although somehow he doubted he would spend what was left of the night in a comfortable bed. Most of all, he wanted time on his own to reflect over what Ash had told him. He had learned more about his past in the last hour than he had in his en-U n w i n T o y s
tire life, but there were still questions he wanted to ask.
Had his father blamed Ash for the mistakes that had been made in Mdina? Why had his parents decided to go to France, and why had Ash been with them at the airport?
What had he seen that he was so unwilling to talk about?
They passed into the arrivals area, and once again they were surrounded by a crowd of touts and taxi drivers.
This time there were two men waiting for them, both Indonesian, slim and slightly effeminate in jeans and short-sleeved shirts. One of them was holding a placard that read: Karim Hassan. Alex stared at it for a few seconds before the name registered, and he was annoyed with himself. He had completely forgotten that it was the name under which Ash was traveling. Ash was Karim. He was Abdul. It didn’t matter how tired he was. A mistake like that could get them both killed.
Ash went over to them and introduced himself using a mixture of Dari and sign language. The two men didn’t even try to be friendly. They simply turned and walked away, expecting Ash and Alex to follow.
It was ten o’clock, and outside, away from the artificial climate of the air-conditioning, the heat was thick and unwelcoming. Nobody spoke as they crossed the main concourse to the curbside where a dirty white van was parked with a third man in the driving seat. The van had sliding doors and, at the back, no windows. Alex glanced nervously at Ash. He felt as if he was about to be swallowed up, and he remembered the last time he had
S N A K E H E A D
gotten into a car with members of the snakehead. But Ash didn’t look worried. Alex followed him in.
The door slammed shut. The two men got in front with the driver, and they moved off. Alex and Ash sat on a metal bench that had been welded to the floor. Their only view was out the front window, and that was so filthy, Alex wondered how even the driver could see where they were going. The van was at least ten years old and had no suspension at all. Alex felt every bump, every pothole. And there were plenty of both.
The airport was about twelve miles from the city, connected by a highway that was clogged with traffic even at this time of the night. Squinting over the driver’s shoulder, Alex barely saw anything until, at last, Jakarta came into sight. It reminded him at first of Bangkok, but as they drew closer, he saw that it was uglier and somehow less sure of itself, still struggling to escape from the sprawling shantytown it had once been.
The traffic was horrible. They were carried into Jakarta on a concrete overpass, and suddenly there were cars and motorcycles above them and below them as well as on both sides. Skyscrapers—bulky rather than beautiful— rose up ahead, a thousand lightbulbs burning uselessly in offices that must surely be empty, coloring the night sky yellow and gray. There were brightly colored food stalls—
the dirt and the heat as the storm clouds closed in overhead.
They turned off the overpass and seemed to leave the main sprawl of the city as quickly as they had entered it.
Suddenly the van was rumbling over a dirt track, splashing through puddles, and weaving around loose bricks and rubble. There were no streetlamps, no signs, no illumination from a moon that had been blocked out by cloud. Alex saw only what the headlights showed him.
This was some sort of suburb, a slum area with narrow streets, houses with tin roofs and corrugated iron patches, walls held up by wooden scaffolding. Strange, spiky shrubs and stunted palm trees grew out of the side of the road. There was no pavement. Somewhere a dog barked.
But nowhere was there any sign of life.
They came to a gate that seemed to have been bolted together from pieces of driftwood. Two words—in Indonesian letters—had been scrawled across it in red paint. As they approached, the driver pressed a remote control in the van and the gate opened, allowing them into a large, square compound with warehouses and offices, lit by a couple of arc lamps and fenced in on all sides. The van stopped. They had arrived.
