“Could you hear what they were saying?”
“Not really. I thought they were tourists having an argument. I watched them for a while. Then they got in the van and drove off.”
“Which direction did they go?” says Detective Muhtar.
The man points to the road. “East, toward the township.”
“What time was this?” says Detective Muhtar.
“Between five fifteen and five thirty a.m.”
Julia looks at her watch and feels disappointment wash over her. It is now after two in the afternoon.
“They’ll be long gone,” she says.
“But at least we know she has a phone,” says Leo. “She may try and contact us again.”
“Show them, Jayar,” says Lucinda.
Jayar wipes his hands on a rag and heads for a cabinet. He takes a key from his pocket, unlocks the first drawer, and opens it. When he turns around, there’s a cell phone in his hand.
“They left this behind.”
73
Daniel lifts his eyes and stares at the hospital entrance. He’s been here for over an hour, watching. It’s more of a clinic than hospital, by western standards at least. But he’s satisfied it will serve his purpose. He can’t believe he’d been so stupid as to leave the map behind. What a silly, amateur mistake. There’s a chance the authorities don’t have it, that he has paid Ela enough to buy her silence, but that is unlikely.
No, by now the authorities would most probably have made the connection between him and Ela, and he doesn’t doubt for one second that she’d throw him under the bus to save herself. Consequently, he has to assume that his entire route is now in possession of the police, forcing him to change his plans.
His current thinking is that since Laos is now out of the question, they will go to India instead. There are plenty of places to disappear there. While he has no contacts in India, he is clever and resourceful and has no doubt he can find Toni and him a suitable place in which to live and raise children. So instead of heading for Iran, they will go through Iraq and Saudi Arabia, then cross the water into India.
But first he needs to get inside that damn hospital. He continues to watch the entrance waiting for the right time. He’s desperate to get on with it but can’t risk getting caught. Patience, he tells himself, the opportune moment will arise.
He’s here because of mistake number two. He had let Toni escape. Even now, he can’t believe how it had happened. Yesterday, the map’s loss had thrown him off so badly he had driven well into the night, becoming dreadfully fatigued and nearly causing a head-on collision with a semi-trailer. Consequently, he’d been forced to pull to the side of the road to rest. He’d intended only to nap lightly for an hour or so, then get back on the road so they would make it to the border, but he fell into a deep sleep instead. So deep, in fact, that he never even heard the sound of the back door of the van opening.
When he finally awoke and saw it open, he thought he’d been robbed. Then the dreadful realization hit—Toni was gone. She’d outsmarted him. She had kept so quiet that he’d missed her shot by an hour and she had seized the opportunity to flee.
He knew she could not have gotten far with her injury, and as it turned out, it took him less than thirty minutes to find her. It was close to dawn and easy enough to see her footprints in the sandy ground, so he followed the rambling trail through the bushes and came to a clearing bordering the area where tourists did hot air ballooning. In the distance, small clusters of people were being helped into baskets by guides. Burners glowed orange and balloons were swelling. Dozens and dozens of them. Quite beautiful, in fact. But there was no time to linger. He had to hurry. Soon all those balloons would fill the sky and many eyes would be looking down upon him.
He turned left and saw the farmhouse. Although he couldn’t explain it, he felt certain Toni was in there. Call it what you will, gut instinct, divine guidance, whatever it was, he headed straight for it and found her huddled the barn. She had looked like a terrified child when he reached out to her.
“Don’t be afraid,” he had said.
“No, no,” she’d said, batting his hand away.
It was pitiful, really. She was still so ill and vulnerable. Even so, she’d surprised him when he tried to pull her out and she bolted from his grasp. Rather than go after her, he stood watching, his heart aching at the sight of her desperate but futile attempts at running away. She only managed a few yards before her legs began to wobble and she collapsed on the ground.
As she lay there, he had looked around in the darkness and said a prayer of thanks for they were alone, in the middle of nowhere, and no one had seen a thing. By the time he marshaled her into the van, she had begun moaning in pain because her shot was well overdue.
“There, there. We’ll soon have you right again, my love.”
But when Daniel went to retrieve his medical kit from the driver’s side pocket, it was gone. Then he spied something just outside the passenger window—his kit agape, contents spilled out everywhere. The pouch where he kept the medication was rolled open and all the vials were smashed and needles bent. When he realized what she’d done, a cold shot of fury hit him and he had shaken her.
“You stupid girl!” he had shouted. “You stupid, stupid girl! That was for you! To take the pain away! Why would you do that?”
So he did the only thing he could—bound her hands and feet and gagged her. She had started crying, but he was
