Deadfall: Agent 21 (21 page)

There was a high stone wall surrounding the hotel, which meant you could only see the beach from the rooms on the second floor. It wasn’t the kind of beach, though, where you’d want to spend much time. The sand was hard and muddy and the water had some kind of green scum floating on the surface. On her first day here, Molly had seen some fishermen pull an enormous, wriggling eel out of the water. So she and her mum and dad had been happy to stay by the hotel pool, and Molly had got to know the faces – and in some cases the names – of all the hotel staff.

Or so she thought.

Because now, as she trod water in the deep end, she saw someone in the same green jacket that all the staff wore. She knew she hadn’t seen him before, because she would have remembered the lines on his face. There was a thin, pale scar on each cheek,
leading from the edge of his lips up to each ear.

He was young. Fifteen, maybe, which would make him only about three years older than Molly herself. And he wore a deeply unpleasant scowl as he stood with his back up against the exterior wall. He was half hidden by a palm in a large pot, but Molly saw that he was carrying a plastic bag. As he looked around the pool area, Molly knew, with a flash of insight, that he was looking for somewhere to hide it.

Suddenly, his head turned. He was looking directly at Molly, and his eyes seemed to pierce her. Molly instantly dropped below the surface of the water. The screams of excited children became muffled. Through her half-closed eyes, the world was a blur. She stayed there until her lungs burned. When she broke the surface of the water again, she quickly wiped her eyes and looked back to where the boy had been standing.

He was gone.

She looked around, her sharp eyes scanning the pool area. He was nowhere to be seen.

Nor was the package he’d been carrying.

Molly climbed out of the pool and trotted over to the beds where her mum and dad were asleep in the sun. She wrapped herself in a towel and slipped on her crocs. She was about to go and have a look
around for this strange boy and his strange package, when her mum opened her eyes.

‘Put some more sunscreen on, love, if you’ve finished in the pool.’

Molly blinked. Sunscreen. Right. She looked around for the bottle. ‘I think it’s up in the room,’ she said.

Her mum sat up and fumbled in the bag for her key card, which she handed over to Molly. ‘Go and get it then,’ she instructed.

Molly knew it was no good arguing. Her mum was
obsessed
with sunscreen. She took the card and headed away from the pool area, into the hotel and towards the lifts.

Their room was on the third floor. She pressed the ‘up’ button and waited for the clunky old lift to arrive.

Its doors hissed open and Molly’s heart stopped. It was not the same boy from the roof who stood in the lift, looking out. But he had the same markings on his face, and he too carried a bulky plastic bag.

He stared out of the lift. Molly felt her face going red.

‘I, er . . . sorry, I’ll wait for the next one . . .’

But the doors were already closing. The boy disappeared and the lift went up.

When it returned two minutes later, it was empty.
Molly stepped inside and pressed the button marked ‘3’. The lift juddered up. A minute later she was stepping into the room she shared with her mum and dad.

It had a sea view. Molly had enjoyed watching the sun set over the horizon as the locals congregated on the beach to fish and chat. Now, as she looked around for her sunscreen, she noticed something else. A group of three boys, standing together and pointing at the hotel.

Dad’s bird-watching binoculars were on a little table by the window. Molly grabbed them and put them to her eyes. Everything was blurry, so she adjusted the little knob between the lenses and the boys’ faces came into sharp focus.

She couldn’t help a little gasp from escaping her throat. These boys were not wearing the green uniform of the hotel. They were wearing bandannas, sleeveless jackets and army trousers. But they all had the same markings on their cheeks: the thin pale scars. They were discussing something to do with the hotel – there was no doubt about it. Molly lowered the binoculars and sat down on the edge of her bed. She told herself that she was being silly. Her mum always said she was a worrier, and she knew it was true. After all, what had she really seen? Nothing.

That was what there was to worry about: nothing.

She took a deep breath, and started to rub sunscreen into her arms. She would forget about the boys with the scarred faces, she decided, and concentrate on important things. Like sunbathing, and enjoying the last day of her holiday.

The residence of the Gambian president was larger than every other house in Banjul, and in much the nicest area. Unlike the rest of the small but sprawling town, the buildings in this quarter were not dirty, ramshackle concrete blocks with tin roofs and poor sanitation. They sat in broad, spacious streets lined with palm trees. Almost all the houses had a Mercedes parked outside. Admittedly, most of these were at least ten years old, but they were still a lot finer than most of the cars in the country, which were held together by bits of string and imaginative welding.

There were more policemen here too. Some strutted up and down the street, impressed with their own uniforms and with pistols swinging by their hips. Others sheltered from the sun in the shade of the palm trees, smoking cigarettes. Outside the president’s residence itself there were three soldiers. Everybody knew that meant the president was at home. When he left, two of the soldiers would go with him, leaving only one to guard the tall iron gate.

It was an important job, guarding the president. A job only given to the most trusted members of the small army of The Gambia. More than ten years ago, the president had seized power in a coup. Nobody had died. It had been easy, but the president knew that if
he
could do it, somebody else could do it to
him
. So the soldiers were even more heavily armed than the policemen. They carried MP5 sub-machine guns and wore sturdy body armour.

The presidential guard carried their weapons like trophies. Nobody dared come near them. They were untouchable, and a little arrogant. So they barely even saw the two boys who walked, shoulder to shoulder, past the presidential residence. They certainly didn’t notice the searching way both boys stared in their direction, noting how many of them there were, and where they were standing.

Nor did they notice the thin scars on each boy’s face.

One of the policemen
did
notice them, however. Unlike some of his colleagues, he was not resting under a tree or trying to look cool. He was a conscientious officer, with a family to care for. Moreover, he saw the markings on these boys’ faces. He had heard the rumours – that a few of the West Side Boys from Sierra Leone had formed their own
splinter group. That there had been sightings of these boys all around Banjul over the past week.

That there had been unexplained deaths whenever they’d cropped up.

Which was why he was following them now, past the presidential residence that they seemed so interested in.

Past the grand houses and the Mercedes cars.

Past the other policemen who wouldn’t have stopped these two boys even if they
had
been suspicious.

‘Boys?’ he said. They had reached the end of the street and were on the point of turning left into the broad, busy main road. Cars thundered past: white bush taxis, pick-up trucks with smoke billowing out of their exhaust pipes. ‘
Boys?
’

The two boys stopped and slowly turned to look at him. He had a better view of their faces now: of their thin white scars, and spiteful expressions.

‘What are you doing in this part of town, boys? Let’s see some identification, hey?’

They boys didn’t move. They just stared at him, their cold faces unpleasantly amused.

‘Come on, you heard me. Some ID.’

‘Sure, boss,’ said one of the boys. He wore a red and white bandana that matched his bloodshot eyes. His reached inside his baggy khaki top.

The policeman saw too late that the ID he was fetching was of the gun-metal grey kind, with a barrel and a trigger. He instantly felt for his own gun, but his fingers hadn’t even reached it when he heard the shots.

The first felt like a heavy blow in his stomach. It knocked him backwards about a metre. He looked down in shock, to see blood gushing through his pale grey shirt. Then he looked up at the boy who had just shot him.

The boy fired again. The second bullet entered the policeman’s body about five centimetres above the first and he collapsed to the ground unable to breathe. In a corner of his mind, he wondered if anybody would come to help. But the sound of the gunshots was drowned out by the heavy traffic and he knew nobody was coming.

He tried to speak. To tell the boys that he had a little daughter at home, who needed her dad. But he had no breath. Instead, he reached out his right arm, begging the boys to show him some mercy.

But they weren’t in the mercy game. The boy with the gun bent down. The policeman’s eyes were growing dim, but he could see the beads of sweat on his killer’s nose.

‘Congratulations,’ the boy rasped. ‘You’re the first one to die here today.’ He had a menacing glint in
his eyes, and seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘But don’t worry,’ the boy continued. ‘You won’t be the last.’

He fired a third shot, and the policeman’s world went black.

The communications tower on the edge of Banjul airport was a tall, concrete structure. It was 750 metres from the large white terminal building where, in the summer months, tourists crowded on and off international flights.

The tower had a large, rotating radar dish on the top. At ground level was a single entrance. A flight of steps led to the control room itself. This was circular, with curved windows all around giving a 360-degree view over the airport and the surrounding area. During the daytime it was guarded by a middle-aged Gambian man called Robert who’d had this job for ten years. He liked it. He could sit in the sunshine all day and watch the planes landing and taking off in the distance. One day, he even hoped to get on a plane himself, but he needed to save up more money first.

Nobody ever approached the communications tower except the people who worked there, and Robert knew them all by name. There were air-traffic-control personnel, and guys from the mobile
phone company. There was a government man who never told Robert his business but was friendly enough. They all had passes to enter the tower, but Robert never asked to see them. That would be ridiculous, after all these years.

He recognized their cars too: beaten-up old saloons, mostly, which they parked up within the high wire perimeter fence that surrounded the communications tower. Robert was supposed to keep the perimeter gate locked, but he almost never did. Why bother? Nobody strange ever came to the tower, and it was a hundred metres from the gate to the tower itself. A long way to walk in the sun.

Today, though, a little voice in his mind told him that perhaps he
should
have locked the gate. Because as he sat on his rickety stool at the foot of the tower, he saw three vehicles entering the perimeter, shimmering in the heat haze. He didn’t recognize them – they were not the run-down old cars that Robert was used to seeing, but were big, shiny four-by-fours. Range Rovers maybe. They drove slowly in convoy and something about them made him feel uneasy.

Robert squinted in the sunlight as they approached. He didn’t move. When the convoy stopped, about thirty metres from his position, he stayed sitting down. In all his ten years guarding the tower,
he’d never had to draw the gun he carried by his side and he didn’t intend to now. He was a peaceful man.

The side doors of the Range Rovers opened in unison. Four people emerged from the first vehicle. They were young – not much older than fifteen – and Robert’s eyes were immediately drawn to their faces. Each youngster had a thin scar stretching from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Like a hideous, fixed grin. They wore a strange combination of clothes. Bandannas, army camouflage trousers, dirty T-shirts and sleeveless jackets that showed their lean, muscly arms.

And guns. They each had an assault rifle strapped across their chest. It looked to Robert like they knew how to use them.

Four more boys climbed out of the Range Rover at the back of the convoy. They also had scarred faces and weapons.

Only then did two figures emerge from the middle vehicle.

These two looked different. They were also young, but they weren’t African. One was tall and thin, with a pronounced Adam’s apple and a cold, cruel look in his eyes. Robert thought that perhaps he looked South American. The other had pasty white skin and thick glasses. His eyes darted in every
direction, and he seemed terrified. It was the sight of that scared kid that persuaded Robert to stand up.

‘Hey!’ he shouted out, choosing English as his language because this was such a strange collection of people. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Sit down, Grandad,’ one of the scar-faced boys shouted back. A few others laughed. ‘Maybe we let you live, hey?’

More laughter. Something snapped inside Robert. Sure, he was a peaceful man – some might even say lazy – but he had his pride. Fumbling, he felt for the old pistol by his side.

If you’re going to draw a gun on an armed man, you need to do it quickly. If you’re going to draw a gun on
eight
armed men, you’d better be like lightning.

Robert was neither.

His fingertips had barely touched the handle of his gun when there was a cluster of clicks as eight safety catches were released. Robert looked up to see the boys aiming their weapons directly at him.

A pause. In the distance, the roar of an aircraft taking off filled the air.

And then the tall South American boy from the second car spoke.

‘Kill him,’ he said.

There was no hesitation. Eight guns fired a single
round each. They all found their mark. Robert only heard the sound of the one that killed him.

Malcolm was indeed weak with terror. As he watched the man at the foot of the communications tower fall, bloodied, to the ground, he felt his own knees buckle beneath him. Cruz caught him before he collapsed, but it wasn’t out of kindness. He yanked Malcolm back up to his feet again, then barked at the East Side Boys. ‘Clear the tower,’ he said.