Hard Rain (26 page)

W
e must have both dozed off eventually despite the cold and hunger, because when I woke, the darkness had disappeared and the rest of the cistern had materialised. Masters and I were spooning on the damp earth.

Through the hole above, morning delivered a triangle of sunlight that hung high on the wall. Masters had been calling out in her sleep, dreaming. I lay still for another twenty minutes, all my joints locked up solid with the wet cold, thinking long and hard about Korean barbecue beef. Her dream having passed, I listened to her breathing and wondered how the fuck we were going to turn this one around.

Masters finally woke, stretched a little, and said, ‘Jesus, I feel like shit.’

‘Shit we’ve got plenty of. Lucky you didn’t ask for coffee.’

She groaned and lay still – in my arms.

‘What happened to Richard?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘You were dreaming. You kept repeating, “It’s over, Richard. Take a hike.”’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Seriously, you had a dream.’

‘I don’t remember it.’

‘Just before you woke up, you were struggling with something, and it was making you angry. You called out Richard’s name a couple of times. “You lying fucker”, something like that. I think “asshole” was in there somewhere, too. Sure sounded to me like you were talking to Richard. Who else could it have been?’ I noticed the dripping sound had all but stopped. ‘You can tell me. You know, Anna, dreams are a window into your heart.’

‘Jesus, Vin . . .’

‘Okay, then – into your soul. Somewhere, at any rate.’

‘It’s over.’

‘What’s over?’

‘Richard and I. Short and not so sweet.’

‘You want to tell me what happened?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Look, my intention was to ride off into the sunset when all this finished. It’s not like you’d have been expecting a wedding invitation. Anyway, as I think you might have guessed, not everything was happy in paradise. We had a fight. You were right – he didn’t appreciate me looking through his case notes, going through his computer files. Caught me in the act, basically. Accused me of espionage – spying on him for
you
on behalf of the plaintiffs. We argued about his position, about the effect the case was having on so many people. Like your friend Tyler, for instance.’

‘What happened to all the crap about attorneys, the system?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t changed my point of view, but there’s a difference between defence and running interference. And, yes, you were right about Richard when you said I didn’t know him. We had a fling in a beautiful city a few years back. That’s all it was. That’s where we should have left it.’

I had nothing to say – at least, nothing she’d appreciate hearing. I was somewhere between breaking into applause on the one hand, and being angry at her for putting me through the mill on the other. Her feelings weren’t my fault, but her engagement to Wadding was nonetheless a
kind of punishment directed squarely at me. And if she’d gone through with it, married the jerk, she’d have been stuck with him. I recalled the last time I’d seen Wadding, the confrontation we’d had when he was coming out of the elevator at the Charisma.
It’s the way she shudders when she comes
.

Masters squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t say anything, please, Vin. I’m annoyed with myself enough as it is . . . Well, I suppose we should get up.’

‘You got a pressing engagement someplace?’

Masters shifted her arm beneath her head, but otherwise didn’t move.

‘So why didn’t
we
go the distance?’ I asked. ‘The real reasons. And don’t give me any of that tyranny-of-distance bullshit.’

Masters turned to face me. ‘You want the real reason, Vin? It was too intense, our relationship. The way we met, the investigation at Ramstein, the shooting of the Vice-President, the car accident, and then the recovery.’

I was about to interrupt when she held up a hand to stop me.

‘Y’ know, I’ve had a little speech prepared for this moment – if it ever arrived. So don’t interrupt me. If you do, I’ll forget it.’ She got it set in her head before continuing. ‘I lost myself when I was with you. I wanted to know what you were doing when we weren’t together. And when we were together, I almost couldn’t bear it – the tearing apart afterwards. And then we’d be back on opposite sides of the planet again and all I’d be able to think about was you. I couldn’t function, even after we’d agreed to call it quits. My feelings for you were destructive and I needed badly to move on. I wanted
less
passion, Vin . . . and I wanted more control. Control over myself, mainly, but also over whoever I was with.’

I let that sink in. She was right about the passion – the depth of feeling. It consumed a lot of my time and energy too. And still did. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I’ll let you know after you’ve asked it,’ she replied.

‘Why Wadding?’

‘Honestly? I don’t know. He was Johnny-on-the-spot, I suppose. He was good-looking, wealthy, great career prospects . . . He was the kind
of guy I always thought I’d end up marrying. He fit the mould. My mom and dad were going to love him.’

‘What about you? Were you going to love him too?’

‘We’d had romance, I felt secure with him . . . I believed –
wanted
to believe – that love would develop further down the track.’

And then I kissed her. It was a small kiss at first, nothing passionate. But it was like a pilot light beneath the furnace because suddenly there was a
whomp
and the main burners lit up and our hands began to move. Her fingers unhooked the buttons on my fly. I did the same to hers. Her shirt came out. Her tongue. I ripped the crotch from her underwear getting them off. An ear. Her hair. Her tongue. A handful of ass – hers. I wanted to eat her, climb inside her. She pulled my hair, cupped my testicles. There was an explosion building with each hurried breath.

I heard a splash. And then another. Ignored it. A third splash. Masters screamed. With ecstasy, I thought – until I got an accidental knee in the nuts a couple of seconds later. She was pushing me away, pointing, glaring in horror at something moving around in the water.

‘Jesus, Anna, you really know how to –’ I saw the eyes first, two red coals the size of cigarette embers swimming a figure-eight in the gloom, getting oriented. Rats.

A black shape sat up on its scrawny hind legs in the shallow water and nibbled at something between its front claws. The animal sniffed at the air, ran around in a circle, then swam for the dead man’s bones. It climbed onto the dirt and rubble, took up a position on top of the human skull and crouched. It squealed next, a high-pitched sound like nails down a blackboard. Its buddies formed up around it, answering the call.

We glared at each other across the shallow lake: them and us. The fuckers appeared to be waiting for something. Probably for us to hurry up and die.

‘Ever eaten rat?’ I said out loud for their benefit as I stood up. ‘They say it tastes like rat.’

One of them squealed. Masters had pulled her clothing together and was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees like any moment she might start rocking.

I wondered what had brought the animals. Did they smell us or hear us? Or did they just happen to fall in, lemming-like, following the boss rat there sitting up on the skull?

I had woken with half an idea in my head – a way to get out. The granite in the walls was harder than the marble columns. I walked towards the rats, which scampered back into the water before I had the chance to use one of them as a football. I then picked up two of the broken granite blocks from the dead guy’s final resting place and took them over to the column. Using one as a hammer and the other as a chisel, I started chipping away below the high-water mark where the stone might be a little softer. The outer layer of marble, about a quarter of an inch thick, flaked off reasonably easily but, like an onion, there was another layer beneath, this one not so compliant. ‘Anna,’ I called. ‘Need a hand here.’

After a little consideration, Masters came over, wary, keeping a lookout for her own personal nightmare, but the rats were lying low, out of sight, biding their time.

Seven hours and six pulverised granite blocks later, what remained of the column where I’d been chipping away reminded me of an apple core. We just had to take out the centre and my theory held that the column should fall, bringing down enough of the unsupported roof and in such a way that we’d be able to climb out. Of course, the whole roof might also collapse and crush the juice out of every living thing below it – a thought that had begun to dawn on me at about hour five.

When Masters was back hugging the wall furthest from the column, I started taking out the last three inches of marble, hefting rocks at it from a couple of yards away. I missed the target more times than I hit it. The light faded, leaving Masters and me with three rats that kept us awake all night with their inconsiderate squeaking and squabbling. Fighting, perhaps, over who was going to take that first irresistible bite.

This was our second night in the cistern, and it went by a second at a time, all forty-three thousand two hundred of them. And now each one of those seconds was like a splinter under the fingernails. Masters screamed when one of the rats jumped over her feet into the water.
The scream was F-16-like. The rodents kept their distance after that, no doubt fearing permanent hearing damage.

The sun came out eventually, mercifully, and lit our tomb. I was up with the first rays, surveying the remains of the column. I chose five granite blocks I knew I could throw a couple of yards, lined them up and waited for the light to increase. Masters took up her position against the wall.

I threw the first block. Missed. Second block struck a glancing blow, below the sweet spot. Third block missed. Same with the fourth block, disappointing my inner quarterback. I threw the fifth block. It struck clean.

The top two-thirds of the column dropped away, struck the base with a
boom
, rolled, splintered, the pieces splashing into the water with such force that the vibration came up through the rock floor. I reached Masters in two jumps.

‘Shit . . .’ said Masters with a cough, clearing the dust from her lungs.

‘Yeah, shit,’ I repeated, looking up. There was a third option I hadn’t considered: that the column would come down without any apparent effect on the roof whatsoever.

I crouched against the wall as the light was sucked from the cistern like someone had flicked a switch. Heavy cloud. It was barely 09:00, a whole day before sunset. The fingers in my cast were throbbing, providing a hint. Snowflakes began drifting down through the hole.

Skinned, rat looked like rabbit, but it tasted gamy. As I thought, like rat. After a couple of goes at it, Masters managed to hold the meat down with minimal gagging, raw hunger having finally overcome her revulsion. She gnawed on a thigh, stripping the tiny bone clean, overcoming her fear by eating it.

The two remaining survivors were out there, lying low, hugging the shadows, doing the rat version of drawing lots. It was better to keep the food supply fresh by letting it run around on the hoof – free range.

I’d made a knife out of one of the dead guy’s ulnas, splintering it and
then sharpening one of the larger pieces on a block of granite. The bone held an edge keen enough to cut and gut. So, sharp enough. To skin the rat, I’d made an incision just above its shoulders, and secured the carcass by tying a shoelace around its neck and looping the ends around the back of a heavy granite block; I then dug my thumbs under its skin and simply pulled it off like a tight-fitting sock.

Day five. Lucky we had water. With water, we could survive a long time down here on a diet that also included cockroach, frog’s legs and tree root. In fact, the beard-like tendrils that also collected and focused the water into our footwear were tender and filling. With a little imagination you could think of it as salad. Okay, a lot of imagination.

Despite this smorgasbord, I’d lost half-a-dozen pounds at least. Masters was looking like a thirty-day contestant on
Survivor
, minus the plastic boobs. With the dank cold, pneumonia would eventually get us. It was just a matter of time.

So staying warm was the biggest challenge. I put it to Masters that we should have sex, purely for survival reasons, of course. It helped pass the time, and it was a hell of a lot more fun than running on the spot. Her counter was that as a survival technique, sex wasn’t so smart, speculating that it burned up too much fuel. Spooning was as far as she was prepared to take it.

What helped most was reviewing the current case, piece by piece, fact by fact, recalling crime scenes, forensic reports, interviews. Yafa and the guy with the toothpick were the killers captured on the surveillance TV footage in the Hilton parking lot – same build, same team, same loopy-nutcase thing going on. They probably did Portman too, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d high-fived each other while they cut away. We killed their Incirlik team – Ben and Jonah – as the interpreter guy had told us. That slip of the tongue confirmed the hit-squad theory. The fact that they were preoccupied with Fedai convinced us that we were right about the other killings being diversions to throw us off the track. In Yafa’s case, maybe they were also recreation.

So, we were solid on the ‘who’. The ‘why’ was the mystery. It had something to do with radioactive water at the south-eastern Iraqi town of Kumayt. But what it had to do with Emmet Portman was the point at which we started scratching our heads.

Masters dropped her lunch scraps in the water – titbits for tomorrow’s dinner to munch on. Something wet had found its way inside my cast, next to my skin. I took the sharpened bone and reached down inside the cast to have a good scratch, shift the spiders around some. And suddenly I saw it, like a set of instructions had just been pinned on the noticeboard inside my head:
the way out
. ‘Jesus, Anna . . . give me a hand here.’

‘To do what?’

My plan contained a slight hitch, namely, blinding pain. ‘You’re going to have to do something unpleasant if you want to get out of here.’