I Googled for DRC consulates or embassies, to try to find out if I could get a visa before I left. Some of the websites wouldn’t open, and those that did had none of the information I needed.

  I binned it.

  It wasn’t as if I had to get to Kinshasa before the convoy headed out. She was going into the lion’s den, but at least I knew where the lion’s den was.

  I looked up Ituri province on the border with Rwanda and tried to find this fucking village, Nuka. I might not be able to get there at the speed of light, but I knew a man who could help me. And if he didn’t, he’d wish he hadn’t been born.

  It was scarcely first light when I wandered down to the basement. The chef wasn’t up yet, but Giuseppe was. In fact, he looked like I wasn’t the only one to have sat up all night.

  ‘Mr Stefan is leaving for China later today. He’s told me to offer you a car and driver to take you to the railway station or the airport as soon as convenient – but in any event by lunchtime.’ He couldn’t quite meet my eye. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Nick.’

  ‘No problem, Giuseppe. I knew the fun couldn’t last.’

  He followed me out to the moped with a small package in his hand. ‘For your journey,’ he said. His breath smelled of whisky.

  I rode to the airport with my PVC holdall on my lap. Abandoning the moped outside the terminal was immature, but it gave me some kind of satisfaction. It was bound to be Stefan’s. He owned everything.

  Then, as I checked in, with not so much as a second pair of shoes to my name, let alone a pair of wheels, I had a thought. Everything I owned was in my holdall: a bit of washing and shaving kit, a sleeping bag I’d nicked from Silky’s room, two spare T-shirts and lots of underwear.

  I didn’t have a home, not even a camper van or a tent. I had nothing in the world except a cheap ring and a beautiful German girl, and maybe I didn’t even have her any more.

  Well, that wasn’t completely true. I had the cheese and Branston sarnie Giuseppe had given me. And the small bottle of water he’d emptied and refilled with what looked suspiciously like thirty-year-old malt.

  6

  Friday, 9 June 2006

  The seatbelt light flickered on and the crew collected our empty coffee cups. The pilot came on the intercom and thanked us for flying Darwin Air from Lugano, and reminded us that the time in London was nine fifteen a.m. Not that anyone was listening. They were all too busy powering down their laptops and putting their shoes back on. I was the only one aboard not using one, and the only one wearing jeans and a leather bomber jacket.

  The last time I’d flown in a prop-driven aircraft, it had been taking me to war. This smart new Saab was a world away from a cramped, noisy Hercules, but I was feeling every bit as uneasy.

  Last night’s Google had come up with some scary reading. There were about 17,000 UN troops in DRC – the world’s biggest peacekeeping mission – but, even so, they were stretched. Eight Guatemalan soldiers had just been killed in a clash with the Lord’s Resistance Army. That didn’t worry me too much, but what did was reading on and discovering why the UN were so crap at their job in the eastern part of the country. It wasn’t only the rebels kicking their arse, it was the terrain. Swamps, savannah, lava plains, all covered with impervious rainforest and high mountain peaks. The rebels had mastered it better than the peacekeepers. That didn’t worry me. It was the thought of trying to navigate over that terrain and get there before anything happened to her.

  We descended through cloud. The outskirts of London were worn out and grey, but then we did our approach over the sci-fi film set they called Docklands. There were so many cranes, they looked like wheat in a field.

  I didn’t want to power up my mobile again. That blank screen was starting to get to me.

  7

  I drove west. I wanted to cross London, get on to the M40 to Oxford, then off towards Hereford. There had been no call from Silky, and it had taken a lot longer than I’d wanted to get hold of the little Corsa 1200. The problem was, my Virginia driver’s licence carried my old address in Crystal City, just outside Washington DC, and my credit card had the Swiss address. I’d done the switch when Silky and I had moved from Australia so there was somewhere to send my bills. I’d stood my ground while the computer stood its own: I told the woman behind the counter that it wasn’t going to process my details because they didn’t fit the software. At last she accepted my ‘I’ve just moved over there to work’ excuse. The final receipt would be sent to Lugano.

  I knew I should have taken the M25 orbital, but it felt more immediate to cut directly through the city. I just wanted to keep moving in the right direction.

  Big mistake, as I realized within twenty minutes when I crept from traffic light to traffic light in Silvertown. Then I hit a faster stretch of road and got flashed by three consecutive cameras that had sprung up like weeds since the last time I was here.

  I couldn’t help but think about the row we’d had yesterday. Maybe it was me who’d sparked this whole thing off . . .

  I’d just got away from another lot of traffic lights and was stuck between two trucks when the mobile rang.

  At last.

  I picked it up but didn’t see the twelve digits I was hoping for. It was the Swiss prefix instead.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘Étienne . . .’

  ‘Just calling to say still no news. Come in for a coffee if you want. It’s fresh on.’

  ‘Thanks, mate, but I’ll have to take a raincheck on that. I’m on my way to a mug of tea.’

  8

  It took far longer than it should have to get to Hereford. It was bucketing with rain all the way, and everyone drove like it was the first time they’d seen the stuff.

  I came down Aylestone Hill into the city centre, and passed the railway station. Four and a half hours was still quicker than a train would have been, by the time I’d trekked from Docklands to Paddington. In any event, I needed wheels. He didn’t know it yet, but Crazy Dave was going to find me a contact in-country and buy me a ticket – fast. As soon as I’d read him his horoscope, I wanted to be heading for an airport.

  I passed the cattle market and headed for the other side of town. Huge estates had sprung up like mushrooms in the eighties. Bobblestock had been among the first of the new breed. The houses were all made from machined bricks and were uniformly ugly. Then they had given the roads names like Chancel View and Rectory Close, even though there wasn’t a single old church in sight. With two point four children inside, a Mondeo on the drive and front lawns small enough to cut with scissors, these places had about as much individual character as a room in a Holiday Inn. No wonder it was Crazy Dave’s manor.

  The only crazy thing about Dave was that he’d earned his name because he wasn’t: he was about as zany as a teacup. He was the kind of guy who analysed a joke before saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it. That’s funny.’

  There had always been a broker knocking around Hereford. He had to be ex-Regiment because he had to know the people – who was in, who was getting out – and if he didn’t, he had to know a man who did. Crazy Dave had set up in business when he was invalided out of the Regiment after a truck driver from Estonia bounced him off his Suzuki on the M4 and forced him to take the scenic route. He’d done a tour of the central reservation, then checked out a fair amount of the opposite carriageway. His legs were still useless and he was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo. I’d felt sorry for him when I met up with him last year. Now I thought two fucked-up legs weren’t enough.

  Only a few months ago, a friend of mine from Regiment days had gone to Crazy Dave for work. He was in the early stages of motor neurone disease, and wanted one last big pay-off so his wife would have a pension. So far so good, but Crazy Dave had found out and taken advantage. Charlie was so desperate, he accepted only a fraction of what the job was worth, and Dave had pocketed the rest.

  I pulled up outside a brick rectangle with a garage extension that might have been assembled from a flat-pack. There was a brand new green Peugeot van on the drive. No lights on in the house, no sign of life.

  I locked my hire car, and as I walked past his Popemobile I could see through the side windows that the whole thing was rigged and ramped for his disability, even down to levers and stuff instead of pedals. It must have cost a fortune. Where there’s war there’s brass.

  As I walked up the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps, I rehearsed what to say. I hadn’t called to let him know I was coming. I was probably the last man on earth Crazy Dave wanted to see and I didn’t want the fucker wheeling it for the hills.

  At the same time, I knew from my last visit that his office was a fortress. He could drop the firearms-standard shutters and that would be that. I could pretend to be a delivery man, but he might tell me to leave it on the doorstep. Or I could say I was one of the guys from the camp, but nobody would come here without an appointment.

  The decision was made for me. There was a camera in the porch, new since my last visit. No point bluffing. I pressed the buzzer. ‘Dave, mate. It’s Nick Stone. Just passing, thought I’d say hi.’

  There was no reply but the door buzzed open. I walked inside. Nothing had changed. There was still a stairlift parked at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top, enough climbing frames for Dave to move about on to keep a whole troop of baboons happy. The only thing different was a few framed pictures on the wall, of a girl in her twenties with Dave’s big bulbous nose. She was holding a baby, who luckily took after its dad.

  I walked into a no-frills living room. Laminate flooring, three-piece suite, a large TV and that was about it. The rest was open space so he could rattle about in his wheelchair.

  French windows opened on to the garden, accessed via another ramp. I followed a narrow path of B&Q fake Cotswold stone that led up to a pair of doors set into a wall. The garage had been converted into an office. There was a stud wall where the up-and-over door had once been, and no windows.

  Crazy Dave was waiting for me behind his desk. Balding, with a moustache like a seventies porn star, the only thing about him that had changed was the expression on his face. Last time I was there he was all smiles. Now he looked tense. Just here to say hi, my arse. He knew there’d be more to it than that, but couldn’t fight his basic greed. I might be here with a million-dollar contract, or a caseful of Iraqi oil bonds with no idea how to sell them on.

  9

  On the desk in front of him, next to a telephone and an open laptop, sat the two most important assets his business possessed: a pair of small plastic boxes stuffed with index cards containing the names and details of more than a hundred former members of special forces. No wonder the garage had drop-down steel shutters and weapons-grade security: to people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, those cards would have been worth more than a containership full of RPGs.

  I closed the door behind me. ‘All right, mate? Want a brew?’ I kept my tone light and happy, but he knew as well as I did that I wasn’t here for tea and a KitKat.

  The little table with the brew kit was still against the opposite wall. I even recognized the Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs that would have come with an Easter egg.

  He shook his head while I went to test the weight of the kettle.

  ‘OK, Dave, let’s crack on.’ I flicked the switch and stopped playing Mr Nice. ‘By the time I get to Heathrow this evening I want a ticket to DRC and a contact in-country who’ll get me to Ituri province and a fucked-up village called Nuka.’

  Crazy Dave’s face didn’t even twitch. He just stared. If he’d been able to move his legs I was sure he’d have put them up on his desk, sat back and chuckled.

  ‘Write the name down, Dave. N-U-K-A. I need to be there as of yesterday.’

  He still didn’t move.

  ‘There are two reasons why you need to pull your finger out and get on with it. One, it’ll stop me putting the word around about how you tear the arse out of the commission so much you make more money on every job than the fuckers in the field. They wouldn’t be impressed with you, would they? They’d probably take you out of here and give that chair of yours a bit of a roll down the hill, know what I mean?

  ‘Two. What are the companies going to say when they discover you don’t even check that guys like Charlie have all their pistons working? Sending out cripples isn’t the finest quality control, is it? I mean, if word got out, you wouldn’t be left with much to broker, would you? And these are good times, aren’t they?’

  I leaned against the wall. ‘By the way, is that your grandkid on the wall in the hallway there?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  The kettle clicked and I threw a teabag into the Smarties mug. ‘But that’s not to say I ain’t going to bubble you anyway, one day. Charlie shouldn’t have been on that job in the first place. He wasn’t physically capable, and you ripped him off. How much was it?’ I put the kettle down and picked up a Tetrapak of UHT milk. ‘Oh, yeah, I remember. You gave Charlie two hundred grand and kept three hundred yourself. Wasn’t that how it went?’

  I looked at Dave. He wasn’t embarrassed, he was angry. He was fuming. His hands gripped the sides of his wheelchair so tightly his knuckles were white.

  I squeezed the teabag with a spoon. ‘Just think, Dave, if you’d got all that money you ripped off instead of kindly donating it to Charlie’s widow you wouldn’t be living here now, eh? I bet that grandkid would be all squared away with an education trust and that girl of yours could have had a nose job. But let’s not worry about that for the moment. I’ve come all the way from sunny Switzerland to hear how you’re going to get me to Nuka.’

  ‘I know where Nuka is. I’m a broker, remember?’ He pushed himself away from the desk and manoeuvred his high-tech chair round it to face me. ‘You finished?’

  ‘Nope.’ I thought I might as well push my luck. I picked up pen and paper from the desk and started to jot down the details of my Citibank account in Virginia. ‘Let’s say twenty grand in cash on top and we’ll call it quits – for now.’

  ‘You know, Nick, if I could stand I would. Then I’d fucking chin you.’

  He raised himself an inch or two off his seat but only to relieve the pressure on his arse or something. He held himself like that for a few seconds. Maybe he needed a fart.

  ‘Here’s how it is, Nick. The Gospel according to St Real.’ He sat himself down again. ‘I fucked up, got greedy and regret it. Charlie was a good guy, but I’ve paid my debt to him. Now, I’ll go this extra mile for you, but then that’s it. We’re all square. I want you out of my way. You’ll always be trouble.’

  ‘I like being around you, Dave.’ I tested the brew: it was good. I had a bit of a weakness for UHT. ‘I like to remind you now and again of what you did to Charlie. Remind you that I could fuck up business and at the same time fuck up that head of yours. Know what I mean?’

  ‘You can try and fuck up whatever you want. In the short term, yes, you could do business some damage. Long term? Forget it. The blokes want work, the companies need bayonets. Supply and demand, Nick. Who gives a fuck as long as the pay cheques keep coming?

  ‘Besides, you’ve got more to worry about than what you’re going to do with me. I keep in touch with Hazel, you know. Loves me, she does. Last time we spoke, she sent her regards, told you not to be a stranger. All over me, she is. Seems I did more for her and Charlie than she can ever thank me for. So, giving me the name of that box-head of yours was only a tiny favour. She threw in a cell number, email address and her stepfather’s home address as a bonus. And the news that she works for Mercy Flight. I like to keep records, Nick. I get the odd one or two fuckwits coming in here and going psycho on me.

  ‘Now, let me see. You don’t need the brains of a bishop to work this one out. Mercy Flight’s all over the place – even in the Congo, if I remember right. What I reckon is, you want to get to her, get something to her, or get her out of there. And it seems to me that if I don’t help you you’re fucked. It’ll take you weeks trawling bars and making grovelling calls. Chances are she’ll be fucked and hanging from a tree by the time you get there. You need me.’

  I looked down at him, and he looked up at me. A hint of a smile spread under his porn-star moustache. He was liking this too much. My brew didn’t taste so good now.

  ‘I’ve got a hundred bayonets on my books. Three are just a press of a panic button away right now. How stupid do you think I am? Try to fuck me around any more and I’ll get them to persuade you to think again. I won’t even have to pay them, just promise to push them up the pecking order.

  ‘Besides, that isn’t going to get you to the box-head, is it? I have what you need. I’m the broker – that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I’m in a wheelchair, not fucking retarded. Now, can we get down to business?’

  There are times when you have to accept you’ve been fucked over, and this was one of them. I was still giving him the long, hard stare, but it became a long, slow nod.

  ‘Good. ’Bout fucking time.’ He tapped a few keys on his laptop, studied the screen, and tapped a few more. He glanced at his watch, then hit another key. The printer in the corner began to whir.

  Crazy Dave wheeled himself away from the desk. He came back with two sheets of A4. ‘Here’s your e-ticket – on the house.’

  I gave it a glance. It was for nine thirty that night, from Heathrow. It was just after three now. I’d have to thrash the Corsa.

  He handed me the second sheet. ‘Your contact. He’ll get you most of the way. There are people working in the area, they’ll take you in. The debt’s paid. Now fuck off out of my sight.’

  I folded the two sheets of paper and tucked them into my jeans pocket, then picked up my brew. I looked at it for a second, then tipped it over his head.