Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

The heat from the sun was ruthless despite the midmorning hour, and already the bitumen joins in the concrete slabs of the airport tarmac had softened to the consistency of sticky black treacle. Atticus Monroe and Tom Wilkes sat under a banyan tree, its hanging roots a screen around them, keeping the worst of the heat at bay as they half-heartedly brushed at the swarms of flies. They sat mostly in silence in the shade, trying to conserve energy, watching the flights come and go across the other side of the apron, the civilian side, and occasionally picked over mission details. Between them, back on Flores, they’d managed to figure out the terrorists’ real intentions at the last minute, saving many lives. Monroe had received a personal call from the D-G of the CIA, passing on the warm regards of the President of the United States himself. That felt good, the recognition of a job well done. Wilkes’s boss, Colonel Hardcastle, had said, ‘Good onya, mate,’ or words to that effect, and that had been the sum total of the official appreciation of the man who’d literally saved the day.

‘You Aussies sure have a low-key way of showing your gratitude,’ Monroe had said after the connection with Canberra had broken. It hadn’t seemed to trouble Wilkes, though. He just went on with the job – business as usual. And the business was still unfinished: a certain loose end by the name of Duat that needed tying up. The terrorist had completely disappeared. Was he dead, killed somehow by persons unknown, or still alive waiting to pop up sometime in the future with a new plan for death and destruction?

Several soldiers from the PNG army wandered around, ignoring their presence, coming and going from the large hangar that doubled as a storage facility and garage for various army vehicles. A flight from Mt Hagen in the highlands arrived, a largish Saab turbo prop. The stairs were wheeled across, the door opened and a small number of passengers disembarked: Europeans, PNG businessmen and several highland tribesmen compete with bird of paradise feathers and boar tusks through their broad noses, and the ubiquitous koteka, an incongruous clash of the ancient with the present. Wilkes was in the middle of wondering whether the tribesmen had been offered tea and coffee along with the other passengers when he was distracted by the arrival of an executive jet reversing its engines on the runway.

The Cessna Citation rolled off onto the taxiway that would bring it to the banyan tree that Wilkes and Monroe had retreated under. The door in the fuse cracked open and the co-pilot popped his head out and then exited, offering a hand to a woman dressed in military fatigues who was descending the narrow stepladder. She declined assistance.

Wilkes watched her as she walked towards them, a backpack over one shoulder, M4 over the other. She seemed comfortable enough. ‘Morning. Lovely day,’ she said, swinging her pack off her shoulder and placing it beside Wilkes’s and Monroe’s gear.

‘Gia,’ said Monroe, standing and giving her a blokey handshake. ‘Glad you could make it.’

Wilkes settled for a simple ‘Hi.’ He’d told her where they were off to and the reasons why, and the deputy station chief had immediately demanded to come along. Wilkes was unsure about her presence. The New Guinea highlands were tough going at the best of times and they were headed way off the beaten track. ‘Don’t worry about Gia,’ Monroe had said. ‘She knows her limits.’ Ferallo was plainly determined and had more than enough seniority for Wilkes’s initial reluctance to metamorphose into a shrug.

‘You boys look thirsty,’ she said, breaking out Cokes from her pack, tossing one each to Wilkes and Monroe. ‘The bird has a fridge,’ she explained, gesturing at the jet behind her.

The Citation’s engines throttled up, the noise killing any attempt at conversation. Monroe and Wilkes sat, backs against the tree trunk, leaving room between them for Ferallo. The executive jet’s nose wheel turned as the throttles were goosed, the pilots waved, and the aircraft swung away on its short taxi to the runway.

‘So, what gives?’ said Monroe suddenly. There were ten minutes or so before the helo was due to arrive to take them up to the Western Highlands – another of Monroe’s CIA specials, no doubt, thought Wilkes – and so there was time to pump Ferallo for details of the mission Wilkes would not normally be privy to.

‘About what?’ said Ferallo, blinking innocently, face blank.

‘C’mon, Gia, don’t be shy. We’ve been jumping out of planes, playing Johnny Adventure…what’s been going on?’

Ferallo belched quietly, the back of her hand attempting to politely disguise the fact as she put the empty Coke bottle on the ground. She’d been authorised to debrief them and there was no time like the present. ‘Okay, well, the biggest development? When it’s all said and done, it turns out Duat was just a patsy, a flunky used in a scam,’ Ferallo said as the heat caught up with her and the beads of perspiration began to gather on her forehead.

‘What do you mean?’ Monroe said.

‘He was being used.’

‘How…?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Before we knew what this was all about, Kadar Al-Jahani met up with three men at a cafe in Rome. We – the CIA – caught some of that meeting on tape. You remember, Atticus?’

‘Yeah, I remember,’ said Monroe, brushing the flies away from his face in a constant salute.

‘At the time, we didn’t know what the conversation was about, did we? But, with the benefit of hindsight and a dash of insight, well, we’ve filled in the gaps. There was a Saudi, a Yemeni and a Palestinian –’

‘Hey, is this the one where they each jump out of a plane and yell, “God, save me”?’ said Monroe.

‘Not unless all three were financiers of terror.’

‘You’re getting it mixed up with the one about an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman,’ said Wilkes, taking a swig of his Coke.

‘Guys?’ Ferallo was doing her best impression of an impatient assistant deputy CIA chief.

‘Sorry, it’s the heat,’ said Monroe. ‘So, they were financiers?’

‘Yep. They were known to the Israelis. Mostly, they underwrote the purchase of weapons for the Palestinian Intifada against Israel. They gave Kadar Al-Jahani a bunch of money ostensibly to set up a second Islamic front. The stated objective of this front – and a very noble one in the eyes of their associates in Hamas and Hezbollah – was to divert attention and resources away from the Middle East, and thus give everyone there a little more room to move.’

‘To make more murder and mayhem,’ Monroe added unnecessarily.

‘One would assume so,’ Ferallo said, now also swatting at the flies. ‘It appears these associates in terror supplied Kadar with the VX and the drone. Launched against the appropriate target, so the idea was, this WMD would be the catalyst for Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to rise up and create the South East Asian Islamic super state.’

‘Hit an oil field and ignite a whole region,’ said Monroe.

Ferallo nodded. ‘Only Kadar Al-Jahani and his financier friends forgot to mention to Duat that they were also business partners. In oil.’

‘What?’ said Monroe, frowning, the revelation throwing him somewhat.

‘I think I get it,’ said Wilkes, shaking his head in amazement.

‘Well then, can you help me?’ Monroe said.

‘Did they buy shares in Saudi Petroleum or something?’ said Wilkes.

‘Sort of. They bought “warrants”. In Exxon. For a small outlay, a warrant gives you a large exposure to the market, so you can make a lot. You can also lose everything. Only these guys had no intention of losing. They bought several million of these warrants, over a short period through various intermediaries,’ said Ferallo. Wilkes impressed her. He was an action man with, obviously, something solid between the ears. She’d asked him to have a drink with her several months ago and he’d declined because he’d become engaged to his TV-land girlfriend. A pretty reasonable excuse. Particularly as Ferallo remembered having a little bit more in mind than a cocktail. Now she wished she’d pushed him a bit harder. And there was news on the engagement front – apparently, the wedding was off.

‘Think insider trading, Atticus,’ said Wilkes. ‘If a WMD is launched against an entire oil field, then everyone’s going to think terrorism has a new focus – interrupting the world’s oil supply. National economies would teeter. After an initial dip oil prices would go through the roof, as would oil shares. If you know that’s going to happen beforehand, you could make a killing.’

‘Appropriate for a bunch of terrorists,’ said Monroe with a snort.

‘If the price went up thirty percent as the result of the attack, a conservative rise experts tell us, Kadar Al-Jahani personally would have made around five hundred million US,’ said Farallo.

Monroe whistled.

‘And Duat knew nothing about any of this?’ Wilkes asked.

‘No. We believe he wasn’t part of the deal. Kadar was siphoning off money for the purchase of these warrants from the money made running guns and smuggling drugs. Not even the moneyman we arrested in Sydney was in on it.’

‘So, how do you know what Kadar was up to?’ asked Monroe.

‘Do you remember the Defence Intelligence Organisation guy – Felix Mortimer?’

Wilkes nodded.

‘Yep, I remember him. Big guy, smart, bad dresser,’ said Monroe.

‘Yeah,’ said Ferallo. ‘He figured it out. Kadar Al-Jahani gave up a series of numbers when he was being interrogated. Everyone thought it was some kind of code that would lead to the location of the weapon, the Sword of Allah.’

Monroe had wondered what the Arabic lettering on the nose of the UAV in the photos had meant.

‘Sword of Allah. He was a general in the time of the prophet Mohammed, and Kadar Al-Jahani was big on the legends,’ Ferallo continued. ‘Anyway, the numbers represented a swift code. That’s a code used to identify a bank and its branch. The numbers were a simple exposition to letters in the alphabet, minus one then plus one for each subsequent number.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Monroe.

The frown on Wilkes’s face told Ferallo he didn’t either.

Ferallo retrieved a notebook from a side pocket of her

pack and flipped it open. ‘I thought you might like to see this,’ she said. Hand-drawn on the page was a grid of numbers and letters.

‘Okay, look here. These were Kadar Al-Jahani’s numbers: 1511472723.’ Ferallo wrote the numbers down, then underlined and circled various numbers and figures on a grid while Wilkes and Monroe looked over her shoulder. ‘Start with the number 1. Add one and the corresponding letter is B. Subtract one from the number 5 and the corresponding letter is D. Follow the series and the 11 becomes an L. “BDL” is the acronym used for the Banco di Luca in its swift code. Once you get a grip on that, the rest is easy. The full swift code is BDLCHZ2D, a particular branch of the Banco di Luca in Zurich.

‘The password to Kadar Al-Jahani’s account was “Khalid bin Al-Waleed”, otherwise known as…’

‘The Sword of Allah,’ said Wilkes.

Ferallo smiled. ‘Give that man a cigar. The numbers given up by Kadar meant absolutely nothing until we knew what we were looking for. And we’ve got Mortimer to thank for that.’

‘Shit,’ said Wilkes, shaking his head in disbelief. Wilkes remembered the flight to Guantanamo Bay and the conversation he’d had with Kadar Al-Jahani. He never would have guessed that the man’s motives had been anything other than idealism. ‘When this is all over, Atticus, we should buy Mortimer a beer.’

‘That might be a bit hard to arrange,’ said Ferallo.

‘Why?’ asked Atticus.

‘He’s dead,’ Ferallo said.

‘Oh?’ Wilkes swatted at the flies. ‘How? What happened?’

‘Had a heart attack,’ said Ferallo. ‘Lots of stress, bad food and no exercise.’

‘That’ll do it,’ Monroe agreed.

Ferallo continued: ‘Anyway, Duat’s motivations in all of this were pure, if you can call wanting to kill a lot of innocent people in a most unpleasant way pure,’ said Ferallo, as the familiar beat of a helicopter’s rotors signalled the arrival of their transport.

‘So it was just about money?’ said Monroe.

‘No, it was about kingship. Kadar Al-Jahani would have been extremely wealthy and, if the other half of the plan had worked and they’d ended up with a fundamentalist home in Asia, he and his cronies would have ruled it.’

‘And everyone would have lived happily ever after,’ said Monroe.

‘Everyone except Duat. He’d have figured the doublecross sooner or later…if they’d ever let him live long enough, that is.’Wilkes stood as the helo approached, taxiing towards them in a slow hover three metres above the blistering blacktop.

‘Do you feel sorry for him?’ Ferallo asked.

‘Who, Duat?’ said Wilkes. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘You know muruk means “cassowary” in Pidgin?’ said Gia Ferallo as they stopped for a rest on one of the high passes that separated Muruk’s village from their destination.

‘The bird? No, I didn’t know that,’ said Wilkes, looking down on the jungle spread out below them. He had a vague feeling of déjà vu, accentuated by the presence of Timbu and Muruk, the chief’s young son. ‘And I didn’t know you spoke the local lingo either.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s here, in the tourist phrase book.’ Ferallo held up the small booklet she’d been reading and wiggled it.

Wilkes felt more relaxed about the trek this time, partly because they weren’t on the tail of a hostile war party, but mostly because he was in-country on official business at the invitation of the government of Papua New Guinea, and was therefore entitled to carry the M4/203 and the ugly sawn-off Remington pump strapped to his pack. And he was wearing military fatigues.

Atticus and Ferallo also carried M4s, not because the rifle was necessarily their preferred choice of weapon but because it was light and reliable. When Wilkes had told them how hard the going would be, Ferallo was disbelieving. But she was a believer now, stripped down to a navy singlet soaked with sweat. And featherweight though it was, the Bushmaster M4’s seven kilos loaded had become a dead weight as they trudged the narrow, slippery mud paths that snaked up and down the hills. Yet Ferallo hadn’t complained about the mud, the climb, the weight, the mosquitoes or the leeches, and Wilkes had to admit he was impressed. And surprised.

‘So why would the chief name his son after the cassowary?’ Ferallo asked Timbu.

‘Well, the cassowary is a big, flightless bird. Weighs around sixty-five kilos and stands around one and a half metres tall,’ said Timbu, amused at Ferallo’s naivety. ‘And the thing has a temper. When it’s pissed off, it can be pretty frightening. Has a sharp toenail over a hundred millimetres long that it uses like a dagger. Corner one and it’ll kick you, and maybe disembowel you. Don’t think of it as being like an oversized chook.’

‘Oh,’ said Ferallo, giving Muruk a friendly, respectful smile he readily returned.

Timbu took a long drink of water from his canteen and ate some yam to keep up his energy levels. The interpreter was keen to return to the highlands when Wilkes had put it to him. Resolving unfinished business was just part of it. After the last trek with Wilkes where he witnessed first hand the damage being done by the flood of weapons, Timbu had decided to enter politics, to defend the rights of the highland people, and try to stop the gunrunning.

‘So, Tom. Tell me again why we couldn’t just take a helo in?’ said Monroe, half joking, as he adjusted his pack’s shoulder straps.

For the simple reason that if Duat were at the village or in its vicinity, they didn’t want to telegraph their presence and spook him. But Atticus knew that and so Tom didn’t feel the need to repeat it. ‘Come on big, tough CIA guy,’ said Wilkes. ‘The walk’ll do you good.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’ said Monroe. Trekking through the bush was hard going and Monroe was a city boy, more at home in the jungle of the concrete variety. But he was first and foremost an adventure junkie, and meeting challenges – especially challenges of the physical and dangerous type – was his ‘thing’.

The conversation trailed off rapidly as they resumed the climb, walking in single file, leaving each with their private thoughts. Wilkes and Monroe had decided to come to Papua New Guinea directly from the terrorists’ camp on Flores. Wilkes’s hunch appeared to be reinforced by the terrorists’ own meticulous records. While most of the detail on the design, construction and flight plan of the UAV had been destroyed, the Babu Islam encampment had been run like a military establishment and spreadsheets were kept on nearly every facet of camp life. Even down to how much rice was consumed.

Within a few hours of securing the encampment, a detailed inventory of the terrorists’ weapons and munitions cache had been found and checked. A single crate of twenty new H&K submachine guns, and boxes of ammunition to go with them, was unaccounted for. And Monroe’s theory that one of two high-powered inflatable boats was missing had been confirmed. Wilkes believed that Duat, stripped of his bank account, and with his terrorist partner Kadar Al-Jahani dead and his army of fanatics killed by the very weapon he’d intended to use on innocent people, had skipped camp as soon as the UAV was launched, taking something he could readily turn into cash: weapons. And where would he try to sell them? The New Guinea highlands? It wasn’t such a stretch. There he had contacts and he was largely anonymous. He could trade the guns for dope which could easily be onsold for a tidy sum – and he’d sure need one to have any chance of successfully lying low, his highest priority now. Every police and intelligence agency around the world was after him, a wanted man right up there with terror’s pin-up boy, Bin Laden.

Wilkes suddenly collided with Ferallo. He’d had his head down, deep in thought, and she’d stopped on the trail in front of him. He glanced up to apologise and realised the collision was no accident.

‘My spies tell me your engagement’s off,’ said Ferallo, feet apart, hands on her hips.

‘Sorry? I –’

‘You’re a free agent now, Tom. So maybe we can have that drink,’ she said.

‘How did you know about me and –’

‘I’m a spy,’ Ferallo said with a shrug.

‘Oh, right…’ Wilkes was taken aback. An approach like this, in the middle of the jungle, was completely unexpected. At their first meeting, he hadn’t found himself particularly attracted to Gia Ferallo. But she’d proved herself to be competent, tough. And by the looks of things, aggressive. Also, Ferallo knew what he did for a living and she was obviously okay with it. He looked at her again. She was striking – the dark, mysterious type. Very different to Annabelle. And that was a good thing, wasn’t it? ‘Sure, a drink. Here,’ he said, handing her his waterbottle.

Ferallo shook her head and said, ‘I’m going to let you off now, but when this is over, you owe me that drink, something in a long chilled glass with ice in it.’ She turned and moved off.

Wilkes watched her disappear, swallowed by the trail. He had to admit that having a drink with Ferallo was actually a pretty exciting prospect, and that realisation caused a twinge of guilt. There was unfinished business with Annabelle. Cancelled engagement or not, she was still very much in his mind. And, at that moment, the image was of an angry Annabelle, an Annabelle looking at him with her arms crossed, frowning, annoyed because he hadn’t told this woman that he wasn’t interested.

The sun was high overhead when Muruk left the trail and led them through a dense patch of low, wet scrub full of spiders the size of a man’s hand with long, delicate black legs. According to Muruk, they were not overly dangerous to humans, apparently, but a bite could leave a nasty wound and permanent ugly scarring. Fortunately, the arachnids seemed more afraid of the large mammals moving through their habitat, and they scuttled away and hid amongst the leaves and branches of the foliage. Muruk was wary of the spiders because he was naked, but the boy was even more leery of what lay on the other side of the scrub.

Wilkes cautiously parted the leaves and saw that Muruk had brought them back to the marijuana field. Women and young children moved through the plants, snapping off thick heads and dropping them into baskets. Harvest time. It occurred to Wilkes that they’d made far better time on the return journey to this village because they’d used the main paths, arriving in broad daylight rather than at dusk.

‘Now what?’ said Atticus, kneeling beside Wilkes.

The children in the plantation horsed around as children everywhere do, chasing each other, getting in their parents’ way. The one area they seemed to give a wide berth to was the spider bush Wilkes and the rest were hiding in. It was a good place to observe goings-on with little risk of discovery, which was obviously why Muruk had led them here. But observation was not the point this time, it was contact. ‘C’mon,’ said Wilkes as he began to move forward. ‘Time to meet and greet.’ He pushed the mat of leaves aside with the tip of his rifle and a large spider fell to the ground and ran away. A few steps later and he found himself standing amongst the towering marijuana crop, the smell of the cannabis almost overpowering. A young girl squealed and ran away, and a few seconds later, Wilkes, Monroe, Ferallo and the rest were surrounded by naked warriors with spears levelled at them, the barbed tips quivering with the fear coursing through their holders’ veins.

‘Jesus, Tom, thanks for the warning,’ said Timbu. He began to talk to the warriors, who shouted back. The men darted half a step forward, feinting aggressively with their spears. ‘Drop your weapons and packs,’said Timbu quietly, maintaining eye contact with the people on the other ends of the spears, ‘or we won’t get further than this.’

Wilkes slid the pack off his shoulder and slowly, carefully, placed it on the ground. The spearheads were coated with a black substance that was probably a nerve poison, a theory he was not prepared to test. He lowered his M4 beside the pack and dropped it the last few centimetres. The others followed his example. Wilkes slowly looked behind him. Muruk had not left the safety of the spider bush and was probably, by now, watching the proceedings from another vantage point further away.

A warrior darted forward and took Wilkes’s rifle. He popped out the magazine and half stripped it down before reassembling it. The man knew his way around the Bushmaster and the fact that he was wearing a penis gourd and had a very large boar tusk through the septum of his nose Wilkes found quite disconcerting – something about the clash of cultures, or maybe even the contamination of one culture by another. And Wilkes recognised him. He was one of the men he and Ellis had knocked out when they first scouted the village all those months ago.

‘I know this is going to sound corny, Timbu, but can you ask them to take us to their leader,’ said Wilkes with the calmest voice he could muster.

‘You’re right. It does,’ said Monroe under his breath. All their weapons had now been confiscated and the one that seemed to be giving their captors the most enjoyment was Wilkes’s sawn-off Remington. They laughed at it and threw it up and down, not taking it seriously. One of them snatched it, aimed it casually at a tree and pulled the trigger. The plantation filled with a BOOM and when the blue smoke had cleared a large section of the trunk was missing. The man who fired the weapon let it fall to the ground and rubbed his shoulder vigorously, the shotgun’s vicious recoil having taken him by surprise. The noise brought more of the villagers to the plantation to see what was going on. One of the men reached forward and placed his hand on Ferallo’s breast and gave it a good squeeze.

‘Ouch,’ she said.

The men behind the spears laughed at Ferallo’s reaction and the release cooled things down some.

‘They couldn’t figure out whether you’re a man or a woman,’ said Timbu.

‘Gee, that’s funny,’ said Ferallo. Still, a sore breast was better than a spear in the guts, she reminded herself. ‘They worked it out yet?’

Another man reached forward to squeeze Ferallo’s other breast, only to have one of the women start shouting at him. The man withdrew from the armed detail and the two, obviously husband and wife, began having a vocal domestic disagreement. ‘Yeah,’ said Monroe, ‘I think they’ve solved that riddle.’

The atmosphere had relaxed somewhat, and children began to dart in and out of the circle created by the ring of armed villagers. One of the men barked a demand and motioned with a flick of his head.

‘I think they want us to go with them,’ said Ferallo.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Timbu. ‘Just smile, everyone, and wave. Look happy. We’re not on Mars, and friendly gestures mean the same here as they do everywhere else.’

‘What about Muruk?’ said Wilkes, waving and nodding at the people who came to stare at the creatures with white skin, something many of the younger highland people had never seen before.

‘Did us a favour,’ Timbu said, following his own advice with a big grin fixed to his face. ‘It’s the payback thing. Best for us if we’re not associated with Muruk’s village. We can start here afresh. Also, it would have been a big risk for Muruk personally to show his face.’

Wilkes wasn’t questioning the boy’s courage at all. He just wanted to make sure the lad was all right.

‘Don’t worry about Muruk. He’ll be fine. No doubt he’ll catch up with us later.’

‘So what happens now?’ Wilkes asked.

‘They’re doing as you asked, taking us to see the headman. Have you noticed the absence of guns?’

‘Yeah…if anything I thought there’d be more here now.’ A young boy had walked up to Timbu, taken him by the hand and was leading him along. Timbu felt a thrill at that. He loved these people and looked forward to the day when he could defend their rights.

It had struck Wilkes as odd immediately when they’d been bailed up by supia – spears – rather than by Kalashnikovs. The men obviously knew their guns here, though, as the individual who’d begun stripping down his carbine had attested. A return to stone-age weaponry was the last thing he’d expected, especially here at this village.

The entourage grew as the party moved off the well-worn path through the jungle and entered the outskirts of the village proper. The place was no different to Muruk’s home except that, being even more remote, there was no western dress worn at all. The women wore strips of grass around their waists and nothing else, whether young or old, and all the men were adorned with koteka of various sizes. The third millennium had not touched this village until Duat and Kadar Al-Jahani decided to involve it in their plan for a new order in South East Asia.

The place felt different in the daylight, with none of the malice of Wilkes’s previous visit, despite the ring of spears around them. They walked past the drying room where Wilkes and Ellis had spied on Duat and company doing the deal and sealing it with a scoob. Two women sat outside a hut pounding on nuts or berries, delivering alternating blows. The tools being used as hammers were, from the looks of them, Heckler & Koch nine millimetre pistols. The heavy butt ends of the pistols were doing a great job although, obviously, not made for it.

Monroe jabbed him lightly in the ribs. ‘What?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Take a look,’ said Monroe, nodding at three women using AK-47s as large pestles to pound whatever was in the bottom of a stone mortar.

‘Well,’ said Timbu, also watching, ‘now we know what has happened to the weapons.’

‘Hmm, inventive,’ offered Monroe.

The group walked the length of the village, ultimately approaching a raised day bed with a thatched roof overhead, where three old men sat playing a game not unlike jacks, with old bones and animal teeth. The men looked up from what they were doing when the noise of the approaching parade reached them. One of them, the youngest of the three, got up and walked towards them.

The man who appeared to be the most senior in their escort handed over one of the rifles, Wilkes’s M4/203. He examined the weapon and passed it back with a quick comment.

‘He says it’s not heavy enough to be of any use,’ whispered Timbu. ‘No good for pounding sago.’The interpreter spoke to the old man in the strange language that seemed to Wilkes to have no defined words or phrases, spoken as it was with a flat monotone. Wilkes had no idea how old the man was. He could have been forty or a hundred and forty. He was little, shrunken much like the chief of Muruk’s village. His nose was extremely broad, made even more so by the presence of an enormous boar’s tusk through it. Oddly, his skin was pale in places, as if the colour had been drained from it here and there. Cancer, perhaps, or some skin disease. Also, the man had no teeth, not one, and so his cheeks were concave and his lips puckered inwards. When he wasn’t speaking he habitually rubbed his smooth gums together. A couple of red and yellow feathers rose from the tight grey bun at the back of his head, and the collection of animal teeth dangling around his neck tinkled when he waved his arms about, something he appeared to do whenever he talked, gesturing like an Italian merchant.

As the conversation with Timbu continued, the chief became more agitated, as did the arm movements. Wilkes guessed it was his normal way of speaking, however, because the people of his village didn’t appear to react to it in the slightest. Eventually, the conversation came to an end and Timbu translated.

‘Tom, I told him that you are patrol officers hunting a criminal, a bad spirit who wants to poison people in your land. I told the chief that this bad spirit is the same one who came to his village with guns. The chief agrees that the man was spiritually bereft. One of these guns blew up when his oldest son fired it, killing him. This happened a month ago. The chief has since banned the use of firearms for hunting and for war. There have been many similar incidents in neighbouring villages and because of this, the old man has been able to convince other villages to also stop using them.’

Timbu turned to the chief and the two spoke some more, the chief again becoming quite animated. ‘You’re going to love this, Tom,’ said Timbu when the chief had finished, finding it impossible to keep the smile off this face. ‘A week ago, this man, the bad spirit, came back with more guns. The chief had no choice but to exact payback. They killed him and ate him.’

‘Yeah, I can see why you’d think that’d make us happy,’ said Atticus, when he’d stopped laughing out loud. ‘That’s one way to end a blood feud.’ Somehow, being eaten was a far more satisfying outcome for the likes of Duat than life imprisonment or lethal injection.

‘How do we know he’s talking about Duat?’ said Ferallo. ‘He’s not the only one running guns in this part of the world.’

‘True,’ said Wilkes, the same thought having occurred to him.

Timbu put the question to the chief, who nodded and shouted a command to one of the men who’d escorted them from the marijuana field. The man ran off and reappeared some moments later. He passed the chief a human skull, which the old man presented to Timbu. A chunk of bone was missing from the rear of the skull, probably the death blow delivered by machete. Ants had done a good job in a short time, picking the skull clean.

‘That could be anyone,’ said Wilkes.

Timbu repeated that to the chief, who pointed to the absent front teeth in the upper jaw. He then sifted through the teeth hanging around his neck until he found what he was looking for and beckoned Wilkes to take a closer look. It was a front tooth. And it was made of gold.