‘She’s gone, Sonja. I thought you knew,’ Stirling Smith said when she asked to speak to her daughter.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Gone where? With who?’
‘With your friend Martin Steele, of course. To Johannesburg and then Mauritius, I gather.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Sonja? What happened at the dam … was that you?’
‘When did Steele leave?’
‘It was wrong, Sonja, blowing it up.’
‘For God’s sake, Stirling, shut up about the bloody dam. Steele … when did he leave; what else did he say?’
There was a pause on the end of the line. ‘He only left a few hours ago, on a Mack Air charter to Maun – same plane he arrived at Xakanaxa on. He’ll be on the Air Bots flight later today. He stayed long enough to meet with that bloody Bernard Trench and collect the rest of his money – your money.’
Sonja tried calling Emma’s mobile phone, but it went straight to voicemail. ‘Emma, if you get this, my love, please, please, please get away from Martin as soon as you can and go to the nearest police station. He’s dangerous. I’m coming for you. Call me.’ Sonja left her number, for the third time. She ended the call and dialled another number on her satellite phone.
‘Yes,’ said the weary-sounding male voice.
‘It’s Sonja.’
‘You’ve got a bloody nerve,’ Sydney Chipchase said. ‘I’ve got half the bloody Namibian Police Force here with me now and they only just let me out of custody. They thought I was in on it, even though I tried my hardest to stop you.’
She heard voices around him in the background. ‘Can you talk now?’
‘Hang on.’ After a few moments he said, ‘What do you want?’
‘Steele.’
‘You and everyone in this country – and Germany. News has just broken about the death of the nurse and her driver. He’s going to be a marked man. I wouldn’t want to be him when GSG-9 catches up with him.’
‘I want him first.’
‘Why should I help you, Sonja? You nearly got me killed and I’m in big trouble with the people who pay my bills.’
‘He’s got my daughter with him.’
She could tell Chipchase was weighing the pros and cons. She had guessed he was working for German intelligence and his reference to GSG-9 – Germany’s equivalent of the SAS – had confirmed her suspicions. If he could facilitate the elimination of Steele without his employers having to launch a major international operation, he might yet gain some kudos and make up for failing to save the dam. Sonja added, ‘You can track him using my girl’s passport, Emma Jane Kurtz. Steele will be on a false one, but he won’t have had time to get her one. He’s said he’s heading for Mauritius, but I’m sure that’s a false trail. I doubt he’ll risk leaving Africa, though.’
‘Leave it with me,’ Chipchase said.
‘Call me back as soon as you have a destination.’ She ended the call.
Sonja was dirty, smelly and ached all over from the battering she’d received in the river and from being thrown around inside the armoured car. All she cared about, though, was getting her daughter back. She looked at Sam. ‘You need to get across the border and get the hell out of Africa.’
He shook his head.
He took her shopping in Johannesburg Airport. He bought her clothes, perfume, cigarettes, some expensive vodka and two swimsuits – a bikini and a one-piece. He even bought her shoes – high heels – which seemed quite a pervy thing for an old bloke to do, but she liked it. She liked him.
Emma drained the last of her white wine and watched him walking towards the bar again, threading his way among the other travellers and their bags. He was well old – old enough to be her father – but there was something about him, many things in fact, that she found incredibly masculine and sexy. Being with him was like surfacing after too long under water. It felt so good to breathe again after the crushing drudgery of boarding school.
She was excited, but she was also nervous in an edgy, thrilling, tingly sort of way. She analysed her feelings and decided freedom was better than any drug her mother might think she’d tried. Emma had known Martin Steele – Uncle Martin – all her life, but it was only in the last year or so that she’d discovered just how much she loved him, and how much he loved her. It wasn’t an uncle–niece sort of love. Not by a long shot.
Emma hated boarding school – something her mother never seemed to grasp – and Martin’s emails from exotic places around the world had helped take her away from the gloom of English winters, the bitchiness of the other girls and the dour faces of the teachers. When he’d suggested they chat on MSN the frequency of their contact increased, as did its intensity.
He treated her like an adult, which she liked, and she felt she could ask him anything. Somehow – she couldn’t quite remember the precise moment – their chat had turned to the topic of sex. She’d asked him if he had a girlfriend and he’d said no. He’d asked her if she had a boyfriend, to which she’d replied, ‘not really’. He’d made some remark about reading a survey that said the vast majority of girls over the age of sixteen in the UK were sexually active, so she was probably getting more sex than he was. He’d warned her to be careful and had launched into a bit of a parental safe-sex talk. She’d been a bit shocked, but she’d also been very keen to let him know that she was still a virgin. She’d had rows with her mum about boys and sex – once because she wanted to bring a boy she’d met on summer holidays home for an overnight stay, because he lived in the country. Her cow of a mother had told her she couldn’t have a boy over, no matter what she did when she wasn’t around. She’d told her mum that she hadn’t had sex with the boy – or anyone else – but she could tell her mother didn’t believe her. She’d told all this to Martin and he’d been very sympathetic.
After that, she’d noticed that Martin had become much more formal with her in his emails and messaging, and she felt like she’d said something to upset him.
He walked back to the table with a glass of white wine in each hand and when he smiled at her she felt her heart melt and flow to her fingertips and toes, and everywhere in between. She’d resurrected the topic of love, romance and, yes, even sex, in their online chats, and she’d let him know that although she hadn’t actually done it, that didn’t mean she didn’t think about it a lot.
It had been like having an adult best friend and she had found herself unburdening all sorts of things on him. He was interested in what she liked – in boys – and what made her excited and what didn’t. She’d had two semi-serious boyfriends between the ages of fifteen and sixteen and while there had been some kissing and touching during the holidays, things had never progressed any further. With one of the boys she indulged in some cybersex. She hadn’t found masturbating while he wrote in broken text-speak particularly arousing, but she sometimes found herself feeling very turned on while chatting with Martin. When they moved, slowly, inevitably to indulging in sex play online, she’d found his words were like poetry, or the book of literary erotica one of her friends had lent her. It didn’t seem wrong or dirty or inappropriate and he’d been at pains to stress that there was no way in the world he wanted to have actual sex with a girl under the age of eighteen, even though the legal age of consent was sixteen.
All the same, when she’d arrived in Botswana it had been very, very odd seeing him in the flesh. It was the first time they’d seen each other in person since their chat had become so explicit and she’d blushed like crazy when he’d given her a chaste peck on the cheek. That first night in Xakanaxa Camp she’d wondered if he would come sneaking into her tent. In fact, she fantasised about it. But he paid her no attention. Although he was old he was even more handsome than she remembered, and she realised she was now looking at him through a woman’s eyes, not a girl’s.
Once more she was left wondering if she’d said or done something wrong, to make him lose interest in her.
‘Cheers, beautiful,’ he said, and they clinked glasses. ‘Not long until the flight.’
She loved that he thought she was beautiful. ‘You’ll get me drunk.’ She sipped the wine. It was her fourth glass. She could hold it as well as any girl at school, but she felt light-headed around him. He put a hand on hers, on the small round table in the bar, and she thought she might catch alight from the heat of him.
She glanced around the crowded bar and caught the eye of a businessman in a suit who was looking up from his laptop. Emma wondered what the man was thinking. Did he think they were father and daughter, or did he pigeonhole them as a dirty old man and his younger mistress. She leaned over and kissed Martin on the cheek and smiled to herself as the businessman looked away.
‘What was that for?’
She shrugged and drank a big gulp of wine. ‘For the dress, for the other clothes, the shoes … everything. I feel free at last, Martin, to be who I want to be. I’m still worried about Mum, though. I wish we could call her.’
‘Well, as I told you before, she’s out of mobile range where she is at the moment, doing a security job for me, but I’ll call her, or she’ll probably call me when she has a signal again. Leave her to me, Emma.’
‘Yes, you can have her, but won’t she be mad at you, when you tell her about … about us?’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t really matter, my love, because in four short months you’ll be eighteen – officially an adult – and you can do whatever it is you please.’
Emma felt lost without her mobile phone. She’d searched her tent, the dining area and everywhere else she could think of before they left Xakanaxa. Like every girl she knew, her phone was like another body part – inseparable and essential to her day-to-day existence. She couldn’t imagine where or how she lost it, and Stirling had assured her none of his staff would have stolen it. It was annoying, but Martin had promised to buy her an iPhone, as soon as they got to where they were going.
He’d been such a gentleman – in real life, that was – unlike some boys she’d met who only wanted to get into her pants. On the second night at Xakanaxa, while her mother had been away in Namibia bodyguarding, Martin had arranged for the two of them to have a private dinner on the balcony of his tent. He’d told her, then, across the candlelight and with the sounds of the African night as a soundtrack, that he loved her and that he wanted to take care of her when she finished school later that year. She’d been stunned, but part of her had been relieved because she’d played this scene out more than once alone in her bed at school. She told him that she wasn’t going back to school, that from now on she would only go where he was going. They’d been brave words and she’d had second thoughts in the last couple of days, but the excitement of travelling somewhere new and exotic had galvanised her.
A woman’s voice came over the Tannoy advising them that this was the first and final boarding call for the Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi. He smiled at her and she knew then and there that she wanted him. Forever.
Sonja turned on her phone while she and Sam were queuing in the centre aisle of the Boeing, waiting to get out and into the terminal at Johannesburg Airport. The message alert beeped so she dialled the number to retrieve it.
‘It’s me,’ she heard Sydney Chipchase say. ‘Mombasa. They left Jo’burg for Nairobi last night, just after midnight. They would have been on a connecting flight earlier this morning. Probably there by the time you get this. Steele’s travelling under the name of Craig Joseph Regan. Call me.’
She did, and when he answered he said: ‘You got my message?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going there?’
‘Of course. Next available flight. I’ll need hardware.’
‘Someone will meet you at Moi Airport. We only know his destination, not where he’ll be staying. Good luck … you’re going to need it.’
Sonja followed Sam out of the airliner and ended the call. She knew where Steele was going, and that he was going to need a shitload more luck than her when she caught up with him.