Crisis Four Page 13

  The result was a Mexican stand-off, like something out of a spaghetti western. For two or three seconds all that could be heard was the crackling of the fire. Sarah cut the silence. ‘Nick, sit down. You’re embarrassing me.’

  I was very confused as she talked to all the mujahedin. She sounded like a parent apologizing for her toddler’s behaviour in the playground. Everyone looked at me and started to laugh, as if I was some sort of schoolboy who’d got it all wrong. All weapons were dropped and the talking continued. Even the two boys sitting at the back looked on me as some sort of mascot. I was expecting them to come over and ruffle my hair at any moment.

  It was only when we were on our way back to Pakistan that she explained. ‘There was no danger, Nick. The old guy – the one we saw last month?’ She smiled as she thought about the event. ‘He is the only one with the power to have me killed, and he wasn’t there. Those guys at the back were just showing face. Nothing was going to happen.’ She sounded like teacher as she added, ‘It’s not only what you see, Nick. Sometimes what isn’t there is just as important as what is.’

  She might have been right that time, but in a similar situation I would still have done the same. Shame for her that she hadn’t remembered her own lesson.

  I sat down to work out what I wanted to say to Mickey, and the way to say it. I’d already forgotten where I’d put his card, so I got out the 3C, tapped in his name and rang his number.

  ‘Hellooo.’ He was eating by the sound of it.

  ‘Hello, mate, it’s Nick.’

  ‘Oh, so soon.’ He sounded quite surprised. I could hear soft rock in the background and an American voice, just as camp as his, enquiring who was on the phone. His voice became distant. ‘Gary, go and do something useful in the kitchen. It’s the office.’

  Gary, it seemed, took the hint. ‘Sorry about that, he is sooo nosey.’ I could hear drink being poured and a sip being taken.

  ‘Michael, remember what you were saying about Sarah and Jonathan going to the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly where it was? I need it for the report.’

  He took a quick swallow. ‘Yes. Falls Lake.’ He broke into a terrible Southern accent. ‘North Carolina, y’all.’

  ‘Do you have an address, or the contact number? You did say that you had a number, remember? You used it to call her.’

  He laughed. ‘Sarah took it off file when old Jonny boy got his come-uppance.’

  I had reached another dead end.

  Then he added, ‘But I think I can remember most of the number; it was almost the same as my mother’s old one. Tell you what, give me five and I’ll ring you back, OK?’

  ‘Give it three rings, put down, then ring again. I wouldn’t want to pick it up and find I’m talking to her mother or anything like that. OK?’

  ‘Ooh, just like James Bond.’ He giggled. ‘No problem, Nick. Talk soon, byeee.’

  I flicked though the book again. Falls Lake did exist, but it covered a vast area. What a dickhead! Why hadn’t I asked him for more detail when he told me the story? Just as well I wasn’t in the security cell.

  Something was smelling bad. I jumped up and ran into the kitchen. The water had boiled away and I pulled a pan of very hot and smelly black noodles from the stove.

  I couldn’t be arsed to clean it up, just put the pot to one side and turned the cooker off. The phone rang. I walked back into the room, counting. It stopped after three. Good news, I hoped. I let the new call ring twice before picking it up.

  ‘Hellooo, Michael here.’ I could hear Gary singing to himself in the background.

  ‘Hello, mate, any luck?’

  ‘The last four digits are exactly the same as my mother’s old number in Mill Hill. Isn’t that freaky?’

  I really didn’t have an answer for that. I contained my eagerness. ‘Oh, and what was it?’

  ‘Double four six eight.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. You sure that’s all you know?’

  ‘ ’Fraid so, Nick. I was just given the contact number. Sorry.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll let you get on with your evening.’

  ‘OK. I’m here if you need me. Byeee.’

  I looked at my watch. It was about half-past nine – according to my body clock, 2.30 a.m. – and I was starting to feel knackered. In the absence of any noodles, it was soon going to be time to RV with Ronald McDonald, but first I had a phone call to make.

  I rang a London number. A very clear female voice answered immediately. ‘PIN number, please?’ The tone was so precise she sounded like the speaking clock.

  ‘Two four four two, Charlie-Charlie.’

  ‘Please wait.’ The line went dead; five seconds later the voice was back.

  ‘Charlie-Charlie. Details, please.’

  I gave her the same details as Metal Mickey had given me and asked for the address. I could hear the clinking of keys as she entered the details. She checked with me: ‘To confirm. North Carolina, address that ends with call number 4468, perhaps in the vicinity of Falls Lake. It should take approximately thirty minutes. Reference fifty-six, fifty-six. Goodbye.’

  Charlie-Charlie stands for ‘casual contact’. The people in London can work from even the smallest amount of information, and you can inquire via the phone for speed, or ask for a written report, which would give more detail but take longer.

  A phone number or car licence plate can lead to you finding out almost everything there is on record about the contact, from the name of his doctor to the last time and place he used his credit card, and what it was he bought. A Charlie-Charlie was about the only perk of the job; I’d used it a few times when trying to find out about women I wanted to take out. No-one ever asks what you want the information for, and it makes life easier if you know in advance what sort of social life they have, whether they’re married, divorced with kids, or have a monthly champagne bill the size of an average mortgage.

  All I needed this time was an address. These sorts of requests were routine, and wouldn’t mean I had gone against Lynn’s need-to-know policy.

  I walked downstairs. I couldn’t see Wayne anywhere. I got to the car, took the parking ticket off the windscreen and threw it in the back. I was committed west, towards Georgetown on the one-way system. That was fine, and in fact McDonald’s were right. Within five minutes I passed the big yellow arches; the only problem was that I couldn’t park up anywhere. I decided to cruise on M until I found an easier place to stop.

  Dead on thirty minutes later I called London. The speaking clock was back. ‘Reference please.’

  ‘Reference thirty-two, fourteen.’

  There was a gap as the line went dead. She was checking the reference number I’d just given her. All I had to do was subtract my PIN from her reference number. It’s a quick and easy confirmation system for low-level inquiries.

  She came back on line. ‘I have three addresses. One . . .’

  The first two locations were nowhere near Falls Lake. One was in Charlotte, another in Columbia. The next one sounded warmer. ‘The Lodge, Little Lick Creek, Falls Lake. This is now a disconnected line. Do you want the zip codes and user names on any of these?’

  ‘No, no that’s fine. Thank you, that’s all.’ I hung up. I didn’t care who the disconnected line used to belong to. It wouldn’t help me one bit.

  As I drove, I couldn’t get Falls Lake out of my head. I passed a Barnes & Noble bookshop, its neon window sign telling me it was open and selling coffee until 11 p.m. I drove on.

  A 7-Eleven came to my rescue with a sandwich and coffee. I turned the car round and passed the Barnes & Noble again while filling my face. I couldn’t resist it; I parked up, ditched the coffee and finished off the chicken sandwich as I fed another meter.

  I went straight to the reference section and pulled out a small-scale atlas of North Carolina. I found Falls Lake and Little Lick Creek. It sounded like a commune for oral-sex fans.

  North Carolina was only a short flig
ht away. I could get down there maybe tonight, and if it turned out to be a fuck-up I’d be back by tomorrow night. I got out my phone and started to make some enquiries.

  I drove back to the apartment with a ticket for the 0700 from Dulles. I would still check out her bedroom and kitchen, though, just in case.

  7

  I took the slip road off Airport Boulevard, following the signs for Interstate 40. According to the map, if I kept on this highway heading east I would hit the Cliff Benson Beltline, which would take me north through Raleigh and on to the lake.

  The weather was a lot warmer here than in DC and the clouds were dark and brooding, almost tropical. It had been raining quite heavily by the look of the large puddles that lined the road, and the sandy soil was dark with moisture.

  The whole area was going through a massive rebuild. The airport itself had been having a makeover, and a new highway, not yet on the map, was under construction. On each side of me as I drove east, yellow bulldozers were going apeshit, flattening everything in sight to make way for the steel skeletons of yet more buildings. From reading the local information magazine on the flight, I knew that the area was fast becoming ‘science city USA’, with the largest concentration of biochemical, computer and technical research establishments, and Ph.D.s per capita, in the entire USA. It’s amazing the stuff you’ll read when you’re bored shitless on a plane.

  Rows of pristine, glistening, black or silver glass-fronted buildings sat in acres of manicured gardens with lakes and fountains – not at all what I had in mind for the American South after all the redneck jokes I’d heard over the years.

  It took about fifteen minutes to get onto the beltline. I drove clockwise heading north around the city, keeping my eyes peeled for signs for exit ten towards Falls Lake. The new money that this transformation had sucked in was impossible to miss, with grand houses and new business fighting hand-to-hand with the old, and demonstrably winning. Smart new office blocks looked down on decrepit trailer parks strewn with abandoned cars and kids, both black and white, whose arses hung out of their dirty jeans, their parents fucked without the skills needed to take advantage of the new opportunity.

  I got to exit ten in another ten minutes or so and headed north on Forest Road. From the map, I knew that the Falls Lake area covered about 200 square miles. It was a very long and winding waterway, with hundreds of inlets, like the coastline of Norway, just the kind of place you could disappear into.

  After seven miles the road became a single carriageway. Tall firs interspersed with smaller seasonal trees looming on either side. Four more miles and I reached the Falls of Neuse and entered forest proper. The Falls was a small collection of neat little homes made of natural wood or painted white on the eastern side of the lake area. Even here, the new was winning out over the old and rubbing its nose in it. Tracts of land were being carved out of the woods to make way for ‘communities’ of enormous mansions to house the middle classes who were streaming in for the new Gold Rush of high-tech jobs. At the entry point into each community was a twee, shiny sign announcing ‘Carriageways’ or ‘Fairways’, and at each junction a barrage of estate agents’ signs directed buyers to even more land which was up for grabs.

  I headed west on Raven Ridge, driving deeper into the forest. The new was gradually less and less evident, until it was the old that prevailed once more: dilapidated shacks with car wrecks for garden furniture, and rundown stores built of bare breeze-block, with peeling signs advertising bait and beer. I passed trailer homes that looked as if they’d just been dumped twenty or thirty metres off the road, with no paved access, just trampled ground, and no fences to mark their territory, just corrugated iron leaning around the bottom of the trailers to make them look as if they belonged. Outside, washing hung on lines getting even wetter. Inside, probably, were the stars of the Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer shows. Fuck knows what the future held for them, but one thing was for sure: new carriageways would be scything through here within a year or two.

  The only buildings that weren’t falling down or apart were the churches, of which there seemed to be one every mile along the roadside, standing very clean, bright and white. Each projected a different recruiting message on the sort of signboard that cinemas use to advertise their movies. ‘You can’t even write Christmas without Christ’ one said, which was true but strange to see in April. Maybe they liked to think ahead.

  I drove for another twenty minutes past trailers and churches, and now and then the occasional neatly tended graveyard right on the side of the road. I came across a small green sign to Little Lick Creek. It wasn’t the creek itself I was after, but the point at which it entered the lake, and where one of the spurs had the same name. Going by the waterproof hunting map I’d bought, there were two buildings in that area which weren’t accounted for by a symbol on the map legend, so they were probably private houses.

  I turned off the tarmac and headed down a gravel road that was just wide enough for two cars to pass. There was a steep gradient each side, and the forest seemed to be closing in, the trees here even higher and more densely packed.

  A sign chiselled into a slab of grey-painted wood warned, ‘Firearms Strictly Prohibited’. Fifty metres further on, another said, ‘No Alcoholic Beverages’. Soon more friendly signs welcomed me to Falls Lake, and directed me to the carparks and recreational areas and hoped I enjoyed myself – but only if I kept my speed to 25 mph.

  Up ahead, a motorhome as big as a juggernaut was bearing down on me. I noticed a small track that obviously took wheeled traffic, because there were tyre grooves worn down on each side of a wet grassy central strip, but I didn’t have time to get in there. I slowed and pulled over to the side of the road, my car leaning drunkenly to the right. The Winnebago was a massive vehicle, with enough canoes and mountain bikes strapped onto its exterior to equip the US Olympic team, and the family hatchback towed along behind. A wall of spray splashed onto my windscreen as it passed. I didn’t even get a wave of acknowledgement.

  I drove for another kilometre or so through the forest before I came to a large carpark. Crunching and squelching across a mixture of gravel and mud, I pulled up next to a big map in a wooden frame. Pictures around the edge displayed various indigenous birds, turtles, trees and plants, as well as the tariff for the camp site and the inevitable: ‘Enjoy your stay – take only pictures, leave only footprints’. It was possible that I would be taking pictures, but I hoped I would leave no footprints whatsoever.

  Driving on for another hundred metres or so, I caught my first glimpse of Little Lick Creek. It wasn’t quite the picture postcard scene I’d been expecting. Tall ranks of firs seemed to have marched right to the lake’s edge. The water was smooth and as dark as the clouds it mirrored, like the smoked glass of a Raleigh office block. Maybe when the sun was out the area was idyllic, but just now, especially with the trees so claustrophobically close to the water, the atmosphere was more like the brooding menace of a penitentiary.

  Over on the other side, 500 metres away and on higher, more undulating ground, sat two houses. They were the ones I wanted to have a look at.

  A dozen or so vehicles were already in the carpark, mostly clustered around a wooden boat shed on the lake’s edge which had been designed to look like a fort. Canoes and rowing boats were lined up near it in the water, plus the statutory Coke machine and another selling chocolate bars. I’d watched a documentary once which claimed that the Coca-Cola company was so powerful in the US that it had even got a president into power in the 1960s. I wondered how their mission statement compared with Ronald McDonald’s. It certainly seems that no matter where you are in the world you will always be able to get a Coke; I’d even been offered one by a six-year-old on a mountainside in Nepal. Out trekking with Sarah in the middle of nowhere, a kid no older than eight came along the track with a tin bucket filled with water and about six battered cans of Coke inside, trying to sell them to the walkers as they made their way up the mountain. Sarah gave him some money but refused th
e Coke. She had this hang-up about cultures being contaminated by the West and spent the next hour bumping her gums about it. Me? I was thirsty and just wished he’d had Diet instead of Regular.

  As I drove past the fort I could see that it was manned by two young lads lounging in the shadows, who didn’t look as if they were coming out unless they had to.

  At the far end of the carpark was a picnic area with built-in grills and a wooden canopy covering the seating. A family barbecue was underway; a bit early in the season, but they were having fun anyway. Granny and Grandad, sons, daughters and grandchildren all filling their faces.

  Beyond it I could see the tops of brightly coloured, family-sized tents. It looked as if each pitch was surrounded by its own individual little coppice. I turned the car through a 180, so I was facing back the way I’d come, and drove towards the toilet block. I nosey-parked between two other cars, front against the toilet block wall, back to the lake.

  Picking up the binos and bird book I’d bought at the tourist shop along with my maps, I got out of the car and locked up. Straight away I was hit by the humidity; having air-conditioning in a car almost makes you forget the reason you turned it on in the first place.

  Everyone seemed to be having a giggle in the barbecue area. A boom-box was playing some Latino rap, and even Granny was dancing rapper style with the kids. In the car to my right were a couple of senior citizens who’d no doubt driven for hours to get here, parked up at the lake and stayed in the car to eat sandwiches with the air-conditioning going full blast and their hats still on.

  I wandered down towards the boat shed, keeping an eye on the spur at the other side of the creek. The larger house of the two was on the left, with a gap of maybe 100 to 120 metres between them. There was no movement around either.