Evolution of Fear Read Online Free Page B

door and pulled it over his head.
    Not for the first time he wondered about this place he’d come to know so well. Hints of its recent past were everywhere. The half-used boxes of ammunition under the counter, the shredded railway sleepers in the buttressed shed outside, old copies of the South African Sunday Times yellowing in the coal scuttle, cupboards stocked with enough lamb stew and tuna to last a year. And now a dead man outside the front door.
    He breathed, closed his eyes a moment. Then he walked to the bookshelf, pulled out an old hardback volume of Macbeth , stuffed it into his jacket pocket, killed the lamp and walked out the door for the last time.
    Clay set off down the footpath at a run, the wind at his back, the rain gusting in sheets that flayed across the open blufflands, the gorse shivering with each whip of the lash. The car couldn’t be far. He was going to find it and put as much time and distance between himself and this place as he could.
    As he ran, the telephone conversation of earlier that day replayed itself in his mind, the words finding cadence with his footfall.
    Crowbar had answered first ring.
    ‘It’s me, broer .’
    ‘I told you to keep quiet,’ Crowbar – Koevoet in Afrikaans – had said. He’d sounded drunk.
    Clay switched to the language of his childhood. ‘I haven’t heard from you.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘Town.’
    ‘ Kak , Straker. I fokken told you–’
    Clay cut him off. ‘Have you heard from Rania?’
    Silence, and then: ‘No. No, I haven’t. But there have been–’
    ‘What, Koevoet? Have been what?’
    ‘Articles in the paper. Written by Lise Moulinbecq. That’s her alias, isn’t it?’
    He’d told her to keep quiet, stay hidden. Irony flooded through him, that particularly brutal nausea. ‘What articles?’
    ‘Something about Cyprus. Some sort of scam involving stolen antiquities.’
    ‘Get me out, Koevoet.’
    ‘Look, Straker.’ Crowbar coughed, deep and bronchial. ‘I have connections in the police. They don’t know who plugged Medved and his two thugs, but they know it happened in your hotel room. They want you for questioning.’
    Killing Rex Medved had been the first right thing Clay had done in a long time, the first unselfish thing. But even as he’d pulled the trigger, something inside him had been pulling the other way, that promise he had made to himself a decade ago, after he’d fled the war, the insanity of a country tearing itself apart: no more killing. And then, deep in the wilds of Yemen, just five months ago, his day of reckoning had come. He’d met Rania. And that night when he’d killed Medved, it had been for something that mattered. It had been for her, for all those people in Yemen that Medved had screwed over, the dead kids, all the poisoned villagers whose minutes and hours and years had been chewed up and shit out into the open sewer of exploitation.
    ‘Be patient, broer ,’ said Crowbar. ‘It’s going cold.’
    ‘Cold? A hundred thousand pounds cold?’
    Crowbar laughed. ‘Not anymore, broer . Medved’s sister raised the reward to a million, just last week. And that’s just for information. She’s offering twice that for the hit, ja .’
    Two million pounds. Enough to change a life: pay debts, buy freedom, solve problems. It changed everything, for him and for Rania, raised risk to the sixth power.
    ‘Congratulations, Straker. You’re finally worth something,’ slurred Crowbar. ‘If it wasn’t for this new job in Angola, might even take it on myself.’
    After all these years, Crowbar was going back to Africa, this time to fight someone else’s war. As he’d said on the drive down to Cornwall, he didn’t know how to do anything else, and wouldn’t want to if he did. He’d even tried to recruit Clay into ‘The Company’ as he’d called it.
    Clay heard Crowbar light a smoke and exhale.
    ‘This Medved woman is not the kind of person you want to get mixed up with, mind.’ The clink of glass,