Glow (13 page)

The guy looks around as if Lacebark mercenaries might suddenly come rappelling down an artificial cliff face. ‘I can’t talk to you.’

‘Well – Martin, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Martin, you don’t have to talk to us,’ says Fourpetal. ‘We can just leave. And then you can decide whether or not to call your boss and tell him we were here, and I expect you probably won’t, since a meeting like this is hard to explain even if it’s no fault of your own, but either way we will be gone long before one of your white vans has time to come here and gulp us down. That can happen. But considering I saved your life once, I think a reasonable code of ethics might say that you’re under some obligation to help us with the answers to a few innocuous questions.’

‘What do you mean, saved my life?’

‘That night at the brothel in Holborn. When that bouncer pulled a knife on you because of what you made that Latvian girl do. No, Martin, I’m not saying he would have murdered you for certain, but I know you would have ended up in hospital with a lot of perforations and explaining to do if I hadn’t talked him down.’ Martin’s mouth just hangs open. ‘Bloody hell, you’re not telling me you don’t even remember?’ Fourpetal continues. ‘Were you really that pickled?’ Raf has to stop himself from smiling: Fourpetal is a prick but he’s really good at this. In McDonald’s on Monday he didn’t seem nearly so confident, and perhaps the difference here is that he finds something nourishing in Martin’s obvious discomfort.

‘I . . . don’t remember any of that.’

‘Well, that might be for the best, actually. But, Martin, the main thing is, you have a chance to return the favour now. Just help us understand what we’ve got ourselves into.’

‘If they found out I’ve told you anything . . .’

‘They won’t. How would they?’

Martin sighs and then walks over to a row of wooden bleachers. Raf and Fourpetal sit down beside him. ‘I honestly don’t even know that much,’ he says.

‘Fine. But maybe you can start by telling us why you’re involved in all this. Aren’t you a lithium man? There’s no lithium in Burma.’

‘There is, actually,’ Martin says. ‘A bit. But this isn’t about that.’ He didn’t realise it at the time, he explains, but his career in the lithium sector came to an end one day in January about twenty-five thousand feet above the southern hallux of the Hindu Kush. Martin was on his laptop but all three of the bodyguards were at the Cessna’s windows watching the dawn enfire the snow like paraffin sluicing through the valleys. In a little while they would cross the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan and by seven o’clock local time they were supposed to have landed in Quetta, where Martin was going to make a last, urgent, probably hopeless attempt to convince officials from the Balochistan provincial government that the exploration licence for lithium deposits north of the city should go to Lacebark instead of a newly established Kernon Whitmire subsidiary called Adosh Mining Corporation.

He hadn’t slept or eaten since they stopped in Odessa to refuel, so by now he was hungry and bored and could already feel against his eyeballs the first crinkly touch of the hundred-metre roll of cling film that jet lag was going to wrap around his head today. All his life he’d carried an alarm clock in his belly like the crocodile in
Peter Pan –
boring about bedtimes, incapable of staying up late, clicking awake at six every day even back when he was at Oxford – but like an idiot he’d let himself take a job that obliged him to fly thousands of miles a year, and he was convinced it was wearing out his heart. In London it would only be coming up to two in the morning. Supposedly his jet lag would get even worse if he thought about that too much. But it was impossible to keep London out of his mind. Back at City Airport, when the plane was already gaining speed on the runway, he had got a call from his wife about his stepson.

‘You have to come home,’ she’d said, damp-voiced.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Dylan’s at the police station.’

At first Martin charitably assumed that the sixteen-year-old had been in a bicycle accident or something. ‘Is he hurt?’

‘No, no, they came to the house and took him away.’

‘Jesus, why?’

‘It’s so awful! Where are you?’

He felt the Cessna lift into the air. ‘On the plane. I’m going to lose you in a second.’

‘. . . have to . . . home!’ Already the signal was dropping as they soared out of reception range.

‘Darling, I’m sure it’s all a mistake – I’ll talk to you when I land!’

Actually, Martin wasn’t sure it was all a mistake. For a while now, in fact, he’d been firmly expecting to find out one way or another that Dylan was up to something criminal. Almost every day of the recent school holidays he had got up at six to see light still creeping out from under the door of the boy’s bedroom. That light always made him uneasy. Sometimes he wanted to knock but he knew it would start an argument. He paid the mortgage on this house every month and yet here inside it was this shady separatist zone where he couldn’t set foot, like one of the semi-autonomous Third World slums that were too dangerous even for the riot squads; his own fault for falling in love with a woman who was already a divorced mother by the time she was twenty-seven. Most likely, he decided, Dylan was involved somehow in selling drugs. He’d read in the paper recently about new pills coming in from China. When they landed in Odessa he couldn’t get a GSM connection, so by the time they were over Afghanistan he was desperate to get back on the ground and have a chance to talk to his wife again.

But then one of the pilots, a Frenchman, came out from the cockpit. ‘We’re changing course.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Instructions from London.’ Martin’s employer, unlike his wife, had the privilege of contacting the plane in flight.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Sukkur.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘About four hundred kilometres south-east of Quetta.’

‘But my meeting with the MMD is at lunchtime.’ And Lacebark were spending a ludicrous amount of money to haul his mouth to that meeting. There wouldn’t be another chance: strictly speaking the committee was supposed to have concluded its deliberations the previous day.

The pilot shrugged. ‘They say they’ll call you to explain as soon as you have reception on the ground.’

‘Don’t we have a flight plan we have to keep to?’

‘They’ll pay someone off.’

They descended towards Sukkur’s single short runway over bland fields of cotton and rice and jute. On their right was the Indus, which new Indian dams and a cold winter had shrunk down inside its grey banks like a consumptive in a baggy old suit. As the Cessna’s wheels hit the tarmac, Martin turned his phone back on, waited for it to negotiate a connection to a Pakistani provider called Telenor, and called his boss in London. He didn’t want to speak to his wife until he could tell her for certain how soon he’d be back.

‘Can you please tell me what I’m doing here?’

‘Harenberg needs someone in Khairpur right away and no one could get a flight in time. Luckily you were already in the air.’

‘What about the MMD?’

‘We weren’t going to get that licence anyway. And Harenberg is saying this is bigger than your MMD meeting.’

‘What does he mean?’

‘There’s a five-seater van and a driver waiting for you at the terminal. You need to get to the police station on Faujdari Road in Khairpur – it’s about twenty miles south of Sukkur. They’re expecting you. There’s a guy in a holding cell there. They’re going to release him into your custody. Lock him in the back of the van and don’t let him out of your sight until Bezant can get there.’

‘What? Holding cell?’ The plane slowed to a halt and Martin stood up to get his suitcase down from the locker. ‘How long is that going to take?’

‘Maybe twenty-four hours.’

‘I need to get back to London.’

‘We’ll take care of everything at this end.’

‘No, I’ve got a . . . family thing. I really need to get back.’

‘Look, Martin, we didn’t divert the plane because Bezant needed you in Khairpur, all right? We diverted the plane because Bezant needed three trained security guys in Khairpur and you happened to be on the plane with them. But at least you’ll be there to make sure nothing gets ballsed up too badly. Twenty-four hours maximum, then you can go back.’

‘So who’s the guy in the holding cell?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You won’t talk to him, he won’t talk to you.’

‘Is he Pakistani?’

‘He’s Myanmar.’

‘How did he end up in Khairpur?’

‘Apparently there are lots of Muslims from Myanmar in south-east Pakistan. Whoever he is, he has friends there. He was hiding out for a few nights on his way to the coast. The house got raided for something completely unrelated and the police picked him up. Unlucky sod. That’s all I know.’

Even on the short walk to the terminal building the three bodyguards formed a protective triangle around Martin and the pilots. Grateful that in small planes and small airports they didn’t find it necessary to shout at you about your mobile phone every thirty seconds, Martin finally had a chance to call his wife when they were queuing to get their passports checked. She started sobbing again when she heard his voice but after a while he got her to explain it all. ‘The police told me Dylan put up this website where . . . Apparently there are these companies in Brazil . . . You pay them three hundred pounds and they’ll make a film for you with two girls. And you can have extra girls in it for another hundred pounds each on top of that. You can tell them exactly what you want the girls to do. Dylan commissioned one of the films and then sold downloads on his website. And he sold so many he commissioned three more films. But the police say some of the girls don’t look like they’re eighteen.’

‘But he didn’t make the films?’

‘No, but he was selling them from his own server, so legally—’

‘There’s lots of glossy porn for free on the internet – I don’t understand how he was making any money.’

‘It’s because of what the girls did.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I could only watch about a minute of the video before I . . .’

Martin waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. There was something about the long silence on the line, like a redacted memory, that made him recall that grim night at the brothel after the Christmas party, and that blonde girl from Eastern Europe. He knew his wife’s mother would tell her that this never would have happened if the man of the house hadn’t been away on Lacebark trips so often, and perhaps that was right, but then by what mechanism, exactly, would Martin’s presence have imprinted on his stepson a virtuous code of behaviour towards young foreign women? From a business point of view, he had to admit that the boy’s model was pretty shrewd. You could make a lot of money from the arbitrage of sexual dignity. If it was any other type of service for which Dylan had established himself as a middleman or outsourcer he probably would have been nominated for some sort of Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Martin thought again of that seditious glow under the door. The police would have gone into the boy’s little
favela
to take away his computer, he realised.

‘You have to come back,’ his wife said. ‘I can’t handle this on my own.’

‘Darling, as soon as I can. Lacebark won’t take me home until this time tomorrow.’

‘Can’t you just get on a commercial flight?’

‘They don’t fly to London from here.’

‘Martin, for God’s sake, our son is in prison! They’re holding him for twenty-four hours and after that he’ll get out on police bail and then something about a magistrate . . .’ She broke down. He told her he’d talk to her in the morning and that he loved her and that she should get some sleep.

Outside the terminal, the pilots hailed a taxi to take them to a cheap hotel in town, while Martin and the bodyguards looked around for the van they’d been promised. After several minutes it dawned on them that it had been parked right in front of them all along and the bearded driver had even been waving from the front seat, but they hadn’t taken any notice because they were expecting something in dirty white or perhaps metallic black. Instead, every inch of this van was painted like the world’s gaudiest Victorian fairground carousel in turquoise and red and orange and gold, with a mural on the side of Hercules fighting a lion inside a spiral of butterflies and flowers and Arabic calligraphy, as well as heart-shaped cut-outs over the tail lights and beaded whirligigs on the hubcaps and tinselly fringes hanging from the mudguards and a panelled mosaic across the rear doors. For a moment Martin wondered if one of Lacebark’s local fixers had made a comical error, and then realised that on the roads of southern Pakistan this would be a lot less conspicuous than a well-maintained American SUV. Nonetheless, when all four of them got inside and the driver set off for the highway, he thought they must look as if they were performing in some sort of West End musical about a gay psychedelic pop band touring with their guru. On the narrow barrage bridge over the Indus they dodged past scooters and rickshaws and two-wheeled donkey carts, and the driver remarked in his laboured English that if you watched the water you could often see dolphins, which then led him by word association to a long unsolicited account of the recent triumphs of the Karachi Dolphins cricket team.