Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

‘You seem very calm about all this, Deena. Aren’t you scared?’

‘I was when they brought me here. Then they put this bowl in the room.’

Sabrina looked. It was a willow pattern soup bowl, half full of chopped leaves. ‘Bhang?’

‘I chew enough to keep from being afraid.’

Sabrina had heard of that. There were people in Latin America who did it all the time, they chewed tiny pieces of marijuana leaf, and left just enough time between chews to maintain a near-normal existence, minus the anxieties.

‘The old woman and the boy took so much they have been asleep all day,’ Deena said.

‘How long have they been here?’

‘Since the day before yesterday, both of them. Hafi brought them when he took over this place. The boy was taken from the place where he worked, a field ten kilometres from here. The woman was asleep on a back porch in Jallapur when they snatched her. They brought her here and for several hours she was kept out in the main part of the building. This is a temple, very special, a private family place of worship.’

‘And the bandits just took it over?’

‘They killed the family, the old woman said. They were out there worshipping, men, women and children, and Hafi simply walked in and shot them. The bodies were kept in this room until it was dark.’

That explained the stink of blood and corruption, Sabrina thought.

‘Then they were taken away and the old woman and the boy were thrown in here.’ Deena leaned closer to Sabrina. ‘Don’t you wonder what they plan to do with us?’

‘I was getting up the courage to ask. Hafi thinks I’m a spy, or he says he does. Does that mean I get treated any worse than anybody else?’

‘Hafi treats all his captives the same,’ Deena said. ‘Everyone in this part of the country knows what to expect when they see him draw up in town in his big red jeep. He wants money. All the money a town can raise.’

‘How are they persuaded to hand it over?’

‘He brings persuasion with him. Always it is one of his captives, and always a person who does not come from the town Hafi wishes to rob. Hafi tells the people, “Look, nobody in your town has been hurt. Not yet. But see what will happen if I do not have the money I demand in one hour’s time.” And he puts the captive in the middle of the road and shoots him or her through the head.’

Sabrina was already framing plans to get out of there. Scope was limited by the certainty that she couldn’t leave these others behind.

‘Do you want a piece of bhang?’ Deena said.

‘No, thanks. What I need is a cup of coffee. I always think better with a cappuccino beside me.’

Two-thirds of the complication was removed an hour later, when the henchmen who abducted Sabrina came into the room and took away the old woman and the young man.

‘They will be robbing two towns,’ Deena said, chewing slowly on a chunk of leaf.

For a time Sabrina was shocked and distracted by the heartlessness of it, the shameful squandering of life. After a while her sense of self-preservation reasserted itself.

‘Deena, do you know how many men are here with Hafi?’

‘Only those two. His gang is very big, so big he calls it a movement. But when he’s out raising money, it is just him and those two.’

‘So you and I are here alone.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Right. Do me a favour.’

‘Mm?’

‘Lay off the leaf. We’ll have work to do.’

Dr Arberry sent a Land-Rover to pick up Mike, Ram and Lenny. The driver was Nisar, an old man with thick-lensed spectacles who drove with his face pushed over the wheel, as if he needed to be as close to the windscreen as possible. Nisar drove erratically but he appeared to be comfortable with the narrow, twisting roads. He swung the vehicle around blind bends with the certainty of a man who knew exactly what to expect.

‘Back to first things,’ Lenny said in the rumbling darkness, watching the cones of the headlights cut into the night. He was squeezed between Mike and Ram, holding on to the back of the front seats for support. ‘This was my life at the start of my career.’

‘Who with?’ Ram said.

‘The DEA. Riding around Colombia in jeeps and jalopies at dead of night, watching out for bad guys.’

‘Except you didn’t use headlights,’ Mike said.

‘Right. We had night-vision helmets. Blanketed engines, too. The element of surprise. We ran over more druggies than we arrested.’

‘Around here,’ Ram said, ‘the bandits operating the drug convoys are the people with the hi-tech. The police caught a straggler off the end of a convoy last month and when they searched his saddlebags he had a night scope, laser-sighted pistol, secure-band radio and a Walkman.’

Nisar turned sharply down a gravelled road flanked by tall mature trees draped with moss. A hundred metres along there was an ornamental iron fence with a cultivated lawn behind it. In the distance they could see the house, a replica of a Southern plantation mansion, pure white, with a tall pillared porch and curved wings on either side.

‘I get the impression Dr Arberry is made of money,’ Lenny said. ‘Do you know him, Ram?’

‘We’re acquainted. He’s loaned me books from time to time. He’s direct, balanced, incredibly focused on his work. He even looks right for the part, like Gregory Peck maybe thirty years ago.’

They passed through tall electrically-operated gates and the driver accelerated up the wide, red-chip drive to the front of the floodlit house. He braked as if it was an emergency, throwing his passengers forward. As they scrambled out, a deep, Boston-tinted voice greeted them.

‘Gentlemen. You survived the journey. Magnificent.’

Simon Arberry stepped to the front of the porch. He was tall and lean, with clipped sandy hair that looked nearly blond against his tan. The impression of healthy middle age was enhanced by his white linen suit and pale blue open-necked shirt. Ram was dead right, Mike thought. It was like meeting a fiftyish Gregory Peck.

Ram made the introductions and Arberry led them inside. The hallway resembled the foyer of a good hotel: small black and white chequerboard tiles on the floor, dark green silk and hessian drapes, oak-panelled doors with brass fittings. There was even an ebony reproduction of Praxiteles’ Wrestlers , mounted on a plinth by the door to the drawing room.

‘This is where I fire up my enthusiasms,’ Arberry said, showing them in. ‘It’s also my communications centre.’

The room was big enough to accommodate an ordinary bungalow, chimneys and all. One wall was fitted from floor to ceiling with bookshelves; on the opposite side of the room, on either side of the Adam-style fireplace, fine rosewood tables and cedar shelves held a range of electronic equipment – radio transmitters, receivers, DAT and reel-to-reel recorders and twin CD burners – all apparently on standby. There were also two satellite-tuned TV sets with the sound turned down.

With glasses of dry sherry, poured by an Indian in immaculate English butler’s livery, the visitors listened as Simon Arberry bemoaned the death of his friend, Reverend Alex Young.

‘He called me a visionary,’ Arberry said, ‘but I’ll tell you something, I never had a tenth his insight or his dedication to these people. With anything he could scrape together, any meagre sums of money or threadbare resources, he would conjure a way of benefiting his flock. Time and again I watched him put together improvements to existing resources with his bare hands. And he was eternally involved, he never stood back.’

‘Your own commitment to community health and welfare can’t be played down,’ Ram said. ‘Reverend Young talked a great deal about your schemes, the facilities you’ve set in place, the plans you have …’