Jon Evans - Dark Places

For Steve it was an extraordinarily long speech. When he finished the rest of us wore tentative smiles to match Steve's grin. He was right. Morgan knew us, and that might be a problem; but we knew Morgan, and that was our secret weapon.

"I hear the ring of truth there," Hallam said.

"I'm convinced," Nicole agreed.

"Righto," Lawrence said. "Enough of this planning nonsense. I always hated it anyway. Shall we go do a little recco then?"

We pulled on our hiking boots, bought some water, donned our hats, slathered on sunscreen, shouldered our day packs, and began to hike up the Todra Gorge. We weren't going to go all the way up. Just high enough to find the perfect spot for an ambush. The perfect place to kill a man.

"Wish I had time to do some climbing," Hallam said wistfully as we set out, looking up at the line of climbers crawling up the cliff face opposite to the hotels. "Precious little of that in England. Some indoor walls, some bouldering, but it's not the same."

"Maybe you could borrow some gear day after tomorrow when it's all over," I said, but I doubted it. I thought that when it was all over we would all want to simply get the hell out of Dodge and let our memories slowly heal over the mental scars.

We moved up the riverbed, dry gravel occasionally marked by a pool of water. Most of the gorge-trekkers had already left, and we had the trail to ourselves. The intense Sahara sun beat down on us and we wrapped spare T-shirts around our necks to protect them. An anorexic creek trickled slowly down from the west end of the gorge, and the trail wandered drunkenly from one bank to the other. On either side were five-hundred-foot walls of red rock, scored into layers like rake marks on sand, each layer ten or twenty feet deep, the lines dipping and swaying like waves.

After about an hour the trail selected the north side of the gorge, stuck with it, and began to rise away from the base. The slopes had changed from sheer to steep but navigable. Goatherds who looked as if they had just stepped out of the fourteenth century coaxed their nimble herds down the sides of the gorge to drink at the river. Another half-hour later we passed an old man with leather skin and black teeth leading a dozen camels to a pool of water. We gave the vile and violent creatures a wide berth.

A little while after that the edges of the gorge began to close back in towards one another, as if magnetically attracted. The trail was still wide, about twenty feet, but the rock face to the right and plunge to the left gradually became steeper and steeper, and the trail grew littered with boulders. I wondered how the boulders got here. Did they fall from above? Or were they deposited by the flash floods that thundered down the Gorge once or twice each year?

We moved more slowly now. Steve detached his Walkman. This was it; this was the kill zone. We examined the boulders we passed, the views up and down the trail, the cliff face beneath us. Looking for the perfect spot to take a man by surprise and throw him over the edge.

We found it about twenty minutes' walk from where the walls grew sheer. About a two-hour walk from the hotel. The trail bent to the left, on a crag which overhung the gorge floor far below, went straight for about fifty feet, and then bent back to the right. The middle of this boomerang-shaped section of trail was decorated by a few enormous boulders. It was ideal. From the ends of that fifty-foot stretch we could see for a long way up and down the trail, but what went on in the middle would be invisible to other trekkers. And it was a hundred sheer feet down to the canyon floor.

We would keep an eye for Morgan from there and wait for him to arrive. Two or three of us would hide behind one of the boulders as he walked past, and as he reached the middle of that projecting stretch, the others would step out at the other end, and his path would be blocked on both sides. It would all be over with in a hurry.

That was the plan.

We returned to the Hotel des Roches for dinner.

"They need an extra character in their name," Lawrence said as he joined Steve and I at our table, in a corner distant from the other diners. "Hotel des Roaches. They seem to expect me to support a tribe of thousands while I'm here. I'm not ready for that kind of responsibility. I'm not a family man."

"Maybe we could set up a Roach Refugee Camp," I suggested. "Rwanda-style. Roaches immigrate — but they don't emigrate!"

"That's a sick joke," Steve said seriously, and for a moment he had me, but then his smile returned and he said "Don't make me approach the bloody UN High Commission on Roach Refugees. They'll up and form a bloody working subcommittee, see if they don't."

"They might even issue a strongly worded press release," Hallam added, joining us. "A fact-finding tour sponsored by celebrity American roaches will be announced."

"Richard Gere will appear on the Oscars asking us all for a moment of silence for the roaches all over the world… " I said. "Where's Nicole?"

"Taking another shower." He shrugged. "What's for dinner?"

"Depends on how many of the menu items are actually available," Lawrence said.

"Cor, we're not in bloody Togo here," Steve said. "Morocco's nearly halfway civilized. I reckon the goods are pretty much as advertised."

"Your optimism does you credit," Lawrence said. "Unfortunately your judgement does the reverse. Hey, that's not just you, that's Australia as a whole. I've got myself a defining proverb there."

"Looks like eight different varieties of couscous," Hallam said, putting down the menu. "No camel though. Had rather a hankering for it."

"We don't eat camels," I said. "Camels eat us. I think they're the dominant species."

The waiter came by and we all ordered vegetable stew on couscous with bread and Cokes. Hallam ordered one for Nicole as well. None of us was vegetarian but we all shied away from meat when traveling in the Third World. Across the room a small group of fresh-faced young backpackers dined on lamb and goat, risking a tomorrow spent sweating and huddling within thirty feet of a toilet instead of trekking up the gorge. Ironically the five of us were probably more impervious to salmonella or whatever the meat might carry, as we were all heavily traveled, armed with cast-iron stomachs full of veteran kill-all-intruders bacteria recruited from at least five continents. But along with resistance to sickness came an increased reluctance to risk suffering it again.

We chatted and smoked for maybe twenty minutes. Nicole didn't arrive. She was still absent when the food came. "I'll go get her," Hallam said. "Probably fell asleep in the tub or something." But he didn't sound entirely convinced — that wasn't like her — and he left the room more quickly than was absolutely necessary. We began to eat.

Hallam came back about a minute later and after one look at his distraught face I forgot all about eating. He rushed up to us and dropped the scrap of paper held in his hand on to the table. He tried to say something but no words came out, just a yelp, like a dog that has been stepped on. I'd never seen him like this. Cool, competent, calm Hallam had been replaced by animal panic.

I looked at the paper even though I already knew in my gut what had happened. A familiar scrawl.

HALLAM OLD BOY YOUR WIFE LOOKS VERY PRETTY NAKED WANT TO SEE HER AGAIN? COME TO THAT PLACE IN THE GORGE YOU KNOW THE ONE YOU PICKED OUT FOR ME TODAY RIGHT NOW, NO WAITING BRING YOUR FRIENDS

TA

"He's here," Hallam managed at last. "He's got her. We have to go."

"Oh, no," Lawrence breathed, reading the note, and he stood up. As did Steve.

I remained in my chair. I needed to think. There was no time to think but I needed to. Sometimes don't think, do is exactly what the situation calls for. But this time, I could tell, it called for don't do, think.