Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

Kaja jerked away from the barrel, and Tony cackled with amusement.

‘Are you ready for the wedding, Kaja? Ready to thaw?’

She smelt the stench of sulphur. The driver had opened the door, watched Kaja with indifference, pointed a short-barrelled gun at her. Even here in the car, ten metres from the edge of the crater, she could feel the overwhelming heat. She didn’t move. The black man leaned in and grasped her arm. She let him pull her without offering any resistance, just made sure she was heavy enough for him to be off balance, so that when she suddenly bounded out he would be caught by surprise. The man was amazingly slight and probably a bit shorter than she was. She struck with her elbow. Knowing it was much more powerful than a fist. Knowing that the neck, the temple, the nose were good targets. The elbow hit something with a crunch, the man fell and dropped his weapon. Kaja lifted her foot. She had learned that the most effective way to neutralise a person on the ground was to trample on the thigh. The combination of a full-bodied stamp from the top and the pressure from the ground underneath will immediately cause such widespread bleeding to the thigh muscles that the person will be rendered incapable of pursuit. The alternative is to stamp on the chest and neck with potentially fatal consequences. She had her eyes fixed on the exposed neck when the moonlight fell on the man’s face. She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He couldn’t have been older than Even.

Then she felt arms enclosing her from behind, her own arms forced into her sides and the air from her lungs expelled as she was lifted off the ground with her legs kicking helplessly. Tony’s voice close to her ear sounded cheerful. ‘Good, Kaja. Passion. You want to live. I’ll make sure his wages are docked, I promise you.’

The boy on the ground in front of her got to his feet and grabbed his weapon. The indifference was gone now; a white fury shone in his eyes.

Tony pressed her hands together behind her back and she felt thin plastic ties being tightened around her wrists.

‘So,’ said Tony. ‘May I ask you to be Lene’s maid of honour, froken Solness?’

And now – at last – it came. The panic. It emptied her brain of all else, rendered everything blank, clean, cruel. Easy. She screamed.

Kaja stood at the edge looking down. The scorching air rose, hit her face like a hot breeze. The poisonous smoke had already made her dizzy, but perhaps that was just the tremulous air blurring her vision, making the lava quiver, down there in the abyss where it shone with tinges of yellow and red. A strand of hair fell into her face, but her hands were bound behind her back with the plastic ties. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Lene Galtung who, Kaja assumed, must have been drugged from the way she stood staring in front of her like a sleepwalker. A white-clad, living corpse with only frost and wasteland within. A shop dummy dressed as a bride in the window of a ropery.

Tony was right behind them. She felt his hand on the small of her back.

‘Do you take the man at your side and promise to love, honour and respect him for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health…’ he whispered.

This wasn’t out of cruelty, he had explained. It was just so practical. There wouldn’t be a trace left of them. Barely a question. People in the Congo go missing every day.

‘I hereby declare you married.’

Kaja mumbled a prayer. She imagined it was a prayer. Until she heard the words: ‘… because it is impossible for me and the person I want to have to be together.’

The words from Even’s farewell note.

A car engine roared in a low gear with headlamps scanning the skies. The Range Rover appeared on the other side of the crater.

‘And there are the others,’ Tony said. ‘Wave goodbye, there’s good girls.’

Harry didn’t know what sight would greet him when they turned onto the plateau by the crater. Kinzonzi had said that, apart from the girls, Mister Tony had only his chauffeur with him. But that he and Mister Tony were armed with automatic weapons.

Before they reached the top Harry had offered Saul the chance to be dropped off, but he had declined. ‘I have no family left, Harry. Maybe it is true that you are on the side of the angels. Anyway, you paid for the whole day.’

They skidded to a halt.

The headlights pointed across the crater, to the clutch of three standing on the edge. Then they disappeared in a cloud, but Harry had seen them and already summed up the situation: one man with a short-barrelled gun behind the three of them. One parked Range Rover. And no time. Then the cloud wafted past and Harry saw that Tony and the other man were shielding their eyes as they watched the car, as though expecting something.

‘Switch off the engine,’ Harry said from the back seat, resting the Marklin on the front seat. ‘But leave the lights on.’

Saul did as instructed.

The man in camouflage knelt down with the gun to his shoulder and took aim.

‘Flash the lights a couple of times,’ Harry said, putting his eye to the sights. ‘They’re waiting for some signal or other.’

Harry squeezed his left eye shut. Closed out half the world. Closed out the wan faces, the fact that Kaja was there, that Lene was there with bulging cheeks and shock-blackened eyes, that these seconds counted. Closed out the turquoise eyes examining him as he said the words: ‘I swear.’ Closed out the popping sound of a shot that told him they had sent the wrong signal, closed out the clunk as the bullet hit the car body, followed by another thud. Closed out everything that did not concern the light refraction on the windscreen, the light refraction in the quivering heat above the crater, the bullet’s probable deviation to the right, the same way the clouds of steam were drifting. He knew that now he was being sustained by one thing: adrenalin. Knew the effect of the natural stimulant would be short. It could wear off at any second. But as long as his heart was still supplying blood to the brain, it was the second he needed. For the brain is a fantastic computer. Tony Leike’s head was half hidden by Lene’s, but it was a little higher.

Harry aimed at Kaja’s pointed teeth. Moved to the gleaming ball between Lene’s lips. Moved the sights up higher. No fine-tuning. Chance. Place your bets, last race.

A cloud of steam was coming from the left.

Soon they would be enshrouded in it, and as if he had been granted a second of visual clarity, Harry saw it: that when the cloud had passed no one would be standing there any longer. Harry pressed the trigger. Saw Kaja blink above the cross on the sights.

I swear.

He was doomed. At last.

The inside of the car felt as if it would explode with the sound; his shoulder as if it would be knocked out of joint. There was a small, frostwhite perforation in the windscreen. The blood-red cloud covered everything on the other side of the crater. Harry took a deep, tremulous breath and waited.

Harry was lying on his back, floating. floating away. Sinking into Lake Kivu while the blood, his and that of others, mingled with the lake’s, became one, disappeared in the universe’s great sleep, and the stars above him were extinguished in the cold, black water. Peace in the depths, silence, nothingness. Until he resurfaced in a bubble of methane gas, a night-blue corpse with Guinea worm-infected flesh that seethed and churned beneath the skin. And he had to get out of Lake Kivu to live. To wait.

Harry opened his eyes. He could see the hotel balcony above him. He rolled onto his side and swam the few metres to the shore. Rose from the water.