Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘He!’ scoffed Therese, shaking her head at the absurdity of entrusting such work to a man. ‘Show me.’

‘I’m fine,’ insisted Rebecca. ‘I just need to speak to Pierre.’

‘But I-’

‘Please, Therese. Come round tomorrow if you like. Change my bandages then. But right now I need to speak to Pierre.’

She nodded and went inside. Pierre emerged almost at once, as though he’d been standing there listening. He cut a coin-sized slice from a stick of manioc with his penknife, ate it off the stubby blade. ‘We look in the forest this afternoon. Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘Thanks anyway.’

‘Of course. Whatever we can do.’

‘Listen, Pierre…’ She hesitated, uncertain how to approach this without alerting him to the kidnap. ‘Did you hear that I’ve offered a reward for whoever finds Adam and Emilia?’

‘Sure. Everyone has heard.’ He flashed her a grin. ‘Maybe I’ll win it myself, eh?’

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t have that much cash with me. And it’s proving a nightmare to arrange. So I was wondering…’

‘You want me to provide it?’ He blanched and put a hand on his chest. ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. I don’t have that kind of money. Truly.’

‘It would only be a loan. I’d get it back to you in a couple of days.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If it were possible, yes, of course. But it’s not. It’s just not.’

She hadn’t expected anything else, but it had been worth asking. She thanked him and took her leave, climbed gingerly back in the Jeep, headed south. Mustafa Habib next, then Delpha. The bumpy track tore at her cuts, forcing her to slow down, allowing her to brood on the kidnap. By a strange twist, one of her first ever programmes had included a segment on hostage taking. Surely if anything was an exclusively human behaviour, kidnapping would be. Yet male baboons under attack had been observed taking their assailants’ offspring hostage: Let me go or the kid gets it. She gave a little shudder at the thought of something similar happening to Emilia. She had to raise this money. But how? And how to repay it? Her credit cards and bank accounts were already stretched beyond their limits. Her house was fully mortgaged and had loans of nearly half a million pounds secured against it.

Good Christ! What had she become?

It had started innocuously enough. Years before, an Oxford boyfriend had ridden in point-to-points. She’d hated those afternoons, all those pompous pricks drinking punch, shivering over stale picnics. And she didn’t even have the fun of betting. Her allowance was so pitiful she couldn’t risk even fifty pence each way. One time, Nicholas had offered her a few quid to take a punt, but she’d been too proud and he hadn’t offered again. Or not directly, at least. Instead he’d put?5 on a horse called Madagascar Pride in the fourth race one afternoon. ‘Madagascar Pride,’ he’d said. ‘I had to place a bet for you.’ Somehow taking the yellow slip from him hadn’t seemed so bad. Madagascar Pride had romped home at 10-1. Fifty-five quid. Fifty-five quid. All the money in the world. After that, Nick had manufactured excuses to bet for her on almost every race. Rather than dreading these point-to-points, she’d begun looking forward to them, had lain in bed afterwards reliving the rush of a close race, the way the tendons in her neck stood out in sympathy with those of her horse.

She’d studied evolutionary biology, she’d known all about game theory, how players could often skew situations in their favour with seemingly perverse behaviour. But until she’d first gone racing, she hadn’t understood the first thing about gambling. She’d assumed that it was about money. But it wasn’t. It was about getting high. Losses were simply the price you paid for your fix. Her break-up with Nick had put an end to it, however, for she couldn’t afford to risk her own money. But then success had arrived, and she’d taken her whole team out for a big night as thanks. Titch had suggested going on to his casino, had signed them all in. She’d known from the first minute that she was in trouble. Her heart had broken into a pleasant canter even walking between the tables, and she’d tasted the delicious metal at the back of her throat. Get out, she’d told herself. Get out while you can. But it had been too late.

There’s something comforting about the word ‘addiction’. It’s an admission of defeat in itself, a way to make the problem so big that there’s no point even trying to fight it. Addictions all work in much the same way, usurping your body’s own reward mechanisms, flooding your system with dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, whatever your craving might be. Rebecca’s problem had been boredom; her fix adrenaline. She’d usually start with blackjack; it gave the illusion of pitting wits. She’d set a limit and vow to leave when she’d reached it, but she never really meant it. Sometimes she’d lose so quickly that she would become convinced the croupier was cheating her, yet she wouldn’t even move table; instead she’d become defiant, throwing down her money until it was gone. At other times she’d eke out her defeat, hunching over her chips until the weariness got to her and she’d grow almost eager to lose, before coming to her senses in the cab, nauseous with the knowledge that she had lost-irretrievably lost-another ten, twenty, maybe even fifty thousand pounds. And despite that, despite her disbelief at her own stupidity, she’d already be calculating how to put together her next stake. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds! Rebecca had lost twice that much in the last year alone. She owed her company over a quarter of a million and as much again to her various banks. She had gambled away her father’s and her sister’s lives, and now she had nothing left.

Knox fixed himself something to eat then took another wander round the lodge. There were group photographs of all the previous Landseer Trust expeditions on the walls, volunteers glowing with youth and sunshine. He gave a little snort of amusement as he looked them over, for he and his fellow MGS divers were going to look shop-soiled by comparison. The wall behind the photographs caught his eye, its plaster studded with shells, quartz and other stones, decorative touches presumably harvested from the beach. In the gloom, it was hard to be sure, but there was an inch long, scimitarshaped fragment of what appeared to be pottery, remarkably similar to coarse-ware they’d found on the sea-bed off Morombe. He examined the surrounding walls for several minutes before he found a second shard, then a third; only this one was white with hints of blue. He touched it with his fingertip, wondering how a shard of Ming porcelain could possibly have found its way on to Eden’s beach. And then a startling thought occurred to him.

Emilia had told him that she and her father had found silver from the Winterton. She’d shown him photographs of dozens of pieces-of-eight recovered from their reef. It was certainly plausible, because of the legend of the Winterton’s lost silver. But what if they’d actually found something else? What if that was why the book on the Winterton was sitting so openly on the shelf yet there was no sign of the one on the Chinese treasure fleets? Those armadas had been huge, and the Mozambique Channel was notoriously prone to terrible cyclones. If such a storm could have swept one ship on to the reefs, then why not two?

He shook his head at himself. He was being absurd, extrapolating so much from such small shards. Why would Emilia have lied? If she and her father had found a Chinese ship here, surely she’d just have told him. But would she? Her overriding concern had always been secrecy, out of fear that treasure hunters would learn about the wreck and dynamite the coral to get at it. Emilia had known MGS was working with Ricky Cheung; in fact, she and her father had originally heard of them because of all the publicity he’d generated around his Morombe salvage. Maybe she’d feared that they’d let this new discovery slip to Ricky, and that he’d announce it to the world, effectively declaring open season on Eden’s reefs. So why hire MGS at all? Why not simply go to a rival? But marine salvage was hugely expensive. Adam and Emilia were planning on bankrolling this one themselves, in order to keep control. MGS would consequently have been far cheaper to hire than their rivals, partly because they priced themselves competitively anyway, partly because their divers and equipment would already be in Madagascar, saving a fortune on flights and freight, and also because a salvage like this demanded hundreds of man-hours studying the history of the target ship, its materials and cargo. That was work Knox and his colleagues had already done.