Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘What are you doing here?’

Rebecca turned. One of Mustafa’s guards was at the door. ‘Ahdaf asked me to wait,’ she told him. ‘She’s fetching something from her room.’ He stayed a few more seconds, then walked off. She hoped he’d go back outside, but she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Damn it. She went to the French windows, slipped outside, went around to Mustafa’s office. There was no external door and his windows were locked. She cupped her hands to look inside, but saw nothing that might help. The guard would find Ahdaf any moment now. The alarm was about to go up. She needed to get away while she could. She walked briskly but quietly towards her Toyota, not wanting to draw attention. The front gates would be locked but maybe she could drive down to the beach, cut back on to the coastal track further north. But then she stopped. Leave now and Mustafa would know she was on to him. If he decided to cover his tracks, she’d never see her father or sister again. She couldn’t leave here empty-handed. She just couldn’t.

She turned and ran back into the house.

The water felt colder to Knox today, though maybe that was just the old wetsuit he was wearing, or even apprehension about what lay ahead. There was no dispute that visibility was worse, however, the sea a thin particulate soup roiled up by waves and currents. He checked constantly behind him to make sure Boris was keeping up, because the noose was already biting into his throat. That said, he wanted to set a decent pace. The only thing in his favour was that he was the better diver; he needed to make the most of that.

The deeper you dived, the greater the pressure upon your body. One effect of that pressure was to enable your bloodstream to absorb more air. In such increased volumes, nitrogen had a heady effect, much like alcohol; and the faster, deeper and longer your descent, the worse it became. Nitrogen narcosis wasn’t in itself particularly dangerous, but it made divers overconfident, impaired their judgement and motor-function, rendered them as prone to stupid mistakes as a drunk behind the wheel. And that was what Knox needed: he needed Boris making stupid mistakes.

They reached the sea-floor. Knox checked his gauge. Thirty-one metres deep already, yet he needed to go deeper still. He led Boris past the underwater tip, pointing out shards of porcelain as he went, giving credibility to his account. They followed a canyon to the pelagic shelf. With the reduced visibility, he only barely saw the orange marker buoys of the fish aggregating device. He swam towards them, continuing the descent to forty metres, then fifty, feeling a mild buzz as the narcosis kicked in. You never grew immune to it, however much you dived. You simply learned to manage it.

Dark shadows ahead. He swam towards them. Boris gave a tug on the fishing line, constricting Knox’s windpipe, making it hard for him to breathe. He stopped and turned so that the line slackened. Boris was treading water some five metres away, holding up his gauges, his expression making it plain he wanted to know what the hell was going on, where the porcelain was. Knox pointed ahead. Boris shook his head. Knox checked his gauges. Fifty-five metres deep, just fifteen minutes of air left. No wonder Boris was getting nervous. If they didn’t start their ascent soon, they’d be at severe risk of decompression sickness. It was now or never. But how the hell to get close enough to Boris to The bull shark surged up from the turbid depths, its maw already open, murderous rows of white stalagmites and stalactites within, rolling up its mean black eyes to show its whites. Knox lifted his feet, thumped its snout with his flippers. It turned and swam away. He glanced around at Boris, watching it in rapt horror, giving Knox his chance. He propelled himself across, grabbed for the knife with his cuffed hands, but Boris was too quick for him, he turned and slashed at Knox’s face. Knox ducked beneath the blade, reached for Boris’s buoyancy-control device, inflated it to its maximum, then stripped him of his weight-belt.

At once Boris began rising like a runaway hot-air balloon. The fishing line quickly played out and pulled the noose tight around Knox’s throat, cutting into his windpipe, dragging him upwards with him so fast that it put them both at risk from the bends. The moment Boris reached the surface, Knox slammed on the brakes, coming to a halt at just four metres, deep enough for him to decompress safely, not that that would be much use if he couldn’t breathe.

Above him, Boris began thrashing wildly. Symptoms of the bends typically took an hour or so to present, sometimes even a day or more. Only in the very worst cases was onset immediate. His struggles pulled the makeshift garrotte ever tighter around Knox’s throat, so that he couldn’t breathe at all, his lungs screaming for air. He needed to get rid of the fishing line now, but he couldn’t even get a fingernail beneath it. He looked upwards, almost in prayer, at the very moment that a spasm of pain wracked Boris so severely that he let go of his diving knife. And Knox watched spellbound as it began fluttering down through the water towards him like a silvery leaf in an autumn breeze.

Rebecca hurried back through the drawing room to the atrium. Upstairs, she could hear Ahdaf wailing like a two-year-old while the guard shouted into his walkie-talkie. Mustafa’s office was locked, but maybe there’d be something in his bedroom. She took the steps two at a time, slipped through a half-open door into a large bedroom with a basketball hoop screwed high on its wall, a pool table with a unblemished cloth. One of the son’s rooms. Not what she was after. The passage was empty; she slipped back out and tried another door. The second boy’s bedroom, a geek rather than a jock, his desk stacked with sophisticated-looking computer equipment. She was about to go out again when she heard guards arriving on the landing outside, opening doors, beginning a search.

Rebecca cast around for somewhere to hide. The only other door opened on to another walk-in closet, suits to her left, shirts to her right. She pulled it softly closed behind her, though leaving it a fraction ajar to give herself some light. Two guards ran into the bedroom a moment later, shouting at each other where to search. She slipped between two suits, grabbed the rail and lifted up her legs. The rail bowed beneath her weight, but held. The door banged open a moment later and a guard rushed in. She could hear him panting for breath as he flipped through the suits then got down on to hands and knees, yet somehow didn’t see her. He ran back out, leaving the closet door open. She let her legs back down, her left shoulder aching from the strain. The voices grew fainter as the guards ran off to search other rooms. She got out her mobile and tried Andriama again, was again transferred to voicemail. As loudly as she dared, she told him where she was and why, recasting her suspicion as certainty. The signal cut off before she could finish her message, however. Someone had turned off the mast.

She knew she wouldn’t have long before the guards came back for a more diligent search, so she looked around for salvation. There were caps and scarves hanging from hooks behind the closet door, but she’d scarcely be able to disguise her way out of here. She risked a peek out. The bedroom was still empty. She went to the window just as Mustafa pulled up in his blue Mercedes immediately behind her Toyota, pinning it in. The driver door flew open; he stepped out and strode purposefully into the house. A moment later she heard him shouting abuse at some hapless guard.

She edged back towards the closet. Something about the baseball caps and scarves was calling out to her. Those two intruders her first night at Eden had been wearing caps and scarves. Could they have been Mustafa’s sons? But that made no sense. Why bother to break in if they already had Emilia and Adam? She felt a little nauseous as she recalled Mustafa bursting in on her meeting with Andriama, how she’d patted her heart and insisted that Adam and Emilia were still alive. Now that she thought back on it, she recalled raising the possibility of a kidnap herself, and had even told them that she’d be staying at Pierre’s that night, so that Mustafa would have expected Eden to be deserted. And he’d likely have had keys for the lodge, too; he’d have been the most likely supplier of the new steel door.