Buch lesen: «The Eden Legacy»

ONE
I

A coral reef, the west coast of Madagascar

Sixty-three metres underwater, even brilliant sunlight becomes feeble, and the glorious pageantry of the reef and its fish is reduced to bureaucratic greys and blacks. Effort put into bright liveries down here was effort wasted, and nature abhorred such waste almost as fiercely as she abhorred vacuums. The only real brightness, therefore, came from the white sand that covered so much of the sea-bed; but even that was diminished by the litter of dead sea-grass and coral, by the scattering of darker stones, shells and gnarled black rock, and fogged by the clouds of sediment that Daniel Knox and his fellow divers had kicked up during the two hours they’d already spent at the bottom.

A tap upon his arm. He turned to see Miles, his boss and dive-buddy, stopping his filming for a moment, pointing up and to his left. It took Knox a moment to see what had caught his eye: a big fish, perhaps twenty metres away, though it was hard to gauge distances underwater. A shark of some kind, to judge from its distinctive silhouette and the easy menace of its movement, though too far away for him to be sure which. Bulls, tigers, makos, white-tips, black-tips and even the occasional great white were common enough along Madagascar’s west coast, particularly on the exterior of these reefs, where food was plentiful and the water was hyper-oxygenated from constantly being crashed against the coral. But they were none of them as dangerous as their reputations, so long as you kept your nerve and did nothing stupid. That was why they alerted each other whenever they saw one, so that they wouldn’t be panicked into a rushed ascent or some other mistake should it suddenly come close.

He nodded to let Miles know he’d seen it, checked his equipment. He touched his dive-knife first: it was reassuring just to have, even if it wasn’t there to defend against a shark attack so much as for cutting through the mesh of discarded nets that so often plagued reefs like these. He checked his gauges next. His oxygen partial pressure looked a fraction high, and his spare gave the same reading, so he adjusted his feed accordingly. Hyperoxia was an easy trap to fall into when diving on a closed-circuit re-breather, as he’d discovered off the Azores the year before. But the modest extra risk was more than compensated for by the fact that the re-breather could scrub carbon dioxide from his exhaled air, then add more oxygen, allowing him to stay underwater almost indefinitely.

A cold current swept him sideways. He let himself be taken by it, then reoriented himself and resumed his exploration, making sure that Miles was filming away, both to provide footage for their documentary and to enable their shipboard project crew to follow along. Not that they’d had that much to film so far, despite it being such a perfect-looking wreck mound, nearly eighty metres long, covered in deep sand studded by rocks, dead coral and a scatter-pattern of artefacts. It lay at the foot of a steep rock shelf that rose sharply from the sea-bed like a gigantic underwater podium on which corals had grown over the centuries to within a foot or two of the surface at low tide, a real hazard for the ships of old, navigating by their crude charts and rough reckoning, on prayer and sacrifices to the gods.

The shark had circled around and now passed close enough by that he could see the ugly pale yellow of its underbelly, the dark spots and stripes on its blue-grey back. A tiger, ten to twelve feet long. He shared a glance with Miles. They were notoriously unpredictable creatures: they’d take a bite out of you just from curiosity. But there was little to be done about it. Sharks liked to attack from underneath; ending the dive and beginning their ascent now would be far more dangerous than staying put. He turned back to the sea-bed. They’d already recovered the two Chinese cannons that they’d known about before they’d arrived. They’d also found a number of early Ming coins and several shards of fifteenth-century porcelain, plus broken coarse-ware, nails and ironwork that were harder to attribute, but which all presumably came from the same wreck. But what wreck? Everything they could date pointed to early fifteenth-century Chinese, which made it overwhelmingly likely that this ship had once been a part of one of Zheng He’s famed treasure fleets, which had sailed near this channel around that time. But those vast armadas had been made up of all kinds of vessels, and most of them had been ordinary junks and supply ships. Magnificent finds, of course, and historically significant. But not what they were after.

Another current swept him towards the tiger. He grabbed instinctively for the sea-bed, fingers raking the sand before hooking something solid. He held it till the current had relented, looked down. It was reddish-brown and scabbed, and it protruded in too smooth a curve from the sea-bed to be natural. He brushed away sand to reveal the top of a rusted iron ring, perhaps a foot in diameter. He checked to make sure that Miles was filming, then beckoned Klaus to bring over one of their water-dredges. The fat grey pipe quickly sucked away the sand and sediment until he’d completely exposed an iron doughnut at one end of a fat long metal rod, like the eye at the top of an impossibly large needle.

The second dive-team arrived with a second dredge, set to work in parallel. The iron shaft grew longer and longer. It could surely only be an anchor. Knox felt his excitement build. Just as it was possible to make an educated guess at a person’s height from the length of their stride, so it was possible to estimate a ship’s size from certain of its component parts. The Chinese treasure ships had reputedly been equipped with anchors eight feet long, fitted with iron flukes to hook on to rocks or dig into sand, and so hold the ship in position. Knox had to remind himself to keep breathing steadily as they exposed a good six feet of shaft. Eight feet. Ten feet and still going. Twelve. And finally they found the first fluke. Knox glanced around at Miles, still filming like the professional he was, but pumping his free fist in triumph; and the exultation of all the others was magnified by the strange distortion of their goggles. For it was surely undeniable now. They’d found what they’d come looking for.

They’d found a Chinese treasure ship.

II

The Nergadze estate, Georgian Black Sea Coast

It was the first time in two years that Boris Dekanosidze had laid eyes on Ilya Nergadze, and what he saw shocked him. The great man was a frail shell of himself, shrunken, pale and bald, lying huddled beneath thick blankets on his medical bed despite the cloying warmth of the room. He had a translucent oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, sensors and tubes on his arms and throat, banks of monitors and other medical equipment on either side, while a disturbingly androgynous male nurse in a starched white uniform sat on a high chair overlooking him, like an umpire at a tennis match.

So the rumours were true, then: Old Man Ilya was dying.

Ilya’s bed was mechanised, allowing him to raise himself almost to a sitting position as Boris walked towards him. With a weak and trembling hand, he clawed down his breathing mask so that it hung around his throat like a grotesque medallion. ‘Good to see you, Boris,’ he croaked, raising his head so that Boris could kiss him respectfully on both cheeks.

‘Good to see you too, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Ilya. But even that much conversation seemed to exhaust him. He let his head drop into his pillow, pulled his breathing mask back up.

Sandro Nergadze, Ilya’s son and heir apparent, had followed Boris to the bed. Now he cleared his throat to gain the nurse’s attention. ‘A few moments, please,’ he said.

‘Five minutes,’ said the nurse primly. ‘Your father must have his rest.’

‘Five minutes,’ agreed Sandro, with a tight smile. He was courteous for a Nergadze, but that didn’t mean he liked taking orders from the help. He rested his briefcase on the bedside table, then accompanied the nurse to the door, closing it emphatically behind him before returning to his father’s bed and standing across it from Boris, so that his father could follow their conversation with his eyes, even if he was too tired to take part in it himself.

‘Well?’ asked Boris. ‘What can I do for you?’

Sandro pursed his lips before replying. ‘You know as well as anyone, Boris, that our family has its fair share of enemies.’

Boris nodded. He’d been Sandro’s head of security until everything had gone to shit, after all. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Things have grown even worse since our Greek … setback.’

Our Greek setback, thought Boris. Is that what they’re calling it these days? Some two years before, during Ilya Nergadze’s ill-fated run at the presidency of the Republic of Georgia, the campaign team had got a tip that their nation’s greatest lost treasure, the golden fleece, had been rediscovered in Greece. But their efforts to bring it back here and so boost Ilya’s flagging popularity had backfired spectacularly, culminating in the death of Ilya’s grandson Mikhail and the destruction of the family’s business empire and political aspirations. ‘I can imagine.’

‘It’s not merely that we have more enemies now,’ continued Sandro. ‘It’s also that they’ve grown bolder, less respectful. People no longer fear us as they did. We’ve introduced extra security, as you no doubt noticed. We’ve also been compelled to start a programme of active threat monitoring.’

‘Active threat monitoring, sir?’

Sandro gestured towards the French windows, the fine view over treetops down to the Black Sea. ‘It’s the damned Internet,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, these days, for our enemies to learn about us. They download satellite photographs of our estates. They check for our names at public events. They search the archives of local newspapers. They gossip about what cars we drive, what planes and yachts we own. All from the comfort and safety of their living rooms.’ He turned back to face Boris. ‘But it works both ways, particularly if you hire the right people.’

Boris nodded. The Nergadzes had never begrudged spending money on their own safety. ‘As you have, no doubt.’

‘We’ve set up various websites and chat rooms,’ said Sandro. ‘We’ve seeded them with the kind of confidential information that our enemies would dearly love to know. Some of it’s even true. We make these sites hard to find, so that only our more dedicated … followers can find them. Then we monitor them, particularly for return visitors. Mostly these prove to be journalists or business rivals. Nuisances, not menaces.’

‘But not always?’ suggested Boris.

Sandro opened his briefcase, drew out a single folded sheet of paper. ‘One of the most persistent comes from a British marine salvage company calledMGS,’ he said. ‘Quite small. Just fifteen full-time employees, though they add subcontractors for certain projects. They’re scheduled to run a month-long survey of the eastern Black Sea this autumn.’

‘Ah,’ said Boris, glancing towards the French windows.

‘This is a printout of their Who We Are page,’ said Sandro, passing Boris the sheet. ‘Recognise anyone?’

Boris unfolded the page, eight thumbnails of young and middle-aged men, presumably senior staff. But the portraits were too small for him to tell much about them; and the names and job titles meant nothing either. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Bottom row,’ prompted Sandro. ‘Second from right.’

Boris looked again. A man called Matthew Richardson. His photo wasn’t just small, it was blurred, too, as though taken on the move. And now that it had his attention,there was something faintly familiar about him, though he couldn’t at first work out what. But then he realised who Sandro and Ilya thought it was, if only because they’d never have summoned him here otherwise. He flinched from an unpleasant memory like flesh from a flame, shook his head. ‘Daniel Knox is dead,’ he said emphatically. ‘He had kidney failure from the burns he took when he and Mikhail …’ He trailed off, not wanting to finish the thought.

‘That’s what they told us,’ agreed Sandro.

‘Why would they have lied?’ asked Boris. But he realised the answer even as he spoke. They’d have lied to protect Knox from the five million euro bounty that Ilya Nergadze had put on his head in retribution for killing his grandson during the golden fleece fiasco. Boris breathed in deep before he looked again at the photo. There was a superficial resemblance; he couldn’t deny it. And the man in the photo had shaven his scalp and grown a thin beard, much as you’d expect from someone trying to change their look. But he also had higher cheekbones than he remembered Knox having, the bridge of his nose was broader, and he looked darker, older, angrier and altogether more formidable. He shook his head as he looked back up at Sandro. ‘It’s not him,’ he said.

‘Are you certain?’ asked Sandro. ‘Bear in mind you might not be the only one who’s had plastic surgery.’

‘Then how can you possibly expect me to identify him from this?’ protested Boris. ‘I’d need to be able to get up close to him, see how he walks, hear his voice and how …’ He broke off as he realised belatedly where this was going. ‘No way,’ he said flatly. ‘The Europeans have my biometrics. They have my DNA. They’d grab me the moment I landed. I’d never get out this time.’

‘Relax,’ said Sandro. ‘We’re not suggesting you go back to Europe. As you say, it was hard enough for us to get you out last time.’ He allowed a little time to pass, presumably to let Boris reflect on the fact that he’d still be in his Greek hellhole prison if the Nergadzes hadn’t had him sprung. ‘But this man isn’t in England at the moment. Or even in Europe. That’s why we brought you here so urgently. We only learned of it ourselves this morning.’

‘Where, then?’

‘On a salvage project,’ said Sandro, opening his briefcase again, taking out a bulky white envelope that he offered across. ‘Off the west coast of Madagascar.’

The envelope’s flap was tucked inside itself. The edge of the stiff paper cut Boris’s thumb as he released it, coaxing out a thin line of blood that left a series of smudged red partials on the contents as he spread them on the bedside table: ten thousand euros in several bundles of banknotes; a sheaf of press-cuttings about some Chinese shipwreck; a first-class ticket in his new name, flying via Istanbul and Johannesburg to the Madagascan capital Antananarivo; a separate ticket on to some provincial airport he’d never heard of called Morombe. ‘And what do you expect me to do when I get to this place?’

‘We want you to track down this man Richardson,’ replied Sandro. ‘We want you to determine whether or not he is really Daniel Knox.’

‘And if he is?’ asked Boris.

Sandro glanced down at the floor, his discomfort evident. But a noise to Boris’s left startled him. He’d almost forgotten that Ilya was there. The old man clawed his mask down once more so that he could speak; his mouth and eyes were cruel and fierce, though his voice was so weak that Boris had to lean in closer to him to make out the words.

‘I want you to kill him,’ he said.