The Obsidian Chamber Read online

  The man stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re bullshitting me, right?”

  “No.”

  “You know how far that is from here?”

  “Yes. Three thousand, six hundred miles.”

  Scratching one of his sideburns, the pilot said, “That’s nine more hours of flying time. I’ll be a wreck.”

  “It’s the last leg. You can sleep for a week once we get there.”

  “Do you know how many hours over the FAA maximum I am already, mate?”

  “I didn’t think trifles like FAA regulations concerned you.” And Proctor gave his bag, and the cash it contained, a meaningful pat.

  “Bloody hell.” Shapely shook his head in disbelief. “Well, it’s your funeral. I’m so fagged I’m likely to augur in, or fly us straight into a mountain.” And with that, he popped a few more of the little white pills.

  Hosea Kutako International Airport was large and—at quarter to eleven in the evening, local time—surprisingly busy. While nowhere near as strict as an American or European facility, the tower had questioned their lack of a flight plan, and Shapely had been forced to come up with a complicated story involving a leaky gas tank, trouble with his communications equipment, and a vulture’s close encounter with one of the jet intakes. Proctor had been surprised the pilot was still capable of such a feat of imagination: he’d been flying almost twenty-four hours straight now, and his jauntiness was long gone.

  “I’m a corpse, brother,” he told Proctor as they turned off runway 26 and taxied toward the airport’s lone terminal. “If you want to fly any farther, you’re going to have to grow wings.”

  “You’ve done well,” Proctor said, glancing out the windscreen. Then he froze. There, parked on the tarmac, was Diogenes’s Challenger.

  “Stop,” he told Shapely.

  “But—”

  “Just stop.” Diogenes reached into his bag, pulled out another few stacks of hundred-dollar bills, quickly counted off forty thousand, and tossed them at the pilot with a hurried thanks. Then he opened the passenger door and was off, racing toward the parked jet even before the Citation had rolled to a halt.

  Three hours, he thought as he ran. He’s just three hours ahead of me.

  It had been an exhausting game of cat and mouse—from plane to plane, over oceans, over continents, keeping on Diogenes’s tail despite all the man’s stratagems. The Bombardier wasn’t going anywhere—one of its engine cowlings was up, and the door to the passenger cabin was open, the deplaning ladder still down. Diogenes and Constance wouldn’t be far, now. With any luck, they were still in Windhoek.

  With a little more luck, they might even still be at the airport—perhaps in the arrival hall.

  Reaching the jet, Proctor raced up the steps two at a time into the passenger cabin. It was empty, but the door to the cockpit was ajar. Inside, a man wearing a pilot’s uniform was seated in the left-hand seat. He was scribbling something on a clipboard.

  Proctor ducked into the cockpit, grabbed the man by his lapel, and bodily lifted him out of the chair. “Are you the pilot from Shannon?” he asked.

  The man blinked at him in surprise. “What the hell—?”

  Proctor tightened his grip on the collar, adding pressure to the man’s neck. “Answer the question.”

  “I’m…I’m one of them,” he said.

  “The other?”

  “He left the airport an hour ago. He already gave his statement. I gave mine, too.”

  “Statement?”

  “About the tragedy.” The pilot was recovering his self-possession. He was evidently American. “Who are you?”

  “I’m asking the questions,” Proctor said. “What tragedy? And who were your passengers?”

  “There were two of them. A man and a woman.”

  “Names?”

  “They wouldn’t give us names.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  “The man was about your height. Slender. Closely trimmed beard. Strange eyes—one was a different color than the other.” A pause. “He had a scar on one cheek.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She was young, maybe early twenties. Dark hair. Pretty. Didn’t get much of a look at her, actually. She was drunk.”

  “And that was it? Just the two?”

  “Yes. At least…at first.”

  Proctor tightened his grip on the man’s collar. “What do you mean—at first? What’s this about a tragedy?”

  The pilot hesitated. “Well…it was the young woman.”

  “What about her?” Proctor asked. “What about the young woman?”

  The pilot looked down, then raised his eyes again to meet Proctor’s gaze. “She died midflight.”

  8

  DIED?” PROCTOR SAID. “Died?” For a moment, a red curtain fell across his vision. An overwhelming desire to inflict extreme violence—such as he had felt only once or twice before in his life, during times of intense danger and physical duress—came over him. It took a supreme act of will not to crush the man’s windpipe.

  With the greatest effort, he mastered the urge. This man was simply an errand boy. There was something better the man could do than die: he could furnish information.

  “Tell me what happened,” Proctor said in a low voice.

  The man swallowed painfully. His face was ashen and beaded with sweat, as if he sensed how much danger he was in. “I don’t know much,” he said. “I wish I could tell you more.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “He wouldn’t let us out of the cockpit.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “The man. The man who chartered the plane.”

  “The man with the scar?”

  The pilot nodded.

  “What else?”

  The man swallowed again. “The trouble started after we landed in Akjoujt. I was taking a nap in the cockpit. Mark—the other pilot—woke me up. I saw another girl, a blonde, board the plane. After that, I heard cries, a heavy thump. That was when…” He paused. “He came in, told us to take off and stay in the cockpit until we landed here in Namibia. Gave us bed urinals, told us to use those if we needed to.”

  The pilot seemed to see something in Proctor’s eyes, because the words that followed tumbled out in a rush. “Look, I didn’t see anything. She walked onto the plane in Shannon on her own two feet. When we got here, she was wheeled out dead on a stretcher.” A pause. “As we were landing, he…coached us. What to tell the officials, I mean. He said she’d had a lifelong history of heart trouble. Death at high altitude…it happens sometimes.”

  “And the blonde? Who is this blonde?”

  “I don’t know.” The pilot moved his head. “Do you think you could ease off a little?”

  Proctor eased his grip on the collar.

  The pilot nodded through the cockpit windscreen. “There. That’s the official who met the plane, interviewed our passenger.”

  He had indicated a short man in a uniform, perhaps sixty years of age. The man was standing beneath a set of lights by a terminal door, at the center of a small knot of people.

  “He’d know more than anybody,” the pilot said.

  Proctor stared at the pilot—a long, hard stare. Then he pushed the man back down into his seat and quickly exited the jet.

  As he walked toward the group, the man in question looked over at him. He had tired but kindly eyes, and his hair was very short, wiry, and pure white. Seeing Proctor, the others stepped away.

  “Goeienaand,” the man said.

  “Goeienaand,” Proctor replied. “My naam is Proctor.” He knew that, though the official language of Namibia was English, most people were more fluent in Afrikaans—a language that various classified ops had, in the past, given him some small facility with.

  “Praat Meneer Afrikaans?” the man asked.

  “Ja, ’n bietjie. Praat Meneer Engels?”

  “Yes,” the man said, switching to accented English.

  “Baie dankie.” Proctor pointed over his sh
oulder, toward the Bombardier. “I’m here about the young woman who was taken off that plane.”

  “I am Masozi Shona. General manager.” The official shook his head. “Sad. Very sad.”

  “What happened?” Proctor asked.

  Shona stared at him. “Pray, what is your interest in the matter?”

  Proctor hesitated a moment. “My daughter. It was my daughter on that plane.”

  The official’s face, already serious, took on a mournful cast. “I am sorry. Very sorry. She is gone. Passed away on the flight.”

  Proctor had not slept—not really—in over thirty-six hours. Ever since speeding away from 891 Riverside Drive, he had been on high alert, under terrific anxiety. Now he felt something give way within him. He did not cry—he hadn’t cried since he was six—but as he spoke, he felt his voice break and his eyes begin to fill. He let it happen, as it meshed with his cover. “Please. You must help me. I…I was following them. I got here too late. Asseblief—I need to know what happened. Do you understand? I need to know.”

  The man named Shona took his arm. “I am very sorry. I will tell you all I know, which is very little.”

  “What…what happened to her body?”

  “It was taken away, sir. By private transportation.”

  “What about the inquest? The medical examiner? Why wasn’t she taken to a hospital—or a morgue?”

  The man shook his head. “It was all arranged before landing. A doctor was called to meet the plane. He made the initial examination, signed the papers.”

  Proctor went silent.

  The official shrugged with a look of sympathy. “You must understand. I am the general manager…but I am not in charge.”

  Proctor understood. This was not America. If enough money changed hands, protocols could be bypassed.

  “But my daughter,” Proctor heard himself say. “My little girl…Are you absolutely sure she’s dead? How can I know if it really was her? Maybe it was someone else.”

  Hearing this, the man perked up slightly. “There is a way I can help you to be sure.”

  “Anything.”

  A hesitation. “It might not be easy for you.”

  Proctor waved this off.

  “In that case, follow me.”

  The man led the way into the terminal, then passed through a set of swinging doors and down a rather shabby, official-looking hallway. Near the end of the hall, he opened one of the numerous doors and gestured for Proctor to step inside. The room contained desks and half a dozen video monitors with CPUs. Two men in short-sleeved shirts looked up as they stepped in. With a few curt words in Afrikaans, Shona ushered them out.

  He glanced at Proctor in embarrassment. “Now I’m afraid I must ask you for…some consideration. It is not for myself, you understand, but—” and he nodded in the direction of the two men who had just left the security office.

  “Of course.” Proctor reached into his bag, took out a small sheaf of bills.

  The man pocketed the money and gestured toward a nearby video screen. “There is not much.”

  He took a seat at the table and Proctor stood behind him. Despite the small size and disheveled condition of the room, the airport’s surveillance setup was of relatively modern design. Shona drew up a keyboard, typed in a few commands, pulled a DVD out of the nearest computer, consulted a tray beside it, pulled out another DVD labeled in longhand with a red marker, and inserted it into the computer.

  More typing, and then a grainy image appeared on the computer screen, along with a running timestamp. There was the Bombardier—Diogenes’s plane. The passenger door was open, and the ladder was extended. Proctor watched as a man in a linen suit climbed the steps into the plane—evidently the doctor—followed by two uniformed orderlies. Quite some time passed, during which Shona sped up the playback. Then the doctor emerged, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was followed by a young blonde woman that Diogenes didn’t recognize. Even in the low-quality video, he could see the sharpness of her cheekbones, the paleness of her eyes. She was followed by the two orderlies, carrying, with some difficulty, a stretcher between them. There was a figure on the stretcher, covered with a sheet. Proctor watched, scarcely drawing breath, as the orderlies manhandled the stretcher down the steps from the passenger compartment. Just as they reached the bottom step, the first orderly slipped, and as he regained his footing the body on the stretcher shifted and the sheet slipped partway off the face.

  “Freeze that!” Proctor cried out.

  The frame froze. Proctor leaned in, staring, hardly able to believe what he saw. His world fell in upon him.

  The frozen video—grainy, seamed by horizontal lines that slowly rose up the screen—could not be denied. The image was all too clear: the dark hair, the full lips, the violet eyes wide open, the once-beautiful face frozen in a rictus of death.

  He sank into a nearby chair. He could no longer delude himself. Constance was dead. She’d never suffered from heart trouble. She couldn’t have died of natural causes on the plane; she’d been murdered. Murdered. And Diogenes was the murderer.

  Vaguely, as if from far away, he realized the man was talking to him again.

  “I am sorry,” the official told him, wringing his hands with genuine angst. “Very sorry. But—you wanted to be certain.”

  “Yes,” Proctor said, not looking at him. “Thank you. I…I need to find them, recover my daughter’s body. They are bad people. Do you have any idea where they took the body?”

  A hesitation. “They did not leave the airport with the hired doctor. This I know, because I watched the doctor depart. The circumstances were unusual, you see—even for here. They went to an establishment that leases automobiles—jeeps, trucks, vehicles for desert use. It is next to the airport, across from the Millennium Business Park. It is the only place open after dark. They put the stretcher in a waiting van and drove across the street.”

  Proctor leapt to his feet.

  “It is very late now,” the man said. “They are almost certainly closed—”

  But he was speaking to an empty room. Proctor was gone.

  9

  THE WINDHOEK-DETMONK Automobile Agency—as it was advertised by two signs, one in Afrikaans and the other in English, along with the proprietor’s name, Lazrus Keronda—was a two-acre lot located amid a sad-looking, business-zoned neighborhood on the main east–west highway just south of the airport. Despite the seediness of its signage, the rental agency was ringed by expensive sodium vapor lights that lit up the night, and a dozen vehicles could be seen through the security fence.

  It was the only business still open, and as Proctor marched quickly across the four-lane highway—quiet at this late hour—the external lights began to snap off, one by one.

  The temperature hovered at just around one hundred degrees, and the Oosweer—the hot wind that often blew in from the coast this time of year—showered him in fine sand as he walked. The low hills of Progress could barely be seen in the distance: ghost reflections of the lights from the city. He glanced at his watch: just past ten o’clock.

  A short, pudgy man in rumpled shorts and a khaki shirt with buttoned pockets was pulling a chain-link gate across the main entrance to the dealership. Proctor gave him a brisk tap on the shoulder and the man turned, blinking against the blowing sand.

  “Hoe gaan dit met jou?” he said, looking him up and down in the way of salesmen the world over.

  “Baie goed, dankie,” Proctor replied. “But let’s talk in English.”

  Proctor prided himself in being an expert at reading people. Even now—dead tired, in deep shock, stricken to the core with grief and self-reproach—he could tell there was something wrong about this man. The nervous way he kept running one hand through his hair as the wind disarranged it; his habit of not meeting Proctor’s eyes; the very tenor of his voice—all told Proctor that the man was dirty and intended to lie to him.

  Now the salesman frowned. “Ek vertaan nie,” he said.

  “Oh, you understand me just
fine, Mr. Keronda.” Proctor opened his bug-out bag, flashed a wad of cash.

  “We are closed,” the man said, switching abruptly to unaccented English.

  “Let’s talk in there.” And Proctor pointed toward a small, dimly lighted shed in the middle of the lot that, it appeared, served as an office.

  “We are—” the man began again, but Proctor gave him a shove that pulled his hand from the gate and sent him stumbling back in the direction of the office.

  Inside the building, Proctor gently but firmly guided the man to a chair behind a battered desk, pushed him down into it, then took a seat in front. “I’ll tell you just once,” he said. “No games. I’ve run out of time and patience. You have information I need. Give it to me and you’ll be rewarded.”

  The man patted at his hair again, wiped sand from his forehead. “I do not know anything.”

  “You had a customer here,” Proctor said. “About ninety minutes ago.”

  The man shook his head. “There has been nobody,” he said.

  Proctor took a deep breath. “I’m asking politely. Next time I’ll be rude.”

  “We have been closed for hours,” the man said. “The only reason I am here so late is because I’ve been doing paperwork—”

  The storm of emotions that had been slowly gathering within Proctor—frustration at the absurd dance Diogenes had led him on; self-loathing for his failure in ensuring Constance’s well-being; staggering grief at the news of her death—came together in a white-hot implosion of rage. Yet externally he remained completely calm—save for the sudden, snake-like quickness with which he moved. Snatching a large letter opener off the desk, he brought it down into the man’s left hand, shattering the trapezoid bone and burying the point half an inch into the scarred wood.

  The man’s eyes rolled white and he opened his mouth to scream. Proctor grabbed an oil-soaked rag off the floor and jammed it into his mouth. He clamped his powerful hand over the man’s jaws, preventing him from crying out.

  The man writhed, moaning through the rag. Blood began seeping around the edges of the letter opener and trickling through the fingers and onto the desk. Proctor kept the man in position for well over a minute before speaking again.