But just then he saw a flicker of muzzle flash, a puff of smoke emerge from the branches of the tree. A half second later, a sizeable chunk of the back of Colonel Fernandez’ head exploded and, as he slowly, lifelessly, dropped to his knees, the distant sound of the shot finally arrived.
Chapter 55
1667, Castillo Santiago, Puerto Bello
Pasquinel was already certain his shot was true without waiting for the smoke to clear to see for himself. Already he was tapping in a measure of powder from his horn into the long barrel, while balanced on a branch. He braced his back against the trunk to help hold his balance as he needed both hands to recharge his gun.
The short, round-bellied Spaniard was down now, he could see that. The other men standing on the platform appeared to be in shock or still trying to understand what had just happened. Good.
He loaded in the next ball with some wadding and quickly thrust it down the barrel on to firmly pressed powder with his ramrod.
Still standing there. One of the Spaniards was now stirring, the other thickset one. That was his other target. The other one whose hand Captain Anwar had shook. He shouldered the rifle, rested it in the fork of the branch directly in front of him and squinted down the weapon’s long barrel, his leathery cheek resting against the warm metal.
Pasquinel sighted the thickset man. He was now squatting down beside the other. Now understanding, turning round to look out across the battlements at the surrounding sparse terrain. Now looking directly at him, or at least looking at the tree in which he was perched, and realizing that was where the shot must have come from.
Pasquinel raised his aim ever so slightly: two hands’ breadth at this distance to allow for the drop in-flight, three hands’ breadth to the left to allow for the gentle westerly breeze this morning. He pulled the trigger and his view of the man’s wide-eyed face, his dark sideburns, the still-frozen other Spaniard and Captain Rashim looking almost as alarmed as the man about to die – the entire scene was suddenly lost behind a billowing cloud of swirling powder smoke.
The artillery officer staggered backwards over the body of his colonel, clutching at his throat. He fell over the colonel and continued writhing on the floor with a gurgling sound as the gentle peal of the second shot finally arrived. The young officer stirred to life, at last understanding both men hadn’t spouted gouts of blood and gristle for no reason. He leaped across the platform and grasped Rashim roughly by the arm.
‘Madre de Dios!’
The young man quickly locked him in a half nelson and spun him round to use him as a shield. Rashim now found himself hoping to God that Pasquinel was not attempting to line up a third shot in an attempt to ‘save’ him.
‘You trick us!’ the officer gasped. He locked his other arm tightly round Rashim’s throat. ‘You … you mark us to your men out there!’
Rashim nodded. ‘They have … ’ He struggled to talk, his voice a choked burbling. ‘They have orders to target the officers first. You’re next.’
The man’s eyes darted from the hillock to the treeline to the rooftops and the spire of Puerto Bello’s nearby church.
‘Surrenderrr,’ gurgled Rashim. ‘Save … save your men. Save yourself.’
The young officer looked almost ready to make that decision. As he dragged Rashim from one side to the other, Rashim caught a fleeting glance of the low stone walls of San Felipe across the bay. Above it, the Spanish flag was no longer fluttering. In its place hung their flag raised high above the gatehouse.
‘Loo–!’ Rashim managed to squeeze out of his windpipe. He pointed across the bay. ‘Loo–! There!’
The young man followed the direction he was pointing, then also noted that the fort’s colours had changed.
‘Oooh … Dios mio … ’
‘S’overrrrghh,’ gasped Rashim. He struggled to loosen the man’s iron lock on his windpipe. ‘It’s over. San Felipe has already fallen. Do you see?’
The man’s white-knuckled fist loosened around Rashim’s throat. He wriggled and pulled himself free, gasping for breath for a moment.
‘So … uh … why not do yourself a favour?’ Rashim finally managed to croak. ‘Surrender?’
Chapter 56
2025, New York
Central Park was just as she remembered it. The lake was drained, leaving a large concrete basin, and that’s where they’d started stacking the city’s cars, buses, coaches, trucks that operated using petrol. Several large industrial compactors had been installed beside the dried lake – ‘car crushers’ – that day and night had for the last few years been grinding their way through cars and spitting out jagged cubes of compacted metal and plastic.
But the cars had been arriving in Central Park on the back of trailers, faster than the compactors could make cubes. The vehicles, piled haphazardly on top of each other like discarded, rusty toys, had spilled out beyond the lake. Now the authorities had chain-linked a perimeter that took in most of the centre portion, including the Ramble, Strawberry Fields, Bethesda Fountain.
Children’s playgrounds, all soft tarmac and roundabouts and swings, bandstands and park benches, giant outdoor chess sets and coffee ’n’ bagel stands, all buried beneath a forest of six to seven-storey rusting towers of useless vehicles, all waiting their time, like prisoners on death row, to be crushed into cubes and carried away.
Sal watched the enormous airship finish winching up the last pallets of crushed metal into the dark bowels of its belly. It hung like a low storm cloud casting a shadow across most of the park.
She’d been late, though. She wanted to get here for midday, because that’s how she remembered it. Father and her, standing here, or hereabouts, gawping up at the huge vessel as it carefully navigated its approach over the tall city skyline and then descended into the open space above the park. Midday, they’d been standing right here. Watching the ship arrive and begin the loading process.
Now it was twenty past. There’d been an incident down on Broadway and the bus (an electric one, of course) she’d decided to take up to the park had been caught in a traffic jam. She’d pleaded with the driver to let her off and walk, but after patiently saying no to her three times he’d closed his plastic talk-hatch on her to shut her up.
Sal realized she’d arrived five minutes too late. The pair of them would have been standing here five minutes ago, Papaji and Saleena. That stopped her short. She realized she’d thought of the girl as someone else for the first time. Not Father and me … but Father and Saleena.
An odd thing. A strange sensation, seeing the person she ‘was’ as another person entirely. Some stranger who was standing with Father …
Instead of me.
Those three words crystallized something in her mind. Brought to the foreground a notion that had been lurking around in the background like a ghostly apparition sulking in a dusty attic.
Who’s to say you’re not the real Saleena Vikram? Hmm?
She watched another fifty-foot-wide pallet of scrap-metal cubes being lifted up into the sky, swinging gently on carbon-fibre cables and chains as it ascended. Again, she scanned the onlookers. Thirty or forty people, a few tourists among them, but mostly the motley assortment of alcoholics, addicts and vagrants that had begun to use the park as a flop centre. On colder nights those abandoned cars with windscreens and side windows still intact afforded at least some protection from the elements.
No Mr Vikram and his twelve-year-old daughter.
Sal cursed. She racked her brains to try and remember where they’d gone to next. Was it the museum? No. That was already in the process of being closed down. Where else? She couldn’t remember. That day’s memory had been all about this spectacular sight. She knew where Father had booked them into for the week, though. She remembered the name of the hotel. Remembered that seedy area. She remembered Papaji had apologized to her after they’d checked in. He’d told her it had looked prettier when he’d booked it online.
‘So, can I help you?’
The hotel cert
ainly wasn’t an expensive one. It was at the southern end of Broadway, in Lower Manhattan, where neighbourhoods like Little Italy, Chinatown and Soho converged. Once upon a time, Father had said, this was a nice place to live. A place where artists and poets met, where waiters hoping to one day be actors hung out with clerks hoping to one day become playwrights and planned scripts they hoped would one day end up on Broadway.
Bohemian, that was the word Father used.
Now it looked like a place only unpublished writers, unappreciated artists might choose to live. Every shop, what few of them there were, sported tough wire grilles over their windows and doors. Every counter inside seemed to have another grille to protect the lowly paid, sullen-eyed till-jockey beyond.
‘Miss?’
Sal looked at the hotel clerk. He was sitting on a stool behind his own protective grille, his attention more on a vintage comedy digi-channel than it was on her. Some milk-skinned, lanky young man was goofing around in a kids’ ball pool squawking ‘Bazinga!’ for some reason. The clerk seemed to find it funny.
‘I … I lost my hotel room key.’
‘Lost your keycard? That was stoopid of you, wasn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’ll have to code you a new one. What’s the room number?’
‘I … uh … I can’t exactly remember that.’
He tore his eyes away from the flickering flex-screen on the foyer wall behind her. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’m with my dad. He remembers that kind of thing. Sorry.’
Another sigh. The clerk leaned forward and tapped on the grubby, old-fashioned touchscreen terminal in front of him. ‘And the name is …?’
‘Vikram. Mr Sanjay Vikram. Room for two.’
The clerk tapped, swiped, tapped, then looked up at her. ‘No. No Mr Vikram staying here.’
‘What?’
‘I said, no Mr Vikram.’
‘But … but … ’ Sal frowned. That wasn’t right. They did stay here. They did. The Douglas Hotel. She remembered the name. She was certain of that. Details. She was good at remembering details. Things like goddamned bloody hotel names for instance.
‘We stayed … ’ She corrected herself. ‘We’re staying here!’
‘Maybe you just got the wrong hotel, sweetheart.’ He offered her the faintest flicker of a sympathetic smile. ‘There are a bunch of other hotels just like this one around here. Maybe you’re in one of those, huh?’
‘Can you please check again?’
He shrugged and did so. ‘Sorry. Nothing. No Mr Vikram.’
Sal remained where she was, waiting, hoping for him to suddenly say, ‘No, wait! Hang on … I guess I must’ve spelled it wrong. Here we are … ’ But he didn’t. Instead, he went back to watching the vintage comedy stream and she remained where she was, standing on the scratched and worn parquet floor of the hotel’s small foyer.
‘This is the Douglas Hotel?’
The man sighed irritably at her and pointed towards the door, to the street outside, to an identically shabby-looking hotel on the opposite side. ‘That’s the Douglas Hotel.’
‘Oh,’ she said and smiled apologetically. ‘I get right and left mixed up sometimes.’
But he was already ignoring her, smirking at the old sitcom.
‘OK, thanks anyway,’ she said finally and stepped out through the wire-mesh reinforced double doors past a couple of old men drinking from brown paper bags down three steps on to the sidewalk. She gazed across the busy road at the hotel opposite, mentally preparing herself to have the same conversation all over again with another impatient and bored desk-jockey.
The wrong side. She’d got the wrong side. She was beginning to question her memories. Beginning to doubt them.
What if they were never here, Sal? That sniping, told-you-so voice of hers.
What if you’re really like Maddy? Huh? Not even a copy of a real person. Made up. Just a piece of fiction. A jumbled-together library of memories. A Frankenstein’s monster.
‘Shut up,’ she whispered.
You’re going to cross the road, to the correct hotel this time, and find out there’s no Mr Sanjay Vikram and daughter staying there either.
‘Shut up!’
And perhaps it’s for the best. I mean, can you really do what you’re thinking of doing? Huh? Can you?
Sal hadn’t thought through in detail what she planned to do. But some foggy notion appealed to her that, like that old fairy tale of The Prince and the Pauper, she might somehow swap places with the real girl.
Come on, ‘swap places’? Like the real Saleena’s going to want to do that? Of course she wouldn’t. You’d have to replace her … you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You’d have to get rid of her, Sal.
All of a sudden she felt sick, dizzy. Yes, she realized that’s what she’d been subconsciously planning. To kill herself. To replace herself. To become the imposter in someone else’s life.
She stopped on the edge of the sidewalk and stared across the bicycle and rickshaw traffic at the far-side hotel. Perhaps it was best she didn’t cross the street and check in there. They were probably not even staying there. In fact, there probably never, ever was a Saleena Vikram. Why would she be any different to Maddy?
‘I’m a Frankenstein girl too,’ she uttered quietly. The nagging voice was quite right. This was a completely stupid idea.
Then, of course, her eyes made lies of those words as she spotted a middle-aged Indian man leading a young girl by the hand, out through the hotel door opposite, down several steps on to the sidewalk. The girl was chatting to her father, animated, excited, swinging her father’s hand as she talked. He laughed back at her. A kind, caring, proud laugh for his daughter.
‘My God … ’ Sal rocked dizzily on her heels. ‘Shadd-yah.’
Chapter 57
1667, Puerto Bello
Liam led his men in a convoy of three pinnaces, rowing across the bay and beaching on the silt and shingle that sloped down from the small settlement of Puerto Bello. As they made their way up on to the settlement’s main thoroughfare, a rutted dirt track running east–west from Castillo Santiago into Puerto Bello and the modest village square overlooked by the settlement’s one church, Liam saw Rashim proudly striding towards him along the track, leading his small army of pirate cut-throats and desperadoes.
He spotted Liam and gave him an exhilarated grin. ‘Liam! Good God! This is like taking candy from a sleeping baby!’ They clasped each other by the arms.
‘Jay-zus!’ laughed Liam. ‘We didn’t need to fire a single shot! They thought we were an invading army and just caved in! It was incredible!’ He looked up the dirt road towards the low walls of Castillo Santiago. ‘How was yours? I heard a couple of shots.’
‘Our French frontiersman took out a couple of their officers –’ Rashim shrugged a little guiltily – ‘while we, uh … while we parlayed. I’m not particularly proud of that. But that was all that was needed,’ he added quickly. ‘No more bloodshed required.’
They led their men down the track towards the town square, the men merging together into one column of cheering, chattering, excited sailors. As they passed by the few single-storey mud-plaster homes coated with peeling white paint, window shutters rattled hastily shut. Ahead of them an old muskreet man yanked on the reins of his donkey to force it off the track and out of sight.
‘The place looks deserted,’ said Liam.
‘Oh, they’re there … keeping out of sight, hiding in their homes.’ Rashim glanced back at their rabble army. ‘Which is probably best for everyone.’
‘Aye.’
The track opened on to a small square before the town’s church: a modest space of rutted, sunbaked dirt, roamed by chickens and roosters, with a well plumb in the middle. The men spilled into it, spread out and began inspecting the square for things they could steal. Liam heard a chicken squawk and turned to see Cookie holding a flapping chicken in his hands. He twisted the bird’s neck, the squawk ended abruptly and he tossed it into a bag on his shoulder.
/> We need to keep our men focused.
They were now fanning out, stepping into alleyways, rat runs between shacks, poking their heads into open, unshuttered windows. Looking for loot. Or worse. The town of Puerto Bello was effectively all but taken, albeit with only a couple of shots fired. Their men were conquerors, victors … and their attention now was wandering, seeking what they expected as theirs – the spoils of victory.
‘Rashim?’
He’d noticed and nodded. He cupped his mouth. ‘Gentlemen! The big prize isn’t this town. There’s nothing here!’
Heads turned sharply towards him, eyes wide, mouths opening ready to roar in angry complaint.
‘The prize, gentlemen, is over there!’ Rashim added, pointing across the town square, along a dirt track that led out of the far side of the settlement and up a gentle slope towards what appeared to be a small building site. Stacks of masonry blocks cut from coral beds nearby, bags of sand and piles of lumber, a framework of wooden scaffolding along a section of wall still to be built.
‘One last fort, San Geronimo … all the gold, all the silver is being stored in there. In a strongroom. Waiting for us to collect it!’ As one, over a hundred heads turned to look up the slope in unison. ‘So, uh … what are we waiting for … lads?’
The men roared with delight, many casually dropping the modest bits and pieces they were attempting to loot and instead started striding out of the town square and up the track heading towards San Geronimo.
Rashim looked at Liam and winked. ‘I do believe I am getting the hang of this.’
Ten minutes later, as they waded up the gentle slope through tufts of knee-high grass under a sun that was beginning to find its strength that morning, a volley of musket fire opened up.