He made a mental checklist. Normally he would have made sure his shoes were clean, his tie straight, his jacket not too creased, that his laptop and BlackBerry were charged and the work for his next appointment was loaded, then glanced through his schedule.
Today the checklist was short: a tyre iron, a penknife, the stick and the pocket torch, which he could use only on the track and behind the sheets. He did not know if, from the hiding place, he would hear cries for help when the cable was cut. He didn’t know where the air vent was, but there had to be one. There was so much he didn’t know.
A last pause and a last listen. He heard the wind in the leaves, and the wolf below him. He had kept vigil with the animal through the night. Together they had endured.
Jago stepped forward, committed. His legs were stiff and his movements clumsy. The night was hard around him. The men behind and above might have seen him from their eyrie. He knelt, swung his legs into the void and scrabbled for a grip. His lead foot found a secure stone, and he was away from the security of the cleft between two great boulders.
He went down. Ledges and cracks in stone to hold his weight, the stick in his hand to guide him. He could make out the sheets that hung on the line, screening the path – he needed the place where the third sheet was against the fourth. He would have been close to the wolf but didn’t hear it. He went lower. He saw a film in his head, the one that had been screened every Christmas when he was a kid, and heard the great lines. A man jumped off a ten-storey building, and as he’d gone down on each floor people had heard him say, ‘So far so good. So far, so good.’ About right. Another line, same movie: a man had stripped off and jumped into a mass of cacti and was asked why he’d done it. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’ A stone slid from under him, bounced, rolled away. Then was still.
The eruption was total. The crows and the pigeons thrashed at leaves and branches and rose, screaming, into the darkness.
The torch came on – but the boy had been in the kitchen. The torch had a strong narrow beam and raked over the hillside. Jago went down on his knees, then his stomach, and tried to burrow but was on unforgiving rock.
14
Every bird rose in flight. The noise split the darkness. If there had been earth under him, Jago would have scraped at it with his fingernails. Impossible. He tried to snuggle lower, but had to see what happened in front of him. The torch was powerful, had a sharp-edged beam.
It would be Marcantonio with the torch. Jago realised he’d been duped. He had thought himself intelligent, street-wise and had believed that the boy’s patience was exhausted. Wrong. At the bank, if he had made a mistake, he would expect to be hauled before a mini Star Chamber – Wilhelmina and two grey-faced men – and made to understand that the bank had to put right the loss to a client. A million, a thousand or a hundred euros, whatever the sum the gravity of the error was emphasised. No one was here to watch over him. He thought the men in the camouflage suits, above and behind him – who had his photograph – would be cursing him, with good reason: the torch beam threatened them, as well as Jago.
It had started high in the trees where the crows and pigeons had been, but now raked over the leaves, branches and rock faces. It seemed to pry into the little crannies where there was shadow and wipe away darkness. It moved steadily, avoided nothing, paused where something was unclear, then moved again.
The dogs screamed. Jago had had his head down and dared to lift his face fractionally to peer below him. The scream became a howl. The torch beam would have found the wolf, enough to make the eyes light up, two spots of gold. The dogs were barking, furious but not yet brave enough to scamper from the safety of Marcantonio. The light came back.
He thought the wolf did not have the strength to leap off the rock where it had been through the night. It would stay and fight for the final moments of its life. The beam, on full power, was locked on it. Jago could see part of its head – he thought its mouth was open, teeth showing. It was crouched. If it had not been for the injury, Jago thought, the wolf would have turned tail, slipped from rock to stone, jumped and manoeuvred, scurried, found cover and been gone in the darkness. But it was injured.
The beam lit it.
Then the light shook, was readjusted. The three dogs were flooded with light and danced at Marcantonio’s feet, rearing on their back legs and howling. If the wolf responded with growls or snarls, it did so too softly for Jago to hear. He saw why the beam meandered. It was full on Marcantonio’s face, then on his arm, which held the shotgun. The boy aimed the weapon, the shortened barrels were resting on his left arm. His left hand held the torch, which wobbled and wavered, searching for the wolf. Jago almost shouted, but the words stuck in his throat, a jumble about the beast getting clear, using these moments to find a refuge. He held his silence because that was survival.
It was found.