Dead Line

TWENTY-EIGHT

Peter Templeton was hot, even sitting in the shade of the portico in the corner of the monastery’s long terrace. He could hear cicadas on the slope beneath him, but the heat must be too much for the kestrels, for the sky was empty of life. As Templeton peered down the valley the air shimmered slightly, oscillating jelly-like in the unremitting glare of the high noon sun.

He had come, as always, in convoy with his colleague. The other car sat two miles below at the cafe, waiting for Jaghir to drive past. Just outside Nicosia a large Peugeot saloon had joined them, making Templeton nervous. He had been relieved when it had finally turned off, and sped south towards the coast.

His mobile vibrated. ‘Yes,’ he said, keeping his voice down, though he had the terrace to himself – the monks were all at prayer.

‘A couple of miles away. I can see the dust. I’d say five minutes to here; twenty to you.’

‘Okay. Keep an eye out for any other cars,’ he added, thinking again of the Peugeot.

Templeton waited tensely, resisting the temptation to look at his watch. He had called this meeting, prompted by Vauxhall Cross’s agitated requests for confirmation of Jaghir’s original story and, if possible, more detailed information. Against Templeton’s better judgement, Jaghir had insisted on meeting him here at the monastery again. Vauxhall Cross had been so adamant that he talk with Jaghir right away that he hadn’t protested.

Something stirred in the far corner of the terrace, and Templeton turned quickly, alert. A lizard hopped once, then twice into the shadows cast by the rough stone wall. Then Templeton’s phone vibrated.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s just passed.’

‘Anything else around?’

There was a pause. ‘Negative.’

Soon Templeton saw the first dust cloud stirring from the track at the base of the hill. He peered across the valley and could just make out a dark saloon edging its way carefully up the slope. Gradually the image magnified as the car approached, taking the sinuous bends carefully, since the track was narrow and perched on a knife-edge high above the valley. On the few short straight stretches the car accelerated briefly, and now Templeton could see the solitary figure at the wheel. Jaghir.

The car disappeared momentarily where the track cut into the hillside, then reappeared in the last big bend before the final precipitous climb to the top. Templeton could hear the tyres gripping on the sandy surface, the rough throttle of the engine as the automatic transmission slipped in and out of gear. Then a flat thud, like a hand giving a short sharp slap against a rubber mat.

Suddenly Templeton saw the car veer like a child’s toy out of control. It headed at a sharp angle for the edge of the track, then the tyres seemed to catch themselves and the car moved away from the edge. Like a slow-motion film replay, the car now slewed across the thin wedge of track in widening swerves.

Templeton held his breath as he watched Jaghir desperately trying to regain control. But the Syrian must have swung the wheel too sharply – the car now careered towards the edge. A front tyre left the track and hung briefly in mid-air, then the back tyre joined it.

For a moment the car teetered perilously, tilted at an angle, as if in suspended animation. Then the entire vehicle tipped sideways and fell through the air, descending for almost a hundred feet until it just caught the protruding edge of a large boulder sticking out of the hillside. This flipped the saloon 180 degrees and it landed on its side on the sharp downward slope, gaining momentum, crashing through the brush, with a noise like dry cereal crushed by a spoon. The car rolled over and over until it came to the bottom of the valley, where it flipped over with a final movement onto its roof, and stayed completely still.

Whoomph! The shockwave of its crash landing rose up the valley, filling the hot moist air with a blanket of sound. Staring down, Templeton saw flames begin to creep from the bottom of the wrecked saloon, licking the side windows, then reaching the tyres that sat like circles of dark chocolate on top of the upended car. The fire spread over the exposed chassis, and Templeton, watching horrified from the terrace above, waited for the petrol tank to catch fire.

It did, in a series of muffled explosions. Now the entire vehicle was ablaze, and Templeton realised that while it was improbable that Jaghir had survived the descent, it was inconceivable he could survive the fire.

Templeton’s phone vibrated and an agitated voice said, ‘I see smoke.’

‘I bet you can. The target went off the track.’

‘Did he get out?’

‘No.’

‘Is there anything I should do?’

Soon someone would spot the blaze – if not below in the valley, then here at the monastery when the monks came out of prayers. Fires were no joke in this tinder box of arid scrub – people would watch to make sure the fire didn’t spread; someone would go down to investigate and then the police would be called. There was time, but not much.

‘Leave at once. And go back a different way. Meet me back at the office.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah. Just go.’ And he switched off his phone.

Templeton left the terrace immediately and got into his car. He was shaking as he drove as quickly as he dared down the track, stopping when he came to the bend where Jaghir’s saloon had left the road. He left the engine of his own car running while he got out and looked quickly at the tyre marks that ran through the dust until they stopped, on the edge of the cliff. Templeton peered down, stunned by how steep the fall had been. He could see the massive, obtruding boulder that the car had hit on its way down, leaving a smear of dark paint on the rock. His eyes followed the vertical trail as the saloon had somersaulted, crushing the scrub in its way, until it came to a halt on the bottom where it blazed now, like a final punctuation mark.

Templeton turned and quickly walked along the track, following the twists and turns of the tyre marks until he came to their first erratic move. What had gone wrong? A blow-out? Possibly, though at such relatively low speed it should have been possible to control the saloon until it had stopped safely on the narrow road.

He looked carefully around the track to see what might have caused the accident. A nail, broken glass, something sharp; perhaps, he thought, even a small remote-controlled explosion. He found nothing.

He had better get going. He jogged back up the fifty yards of track, climbed into his own car, then drove down towards the junction, anxious to get away before a patrol car arrived and trapped him on the one-lane track.

Five minutes later, he was far enough away to think about what had happened. Could it have been a simple puncture after all? Realistically he had to admit that the odds of a blow-out at low speed on the way to a covert meeting, resulting in Jaghir’s death, were minimal. Far more likely that Jaghir’s work for a foreign agency had been discovered and his Syrian masters had extracted the penalty. But he’d found no evidence to support that theory, either. It was only as he saw the residential apartment blocks of Nicosia appear on the horizon that he remembered something else – the dull crack he’d heard just before the ill-fated saloon first veered. His hands shook. If Jaghir had indeed been killed, how had he been detected?