Kingdom of Darkness

23

Eddie looked up at a knock on the door of Silva’s office. Miranda entered, speaking to the mayor before addressing the Englishman. ‘Santos and Vargas are both in the jail. El Jefe’s shoulder has been bandaged.’

‘What’re you going to do with them?’ Eddie asked.

‘I will have to tell the federal police what has happened here. All of it,’ he added, with a mournful look at Silva.

The mayor dropped into a chair with a heavy sigh. ‘I was afraid this day would come.’

‘What, the day your town’s little secret got out?’ Eddie replied, scathing. ‘That you were hiding a bunch of Nazi war criminals?’

‘It has never gone this far before, never!’ Silva protested. ‘The cops were only supposed to scare people away. They never tried to kill anyone.’

‘But you didn’t try too hard to talk Santos out of it after you spoke to Kroll, did you?’

‘You do not understand,’ he said, hands jittering in agitation. ‘El Jefe is not a man you argue with. Even though I am the mayor, he… he has all the power.’

‘Had all the power,’ Eddie corrected. ‘You’re in charge now. So do the right thing.’

Silva put his head in his hands. ‘The men in the Enklave, the Germans… without them, there would not be a town. You have seen the dry lake, the farms — Lago Amargo is dying! It would be dead without their payments.’

‘But Julieta said they made the lake dry up in the first place. Get rid of them and you get your water back.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know…’

Eddie banged a hand on the desk, making him jump. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. Those bastards up in the Enklave have got my wife, and my friends. I’m going to get them back — and you’re going to help me. Otherwise there really won’t be a town, ’cause I’ll burn the fucking place to the ground. Starting with your hotel.’

Silva wearily raised his head. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to call Kroll. Tell him I’m dead. That way, they won’t expect any trouble when I go up there.’

‘But what if he wants to speak to Santos?’

‘I don’t fucking know! You’re a politician; lie. But once you’ve done that, I need to know the best way to get up there, and what I can expect to find.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Silva. ‘I have never been inside the Enklave. No one from the town has.’

‘Seriously?’ Eddie said in disbelief. ‘So nobody knows what’s up there?’

‘I do,’ said a new voice.

All three turned to see Julieta at the door, which she had silently eased open. Silva jumped up, admonishing her in Spanish.

She responded in English. ‘No, Papá. I will not go to my room. I am not a child any more! This town has been sick for a long time, and we all know it — but this man has helped us by stopping El Jefe. So now we must help him. It is the right thing to do.’

Silva was clearly unhappy at being challenged by his daughter, but he seemed so drained by the day’s events that he lacked the energy to argue with her. ‘How do you know what is in the Enklave?’ he asked instead.

‘I have been inside.’

The mayor’s eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘Roland took me up the hill, in secret. We followed the old railroad.’

‘Roland? That boy?’

‘You’ve met him?’ Eddie asked Silva. ‘They come down to the town?’

‘Once or twice a year. They buy supplies, tools, things like that. They grow their own food, but it must not be enough for all of them any more.’

‘All of them?’ echoed the Yorkshireman. ‘How many of these buggers are there? How big’s this Enklave?’

‘Their land starts at the edge of the lake, and goes all the way to the old mines in the mountains.’ The bases of the peaks Eddie had seen on the way into Lago Amargo were at least ten miles away; the Enklave was indeed huge. ‘It is…’ Silva thought for a moment, ‘more than two hundred and fifty square kilometres. But I do not know how many people live there.’

‘Over one hundred,’ said Julieta. ‘Roland told me. Maybe one hundred and twenty.’

‘That’s a lot of Nazis,’ Eddie muttered.

‘Roland is not a Nazi!’ she protested. ‘He is… different. He wanted to find out more about the world, so…’ Guilt crossed her face as she glanced at the computer on Silva’s desk. ‘So I let him use the Internet when you were not here, Papá. Volker, too. He used it even more than Roland.’

‘Volker Koenig?’ said Eddie.

‘Yes, Roland’s brother.’

‘I met him. Briefly.’

‘Where is he?’ she asked, excited. ‘Is he okay?’

He hesitated before giving her the bad news. ‘I’m… afraid not. He’s dead.’

Julieta stared at him, stricken. ‘What — what happened to him?’ asked her father, equally shocked.

‘He came looking for us, but a Nazi called Jaekel shot him. I’m sorry.’

‘He shot Volker?’ she whispered. ‘But — but why? Why was he looking for you?’

‘He wanted to give something to my wife — she’s an archaeologist, Nina Wilde.’

‘I know that name!’ she said. ‘She is famous, yes?’ Eddie nodded. ‘Volker read about her on the computer. You are really married to her?’

‘Yeah, hard to believe with a face like this, I know,’ he said with a bruised smile. ‘They’re holding her, somewhere up there. I’m going to get her back, and the other people they’ve kidnapped too. You know how to get in?’

‘Yes — there is a hole in the fence. Roland and Volker used it to sneak down to the town.’

‘Will you show me?’

‘Of course. I will go with you.’

‘You will not,’ said Silva firmly.

‘I have to, Papá,’ Julieta insisted. ‘I have to find Roland and make sure he is okay… and I must tell him his brother is dead.’

Her father’s face fell. ‘I… Yes, you are right. But,’ he went on, raising a forefinger in warning, ‘you are not to take any risks, you understand? These people have become dangerous.’

‘They always were,’ Eddie pointed out. The reminder did not make Silva any happier.

‘What are you going to do once you are inside?’ Miranda asked.

‘First priority is rescuing Nina and the others. Then,’ he added to Julieta, ‘we’ll try to find your boyfriend. Anything else that happens… well, that’s up to them.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Silva.

‘It means that if anyone gets in my way, they’ll wish they hadn’t. But the main thing is finding Nina. Once I’ve done that, I’ll bring her and the others out, then call in the cavalry.’

Silva put his head in his hands again. ‘This could end everything. I do not know what to do…’

‘Do what is right, Papá,’ Julieta told him softly.

A sigh, then the mayor looked up at Eddie. ‘Okay. I will phone Kroll. Then,’ reluctance filled his voice, ‘Julieta can take you into the Enklave. If you promise that you will keep her safe.’

The Yorkshireman nodded. ‘I’ll watch out for her, trust me.’

‘Okay. Then… good luck, Mr Chase. I hope you find your wife, and your friends.’

‘So do I,’ replied Eddie. ‘So do I.’

After retrieving his belongings from the police station, Eddie set out with Julieta. ‘So how far’s the entrance?’ he asked, looking westwards towards the distant mountains. The crumpled hills rose quite steeply in places, but there was a distinct edge to the terrain that suggested a plateau higher up the slope.

‘There is a big gate about two kilometres from here,’ said Julieta, pointing along the dry lake bed. ‘The railroad from the mines goes to it, but it has not been used for a long time. Planes sometimes land on the lake, though; they have marked out an airstrip. There have been a lot recently — more than usual.’

‘How often do they normally come?’

‘Once every two or three months.’

‘Bringing people, or cargo?’

‘Mostly cargo. I was once out at the lake when a plane landed, so I hid in the bushes to watch. It brought lots of wooden boxes, but I do not know what was in them. But one came not long ago,’ she added, ‘and some men got in and flew away. That was weird, because they do not usually leave the Enklave.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Two weeks?’

Probably going to Egypt, Eddie thought; their entrance to Alexander’s tomb would have taken some time to prepare. ‘So if nobody leaves, how did you meet Roland and his brother?’

‘I told you, they were… different. It was over a year ago — I was looking for herbs when I found them both hiding behind some rocks. It was funny,’ she said, a faint flush of pink appearing on her cheeks as she smiled, ‘you would think they had never seen a girl before. Roland was so shy, he could hardly look at me! Volker was more… oh, I do not know the right word.’

‘Confident?’

‘Yes, that is it! But he was more confident about everything. Volker was the real explorer — he wanted to know all he could. After I showed him the Internet, it was hard to get him off the computer.’

‘And Roland wasn’t like that?’

‘He was, but not so much.’ Another blushing smile. ‘He was more interested in me. They would both sneak out of the Enklave, and I would spend time with Roland while Volker used the Internet.’

‘What was he reading about?’

‘Everything. In many languages, too — he was very smart. So is Roland, actually. He told me they are all taught English and Spanish as well as German. But Volker read a lot about history.’

‘What, like archaeology?’

‘Sometimes. But most of it was recent history. The Second World War.’ She shook her head. ‘There were always rumours about the people in the Enklave, that they were Nazis, but my father told me not to think about them. He tried not to think too much about the Enklave himself — like it was a secret he wished was not there. He wanted me to stay away from them when they came into town, but… I did that anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘They were not nice people. They always seemed very angry, looking at us like we had done something wrong — even though it was our town! But Roland and Volker were not like that. They were not supposed to go outside the Enklave, but they did — well, it was Volker’s idea, but Roland went with him — because they wanted to see if what they had been told about the rest of the world was true.’

Eddie smiled faintly. ‘If Roland’d never seen a girl before, I’m guessing they were pretty surprised about everything else they found.’

‘Volker was — and he was angry, too, at first. Like he didn’t want to believe it. But he kept coming back to find out more, and… and he was still angry, but now at the people in the Enklave for lying to him.’

‘What did they lie about?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask, because I did not think I wanted to know. But when he left, he said he was going to stop the lies. Roland did not want him to go, but he said he had to. That… that was the last time I saw him.’ Her voice caught.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Eddie.

‘Thank you. I do not know how I am going to tell Roland, though.’ She wiped an eye, then changed direction, heading away from the lake bed. ‘Up here.’

They climbed a rumpled slope dotted with scruffy vegetation. A tall barbed-wire fence stretched into the distance, enclosing a huge tract of land. ‘How far’s the hole?’ asked Eddie.

‘Not far, inside some bushes. They check the fence for gaps, but this is hard to see from inside the Enklave. It is big enough to crawl through. Don’t touch the fence, though,’ Julieta added in sudden warning.

‘Is it electrified?’

‘No, but there is an alarm. I do not know how it works, but men come down in a Jeep if it is touched.’ She led him up the hillside to a stand of shrubs that was bisected by the fence, and pulled back a bush to reveal a small depression beneath the lowest barbed strand. Eddie bent for a closer look. It would be a tight squeeze, but he would fit through.

He surveyed the grounds within the fence. No sign of life, or any indication that they were being observed. Some laborious mental arithmetic during the walk — if Nina had been with him, she could have done it in moments — had told him that the Enklave’s perimeter was over thirty miles long; a lot of ground for a hundred or so people to monitor, especially with so many blind spots caused by the rippled terrain.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll go first, then you follow. If you’re absolutely sure about coming.’

‘I am,’ said Julieta firmly. ‘I have to know that Roland is okay. There is a way up where we will not be seen — Roland took me once because I wanted to see where he lived.’

‘How long will it take to get there?’

‘About two hours.’

Eddie checked his watch. By the time they reached the top, they would be heading into darkness, but that could be to his advantage. ‘All right then. Let’s go.’

He dropped on to his back and wriggled under the barrier. There was a tense moment when the wire almost brushed his stomach, but he sucked it in and passed through without incident. On the other side, he rose to his feet and checked his surroundings.

The landscape looked little different from that outside, but it felt as if a switch had been flipped, putting him on high alert. He was about to head into the Nazi stronghold — into darkness in more ways than one. ‘Where Llamas Dare,’ he muttered, before turning as Julieta emerged. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Which way?’

‘There.’ She pointed along a crease in the hillside. ‘It goes to the railroad bridge.’

‘Okay.’ He drew the gun he had taken from Vargas and pulled back the slide to chamber the first round from its reloaded magazine. ‘Let’s get started.’