Age of Heroes Read online

  Badenhorst put his eye to the hole again, as urged. Kadeer didn’t mean inside the door; he meant through it, to the chamber beyond. Badenhorst had been so preoccupied with fathoming the workings of the trap, he had neglected to consider anything else. Is good thing, Kadeer had said.

  Of course.

  It was only a glint in the darkness. Metal reflecting the light outside. An outline of something gleaming – and sharp.

  But it was enough.

  Badenhorst had been doing this job for two years: hunting down specific artefacts in isolated and often all-but-inaccessible regions, a dozen of them all told. Two years of his life spent chasing down treasures and piercing the layered defensive measures protecting each one. Two years of travel, preparation, recruitment, discomfort, toil, supervision, setback, slow progress and hard-won success.

  Every time, at the moment of final discovery, when the object of his search stood revealed, it was worth it. Every time, he felt like Howard Carter peering through the chink into Tutankhamun’s tomb and glimpsing the “wonderful things” within. The exhilaration, however brief, was a fair reward for the days of stress, demand and frustration preceding it. For a few precious seconds, Badenhorst forgot he was helping to lay the groundwork for a string of murders, and could almost believe that he was doing something good instead.

  LATER, IN HIS tent, he fired up the satphone and rang his employer. Early morning, China Standard Time, meant it was late the previous evening for the recipient of the call, but Badenhorst had been told never to worry about the hour. Day, night, whenever, he should get in touch as soon as each artefact was found, without delay.

  His employer picked up after eight rings.

  “Badenhorst. Speak.”

  The words were fragmented, rumbly, as though bubbling up from deep underwater. The satellite relay might have been partly responsible for that, scrambling the signal as it bounced through low Earth orbit and adding a scrim of static, but Badenhorst was pretty certain that some kind of voice changer software package was in play as well. The distortion was the same wherever he was in the world. It seemed intended to disguise everything about the voice’s owner – their age, gender, accent, class – leaving him with absolutely no pointers towards their identity.

  That was perhaps the weirdest aspect of the entire undertaking. Badenhorst had no idea who he was working for. Not the faintest clue. His employer had remained anonymous throughout, from the initial exploratory email sent to him from a secure mailer, enquiring whether Badenhorst would be interested in a job so lucrative it would allow him to retire and spend the rest of his life in luxury, to the regular financial transfers he received from a numbered offshore bank account to cover ongoing expenses and fund the project. Every step of the way, Badenhorst had been walking blind, led along by an unknown benefactor. For a man like him, who trusted no one but himself, it had been quite a leap of faith to accept the job offer, no questions asked. Had the payday not been so mouth-wateringly tantalising – twenty million dollars cash, waiting for him in a bank vault on Grand Cayman – he might have baulked.

  “We have it, boss,” he said.

  A pause, a blip of delay. Then his employer said, “Excellent. You’re holding it in your hands right now?”

  “Not quite. Not as such. But it’s only a matter of time. Today, this afternoon at the latest, we’ll have extricated it.”

  “Then isn’t this conversation a little premature?”

  Badenhorst swatted away a fly that had come to suckle on a bead of sweat on his forehead. “Getting the artefact is a formality now. We’ve jumped all of the hurdles. My men are wiring up explosives even as we speak, to crack the final door. Then it’ll be done and dusted.”

  “Don’t get overconfident,” said his employer. “You can’t be sure there isn’t a last little surprise waiting for you. Sneaky bastard, the man behind all this. He really didn’t want the things to be found, and made sure anyone who tried would be punished.”

  “We have been punished. Lost another labourer this morning.”

  “How many does that make it in all?”

  “Five. He’s the fifth casualty. Not counting the wounded, that is. The fifth death.”

  From the other end of the line came what sounded like a sigh, although it could just have been noise on the line. “Tragic but unavoidable.”

  “Omelette, breaking eggs,” said Badenhorst with practised nonchalance. “Can’t get too worked up over some coolie mongrel, nè?”

  “Your pragmatism does you credit.”

  Badenhorst couldn’t decide if he was being mocked or not; the distortion on the voice masked nuances of tone. He chose to believe that he had just been complimented. There were good reasons for not getting testy with his employer. Twenty million of them, in fact.

  “So we’re almost finished, eh, boss?” he said. “Eleven artefacts recovered, one to go.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “Just making the point that everything’s on track, going nice and lekker. Where to next? Russia, am I right? That’s where artefact number twelve is.”

  “Correct, but I’m thinking we can do without.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been such a long, drawn-out campaign. I’m not sure I can be bothered to hang on any more. We’ve got enough. Eleven’s enough. We can manage without the twelfth. It may prove more useful, anyway, staying where it is. We shall see. No, it’s decided. We are bringing this phase of the operation to a close and embarking on phase two. Are you up for that?”

  “You’re saying this is it? No more digs? I can be getting on with what I’m used to doing?”

  “Exactly. It’s time to commence enlistment and training.”

  Badenhorst’s true skill set. “I’m happy with that.”

  “I had a feeling you would be. You’ve got three months. Will that be enough?”

  “Are you asking me or telling?”

  “What do you think?”

  THREE MONTHS, BADENHORST mused, wandering through the campsite, puffing on a slim joint. Three months to assemble a unit of killers and accustom them to using a suite of weapons they were hardly likely to be familiar with. It was doable. Just. He might have wished for a little more time, but his employer had clearly run out of patience. He or she wanted to accelerate the schedule. Badenhorst would simply have to facilitate that.

  A wind was picking up, sending specks of sand swirling through the air. The sand ticked grittily on the windows of the Mercedes-Benz 6×6 G-Wagens parked at the edge of the campsite, which would shortly be carrying Badenhorst and the labourers back to the city of Ürümqi. It would be a seventy-two hour drive along virtually non-existent roads, but superior upholstery and suspension of would make the journey bearable. So would the satisfaction of having his prize stowed in the back of one of the cars, snug in a foam-lined steel flightcase.

  Badenhorst smiled.

  Three months, and then the killing would begin.

  Now there was something to look forward to.

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  ONE

  Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego

  THE VOYAGER HAS come to the end of the world.

  No, scratch that. Too corny.

  The weary travel writer has come to the end of the world.

  Nope. Still too corny.

  How about: At the very tip of the South American continent, in the southernmost city on the planet, you can truly believe you have run out of civilisation, and there is nothing beyond and nowhere left to go.

  Hmm. Maybe.

  Or why not just have done with it and start like this? “I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate, first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger...”

  Anthony Peregrine looked up from his laptop with a sour expression, half scornful, half rueful.

  If in doubt, turn to the classics for inspiration. Even if your chosen quotation
was only tangential to the subject matter, it sure as hell lent your copy a touch of sophistication.

  Then, of course, there was the plain unvarnished truth. He could go with that option – although there was barely a person alive who would believe it.

  The immortal, now with three millennia under his belt, has come to Patagonia to write a series of colour pieces for gofar.com because that’s what he currently does for a living: roams the world and cobbles together articles about the places he visits for the benefit of semi-respectable travel websites. It’s really just a pose, though, the travel writer thing. A pretext for the wanderlust that has consumed him throughout his extraordinarily long life, ever since the fall of Troy. Something to justify his inability to settle down in any one spot for any meaningful length of time.

  The laptop screen remained resolutely blank, the page word-free. The cursor blinked like someone tapping their foot.

  Another beer.

  Anthony ordered a fresh pint of Hain, the local draught lager, and sipped it, gazing out across the Beagle Channel towards the island of Navarino. He was in Argentina, and across the strait lay Chilean territory. A few boats plied the bleak grey stretch of water, deep-sea fishing vessels mostly, leaving harbour, along with a couple of catamarans taking sightseers out on whale-watching and seal-spotting excursions. A sharp wind from the Atlantic ruffled up small waves and swirled into the open-sided seafront bar, but its bite was mitigated by the heat from a log fire blazing in a raised stone hearth.

  The beer didn’t bring immediate inspiration, but it did go some way to quenching the ennui Anthony was feeling. He wondered whether this travel writing gig had run its course. He had been at it for – what was it, a couple of decades now? – supplying copy first for airline in-flight magazines and then online outlets. The novelty, such as it was, had worn off. He was running out of things to say, different ways to describe the destinations he fetched up in. It was hard not to lapse into cliché when the world was becoming increasingly homogenised, when diversity and individuality were being drowned by the rising tide of McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola...

  No, he couldn’t blame his dissatisfaction on multinationals and the march of globalisation. That was too easy, too trite.

  Anthony’s problem was that there was nothing new for him, nothing he hadn’t seen countless times before, in one form or other. Three thousand years – that sort of longevity took its toll.

  So why not just knock it out? It was only a few paragraphs of mindless clickbait that readers would scroll through in seconds, something to link some stock photos together and generate traffic for advertisers. They were hardly expecting James Joyce, were they? Besides, he had promised at the end of his previous article that he’d be writing about Tierra del Fuego in this one. He had fans, a small core of devoted followers, some of whom travelled to the places he recommended. He couldn’t let those people down, could he? He had to give them something, even if it wasn’t much.

  So...

  Ushuaia is a city of contrasts. The capital of Tierra del Fuego, it nestles at the foot of the snow-capped Martial Mountains and boasts a thriving port and some excellent restaurants. But it’s also unfinished-looking and in parts primitive, littered with low, drab buildings that have a Swiss-chalet feel to them but are otherwise architecturally unremarkable. Industrial zones sprawl towards a rugged, wild coastline. Tepid summers give way to bracing winters, the typical climate of subpolar latitudes. Founded by British missionaries, Ushuaia is now staunchly Argentinian, as evidenced by the Malvinas War Memorial occupying a plaza downtown next to –

  “Is that a MacBook Pro?”

  Anthony stopped typing, glanced round.

  The stranger at the adjacent table waved a hand apologetically. “Sorry, mate. Rude of me. I’m a nosy bastard. Just ignore me.”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Anthony. “Glad of the interruption. You a Brit?”

  “English, yeah. You a Yank?”

  “Kind of. More like a citizen of the world.”

  “You sound a bit Yank.”

  “Don’t all citizens of the world? Brave of you, though, coming here, if I may say. An Englishman. They’re not fond of your country in Ushuaia.”

  The Englishman shrugged. “I’m a big boy. I can handle myself.” He motioned at the laptop. “You a blogger or something?”

  “Travel writer.”

  “Oh. Cool. Must pay all right.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I couldn’t help noticing the hardware, could I? Third gen, right? Fifteen-inch Retina display. Flash storage. Extended battery life. Yours looks like a top-spec model, too. I’d love to be able to afford one of those.”

  They chatted about MacBooks for a while, and about portable computers more generally, and then the conversation strayed to Anglo-Argentinian relations, the Top Gear incident, the Falklands, broadening out from there into a sweeping discussion of geopolitics. The stranger’s name was Roy Young, and he was intelligent and engaging company. He had clearly travelled himself, although not to the extent that Anthony had – but then no one had to the extent that Anthony had. He was lithe and well-proportioned, early thirties, in good physical condition, with close-cropped hair that suggested military service at some point in his past. He had come to Ushuaia to ski, he said. It was early June and the season hadn’t officially started, but snow had already fallen and he had heard there was already good powder up on Mount Krund. He planned to head up to the Cerro Castor resort in the next couple of days and try out the slopes there. Anthony admitted that he did a bit of skiing himself from time to time and had been toying with the idea of visiting Cerro Castor.

  Young bought a round of beers, which endeared him further to Anthony, and as the afternoon shaded into evening the two men grew ever friendlier. They ate dinner together at the bar – sausage casserole, spicy fried potatoes, chicken fajitas, rounds of smoked cheese – and at some point Anthony found himself agreeing to accompany Young on a trip aboard the Tren del Fin del Mundo, the narrow-gauge steam railway that ran from Ushuaia into the Tierra del Fuego National Park. It was a horribly touristy thing to do, but then Anthony was a travel writer. Wasn’t he supposed to do horribly touristy things and report back about them? Wasn’t that the whole point?

  ACCORDINGLY, HE ANDYoung met up the next morning, took a taxi out to the “End of the World” station, and were soon trundling along in a little carriage with large windows, hauled by a puffing locomotive, through a rolling, snow-bleached landscape. The train wended its way along Pico Valley, halted at the Cascada de le Macarena station, then continued onward and upward to its terminus, El Parque station, where the two men alighted.

  Young had proposed a hike into the forest, which sounded okay to Anthony as it was more adventurous than turning around and going back, which was what the great majority of the train passengers did. Young had brought a rucksack loaded with provisions, and they were both of them dressed for the conditions – walking boots, puffer jackets, thermal gloves. They strode off towards the treeline, Young setting a forthright pace, Anthony ably keeping up.

  For the first kilometre or so, Anthony talked about how the railway line had originally been built to serve the penal colony which had been established in Ushuaia in 1896. The trains had brought timber down from a forestry camp so that the prisoners, used as forced labour, could erect houses and help expand the town.

  “Funny how a symbol of one era’s suffering becomes another’s jolly daytrip jaunt,” Young commented.

  Anthony chuckled. “I might use that line in my piece.”

  “As long as you tell everyone who said it.”

  “Never. I’m a writer. I steal. I don’t give credit. Everything is fodder for my prose – even people.”

  “Bastard.”

  “At least it suggests the world is getting better.”

  “What, shamelessly pilfering some other bloke’s words of wisdom?”

  “No. A prison railway becoming a tourist attraction. The present transcending th
e past. Suffering giving way to leisure.”

  “Bollocks,” said Young. “The world’s just the same as it ever was. Something improves somewhere, something else turns to shit. For every peace treaty that’s signed, another war breaks out in a different place. For every dictator who gets overthrown, some other extremist regime pops up and embarks on a genocide.” He held up his palms and waved them like the sides of a scales: left up, right down; right up, left down. “It all evens out. Checks and balances, yeah?”

  “I like to think there’s an upward trend nonetheless,” said Anthony. “Continual progress. I take the long view. Life is markedly more pleasant and comfortable now, for the majority, than it was even just a century ago. That’s an objective, provable, quantifiable fact. People are living longer, they’re healthier, there’s more to eat, more free time...”

  “Yeah, but at what cost? The cushier it gets for us, the faster we bring on climate change. The more we consume – the more of us there are doing the consuming – the bigger a mess we make of the environment. All the oil, the plastics, the heavy metals, the agrochemicals, the manufacturing... We’re dooming ourselves, shitting the bed we lie in, but it’s okay, doesn’t matter, as long as we’ve all got pizza delivery and smartphones and the latest app. Speaking of which...”

  Young produced an iPhone and took a map reading.

  “Don’t want to get lost, do we now?”

  “For someone who bemoans how consumerism is destroying the planet,” Anthony said, “you seem to like your tech.”

  “I never said I was consistent.”

  They hiked on in silence for a while, the only sound their feet crunching snow. Roy Young, Anthony thought, was an interesting individual, much more complex than he appeared. On the surface, he was affable, competent, droll, but there were dark undercurrents running beneath. If he had once been military – and Anthony knew what to look for and was sure he had been – then he would have been the type who thought hard about every decision, the type who might even question orders if he felt they didn’t serve the best interests of himself and his brothers-in-arms.