Randa could sense Brooks thinking of more to say, greater ways to entice Conrad, but everything they were willing to reveal was out there. That, and the roll of cash in Conrad’s pocket.
He viewed them over the top of his whiskey glass, then broke out into a huge grin.
“You won’t last a day,” he said.
“What?” Brooks asked. He was drinking as well, but slowly. Randa was worried that he’d blurt something about their real reason for going on this journey, because he knew the time for that wasn’t yet. They’d push Conrad further away, not pull him in closer. He was a pragmatist, and little about Monarch and their search sounded rational.
“Untouched biodiversity?” Conrad said. “That’s a fancy way of saying uninhabitable. Rain, heat, mud, disease-carrying flies and mosquitoes. Little shelter, rations at a minimum, no resupply. Sure, you load up on Atabrine for the malaria, but other bacteria? Ones we don’t know about?” He drained his glass, leaned forward and poured some more. “And we haven’t even gotten to all the things that want to eat you alive.”
Randa put his glass on the table and nudged it towards Conrad, who poured in another two fingers.
“I sense that a negotiation is in progress,” Randa said.
There was an envelope on the table containing more money. The cash he’d thrown to Conrad had been simply to grab his attention, but in the envelope was ten times that amount. Conrad had not touched it, but it sat there between them, a plea and a promise. He could buy a lot of bad whiskey with that, Randa had thought as he’d placed the envelope down, but he berated himself soon after. This image of Conrad—drinker, hustler, haunter of smoky dives—might have been accurate, but it was not who he really was. Perhaps now that the war was over he was in a holding pattern, just waiting to see what came next.
Perhaps he didn’t want anything to come next.
“We’ll double that,” Randa said.
“Triple,” Conrad said. “Plus a bonus if we all make it back.”
“If?” Brooks asked, looking at Randa wide-eyed. “Pay the man! I mean… I mean, I think we should fairly compensate Mr Conrad. For his expertise.”
Randa grabbed his refilled glass and raised it for a toast. “To profit during peacetime,” he said.
Conrad joined the toast and sipped from his glass. “One more question,” he said. “You came here looking for a tracker.”
Randa nodded. Brooks froze with his own glass tipped to his lips.
“So who, or what, am I tracking?”
“Mr Conrad,” Brooks said, putting his glass down without drinking. Randa was glad, and he was also impressed to see that Brooks had hardly drunk anything. Young and green he might be, but he knew the value of keeping his head. “This is all the information that we have, okay? There is no map of this place. To our knowledge no one’s ever been there before, or if they have they didn’t see fit to chart the place and make that information available to the world. So we need someone with your skills and unique expertise in jungle terrain to lead our ground expedition.”
“We’re just scholars and scientists,” Randa said. “We need someone with experience in case things go sideways.”
“Sideways,” Conrad said. “Right.” He swigged some more whiskey and slammed his glass down on the table.
Done deal, thought Randa. He should have been relieved: they were one step closer to their mission. But though he was excited, their reasons for hiring this man played on his mind. He was a tracker, true, but he was a killer as well. He knew the jungle, but he had no inkling of the things that might be waiting there for them.
The deception did not sit well with Randa, but for now it would have to stand. The time would come when he could tell Conrad of the true nature of their expedition. He only hoped that time was a moment of peace, not danger and threat.
The drinking den in which they sat suddenly seemed much less dangerous when he compared it to where they were about to go.
FOUR
Mason Weaver looked into the eyes of the traumatised child and wished she could not see. Photographs told so much more than being there ever did. She remembered seeing this young girl staring at her with the remains of her bombed and burning village in the background, feeling sad about it, taking the picture, then moving on. It was just a moment amongst many other bad ones, and a few minutes later she’d forgotten about the little girl.
Now, seeing the image forming and emerging in the tray of chemicals in the darkroom, Weaver realised that this was a picture that could touch nations.
You didn’t want me there, she thought, looking into the girl’s eyes. You’d hate it if you knew this picture existed. She saw that truth in the girl’s eyes and recognised it so well, because it also existed in her own.
Weaver had only ever wished to live in the background, which was why she spent most of her life behind a lens.
It was probably her father’s fault. She didn’t think about the past too much, but when she did it was with a feeling of sinking sadness rather than anger or regret. He’d been a good man, but in his goodness he’d managed to give the young Weaver a sense of insecurity that had plagued her through her teens and into adulthood. He had wanted the best for his only daughter. Nothing was ever quite good enough for her, and that included the things she did as well as the things done by those around her. If she performed poorly in a school test he blamed the school, but she always read an underlying blame in his voice for her, whether it was really there or not. In his quest to create from his child the adult he desired her to be, he forgot to consider everything that she wanted. It was a benevolent dictatorship, and by the time Weaver was old enough to even begin to understand what damage such control was bringing down upon her, it was too late. The damage was done.
She was only sixteen when he died. At the funeral she’d felt invisible, as much a ghost as he might have been, drifting from room to room during the wake at their house with no one seeing her. Her mother had spent the day standing in the kitchen making endless cups of coffee for the mourners. She had no siblings. So Weaver had wandered the house, never finding comfort in any one place and constantly seeking something and somewhere she could not find.
She’d left home six months later, going to college and returning only for brief visits, and she’d spent from then until now still seeking that thing, that place. It was only through the lens of a camera that she started to feel close.
Weaver moved the photo back and forth in the tray, waiting for exactly the right moment to remove it.
The phone on the wall started ringing. She’d been waiting for a call all day, but now was the most pressing time. If she left the photo for too long it would overexpose and be ruined, and she knew already that this was one of the best shots she’d ever taken.
“Come on, come on,” she whispered, nursing the photo towards perfection.
The phone sounded impatient.
When the exact time arrived she pulled the photo from the tray and slid it into the stop bath, lunging for the phone at the same time.
“Weaver.”
“Mason, it’s Jerry.”
Her heart skipped. This is the call I’ve been waiting for! Jerry had come to report on the war for various European news agencies, but his talents had stretched much further than being able to get a story. It turned out that Jerry could get almost anything. He’d become known as something of a fixer amongst the journalistic family in the Far East—arranging interviews with generals, embedding reporters with Special Forces teams, extracting information from embassy staff; he also had a handle on where and when big announcements would be made, and he knew his way around military circles and society like no one else.