The Courier. Ava McCarthy
‘Wait! Let me go first!’
A fist punched him in the side of the head, slamming him to the ground. Three savage kicks crunched into his lower back. He curled, foetal-like, to protect his abdomen, but the taller guard yanked him up and hurled him against the wall. Mani slid to the ground, panting. The guard raised his weapon, took aim.
‘Just stay still, college boy.’
Mani squinted up at his face. It was large and square, like a slab of cement. His name was Janvier, a Belgian mercenary. Rumour had it that he practised his sniper aim from the watchtower by shooting passing miners in the back. Behind him, the other guard looked young and pale.
Mani pressed himself into the wall, his skull pounding. By now, Alfredo was locked inside the x-ray room. Mani checked the warning light over the door. Flashing red would mean the x-rays were on. The light was still green.
He thought of the black specks they’d find in Alfredo’s stomach. He closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do.
A buzzer sounded. The light flashed red. Mani began to count. Twenty-five seconds was all it took to scan someone head to toe. Another fifteen to check the results.
Eight, nine, ten.
Van Wycks had every angle covered. Daily x-rays at the end of every shift. More x-rays and searches when your contract ended and you left the compound for good. Sometimes they fed you laxatives the day before just to purge any diamonds out.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.
Nothing was allowed to leave the mine. Any vehicles that came in never went out, in case they carried diamonds through the gate. And if a mine worker died, his family never got his body back. Instead, he was buried inside the compound, so that no one could smuggle diamonds in his corpse.
Mani opened his eyes. Twenty-five seconds. The light turned green.
He listened. All he could hear was his own ragged breathing. He couldn’t bring himself to count any more.
Then he heard a yell. Something in the other room crashed to the floor. A door slammed. Mani stiffened, snapping his eyes to the window. Alfredo stumbled into view, crouching. He lurched across the compound, heading for the electric fence. A shot cracked into the air. Alfredo buckled at the knees, sagged to the ground. Blood seeped from his thigh. He clawed at the dirt, trying to drag himself on.
Okker strolled up behind him, swinging a rifle in one hand. Mani swallowed.
Okker laughed. ‘Look, he’s going for the fence.’
Alfredo stopped crawling and lay trembling in the dust. Okker bent over him.
‘What are you going to do, tunnel under it?’
He guffawed again, looking around for an audience. Then he turned back to Alfredo, took casual aim and shot him in the face.
Mani gasped. He shook his head, couldn’t breathe. Okker was still laughing. Mani wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Okker snapped open a knife and sliced through Alfredo’s shirt, baring his scrawny abdomen. Then he touched his blade to the dusky skin.
‘Let’s slit him open, see what we’ve got.’
Mani jerked back against the wall. His limbs twitched, pulsing with shock. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to listen to the ripping sounds from outside. The diamond in his own gut scorched through him.
Something clicked near his ear. Mani opened his eyes and stared into the bore of a gun. Janvier smiled. Behind him, the younger guard looked sick.
‘You’re up next, college boy.’
‘Someone’s been looking for you.’
Harry spun round, backing up against the safe. A pintsized young woman stood in the doorway, a mug of coffee in her hand. Harry rolled her eyes at her own jumpiness.
‘You scared me,’ she said.
Imogen Brady stepped into the room. ‘He called three times, wouldn’t leave his name.’
Imogen’s eyes raked Harry’s face. Friend and business partner, she occasionally doubled up as Harry’s self-appointed keeper.
‘He sounded pissed off about something,’ she said.
Harry’s pulse raced. Baseball cap, tanned face, the barrel of a gun. Had he started to track her down already? She turned back to the office safe to hide her panic.
‘Probably a recruitment agency.’ She swiped her keycard and punched in her access code with trembling fingers. ‘Do me a favour, next time he calls, tell him I’ve gone away for a while.’
Imogen came to stand beside her, her head barely reaching Harry’s shoulder. ‘Is that the laptop from the new client?’
Harry bit her lip. She’d told Imogen about the call-out to Monkstown before she’d left, but now she wished she hadn’t. Her next move was definitely the wrong side of legal, and the less Imogen knew about it the better. She shoved Garvin’s laptop to the back of the safe, then snapped the door shut.
‘It’s just routine stuff.’
Imogen blocked her path. Her eyes were huge in her pixie face, but she still managed to look stern.
‘You look terrible.’ Imogen glanced at the safe, then back again. ‘What’s up?’
‘Just tired.’ Harry tried to keep her voice light. ‘Not sleeping well lately.’
That much was true, at least. For the past few months she’d been plagued by nightmares that slashed like hatchets through her sleep. Recurring flashes of betrayal and death. She suppressed a shudder.
‘It’s that house of yours, if you ask me.’ Imogen plonked a hand on one hip. ‘Cooped up in the middle of nowhere, it’s enough to depress anyone. Why don’t you get a place in town, somewhere closer to the office?’
Harry’s gaze drifted around the small, open-plan space where Blackjack did its business. The walls were a mix of exposed brick and pipes, the high domed ceiling a mess of ancient plumbing from the original Guinness Brewery warehouse.
The office was located in the Digital Hub, a cluster of technology companies based in the old Liberties area of inner-city Dublin. Harry had chosen it as the home for her new company a few months before, funding it with money left over from her exploits in the Bahamas. The location had an edginess that had appealed to her: state-of-the-art technology tucked in between the bargain stores of Thomas Street and the chimney stacks of Guinness with its yeasty, Bovril smells.
Harry shivered. Normally, the Blackjack office filled her with pride, but not today. Today it was a place where a man with a gun might find her.
‘Here –’ Imogen thrust her untouched coffee into Harry’s hands. ‘You look like you could do with this more than me.’
Before Harry could reply, the phone rang and Imogen bustled off to answer it. Harry took the opportunity to slip away to her own desk, where she’d hooked up her office computer to the copy of Garvin’s hard drive. She pulled up a chair and sat hunched over the keyboard.
Given the choice, this was the last place she’d be. But she needed to do some snooping, and this was where she stashed her burglar’s tools.
She stared at the screen and wondered where to start.
You could tell a lot about a person just by digging through his computer: what internet sites he browsed, what files he opened, what photographs he downloaded. In fact, you could unearth more information than there was time to analyse, and that was the problem.
Harry drummed her fingers on the desk. Normally, she’d have some context, some obvious starting point. If a client