The Messiah Secret - James Becker [108]
He glanced at his watch. ‘Do you want to start now or find somewhere here to stay for the night?’
‘Let’s leave now. I’d rather we got clear of Pänämik and at least tried to get into the right area.’
As Bronson started the Nissan, three men walked past the four-by-four and glanced at it incuriously. Two had the typical features that they’d got used to seeing since their arrival in Ladakh, but the third man had a much fairer – almost ruddy – complexion, and auburn hair.
‘Is he a tourist, or what?’ Bronson muttered to Angela, as the three men walked past the jeep.
‘Not the way you mean it,’ she replied. He’s almost certainly from Baigdandu, a village about forty miles to the west of here. Every now and then a boy or girl is born there with red hair and blue eyes. There’s a local legend that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived and then settled there, and it’s their genes that cause the aberration.’
‘Greeks?’ Bronson asked. ‘But why—’
‘I know,’ Angela interrupted. ‘The story makes no sense. Even if a bunch of Greeks did turn up here and inter-marry with the locals, that’s still not an explanation for that complexion. I mean, how many Greeks have you ever seen who have red hair?’
‘But what was a group of Greeks doing here in the first place? We’re a hell of a long way from the Mediterranean.’
Angela paused, then rubbed the back of her neck to ease her tension. ‘Exactly the same as us, actually.’
Bronson whistled. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘That’s what the legend says.’
‘But they didn’t succeed?’
‘We wouldn’t be here, Chris, if I thought there was the slightest chance that anyone had beaten us to it.’
Twelve thousand feet above Pänämik, the Israeli-built Searcher II UAV described a lazy circle in the sky, a near-invisible speck, its engine completely inaudible. Then the craft straightened up and started flying towards the south, anchored to the slowly moving Nissan Patrol by the electronic tether of the signal from the tracking device.
56
‘So where are we now?’ Donovan asked from the back seat of the leading Land Cruiser. He’d flown in from Cairo the previous day, and joined the group at the military airport at Hushe in Eastern Baltistan, just before the vehicles left for the Indian border.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ the man in the front passenger seat muttered under his breath, then glanced behind him. ‘We’re about here, between Lhäyul and Gömpa.’ He pointed towards the map in his lap.
‘How soon before we reach the road junction?’
Donovan had asked the same question at least four times already. He clearly wasn’t enjoying the bucking and lurching ride.
‘It’s about twenty miles away, so maybe forty minutes on this kind of surface. You still sure that’s where these two Brits are going, boss?’
Masters, sitting beside Donovan in the back seat, shook his head. ‘Right now, I’m not sure of anything. But according to the guys who followed them to Pänämik, they’re going cross-country and it looks as if they’re heading towards the road that runs from Arann out to the east and then goes up and over the Saser Pass. So that’s where we’re going too.’
The border crossing had been much easier than Masters had expected. Rodini’s plan had worked just as they’d expected, and all the Americans had had to endure was a vitriolic tongue-lashing from the senior Indian Army officer there.
Now they just had to locate Bronson and Angela Lewis, after which they should be able to wrap up everything quickly. They’d whistle up Rodini’s chopper and get the hell out of India and back into Pakistan, where they wouldn’t have to sneak around quite so much. And once they got there, they could finally hand over the relic to Donovan, who could load it into the back of his private jet. And then they would collect the balance of their money.
Masters settled back in his seat. Good organization, that was what it was all about. Attention to detail. If all went according to plan – his plan – he’d be back in New York by the end of the week.
If they’d thought the pot-holed and dusty roads in Ladakh were any