Lomax twisted to one side and looked up. In the light from the instrument panel Nikita seemed almost subhuman, the bones of his face standing out in sharp relief as sweat dripped from his pointed chin.
Riki, who had been smoking a cigarette, tossed it out of the window and started to sing, and the roaring of the engine drowned his voice so that as his mouth opened and closed no sound seemed to come out.
There was an impossible, nightmarish quality to the whole thing and for the first time Lomax began to feel afraid. “Listen to me!” he shouted desperately.
If either of them heard him above the noise of the engine, they made no sign. The truck bounced over a ridge in the road, rolling him over on his face again, and as panic moved inside him he turned on his back and cried at the top of his voice, “For God’s sake listen to me!”
The effect was almost miraculous. The truck skidded to a halt and Nikita cut the engine in the same moment. They sat looking down at him, neither of them saying anything, waiting for him to speak, and Lomax said, “This is madness. Bailing me will earn you nothing but grief.”
“You have a better idea” Riki asked calmly.
“I’m a rich man,” Lomax said. “My life is worth a great deal to me.”
The very oppressiveness of the silence which followed told him that he had said the wrong thing. With a sudden curse, Riki raised a foot and pushed hard down on the unprotected neck. Lomax started to choke and a few seconds later the pressure was released.
“You ever hear of a man called George Samos?” Riki demanded.
Lomax nodded, feeling suddenly cold, realising what was to come. “I knew a shepherd by that name. He helped me when I was here during the war.”
“He was our uncle,” Riki said. “Our father’s brother. The Germans hunted him down up there on the mountain and shot him like a dog.”
“You think money could pay for that, Englishman?” Nikita demanded.
There was nothing Lomax could say, nothing they would have been prepared, to listen to. He lay there helplessly while Riki produced a large red bandanna and quickly gagged him with it, and Nikita started the engine again and drove away.
He was aware that they had entered the town because the truck had to slow to negotiate the narrow streets, and by turning his head slightly he could look up through the windscreen at the roofs of the houses.
When the truck finally rolled to a halt and Nikita cut the engine, Riki jumped to the ground first. He pulled Lomax out after him and held the Beretta under his nose.
“Do exactly as you’re told,” he said. “Don’t make me use this thing.”
They were parked at the end of the breakwater which was farthest away from the pier. It was dark and lonely, the only sound the lapping of the water against the pilings of the old wooden jetty below. When a caf6 door was opened somewhere in the distance the music and laughter might have been coming from another planet, and Lomax shivered as they went down a flight of stone steps to the jetty.
The old forty-foot diesel launch moored at the far end was festooned with nets still damp from the day’s labour, and stank of fish, the deck slippery with their scales. They made him lie face down on the nets while they tied his ankles, and then Nikita went aft and returned with a pile of heavy chains which he dropped on the deck with a clatter.
Riki turned Lomax over and squatted beside him. “For you, Englishman. There’s a place we know a couple of miles out. Dark and quiet and very deep. You’ll have it all to yourself.”
He patted Lomax on the cheek, stood up and turned to his brother. “I’ll take her out. You see to the moorings.”
He went into the wheelhouse and Nikita cast off aft and moved into the prow. For a moment he was out of sight and Lomax swung on to his side, straining desperately at the ropes which bound him, but he was wasting his time.