The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

met his look with the same directness, mirroring his seriousness, unaware that he was laughing at her. And at once he regretted his flippancy.

‘I remember see ladies smoke, Phnom Penh. It make them look like bad woman.’

‘Sounds like your mother talking again.’

‘You no laugh me, Mistah Elliot.’

He heard, with something like shock, her father’s voice in hers. The way she said his name. And he remembered she was somebody’s little girl who’d grown up without a father.

‘You no – curious?’ she asked, rolling the word around her tongue, savouring its newness.

‘About what?’

She looked at his blankness and wondered if it could be real. A little half smile. ‘You no curious.’

‘If you mean about what happened to you and your mother, to this whole godforsaken country, I’m not paid to be curious. Just to get you out.’

‘You only thinking and doing what you paid to.’

‘Yes,’ he said. And he remembered the heat and the white blinding brightness, and then the sightless dark, the smell of sweat and fear. And after, through the red mist, smoke clearing, eyes adjusting, the broken bleeding bodies. Children, like Ny, and younger. ‘It’s an old army trick I learned years ago. Otherwise you end up drunk somewhere, or shooting junk.’

She didn’t speak for a long time, sitting on the edge of the stone balustrade watching him. He let his head fall back against the pillar, the cigarette easing his tension. And as the tension eased, so he felt the first seductive waves of fatigue. His eyes were gritty and sore and he closed them for just a moment. And saw himself standing beneath the stark winter trees in the rain watching the stranger in black who was his daughter being led away by another stranger – a young man with red hair. He knew she’d seen him. But of course she had no idea who he was. A stranger at her mother’s funeral who was her father. She commented on him to the young man with red hair who flicked angry eyes in his direction before steering her away toward the line of cars.

‘Will your friend die?’

Ny’s soft, stilted voice startled him. He opened his eyes and saw her still sitting on the balustrade. Birds fluttered around in his chest and stomach. He saw that his cigarette had burned down to the filter and gone out. ‘What?’

‘Your friend who is shot. He will die?’

The blunt, emotionless quality of her question was unnerving. She accepted death with the same ease she accepted life. But, then, hadn’t she known as much of one as the other? ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

She seemed to accept this, nodding thoughtfully. Then, ‘My mamma mean what she say.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Elliot searched his pockets for another cigarette.

‘Will you take us Phnom Penh?’

He found one and looked at her irritably. ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

‘No answer without question.’

He lit his cigarette and got to his feet. He was getting tired of her fatalism. ‘Sometimes the last thing you want to hear is the answer, so you don’t ask the question.’ And he walked back into the temple to the glow of the dying embers of McCue’s fire. He heard Ny’s bare feet behind him. ‘I thought I told you not to let the fire go out.’

Without a word she padded towards the circle of light and picked up a log to poke among the ashes before piling on fresh wood. McCue sat up, instantly awake. His eyes shone like polished coals, fastening on Elliot as he stepped into the flickering light. ‘My watch?’

Elliot nodded. ‘Wake me at first light.’

*

The blood drained out of the dawn sky leaving it a blue so pale it was almost yellow. A mist lay across the water like gently undulating gauze slowly smoking into the morning haze as the sun rose to scorch the air. McCue and Elliot stood, silent statues, staring out across the causeway towards the jungle. With the light, they realized how vulnerable they had been through the night. The wat was surrounded on three sides by flat swampland, tall trees growing sparsely through the swollen waters of the Tonle Sap. They had limped up a blind alley without knowing it. Had the Khmer Rouge picked up their trail the night before, they would have been trapped. As it was, they were still in danger, and Elliot wanted them out of here fast.

‘Do we go north or south?’ McCue asked without looking at him.

‘North.’

‘What about the old woman?’

‘She’ll have to be persuaded.’

‘That will not be possible.’ They turned, startled, to find Serey there, calm, almost serene, Ny standing a respectful distance behind her. ‘And I am not such an old woman. Even if I look it.’

‘Lady, I’m sorry for calling you old, but we got no choice but to head for Thailand.’

Serey remained implacable. ‘Perhaps you do not. I do. My daughter and I are going to Phnom Penh.’

‘Shit!’ McCue glanced at Elliot. ‘What’s there? There’s nothing there, is there? No hospital, no doctors, nothing. They emptied the goddamned place, didn’t they?’ He shook his head. ‘Mikey’d never make it.’

Elliot was impassive. ‘He’ll never make it to Thailand either.’

McCue regarded him with disbelief. ‘Shit, man, you’re not going along with this crap? Phnom Penh! That poor bastard ain’t got a chance! Be like putting a gun to his fucking head – never mind ours!’ He turned towards Serey. ‘You want that, do you, lady? You want the man’s blood on your hands? Maybe ours, too?’

‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ she said simply.

‘We’d better move,’ Elliot said.

McCue grabbed his arm, frustration boiling over. ‘Where to? Phnom Penh?’

Elliot’s silence was his confirmation.

‘Why, for fuck’s sake? Why are you doing this?’

‘Because we can’t make them go north with us, and they haven’t a hope if they go south on their own.’ He paused. ‘Then Slattery would have died for nothing.’

McCue ground his anger out through clenched teeth. ‘He ain’t dead yet.’

‘Only a matter of time,’ Elliot said, and he pulled free of McCue’s grip and walked