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

The newsroom was busy, green phosphor screens flickering under fluorescent lights, the hubbub of voices engaged in a dozen telephone conversations, lights winking at empty desks. The heads of department were in with the editor for the editorial conference.

David threw his coat across the desk and slumped into a seat to face his terminal.

‘What you doing in at this time, Dave? Thought you were still on nights.’ The reporter opposite glanced incuriously across the desk.

‘I am. Got some calls to make,’ David said.

The reporter shrugged. ‘Real go-getter, aren’t you?’ He watched David start up his terminal and search through a drawer for his contacts book. ‘Still bucking for a job on features?’

David made no response. He picked up his phone and flicked down a switch for a line. He punched out a long number and waited.

‘Still no word from your girl?’

He glanced up grimly and shook his head. The ringing tone sounded in his ear, and he tensed as his call was answered six thousand miles away on the other side of the world. He checked his watch. Three o’clock. It would be ten in the evening there. ‘Narai Hotel.’ The tinny voice crackled in his ear.

‘Could you put me through to Lisa Elliot’s room.’

‘One moment, please.’ There was a long delay before the voice returned with the familiar response. ‘Sorry, no one of that name stay here.’

‘Look, I’m calling from London.’ David had difficulty keeping his frustration in check. ‘She was supposed to check in nearly two weeks ago. She promised to call and I’ve heard nothing. I’ve called the hotel several times already, and you keep telling me there’s no one of that name staying there. I wonder if you could check if she ever booked in?’

‘Sorry,’ said the voice. ‘No one of that name stay here. Very busy now. Thank you. Goodnight.’ And the line went dead.

‘Fuck!’ David slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

‘The Vietnamese have taken Phnom Penh,’ the reporter opposite said.

David frowned at him. ‘What?’

‘Came in on the wires early this morning.’

‘So what the hell’s that got to do with me! She’s in Thailand, not bloody Cambodia!’ The reporter shrugged again and turned back to his screen as David lifted the phone and dialled an internal number. He waited impatiently.

‘Library.’

‘David Greene, reporters. I’m looking for a file from nineteen sixty-three.’

*

The pages of history, enshrined in celluloid, jerked across the screen in a blur as David turned the microfilm impatiently through the plate. Increased American involvement in Vietnam; 16,000 US military ‘advisers’ now attached to South Vietnam ARVN forces; Soviets withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba; Buddhist monk sets himself alight in Saigon street; Beatlemania. He paused momentarily. November 22 – Kennedy assassinated in Dallas.

He had a vague recollection of squatting in short-trousered uniform in a seedy scout hall, a boy running in flushed with excitement, shouting, ‘The President’s been shot! The President’s been shot!’ He had been eight then. He turned the film through more pages, days, weeks. Then, 13 December 1963 – Aden Massacre: Court Martial Opens. He stopped, adjusted the focus, and squinted down the tight columns of copy looking for names. But his mind wandered again.

There was another name that hovered, infuriatingly out of reach, somewhere in the back of his mind. A name Lisa had told him the night she flew out to Bangkok, one that the sergeant had given her. An odd name. But he hadn’t paid much heed at the time, and now it simply wouldn’t come back. Tun, Tan, Tok – for a moment he wondered why the hell he was bothering. If Lisa had wanted to phone him, presumably she could. Perhaps she’d lied to him. But he discounted that, and for all his increasing ambivalence, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong, something bad must have happened to her.

He turned his gaze back to the screen. There were several references to the young Lieutenant John Elliot who had ordered his unit into the village. The full list of the accused didn’t appear till further down the story. David ran his finger lightly down the screen to stop at the name of Elliot’s NCO. Sergeant Samuel Robert Blair. He drew a deep breath of satisfaction and wrote the name down in his notebook. If Lisa could find him, then so could he.

II

The lights from across the river, reflecting on the water, danced brokenly on its wind-ruffled surface. Blair gazed out beyond his dark reflection in the glass and heard the wind among unseen trees on the embankment. Behind him, a tiny reading lamp lit a corner of the room. Newspapers detailing the triumphant progress of the Vietnamese army in Cambodia lay strewn across the floor. He sipped pensively at a glass of iced water turned faintly amber by the merest splash of whisky. His mood was one of melancholy, laced with a hint of anger. Anger at himself. He could, he knew, have done more to discourage Elliot from his Cambodian enterprise. It was madness and he had known it. But then, so had Elliot. Would he even have listened? Blair smiled a humourless smile and shook his head. He doubted it.

He turned back into the room and eased himself down into his well-worn armchair, then placed his glass on the floor and lifted a gnarled and blackened pipe from an ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair. He tapped out the dottle from the bowl, and began refilling it from a soft leather pouch.

Elliot was a resourceful man, he told himself. If anyone could pull it off, it would be Jack. He paused suddenly, catching his thoughts, and sighed. He knew it was a false optimism he was trying to kindle, and there really was no point. He struck a match and sucked several times at the stem of his pipe, drawing the flame down through the tobacco. He listened to it crackle and then tamped down the glow with a blackened, calloused forefinger.