Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Twenty Eight

I knew what was wrapped in the canvas before Ty unfolded the last layer, but on this occasion being right gave me no gratification.

The sun had melted across the treetops, casting a golden glow on the dull metal before me while the anxious sweat on my brow was beginning to cool.

"What we have here, Satchmo, is two semi-automatic pistols and a submachine gun," Ty said matter-of-factly.

"Have you ever fired a weapon before?" he asked.

"Of course I haven't!" I snapped. "I'm not some homicidal fucking maniac who goes around kidnapping and killing people."

"OK, then we'll have a crash course in firearm use. Come and sit down."

Reluctantly, I sat beside him in the long grass, eyeing the guns before me with the utmost suspicion.

"Why do we need them at all? What happened to the one you took to Michaels'?" I asked.

I hated guns, gun crime and even target sports. During my father's time on the police force, he had been shot at several times and his experiences had ingrained a vicarious loathing that I had never shaken.

"That was well past its sell-by date. Besides, it doesn't pay to hang on to such things once they have been seen by someone who can use that information to harm you. In any case, Dexter sells the real deal," he explained in a tone that he might have thought was reassuring, while straightening the three weapons on the canvas wrapping.

"Where the hell does he get this stuff from?" I was looking at some serious military hardware.

"He has friends who can make this gear vanish from quartermaster's stores across the world. Plus, he confiscates a lot from the kids on his patch, but that is all crap."

"I'd really rather not have one," I pleaded.

"Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it," Ty smirked. "Don't forget that Sharp has killed. The two men he brought today were both armed and one held a gun on us while we talked. With luck, when he returns with Martha we will have to do little more than threaten them," he continued in vain to sound reassuring.

"And if we're out of luck?" I said, knowing the answer.

"You'll know what to do, Satchmo. This will be yours," he handed me a dull black, blocky looking pistol with an ergonomic grip and large square trigger guard. I took it from him and cradled it in both hands as if it were a tangled ball of baby vipers.

"What you have there is a Glock 20 10 mm semi-automatic, manufactured in Austria. The casing is principally synthetic, you see how light it is?" Ty explained.

I nodded; it was a lot lighter than I expected.

"I chose this for you because it is easy to handle. The 10 mm cartridge gives good stopping power and the clip holds fifteen rounds. It is unloaded, but this is how you check." He took the pistol from me and held it out, so I could see what he was doing.

"Are these legal?" I took the gun back and began to mimic what I had just seen, confirming that the weapon wasn't loaded.

"Don't ask silly questions, Dexter provides untraceable hardware. You know he had a wire-guided anti-tank missile in that basement?" Ty smiled playfully.

"Holy shit..."

"I know, I nearly bought it! One of those would make a hell of a mess of Sharp's flashy motor. OK, now onto the pistol. Firstly, point it well away from you, and anyone else that you don't want dead, then release the mag like so..."

He ran through the procedure he had just shown me, flipping a little switch on the butt behind the trigger so that the magazine dropped slightly. He removed it and laid it before him.

"Always remember that there might be a round in the firing chamber. Check it and remove it by pulling back the slide," he demonstrated the action with a satisfying clunk.

"Then examine the chamber through this hole. When you are sure the weapon is empty, let the slide go and pull the trigger." The mechanism gave a loud click and Ty placed the pistol next to the magazine.

"Loading the gun is essentially the reverse, insert the clip and draw the slide to chamber a round. You try."

I loaded and unloaded the Glock several times until it felt comfortable.

"Good, now we will do it with some bullets." He ejected the empty magazine that I had been practising with and handed me the pistol and a full clip which had a little brass packet of death gleaming menacingly atop it. I loaded it as I had previously, pulling the slide and chambering a round.

"What about a safety catch?" I asked. I'd seen films; guns had safety catches, and I was all about the safety.

"Good question. The Glock doesn't have a safety catch as such; it has a pressure bar on the trigger. When you put pressure on it the mechanism is unlocked, a further squeeze cocks the striker, then fires the weapon." Ty mimed squeezing the trigger in the air, his finger moving in stages.

"OK," I grumbled. I would have preferred a nice, big, and uncompromisingly stiff, switch.

"Unload it, Satchmo; never leave it loaded when you don't need to use it," he chided me gently.

I followed my previous procedure and recovered the bullet that popped out when I pulled back the slide.

"We have some spare ammo, so let's go and let off a few rounds," Ty said wrapping the cloth back over the other two weapons.

I trailed him down the meadow and to the edge of the wood where we had found Jonah's mutilated corpse hanging in the trees. I hefted the gun from hand-to-hand, getting used to the feel of the synthetic grip and the pleasing way it fit snugly in my hand. I wasn't fully over my hatred of firearms, but I would do what it took to ensure Martha came to no harm, and if that meant waving a pistol and pretending to be menacing, then so be it.

Ty showed me how to hold the weapon in a two-handed grip to help steady my aim, and adjusted my stance so that my body formed a solid triangular base. Then the moment came. I raised the loaded pistol at a broad tree twenty metres away, sighted down the barrel and squeezed the trigger, exhaling as Ty had told me. The gun went off with a boom and it jumped in my hands like an electric shock as the recoil jolted my arms.

Birds flew out of the trees all around us and I took a few steps back. Ty inspected the tree and poked at a nick in the bark at the edge of the trunk.

"Not bad, have a few more to get used to the kick," he suggested.

I steadied my body and fired four more shots, one after the other. All of them thudded into the tree, sending little showers of splinters and, in spite of myself, I couldn't suppress a smile. I took aim again and let off four more rounds. Again, all hit the trunk in a neat cluster.

"Good stuff, Satchmo! You're a natural shot my friend. Unload now, otherwise we'll have someone in the village thinking World War III has kicked off," Ty smiled as I unloaded the pistol and gathered the spent shell casings from the grass.

"Now listen to me very carefully," The smile was gone, and he gripped my upper arms so that I couldn't squirm away.

"I know you aren't happy about this, but shooting trees and shooting men are very different things. If you ever have to use that thing for real, then forget what you've seen in films when the hero shoots the gun from the bad guy's hand, or wings him in the arm or leg.

Trust your instincts, you'll know if you have to fire. Don't think about it, do it. If it ever comes to you pulling that trigger you shoot to kill because the bastard you are aiming at will do the same," Ty's eyes blazed, daring me to break away from his stare.

I nodded, trying to avert my gaze. He held me tighter.

"Forget all of that Hollywood bollocks about head shots. Aim for the chest, and not just once. You fire twice, two rounds, tap tap. When your target is down you try to eyeball his weapon. If you see both of his hands are empty, then fine. If you can't see either hand you give him another round to make sure. Is that clear?" Ty said, releasing me and I stepped back.

"But that's murder!" I spluttered.

"He'd do it to you. Morals are no use to the dead, Satchmo." His eyes were hard.

"I don't think I can kill anybody," I said, returning Ty's glare squarely.

"Yes, you can if your life depends on it. It might not be just your life at stake, Satchmo. Don't brood on it, we won't have to shoot anyone. Now, get that clip reloaded and give me the Glock, I need to strip and oil our purchases."

I ejected the magazine and returned both to Ty.

At that moment I recalled Dexter's words that Edge was the meanest motherfucker he had ever met and I couldn't shake from my mind the parallel images of Jonah Saddlebury and Sergeant Wilson hanging upside down from trees.

*

I woke from a fitful sleep with my T-shirt damp from sweat. The morning was hot, grey and humid. Something had been flitting across my unconscious as I slept; something that I was missing in all the confusion of the past days.

I'm not the greatest morning person in the world and it generally takes me a fair while to get my brain in gear. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag, threw my damp shirt into the corner of the hayloft that was serving as my laundry and stretched thoroughly. There was something very obvious about this gold business that was preying on the shadowy fringes of my mind and would not step into the spotlight.

I scurried down the ladder and out into the farmyard where I found Ty undergoing a vigorous series of exercises. He was shirtless, like me, but unlike me he was not comfortably padded with a layer of fat. Every muscle and sinew in his torso strained and corded as he reeled off countless press-ups and sit-ups while sweat ran off him in great rivers.

"Morning," I muttered. He merely grunted and nodded in reply. I sat with my arms clasped around my knees and waited patiently for him to finish. Eventually he did so and dripped over to sit next to me.

"Humid today, Satch," Ty puffed.

"Hmm, I hope Martha is OK, maybe Sharp will let us speak to her."

I was worried. We shouldn't have wasted time at Dexter's, we should have been finding the votives to get her back safely.

"I doubt it. He holds all the cards at the moment. The best we can do at the moment is try to relax and sort out our plan. I'm going for a shower; can you nip into the village and get us something for breakfast?" Ty replied.

"Why, have we run out?" I asked. We had been eating some delicious local eggs, bacon and fruit.

"Yeah, there's bugger-all left."

And there it was, epiphany, the breaking of the mental dam that had been holding back my thoughts and suddenly I knew what I had been forgetting.

"Bugger all. Fuck it!" I said out loud.

"It's your turn Satchmo, I got the last lot!" Ty sounded put out.

"Not the food, something's been bothering me, and I just remembered what it was!" I stumbled over the words as they spilled out.

"Do tell," he urged.

"Your uncle and the professor found the coins and the votives, right? They left us clues to get to the coins, they must have given us clues to get to the votives! I forgot all about them."

Ty shook his head. "So had I, but we don't know they located the votives, maybe it was just the stuff in the river. With all of this Sharp business I hadn't given it any thought," he mused, ruffling his mop of dark hair with one hand.

"Where did I put them?" I muttered, scrabbling to my feet.

"I'm going to shower while you find out, I stink like a polecat." Ty was already heading to the cowshed when I turned and made for the farmhouse.

*

The bag of information on Morgan Edge was where I had left it in the kitchen and I emptied the contents hurriedly onto the table.

I shuffled the papers across the surface until I found what I was looking for; a small glossy postcard and a folded newspaper. I examined the postcard for anything that I had missed before. The picture was of a white stuccoed fort standing crisply out against impossibly blue sky and golden yellow sand with a large forked cactus standing proud in the foreground.

I turned the card over and read the message again, it simply said Remember the Alamo. I stared at it, trying to decipher any cryptic meaning it contained. I held it up to the light and rotated it in an act of frustrated desperation, looking for extraneous marks or invisible ink.

After several minutes of minimal revelation, I put the postcard back on the kitchen table and scanned the newspaper again, looking for any hint of clue in the headlines and main body of the text. At various points the print was ringed or underlined; sometimes words and other times numbers.

I copied out all the highlighted characters onto a fresh sheet of paper, then tore it up so that each element was on its own small piece. There had to be a code or message there, but no amount of rearranging of the fragments caused it to make sense.

I swept the scraps into a rough pile and propped the postcard against the newspaper while staring at the picture of the fort, rubbing my temples in the hope of providing increased synapse activity. When this failed, I rose and headed back over to the hayloft for a T-shirt, hoping that being fully clothed might resurrect my powers of detection. On the way back to the farmhouse I caught up with Ty, who was leaving the cowshed fully-clothed and towel-drying his hair.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"I found what I was looking for, but so far I've got nowhere," I replied, glumly.

"Let's have a look-see." He followed me back into the kitchen and began playing with my pile of paper-scrap code words.

I returned my attention to the postcard. I wrote 'Alamo' at the top of another sheet of paper and underlined it, then sat altering my gaze between photo and the blank page.

"OK, what's the Alamo?" I said. Ty stared at me as if I had been released for the day to experience the world of the sane.

"You're joking, right?" he said.

"No... What's the Alamo, and why should I remember it?" I replied a little bemused.

"Jesus Satchmo! That is the Alamo." He pointed at the fort on the postcard.

"OK."

"You mean you don't know?" he asked. I was beginning to feel a little stupid here.

"Can you give me the short version?" I asked, Ty sighed.

"1836, modern-day Texas was under the control of Mexico, but a group of anglicized settlers was struggling to gain independence under an army led by Sam Houston. The Mexicans sent a sizeable force to put a stop to this rebellion under the command of a guy named Santa Anna.

February 23rd 1836, Santa Anna gets to a small mission called Alamo. It had been captured by the Texans and fortified. By the time the Mexicans got there it was garrisoned by about a hundred and eighty men including a couple of guys you might have heard of; James Bowie and Davy Crockett," Ty paused and raised an eyebrow at me.

"The guy with the hat?" I asked, recalling images from black and white films of a whiskered man wearing a lid that gave the impression that he was attempting an unsanctioned colonoscopy of a raccoon using his head.

"The very same. Santa Anna shows up and lines up his army outside the fort. He has about two thousand men and expects to have no problem with a handful of Texans, half of whom were farmers. He asks the local Texan commander, Travis, to surrender. Travis refuses.

Travis is desperately asking the other commanders to send help, while Santa Anna uses his cannons to smash the walls of the Alamo to pieces," Ty paused, and I was scribbling what he was saying onto my piece of paper.

"After twelve days of bombardment, Santa Anna gets bored waiting for the Texans to surrender and orders an assault to take place the next day. His men are a bit surprised because the Texans have no food, not much ammo, and nowhere to go. They would have to surrender at some point.

The attack duly takes place and the Texans put up a good show, but the numbers are against them. After a vicious fight, the Mexicans take the Alamo. All but a handful of the Texans die in the battle and the survivors are executed by Santa Anna. Only the women and children got out," Ty explained.

"Nice..." I commented.

"Yeah, that wasn't the only time Santa Anna slaughtered his prisoners. Anyway, he got his; not only did a hundred and eighty Texans manage to kill about six hundred of his men at the Alamo, but about a month later his Army was surprised and destroyed by Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. Texas was no longer Mexican, and Santa Anna was captured trying to ponce-off dressed as a peasant," Ty smiled, seemingly happy with this two-hundred-year-old turn of events.

"How do you know all this stuff?" I asked as I was finishing jotting what he had told me.

"A more pertinent question is how you don't know it," he snapped. You can't argue with that kind of logic. "Morgan used to tell me tall tales of military history when I was a child."

"That's all well and good, Ty, but at first glance this doesn't seem to have much relevance with the troubles of a two-thousand-year old Roman legionnaire and his stolen golden sword," I replied snippily, though the fact that Morgan used to tell Ty these stories pointed to there being something there.

"No... My uncle had a hand in this, there must be something else. Let me think," he rubbed his damp hair with both hands and showered me with a light spray of water like a puppy on a beach.

"There are a lot of myths surrounding the battle that are impossible to prove or disprove. Firstly, there's the idea that the fortnight the Alamo held out gave Houston time to organize the rabble of his army and get it into position to beat Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

But, as I remember the history, he spent most of the time pissing about writing a revolutionary constitution rather than getting men and planning.

Then there is the story of when the defenders where initially given the option to surrender. The Texan commander Travis calls them all together and gives them the choice to individually accept the terms, saying he was staying and fighting whatever they chose.

Despite many of the Texans being volunteers with wives, families and farms, they all stayed. Famously, Travis is said to have drawn a line in the sand in the fort and asked any man who wanted to surrender to step across it without fear of reprisal," Ty absently rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to remember.

"No one did?" I asked.

"No, that was a clever bit of psychology. The implication being that you would look a coward in front of all the other men," he drew up a chair and sat next to me, picking up my sheet of paper to examine the notes I had made.

"So, what has Remember the Alamo got to do with us?" I turned the postcard over and examined the writing for the umpteenth time.

"I suppose the legacy of the affair was the use of 'Remember the Alamo!' as a battle cry used by American troops. It has always been hailed as a glorious stand against the forces of oppression. It also spawned the phrase 'line in the sand'." Ty was scanning the lines I had written.

"A stand against the forces of oppression..." I parroted.

"Yes, there are similarities with what we think happened here at the Roman fort when the Ordivices caught up with the legionaries, I suppose. They must have laid siege and then assaulted, killing everyone inside," Ty mused.

"That must be the link then!" It made sense.

"No..." Edge was thoughtful. "Morgan was no fool. The Texans were battling against a distant and oppressive authority, but in the case of the Romans it was they who would be seen as the oppressive rulers. That's not what Morgan was getting at." He gazed off into the middle distance and I too scoured the notes I had written for any kind of clue.

Minutes passed in silence and I gave up. Ty was clearly going to solve this himself, or the votives would stay hidden for another two thousand years. My stomach gurgled very audibly as my guts made their emptiness known. I had never got around to getting any breakfast supplies from the village shop.

"I'm going to go get some food while you think this Alamo thing over. It's a shame you don't have a fridge in here, it would save us a lot of hassle..." I grumbled. No sooner had I finished than Ty's eyes shot open, and he stared at me.

"What?" he exclaimed.

"Well, I'm hungry and I'm not being much help here," I started to explain.

"What did you say, Satchmo?" he was almost shouting. I was confused that my desire for grub had so offended him.

"I'm going for some food. You know, I didn't really eat much last night what with all the problems..." He seemed to have gone crazy. I just wanted some lunch.

"No, no, no! After that?" he was sitting upright now, all of his attention focussed upon me.

"That you need a fridge here?" I asked tentatively. He thought for a while then a broad grin spread across his face.

"Morgan, you sly old bastard! Remember the Alamo..."

"What?" I was obviously miles behind.

"Draw a line in the sand..." Edge was not talking to me but running something through in his head.

"Ty, will you please tell me what the fuck is going on?" I was getting exasperated.

"You did it Satch... Yes! That must be it. Come on!" He leaped to his feet and hurried out of the door and straight into the heat of the farmyard.

I trotted after him and found him under the kitchen window, pulling weeds and overgrown shrubs away from the thick stone walls of the farmhouse.

"Ty, please..." I begged him.

He stopped for a second and looked at me, his eyes alive with an excitement I had never seen before.

"No fridge Satchmo! Of course there is no fridge here, nor has there ever been!" he replied, beginning to scoop loose earth away from the wall with great sweeps of his arms. He was clawing at the ground manically.

"I don't get it. What are you doing?" If Ty had gone gaga, then things were going to get very bad indeed.

"I'm finding the fridge Satchmo. When this house was built there was only one reliable method of cold storage, and that was to have a subterranean larder. The farmer's wife would keep butter, cheese and cured meats below ground where the ambient temperature was several degrees lower, which would help it keep," he said quickly, tripping over the words.

I'm sure Ty thought he was offering a rational explanation for his behaviour, but to me it seemed madder than ever.

"What's that got to do with the bloody Alamo?" I responded. He was making absolutely no sense at all.

"Nothing, other than line in the sand and the myth surrounding the surrender," Ty answered.

"Why? Did Travis crack a cold beer from the subterranean larder before breaking the bad news about a shit-load of homicidal Mexicans appearing over the horizon?" I snapped.

"No, Satchmo!" Edge laughed, scraping more and more earth and loose weeds away from the wall. "How far are we from the beach?" he prompted.

"About three-hours drive..." Nope, he had flipped.

"Right, but about two metres under the topsoil in this region here is a heavy band of finely particulated silicone deposits," Ty lectured.

"Huh?"

"Sand, Satchmo. Sand." He stopped digging and sat back on his haunches to see if the penny had dropped with me. In truth, it was still hovering somewhere around my midriff.

"Line in the sand?" I parroted.

"Precisely, and the only part of the farm that would naturally have a layer of sand is the floor of the old subterranean larder," Ty said, beaming.

He had uncovered what looked like the edge of a plank of wood and got back to clearing the earth from its length.

"It's a bit spurious isn't it?" I was a little sceptical.

"Yes, but it was meant for me. I helped Morgan seal the old larder up when he first moved here. He was worried about local kids or stray animals injuring themselves or getting trapped down there.

The only two people who would know about the existence of this thing are Morgan and me, let alone what makes up the floor down there."

"There are children in Pebble Deeping?" I was surprised.

"There were back then. I was one of them. Now shut up and go get a shovel," Ty resumed earth clearance and had partially revealed a plank about a metre and a half in length.

I trotted back to the front of the house and retrieved Ty's entrenching tool and a large Maglite torch from the Land Rover. When I returned, he had half uncovered another plank. I handed him the tool, and he made exceptionally short work of clearing the rest of the topsoil to reveal an entrance that had been boarded up with a dozen planks nailed into a frame of some sort.

"Originally, this was sealed with double trapdoors like those over a pub's cellar. Morgan took them off and fixed these boards in place." He bent low over a plank and spat very deliberately on it. He rubbed the saliva into the wood and wiped away the muddy smear with his sleeve. Revealed was the tiny head of a silver nail.

"Gotcha, Morgan!" Edge whispered under his breath. "Look at this, Satchmo. See the scratches?" I looked intently at the head of the nail and there were indeed silvery score marks upon it.

"That is a new nail with fresh hammer marks. It certainly wasn't put there twenty years ago."

Ty worked the sharp blade of the tool under the edge of the wood and levered it upward. After a few minutes of hacking and jimmying, he had prised the first plank out of the frame. The others followed in quick succession, and we soon found ourselves standing on the precipice of a walled pit about two metres in depth.

The larder lay in the shadow of the house and the details of the interior were dim and indistinct. Smooth stone lined walls were indistinct in the gloom, and I saw the dark shapes of shelves built into them at ground level.

"Satch, give me the torch please," Ty asked, and I handed it over. He turned it on and trained the circle of light on the floor of the old larder. Fine grains of sand sparkled in the artificial illumination, twinkling like the sun reflecting on a beach.

But it wasn't the reflection that made me catch my breath, nor what made Tyrone Edge chuckle heartily.

Running across the base of the pit was a deep and unmistakable line etched into the surface of the sand that comprised the floor.