A thousand suns

She draped an arm around his narrow shoulders. ‘Excellent! Listen, go back to your hotel and get some zeds. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll sort out the details and expenses. Okay?’

Chris nodded, finally aware that he had been a straight thirty-two hours without a moment’s sleep. She led him from the conference room onto the noisy open office floor, and patted him gently on the arm.

Chris was uncomfortably aware that a few heads were turning their way.

Christ, I hope they don’t think I’m her bit of sugar.

She winked at him. ‘I want you in bed, okay? Get some rest, you look like death warmed up.’

Chris winced, knowing that those members of her staff with the keenest hearing had only heard the first part of that sentence.

Chapter 2 The Coast Road

The late-afternoon sun shone through the silver birches lining the coastal route and cast a steady procession of hazy beams across the road. Alternate strips of light and shadow dappled the windscreen of the Cherokee, and Chris found himself squinting from the intermittent and distracting glare.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and slipped them on.

‘Giving you a headache?’ asked Mark, sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

Mark Costas was a good diving instructor. He’d known Chris back when he’d trained him for a PADI certificate. Like the best of teachers, he easily inspired trust from his pupils, and that was mainly because of the calm, unflappable demeanour of the man. His darkly tanned face, framed with a lush black beard and topped with a Yankees baseball cap, was a picture of measured ease.

Along this part of the coastline there were a number of small villages perched on the seafront. Quite a few of them seemed to service small fishing vessels of one sort or another, and many of these were beach-launched, from trailers reversed into the water, and retrieved in the same way. Once upon a time most of the boats along this stretch of coast were part of an industry; now the vast majority were used for sports fishing.

On the right of the road it was becoming cluttered with the detritus of generations of nautical activity — abandoned, weatherworn wooden hulls riding high on grass-topped dunes shored up with wooden pallets, and an endless melange of crates and washed-up freight spillage garnished the roadside. They passed through a village that consisted of no more than an old boat yard, three houses, and a gas station-cum-diner, an isolated sign of habitation amidst a rolling montage of coastal wilderness.

‘It looks like something out of a Stephen King novel,’ said Mark in a rumbling, deep voice.

‘I know, beautiful isn’t it? I could live in a place like this.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Chris drove in silence. It really was magnificent, inspiring and solitary. His recent sojourn in the southern Atlantic wilderness had changed him. After so many months being alone out there, he’d found the aggressive noise and haste of New York a little overpowering. He frequently had found himself back in his hotel room relishing the comparative peace and quiet, happy to have the echoing wail of police sirens and the harsh rattle of urban noise muted to nothing more than a subdued rumble seeping through the double-glazed window.

New York these days felt like a town under siege. Every subway train and bus station was manned with cops checking IDs. Having olive skin, or even just having a dark beard, seemed to invite suspicious inspection from every passer-by.

It wasn’t just New York. London was the same. Cities twinned by their paranoia, waiting for the next big bang.

Chris shook his head; it was becoming an ugly world, one waiting, spoiling for a fight. Those months away from it all, away from people, photographing terns and penguins, that had been a refreshing antidote. But on coming back from his months of solitude, the whole Muslim- Christian hate thing seemed to have gotten worse. The news seemed to be fuelled by this alone these days.

He felt old. He certainly couldn’t face doing another ‘hot’ assignment. A year ago he’d done some work in northern Iraq for News Fortnite, documenting the appalling and bloody tit-for-tat killings between the Kurds and the Sunnis that was still going on even now, years after the second Gulf war. A few years ago he might have been able to dispassionately shut out the worst of it on this kind of field job, but that last one had finally got to him.

From now on, he would be happy to stay away from the hazardous stop-and-drop assignments like that. It was going to have to be terns and penguins, or he was going to have to find a new way to earn a living. The world was becoming too ugly a thing to study through his viewfinder.

‘So how long are you planning on staying out here?’ asked Mark, disturbing Chris’s woolgathering.

‘I don’t think we’ll need to be too long here. I can probably do the shoot in one dive if the water’s clear and we have a good day for the weather.’