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‘Tell me now. If there’s someone out there endangering the elite runners, then I can help. I might be the only one who can.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asks Pete.
‘This phone,’ Emilio says, grabbing his medical bag and pulling out an old smartphone. ‘Boones gave it to me last night. It will ping if an elite sets off their emergency beacon. He instructed me to be in a vehicle, ready to move, in case.’
‘So you can contact my dad?’ I ask.
‘I can’t say.’
‘Emilio, this is serious. People are in real danger. Including my dad.’
He hesitates, his eyes darting across my face. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This man.’ I take back my phone from Pete and enlarge the photo. ‘Matthew Knight. He’s come here to hunt down the person who he thinks killed his dad. He’s running under an alias – Matteo Poddighe, race number 501. And now he’s got himself promoted to the elites so that he can find his target.’
Pete interrupts. ‘That’s Adrienne Wendell. You might have examined her?’
Emilio’s eyes harden. ‘Yes, I know her. This man is after her?’
‘And my dad has the only way to track her. So if you have any idea where he is, we have to find him.’
Emilio swears under his breath in Italian, but he nods. Next to me, Pete is twitching with anxious energy.
‘Let’s go,’ I say.
But Emilio doesn’t get on his phone straight away. Instead, he walks over to one of the tables. He pulls some of the papers stacked in the corner in front of him, shuffling through them until he finds a map. He unfurls it. ‘I only know some of the plan. Boones isn’t exactly forthcoming. What I know is that he’s taken the ten remaining elites and set them off on different routes. They will lead to the same finishing line, and some intersect more than others. They will all cross this mountain – Jebel Tilelli – at some point during the last half of the race.’
‘So the runners are spread out across the desert?’ asks Ali.
‘Yes. He didn’t even share his race routes with the Berbers.’
I turn to Ali. ‘Is that a problem?’
He shrugs, but it’s not a gesture of nonchalance. It feels more like … resignation. Like he knows more about the magnitude of the desert than we can ever imagine. ‘If you don’t know exactly where the runners are, finding them will be impossible.’
Impossible. I hate that word.
Pete hates it even more. ‘Even with the Jeeps?’
‘A man was lost in the desert on one of these races. He wandered into Algeria,’ continues Ali. ‘They didn’t find him for a week.’
I’d heard that story. It’s one of the legends of the Marathon des Sables. How one person got lost in the dunes after a storm, the desert erasing all traces of his presence.
‘But we can use one of the helicopters,’ Pete says. ‘We can cover so much more ground that way. We know they’re going to go to the jebel at some point – we can start there.’
I tap the table. ‘Think Henry will let us?’
‘We’ll force him! We’ll remind him that there’s a fucking convicted murderer on the loose!’
A loud chirrup of beeps interrupts us all. Emilio digs in his pocket for the phone. He swipes at a few buttons on the screen, then he nods to Ali. ‘You’ve got a car fuelled up and ready?’
‘Yes,’ Ali replies.
‘Great.’ Then Emilio looks at me. ‘If anything that you’re telling me is false, and you’ve messed up Boones’s race for no reason and dragged me into it, I want you to be there to tell him. So, Stella, come with me.’
‘That was him? You know where he is?’
‘Not Boones. One of the emergency beacons has been activated. Runner eleven. Alexander Schmidt.’