Page 44 of Runner 13

Stella

The radio bleeps and Henry calls my name. I fumble in my pocket as Pete continues to stare at the photo of Matthew/Matteo on my phone. ‘We’ve located Dr Emilio,’ says Henry over the radio. ‘Your friends have him contained in the medical tent.’

‘Got it,’ I reply. Pete and I exchange a look. ‘Just because he’s not Glenn’s son, doesn’t explain why he had the ketamine,’ I say to Pete. ‘He still might be involved. Matthew’s accomplice, like we speculated. We have to be careful.’

We take off at a jog towards the tent. Mac, Ali and Rachid surround the doctor in one of the chairs, whose face is a bright shade of crimson. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Emilio shouts, as we arrive.

‘Give it up, man – we know you poisoned Nabil!’ says Mac with a dramatic flourish of his hand. He’s enjoying this too much.

‘What?’ Emilio splutters. ‘I did nothing but try to save that man. Who even are you?’

‘Then why did she find ketamine in your bag?’ Mac points at me. ‘Really, Dr Emilio, explain that to us – or should I call you Matthew ?’

‘Oh, cool it, Mac, you’re not Hercule fucking Poirot,’ Pete mutters, grabbing Mac by the arm and pulling him back. ‘We found a photo of Matthew Knight and it’s not him.’

Mac deflates like a balloon. ‘What?’ He looks at me expectantly, as if I’m going to take his side. ‘So he’s not involved?’

‘I told you,’ says the doctor, standing up now. This time no one stops him. ‘Those drugs are for your father, Stella. That’s why I have them with me. But who is this Matthew person and why do you think he poisoned Nabil?’

I swallow. I still don’t know who I can trust.

‘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.’

‘I’m not letting you go alone,’ says Pete.

Emilio shakes his head. ‘There’s not enough room for everyone – we need space in the car for the patient. If you must, you can follow us.’

Pete glances at Mac and Rachid, who immediately jump up.

‘I’ll stay back and organize the chopper,’ says Mac. ‘Henry’s a mate – he sponsors our podcast. I’m sure he’ll listen to me. I’ll contact you on the radio if we find anything.’

‘Let’s go then,’ says Emilio.

Emilio gives coordinates to Ali once we’re in the four-by-four.

Pete follows in the car behind with Rachid.

We swing out of the bivouac just as Henry is gathering the fun runners to start their race.

Watching them getting ready to start their third stage as if everything is normal, I feel like I’m having cognitive dissonance.

But I can’t blame them. They don’t know any different.

They have no cell phones, no social media, no radio.

They’re a bubble, cut off from the outside world.

They don’t know what’s going on in their own race even. That Boones has stolen away the elites.

Word will spread. Rumours have a way of flying even in the most remote places.

But I have a feeling it will only generate excitement.

Our small group is the only one worrying – because of what we know.

But for the rest of the world this is the pinnacle of running.

This is the ultimate display of human endurance and suffering and triumph over adversity.

Boones is enemy and friend, god and devil, trickster and saviour. Father and stranger.

The car bounces as we speed across the dunes, but I’m used to it now. In fact, I urge Ali to go faster. Rachid and Pete can keep up. We need to get to Alex as quickly as possible. Obviously I hope he is all right. But more importantly, I hope he can lead us to my dad.

Dust flies up behind the vehicle as we speed along a dried riverbed – at least here, on hard, compacted earth, it’s possible to drive quickly.

Ali takes advantage. Until Emilio taps him on the shoulder for him to slow down.

He’s staring at his phone, at the GPS dot blinking on his screen. ‘Somewhere here.’

We slow to a crawl, scouring the riverbank, until we spot footprints in the sand, veering off and away from the path of the ancient river.

Ali swings the car round and we mount the riverbank.

On this softer sand it’s hard to travel with the same haste.

Shards of rock threaten to damage the tyres and Ali needs to carefully navigate round stumpy bushes – like everything in this damn place they’re even tougher than they look and can do serious damage.

‘Over there,’ Ali says, suddenly pulling the steering wheel down to the left, hard.

I brace myself against his headrest, unsure what he has seen.

When the car stabilizes, I stare out of the window, scanning the bleak desert landscape.

Everything is a shade of brown. Monochrome.

It’s hard to make anything out. Ali is far more used to it than we are. We have to rely on his instincts.

‘There,’ he says again, this time pointing. I follow the line of his finger. It takes me a moment – and some movement – to realize what he’s pointing at. Someone is sitting on the ground in the meagre shade offered by a shrub. He’s weakly waving in our direction.

‘My God, how did you see him?’ Emilio says. ‘That’s lucky. A helicopter would have no chance,’ he adds.

It’s far luckier for him than us. He looks half dead – dehydrated, fatigued – and probably suffering from heatstroke. His race number is dirty, smeared with something that looks like blood.

Emilio is straight out of the car with his bag, water, phone. I follow, not even waiting for Pete in the other vehicle to catch up.

‘Alex? Do you know where Boones is?’ I ask, once he’s had a sip of water.

He looks up at me, but he barely looks human. His skin is grey, his eyes unfocused, and he’s staring at me like I’ve grown three heads. He makes a sound but it’s not words.

Emilio frowns. ‘I need to get him back to camp. He needs proper rehydration or he’s not going to make it.’

I spot a map beside Alex and pick it up. It’s hand-drawn, my dad’s neat illustrations pointing out the water caches, the jebel climb, the finishing line. It has Alex’s starting point marked. It looks roughly thirty miles away. With any luck we can work out where Boones might be.

I walk back towards Pete, who had caught us up, gesturing for him to follow me to the car.

Ali is waiting in the driver’s seat. I show him the map.

‘Can you get us here?’ I point to the start.

According to the map, it’s in front of some sort of rocky structure – another jebel, smaller than Tilelli, or else a cliff of some kind.

‘Sure.’

‘Pete, get in,’ I tell him.

‘How’s Alex?’ He frowns with concern, craning his neck to see.

‘Dehydrated. Woozy. Doesn’t look like the victim of an attack, though. Emilio can take him back to the bivouac in Rachid’s car. Either you come with me or go back with them.’

By way of an answer, he jumps in the car, but I can tell he’s agitated.

‘Drive,’ I say to Ali once I’m in the front seat. I don’t have time to coddle Pete right now.

Emilio is shouting at us, but it’s not like I’ve abandoned him high and dry. He can get back with Rachid. That was his job, as he was at such pains to point out.

‘I don’t get it, why are we going backwards?’ Pete asks me. ‘You saw the map. We should be heading out to the water caches to find Adri.’

‘Those were personal to Alex – who knows if Adri is being sent to the same caches. And, remember, my dad is sick. He won’t be travelling on foot.

He must be in some sort of vehicle. If we go back to where Alex started from, we might be able to follow his tyre tracks.

You heard what Ali said – finding these runners will be impossible, like needles in a haystack.

Shit, we had Alex’s GPS beacon beamed directly to Emilio’s phone and we still had trouble finding him.

’ I glance at Ali, who catches my eye and nods. He’s with me. He’s not with Pete.

Even I am finding it difficult to be with Pete. It’s not his fault. It’s mine. I’ve kept things from him, secrets I’ve kept our entire relationship. And he’s so worried about Adrienne.

Adrienne. The woman who ruined so many lives: Glenn’s, my sister’s, mine.

The anger I’d felt towards her has mellowed over time, becoming more like a simmer.

But now that she’s back in the game, competing in a race, I feel the familiar heat rising again.

That she can get back in the ring, when Yasmin never can.

That she can put the past behind her.

But mostly: that she’d been there when I’d run away. She’d been a sister to Yasmin in the moment of her greatest need. And that fills me with rage and guilt and pain.

‘It’s going to take us an hour to get to this point, right, Ali?’ Pete asks him.

‘At least,’ he replies.

Pete turns to me. ‘Good. We have time. Now you can tell me what really happened in Ibiza.’