Thunderbolt Wilbur Smith (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

cash I’d ever had came from her I’d just be giving her back her own resources. Now I could actually add to her much depleted – thanks, ‘Dad’ – war chest. I’d not yet told Mum this was what I intended to do. The idea was I’d hand over whatever I found at the end of the trip. And now I had something to give. A warm glow spread through me as I thought how happy she’d be when she realised that’s what all the detecting had been about.

‘It’s a good start,’ I said.

‘Because it’s a good plan.’ Xander shrugged modestly.

‘Self-evidently,’ said Amelia.

Turning to Pete I said, ‘Any idea when you might have that lucky feeling again?’

6.

We returned to Ras Nungwi and helped Pete sort out the boat before stepping ashore. Even after we’d tied up to the jetty and put everything down in the hold for the night, he fussed about wiping down the controls, seats and surfaces with a big chamois leather. This just made me feel worse about my carelessness earlier. He sensed as much: as we walked up the gangplank he put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Jack. A split boat seam can be mended. Think about what went right today.’

I saw my face reflected in his dark glasses, blinking, and the thought went through my head: if I’d trashed something of ‘Dad’s’ he wouldn’t have let me forget about it for weeks.

It was Pete who blurted out our success to Mum, as soon as we found her. ‘Not one but two rings, on the same dive. Platinum or white gold. Didn’t I tell you I’d take them to good spots?’

There had been more at stake in our search for him than I realised, I saw.

‘Bright and early tomorrow?’ asked Pete.

‘Stay for dinner. Celebrate,’ said Mum.

Pete mumbled something about errands he had to run.

‘We won’t actually be eating for an hour and a half,’ Amelia pointed out. ‘Plenty of time to do all that and come back.’

Once we’d persuaded him to return later, I headed to my room for a shower, and when I got back to the beachfront bit of the hotel Amelia, who’d beaten me to it, was talking with Mum and Xander about Mum’s coral reef destruction research. I arrived to hear Amelia say, ‘Oh yeah, fan coral. It looks a bit like marbled ham. Decimated by sixty per cent?’

‘You’d be interested in what I dug up online,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll get my laptop.’

I hadn’t yet sat down, so I offered to fetch it for her. She thanked me and handed me the key to her room. I ambled off through the palm trees, sand dusting the boardwalks, scratchy beneath my bare feet.

On my way I passed a young girl, no more than eight years old, carrying a pile of freshly laundered towels. She stuck in my mind as, when I entered Mum’s room, I came upon another girl who, though not as small as the first, was definitely younger than me.

She’d turned Mum’s bed down and was placing a wrapped chocolate on the pointlessly large pile of pillows. I waited awkwardly for her to leave. That she was younger than me somehow made the situation worse. She did a lot of smiling and nodding and saying nothing as she backed out of the door.

Mum’s laptop was on her dressing-table/desk. When I disconnected the mouse the screen came to life. I would never have intentionally invaded her privacy by looking at what was on it, but something on the screen caught my eye before I could look away. It was a new message box. The image was small, floating at the top left of the screen in front of whatever Mum had been reading, a headshot accompanied by some text.

The words read: Hard to say exactly. It’s only a short flight, I know, but I’ve a proper mess to sort out here first. Believe me, I’m doing my damnedest. This meeting is as important to me as it is to you and him.

Out of context this message didn’t mean much, and I like to think I wouldn’t have read it all if I hadn’t first noticed the face of the man I assume sent it, hovering next to the text. The headshot was all of a centimetre wide, so the man’s eyes were little more than pinpricks, but something about the set of them – wide-spaced in his face, watchful under a determined brow – together with his square chin, drew me up short. I couldn’t work out why to begin with. I recognised him somehow. I’m good with faces: I tend not to forget them. But I’d never met this guy, as far as I could remember. And yet I knew him. His face, or a version of it, swam in every reflective surface I’d ever seen.

This meeting is as important to me as it is to you and him.

I shut the laptop and carried it in a daze back to Mum. She didn’t blink at the message, just clicked it shut and got on with showing Amelia the coral reef research papers she’d dredged up. I’d already tuned out. I was thinking about Mum’s earlier promise, when I asked her to tell me who my real father was. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s time,’ she’d said. When would that be?

For some reason I couldn’t get the words hard to say exactly out of my head. I’ve a proper mess to sort out here first also reverberated, and so did it’s only a short flight. Mum had suggested this Zanzibar holiday to help us get away from everything, or at least that’s what she’d said.

Had she in fact been bringing us closer to the man who sent that message? To ask her I’d have to let on that I’d read it. Though I hadn’t meant to intrude, I didn’t want to admit I had and risk losing her trust in me.

‘You’re a