Authors: Nic Bennett
Jonah shot back, irritated at his father’s seeming concession to defeat. “That’s pathetic, Dad. The bruising on your face is evidence. Let’s go to the police, show them this stuff, and let them handle it,” he urged. “Maybe they’ll give us protection.”
David ran his fingers across the swelling around his eyes and shook his head. “Scrotycz is a very wealthy Russian citizen living in London. Helsby Cattermole is a very successful bank. They have a lot of power. They have a lot of connections. The cops are not going to go charging in and risk upsetting them. They’d have to pussyfoot around, and by the time they got anywhere, if they got anywhere, this will all be over.”
Jonah shuddered. None of this was what he wanted to hear.
“Which is why I need the Baron’s trading records,” David urged. “I have to get some real evidence that directly implicates him and whomever else he’s working with: trades, bank accounts, names, addresses.”
“Okay …” said Jonah slowly, “but why bring me into it?”
David took a deep breath. “Jonah, you are the only person who can get inside the building and extract this information. You know about trading. You know about computers. You know the Baron as well as anybody. And I’m sure your access to the trading floor will be reinstated soon enough.”
“I dunno …”
David interjected, “He thinks he owns you. He won’t suspect you.”
“He doesn’t own me,” Jonah snapped.
David looked at him. “I said he
thinks
he does, like he does all those other people in the Bunker. He’s bought their loyalty with
money and status. Anybody who doesn’t buy into the Baron-Bunker thing disappears pretty rapidly.”
Jonah thought of Jammy and Franky. He couldn’t speak for the Baron’s former assistant, as they’d never actually met, but Franky was loyal—she’d told him so. “What about Franky? She was loyal,” he countered.
“Maybe at first, but I’m sure the Baron couldn’t have been too happy when she said that she wanted to get married. It would have meant that her allegiances would have been divided.”
The knot in Jonah’s stomach tightened again.
“Jonah, your life is in danger,” David pressed. “One person has been killed over this, and those Russians were for real.
I know.
I’ve met their kind before.” He paused, apparently weighing what he was going to say next. “But I can protect you if you give me the chance,” he said slowly.
Jonah almost burst out laughing. “You! Protect me! Biff! The man who doesn’t fight back! I was there in the park, Dad. Where was the protection then?”
David stayed composed. “Jonah, give me five more minutes and I’ll explain. I should have told you about my past a long time ago. I can only hope that when I’ve finished, you’ll understand why I didn’t or, rather, couldn’t.”
The atmosphere in the car suddenly seemed to have changed. The darkness had closed in around them, isolating them from the outside world. There was something monumental in the tone of his father’s voice that wanted to take control of Jonah’s being. He felt a shiver go through his body, a goose walking over his grave.
David swallowed hard. “You know I grew up in Africa,” he started.
Jonah nodded. That much he did know. Beyond that, though, his father’s earlier years were a bit of a mystery. He’d never offered to tell Jonah about them, and, Jonah admitted, he had never thought to ask.
“I was born in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe. My father was a tobacco farmer, and we lived an outdoor life.” David’s eyes lit up. “I could shoot a gun by the time I was ten, skin a buck at about the same time, and fire up a decent barbecue from the age of eight.”
Jonah was deadly still. This was the first time in his life that he had had any sense that his father had been a kid too once upon a time. A picture was forming in his mind of his dad in khaki shorts. He was holding a gun and smiling, his parents on either side of him, looking proud.
“But things were getting difficult. Rhodesia was a British colony, and there was a civil war taking place between the whites and the blacks. In the early 1970s things began to really intensify as the black freedom fighters got themselves organized. I left school and headed back to the farm to wait until my eighteenth birthday and the arrival of the drafting papers.” David paused, as if summoning all his strength. “Then my parents were murdered.”
The picture in Jonah’s mind exploded. “What?!” he exclaimed, sweat building at the back of his neck. He knew that his grandparents had died before he was born, but he’d assumed it was from old age. Only now did he appreciate that they were probably younger than his dad was currently.
“I told you they died before you were born.”
“Yes. But …” Jonah’s palms felt clammy.
“I didn’t think the details would help you. You really were too young to understand.”
“How? What? Who?” Jonah stammered.
“Killed by terrs, short for terrorists—that’s what we called the freedom fighters. I was the one who found their bodies.”
The car suddenly felt very warm to Jonah, the richness of the leather and wood oppressive. His dad wasn’t looking at him anymore. Instead his gaze was focused above him at some spot in the distance. “I’d been into town. It was a Friday night, and I was driving back home after a few beers with the lads. I saw the flames from quite a long way off, lighting up the sky, and when I drove through the gate I could see that the fire was coming from the barn. I saw my father dead in the doorway: shot and chopped. And my mother lay just beyond him.”
Jonah’s throat constricted as he thought of his grandfather and grandmother’s blood drenched bodies dismembered on the ground. He swallowed hard, wincing at the bitterness of the bile that had risen into his mouth, as David’s gaze dropped back down to focus on him. Jonah couldn’t see any tears in his eyes, but he had the sense that his dad was holding them back. He wanted to say something to comfort his father, even though the pain was decades old, but nothing seemed sufficient, certainly not “I’m sorry.”
“I felt so angry. A cold anger. I wanted to hurt something. Kill something. Mutilate it. Hear it scream. Watch it die,” David said.
Now Jonah saw emotion in his father’s eyes as he recalled the fury he had felt.
“After the funeral I ended up joining the Selous Scouts, an undercover counterterrorism unit within the Rhodesian Defense Forces. We were guerillas. We’d go into an area, dressed and armed as terrs, and hunt them down, infiltrate their groups. We turned the hunters into the hunted.”
“
You
joined a counterterrorism unit?” pressed Jonah. Surely this was something a father would be proud to tell his son.
“I did. I was young, but given my tracking ability and fluency in the local language, Shona, I was a candidate. Through my involvement in the Scouts, I learned about weapons and unarmed combat. I also learned to speak Russian.”
“In Africa?”
“Yes, the Russians were financing some of the terr groups as part of their efforts to spread Communism. As a whitey speaking Russian, I could pass for one of the soldiers sent there to train the terrs.”
Jonah was reeling with shock at everything his dad was telling him. He’d been let down by his father for so long, never understanding how he’d come to be the man he was. But now that he was finally laying it out for him, Jonah could only feel sorrow and regret that he had known such pain.
“I can’t remember most of my time with the Scouts. All I know is that we did terrible things in the name of our country. I must have blocked it all out.” David took a deep breath, steadying himself. “What I do remember is my last operation. It wasn’t ’til then that I woke up.”
Jonah leaned forward.
“We’d received orders to raid a village over the border in Botswana. It was a storage dump: guns, missiles, the lot. We were going in first. We were told to gun down anything that moved and to wait for a Botswana Defense Force truck to come and collect the weapons.”
Anything that moved?
Jonah’s stomach lurched. Anything meant people. His dad had killed
people
.
“We were dropped by helicopter about twelve miles way and
made our way there overnight. It was still dark when we hit the huts—grenades first and then bullets. Our orders were to sweep the place—no one was to come out alive. That’s what we did. When the shooting stopped, I switched on my spotlight and saw the wreckage we’d caused.” David’s voice caught in his throat, and he placed his right arm against the car door to steady himself. “The hut was strewn with dead children. It wasn’t a terrorist camp at all. We’d hit an orphanage or school or something.”
Jonah gasped and brought his hands to his face. His father hadn’t just killed people—he’d killed
children
, boys and girls younger than himself.
David, who never cried, finally began to tear up. “I thought we must have made a mistake. But the truck arrived and they walked in, cold as anything, and pulled back a tarpaulin in one corner that was covering the cache. That’s when we saw what lay beneath: elephant tusks. We hadn’t come for weapons. It hadn’t been a mistake. We’d come for ivory. And we’d killed children for it.” David started visibly shaking. “That was the end for me. I walked into the bush. I was getting out.”
This time Jonah couldn’t control the bile that welled up into his mouth. He reached for the car door and pushed it open. He couldn’t possibly be sick in the Bentley. He leaned out and spat onto the concrete floor. What his father was telling him was worse than anything he could have imagined. He spat again. And again. He breathed deeply, desperate for the cool air as saliva filled his mouth. He was back in control. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and sat up, turning back to his father, leaving the car door open so that the air flowed in and the lights stayed on.
“You okay?” David asked, peering over at his clearly distressed son.
Jonah nodded, squeezing the handle of the door to steady himself.
David took another deep breath, and Jonah could see the pain in his eyes. “When you were born, it brought back the memories of that hut. The tiny bodies. The terror. The blood,” he continued, his voice unsteady. “Every night I would wake up screaming from the dreams that invaded my sleep. I couldn’t hold you, couldn’t feed you, and eventually couldn’t bear to see you. Your mother called it “the darkness” and tried to help me, but I wouldn’t listen. Our marriage fell apart, and after the divorce she suffered a nervous breakdown for which she ended up blaming you too. It’s why she went to America. I’d driven her close to suicide, she said, and she couldn’t have anything to do with either of us anymore.” David’s head dropped to his chest, and his body began shaking even more vigorously. When he looked up, Jonah could see that tears had started to stream down his cheeks. “I’m so, so sorry Jonah,” he said, shaking his head. “So, so sorry. You tried so hard to be loved and I couldn’t do it.”
Jonah felt his own emotions intensifying, but before he could figure out what to do or how to react, a bright light streamed into the garage.
“Down!” David whispered, pulling Jonah below the windows of the Bentley. Jonah reached for the car door to close it and extinguish the lights, but his father tightened his grip and shook his head.
Jonah heard the sound of high heels clicking across the
concrete floor, coming closer. He caught a flash of blonde hair. His heart beat faster. The heels stopped.
Had she seen the lights and the open door?
He felt his father’s grip tighten even more.
Suddenly, the silence was ripped to pieces by the unmistakable roar of a Harley-Davidson engine. The engine revved and moved past them toward the exit. David looked up and out the window as Jonah heard the garage door opening, the engine revving again and finally disappearing out of earshot.
Jonah scrambled back up to the seat, still unsteady over everything his dad had revealed. “That was Amelia.”
“Yes,” said David, wiping his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. “We’ve been here too long.” He reached into his pocket and took out a cheap cell phone, handing it to Jonah. “Thank you for listening to me, Jonah. I hope I’ve answered your questions, but if there’s anything else you need to know use this rather than your own phone. That way they can’t track you.”
Jonah took the phone. He couldn’t believe it had come to this.
“I’ll go out first to check if it’s clear. You can find a hiding spot near here, but don’t leave until I come back and give the all clear.” David placed the envelope into the seat back pocket to be collected by his insider. He opened the door on the driver’s side, closed it gently, and disappeared into the darkness.
Jonah followed from the passenger’s side, waiting behind the pillar at the bottom of the stairs, as his dad had instructed. His mind was reeling: Selous Scouts, murdered parents, massacred children. It was all too much. He saw the fire escape door open and close. Thirty seconds later the fire escape opened again, and he heard his father whisper, “All clear.”
Jonah began to climb the stairs, a new thought occurring to him. If his father had had enough ingenuity to escape the team of special forces that had hunted him in Africa, then maybe he was right that he could protect Jonah.
Jonah needed to find how exactly he had managed to elude capture. He sprinted to the top of the stairs and burst out into the open air, sucking it deep into his lungs, and looked around for his father. Night had fallen, but he could make out an indistinct figure at the end of the deserted lane, walking quickly close to the walls and out of the street lights.
“Dad!” he called in a voice he hoped would carry far enough without alerting anyone else. The figure at the end of the lane stopped, took two steps to the left, and disappeared into the shadows.
Jonah started running. He reached the spot where his father should have been, but there was nobody there. Where was he? Had he ignored Jonah’s shout? Jonah looked around in panic. Why would he have disappeared?
A voice behind him made him start. “Jonah. I’m here.”
Jonah spun around to see his father step out of the shadows and walk toward him. He must have run right past him.
“What is it?” David asked.