Mosaic (16 page)

“Shall I call Nathan? He's in the car—”

“Listen.”
He heard her suck in a deep breath six thousand miles away. “Joachim De Witte is dying. He needs a heart transplant, but they can't find a suitable match. Joel is De Witte's bastard. Will, they don't want Joel at all. They want his heart.”

Vanderbilt drove to the address he had been given. It was a lock-up garage barely a mile from the airport perimeter, directly under the flight path. It was already dark—another night was setting in—and as he hunted for the right alley the lights of a big passenger jet seemed to fly down the street towards him. Involuntarily he ducked. He knew the thing was already hundreds of feet up and climbing, but human instinct had been bred in before there were aeroplanes.

He picked it up in the rear-view mirror and watched it go with regret. He would have liked to be on it, but once again his plans had been frustrated. When he called his controller back, from a filling station outside Dumfries, he was told that a suitable plane had been located but the earliest departure they had been able to arrange was the following morning. Once more he was faced with killing time in a hostile land surrounded by enemies. He was advised to wait until dark and then make himself at home in the garage. A van would come for them in the morning.

He found the key, and the dust hiding it appeared undisturbed. Still he entered cautiously, checking inside and outside and only driving the car into the garage when he was sure he had neither pursuit nor ambush to contend with. He locked the door behind him and groped around for the light switch.

All down the long side wall were packing-cases, stacked anything up to three deep. Many had been used before and carried old Customs markings. He found one which had already been to Zaire, that carried an old red stencil claiming “Machinery—with care,” and pulled it down. It was one of the smaller crates, big enough to take the folded body of an unconscious man but perhaps not big enough to look that it would. The top was loose, and when he removed it the contents made him grin: a hammer, a tin of nails and an enormous suit of overalls. Someone else had picked the crate out too. Joel Grant would enter the airport in the packing-case, as cargo; Vanderbilt would enter in the overalls, as a cargo handler. He would stay aboard after the last crate was loaded and, since he should never have been there at all, would probably never be missed. There would be no difficulty getting himself and his burden off the plane and through Customs at the other end. The Hastings was going beyond Zaire.

He pulled the overalls on over his suit, then turned back to the car. He was still worried about the sedative, unsure whether he should risk using it. The only other option, since Grant had to be kept quiet throughout the loading and right through until the plane was in the air, allowing for any delays, was another fairly substantial thump behind the ear. For a cargo Vanderbilt had been warned to handle with care Grant had already been knocked about a good bit. If Pretoria was right the drug would be safer; if Grant was, the rabbit-chop would be. Finally deciding that if there was to be a débâcle, with a dead body smuggled thousands of miles at massive risk and expense, it would be better on Botha's record than his own, so once again he prepared the hypodermic. He compromised a little by reducing the recommended dosage by twenty per cent in consideration of Grant's frail physical condition and suspect medical history. A bleary mumble in the depths of a packing-case in a cargo plane with the screws already turning was a small and justifiable risk.

Only then did he unlock the boot of the car, unlock the handcuffs, untie the rope anchoring his feet and drag Grant out.

Grant had been confined in the dark, cramped trunk for some hours. The force of the weak, fly-bespeckled light bulb hit him like a blow and above the gag his eyes screwed tight against it. He could not straighten his legs and when Vanderbilt let go of him he crumpled awkwardly to the cement floor. He hardly felt it as in quick succession the hard rough floor hit his knees, elbows and face. He had long since passed the apex of pain to which the cramps had steadily risen and which had had him whining into his gag in the rattling dark while sweat and tears mingled on his temples. Until his circulation returned to normal, inflicting as much agony in the flood as it had in the ebb, all sensation would be dulled. He lay on his side on the floor, eyes clenched against the light, and waited patiently to be picked up.

Vanderbilt looked down at him: not without concern, but it was the concern of a trucker for valuable goods possibly damaged in transit, or a vet for a hamster that might not make it through the night. Professional detachment like an impermeable membrane stood between Grant and any hope of compassion. So when Vanderbilt knelt before him and began chafing vigorously at his sleeping limbs, it was a purely professional service, given and received as such. All it meant to the Boer was the careful handling of fragile goods; all it meant to Grant was some more pain to add to that he had already had. He did not see in it the grains of another escape. He no longer thought in those terms. He knew he was too weak now to fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

When he was satisfied with the results of his efforts, Vanderbilt fastened the handcuffs round his prisoner's left wrist and to the towing-ring under the bumper. “Sweet dreams,” he said.

So passed the third night they had been together, without incident except for the brief disturbance that followed from Grant lapsing into an exhausted slumber and dreaming far from sweetly. Vanderbilt slapped him awake in a manner oddly similar to the way Liz used to free him from nightmare, even with something of the same gentleness.

Vanderbilt had himself and his prisoner ready to leave before dawn, but it was well into the morning before he heard the throaty rumble of an engine in the alley outside. Just in case he knelt by Grant and folded a hand across his mouth. But at the quiet rhythmic tattoo at the door he rose to his feet and went to stand by the door.
“Ja?”
It was too late for concealment.

“Captain John Crane, Mr. Vanderbilt. I believe you have a cargo for me.”

Vanderbilt opened the door. Captain Crane did not so much walk in as fly in, propelled from behind by a large black hand. The other large black hand held a gun. Towering in the doorway, Nathan Shola seemed for a moment to represent the quintessential vengeance of all black men against all white: Montezuma's revenge, and Atahualpa's, and Cetewayo's, and Steve Biko's, and Nelson Mandela's. He was not so much a man as a vessel for an anger which spanned centuries and continents, a storm of rage contained in glass, visible and potent and constrained only by that flimsiest of fabrics, civilization. In that first moment he could have killed them both, in cold blood and without compunction, as he had killed his enemies when he fought on his own land; and if he had been alone it is probable that he would have done. But he was not alone and he was not at home, and the moment for murder passed; and when it had he followed the gun into the garage and Will Hamlin followed him.

Inevitably, Danny Vanderbilt had faced death before. Not many times: he was too good at his job, and so were the people he dealt with, for that kind of thing to become a habit. But it had happened: the feeling was familiar, that deep dynamic stillness of body and mind that lasted perhaps only a moment before events proceeded, demanding their own responses almost automatically. But afterwards that frozen moment of death in a cage was what he remembered. Sometimes he could not even recall exactly how he had evaded it: his training went as deep as instinct, but no training could wipe out those few glacial moments in his life when he had confronted infinity down a dark tunnel maybe . 38 in diameter.

Now here was another one. Staring at the gun in Nathan Shola's hand—not down the barrel, it was not pointed at his head, Shola knew better than to choose the smallest effective target and anyway he did not owe Vanderbilt the favour of a clean kill—he felt the same stillness, the same coolness in the air, the same sense of waiting for history to take its course. He was not afraid, not even of the likelihood of pain. He was irritated, hardly more than that, to be thwarted so close to success. He wondered if there was any way he could take at least one of them with him; Grant, unfortunately, was some distance behind him and certain to remain there, attached to the car and hunched up on the cement floor in front of it.

Vanderbilt looked up from the gun to the face of the man holding it. It was hard enough to drag the eyes away from the organ of his imminent destruction, but it was necessary. Guns never showed weakness. “You, I take it,” he said, “are Shola.”

Shola's face displayed a black rage seen, as it were, through a veil of watchfulness. It was bad news for Vanderbilt, who would have much preferred a mouthing, spitting fury, lurid threats and a waving gun. There was a small chance of being shot almost accidentally, but the excitable gunman was little more than a dangerous child to be disarmed. Shola was something else: another soldier, another professional. The anger in his eyes would not distort his vision, nor the fury in his soul interfere with his reactions. He would not be hustled into firing off potshots before he was ready, and when he was ready he would hit what he aimed at. Vanderbilt had faced death before: not until now had he felt in the marrow of his bones that the odds were on the other man's side. Had it been a situation where he could have admitted defeat, turned his back and walked away he would have done so. He had no time for death before dishonour. But he knew that if he walked past Shola with his back turned he would not reach the corner of the street.

Shola said, softly, soft and sibilant as the hiss from the lips of a serpent, “And you, I suppose, are the bastard who beats up on women and breaks up sick kids.”

“Him?” Vanderbilt had to screw on his heel and look back over his shoulder to see Grant. He did not look sick: a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but time in a car boot tended to do that to a man. He had had the opportunity to work off the worst of the night's cramps, and the sudden turn in events had filled his body with animation though he could only kneel beside the bumper. The life was back in his eyes, too, which never left Shola's face, although Shola would not glance away from Vanderbilt long enough to return the look. Vanderbilt said, interestedly, “Why, what's wrong with him?”

Shola's lip hardened. “You've had him three days and you don't know? You think he was always scared of the dark? What the hell good would he have been to us? You did that to him—you and your Security Police and your Section Sixes and your twenty-four-hour interrogations. And De Witte. Oh yes: do you know about De Witte?”

Vanderbilt thought he knew all about De Witte. He shrugged. “I don't know what you're talking about. Shell-shocked? He nearly broke my neck. He did kill my pilot. But for that we'd have been out of this country thirty-six hours ago. I wish he had been sick. I wish De Witte had done a proper job on him.”

In Shola's eyes the anger surged. He took a long stride forward and swung the gun; the barrel clipped Vanderbilt across the jaw with enough force to send pain lancing through every nerve in his face but not quite enough to fell him. He reeled back, agony pulsing in his skull, taking care to reel towards the car.

Shola stole a moment then to look at Grant. “Joel, my friend, we almost lost you this time.”

For Grant reprieve had come almost too abruptly on top of despair. His face was aglow, his eyes bright with fever and unshed tears. He could hardly speak; all he could do was repeat, “Jesus, Nat; oh Jesus,” and fret at his chain like a dog.

“Easy, Joel. We'll have that thing off you in a minute. First, tell me has he got a gun.”

On his knees by the bumper, Grant looked up at the big Boer. Vanderbilt had one hand on the car wing to steady himself, only partly for the sake of appearances, while the other nursed his raging jaw. Behind hooded eyelids he was hoping that he had not miscalculated, that the pain would not prove too much of a disability. He was hardly aware of Grant's burning gaze.

Grant said unsteadily, “He was taking me back to Pretoria.” It was not possible to tell whether the tremor in his voice was due to fear, or hatred, or only deep fatigue, all of which cast their shadows by turns across his hollow face.

Shola spoke to him sharply. “The gun, Joel. Did he have a gun?”

Without shifting his gaze Grant responded. His voice was strange, strained. At first he seemed to be talking at random, talking out the horror. Only after a minute did Shola realize that it was a reply of sorts; not an answer so much as an invalidation of the question. He said, “He was going to take me back. To De Witte. To have my head ripped up again. I fought him, Nat; I did fight him, but I couldn't beat him. I couldn't even make him kill me. But I got the pilot.”

Vanderbilt waited for the pause, as if unwilling to interrupt him, and then said quietly, “There is a gun. In the car, in the glove compartment. He never saw it.”

Shola despatched Will Hamlin with a jerk of his head. Hamlin kept carefully clear of the line of fire and went to the nearside door: the Boer was beside the driver's door. The pilot, Crane, was at the back of the lock-up—not because he hoped to find an exit there but because it was the furthest he could get from the gun. If he once knew how far a hand gun can throw lead accurately, given a good enough hand, he was trying hard not to remember. Hamlin took Vanderbilt's gun—a little gun, not much more than a lady's gun, that would disappear in his big hand but still blow incapacitating holes through anyone who stood in his way—and returned with it, holding it gingerly, the way he had come.

Shola said, “Now the keys. Free him.”

Grant said, still in the same oddly flat voice, “He's good, Nat. They knew what they were doing when they sent him. He may be better than you. You should kill him now. Before he finds a way to fight back. You should kill him now. For what he's done. For what he was going to do. Kill him, Nat. Kill him now. Or let me do it.”