Mosaic (19 page)

Vanderbilt was behind the wheel. The pilot was in the passenger seat. Grant was in the crate, in the back, bound, gagged and finally drugged. While Vanderbilt was nailing the lid on he had contrived to beat repeatedly on the slats with some mobile part of his anatomy, but the noise had quickly grown faint and now there was silence. Grant was sliding down a midnight velvet tunnel into deep unconsciousness.

Just as the Boer had at last yielded to the need for it, so in the end Grant had fought the needle. Vanderbilt threw him like a roped calf in the back of the van, face down, stapled his instep over Grant's elbow and shoved the hypodermic in to half its length. Then he lifted Grant bodily and tossed him into the crate and hammered the lid down.

He had by no means discounted the possibility that when they prised the top off they would find only a corpse, stiff and shrunken, diminished to a doll without the nervous energy which had animated it. He hardly cared. He had done his job; if someone else, Botha or his medical adviser, had proved unequal to his, Vanderbilt would find it hard to regret that their mistake had saved Joel Grant from another encounter with his monsters. All Vanderbilt wanted now was to be home.

When the van rounded the corner Will Hamlin was in the middle of the alley, on his feet but only approximately vertical, swaying slightly as if there was a breeze. He looked less like a running forward than an old boxer who has taken too many punches. Neither to left nor right of him was there room for the van to pass. Vanderbilt sighed and trod gently on the brake.

“No!” It was the man beside him, who had led these people to him, who had cowered in a corner of the garage all the time he might have been trying to atone for that, who now considered the moment opportune to reassert himself. “Run him down. Run him down! We can't afford any more time.” His voice was harsh and excited, and if he had been driving he would have done it. Vanderbilt hoped he would keep a cooler head about any emergencies which arose at thirty thousand feet.

The van coasted to a halt with its bumper a hand's span from Hamlin's knees. He hardly seemed to see it. He would not have jumped aside if it had come at him; perhaps he could not have done. Only a feat of will was keeping him on his feet.

Vanderbilt pushed back the door and swung down. Hamlin let him walk right up to him before he even raised his head, and then it was an effort. His face was haggard, his eyes dull with pain. Vanderbilt said gently, “You'll have to move, you know.”

Hamlin cranked his head a little higher to look him in the eye. “You have no right—”

“No,” agreed Vanderbilt. “None at all. But I'm taking him just the same. Will you move?”

Hamlin shook his head, mute and stubborn. Vanderbilt laid a hand quite lightly on his broken forearm, cradled in front of him, and Hamlin's knees gave under him. The Boer caught him as he dropped and put him back against the wall. But before he could straighten up Hamlin fisted his good hand in Vanderbilt's sleeve, letting the other trail on the ground like a bird's broken wing. Vanderbilt hung onto his patience: hitting an injured man was about as good for his ego as beating girls. “Let go.”

Hamlin's voice was a hoarse whisper, thick with hurting and desperation. “You don't know why they want him.”

“I told you, I don't have to know. All I have to do is take him back.”

“They don't care about anything he knows or anything he's done. They want his heart. They want to transplant his heart into De Witte. Joel Grant is De Witte's son.”

As if he had not heard Vanderbilt broke the frail grasp of Hamlin's clutching fingers, returned to the van and drove away.

Liz Fallon, wearing her prettiest dress, walked quickly through the reception area towards the lifts, exchanging smiling nods with the people on the desk as she did so. They knew she was visiting their VIP. There had been some discussion about her, over the teacups. Some of them believed she was De Witte's mistress, brought in to cheer him up now that he was dying (had not a queen of England once made such a gesture out of love for her dying king?) but the more worldly among the women pointed to her clothes and expressed the opinion that London was the devil of a long way to bring a mistress and he was bound to have one closer.

Liz had the lift to herself, so she let the smile slip. It was inappropriate to both the occasion and her feelings about it. As the car climbed she was thinking about Elinor.

By a careful cocktail of truth and suggestion she had succeeded in reassuring Mrs. De Witte that the operation would not go ahead. She told her about Joel's friends in England who were already hard on Vanderbilt's heels and would undoubtedly pin him down within hours. She told her about the police who would be pulling out all the stops, and the careful check that would be mounted on airports and docks. She had managed to convey a supreme confidence that Vanderbilt would be stopped and his prisoner freed at, if not before, the point where he tried to escape the country.

She had not said what she already knew, that the police were being deliberately hampered for political reasons; and when she was called from an early lunch by the telephone, and it was Will Hamlin phoning from hospital in Glasgow, his voice thick with pain and defeat, while the doctors hovered irritably in the background waiting to anaesthetize him and set his arm, she felt no compulsion to pass on to Elinor the bitter news he brought her. Nor was there anyone else whose help she could call on. The possibility she had foreseen when she bought her plane ticket had finally developed: Grant's last hope was a friend on the ground in Pretoria.

She had not, in all honesty, expected to be able to free him. She had considered the pros and cons of launching a public scandal, but decided it would take a great deal more in the way of atrocity, and a great deal more time than she would be allowed, to mobilize public opinion in this three-monkeys of a city. She had come reluctantly to the conclusion that the best service she might be capable of doing Grant, who had lived in her house and slept in her bed and shared his worst dreams with her, was to contrive his death before he disappeared again into the bowels of the building where they had wrecked him before.

But what she had learned from Elinor De Witte altered things, raised the possibility of new solutions. True, the likeliest end was still death or imprisonment for both Grant and herself, but there was at least a chance for them if she was successful now. She dared anticipate success. The foundations for it had already been laid. But she took no pleasure in it, did not relish—even apart from its implications for herself—what she was about to do.

The lift doors opened and she cranked the smile back into place, and stood for a moment chatting and joking with the guards of the man she was going to murder. Then one of them opened the door for her and, smiling, she passed inside.

She closed the door quietly and turned to the bed, the tiny, utterly serious gun from her pretty purse in her hand. De Witte's grin of welcome died on his lips.

Liz's voice was low and flat, her eyes emptied of emotion; or almost. De Witte saw no fear there, no hesitation, but he thought he saw regret. Liz said, “If you give me the chance I'll explain this. But if you call for help I will kill you immediately and take the consequences. All in all, I don't think your government will want to put me on trial, in open court.”

For De Witte the threat of death had been a dark companion for as long as he could remember. He had been within moments and inches of it on many occasions. For more than a year, apparently, it had been only the thickness of a worn heart wall away. He did not wish to die but death held no terrors for him, so he did not panic at the sight of the small, serious gun but took her at her word. “So explain.”

Liz drew a deep breath, wondering where to begin. The chain of events had been forged a quarter of a century before, the vital link that made sense of all the rest closed only hours before. Not knowing how far she would get before circumstances forced her to cut short the account, she began with what was, from De Witte's point of view, the most important part. “You have a son.”

She told him the story Elinor had told her, about the girl and her child, and how everything his wife had done was out of love for him. Liz knew it was important for him to hear that; it was also, less explicably, important to her that he should know.

De Witte listened without interrupting, at first with disbelief, then with gathering tears brightening his eyes. Liz watched a whole lexicon of emotions play across his white face: grief and anger and delight and regret and shame and hope. And she knew, leaving the difficult parts till last, that he had deeper wells of feeling yet to plumb.

When she paused for breath, De Witte said, “I want to meet him. You know where he is, don't you? I want you to bring him here.”

“You've already met him. His name is Joel.”

His brow furrowed as he tried to remember. Liz saw understanding strike him with the force of a blow. “Joel Grant?” he whispered, stricken. “Oh dear God.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Why didn't he
tell
me?” De Witte's voice actually broke.

“He didn't know. He still doesn't. The only people who ever knew were his mother and your wife, and Mary died when he was a boy. Joshua Mpani as good as raised him.”

“That Kaffir! Raised my son a traitor?”

“And lost his own life rescuing him from your torturers. You'd have torn him apart but for Mpani. Between you, you damn nearly destroyed him. And now he's in terrible danger again, and I think maybe I'm the only person in the world who can help him, and the only way I can see to do it is with this.” She waved the little gun, and if there was resolve in the gesture there was also despair.

“You want to kill me? I don't understand.”

“I don't want to kill you, Colonel. Perhaps I should but I don't. But Joel needs you dead. Your people have him. A man called Vanderbilt kidnapped him from my house three nights ago, and an hour ago I heard he'd succeeded in getting Joel out of the UK. He'll be here tomorrow. And if you're still alive when he arrives, your people will kill him. Not for anything he's done, or anything he is except that he's your son.

“They knew about him long before I did. They have his medical records, from when you had him before and probably from the hospital where he was born. Your funny blood, Colonel—Joel has it too. That's why they want him. They want to give you his heart.”

The silence between them grew and stretched and crawled, like a wakening beast. It was as if the monstrous thing was something quick and vital, and in the room with them, stirring and hungering. As if afraid to draw it, neither spoke.

De Witte was a sick man, and the news the woman had brought him had shocked him to the depths of his soul—much more than the gun she was pointing at him. But he was also an intelligent man, and neither sickness nor shock had made him foolish. He had probably as much skill as any man living at determining truth from falsehood: the fact that this was personal did not alter the criteria for judging it.

He recognized the essential truth in what Liz had told him. It made sense, it fitted with known facts, it matched with rational patterns of behaviour; it had the ring not only of authenticity but of inevitability that true stories have. That being so there was no point in launching a barrage of questions that would obscure rather than clarify the basic dilemma. They had almost nothing left to say to one another.

Except: “Joel is still alive?” De Witte was amazed and even faintly amused at the speed with which he had learnt to say his son's name with proprietorial overtones.

“Yes. He has to be, for the transplant to succeed.”

“I won't permit it. I can protect him.”

“Do you really believe that?”

De Witte thought for a long moment. Then he shook his head. Then he looked up and fixed Liz with a fierce gaze. “Who's done this to us?”

“You'd know better than I,” said Liz.

De Witte nodded. “Botha. Not Vanderbilt: Danny would have come to me if he'd got wind of what they were planning. Harry Keppler, of course—my doctor, I've known him since we were boys, he was always a ruthless bastard. The rest of his team?”

“Not necessarily.”

“No. Once they have him here and they're ready to go, all it takes is someone to inflict the kind of head injuries transplant donors always have, he's admitted as a road accident victim, complete with forged consents, and nobody's any the wiser. Me least of all. I didn't know I had a son to lose.” He sucked in a deep, painful breath. “But Elinor knew. It was her idea, wasn't it?”

Liz saw no point in denying what was self-evident. “Yes. In a desperate moment she confided in your doctor. Afterwards she tried to stop it but they wouldn't listen. She told me in the hope that I could stop it. I think, in the back of her mind, she knew then what I would have to do.”

“Kill me.”

“I don't know what they'll do then. They know there are people in England who know the whole story. They may give Joel back as the price of our silence. Or they may try to kill us all. If they win I shall die a murderer; but if we win, your death will have bought Joel's life. I can't offer you much in the way of consolation, but I promise that if there's any way at all I'll make sure he knows that. You two were never much good for one another before; maybe—” She did not finish the thought: it seemed impertinent to.

She raised the gun in both her hands. De Witte could see right into the barrel, so she was aiming at his right eye. At least she was not going to make a bollocks of it.

But then, she was not going to do it at all if he could prevent her. He said quietly, “Liz, wait. There's a better way.”

“Better for whom?”

“Oh, for you.” He added sharply, “I listened to you, girl, now do me the courtesy of listening to me.”