Mosaic (7 page)

Liz said, “What else, for God's sake?”

Hamlin shrugged, apologetically. “Well, how long has he been here? Something over a year? What's he been doing in that time? All I'm saying—asking—is, could he have done something to lay himself open to this kind of counter-attack?”

Liz and Shola exchanged a look heavy with significance. Shola strolled over to the window and lowered himself gracefully onto the sill, crossing his long legs at the ankles. “You haven't met Joel, have you?”

Liz said, “You can forget it, Will. There is no chance of Joel having resumed covert action for his cause in Sorley.”

“Would you necessarily know?”

“I would know,” she said, “through living with him, and Nathan would know because that's his work—it's his job to know. For now, Will, Joel has enough trouble making it from one day to the next without getting himself involved in revolutionary politics.”

“But he was involved,” pursued Hamlin. “He cared enough to join Mpani in the first place, and that couldn't have been the easy option. Mightn't he care enough still to follow events, to meet people; conceivably to hear something?—I don't know, something that Pretoria could want to know. Isn't it possible?”

“No,” Shola said firmly.

Liz expanded. “You see, Joel was damaged. The damage they did to his body was unpleasant but it healed; those scars don't trouble him much. But the damage they did to his mind won't mend in a few months or a few years. I doubt he'll ever be entirely free of it. It haunts him. He wakes yelling most nights. He hardly leaves the house. He talks to almost nobody but us. If I have friends in, mostly he stays in his room. If we're watching television and somebody with a South African accent comes on he starts to shake. One night last month the police came to the door. A neighbour's kid was missing and they wanted me to check the garden, the shed—you know. After they'd gone I found Joel at the kitchen sink, spewing his guts up.”

After a lengthy silence Hamlin cleared his throat and said, “They really messed him up, didn't they?”

Shola spat with a sudden ferocity, “De Witte did. When he was taken—Joel—he knew everything about Mpani. Places, names, dates—everything. We needed time to break it up, get people away, make new camps, new routes. Joel gave us that time, but it took everything he had: all the courage, all the strength. That was why we had to risk everything to get him out. He'd earned it. Even knowing what it cost, he was worth it. I could kill people who judge him by how he is now. That's what they did to him. That's what De Witte did.”

“Nathan, I'm not judging,” Hamlin said gently. “I'm just trying to think what they could want with him.”

Liz said, “He must be frightened out of his wits.” Behind her eyes there was a quiet rage.

Nathan Shola said, “I'll find them. And I'll kill the Boer bastard.”

He made it a promise.

By mid-afternoon Joel Grant had just about acknowledged his position as hopeless. He had tried threats, he had tried entreaties, he had even tried bribery although he owned nothing of value and did not know there were people who would pay money to see him safe. But Vanderbilt remained intractable. He seemed faintly amused by both the threats and the bribes.

Curiously, Grant was feeling rather better. He was not as cold, and both the concussion and the shock were wearing off. Even the stark terror that had lacerated his mind like a sharp knife was beginning to dull, the recognition that he was as good as dead already serving as a kind of neural anaesthetic. There was a certain numb comfort in the thought that his situation could hardly get worse.

Vanderbilt had the holdall open on the boards beside him, the electronic gadget that was the radio beacon on his knee. He was familiarizing himself with its operation: it was important that the thing transmit for the minimum period necessary, and he did not want to waste time setting it up or closing it down. He practised until he could do it with his eyes closed.

The beacon was necessary because, for both security and practical reasons, no specific rendezvous between himself and his helicopter had been arranged. When he telephoned in after taking Grant he nominated a broad area within which he would locate a suitable landing spot. In return he was given a frequency for the beacon and the flight path the helicopter would follow. Now he had only to drive to the nominated area and wander round the lanes until he found an appropriate field on the flight path. When he heard the helicopter he would activate the beacon, the machine would home in on him and they would be airborne again within a very few minutes. The beacon would be transmitting for perhaps as little as thirty seconds, on a short-range and little used frequency where there was scant chance of arousing someone's curiosity. It was a system Vanderbilt had used before, always with satisfaction. It was simple, elegant and efficient, and it meant he did not have to commit himself to a meeting-place when all the professionals knew that meetings were the most dangerous part of their work. It was another example of Vanderbilt's extreme, almost pathological, caution. But he did not care that some of his colleagues considered him an old woman. All that concerned him was that when his transport descended out of an overcast sky there should be no one to watch him heave a wriggling sack on board.

Except that the sack would not be wriggling. The sack would be half-way across Europe before it even started to stir. That was what the sedative was for. Grant would be oblivious before he left the cottage. Vanderbilt did not expect to be stopped on the road but it could happen; there were other reasons for flagging down a car besides suspecting the driver of kidnapping, and Vanderbilt did not want to have to kill an English policeman who stopped him to warn of a defective brake light and heard the boot hammering. Then there was the transfer from the helicopter to the cargo plane waiting at Gatwick. It would be discreet but it would inevitably be seen by someone. The plane was supposed to be waiting for spares: it would be better if the boy did not start yelling.

When he was happy about the beacon, Vanderbilt picked up a syringe and the bottle of clear liquid and read the dosage on the label.

Grant was watching him. “You're not shoving that into me,” he said with conviction.

“Good stuff, this,” said Vanderbilt, charging the syringe carefully. “You'll be half-way home before you know you've left.”

Grant's narrow jaw came up, belligerently. “I thought you needed—” Then a kind of darkness fell behind his eyes. His nostrils flared on a sharp breath and he looked away. “Do what you want. I can't stop you.” He had spent the last half-hour trying to conceive of a form of suicide available to a man tied to a bed under the gaze of his warder, and he had almost handed back unused probably the only chance he would be given.

For perhaps a minute it seemed as if the exchange had passed into history without Vanderbilt recognizing its significance. He finished filling the syringe, carefully laid it aside on the windowsill and read again the label on the glass bottle. Then he looked across the room at the man on the bed, and out of his broad bland face the gaze was as sharply piercing as thorns. “What did you start to say there?”

Grant stiffened. He tried to relax the taut muscles but could not. He thought that his rebel body was intent on betraying him so that it could go on living. He thought his body must have forgotten what the price of that betrayal would be. He grunted, “Nothing.”

Vanderbilt rose unhurriedly and strolled over to the bed, and stood over Grant looking down at him thoughtfully. Automatically Grant moved away from him; as far as he could, tugging himself up by means of the handcuffs to crouch against the iron bedhead. If Vanderbilt started hitting him it would make no difference whether he was lying, sitting or doing a tap-dance; if he could not run away he would get hurt, but some surviving shred of self-respect argued against waiting for it prone.

But Vanderbilt was not proposing violence, not yet. He was talking—reasonably, with that same compound of sweet reason and iron patience that teachers use on difficult children. “Yes you did—don't you remember? I said I was going to knock you out with the hypo and you started to say you thought I needed something. And then you stopped, because you thought I was making a mistake and you thought it could work in your favour. What were you going to say?”

Grant spat, “Go to hell.” He saw his chance of an easy death beginning to slip away from him. In desperation he decided that a sudden and noisy diversion was his best bet. He hoped that if he turned suddenly rabid Vanderbilt would shoot the drug into him without giving the matter any further consideration, to keep him quiet. He also hoped that it would prove as lethal as he expected: he was not a doctor, he only knew that drugs they had given him at Harare had almost killed him before they realized how savagely allergic he was to a broad spectrum of their chemical arsenal. Hoping he would not just wake up later and sicker than expected, he launched a low and dirty swing at the looming Boer with his free left hand.

Vanderbilt caught his swinging fist in the palm of one hand, without rancour, and held it with no apparent effort. He went on talking as if nothing had happened. “You aren't exactly wild about going home, are you? So maybe in some way you figured an armful of this stuff would change that. Only one way I can see, but maybe you're scared enough to welcome that. So what you were saying was, you thought I needed you alive. What's the matter, boy, you got allergies?”

“No,” muttered Grant, but he could not make it sound convincing.

Vanderbilt grinned at him and released his hand. “Pretoria may have had trouble getting the truth out of you, but I bet they always knew when you were lying.”

The undisguised amusement in the big man's tone stung Joel Grant to anger. With a certain terse dignity that would have surprised his friends, he said, “It'll be time enough for you to mock me when somebody's done to you what Pretoria did to me and you've come through it better—boy.”

The parting shot was an obvious and deliberate insult, intended and taken as such. Vanderbilt swung instinctively; instinctively Grant flinched away from the broad hand; but at the last possible moment the Boer amended the blow from a punitive slash across the face to an almost friendly swipe across the top of the head, the sort of tap you might give a presumptuous child. Grant was left cringing for nothing: as the anticipation of assault ebbed he felt a tide of humiliation rising through his hollow cheeks.

Vanderbilt watched his discomfiture with half a smile, like a man enjoying a sly joke. But behind the smile, in the place where he did his thinking, he was troubled. If Grant had begged him not to use the drug he would have gone ahead with a clear conscience, confident that the only thing Grant was allergic to was the thought of having to pay for his treachery. He knew that once that needle slid into his vein any hope he might have had of contriving an escape was gone. He did not know his captor, could not know that anyway there would be no chances because Vanderbilt never took any. He must consider that his liberty, and ultimately his survival for he clearly believed that going home would cost him his life—and for all Vanderbilt knew to the contrary he could be right—depended on staying awake now.

But he had not pleaded for his awareness. He had almost said nothing; so nearly nothing that the significance of the swallowed comment could easily have been missed or misunderstood. Vanderbilt was not blind to the possibility that Grant was double-bluffing him—that it was a lie which Grant wanted him to believe, so that having sown the suspicion a feigned attempt to cover it was the best way of ensuring its germination—but there were two objections. The first was that Grant hardly seemed up to that degree of subtlety, and the second that the ground bait was insufficient to guarantee a bite. He was inclined to believe that Grant both thought and hoped the drug would kill him.

There remained the strong possibility that Grant himself was mistaken—perhaps not about his medical condition but about the effect this particular drug would have on it. Pretoria had had him for weeks: plenty long enough for any problem which threatened his successful interrogation to emerge. They would have used drugs; they would know about any hypersensitivity. If Pretoria had given him this compound it was because it was safe. De Witte did not make that kind of mistake.

But maybe Botha did. Vanderbilt did not know. He decided to back his instincts, his skill and his luck, and hold off drugging Grant until he was left with no option. He did not expect it to come to that. He was confident of his ability to manage his prisoner with one hand tied behind his back, whereas in fact the reverse would be the case. There was some risk involved, but there was risk anyway and he had come too far and gone to too much trouble to go home with a corpse.

The decision made, he delayed no longer. He repacked the bag, though he left out the loaded syringe which he put, its needle carefully capped, into a deep pocket of his coat. He unlocked the end of the handcuffs he had fastened to the bedstead, and in a rough parody of dressing a child he pushed Grant's arms into the sleeves of his raincoat. Grant tried to pull away from him but Vanderbilt tugged him back, without difficulty or rancour, and joined his hands behind him. Then he turned him round and buttoned him up with a grin. “What is it they say here?—That should stop you catching your death.”

With his bag in one hand and the short chain linking Grant's wrists in the other, towing him backwards through the still house, he made a last tour of the upstairs windows, checking all the angles before he made his move. There was nothing to see: even the distant sheep had wandered to another part of the fell. Except as prompted by the wind, nothing stirred in the overhung lane at the front.

He found himself listening to the house. Its age disconcerted him. He supposed it was a few hundred years old, and unless someone took a bulldozer to it to make room for a motorway it would probably last another few hundred. His country was not as old as this little ordinary stone house; and unless he made a serious on-the-job blunder one day he rather expected to live long enough to witness its demise. The thought caused him sorrow but not despair: he was a practical man, he knew nothing was forever. Not Rome, not Camelot, not South Africa.