Authors: Anthony Bidulka
And how did my search for Matthew Ridge/Moxley fit into all of this? Who was he really? Who had he 119 of 170
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become? Was he an innocent in all of this, or, as Cassandra had hinted at earlier, was he somehow complicit in what was going on here? Was she giving me a hint? Had I somehow stumbled into something bigger, more dangerous, than I knew? Bigger than Matthew’s mother had reason to suspect?
I eyed the door again and felt a bead of perspiration dribble down my temple. I was being pushed into a corner. Either I had to find a way to escape or be crushed. Or…I could push back. I preferred the sound of that. The one thing I cannot abide is a bully.
The only way to find out what was going on, was to do exactly what I’d come here to do in the first place. I was going to talk to Kevan the masseur tomorrow morning, then I was going to find Matthew Moxley and let the cards fall where they would.
But until then? It was time to face down my paranoia.
I regarded the door once more. I rose from the desk and moved gingerly towards it, feeling an imaginary heat emanating from it, pulling me and resisting me at the same time. I stepped up to it and carefully placed my ear against the cool, wooden surface.
Dead silence.
Of course, no one knew I was here. I’d seen no one looking for me, either of the two times I’d been to Chobe that night. There was no reason to believe I’d been found out. There was no one behind the door.
Paranoia be gone!
I knew I needed to get somewhere safe to spend the rest of the night, somewhere I could think, maybe get a couple of hours of shut-eye. That’s what my exhausted, sleep-deprived body and mind desperately needed: safety, thinking time and sleep. With those three things, I hoped matters would become clearer in the morning, because they weren’t too obvious right then. For some reason unknown to me-yet-Cassandra had set me up, faking her own abduction. She knew I’d return to the village, find her missing, and then what? Did she think I’d make for the river and try to get back to Zambia? Would they be waiting for me at Kasane? Kazungula? The Livingstone airport? Well, I wasn’t going to make it that easy for them.
I gathered my things, and, reluctantly, Cassandra’s as well; no need to advertise my break-in to the activities director when he or she got there in the morning. I’d take them with me and dump them somewhere less conspicuous. Then I’d use my lock picks and find myself a nice, quiet, unoccupied guest room (even a broom closet would do) to sleep in.
I switched off the light, opened the door and came face to face with the barrel end of a shotgun.
Not so paranoid after all, Quant.
Jaegar.
“Put your hands behind your head,” he ordered in a deep voice.
“Uh, what about this stuff?” I hated to be pragmatic at a time like that, but really, my hands were full with knapsacks and duffle bags, mine and Cassandra’s.
“Put the bags down…no…hold them.”
I guess he realized that if I deposited the bags outside the activities director’s office, they’d attract someone’s attention sooner or later, and I suspected that that was the last thing he wanted.
“Walk forward,” he barked.
I did as directed, and in case I needed further encouragement, I felt the tip of his firearm jab the middle of my back. “Where are we going?” I asked as casually as the situation allowed.
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“River.”
Oh shit.
Jaegar prodded me along as we marched down the deserted corridors of the lodge, through the front foyer, past the pleasant sitting areas, the bar, the dining room, then down a set of steps that took us into the darkness outside. We made our way past a pool area, landscaped lawns and gardens and finally onto a dirt path that was on a slight decline (which I took to mean we were getting close to the water’s edge). I could smell dampness in the air, along with a faint pungency that might have been the scent of blood from a distant lion kill, warthog poop or just my own fear.
When we were far enough away from the lodge that it was unlikely anyone awake at that hour would see us, Jaegar lit a pocket flashlight, which did its best to illuminate the way but only revealed shadows of trees and grasses along the path, and alarmed a few night creatures that scurried out of our way.
Eventually, we rounded a bend in the path and I saw a faint light, moving gently up and down, side to side. I soon recognized the source: a lantern on a boat, shifting listlessly in the water alongside a wooden pier.
“Get on,” Jaegar ordered when we reached the craft, a large, flat-bottomed thing with a knee-high railing around its circumference and a slightly pitched roof held up at each corner by thin, round stems of metal. I realized this was probably one of the boats used for the lodge’s water-based safaris, but somehow I didn’t think this voyage was going be a pleasure ride. There was a long, narrow table at the centre of the boat, surrounded by a half dozen of the kind of white, plastic chairs you’d expect to find around a pool or barbecue pit. Huddled beneath a coarse blanket on one of the chairs was Cassandra Wellness. There was only one oil lamp burning on the boat, but it was enough for me to see the look on her face and immediately know that I’d been mistaken about her role in all of this. She was scared.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded to know from Jaegar as he urged me aboard and Cassandra and I exchanged wordless stares.
“Sit down,” was his informative reply.
I did as I was told, lowering myself into a seat next to Cassandra. “Are you okay?” I asked in a shushed voice. “What’s happening here?”
“This stupid asshole broke into our room; he attacked me, then brought me here,” she spit out with enough venom to take down a tyrannosaurus rex.
“Yeah,” I said, “I got that. But why? And why didn’t the villagers help you? By the look of things you put up quite a fight.”
“He had his big, fat hand over my mouth!” she explained, glaring at Jaegar.
Cassandra Wellness was pissed. And when Cassandra Wellness is pissed, everyone is going to know about it. Her eyes came back to mine. “I was so tired after you skulked off that I fell right to sleep. I didn’t even know he was there until he was already on top of me. He probably wanted to rape me!” She turned to him again and hissed at his face. “Pervert!” Then back to me. “I couldn’t scream, but I kicked things around pretty good.”
I could appreciate Cassandra’s disgust with our captor, but I needed facts. “How did he know where to find us?”
“He said he followed us,” she told me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t believe a word this jerk has to say.”
I frowned. “But that’s impossible. We saw the truck that pulled up behind us. No one got out of it. They 121 of 170
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were still in the vehicle watching the Jeep burn when we left.”
“He said he followed us,” she repeated, pulling the blanket closer around her shoulders. The night had brought coolness and the water surrounding us was adding its own chill. “That’s what he said; don’t ask me.” She was in a generally belligerent mood.
While we talked, I was also keeping a close eye on Jaegar. He had released a rope that bound the boat to the dock and was now using an oar to push the vessel back from the grassy shore with a silence that assured our departure would be unheard and probably unseen. Maybe he just wanted to get far enough away so no one could hear Cassandra calling him a pervert.
“Where are we going?” I stood and demanded to know in a forceful voice, hoping that someone, somewhere might hear me (if they hadn’t already heard Cassandra’s cussing) and come to see what the ruckus was all about.
“Shut the mouth,” he ordered harshly. “And sit!”
He had the gun; I thought it best to comply.
Showing great dexterity with a shotgun in one hand (pointed at yours truly), and the boat’s controls (the kind that faced into the boat-and at us-rather than outward from the bow) in the other, Jaegar started the motor. He kept it at a quiet idle, but that was enough to back the boat further away from shore and send it floating down the centre of the wide, listless river. I guess I was wrong earlier. This
was
becoming
The
African Queen
.
We travelled this way for several minutes, Cassandra continuing to fume and me trying to get my bearings and figure out an escape plan. The water and sky were black as tar, becoming one at some indistinguishable point. The river was not so wide as to make the shore on either side invisible-in daylight-but at this time of night I could barely make out the vague impression of some unidentifiable shapes that might signify trees and bushes on good old terra firma. But it didn’t matter, for I had other measuring sticks that told me we weren’t travelling too far from land.
Every so often, the purplish glow of the African moonlight would catch a flash of silver-the watching eyes of night predators on the prowl for supper. The eyes of hyenas, leopards and those damn warthogs.
Along with the visual evidence of the hunt came the sounds: low moans, snarls and rumbles born deep within powerful chests; and too, somewhere in the far off distance, I could hear drumming. The African villagers were beating out the traditional rhythms of a time long past but never forgotten. Under other circumstances, this ride would have been a most remarkable experience, magical, unforgettable, but tonight it was a foreboding journey, part of a sinister master plan I’d yet to figure out.
Jaegar throttled down, bringing the boat’s engines to a halt. We seemed to be drifting aimlessly until the craft unceremoniously bumped up against a spit of land, a three-metre-by-three-metre island of mud chunks and tall reeds with edges so sharp they looked as if they would slice skin with the slightest pass. I knew we’d departed from Botswana and that the land mass on the opposite shore was Namibia, so that made this little piece of soggy earth in the middle of the Chobe River…up for grabs? Perhaps we’d landed here to lay claim to this desolate, sodden piece of dirt in the name of…Jaegarland?
Jaegar’s steps made heavy sounds that reverberated over the calm surface of the water as he made his way to where Cassandra and I sat. With the gun’s barrel level with my face, he ordered me to get up.
Dark. Deserted. Gun in my face. Not good.
“No!” Cassandra let out in a tremulous voice, her earlier brash-ness discarded as she gave in to the gravity of our threatening situation. “What are you doing?”
“It’s okay,” I lied as I stood, giving her a reassuring look followed by a “come on, you’re not really 122 of 170
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going to shoot me” look for Jaegar.
“Hands up,” was his disheartening response.
I did as I was told.
With the front of his gun, SpongeBob SquareHead motioned for me to walk ahead of him to the far end of the boat. I proceeded to the desired spot, my feet moving slowly but my mind racing, frenetically trying to identify ingenious “how am I going to get out of this one?” scenarios. So far all I’d come up with was a quick swim to shore, hoping he was a poor shot.
I reached the edge of the boat, the insubstantial railing the only thing between me and the water.
“If you don’t agree to do what I tell you to, I will shoot you and you will fall into the water and you will die,” Jaegar said with irritating succinctness. I’d never heard him speak more than a few words at once before, so he must have been practicing this soliloquy for quite some time.
“I’ll probably go for the ‘doing what you tell me to’ thing,” I replied, “but can you tell me exactly what that is first, and then I’ll decide?” A smart ass to the bitter end.
“Russell, don’t fool with this guy,” Cassandra warned. “I think he means business.”
You
think
?
I couldn’t see because my back was to them, but I was hoping Cassandra was sneaking up on Jaegar with a flowerpot or something to hit him over the head with. It worked on
Three’s Company
; it could work here.
“What do you want, Jaegar?” I asked. “I really want to know.”
“Not what I want,” he told me. “What the boss wants.”
Interesting. This was beginning to sound kind of
Sopranos
-ish. Maybe Matthew Moxley hadn’t changed his stripes so much after all. Maybe he’d become some kind of crime lord and Jaegar was his muscle.
“Who’s your boss?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. I was surprised with the one I got.
“Christian Wellness.”
I slowly rotated on the spot, hands still in the air, and let my eyes move past the considerable bulk of Jaegar to Cassandra Wellness. I couldn’t make out much in the muted light given off by the lamp, but I could see enough to know that my fellow prisoner was in as much shock as I was at this tasty tidbit of information. She remained motionless in her seat, then ever so slowly her eyes made for the floor.
“Relative?” I asked, sucking in my cheeks, seeing as I was too far away to bite off her head.
“My husband,” she answered in a muffled voice after a moment of stunned silence.
“This is what he wants,” Jaegar interrupted our lovely chat.
“Okay, spill it,” I said, feeling more than a little pinch of irritability in the knotted space between my eyes.
Jaegar began. “He wants you to be so very much scared that you are going to run so fast no one will see you. And you run so far you will never see his wife again. If you don’t agree to this, I will shoot you. And if the bullet doesn’t get you, the hippopotamus will.”
I almost laughed. It was not just the way the word hippopotamus sounded in his thick Germanic accent, 123 of 170
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but really, “The hippopotamus will get me?” I was pretty certain I could outrun or outswim a roly-poly hippo.
Jaegar must have seen the skepticism in my face and sensed the lack of seriousness with which I was taking his threat, so he added, “Hippopotamus are the most dangerous animal in the water in Africa. Not snake. Not crocodile,” he said darkly. “Hippopotamus.” He smiled then, as if in respect for their reputation. “They will snap you in half with their jaws, just because they can.”
“It’s true, Russell,” Cassandra said in a sombre voice.