by Patty Jansen
“Where the hell are we?”
“About two hours north of Athens. I thought it’d be safer to collect you here.”
Outside the Exchange enclave? I glanced at Thayu, but it was too dark to see her expression.
Amarru led us across the tracks to the tiny station building. A barbed wire fence with clumps of sheep’s wool hanging from the spikes separated the paddock and the yard, where a rusty motorbike leaned against a post. I imagined someone having come to work on the bike and having died in the little office years ago, while no one noticed, and trains went by and his motorbike stood in the rain.
It was that kind of place.
On the other side of the building stood an unmarked minibus. I’d seen the vehicle before, usually when Nicha and I lived at the Exchange and it had been used to transport VIPs. The bus had bulletproof glass and sides. The last time I saw it, it had no valid registration that allowed it to leave the enclave.
It still didn’t.
We climbed in. The driver sat behind the wheel, his face lit from below by the dashboard lights. He was Indrahui, the man I’d come to recognise as Amarru’s regular security guard. She seemed to like Indrahui guards, because my own Evi and Telaris had also come to me through her.
We sat down, strapped in, and the bus started moving. Nicha yawned, covering his mouth with the back of his hand.
After exchanging a few words with the driver, Amarru came to sit between us. She wore tight-fitting trousers and a fur-lined, waist-length jacket zipped up under her chin. Both garments were Earth style. Her hair was more grey than black these days and she usually only tied back the top half. The glasses made her “Chinese matron” look complete. I’d never found out whether she actually needed them.
Her somewhat frumpy look belied the hardness underneath. Amarru Palayi was the highest-ranking Coldi person on Earth.
“Danziger is trying to shut us down,” she said.
I said, “He’s been trying for years. Now he got sent that plan, and has been trying to find some illegal activity that stems from it as an excuse to crack down on the Exchange.”
“This is different.” Her voice sounded serious.
I frowned at her. “Does the Exchange have any knowledge of this business in Africa? I mean, knowledge that Nations of Earth doesn’t have?”
The short silence that followed worried the heck out of me. Amarru was uncharacteristically diplomatic for a Coldi person, which was why she was such an excellent candidate to head the Exchange’s Public Relations department, but sometimes I wished she was a little more blunt.
She said, “You would normally think that getting the smuggling under control is a good thing. And it is, and we should get it under control.”
That didn’t answer my question at all. “But there are complications?”
“We don’t know who any of them are.”
“And I’m guessing you normally do when something like this pops up?”
“We usually have a pretty good idea.”
“My guess: some of the Zhori clan?” On Asto, the Zhori clan specialised in running and stocking the giant warehouses and food distribution chains. When they left Asto, many ended up doing the same thing, except not legally, especially in places where legal import and export was forbidden.
She shrugged. “Maybe, but we have a Zhori representative at the Exchange. He knows nothing about it. He says there are no Zhori in Djibouti or Ethiopia.”
Here a normal person would question if her contact spoke the truth, but if this person was in Amarru’s loyalty network—and he would be in order to work for her—he would tell her the truth. Then, in a twist that Earth people found bizarre, he would tell his clan leader that he had told Amarru this. An Earth person also would never employ someone who so clearly worked for the enemy, but that juxtaposition, balance, rimoyu, was the essence of Coldi society.
That was why the loyalty system worked and led to fewer armed skirmishes.
I asked Amarru, “So what do you think?”
She blew out a breath. “Maybe part of the Zhori clan has splintered off. I think there may be a link to Lucius Brown.”
“What? Is he responsible?” With the best will in the world, I couldn’t imagine that. He wouldn’t be so stupid.
“Not immediately, and how much he really knows remains to be seen, but he’s a pompous idiot who is susceptible to smooth talkers peddling criminal schemes. He’s pretty much crawling at the feet of people who want to invest or relocate to northern Africa.”
“That’s understandable.”
She shrugged. To a Coldi person, large-scale desertification would not be much of a threat, but successive politicians had called the entire northern half of Africa the eyesore of the world. Climate scientists had called the region a barometer for the health of Earth’s ecosystem, and it had been pointing at tempest setting for the last seventy-odd years. The Saharan countries, and all the countries around them, and even the countries around those countries had been hit very, very hard.
Amarru continued, “If you go digging around in Lucius Brown’s biography, you’ll find that he disappeared for two years.”
I nodded, not sure that I liked where this was going.
“It was after the outbreak of the Nile Flu, which killed both his parents. He was nineteen years old and fled across the Mediterranean to Greece.”
Nope. I definitely didn’t like where this was going. “Let me guess: it was during the time that the Zhori clan had their headquarters in Crete.”
“You got it.”
Damn it.
Matriarch Dyiizhu Zhori had been one of the main criminal elements in the Kazakhstan weapons smuggling case and that had never been dealt with satisfactorily. Oh yes, the Kazakh rebels had been dealt with, but apart from Dyiizhu Zhori, who had been killed by a sniper, the Zhori smugglers had dispersed, gone back to Asto, or assumed false identities and continued plying their trade.
While the bus travelled over bumpy back roads, she explained to me how the situation stood, to the best of her knowledge.
Apparently, the hard core of the Zhori had moved to Africa following the suggestion by Lucius Brown. It was, in a way, ideal territory for them. Hot and dry like the lowland desert of Asto, vast swathes of land were pretty much abandoned by anyone except some hardened tribes and rebels, and people who still operated some of the old oil rigs, small scale refineries and drove vehicles that ran on petrol. How quaint. To them, it meant independence, even if what they did was illegal. The Zhori clan’s trade was technology that allowed similar rebel groups, and other odd bods and communes, to operate independently of governments.
Lucius Brown had connected the Zhori clan with these African outcasts and rebel groups. Since he came from a rich family, had held a pilot’s licence since the age of fourteen and had a plane, he had travelled extensively throughout the region and knew it well. He would have known which country or ex-country was amenable to overlooking the fact that one of the most influential organised crime groups—and Amarru did actually use the word “mafia”—established in their country, and would be happy to take bribes from them.
But instead of choosing one locality, the Zhori mafia had spread out over a variety of locations including the north and east coast of Africa, especially towns that were suffering because of drought, infiltrating towns and setting up businesses. Coldi did heat and drought very well, of course.
This sort of thing had been going on for many years. The presence of the Zhori clan kept the locals happy. They had money and gave the locals jobs. And the vast majority of their activities were legal, so they blended in with the local population.
I said, “So, they went straight and led mostly honest lives. Maybe they helped some of the rebel groups organise themselves be
tter. What changed? Why did they start importing weapons?”
“A few things happened recently. Because of the election, and because Lucius Brown controls a vital part of the vote for the assembly, people at Nations of Earth—non-African people—started digging into his past. That’s what journalists do.”
I nodded. I’d experienced some of that myself.
“The journalists found this connection with the Zhori clan and didn’t like it. Questions were asked. He’s busily trying to cover up the damage, claiming that he was idealistic and naïve and had no idea who these ‘Chinese-looking’ people were.”
“A classic case of a politician covering his arse.”
“Pretty much. But it is because of these investigations by these journalists that these weapons were found. We don’t know how long it’s been going on. Secondly, the part of the continent where those weapons were found is in the grip of a particularly power-hungry warlord, and it is this man whose name was on the crates that contained the guns, and this man who claims ownership of the land where the mysterious building site is. The man is Robert Kray, of whom we have no information other than a few grainy pictures that may or may not be of him. He heads a band of rogues called the krayfish, who apparently can be recognised because, as a bizarre initiation ritual, they have their front teeth knocked out.”
Ouch.
“For some reason that we don’t know, they were given—or bought or offered to build—the plans of this Asto desert settlement that was slated for Libya in 1975, but never got off the ground. These krayfish, who appear to be local youths from the refugee camps, are the people doing most of the building, and protecting this planned settlement.”
“All right. Now I’m officially lost. What does this have to do with Lucius Brown or the Zhori mafia?”
“The Zhori are everywhere in northern and eastern Africa, and I suspect that part of the clan has broken with the clan leader and is operating their businesses in the lawless refugee camps and the bases of sea pirates along the shore. And judging by the size of that haul, they must be planning something major. The region is particularly sensitive and volatile. We have hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of refugees in camps along the coastal towns of Djibouti and further south. We have a warlord planning projects in what’s considered an uninhabited or uninhabitable area. We have a warlord recruiting these desperate people, and we have someone, possibly Zhori, supplying these people with weapons.”
“Why would they import non-Asto weapons? They’re harder to get if you have to go through official weapons Traders, and they have to keep records and keep it all above board.”
“Have you seen these guns?”
“I have. Impressive.”
“There is your answer. They’re impressive. In Kazakhstan, plain second-hand service guns were impressive for the rebels who used them. These days, everyone knows those guns, and every self-respecting rebel group has them, so something more advanced was needed.”
“Where did the weapons come from? Tamer or Indrahui?”
“That’s another disturbing thing: we can’t tell.”
“Can’t tell?”
“No. We haven’t seen this type before. They contain no foreign air bubbles that we can clearly identify as Indrahui or Tamerian. Someone is being very careful.”
She further explained that the Exchange had already secured the cooperation of the Trader Guild to see if they could unearth how the weapons could have made it to a shed in the area normally used for foreign aid in Djibouti. A couple of Traders were facing intense questioning, but the most obvious candidates had already been cleared.
“So that attack on me—those were krayfish?”
“Most likely, since they have the strongest motive to stop your investigation. These are not people to be toyed with, which is why you have to stay dead for the time being.”
“So that was you feeding bullshit to the media? I thought it could be Danziger because he wants to keep me quiet and avoid another ‘ALIEN ATTACK!’ news storm.”
“Yeah, that was me. We have Melissa now.” Journalist for Flash Newspoint, in training to take over my old position as Earth observer to gamra at the end of the month. I guessed it was probably always a better idea to have a media person in that role.
“Danziger knows very little of what’s going on, thankfully,” Amarru went on. “He’s edgy because of the election. He’s prided himself on his being tough on these terrible chans position, and he’s not going to be happy if a second Kazakhstan breaks out.”
It was weird hearing her refer to herself with this derogatory term, but Danziger would use it. He was one of the few politicians who got away with it.
I said, “So, someone brings him this weapon, and he thinks ‘Aha. We still have this upstart Cory Wilson at our disposal until the end of the month. Let’s get him out of harm’s way and send him to Africa to solve a problem.’ ”
“Pretty much.”
There was also a persistent rumour that I controlled the vote of much of the colonials, that I lobbied them and sent them secret messages.
“He’s trying to remove as many obstacles to his re-election as he can. ‘If the hands are busy, the mouth cannot work overtime.’ ”
Amarru said, “Your knowledge of proverbs has improved a lot recently.”
“It’s a necessity.” Ezhya used a lot of them. “But getting back to the problem, this is much bigger than I can solve by myself. What am I supposed to do? Danziger had something lined up for me, but thanks to Mr Kray’s thugs, I never got to see the brief.”
“From all information we have, he was going to send you to Lucius Brown.”
“I did suspect that, although there would have been little point if he fell out with our friend Mr Kray. So I wonder why Dekker would send me to Lucius Brown.”
She shrugged. “To send you down a political boghole? To show to his opponents that ‘Look, this is what we are doing about the problem’? I don’t know.”
“What do you want me to do? Go in hiding until after the election?”
“No. We do want this solved. A group of small entities at gamra filed a complaint against Asto that we are trying to annex Earth despite years’ worth of warnings. If this material becomes publicly available, the complaint may well stand. These are smart people. They know about the Zhori clan and their history. They don’t care that the Zhori may not actually be involved in this case themselves.”
“But what can I do by myself?”
She nodded. “You can’t do much alone. But I have a contact lined up for you. We’re going to meet this contact now.”
I looked outside. The sky had turned pale blue and the sun was about to come up. Through the heavy, bulletproof glass, I could only see rows and rows of leafless grapevines and the occasional old farmhouse surrounded by pines or cypress trees.
“I guess that’s why you’re taking me to some remote rustic place?”
She grinned. “Secure locality, Cory.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
CHAPTER 8
* * *
NOT MUCH LATER, the bus turned off the main road, as much of a goat track as it was, and went up the drive of what looked like an ordinary farmhouse.
The sun had risen about a hand’s width above the horizon. The sky was a bit dusty but otherwise cloudless and the low light edged rows of grape vines in a golden glow. The plants had no leaves because it was winter, and the soil in between the rows was stony, dry and fallow. I had suspected that we were close to the Exchange enclave, which included Athens and its immediate surroundings, but it now became clear how close. Between the hills I spotted a small section of a fence. It was at least three metres tall, made from wire mesh with barbed wire on top. This was likely why the house had been abandoned: non
e of the locals liked living close to the Exchange enclave. Once, before the fence went up, Athens would have been their main market. After the fence went up, they would have to travel a long distance to sell their products.
The farmhouse itself was made from natural stone, with red terracotta roof tiles. It had to be at least three hundred years old, but seemed to be in reasonably good condition.
In the back yard, surrounded by olive trees, the bus came to a halt next to two solar vehicles. There was also a rickety shed, the door half open. I spotted a glimpse of metal inside. Some sort of vehicle bigger than a car. I glanced at Nicha to check if he’d seen it, but he was looking at the farmhouse.
Now the bus had moved and I couldn’t see it anymore.
Certainly, they wouldn’t bring offworld aircraft here, would they? All Exchange traffic was supposed to stay at the Exchange. And if they brought an aircraft here, would they so carelessly leave the door open so that I could see it?
The driver opened the door to the bus and I got out, feeling stiff from the long journey. I really hoped there would be some opportunity for a proper rest and, while I was at it, how about I contacted Barresh to let them know there had been a snag and I was meant to solve an impending implosion on Earth before I returned home. Oh, and Ezhya, too. He’d be impatient about my sudden disappearance.
The farmhouse’s door opened as soon as the bus had stopped. In the doorway stood a Coldi person, gender unspecified, whom Amarru appeared to know.
We followed her across the yard. Thayu looked cranky and Nicha wondered aloud whether the farm’s hospitality was likely to include breakfast.
