by Patty Jansen
The beefy servant came back, wheeling a trolley. On the top stood a stack of porcelain plates, a set of cups and a jug, all of them white.
The bottom shelf held a large tray with a silver lid. The servant took this tray and put it on the table. He had to push some of our gear aside to do so.
“Your dinner, sirs,” he said, and bowed.
“When is Mr Kray going to see us?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. Be patient. Mr Kray is busy. He’ll see you as soon as he can. You can stay here tonight. I assume it’s comfortable?”
“It is, thank you,” I said. Mr Kray is busy, my hat. I had a suspicion that keeping us here had been the aim of capturing us in the first place.
The servant bowed and left.
On the covered tray, we found a selection of spring rolls, salads, smoked fish and little pancakes. There was nothing that Nicha and Thayu or Evi and Telaris couldn’t eat, but Thayu wouldn’t let us touch it until she had inspected the trolley and trays for bugs.
She found none.
“It’s got me baffled,” she said, while Nicha was using his testing wand for analysing the food for poisons. “I can’t believe that there wouldn’t be anything. If he was a local warlord, yes, but he’s from Indrahui. He’d be smarter than that.”
And smarter than to have an alarm on one door but not the other.
Nicha said, “It’s safe as far as I can see.”
Evi still looked dubious. He would probably have been happier to refuse the food, but the need to stay healthy to perform his job took priority.
As we made our way to the couch, the white cat followed us. I didn’t want it to upset and of the others, so I held up a piece of fish, which it duly demolished.
This meant, of course, that I was going to be its next most favourite thing. It jumped onto the couch next to me, but after another piece of fish, it was happy to sit on my lap and let me eat the green bits.
Considering that we were in the middle of the desert, the food was extraordinary. Mr Kray sure liked luxury. When we finished, we expected the servant to turn up to take the dirty plates away, but no one came.
It was fast going dark outside. The white cat had had folded its legs underneath its body, had its eyes closed and sat purring heavily on my lap. It was a bit hot, but I judged it better than letting it disturb Thayu or Nicha.
Thayu was prowling across the room, impatient, because she wanted to keep looking for bugs, and didn’t want to be caught in the middle of something that looked suspicious when the servant came in to pick up the remains of dinner. And she was annoyed because he didn’t show up.
Eventually, Nicha said, “Stop pacing. I know how to get him to come. We’ll open the door to the courtyard and the alarm will start ringing.”
That idea met with approval, so he rose and slid the door open. . . . Nothing.
Well, what the hell?
“The guy who was here before must have turned the alarm off,” Nicha said.
“Why would he do that while we’re in the room?” Telaris asked. “That makes no sense.”
But I realised: there was another difference between now and this afternoon. Maybe the doors had no alarm, but . . . “Thay’, come here with your scanner.”
She frowned.
I pointed at the purring cat.
Her frown deepened, but she held her scanner close to the white fur. I could see the screen, and I could see the jump in wriggly lines.
“There is your bug.”
CHAPTER 22
* * *
WE ALL GATHERED around the cat, which kept its eyes closed and kept purring.
“That’s interesting,” Thayu said. Her face showed that she was just about as unsure what to think of this as she was about the concept of cats in general.
I stroked the cat, digging my fingers into its white fur. All I could feel was soft skin, muscles and bones, all vibrating with the cat’s purring. I couldn’t feel anything artificial. It made me nervous. I normally didn’t mind cats, but right now I wanted to toss it out the door.
Thayu gestured to the wardrobe.
I got up from the couch still carrying the cat. It had opened one eye and looked at me balefully.
“Look,” I said, and pulled some of the clothes off their hangers to make a little nest on the floor. My father’s cat Myra loved nests of dirty laundry. The cat was happy to lie on the pile. I shut the door. That was one problem solved. We went back into the bathroom, where we sat around the empty bath.
“That’s one of the more interesting places I’ve ever seen a bug,” I said.
“It’s cruel,” Evi said. “I should have known that he would do something like this. He does it with people, too.”
“People?” I felt sick.
“Yes, on Indrahui, he would occasionally free his prisoners of war. They’d have sensors and explosives implanted, and when they arrived home . . .” Evi made an explosive motion with his hands.
Thayu’s face showed the horror I felt. “That’s stupid. What’s the point of that?”
“I would use a lot of words that are stronger than stupid,” Nicha said.
Evi said, “The point of Tanaqan is that he uses everything and everyone around him to gain an advantage. And he loves seeing people being cut to pieces in front of him.”
Telaris said, “That cat has got a radio chip that’s receiving and sending. We can figure out the frequency and then we can try to get into the network that it sends to.”
“You make that sound simple.”
“It can be,” Thayu said. “Usually, though, it isn’t. Some of these networks use really complicated passwords.”
Evi took his reader from his pocket and unfolded the screen projector. “Let’s get started. We’ve got some serious work to do.”
Thayu said, “Can I suggest that we keep working in the bathroom while anyone who is not needed here goes into the other room and keeps an eye out if anyone comes in?”
“Some of us should sleep, too,” Nicha said. I guessed he wanted to be part of that group.
I was quite useless at technology, so I was also assigned to the guard and sleep team that would remain in the living room. Thayu and Evi would go into the bathroom.
Thayu accompanied me into the little passage that went into the living room, where she held me back for a kiss.
“Good night.” Her voice was soft.
I was about to breathe in to protest, but she said, “No, you are really worth more to us when you’re rested.”
“That really vouches for my computer skills.”
“We may need your cat-handling skills later.” She brushed her armour. The surface was dull dark grey. “That animal has been putting hair all over me.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you worried about your appearance.”
She grinned and we each went our own way.
Telaris insisted on keeping watch by the door, and told me and Nicha to go to sleep. We got into the big bed with the white cover. I was asleep in minutes.
* * *
It was still dark when Thayu shook my shoulder.
I lifted my head, squinting into the light she shone in my face. “What’s going on?” I squinted into the glow, having trouble figuring out where I was.
“Come. We’ve found out some interesting things.”
Nicha was already sitting on the edge of the bed, looking unimpressed with the fact that it was still dark outside.
I stumbled from the bed feeling stiff—what had I been doing yesterday?—and followed her into the bathroom. Evi sat with his reader on a bench intended for putting one’s clothes, leaning with his back against the wall. The light from the sc
reen made his face blue. He motioned me to join him.
I did.
His screen displayed an image in bluish-grey hues, showing a corridor where a man in a white uniform stood guard in front of a door.
“That’s outside our door,” he said. “We managed to get into the security camera network.”
He flicked to another image showing a gun mounted on a stand. “And in case we’d intended to climb onto the roof from the courtyard, just as well we didn’t, because these are up there and they’re attached to motion sensors.”
Another image, this one of a luxurious office with a big wooden desk with a high-backed chair.
“This is bigger than the president’s office.” More luxurious, too. A couple of antique oriental vases stood on a table in the corner. An old bookcase held a collection of old tomes with gold-embossed lettering on the spines. A low table with carved legs sat in front of an old-style leather couch. Old paintings of sailing ships hung on the walls.
“You might find this interesting.” He picked out a section of the image of a cabinet behind the desk and enlarged it.
On the top rested a number of photo display frames. Evi panned through the selection of photos. Most of them featured Mr Kray in places like Paris, Rome, New York, and even inside the main assembly hall of Nations of Earth. It made me kind of sick to see his toothy smile—no canine teeth—against the backdrop of the floor of the hall. All the seats where Danziger’s helpers and committees would be sitting were empty, except for a guard who stood next to the president’s chair. I guessed this was taken during the open hour for tourists.
Hey what was that?
Another photo showed people sitting at tables at some official dinner party function. It had to have been a while ago, because Danziger was in the picture, looking a lot younger than he was today. He was smiling at the camera, holding his arms over the shoulders of two people. On one side was a dark African man I recognised as a younger version of Lucius Brown. On the other, Robert Kray.
Shit.
I stared at Thayu. “Danziger is friendly with these guys?”
Then why did he tell me . . . No, wait. I had not seen Danziger when I was called back. And even though the message I’d gotten was under Danziger’s letterhead, Simon Dekker would have access to that. In fact, Dekker had specifically told me not to contact Danziger. Or the press. And he had made threats about it, too.
So what?
Dekker was trying to manoeuvre behind Danziger’s back?
Maybe Dekker was trying to clean up messy business from Danziger’s past, prior to the election? Do not go to the press certainly fitted with that line of thought. But why not contact the acting president? Because he was not supposed to know that this was happening? He was not supposed to “remember” the time when this picture was taken? He was using his aide and an unfortunate Nations of Earth employee, whom he hated anyway, also known as Cory Wilson, to clean up the mess?
My heart was hammering.
Evi flicked to the next image. It showed an underground passage with a walkway on one side suspended over a couple of large pipes that disappeared out of view into the darkness of the tunnel.
“Water?” I asked.
“Mashara is fairly certain about that. This tunnel is not far from this room. It leads all the way under the hill to the main site in the next valley.”
The next image showed a large hall. People worked at benches assembling things. Many people. Local people.
He showed me a shot taken from a different angle. A woman in traditional garb was putting long things in a wooden crate. Wait—
“Are those guns they’re putting together?”
“Indrahui-style plasma guns, Delegate.”
The type I’d seen in Dekker’s office. A few men were assembling crates next to the women’s workbench. Closed crates stood against the back wall in stacks of three. There were at least thirty. If every crate contained twelve guns . . . “That’s a lot of guns.” Also, if they produced this many guns, it was a wonder that they hadn’t been noticed before. How long had this been going?
Everyone had been wrong about these guns. They weren’t importing them. They were exporting them.
My head was reeling.
“Where do they sell all of them?”
“Mashara has been sent this image.”
It was a much-enlarged satellite image, no doubt one sent to Thayu by her father. It showed some sort of nomadic settlement with tents in the desert. At least ten or twelve tents stood in a circle, with a fireplace in the middle.
To the side of the camp was something that looked like a drinking trough surrounded by longitudinal specks. They were camels.
“They trek through the desert? How hot does it get there?”
“They take adaptation.”
“What about the camels? I know they’re animals of the desert, but I don’t believe they’d happily travel through that area.”
“They take adaptation.”
“The camels?” But as I said that, I knew that it was true, and so brilliant that no one would have suspected it for a long time. They’d produced weapons, loaded them onto camel trains and carted them across a desert everyone said was too hot to traverse, but which they could cross using adaptation medicine brought to them by Henri. Damn. That was where our pilot came in. And he was probably in a lot more danger than we’d first thought. Sure Mr Kray didn’t appreciate him bring nosey foreigners to this area as a side job.
Actually, knowing what I knew about Romi Tanaqan, I was wondering if Henri was still alive. That thought chilled me.
Evi went back to showing the security camera images, now showing a passage with counters on both sides where people lined up to collect trays and parcels. In the rooms behind the counters, I could see racks of clothing, or people cooking, or tables full of knickknacks made from rubbish like we’d seen in the city: cups or lights made from cans, sandals made out of tyres and door mats knitted from plastic bags.
“It’s a whole underground city,” I said.
“This is not the only one. There are ones in Egypt and Sudan.”
Thayu said, “No wonder that all these people disappeared. They work here.”
Evi said, “They don’t just work. They have been sold in pahemin. Only their families don’t know this.”
And those families wouldn’t understand that if the worker defaulted on their commitments, everything the family owned was at risk.
“I wonder what Dekker thinks we can do about this. It’s a massive operation, much more extensive than Kazakhstan ever was.” That had only encompassed a few Zhori bases inside old buildings and in the field. It had only concerned itself with the sale of weapons, and had never been touted as a solution against the incredible poverty in the area.
You don’t need to do anything about it. That was Asha in my head again. If the ship was moving into geostationary orbit, he would be able to communicate with us any time of the day. Fortunately, he would also be a lot further away. Take pictures. Pass the information to us. We will make maps and run any images of people through face recognition. We will find the criminal elements.
And what will you do? Oo-er, that was a cocky question with a cocky pronoun.
We will pass it on to the appropriate authorities. The answer was equally cocky. I didn’t believe him and he knew it.
Pardon the inappropriate analogy, but I wished I could get this damn monkey off my back.
Evi flicked to the next image, which showed a hall with many seats that were all empty. There was a small stage at the front of the hall where a dais stood with a curious symbol on the side facing the audience.
I frowned at Evi. “What’s that for?”
“There appears to b
e some kind of convention in progress now.”
He changed to the next image: a large dining hall where people wearing dinner suits and fine dresses were seated along tables laden with food. There were hundreds of them, Africans and non-Africans alike. People wearing white aprons walked between the tables serving the diners.
Mr Kray stood in the middle of the hall. Like all Indrahui, he cut an imposing, tall figure. His dark skin stood out against his white suit. His hair was shorter than in any of the previous images I’d seen of him and he’d died it a convincing pepper-and-salt grey. He was facing the camera and most in the audience had their backs turned to the camera.
“What is this about?”
“Mashara is still trying to establish this. Also who these people are. At this stage, Mashara does not know.”
But even if we couldn’t see who they were, their clothes marked them as rich and influential people, and here they were, wined and dined by the most notorious war criminal in all of gamra.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
“I THINK WE SHOULD use this conference of his as an opportunity to get out of here,” Thayu said. “I’m sure he has to be careful that these beautiful people don’t get any wind of trouble, because they don’t like to get blood or dust on their pretty clothes.”
“The guards will be more nervous with all those important people here,” Nicha said. “They can’t afford any trouble either. That’s why we’ve been locked up and forgotten. He probably intends to deal with us once everyone is gone.”
I now also realised why Tamu had complained that it had been busy the previous week in her hotel. This many different people travelling to this region at Mr Kray’s invitation for this conference would need a host of servants and others to look after them. The guests would have stayed in swanky hotels in the city. The workers were more likely to stay in Tamu’s hotel.
I agreed with Thayu: Mr Kray was preoccupied. This was the best time to try something. We studied the detailed 3D scan of the building and underground passages that Asha had produced, from his scans and the information collected by us.
