by Jo Bannister
Grant gasped, “You’re crazy. You’re going to kill me, and you’re worrying I might catch cold?”
Vanderbilt straightened up slowly. The phantom recognition had jolted through him, mind and body, like an electric shock. He did not understand what had happened—he was a pragmatic, unimaginative man—and, it disturbed him. He said, “Have I seen you someplace before?”
Grant sat up awkwardly, levering himself up one-handed, pulling the coat about him with a bad grace. “Were you De Witte’s understudy in the black hole of Pretoria two years ago?”
Vanderbilt acknowledged the description with a sardonic twitch of the lip. He shook his head. He had slightly long dark blond hair. “It wasn’t there.”
Grant’s lip curled thinly. “Then it wasn’t anywhere, because I remember the other bits of my life and I don’t know you from Adam.”
Vanderbilt shrugged and moved back to the window, but he could not shrug off the feeling of unease which lingered in the wake of his small, unlikely aberration. Outside the sun was higher but nothing else had changed.
On her way up to her husband’s hospital room Elinor De Witte was waylaid by his doctor and steered gently into his office. Her heart turned over once and then went racing with the expectation of tragedy, but it was not that. Harry Keppler smiled reassuringly as he guided her to a seat; a tray with cups and a steaming pot was waiting on his desk. She had known him well for thirty years. She knew what he was going to say. She wished one of them might die before he said it.
Dr. Keppler poured the coffee confidently with fine strong hands, not needing to ask how she preferred it, and passed it to her. She put it down quickly before he should hear her agitation rattling cup against saucer. Keppler smiled again and laid his cool hand on her forearm.
“Tomorrow, Elinor; or as soon as the courier can get here. It’s time Joachim was told.”
Her skin crawled. The fine hairs along the back of her neck stood up. It was as if he did not know the circumstances, that what the courier was bringing was a living man with a human soul. But of course he knew, it was relevant medical information, he was just trying to keep it professional and impersonal, to save her feelings. He need not have troubled: she would never feel clean again. She wished he would not touch her.
“I thought you might like to tell him yourself.”
“No!” Her hand flew to her throat; she felt the pulse flutter there like the heart of a captive bird. “Harry, don’t ask that of me.”
He drew his own chair closer and sat down. “You know I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want. I know how difficult this has been for you—traumatic, even. But think of Joachim. In a few minutes someone is going to go into his room to tell him that in the course of the next twenty-four hours he’s going to undergo major surgery with no guarantee of success. He knows the situation: he knows he can die under the knife, in the recovery room, or of any of a thousand complications that can come up without warning over the next several months. Think how he must feel. He needs all the support he can get, and you and I both know that all my professional expertise will mean nothing to him compared with you sitting there holding his hand. Don’t you owe him that much?”
She jerked to her feet; the full cup went tumbling from its perch on the arm of her chair and she paid it no heed. “Harry Keppler, don’t you presume to tell me what I owe my husband. I love my husband; I love him so much I have done a terrible, evil thing to keep him with me. I can’t afford to think too much about what I’ve done, and I can’t afford to talk to him about it because I just might tell him the truth.
“Harry, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve lied to Joachim. The last big lie was twenty years ago, and that was about this boy too. I haven’t practised enough to become good at it. If he came to suspect the truth, or even half of it, he’d put a stop to the whole monstrous business, and then I would lose him and so would this country. So if you’ve any sense, Harry, you’ll go in there and tell him yourself, just what you want him to know, and I’ll come in afterwards and sit by his bed and hold his hand, and I won’t say a word until you come for him. And may God forgive us all.”
Nathan Shola spent the morning on the telephone. He made calls to Europe, to America, to various places in Africa and repeatedly to London. From time to time he received calls in return. He was cashing in old favours. By lunchtime he had found a name to go with Liz Fallon’s description of the Boer, and had identified him with an élite direct action office run personally by De Witte but for the present by a man called Botha. He knew that Vanderbilt was respected as an effective operative and was credited with two kills outside South Africa. One was a reluctant informant who died under interrogation in a disused tobacco shed in Angola, the other a defector who thought himself safe in Miami under the protection of the FBI.
He had also learned about the attack on De Witte, that the damage had been repaired but that he was still in hospital. He had heard the rumour that the big man was dying anyway, and the other rumour that the hospital was standing by for a last-ditch attempt to save him with a heart transplant. However, Shola’s informant discounted this as unlikely: there had been difficulty in locating enough blood of the right type for him after the stabbing, which suggested that the search for a compatible donor organ would probably take longer than a man with a bad heart had got.
“There’s something wrong here,” Liz said thoughtfully when Shola had finished his report. “I grant you, if they wanted Joel back for a show trial, Vanderbilt is the man they would send and he would go about it pretty much as he has. But is it the kind of operation that would be initiated by De Witte’s stand-in? Look at it from his point of view. He’s probably wanted the job for years; finally he sees it within his grasp. He knows that a permanent decision will depend largely on how he acts now. So is he going to stake his career on an operation as unnecessary and prone to failure as this one? How much prestige is there in the show trial of a sick man when, whatever the court decides, it’s bound to result in an international incident?”
Hamlin was nodding. “She’s right, Nathan. They can’t put him on trial. Grant is a bona fide resident here, entitled to the full protection of British law. Pretoria can’t admit openly to having sent an operative to kidnap him. The British Government may make a show from time to time of disapproving of the Republic, but by and large relations between them are equable. South Africa hasn’t so many friends on the world stage that she would deliberately set out to alienate one. If they do take him back, they’ll have to keep him under wraps for the rest of his life and then bury him in an unmarked grave. And what good will that do them?”
Shola indicated agreement with a slow inclination of his narrow head. There was nothing he could add: their reasoning was good. With all their special knowledge of the situation, the more they thought about Joel Grant’s kidnapping the less sense it made.
The atmosphere in the small front room had grown thick with breathing and frustration, and with the smell of cold coffee from the several cups shouldering for space on the table. None of them had felt like eating; none of them had felt much like coffee either, but periodically Liz or Will had got up to make some, primarily to occupy their hands. The idea of occupying them with some washing-up never seemed to occur to them. They seemed to have been sitting together in that room for days, not hours. They were all tired.
Shola stood up abruptly, stretching to dislodge the tension and fatigue gathering in his muscles. “Then it is something he knows that they’re after.”
“And we’ve already agreed that makes no sense,” said Liz, a shade testily.
“Then we were wrong,” replied Nathan Shola. “Or more correctly, there’s something we don’t know about that makes sense of the apparently absurd.”
“Perhaps we’re assuming too much,” offered Hamlin. “Can we be quite sure that this is to do with Grant’s guerrilla activities in South Africa?”
Liz blinked at him. Shola stared with frank surpr
ise. “I would have said it was a fairly safe assumption.”
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.
Chapter Five
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?”
