Bad Seeds

by Jassy Mackenzie

  “Well, that’s great,” he managed to choke out. “I’m so glad you’re going to be spending some time with your mother. It’ll be . . . lovely to see Ada again.” He closed his eyes briefly in anticipation of a thunderbolt from on high—the liars’ punishment. “And you’ll call me, won’t you, if you think the baby’s going to arrive?”

  “Mm,” she responded noncommittally.

  “I’ll see you later,” he concluded.

  He replaced the receiver quietly. Then he yelled, “Fuck it all.” His words reverberated off the opposite wall, which was decorated with two dog-eared crime prevention posters and the latest staff memos.

  The passing detective, coming the other way now, glanced in his door again. “Everything all right, Sup?” he asked.

  “Fine,” David snapped. He felt marginally better after screaming his anger out. Perhaps he could sit here every evening and yell profanities at the wall. It sure beat passing sambals around the dining room table with Ada.

  He let out a deep sigh. Then he pulled the topmost case file toward him.

  Where to start with the motel murder? There were so many possible angles.

  There was the now-dead Mr. Loodts and his murky history at Inkomfe. There was Gillespie, who controlled security there, and there was Lisa Marais, the ex-employee turned environmental activist. All of these people deserved close scrutiny. But first he was going to focus on the person who worried him the most.

  David didn’t trust Carlos Botha. His gut told him there was more to the man.

  And he was deeply uneasy that Jade was on the run with Botha. It could prove very dangerous for her, and David had a bad feeling that danger might not only be from the assassins pursuing them.

  “Carlos Botha,” he said aloud.

  He didn’t have much information on the man, but there was enough to look him up in the system, probe his background.

  “Right,” David said under his breath, turning to the flickering screen. “Mr. Botha. Let’s see who you really are.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Jade awoke to find the small office window bright with the first light of morning. Botha was nowhere in sight. How many hours of sleep did this man survive on? She felt cold, tired and stiff. She was in dire need of strong coffee, but she’d have to make do with a glass of water, and she thought there might be a dried fruit bar in her bag.

  With a jolt, she realized that her bag was still in the car. She’d locked it, and the key was in the pocket of her jeans, but even so, the Mazda didn’t have an alarm, and wasn’t exactly a challenge to break into. She wasn’t worried about anyone getting into this fortress from outside, but she was paranoid about Botha checking up on her.

  Where was he?

  Listening intently, she heard footsteps coming from the warehouse.

  She padded quietly across the room and down the narrow corridor, then peered out the doorway.

  Morning light flooded in through the warehouse’s east-facing windows. The glass was opaque with dust; the light streaming in turned the smooth concrete flooring to gold.

  Botha, dressed only in the spare pair of track sweatpants she’d bought him, was standing on the warehouse floor in the open space between the farthest rows of shelves, which was slightly larger than a boxing ring.

  His pose was balanced, his arms held at chest height with muscles taut. The posture looked both natural and relaxed. She watched his shoulders rise and fall, the only sign of movement. Then he exploded into action. Limbs became weapons, feinting and stabbing with the speed of a predator on attack. He never pulled a punch, seeming to have no reservations about hitting the edge of his capacity. He launched himself straight upward with one foot and punched the other into a vicious kick. The ball of the foot went into a perfect, brutal arc that would have connected with the jaw, or maybe the throat. Crushing the larynx, shattering jawbone.

  She watched Carlos Botha transform from a reserved, self-contained security expert into a finely tuned killing machine.

  This didn’t look like classic karate to her—she had seen that practice before. Perhaps the key difference was discipline, because she suspected a karate sensei might frown at the amount of focused aggression driving this workout. It was as if Carlos Botha was unleashing a terrifying anger out on an invisible opponent, anger she hadn’t known he possessed.

  She watched for another fifteen minutes before the workout was over. He slowed, rested for a moment with his hands on his thighs. She could see his chest heaving, and the gleam of sunlight off his sweat-dampened forehead.

  Quickly, so he wouldn’t know she’d been checking up on him, she went back into the lounge. After a minute, she heard him approach. He headed straight for the small bathroom next to the office.

  Jade hurried across the warehouse to the garage and opened the side door. There was the car. Still locked, safe and sound. But where was her bag? It wasn’t on the backseat where she’d left it. Worst-case scenarios unfolded in her mind as she yanked the back door open, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw that it had fallen onto the carpet in front of the seat.

  She lifted it out, but as she did so, a small plastic bag fell out of the side compartment, and tiny black objects scattered onto the garage floor.

  Oh, hell. The gift that Shadrack had given her when she’d met up with him and Sbusiso yesterday, the seeds of the African potato plant. The real Inkomfe, Shadrack had said. She’d better clean them up before Botha noticed them.

  She knelt down and carefully picked up the shiny seeds, placing them back in the bag. Maybe one day she would plant them in the garden of her rented cottage. It seemed a shame not to, since Shadrack had been kind enough to give them to her. She had a knack for killing anything she planted, though, so perhaps she could ask somebody else to do it for her.

  A few of the seeds had rolled under the car. She was tempted to leave them there, since they were out of sight, but they were a gift. And it was better to be thorough.

  She bent lower, groping in the blackness under the car but finding only dust. With a sigh, she sat up and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. With its flashlight activated, she leaned down again.

  And that was when she saw it.

  Jade’s breath caught. The few rogue seeds were forgotten; her attention was fixed on the white oval piece of plastic attached to the underside of the Mazda.

  Completely out of sight until now.

  With shaking fingers, she took hold of the object and wrenched it free. It came away reluctantly; it had been affixed with strong double-sided tape to the plastic belly pan just behind the front wheels.

  “Oh, Christ,” Jade whispered, staring down at the device. She knew it well—it was a model she had used herself in the past. It was a GPS tracking device. The plastic shell contained a SIM card and battery. It was waterproof, simple and reliable, and usually lasted about three days before needing to be recharged.

  Suddenly everything that had happened in the past forty-eight hours made sense. Especially how their pursuers had managed to catch up with them whenever they had thought themselves to be safe, even if it had taken time, plus trial and error. The device was badly positioned—it would only have been able to pick up a sporadic signal under the car, but if you were a patient hunter, that was enough.

  She had been leading the gunmen to Botha.

  But when and where had this device been planted? Jade’s thoughts raced as she replayed where she’d been since their escape from the motel, and who she’d seen.

  She surely hadn’t been followed to that disastrous meeting with Lorenzo, so it must have been done when she was with Gillespie. She should have been more careful, and realized their pursuers might have posted a lookout near Inkomfe. If they’d recognized her, then her attempts to disguise her car would have been futile.

  That meant it was thanks to her complicity with Gillespie that the killers had been a
ble to track Botha again. Last night, she and Botha had escaped with seconds to spare. It could so easily have turned deadly. And it had been her fault. All hers.

  A soft footfall sounded behind her and Botha’s voice cut into her confusion. “What are you doing?”

  Jade’s own body language betrayed her. She started at his sudden appearance, and as she spun around, her instinctive reaction was to hide the device from him.

  She stopped herself, but it was too late. He saw instantly what she’d been trying to do. His surprised expression quickly hardened into an angry suspicion, which her stammered, “I—I was about to show this to you,” did nothing to dispel.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Give that to me,” Botha ordered, pointing to the device.

  Warily Jade handed it over. Although his voice gave nothing away, she sensed he was smoldering. She had no way of predicting what he’d do next. He was an unknown entity, and she was intensely aware of how little of himself he’d revealed.

  What would she have done if she’d found out she’d been double-crossed this way? There’d been trust between them, fragile and short-lived. Now it was gone. If his anger erupted into violence, she’d have to try to fight him off, even though she didn’t rate her chances against his training and raw, aggressive strength. What could she use? She had her bag and car keys. There was the pepper spray she’d taken from Scarlett Sykes’s purse. If she could get to it or use her keys to do damage, then she would be able to sprint outside and head for the gate. Botha was wearing only his jeans, which must have been hastily pulled on, and he was barefoot. That surely meant she had a chance.

  He was beside her lightning fast, his hand clamping over her wrist as fear boiled inside her. She could feel heat radiating from him. “No running away.”

  “I’m not running,” Jade told him through gritted teeth. She stood frozen in his grasp, her mind racing, wondering if his tightly clenched fingers could feel the hammering of her pulse. This was a risk she should have considered more seriously. Of course he would figure out who she really was. She had no plan for what to do if this happened. She hadn’t discussed her whereabouts with anyone. Only one person in the world knew where she was right now, and that person had her trapped in a viselike grip.

  She’d never thought she would want to see Robbie again, but at that moment she prayed he might walk into his abandoned garage.

  Abruptly Botha let go of her arm just as she had begun to gasp in pain from his pincerlike grasp. He put the device down on the car roof, turned to the door leading to the warehouse and slammed it shut so hard it rattled in its frame. Using the side of his hand, he punched it with incredible force. If it had been plywood, it would have splintered. As it was, the metal door simply shook.

  He was breathing hard, in time with her own breaths. He pinned her with his glare, poised to chase her if she ran.

  “Okay. Okay. Let me explain!” she shouted.

  “What is there to explain? You’re working for somebody else. Who? Gillespie?”

  “I am not.” Jade couldn’t afford to back down now. Her instincts were warning her not to show weakness; Carlos Botha was a key player in this case, and she was the only person who could find out anything about him, even if she was working on her own now. “I haven’t been paid a cent by anyone except you, and I’ve been fighting just as hard as you to stay alive.”

  “Then what the hell is that?” Botha’s finger stabbed in the direction of the device.

  “It’s a tracker.”

  “And you knew it was there?”

  “I had no idea. I came to get my bag and dropped something. I only found it just now, when I was looking under the car. Damn it, Botha, if I’d wanted to tell anyone where you were, I could have just made a call. And if I was working with the people who are trying to kill us, then why would I have gotten us out at the Best Western? And at the Radisson in Sandton?”

  There was a pause. With the main garage door closed, the room was quiet except for the ragged rhythm of their breathing.

  “Who put it there?” He spoke through clenched teeth.

  “I don’t know,” Jade said. She still felt dizzy from the shock of finding the tracker and realizing when it must have been planted.

  “You’re not telling the truth.”

  “I am.”

  “Tell me this, then. Where did you go the night we were at the Radisson?”

  Jade stood very still, trying not to let her face betray the speed at which her mind was racing.

  “You weren’t in your room that night,” Botha said. “I knocked. You didn’t answer. I checked, and you weren’t inside. I went down to the garage, and your car wasn’t there. You didn’t say anything about it the next day. Where were you?”

  He was facing her directly, and even though he wasn’t much taller than her, she found his physical presence overpowering. The channeled rage in his demeanor, the brute strength within his streamlined frame.

  Jade grasped desperately for the right response, but nothing came to her. Silence filled the garage, thick as smoke, an unspoken admission of her guilt.

  “You were asking questions at Lorenzo’s today,” Botha said, and Jade’s stomach twisted with dread. “How did you even know about Lorenzo’s? I didn’t tell you, so who did?”

  She couldn’t meet his gaze, but stared narrow-eyed at the exit door beyond him, her only means of escape.

  “Who hired you?” Botha asked her, his voice now dangerously soft. “Loodts? Gillespie? Someone else from Inkomfe? I’ve been expecting them to try to plant somebody close to me. I just hadn’t thought it was you. But it’s my job to pick up on these things, Jade. It’s what I do.”

  She thought his job was security systems. Maybe she’d been wrong.

  “Why would you be expecting someone from Inkomfe to track you?” Jade finally snapped, but Botha was not to be deflected.

  “It’s Gillespie, isn’t it?”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Isn’t it?” Botha shouted, leaning toward her. His voice hammered her. His eyes were blazing, his fists tightly clenched, but Jade wouldn’t give an inch. Drawing on the reserves of steel-hard toughness that she’d developed over years of working with the corrupt and the untruthful, with thieves and abusers and killers, she glared back at him. She met his anger with her own resistance, willing him to hit her, to see how far it got him.

  She wouldn’t give up a name, not even if he split her lip. She wouldn’t give it up if he blackened her eye or broke her jaw. If he landed a blow, she would ride the pain and use her limited combat skills to fight back. As soon as she saw his hand move, she would knee him in the groin, hard, and then kick him in the face as he doubled over. And then . . .

  “Jade,” Botha said again, and her eyes widened at the unexpected gentleness in his voice. She saw that his tension had abated. His fists had unclenched, his eyes had relaxed. “Fighting with you is going to get me nowhere. I don’t want to do it. I—hell. We barely escaped with our lives last night. I don’t know what you were hired to do, but I do know I owe you big time. I need you on my side. But you might already have chosen a different side.”

  She hadn’t prepared herself for this approach. His unexpected honesty disarmed her more effectively than a punch in the face could have done.

  She took a deep breath, thinking of their survival, and for the first time ever, she made the decision to betray the identity of the person who’d hired her.

  “Gillespie asked me to trace you,” she said softly.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Jade and Botha stood facing each other in the small garage. It was suffocatingly warm, the morning sun blazing onto the corrugated iron that protected them from outside cell signals.

  “Let’s talk in the office,” Botha said. “Can we bring that thing in without it broadcasting?”

  Jade nodded. “The who
le building is a dead zone.”

  They walked back into the office, which was blessedly cooler. She was still trembling from their earlier confrontation. She laced her fingers together so Botha wouldn’t see.

  “Gillespie hired you to find me?” Botha asked. He pulled on the gray shirt Jade had bought him and sat down at one end of the couch. She took the other.

  “Yes.”

  “So you traced me. And then?”

  “Gillespie wanted to know what you were doing. He said I had to talk to you if necessary to get information.”

  Botha nodded. “Did he tell you why?”

  “There was a sabotage incident at Inkomfe early on Friday morning. He suspected Lisa might be involved, and she’d been the one who hired you before she left Inkomfe. You’d also gone AWOL from work. He couldn’t reach you, so he wanted someone to check up on you.”

  Botha was watching her closely. “Why did he suspect Lisa?”

  “He said she quit her job on bad terms and made an unusual transition to environmental activism. I can’t fault him for wanting to check on you. It’s what people do. There was attempted sabotage at Inkomfe. And something is clearly going on. Loodts was murdered, you’re being hunted and Gillespie was beaten up when he left work yesterday morning.”

  “Gillespie? Beaten up?”

  Jade nodded. “He really was hurt. I met him at the Grand West Mall. I think somebody saw me arrive there, and planted the bug on the car to trace me back to you. When I asked Gillespie about what happened to him, he said he thought it was a warning.”

  To her surprise, Botha gave a humorless laugh. “I’m sure it was.”

  “For what?”

  She hadn’t expected Botha to tell her straight out, and he didn’t. Instead, he answered her question with his own. “You said I was the only one who’d paid you. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it is. Gillespie was supposed to pay me, but he hasn’t so far.”

  “Gillespie has a habit of not paying people. Or shorting them.”