Aron left with mixed feelings. He was pleased that Jason had taken him seriously. He was surprised by Jason’s newfound interest in his geological theories. And he was confused by Jason’s lukewarm concern about the possibility that upward of half of his best diamonds were being stolen. He wandered back to his bungalow, wondering which way up he should hold his graph after all.
Chapter 21
For several weeks, that was more or less where matters stood. Aron spent some time exploring ideas with Jason, but he felt that Jason’s heart wasn’t really in it. Aron might have settled back into his more comfortable geological puzzles if one night he hadn’t had too much coffee while he finished his monthly production report. He spent time on his graphs and tables and wrote up his journal detailing his rising concerns about the mine management. He had another cup of coffee. Eventually he realized it was two in the morning and that he was wide awake. He decided to walk up to the vantage point above the mine and watch the moon over the desert. As he was about to leave, he went back in and took down his revolver from its hiding place behind some textbooks. Recently, there had been rumors of a leopard about.
By this time of the night the ground had cooled. For once it was really pleasant walking outside. He felt invigorated and almost jogged along the road. When he reached his favorite spot, he looked over the hills in the full moonlight for some breathtaking minutes before he realized that something was not as it should be. There were lights on inside the plant, and the perimeter fence lights were off. A single mine vehicle was parked at the entrance. It looked like one of the security vehicles.
Aron knew he should raise the alarm, but he was sure that the answers to his puzzles were in the building. He fingered the gun in his pocket and walked down the road toward the mine. He felt very exposed in the moonlight, but there were no signs of life at the mine—just the wrong lights on and the lone empty vehicle. He found the perimeter gate locked, as it should be. He had his keys with him. Years of habit in big cities and some petty theft some months ago at the mine compound made him lock his bungalow.
He let himself through the gate, locking it behind him. He couldn’t avoid some clatter, so he stood behind the vehicle until he was sure that there was no reaction. Then he worked his way around to the plant door, keeping out of sight of the windows. The main door was ajar. He peeked in, trying to see what was happening inside. This was the security entrance to the plant. There would normally be a guard on duty, putting packages and overclothes through the X ray while their owners went through the personnel scanner in a double-door chamber like an airlock. The room was empty. The sensors were off, and both doors stood open. One could walk straight through the chamber, which he did. It was eerie. The plant was always either busily active or closed tight upon itself like an oyster hoarding its pearl. No one passed through it without authority. It felt as though the plant was deserted, abandoned.
Then Aron heard voices coming from the sorting room.
For the first time he was scared. It was stupid to have come here alone. He should have gone straight to Jason, and the two of them could have looked for Dingake and let him take charge, if indeed he could be found. He considered going back, but the sorting room was open-plan. It should be easy to see who was in it. He took the revolver out of his pocket and pulled back the hammer. It made him feel silly rather than secure. I’m a second-rate actor in a B-grade American movie, he thought. Nevertheless he moved quietly up to the open door and looked in.
Two men stood at the sorting table with their backs to him, talking. The table was covered with what appeared to be large, uncut diamonds. So I was right, he thought. Somehow they hid them here, and now they’ll get them out. He couldn’t understand why this was taking so much discussion. Perhaps they were already arguing over the spoils?
He had no intention of staying to witness the outcome, however. He needed to get away while they were preoccupied. He started to back away as quietly as he could, keeping his eyes fixed on them. The two men carried on with what they were doing. One raised his voice, and there seemed to be a brief argument, but all Aron could determine was that they were not speaking English. Then he was through the door back into the passage. He let out his breath. He hadn’t even realized that he had been holding it.
Suddenly a huge hand closed around his forearm, the long, fat fingers reaching right around his wrist. He felt his bones grind and the gun slide out of his grip. He twisted around to see a massive black man dressed in khaki fatigues. He didn’t cry out, and for a moment the man said nothing. Then he called out quite casually, “Boss!” One of the men at the sorting table turned at once, a stocky man with a bushy red beard. He looked surprised and then angry. Aron was sure that he had never seen him before. An instant later the second man turned toward them. He was well built, with thick black hair and a heavy black beard. Aron recognized him at once. It was his boss, Jason Ferraz.
Chapter 22
“Sin? O que voce querem?”
There were a few moments of silence on the line as the caller deciphered this greeting. Then, “Yes, hello. I want to talk to you.”
“You talk to me. What you want talk about?” The voice had a heavy Portuguese accent. It sounded neither interested nor friendly.
“I know what you are doing. I know why you are doing it. I think we need to talk about that.” The caller’s voice had the refinement and pronunciation of a graduate of an upper-class English school. The recipient was sure he had never heard it before, and yet there was something about it that seemed familiar.
“Bullshit. You waste my time with bullshit. I hang up.” And he did so. No one should have his mobile phone number, except the few people who needed to know it. Probably this was a wrong number or some sort of scam. He didn’t expect to hear from the caller again, but almost immediately the phone rang. He checked the screen for the incoming number, but it was listed as private. He grimaced so that his red beard bristled. “What you want?” he shouted into the mobile phone.
“If you hang up again, there are other people I can talk to. People who would be interested to know that you have kidnapped an important person and are holding him for ransom. The police, for example.”
“What you want? You after money?” This was said more quietly as the man tried to work out who could have this phone number and know so much. He needed to know who this person was. He needed to know whom he now had to kill.
“No, quite the contrary. I want to do a deal. One that will be very much to your advantage.” There was a long silence. It seemed that the caller did not intend to go on without encouragement. At last a response came. “What deal?”
“You are holding this person until a specified date. There is a ransom to be paid, but you are going to hold him for another two weeks. Then you are supposed to release him, not so? He is supposed to accept what has happened, and you are supposed to have time to leave with your money. Lots of money, not so?” The voice paused. Then it resumed, calm but firm, “That’s not going to work, is it? The man will know too much about where he has been, whom he has seen, how long it took him to get there. You can’t let him go alive. That wouldn’t make sense, would it?”
“Who you anyway? Who thinks he know so much about someone else’s business? Very dangerous know too much about other people’s business.”
“You don’t need to know my name. Just think of me as a friend.”
“So, friend with the bullshit. What you want? What’s your deal?”
“I want what you want. I don’t want this prisoner of yours telling stories after you let him go. I want you to kill him.”
There was silence while the man with the red beard digested this. The caller had explained that his prisoner couldn’t leave alive, but he knew that anyway, so what was the game? Why was he having this conversation? Why didn’t the caller just sit back and wait for what was inevitable in any case? Obviously the caller wanted something else, or something more. Perhaps that would give a clue to his identity. “So what’s the deal?�
� he asked for the third time.
“I want two things. First, his death must look like an accident, but not something crude that the police will see through. An accident that stays an accident. I don’t care how you do that—you’re the expert, not so? The second is that it happens after the date he was supposed to be released. You keep him alive until then. After that he dies. In an accident.”
Again there was silence, but it was no longer hostile. Between these speakers there would never be any trust, let alone friendship. They recognized that each operated by a private set of rules, rules that had nothing to do with morality or legality or collegiality, only personal advantage. Right now, it seemed, their interests might be aligned. If so, they could cooperate, do business. But tomorrow that might all be different.
“Sin. Much harder than just get rid of the body. Why I go to all this extra trouble?”
“I’ll pay you two hundred and fifty thousand when he dies in an accident at the right time, and another two hundred and fifty thousand after the funeral. U.S. dollars.”
“I want money up front. Why I trust you?”
The voice on the other end of the line laughed. “You don’t have much option, do you? If it doesn’t work out the way I want, the police get a road map. A road map that leads straight to you. And if it does work out, you walk away with another half million. Dollars. And if I don’t pay? Well, you’re home free, aren’t you? With plenty of time to come after me.”
Red Beard hadn’t been born the day before, or even the day before that. It was his turn to laugh. “Sure. Very good. I take all risk, you get what you want. Maybe I get money, maybe not. You know what I think? I think this is bullshit. I think this job’s blown, Mr. Friend. Maybe cops know already, maybe not. But you know. That’s already too many people. You get your package back right now. With bullet in his head. Look for him tomorrow.” Deliberately, but smiling this time, he hung up.
As he expected, the phone rang again almost immediately. “All right,” said the upper-class English voice. “Two fifty up front. Two fifty after the funeral. But if you screw up, I come after you. And I bring the police with me. I think they’d be very interested in meeting you.”
“Okay. But you give me a name. No name, no deal.”
“If you insist. My name is Daniel.” Red Beard sensed that that was the best he was going to get. He didn’t like it, but half a million dollars is a lot of money.
“Where do we meet so you can give me the money?”
“No meeting. That’s absolutely not negotiable. You’ll get the money.” And suddenly Red Beard was listening to a dial tone, wondering if he had played this hand too well or not well enough. The money would be nice—if he got it—but this Daniel was a loose end. He didn’t leave loose ends. Not ever.
The next morning a text message from his bank in Lisbon reported that his account had received an electronic funds transfer from a bank he had never heard of in Bermuda. He was disturbed that Daniel knew where to send the money. The amount was two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. He was tempted to take the money and run. But he didn’t. He had one big weakness. He was greedy, extremely greedy. But he was also careful, extremely careful.
Chapter 23
The room was comfortable enough. It could have been mistaken for a hotel room in one of Botswana’s cheaper establishments. A metal-frame bed with a spring base and inner-spring mattress stood in the corner farthest from the door. The mattress could have been firmer, but the linen was clean and changed every few days. There was a small table with a battery-powered reading light. In the center of the room a worktable doubled as the dining table, with two plain-varnished pine chairs. The table was dressed in a cloth that looked as though it had been retired from an Italian restaurant, judging by its faded pattern of Chianti bottles and dried vegetable bunches. An easy chair, whose insipid red clashed with the tablecloth, was in the far corner. A large wardrobe’s open doors revealed a sparse mixture of clothes.
Off the main room was a small bathroom. A shower was mounted on the tiles over the bath, surrounded by a stained plastic shower curtain. On the wall over the hand basin clung a small medicine cabinet with an open sliding-mirror door, revealing an electric razor, toothbrush and toothpaste, male deodorant, and a hairbrush. A hurricane lamp hung over the cabinet, with an asbestos fire shield above it. The windows in the bedroom had been bricked up, and the bathroom’s window had been covered with a sheet of plywood attached to the window frame with heavy screws.
The room was comfortable enough, but it was a prison.
The prisoner was sitting at the table, carefully studying a pile of newspapers he had been given. He had first looked through the headlines in all the sections and then, disappointed, settled in to absorb everything to be found in the text. There was a copy of last week’s Botswana Gazette, and three days’ worth of the government Daily News from earlier in the week. Neither ranks among the world’s great newspapers, but he spent nearly an hour going through them. With no ventilation, the room was stuffy and hot. He was sweating.
There was a perfunctory thump on the door, and a huge man came in with a lunch tray. Being so large, it was not surprising that the others called him Sculo, an abbreviation of minúsculo in Portuguese. The hulking man didn’t seem to mind. He was big, but not fat, and very black. He was sometimes willing to talk if things were going well, and he seemed to have no animosity toward the man he guarded.
“Hey, man,” he said by way of greeting, “they were generous today! Told the cook to make you some real chow for lunch. Hamburger. Potato chips. Cold beer.” He laughed as he set the tray on the table, pushing the newspapers aside. Then he dumped himself on one of the wooden chairs, which protested as he leaned back.
“You’ll be out soon now. We get our money. You go home.” He seemed to mean it. This was an opening gambit in an ongoing conversation, and the prisoner took his cue. “You’re not part of this Bushman Peoples’ Liberation Movement nonsense, Sculo. You certainly don’t fit the Bushman template. About ten sizes too large! Not that anyone has ever heard of this BPLM before, anyway. How the hell did you get mixed up in this?”
Sculo just shrugged. “Man,” he said, “I started off in Angola with Savimbi’s assholes. Then it was the National Angola Army of Reconciliation or some nonsense like that. Their generals didn’t know which end of a gun the bullets came out. Just there to keep the MPLA in power to get their hands on the diamonds and other good stuff. When they actually tried fighting, I went off on my own.”
“You’re a mercenary, then?”
“Ja. You could say that. If you’re in the army, they send you to stinking places. You eat garbage, sleep in mud, and people try to kill you all day. And you get paid shit. As a mercenary, they send you to stinking places. You eat garbage, sleep in mud, and people try to kill you all day. But you get paid like you’re a king!” He laughed as though this was a really good joke. The prisoner smiled and took a sip of his beer.
“You better eat that lunch before it gets cold,” said Sculo. So the prisoner started on the hamburger. He was hungry, and it didn’t taste bad.
“Ja. Out of here soon. The Boss told me. Your guys are busy raising the money.” The Boss was the bearded Portuguese man who seemed to be in charge. The prisoner thought of him as Red Beard. He had two Angolan shadows who communicated only in Portuguese.
“Red Beard doesn’t have anything to do with the Bushmen either. It’s just a scam to shake money out of the company,” he told Sculo. But Sculo wasn’t going to let his good mood be disturbed as he scavenged a few chips that had been left on the plate, dipping them into the sauce.
“Maybe, man. Who cares? They pay us the million. I get my share. We all go home.” Sculo nodded to emphasize the happy ending. He seemed very relaxed, and the prisoner thought it was worth a chance to try to buy help.
“If you help me, you could get a lot more money than your share here,” he responded. “How about all of it? The whole million?” For a moment Sculo just loo
ked at him, but then he laughed as though it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time.
“That’s good. That’s a real good one. A million dollars all to myself. Could get out of this business. Go live in a nice place in South America with nice girls. No AIDS. Only problem is, I get real dead along the way.”
This last thought seemed to rather spoil the joke, and he stopped laughing.
“Well, you finished?” He replaced the empty plate, glass, and beer bottle on the tray, which he carried out without another word. The prisoner heard the lock turn. He called out, “Tell Red Beard I want to see him.” There was no response, and he wasn’t sure that Sculo had heard.
He picked up a newspaper and moved to the easy chair. He admitted to himself that he was very worried. When he had been taken, he was frightened, of course, and then Sculo had knocked him out. When he came round, he was alone in this room on the bed. But once they told him they wanted a million dollars in ransom, he almost relaxed. That wasn’t a really large sum of money and should have been raised in a few days. But that was over a week ago. Why had it taken so long? Had the company brought in the police? There was nothing in the newspaper—there never was. He couldn’t just disappear for two weeks. Someone must have noticed.
He was now sure he was here for a purpose other than the ransom, and that he was not likely to leave alive once that purpose—whatever it was—had been achieved. Sculo might believe it, but he no longer did. His one hope was that he had discovered where he was, and help was not too far, if only he could get out of this building.
A Carrion Death & The 2nd Death of Goodluck Tinubu Page 12
