Why You Were Taken

by JT Lawrence

  ‘So your timing is excellent,’ he says, using his handset as a wireless pointer to open a browser on the main projection, revealing the photo of the college students and allowing the programme to run, showing which facial features were isolated to run a match.

  ‘This FusiformG has the most amazing features baked in. You won’t believe the results. Who the creeps are, in the photo, I mean.’ He pushes his glasses up again. ‘It’s huge. It’s, like, cosmic. No wonder they’re trying to cover it up.’

  ‘Marko?’ comes a feminine, distinctly Hindi voice from the top of the stairs. Marko rolls his eyes.

  ‘Not now, Ma!’ he says. ‘I’m having a meeting!’

  ‘Marko?’ she calls, closer now.

  ‘Ma!’ he says, ‘I’m busy!’

  Gold-trimmed indigo erupts at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I thought I heard voices!’ She beams—a handsome woman in a sari bright enough to spike your eyes out, holding a silver tray full of deep-fried goodness. Smoky ribbons of scent: cumin, turmeric, cardamom billow towards them. Kirsten blinks, wonders briefly if she is hallucinating. Her arm seems swollen now.

  ‘Marko, you should have told me you were expecting visitors. I would have cooked dosa!’

  He blushes, stalks up to her, takes the tray, bangs it down on a crowded desk. A designer toy—a Murakami—falls over. Kirsten gently rights it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘It’s just a little plate of eats, nothing special.’ The woman smiles.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ Marko mutters, steering her towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’

  ‘You’re too skinny!’ she says, pointing at Seth. ‘I’m making beans, if you want to stay for dinner.’

  Once Seth sees samoosas on the platter, he laughs out loud. It is refreshing to see an old cultural stereotype played out in real life. South Africa has become so cosmopolitan that it is rare to see, say, an Afrikaner farmer in a two-tone shirt wearing a comb in his khaki socks, or a coloured fisherman missing his front teeth. He celebrates this by eating a samoosa that burns his mouth. Excellent.

  ‘As I was saying.’ Marko sighs, then looks excited again: ‘Cosmic.’

  FusiformG automatically opens browsers on three of the other screens, one for each of the faces, and the first two identities are revealed: blip, blip. The software is still searching for the third face. Cross-referenced with hundreds of televised interviews, PR shots and virtual news articles. Kirsten and Seth stare at the matches.

  ‘Shut the front door,’ whispers Kirsten.

  The first man, good looking, smiles back at them with his perfect teeth.

  ‘This is—’ begins Marko.

  ‘Christopher Walden,’ says Seth. ‘Founder and CEO of Fontus.’

  ‘Then,’ continues Marko, ‘Thabile Siceka, the Minister of Health.’

  ‘No,’ says Kirsten, in disbelief.

  ‘The third face is taking a while... could be that the third person isn’t as well known or photographed as much as the first two. Maybe the shy one, staying out of the limelight.’

  ‘So, we have the CEO of one of the biggest, most successful corporates in the country, and the minister of fucking health. Industry, government, and what we can probably guess is some kind of academic, doctor or scientist. Reach and power to do anything. The Trinity.’

  ‘The Holy Trinity,’ says Marko.

  ‘More like the Fucking Unholy Trinity,’ says Kirsten.

  ‘But we still don’t know why. Why the kidnappings, why the murders,’ says Seth, ‘and why now?’

  ‘We need to focus on finding Keke. She’s got,’ Kirsten looks at her watch, ‘maybe three hours left before she—’

  ‘That’s if they haven’t killed her already,’ says Seth, and they both glare at him. He spins the ring on his finger. ‘Where do we even start?’

  The room is quiet.

  ‘Marko?’ comes his mother’s voice from up the stairs again. ‘Marko? Would your friends like a mango lassi?’

  ‘There’s one person that can help us find the Trinity HQ,’ says Kirsten, as they jog to the car. ‘Someone that’s not involved in the Genesis Project. Someone who would want justice done.’

  The gate opens and the barking starts again. Once they’re on the road, Kirsten takes her mother’s letter out of her pocket and reads it to Seth.

  ‘Ed Miller is his name. There’s an address. Melville. He has the packet of information. Everything we need to know about what the Genesis Project is and why we were taken.’

  The car is redolent with curried potato and coriander. Marko’s mother wouldn’t let them leave empty-handed and packed them a Tupperware take-away, along with some gold-coloured paper serviettes, despite her son’s embarrassed protestations.

  Kirsten is quiet, anxious they won’t find Keke in time, or, as Seth had said, worried that the worst had already happened. Tears sting her eyes but she blinks them away, opens the window to get some fresh air. It’s a strange sensation to her: tears. Little lines like pins dance in the top half of her vision. She doesn’t remember the last time she cried. Has she ever cried? She breathes in deeply, swallows the warm lead in her throat and looks out the window at the ChinaCity/Sandton skyline. Seth catches himself thinking about the future. He won’t be able to go back to his ordinary life after this. What will he do? What will it be like?

  That’s if we survive today, thinks Kirsten, which is looking increasingly unlikely.

  They stop at a red light in the middle of the CBD. A man dressed in filth appears out of nowhere and peers into the passenger side, giving Kirsten a shock.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says, in fright, ‘I’m not used to seeing beggars anymore.’ A gun appears in the ragman’s hand.

  Oh.

  His wrist is inked with prison scrawls. A Crim Colony graduate. In other words: an ex-con, or in this case: a con.

  ‘Out,’ he barks, shaking the weapon at her. She tries to go for her handbag, reach for her own gun, but the man loads the mechanism and something tells her he won’t hesitate to put a bullet in her brain. She puts her hands up.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ shouts Seth, flames in his cheeks. ‘Not today!’ he shouts at the hijacker, ‘not today! You can fucking have the car tomorrow, but not today!’

  ‘Out,’ says the man, his voice iced with violence.

  ‘Fuck!’ shouts Seth, hitting the steering wheel, ‘Fuck you!’ He gets out, slams the door, sending a lightning bolt of silver through Kirsten. Kicks the car door, kicks the tyre.

  ‘I need my handbag,’ says Kirsten to the hijacker, ‘and that other bag. It’s medicine. I’m keeping both bags, you take the car.’

  The man is annoyed, looks around: this is taking too much time. Kirsten unzips the insulin, shows him, but he searches her handbag himself, takes her Ruger with a loud whistle, and her empty slimpurse. He throws both bags onto the road and Kirsten scoops them up off the tar, picking up the lipstick taser and keeping it hidden in her palm. The hijacker loses focus for a moment as he tries to start the car, lowers his gun-hand. Kirsten tasers him and is surprised by the force of the current. A thin blue line connects them for a second (Electric Sapphire then he slumps back.

  ‘Holy fuck!’ she says.

  His gun clatters onto the road, his eyes roll back.

  ‘Is he dead?’ she asks.

  Seth opens the car door, pulls the slack body out and leaves him on the shoulder of the road. It doesn’t escape his attention that this is the second time he has pulled a limp body out of a car during the past six hours. He inspects the man’s gun, a semi-automatic, and finds it empty. Throws it into the car. Passes Kirsten her Ruger.

  ‘I don’t know, don’t care,’ he says. ‘Let’s go find Ed Miller.’

  Chapter 32

  Cheerios

  Johannesburg, 2021

  Kirsten presses the red button (Faded Flag) and a doorbell rings out, jarring in its cheer. Static. It’s an old Melville house, with chunky whi
tewashed walls and a green tin roof. It has the look of an artist’s residence: slightly run down, a little messy, decorated in a quirky way. The house number is a mosaic. If you look through the pedestrian gate you see a goat, made out of wire and beads, grazing in the garden. The rusted arms of an Adventure Golf windmill inch around. The black-spotted roses need pruning.

  She presses the doorbell again, holds it down for longer. More static then they hear the phone being picked up. Crackling on the other end.

  ‘Hello?’ says Kirsten. ‘Ed Miller? I’m Kirsten Lovell. You knew my mother?’

  There is a pause then the gate buzzes. He opens the front door, cautious, sees her, and relaxes. When he sees Seth he looks nervous again.

  ‘You can trust him,’ she says.

  ‘How do you know?’ says the man she assumes is Ed Miller.

  ‘He’s blood of my blood.’

  Miller stares at them for a while. He is wearing a creased Hawaiian shirt and ill-fitting chinos. Horrendous tan pleather sandals. He has a full head of snow-white hair that moves when he nods. He comes out to make sure the security gate is closed behind them, sweeps his gaze left and right on the street before he clangs it shut. Kirsten studies him. Can’t imagine her mother dating a hippie.

  ‘You have something for us?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s not here,’ he says. ‘Too risky. They’re everywhere. I put it somewhere safe.’

  Kirsten closes her eyes, hears the ticking of time she doesn’t have.

  ‘It’s close,’ he says, ‘I’ll take you.’

  His aftershave smells like something with a ship on the label. Small crunchy loops the shape of Cheerios float around him. He shrugs on a light jacket and takes a set of keys off the hook by the door. Seth grabs them out of his hand, startling him.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ he says.

  They climb into the beetle of a car. Miller seems too tall for it and hunches over in the front. Kirsten wonders what kind of person buys a car that is so obviously too small for them.

  ‘Oh, wait,’ he says, tapping his temple with the side of his index finger. He gets out of the car, walks to the garden shed. Ducks under the door and disappears into darkness. Kirsten and Seth look at each other. They don’t have to say it out loud. They are both thinking: Fuck.

  Miller steps out of the shed, back into the sunlight. He is holding a couple of shovels. He holds them above his head and shakes them, as if he has won a race.

  ‘My mother said we could trust him,’ Kirsten says.

  ‘By ‘mother’, you mean, ‘kidnapper’?’

  She pulls a face at him. What choice do they have?

  He returns to the car, folds the passenger seat forward and takes in Kirsten’s long legs.

  ‘Move up, honey,’ he says, dumping the shovels next to her. He winks at her before he slams the chair back in place and climbs in. She kicks the back of his seat.

  Seth starts the car. It’s a prehistoric thing, and chokes twice before it comes to life. Miller smacks the dashboard twice.

  ‘Good girl!’ he shouts, making them both jump.

  Kirsten is still staring at him, trying to imagine what on earth they had to talk about. She had thought of her ‘mother’ as a dry, sexless, beige, irritated woman. She can’t imagine the two of them having a conversation, never mind a twenty-six-year-long affair.

  ‘Which one to open the garage door?’ asks Seth, looking at the rubber buttons on the ancient remote.

  ‘Uh, the blue one,’ he says, but nothing happens.

  Pins of dread on Kirsten’s skin. Seth is slowly reaching for his gun.

  ‘I mean, the orange one. Sorry.’ He laughs. ‘Nervous.’

  Seth clicks the orange button and the garage motor heaves up the door. They all exhale. Four and five, thinks Kirsten, easy enough to mix up.

  The man beats a melody on his khaki-clad thigh.

  ‘Left,’ he says.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks Seth.

  ‘To the hidey-hole I came up with. Genius, if I don’t say so myself.’

  ‘Where?’ asks Kirsten. ‘We don’t have much time.’

  ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ he says.

  Kirsten looks at her watch, feels the adrenaline pulling at her stomach. This had better pay off, or Keke is dead. Seth puts down his foot.

  They pull up at a small flower farm on the outskirts of the city. The guard seems to recognise Ed and drags the gate open for them. The metal catches on the hard sand. Miller directs them along the powder dirt road, and they drive until it comes to an abrupt end. Seth, driving too fast, slams on the brakes and they skid a little, landing in some wild grass. They look around, as if wondering how they got there, sitting in a vast field of flowers.

  Kirsten is exhausted, nervous, dirty, and hurt, surrounded by blue skies and blooms. The prettiness around her is not making sense.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she says, ‘why here?’

  ‘Why else? Your mother loved flowers,’ he says.

  ‘Loved killing flowers, more like,’ she says. ‘She killed every plant we ever had.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘correction: loved cut flowers. I sent her some every year on her birthday. Lilies—’ He sniffs. ‘—were her favourite.’

  Kirsten remembers the huge flower arrangements arriving once a year. She had always assumed they were from her father, but realises now that would have been out of character for their relationship: there hadn’t been a flicker of romance in it. She doesn’t remember ever seeing them touch. She hadn’t realised that holding hands was a thing couples did until she saw someone else’s parents do it.

  When the bouquets arrived her father would complain of hay fever. He’d throw out the flowers as soon as a single petal turned brown; inspected them daily until he found one.

  ‘It’s buried under that tree,’ he says, pointing at a leopard tree a hundred metres away. Kirsten and Seth each grab a shovel, swing them over their shoulders. They must look daunting in their ripped clothes, their skin bruised with black blood.

  ‘Whoah,’ says Miller, feigning surrender. ‘Settle down there, puppies.’

  ‘Let’s get a move on,’ says Seth. The sun is sinking fast.

  ‘Seriously, whoah,’ says Miller. ‘I’m gonna need to pat you down, cowboy.’

  ‘No need,’ says Seth, taking his gun out of its holster. ‘I’m packing. So?’

  ‘Well, will you be kind enough to leave it in the car, please?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Son, no offence meant,’ he says, hand on hips, Hawaiian shirt restless in the breeze. ‘But I don’t know you, I can’t trust you. A couple of weeks ago the love of my life was murdered for a reason I’ll never understand. Then you two show up in your punk clothes saying you’re the people Carol told me to expect. I’m hoping for the best, but I will not walk into a field in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangers with a gun. I am not armed. I think it’s fair to ask you to leave your weapon in the car.’

  Seth thinks about it, then shrugs: ‘Fair enough.’ He walks towards the boot but Miller stops him, putting his hand on the warm metal.

  ‘It’s broken,’ he says. ‘Hasn’t sprung open in years. Just put it in the cubbyhole.’

  He does what Miller says, gives Kirsten a quick questioning look. She barely nods. They rush to the tree. Miller falls behind.

  ‘Which side?’ Kirsten yells from under the canopy.

  ‘Where you’re standing!’ yells Miller. The twins begin to dig. Kirsten struggles with one arm, but is able to use her foot for leverage. It hurts like hell. The ground is baked clay. Keke’s phone beeps with a SugarApp warning. Code orange: three hours left.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asks Seth, swiping his brow. ‘You sure it’s here?’

  They both look up at the same time, and find themselves staring up the barrel of his gun.

  ‘You have got to be fucking kidding,’ says Kirsten.

  ‘We are who we say we are,’ says Seth. ‘We’re the good guys.’
>
  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘Keep digging.’

  They know he means for their graves.

  Chapter 33

  Baby Starter Kit

  Johannesburg 2021

  The heavy-set man, clad in charcoal jeans and polished workman boots, looks completely out of place in bright and bonny BabyCo. He is standing before a twirling display of sippy cups that plays a childish song and ends in a forced giggle. He wishes there are more customers so he can at least attempt to blend in. The cheerful products on the shelves seemed to age right in front of him. It is like browsing in a pastel-shaded ghost town.

  He is excellent at his job, but this isn’t his job; this is the antithesis of his job. If a polar opposite exists of what he was good at, this is it. But he is not one to shirk orders.

  He grabs a blue silicone beaker with an animation of a sniggering snowman on it and slings it into his basket. He hopes no one he knows will see him in here. It will be difficult to explain. Another reason he gave in motivating for ordering this all online, but The Doctor said no. It is urgent, he said, and he doesn’t want any kind of paper trail. Moving towards a new aisle, he jumps when a BabyCo-bot surprises him on the corner. The bot is clown-themed: wide eyes, red nose—grotesque, painted-on smile. A uniform of bright, clashing colours and a hyuck-hyuck-hyuck chuckle. Scary as hell. No wonder this shop is a graveyard.

  ‘Congratulations!’ effuses the robotic shop assistant. ‘May I give you a hug?’

  ‘Not unless you want your arm broken,’ the man says.

  ‘Pregnancy is such a special time. You and your baby deserve the very best!’

  The man tries to walk past the bot, but it blocks his way.

  ‘What can I help you with?’ the clown says, glowing and hyuck-ing at him.

  The man growls.

  ‘We have great specials on disposable nappies!’ shrieks the machine, lighting up. ‘A pack of forty newborn-sized diapers for only nine hundred and ninety-nine rand! Get two packs for one thousand and seven-fifty!’