Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within

by Patty Jansen

  I met Lenka’s eyes across the hall. “We’re leaving. I’m withdrawing my agreement to cooperate with this court. As you have already noted, the witness is not from here and is bound by no laws to appear. From the moment we arrived, the court has treated her and her family as curiosities and has refused to listen to their concerns and their wishes to be heard. As far as I am concerned, this trial is a farce. It’s purely a political game to show the people that the Pretoria Cartel is capable of self-policing, while also avoiding investigation in certain areas of conduct. The accused is no angel, but based on the evidence only we can provide, there is no way you can conclude that he committed this particular crime, and any push to do so makes this whole process even more ridiculous. He should be standing trial for crimes we can prove he did commit, but I understand that would require the court to take a stance in recognising me as a representative of gamra, and recognising that a framework for legal cooperation with gamra is one thing that’s most sorely needed in this whole sorry affair. But I also understand that most people in charge of the court don’t want to see that happen. I’ve had enough of dancing around this issue and pretending it doesn’t exist. We’ve done this for over twenty years and it has gotten us nowhere. I am no longer going to waste my time here.”

  Robert had suddenly sprung into life. He sat up straight, his eyes wild.

  I turned away and led our group in the direction of the door to the foyer.

  “I did not kill him,” Robert shouted in the courtroom behind me. “See? Even he says it.”

  A number of people shouted, and the judge rang her bell and called for order.

  While I gathered my team around me, Lenka came up to me. Her cheeks were red and eyes wide. “Cory, do you have any idea what you’re doing? The cartel, Minke Kluysters in particular, is a very dangerous enemy to have.”

  “I’m not an enemy of his. I’m willing to talk when they stop playing games with me. I’ve taken the first step. The next one is up to him.”

  “It might involve assassins and weapons.”

  “He doesn’t scare me.” And then I said something that Amarru could have said. “Our assassins are better than theirs.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I realised what I’d said. I didn’t think Lenka understood the underlying meaning—that of theirs and ours, “theirs” meaning the world where I’d been born and had grown up.

  Me, using Amarru’s words. These sorts of things kept creeping up on me when I wasn’t thinking.

  “I’ll be fine, really,” I said, and she probably didn’t even notice my unease. “I have a lot of security with me.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ll try to keep in contact.” We might need her later.

  And so we marched out of the courtroom, in the company of Reida pushing the trolley and Kita carrying a squealing Idda.

  In the foyer, a line of guards were herding people towards the far side. “Everyone out, come on people, leave the building.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said.

  Another group of guards was already coming in our direction from deeper inside the building, and I did not want to be in their control.

  Veyada led the way.

  While we crossed the hall, Mereeni showed me her reader. “This is the document that Dharma Yuwono has just made public. It outlines all the thing he mentioned in his speech, including a lot of ways in which people can get involved. He owns a data distribution company. Their setup is really professional.”

  “How do they manage to avoid being blocked? Do they block detractors from accessing this information?”

  “Not at this level. It’s like a regular media hub where people get their information. It covers a lot of other news as well. It’s run by Blues so no one in government cares. They’re playing the Pretoria Cartel at their own games.”

  She skipped back to an overview page with one-line news items from all over the world, not only the powerful countries. The hub was called Blue Day.

  “Dharma is a Blue?”

  “He is. Came from the slums of Jakarta and worked his way up. He’s one hell of a smart guy. Inspirational to many.”

  Inspirational to me. This whole case had taught me one thing: I’d been wrong about how to effect change in opinions on Earth.

  All my working life I had assumed that in order to change, we had to convince the ruling order, but as I’d noticed, the harder you pushed for a change, the more they dug in. Maybe it was no longer time to change the minds of the ruling order, but to change the ruling order altogether. Time to abolish this horrible White-Blue system. Time to put the past behind us and move on. Time to engage the disenfranchised. The Age of Enlightenment Mark Two. And who would be better positioned to do that than a president on her last term, who had nothing to lose?

  The potential for upheaval in the next year was staggering.

  Margarethe was going to need all the help she could get, including mine, including that of all the people around me, and it was up to me, for once, not to turn my back and let Nations of Earth muddle along its own misguided path, but to do the best I could to represent the truth. We’d had two decades of sticking heads in the sand on this issue. Earth’s society had become more backward-looking and insular than it had been when knowledge of gamra first became official.

  Veyada led the way through the protester crowd, most of whom were calmly waiting to file out the door into the forecourt.

  My team drew around me to shelter me and the Pengali from the mass of people. An official was yelling through a microphone for people to leave. Others shouted at him. Several people were still chanting. Outside, people were packing up the camp, and sometimes the police even attempted to help.

  I could see the hands in the fountain, and the tents and a lot more people. More police and Nations of Earth personnel, one of whom came to me.

  “Mr Wilson, the bus is out the back. We will take you to your hotel.”

  “Thanks, but there is no need. I can make my own way home. It’s not far.”

  “The court has ordered us to see you out of here safely.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” I glanced at Evi and Telaris and Sheydu, all of whom looked tense.

  “We insist. It’s for your safety. The court and Nations of Earth would be hugely embarrassed if something happened to you.”

  I gave him a hard look. He was a clean-shaven officer with olive skin and brown eyes. He had probably been ordered to collect us. I made my voice as insistent as I could make it. “You can tell your superiors that I have my own security, and rather a lot of it. Thank you for the offer, but we won’t need it. Goodbye.”

  I turned away from him, pushing the trolley.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  THE NATIONS OF EARTH security guard wasn’t happy about me walking off, oh no; that was written all over his face. But I suspected that the presence of an unpredictable crowd—or at least a crowd not unequivocally friendly towards the guards and police—stopped him and his colleagues from using any form of physical threat on me. They might well have been ordered to use any means to keep me under control, but also not to display, let alone threaten me with, weapons.

  We pushed through into the crowd, and they stayed behind, talking to each other and into their communication devices.

  I stopped at the fountain with the linked hands and called the others around me. “What do we need to know? I want to get out of here as soon as possible without falling under their influence again, without armed skirmishes.”

  “The others have left the accommodation,” Veyada said.

  “What? Why?”

  “We’re leaving, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Eirani and Karana have packed up our rooms and Devlin and the guards have packed up the tech. They’re waiting with a bus.”

  That was a relief. “Can they come here?”

  “Apparently vehicles need a special permit to come into the town centre. We’re going to have
to meet them.”

  I glanced at Sheydu, who was untangling a set of detonators she had pulled out of her pocket. She gave me a pointed look. She definitely didn’t think we could get out of here without trouble.

  “Who is watching us and where?”

  “I’m not so worried about who,” Sheydu said.

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  “Their numbers. They’re up there, and up there and there.” She pointed to the building to the left and the building to the right of the courthouse. “They’re also with the riot police down the street.”

  “What do you mean ‘they’? Tamerians?”

  “Can’t tell that from here. Just spies. They have vehicles stationed along the edges of the dead zone. There is also a Nations of Earth vehicle waiting for us at the accommodation, and a hover jet at the airport.”

  “They really want to get rid of us, it seems.”

  Veyada said, “Amarru says we should make our own way back. She guarantees a safe trip on a commercial flight tonight, but if we want to catch that, we need to get going. The bus belongs to someone from the Exchange register.” That was the directory of people, mostly Coldi in various positions and jobs on Earth, that any gamra citizen could call on for help. “Some of us know the locality. We should make it to the vehicle as soon as possible.”

  “I get you, but how do we get out of here without confronting the Special Services guards? I have no desire either to be forced to go with them or to create a fuss.”

  “We have to divide into groups,” Sheydu said. “There will be one or two groups simply walking to the vehicle, which is not far from here, but which will shift according to the projected safest route out of here, and there will be another group of us with the skills to shadow and protect the other groups.”

  We then discussed who would go in what group. Sheydu said that we shouldn’t all use the same route and that it should be unclear where we were going. Apparently, not even the hotel staff were informed that we were gone, so we still held the element of surprise.

  I wondered if this level of precaution was necessary, but clearly my team knew a lot more than I did and they thought it was. I could only hope that I would hear about it once we were safe. Meanwhile, we had this awkward trolley that we couldn’t move fast and definitely wouldn’t be able to run with. And we had Jemiro, who couldn’t run at all. There were enough steps and curbs to make me disinclined to take the drum through the streets.

  While we had been talking, Evi had flicked through a couple of screens on his reader. He was looking at maps—no, satellite pictures.

  Then I remembered something. “How recent are those images?” I asked him.

  “The images? This morning. You can see the police vehicles around the corner and the tents outside the building.”

  I also saw something else: the dinghy that the Pengali had used to come here the previous night and we had never returned to the tourist boat jetty. It still lay in the canal at the bottom of the rickety ladder. So we should split up and go different ways, huh?

  I turned to Ynggi. “I think we might go for a little trip by boat.” I showed him the image. His face lit up. Sheydu gave me a dark look. Somehow our latest adventures always involved boats.

  Coldi did not like water, and this was true for Sheydu in particular, much as she tried to hide it. She put down her pack, and dug out an object the size of a bar of soap.

  “Waterproof explosives.”

  I feared as much. Hopefully we wouldn’t need them.

  First we had to get to the water without attracting too much attention. Not all of us were going to fit in that dinghy either, especially not if the irrka drum had to come, and there didn’t seem to be an easy way to transport it otherwise.

  We decided that I would go with the Pengali, because they could believably make the argument that it was the way they had arrived here, and they should take the dinghy back to its owners.

  Jemiro should also come, because he probably couldn’t run and really needed medical attention.

  I wanted Thayu to come. She didn’t look well, but like the other Coldi, she only pretended not to mind getting close to bodies of water. She insisted on staying on dry land.

  Veyada would come with us.

  The others were better suited to making themselves scarce in a crowd since they’d all had that mysterious spy and sniper training at Asto.

  “And you’re all armed,” I added to that.

  At that moment, Thayu took a cloth bag from under her coat and pressed it into my hands. I recognised the familiar shape through the material. Damn, the gun. How had she smuggled that into this high-security area? I quickly put it inside my jacket. Then Telaris handed me my body armour.

  “Put it on,” Thayu said.

  Knowing she would not leave me until I did it, I took off my jacket and wormed myself into the armour. It was going to be pretty uncomfortable wearing it over the top of my shirt, but I wasn’t taking my shirt off. I looped the gun bracket around my chest and closed the jacket over it.

  There.

  I hoped no one would ever get to see what I carried under there.

  “I wish you would come with us,” I said to her in a low voice.

  She shrugged. She didn’t even argue with me about how the dinghy would be loaded up already, and how they would be more nimble protecting us from the quay, all arguments I expected to hear from her, but she just shook her head.

  “Hey, are you all right?” I touched her under the chin, looking into those gold-flecked dark eyes. Her face had lost all the rosy-cheeked complexity it had displayed earlier this morning.

  She didn’t even answer the question.

  I squeezed her arm. “Look after yourself.”

  She pressed her lips together. Not well at all. A wave of worry washed over me.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “The sooner we’re out of here, the better.” Jemiro, too, looked like he might collapse any moment.

  The Nations of Earth guards and police stood around the perimeter of the forecourt, watching warily, knowing that if something blew up, they’d be vastly outnumbered.

  The area hummed with an atmosphere of nervous activity. People were packing, gathering in groups, looking just as keen to get out of here safely as we were. I overheard some talk that the police had ordered the area vacated and that there were groups of riot police gathering in surrounding streets; and according to the satellite imagery I’d seen on Veyada’s reader, that was correct.

  The amplified voice of a man boomed through the street. He spoke about leaving the area peacefully. That was exactly what Dharma had told the people to do. The fight would be fought in politics, in information, in the media. If anyone was creating tension here in the street, it was the police.

  We pushed the trolley past the fountain.

  The paving was a lot rougher here and it was hard to see where we were going because of all the people cramming around us. Many carried big bags.

  Someone from the police or the guards was still yelling through a microphone for people to be calm and make their way out of the street peacefully.

  “It’d be a lot more peaceful if he stopped screaming,” a man next to me said.

  We arrived at the steps that led to the street. Several people helped us lift the entire trolley with Jemiro on it. His eyes were half open, and he almost fell off the trolley.

  “What’s wrong with him?” a man wanted to know.

  If only we knew. We needed to get him to the Exchange quickly, because a local hospital would not be able to help him.

  Groups of people ran across our path, away from the area to our left where all the noise was coming from.

  “What’s there?” I asked.

  “Tram stop,” Veyada said. “People are going home. The police demand to see identification.”

  “Better stay away from those police then.”

  We crossed the dedicated driverless vehicle road. The section on the other side was paved with cobblestones that
made our progress slow and awkward. The hotel trolley was not made for this. One of the wheels was already starting to come loose.

  A volley of shouts broke out to our left, accompanied by dull thuds. A smoke canister flew through the air and landed in the waiting crowd. People ran, covering their noses and mouths.

  The amplified male voice called, “Please move away from this area. I repeat, please move away . . .”

  I said, “Come. It’s not far, let’s carry this thing.”

  Between Veyada, myself and the Pengali, we lifted the trolley. It was heavy and awkward to carry, because the only place to hold it were the edges of the platform and they cut into my hands. I couldn’t carry my part of the load with just one hand, so I had to walk sideways. People ran around us. Clouds of acrid smoke wafted over the street. My eyes stung with it.

  Ynggi started coughing. We had to put the trolley down for him to catch his breath. I couldn’t see anything in the street behind us except figures running through the smoke. The forecourt to the court building lay deserted, with debris from the camp scattered around. All the people were at the tram stop where the male voice still ordered people to go home and be calm over the noise of people shouting and thuds that made me think there was a fight going on.

  I said, “Ready? Let’s cover the rest of the distance in one go.”

  Just as we had picked up the trolley, three police officers on horses came onto the forecourt.

  Ynggi gasped and stopped. “What are those?”

  “Those are horses.”

  “They’re so big.” His eyes were wide.

  “Yes, but not dangerous. Now let’s keep going.” Before they noticed us with this big thing.

  We struggled on and reached the edge of the quay. Ynggi climbed down the ladder first—I don’t think he believed me about the horses—followed by Veyada. Abri, Kita and I lifted the drum over the edge into the hands of Veyada and Ynggi. Veyada mainly, because Ynggi was too short to reach.

  Just as well Veyada was strong.

  They put the drum in the middle of the dinghy, across the seats. Veyada and I managed to wrestle Jemiro down. Veyada half sat, half lay him against one of the benches. He didn’t have to say anything for me to know that things were not well. Jemiro’s skin had felt clammy and cold. His face was sickly grey and his eyes glazed over.