by Blake Banner
“Steroids?”
Frank sighed again. “They’re developed by Omega at the labs in Pakistan. They induce a state that is both passively receptive and highly excitable. Subjects can work up to thirty-six hours without rest. We’ve tried it on a couple of individual subjects and the results are pretty amazing. Their personal output went up by like...” He shook his head. “I don’t know, three hundred percent? Maybe more.” He shrugged. “It opens up the possibility of using women and children as laborers too. I’d be pretty surprised if they don’t go with that.”
I studied Nelson’s face. “You’re down with that?”
He sighed like I was being embarrassingly naïve. “These people… they are little more than animals. I mean...” He gave a small laugh. “What are their lives? You have seen the desert out here. They are born here, they live forty, fifty years, sixty at the most, they die and their bones are picked by the animals. They live in superstition, with spirits and tribal gods. They cannot read. They have no schooling. To work on a project like this, it is a dream come true for them. And for the time they are working, taking the steroids, they feel powerful and strong. It is a blessing for them.” He shook his head again. “You don’t understand these people like we do.”
I turned to Frank. “So, what are the side effects of the steroids?”
“One in a hundred might develop tumors, not necessarily malignant. One in two hundred might get an enlargement of some organ, like the heart or the kidneys, or even the brain. But we figure it’s an acceptable risk.”
I smiled. “You figure it’s an acceptable risk.”
Bob was shaking his head at the floor. “But, in any case, I really think you are asking all the wrong questions. As Nelson said, these…” He waved his hand. “These folk are barely human. That’s true. They are primitive to the point of being practically simian. But, hey, you know what? I wouldn’t actually treat my dog the way we are treating these workers. Nevertheless, you have to ask yourself the question: What are we doing it for?” He stared at me, wide-eyed, and gave a small laugh. “Have you any idea what this reactor is going to achieve? It will supply the entire globe with clean energy, for the next ten thousand years, at a cost of a few hundred thousand rand a year just to maintain the physical infrastructure and the core personnel. It means the end of coal, gas and petrol. It means the end of the internal combustion engine. It means clean air, clean oceans, a stabilized environment…” His eyes were alive with passion. “Frankly, if a few kaffas have to be sacrificed to achieve that end, I think it’s a small price to pay.”
Njal spoke for the first time in a while. “You think maybe that’s because it’s not you paying the price?”
He drew breath to answer, but then bit back the words. Instead he said, “So what do you plan to do with us?”
I still needed their cooperation, so I managed to look slightly surprised. “I plan to send you back to work.” I turned to Frank. “When do you report to Omega?”
“Once a week, on a Friday, I fly down to Cape Town for a progress meeting. Usually the guys come with me.”
“Who do you meet with?”
“I…” He shook his head. “I can’t…”
I turned to Bob and put a 9mm slug through his right kneecap. He screamed like a fifteen-year-old girl and fell on the floor clutching his leg. His shin and foot were sticking out at a grotesque angle. I turned back to Frank, who was staring at Bob with wide eyes and a gaping mouth.
“Who do you meet with?”
He started shaking his head again. His face was distressed. Bob was still screaming. Frank kept saying, “No, no…”
I shot Bob through the head and he went quiet and lay still, except that his hands and feet twitched occasionally. His blood pooled slowly under his head. I said:
“This is because I didn’t remove your thumbs when we started. Now, Frank, let me see if I can make you understand this: The way things are going, Bob is going to be the lucky one.” I turned to Nelson and Ken. “You two are going to pay the price for Frank’s heroism. I am going to ask him one more time. No answer, and we start removing limbs.” I turned to Frank and almost felt compassion for him. His face was tight and contracted, his eyes wide and staring. I said, “How about it, Frank? Take a moment to assimilate the fact that you have no choice. Now answer me. Who do you meet with from Omega?”
“Pi…”
“Good. You know who he is?”
An imperceptible nod. “Ruud Van Dreiver…”
“Good. That’s very good. You’re doing well, we are almost done. All I need now is the plans for the building. I don’t care about the reactor. All I want is the building.”
He pointed toward the dining table. “My computer…”
“Go with my colleague. Show him your password.”
He closed his eyes and sat for a full five seconds, breathing deep, shuddering breaths. Then he stood. Njal showed him a pen drive and he closed his eyes again. His face was gray. He went with Njal. They spent ten minutes on the computer and Njal looked over at me and nodded. “OK, I got it.”
Frank stared into my eyes across the room. “You said if we cooperated, you would let us go.”
I nodded. “I did. How much do you know about Omega’s long-term plans?”
“What little they have told us in seminars…”
Nelson interrupted. “Humanity is a plague. It is destroying its host and will eventually destroy itself. Omega plans to save the planet, and in so doing, to preserve what good humanity has created: democracy, medicine, the great philosophies, science. They will build a great library…”
I interrupted him. “And the price humanity pays for this great salvation is eight billion lives sacrificed so that a small elite can move into the new Eden.”
He shook his head. “Those who survive into the new age do so because they are of a higher order than common humanity. It’s nature who wipes out the plague, not Omega.”
I smiled. “And what makes you of a higher order, Nelson?”
He put a long finger to his head. “My mind, my clarity of vision, my understanding.”
I looked up at Frank. “And you?”
He sighed and shook his head. “It is beyond your understanding. It’s our ability to see beyond the petty, and understand the grand design.”
I smiled at Ken. “Whose grand design, Ken?”
“Pi’s…”
“Not Alpha’s?”
Frank went very still. His voice was tense, wooden. “Alpha is dead.”
“Is he?”
Terror and realization dawned on him at the same time. He half whispered, “You…”
“Yeah, me.”
I shot him between his eyes. Njal shot Nelson in the back of the head and I put two slugs through Ken’s heart. Then there was a strange stillness in the room. Stan Getz was playing the Girl from Ipanema, Nelson was sagging forward and blood was pooling on his lap, trickling down from a large hole in his forehead.
Njal said, “Now we got a problem.”
I pointed at the vodka and the gin. “Grab the bottles and wait by the door.”
He looked at me like I was crazy, but did what I said. When he was safely behind me, I emptied a few more rounds into the sofa and the bodies, then opened up with the Heckler and Koch, ripping the bodies and the sofa and the armchairs to shreds, and stripping kindling from the bar and the table, making the chairs spin and dance across the floor. When I’d emptied the magazine, I said, “OK, let’s go.”
We swung into the Land Rover and, keeping the lights off, sped out of the compound and onto the N7, accelerating north at sixty miles an hour. The moon was higher and the visibility was better, but moonlight can be misleading, and you have to be really careful, or it can lead you far astray.
At the second major bend in the road, we turned west of north and plunged into the desert. Once off the blacktop, we slowed to a steady twenty-five, trailing large, billowing clouds of moonlit dust behind us.
After a while, Njal said, “
What’s your thinking? Or are you just going fucking crazy?”
“The Range Rover is gone, so is the money, and so are the bottles of booze and the girls. But the computer is still there. There are three different types of rounds in the room, the predominant one being from an assault rifle, fired recklessly. When they dust the place, they are going to find prints from the girls as well as from the victims. The picture won’t be crystal clear, but it will paint a picture that suggests a raid by a gang, rather than an interrogation and an execution. The victims picked up some hookers. The hookers’ boyfriends or pimps showed up, killed the victims, stole their money and their booze, and left with the girls, leaving the laptop behind them. Hence, they were not interested in the computer or its contents.”
He was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “That sounds like wishful thinking.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but it’s all we got.”
We didn’t return to the rocks where we had been keeping watch on Goodhouse. We returned to the gully with the overhanging rocks where we had left the Land Rover. There we hung a tarp from the two trucks, made a small fire, sat around it in silence and brewed some coffee.
When the coffee was done, Njal poured us each a cup and handed me mine.
“Wishful thinking aside, Lacklan, this is gonna put Omega on red alert.”
“I know. Maybe. Either way, we need to assume it will.”
He frowned at me. “So…?” His frown deepened further. “And what do you mean, maybe?”
“Every hit we have made so far has been directed against the actual members of Omega themselves.”
He made a skeptical face. “That’s true.”
I went on. “In this case, the members of Omega are congregating on the south coast, at the other end of the country.”
He made a different kind of skeptical face with a touch of ‘maybe’ in it.
I continued, “Also, they will be looking for the Range Rover, and when they find it, it will be in Cape Town. There is nothing in the attack that immediately and positively speaks of a threat to the reactor…”
“Except the death of the architects.”
“Think again, Njal. I already told you, the laptop was left behind, which speaks to a lack of interest in the project. Plus, the four guys we killed were lower middle managers, and they were careless, taking hookers back to the cabin. They were only recently initiated into Omega, knew practically nothing of the organization and were overseeing the construction of the building, not the reactor itself. We have caused exactly zero damage to the project so far. So…”
“So?”
“So, they will increase security, they will search for the Range Rover, and they will wait. Nothing will happen. After a few days, they will conclude it was a random home invasion. The theft of the booze and the money, and the wild, erratic use of firearms will tend to confirm that view. Like I said, probably some boys associated with the girls they’d picked up.”
He puffed out his cheeks and blew. “You are very confident, my friend.”
“It’s a front, believe me.”
“What do you mean, nothing will happen?”
“We need to get the contents of that computer to Jim. He needs to analyze it and we need expert guidance, not only on how to blow the damn thing, but whether it can be destroyed at all. That is going to take a few days at least. During that time, we do absolutely nothing here at the site.”
He nodded, then narrowed his eyes. “Here at the site…”
“I’m going to Knysna.”
“You. You are going…”
“You have to stay here.”
Now he looked mad. “What?”
“Think about it, Njal. Stay with me and follow my reasoning. They are going to be on high alert for a few days at least. As soon as the Range Rover shows up in Cape Town, they are going to be looking at Knysna, which is just five or six hours’ drive from Cape Town, as well as being the site of the Omega summit, where the five heads of the cabal will meet. That is where they are going to perceive the threat. That is where they are going to focus. Agreed?”
“Yuh, and that is why…”
I held up a hand. “Stay with me. Now, that is going to take the heat off the reactor, at least for a while, which means that as soon as you get a reply from Jim, you can start laying the plans to destroy this place. It also means that if I don’t make it back, you can at least destroy the reactor. If we both go to Knysna, we both risk getting killed there, then nobody can finish the job.”
He stared at me a long time. Finally, he said, “You sent the girls to Cape Town deliberately, to deflect attention from the reactor. When you said we had two options, an ambush or go look for them, you had already planned this and made up your mind…”
I sighed. “Not exactly, Njal, but it made sense that if they were the foremen of the site, they would have cash for expenses, to pay the laborers, that kind of stuff. It seemed like a good opportunity to make the hit look like a theft. I was going to take the Range Rover to Cape Town, but the girls were a bonus and made that unnecessary.”
He still looked mad. “OK, but next time, you run the fuckin’ plan by me first, Lacklan. You don’t fuckin’ maneuver me into it. That ain’t cool.”
“Understood.”
“So when you gonna go?”
“I’ll grab four hours sleep and leave around four AM. Meantime, you send the files on the pen drive to Jim and await his instructions. Apart from that, we maintain total radio and cyber silence. I shouldn’t be more than a couple of days or three. If it runs over, I’ll let you know. If you haven’t heard from me in five days, assume I’m dead.”
He nodded. “OK.” He stared at the fire a while, the small orange flames dancing on his long, angular face. After a while, he twisted his mouth into a snarl. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that you didn’t tell me what you were thinking. The plan is OK, but you should have told me.”
“I apologize. It won’t happen again. But we need to move past it now.”
“OK. Go sleep. I keep watch.”
EIGHT
Before sleeping, I had booked an Audi A4 from Hertz at the Springbok Airport. Jim had already booked a log cabin at the Dylan Thomas luxury holiday resort in Knysna. So I prepared a small kit bag with the weapons I thought I might need, took the Land Rover to Springbok, which was a two hour drive and got me there at six thirty that morning, left the Land Rover in the airport parking lot, and picked up the Audi A4, which I figured would fit in better with the clientele at the Dylan Thomas Resort.
After coffee at the airport, I set off on the eight hour drive to Knysna, aiming to get there by three or four in the afternoon. The drive was long and tedious, and the landscape dry, semi desert and largely unchanging for the two hundred miles from Springbok to Vanrhynsdorp. However, soon after that, the road bore east and began to climb into the Boland Mountains at the back of the Cape, heading through broad, lush fields toward Worcester and the Haweqwa and Riviersondorend Nature Reserves. There the landscape changed and became greener and easier on the eye.
The drive through the mountain pass took a little over an hour, and soon I had left Cape Town and the Atlantic Ocean behind. I was out on the south coast, with the Indian Ocean on my right bringing in warm, moist air, and only a hundred and fifty miles to go to Knysna. To my surprise, here the landscape was Mediterranean, with broad, fertile fields, semi arid hills and an abundance of pine trees, the whole area dotted with incongruous village names like Heidelberg and Albertina.
Finally, at four in the afternoon, I rolled down out of the hills that looked as though they belonged in southern France and drove the last stretch from George to Knysna with the windows down and the sea air battering my face, blowing away the cobwebs of exhaustion of the last couple of days. Most of the way, the Indian Ocean lay deep and blue on my right, reflecting broken sheets of light across the white beaches and rocky headlands of the coast. And, just before I reached Buffalo Bay, outside Knysna, I noticed a small village practically on the be
ach, where a range of old, painted fishing boats were drawn up on the sand, strung with nets. That made me smile.
The Dylan Thomas Resort was a collection of luxury log cabins that sprawled across the steep side of a hill which led down from Knysna town to a turquoise lagoon fed by the Indian Ocean, slightly to the south, and a couple of nameless rivers in the north. The cabins were connected by a network of rambling paths that wound through scattered pinewoods and copses which enclosed the cabins in discreet privacy, and housed myriad birds including African wood pigeons, robins and golden orioles. The place was beautiful and for a short while I indulged the fantasy of coming here on holiday with Marni, instead of coming on a mission to assassinate five people I had never met.
The fantasy passed and I wound down the track to the reception building, where there was also a café, a restaurant and a cocktail bar, all constructed in African hardwood with thatched roofs over large plate glass windows allowing panoramic views of the lagoon. I parked my car in the lot and sat a moment looking at my face in the mirror, thinking about the week’s growth of beard on my chin, and thinking also that it was not such a bad thing. Coupled with an English accent learned from my mother, to be used on our visits to her parents, it might serve as something of a disguise.
I climbed out of the car, crossed the lot and checked in at a reception desk where a pretty girl who said her name was Janine gave me a key and said my cabin was the Polly Garter cabin, up the path and on the right. I told her in a flawless imitation of Hugh Grant that Polly would have to wait until I’d had a martini, extra dry, and she laughed like I was the funniest man on the planet. Then she asked me if my bags were in the trunk.
“Nicked in Jo’burg,” I told her. “I shall have to restock my wardrobe while I’m here. Perhaps you could lend a hand.”
She winked at me. “Which one, the right or the left?”
