Mosaic (20 page)

“There may not be much time. If someone comes—”

“We don't need much. Just long enough for you to be seen leaving the building. Have you your passport on you? Then forget about your luggage, go straight to the airport and get on the first plane going anywhere. With luck they won't even think about you until you're out of the country. Even if they do pick you up, all they can do is ask you what we talked about. Half Pretoria will know I shot myself after you left.”

“Shot—yourself?” Liz's weapon wavered off target as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying.

“You heard.”

“You want my gun?”

“No, thank you,” he said politely, pulling a cannon from beneath the bedclothes, “I have my own.”

She regarded it with that supreme calm which is the only possible alternative to panic in certain extreme situations. Eventually she remembered to breathe. “How long have you had that thing pointing at me?”

De Witte raked up a small smirk of professional pride. “Since about five seconds after you pointed yours at me.”

Liz closed her eyes for a moment, trying to marshal her thoughts. She felt her firm, desperate grip on events beginning to slide. She felt that if she lost control now she would never wrest it back, the chaos would come pouring in and drown her. She looked from his gun to hers. It was trembling slightly. It had come to feel very large—not heavy, particularly, though perhaps heavier than it looked, but cumbrous and awkward and out of place. It was not part of her style, pointing guns at sick old men in hospital beds. She wished she could put it away. She wished she knew what De Witte was thinking.

She said, “Let me get this straight. You think I'm going to put this thing back in my bag, say a fond farewell to your bodyguard and walk out of here, trusting in your word as a gentleman that once I am clear of the building and thus beyond suspicion you will put a bullet in your own brain?”

“That's about it,” agreed De Witte.

“Do I look stupid?” demanded Liz.

“No. Up till now you haven't acted stupidly, either; rashly perhaps, but not stupidly. Don't spoil it now.”

“I've come six thousand miles to kill you!”

“You came six thousand miles to save my son. There's a difference. You achieved your aim when you told me who he is. You don't need to risk yourself any further. There's nothing you can do now that I can't do better.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Yes you do. Because if I'd wanted you dead, I wouldn't have shown you this”—he waved the big gun negligently—“I'd have used it.”

“Then I don't trust you. Joel Grant is your last chance. Without his heart you'll be dead within weeks. Knowing what you should do and doing it are two different things: I don't know what I'd do, so how can I trust you? Once I'm out of this room and on my way home, what's to stop you having second thoughts? It's not as if you have to do anything. All you have to do is nothing, and you live.”

“And my son dies.”

“You don't know him. You've only met to exchange hatreds and hurts. You wouldn't like him if you could meet again.”

De Witte smiled, a shade wanly. “How many fathers do like their sons? How many sons like their fathers? Infanticide is still frowned on in polite society.”

“This isn't a joke,” cried Liz, indecision and frustration tormenting her.

“No, it isn't. It's my son's life we're talking about. I gave him that life and knew nothing about it. Two years ago I came close to killing him, still unknowing; I would have killed him, eventually, without the intervention of that damned Kaffir who was there for him when I wasn't. You don't get too many second chances in this world, girl, but I've got one now: to give my son life again, and to know it and pleasure in it like fathers are supposed to, and all it's going to cost me is a few weeks of sickness I can do well enough without anyway.”

Against all her inclinations, Liz found herself trusting him. She believed he would kill himself in the hope of saving his son, and to save her the consequences of doing it. But once she left the room there would be no going back. She would have chanced her own life on his sincerity, but to chance Joel's she needed to be more than sure.

She said, subtly persuasive, “You could have his life. You could be well again. He was never a son you could be proud of: not only a traitor to his blood but a deserter from his cause. I'm fond of him, but even I don't think he'll ever amount to anything.”

De Witte regarded her at once sternly and with kindness. “If I didn't know what you were doing I'd tell you to stop being disgusting and go away. As it is I'll just tell you to go away. Now. Please?”

She went. She went unsteadily, her emotions tearing her both ways, her mind that had been so sure and determined now a maelstrom of conflicts, an upheaval. She believed he would keep his word, but the awesome responsibility of having thrust that on him, coupled with the implosive anticlimax that came of tooling up, actually and psychologically, to execute a terrible deed only to have it taken from her at the last moment, had left her in a kind of shock, reeling and uncertain. She fumbled the little gun back into her purse and groped for the door.

“Liz!” De Witte hissed after her, and when she forced herself to face him he smiled and said, “Bravely.”

She took his meaning. Her head came up, her back straightened and she went out of the room with a quick smile for his guards. Before the door closed between them De Witte called to her, in a marvellously ordinary voice, “And if you do see him again, Liz, give him my love.”

She nodded without looking back and walked quickly to the lift.

The lift dropped slowly and the entrance hall was full of people cutting her off from the day. She smiled and nodded automatically at anyone who looked her way. She felt to be moving in a trance. At every moment she anticipated outcry behind her.

The bright day beyond the glass doors restored her equilibrium somewhat. She stood in the afternoon sun, taking deep breaths of the warm scented air and pushing the freshness into the bottom of her lungs. Then she looked up.

His room was at the front of the building, on the top floor. She did not know which window. They all looked alike, bright and blank as idiot eyes in front of no soul, impervious of tragedy and triumph alike. There was no way of knowing what, if anything, was happening behind them.

For perhaps two minutes she wrestled with the fear that he would go back on his word, and with the urge to return and find out what was happening. If he chose not to die, perhaps believing that he could bully those around him into abandoning their monstrous ambition, choosing to ignore the reality that all the oaths in the world would not stop them slipping him a Micky Finn with his medication and acting in accord with their own and his best interests rather than his expressed wishes, De Witte would not be to blame—she would. She had held his fate, and Grant's, in the palm of her hand, and there was no escaping the fact that—however good the reasons, however plausible the promises—she had left De Witte alive when only his death offered any hope of saving Joel.

But in the deepest recesses of her soul she still trusted him; and anyway it was too late to go back. If he had betrayed her there were men seeking her now; if he had not she risked wasting his generosity by hanging around here. She raised a hand to hail a taxi.

As she climbed in she heard, far above her head, a faint heavy report, muffled by glass, as if someone had slammed a door. She did not look up. She told the driver to take her to Johannesburg, to the airport. Long before she got there the tears were splashing

on her hands folded in her lap, and she did not know for whom

she wept.

When the Hastings was clear of British airspace Vanderbilt vented a long, deeply sincere sigh of relief. And immediately began to feel badly about the whole messy operation.

If he was honest with himself, which was something Vanderbilt tried to be, it was not any of the specific actions which had been required of him that was causing this bad taste in his mouth. There was none he had not done before, without compunction or regret. He wished he had a rand for every time he had used his strength against people who were not his physical equal: women, men, kids, the hurt, the bound, the frightened. None of it was novel, and while he derived no great pleasure from it he accepted the need for it to be done and the desirability of it being done efficiently. Nor was it the first time his success had been crowned by another man's death.

If he was honest, what rankled most was the trail of disorder he had left behind him. Good operations were swift and smooth, and after the mechanic had gone home all that was left to show he had been was the body of his mark, or the burning building, or the empty file where important papers used to be. A good mechanic did not attract attention to himself. Vanderbilt was troubled, and indeed ashamed, that he had left a trail Shola could follow, and deeply bothered that he would not even have won the success that confounds criticism but for the intervention of some smooth-faced ruthless little commando from Carver's army who, except for a fluke of politics, would have been against him rather than with him. Yet when he reviewed the thing objectively he could not see where or how he should have acted differently.

He shrugged off his seat-belt and edged out into the aisle. There were only a few rows of seats immediately behind the bulkhead; all the space in the central fuselage was filled with crates. They were stamped for Egypt and for Zaire, but one of them was going further. Vanderbilt slouched down the aisle, the seats on either side brushing his thighs, to where they had parked the smallish crate loaded at the last minute from the van.

The flight engineer had noticed and asked what it was; the pilot had told him spare parts. The engineer had gone up to the flight-deck without comment, but he had not appeared greatly surprised by either the last-minute crate or the unexpected supercargo in overalls. If he did not know Kane was working something on the side he guessed; either he was paid off or he genuinely did not care. Vanderbilt made no enquiries: the crew was Kane's responsibility, if he wanted to go on flying he had presumably safeguarded himself as far as they were concerned.

They had left the last crate accessible, abutting the aisle and with nothing on top of it. Vanderbilt stood for a while looking down at it, his hands in his pockets. Then he looked round for something to use as a crowbar and prised the lid off.

Grant lay on his side, curled round, with his knees drawn up. He made no response to the sudden light. He was deeply unconscious. Vanderbilt, wondering leaned closer. Grant's breathing was deep and even, and under his jaw the pulse was firm and steady. He was sleeping, not dying. Pretoria had been right and Grant wrong. And Vanderbilt had been wrong not to use the hypodermic back at the cottage. He would have been home by now if he had, and Piet the helicopter pilot would have gone home to his wife.

Vanderbilt went on gazing at the man in the crate, thinking about what the man with the broken arm had said. That was the reason for that sudden, extraordinary flash of recognition he had experienced: something of the expression, something of the personality of the big old man floating like a mirage in the thin pale face of his sleeping child.

And if that much was true, the rest probably was too. It explained what he had been unable to understand before, how a defunct terrorist could be of sufficient value after two years out in the cold to be worth risking an international furore over. It also explained that odd emphasis Botha had placed on his captive's health. Looking down at Grant's passive, ambiguous face he wondered what terrible divisions in a family could result in a man and his son taking up arms against each other; and worse than arms. Vanderbilt knew what had been done to Joel Grant in his father's house, and he believed Will Hamlin's murmured, fainting accusation. The man had been too tired and confused to lie, his allegation too terrible to be other than true.

He waited for some feeling about that to come and none did. Feelings were not really his line of business. All that he could get his mind round was that Joachim De Witte was his chief, for whom he had untold respect and no small affection, and that Joel Grant was not. He realized that made him an emotional bankrupt, and found he had no strong feelings about that either.

He wandered over to a window. The Hastings was at height and over sea. He wandered up to the flight-deck. The engineer looked at him incuriously, the copilot did not even turn round. When Kane saw him he waved him brusquely back. Vanderbilt shrugged and walked back down the plane. A couple of minutes later the pilot joined him.

“Listen, you'd better stay away from those two. They've been paid off, but I'd just as soon they never knew what they've been paid off for.”

“All right,” Vanderbilt said mildly.

“I mean, Christ Almighty, it's not like a box of rifles or illicit currency, is it?”

“No,” agreed Vanderbilt.

“Hell, we all got in the way of carrying extras when they started that sanctions nonsense over Rhodesia, but washing machines and televisions is one thing and people is another, and people being taken somewhere they don't want to go is a different thing again, right?”

“Quite so,” Vanderbilt agreed smoothly, bridling his irritation but not so closely that Kane should not catch a dangerous glimpse of it. “Which is why you were not expected to help us out of the mere goodness of your heart.” As he said it he winced. There were a number of expressions he was going to have to foreswear after this, because of their loaded meanings.

Kane, who had not been close enough to hear what Hamlin said, did not notice. Nervousness was enough to make him argumentative. “Oh yes, I'm sure it seems a hell of a lot of money to you. But you take out of it the extra fuel, landing charges, sweeteners for those two up front, ditto for people on the ground, and it stops looking quite so generous. And then it may have to last me a very long time, if I can't go home.…”