Mountain of Black Glass (12 page)

But even if he had little interest anymore in investing the hard work of maintaining a social life, had weighed the pros and cons and reconciled himself largely to celibacy and—much more frightening—perhaps a solitary old age, he had not entirely given up his dreams. In all those years of fiercely hard work, he had never regretted anything except the lack of rest, of time to think. The worst thing about middle age, he had discovered, was that if you weren't careful, your life sped past at such a breakneck pace that an entire year could sneak by and leave no important memories.

So he had yearned through all the years with Susan for a little time to himself, real time and real leisure, not the annual week of taking his mother to play the slot machines at Sun City (while himself hoping for a brief and discreet romance, which had indeed happened a couple of times, a happy encounter at a casino bar after Mama's bedtime, the memory of which would carry him through the rest of the year.) Jeremiah had longed for time to think, to read, to regain at least a little of the young man he had been back in school, when he had felt that living in the world should be synonymous with changing the world. What of all the books he had used to read, the big thoughts, African history, sexual politics? He had been lucky in the Kloof years if he found time to check the traffic reports and download an occasional recipe.

So here he was, after all these years and in this most unexpected way, with nothing to do but read and think, with no company but his own, with no demands on his time and attention that could not have been fulfilled by a four-year-old child. He had exactly what he had wanted for so long. And he hated it.

 

Now that Long Joseph had—for lack of a better term—escaped, one of the things that Jeremiah found himself thinking about far more often than he would have liked was the terrible responsibility of being the only person looking out for Renie's and !Xabbu's safety. There had been little need for worry thus far: although their heart rates had spiked several times, nothing had crested above the military's own warning system levels, so he had to assume they were experiencing the normal ins and outs of virtual existence. Not that there was anything actually normal about any of this.

It was nothing new, of course. Throughout his years as Doctor Van Bleeck's companion and protector the responsibility of her safety had weighed on him heavily. Durban had suffered several waves of carjackings and kidnappings, including a year-long reign of terror by one gang of young thugs who routinely murdered drivers just so they could steal a particular automotive opsys bubble chip that was then drawing a high price on the black market. Twice Jeremiah had escaped in high speed chases from threats that he felt were very serious indeed, and once he'd driven away from a crossroad with three hoodlums still clinging to the hood, trying to break the expensive, shatter-resistant glass with tire irons. When the last of the young criminals had tumbled to the pavement and Jeremiah had begun to turn the car back toward home, a shaken Susan had instead asked him to drive her to the hospital. Her heart was beating so swiftly, she later told him, that she had been positive she was going into cardiac arrest.

Even thinking back on that now, he felt cold. There were so many dangers in the world—so many crazy, desperate people!

A deeper and more subtle chill spread through him, a deep unhappiness that made him feel sick to his stomach. Here he stood in this vast underground fortress worrying about how someone had once almost hurt Susan, ignoring the fact that she
had
been hurt, and that in the end he had failed in his duty to her as completely as anyone could fail. Men had broken into the house and had beaten Susan Van Bleeck so badly that she died. All the things Jeremiah had done for her over the years, the dramatic and the domestic, had all come down to that. He had failed to protect her, and they had killed her.

And now he had been planted with ultimate responsibility for two more people—people he could not speak to, could not even see. But if something went wrong, if their hearts stopped, or if someone cut the power to the military base one night while Jeremiah slept, their deaths would still be his fault.

It made him want to follow Renie's father, to flee into the big world outside and leave the responsibility to someone else. But of course there wasn't anyone else, which made the duty even more miserable, more impossible to escape.

Jeremiah was thinking some variant of these thoughts—his mind had been traveling in rather unhappy circles in the days since Long Joseph's midnight departure—when the phone rang for the first time.

 

It was such an astonishingly unexpected noise that at first he did not even know what it was. The incredibly old-fashioned handset slung in its metal cradle on the huge concrete pillar beside the control panels had long ago lost even its initial novelty and become merely another object in his visual field, something that would have attracted his attention only if it had disappeared, and then perhaps not for days. When the insistent ringing began, a purringly metallic tone quite unlike anything he'd ever heard, it sounded five or six times before he even understood where it was coming from.

Decades of secretarial reflexes summoned into operation, for a moment he seriously contemplated answering it—he even had a brief vision of himself picking up the handset and saying
“Hello?”
like someone from a costume drama. Then the full magnitude of the thing came to him and he sat frozen in fear until the ringing stopped. His pulse was just beginning to return to normal rates when the ringing started once more.

The phone rang every five minutes for the next half hour, then stopped again, apparently for good.

After the worst of the surprise was over, he was able to put it aside, even smile at his own reactions. Obviously Martine and Singh had reconnected the telecom lines, otherwise Long Joseph wouldn't have been able to access the net, even in receive-only mode. So if there was a working line, phone calls could get through, too, even random ones. Someone had triggered a number that just happened to belong to Wasp's Nest—perhaps some autodialing machine, perhaps a simple mistake. It would be foolish to pick it up, of course, but even if he did, probably not fatal. Not that he would touch the phone if it happened again—Jeremiah was tired and worried, but not stupid.

It seemed much less academic when the phone rang again four hours later, then rang back every five minutes for another half hour, then stopped again. Even so, he did not panic. It meant nothing, and never would unless he himself answered it, and there was no reason to do that.

The phone continued to ring, sometimes after intervals as short as two hours, sometimes after a hiatus as long as eight hours, or once ten—always the same phone, always with the same, persistent pattern of five minute retries. If it was just gear, Jeremiah decided, just mechanical, then anything so aggressively upsetting must be Satan's own autodialer. But what if it wasn't?

Try as he might, he couldn't imagine anything good that the phone might represent—someone at Power or Communications trying to find out why an abandoned base was sucking from the grid at a greater rate than it had in years, perhaps? Or something even more sinister, the same mysterious people who had mauled Susan and burned down Renie's house and God knew what else? He could not think of anyone they knew who might even guess they were in this place, so there was no reason at all to answer, which should have made the whole thing easier. Still, the constant repetition was maddening. He tried to turn off the phone's ringer, but the ancient device had no external control. An attempt to remove the entire phone from the pillar was equally useless: he wrestled with the frozen bolts for the better part of an afternoon and managed nothing more than to scrape his knuckles bloody, until in a fit of frustrated fury he beat at the phone with the inadequate wrench, dimpling the several layers of bland gray-green paint but not even denting the heavy iron cover.

It went on. The phone rang every day, usually several times a day, and each time it did, he flinched. Sometimes he woke up from his sleep to the sound of the phone, even though he was now sleeping on the far side of the underground base, completely insulated from its noise. But by the end of the first week he heard it anyway, even in his dreams. It rang and rang and rang.

 

“M
AN, you gone a long time. You just get one bottle of wine?” Joseph rolled down the sack and squinted at the label. At least Del Ray had gotten him Mountain Rose as he had asked, which might taste like cat-piss but had a reliable kick.

“It's all yours. I don't drink wine,” Del Ray said. “At least I don't drink the kind of wine they sell around here. I got myself a beer.” He brandished a bottle of Steenlager.

“You should get that Red Elephant.” Joseph upended the squeeze bottle and took a generous swig. “That's a good beer.” He settled on the garage floor with his back against the wall, unmindful of oil stains on his trousers. An hour ago he had been certain he was going to get a bullet in him, not wine, so he was in a very, very good mood. He had even forgiven Renie's old boyfriend for kidnapping him, although he had not entirely given up the idea of punching him a good one in the face, just on principle, to let him know that it wasn't smart to mess with Long Joseph Sulaweyo. But not as long as this Chiume fellow still had that gun tucked in his pocket. “So what is all this foolishness you getting up to?” Joseph asked, smacking his lips. “Why you running around all tooled up like some kind of Pinetown rude boy?”

Del Ray, who had only taken the first sip of his beer, scowled. “Because there are people trying to kill me. Where's Renie?”

“Oh, no.” For once Joseph had right on his side, he felt quite sure. It was a novel feeling and he intended to enjoy it. “You don't come kidnapping and mistreating me and then expect me to answer all your questions.”

“I've still got the gun, you know.”

Long Joseph waved his hand airily. He had this young fellow's number. “Then shoot me. But if you not going to shoot me, then you better tell me what cause you to go snatching people off the street when they are minding their lawful business.”

Del Ray rolled his eyes but did not pursue it. “It's your daughter's fault, and if you don't know about it, you ought to. She came to me, after all. I hadn't talked to her in years. I was married . . . I was married . . .” He fell silent for a long moment, his face morose. “My life was going very well. Then Renie called up with some crazy story about a virtual nightclub, and now it's all gone to hell.”

After Del Ray's explanation of Renie's request and their meeting on the Golden Mile, the younger man fell silent, staring at his beer. “These three fellows came to talk to me,” he said at last. “And everything started to get very, very bad.”

Joseph noted with alarm that there were only a few swallows left in his bottle. He put the cap on and put it on the floor, tucking it just out his line of sight to make it last a bit longer. “Who come talk to you? You said some Boers?”

“Two of them were Afrikaaners. One of them was a black man. The main man, the big ugly white fellow, told me that I had been asking questions that didn't concern me—that I had made some important people very unhappy. They wanted to know who Renie was, and especially why she was talking to some French woman named Martine Desroubins. . . .”

“You are joking. All this about that French woman?”

“You had better believe it's true. I told them I didn't know anything about her or any of that, that Renie was just an old friend who'd asked me a favor. I shouldn't have told them anything, but they scared me.

“They came back a little later and told me Renie wasn't living in the shelter anymore—that you'd moved. They said they needed to speak to her, that they were going to explain to her she would be better off leaving this whole thing alone. So I . . .”

“Wait just one minute!” Long Joseph sat up and almost knocked over his squeeze bottle. Despite his rising anger, he snatched it up protectively. “You the one who tried to sell Renie out, I remember now. You traced her phone call . . . !”

“I . . . I did.”

“I should knock off your head!” His words belied his secret pleasure. This proved exactly what Joseph had always believed about men like Del Ray, university-educated, fancy-suited. “You lucky you still have that gun.”

“Damn it, I didn't want to! But they knew where
I
lived—they came to my front door! And they promised they weren't going to hurt her.”

“Yeah. Believe an Afrikaaner policeman when he say that.”

“These weren't police. These weren't anything
like
police. But they weren't just criminals either. They had to have found out about me from someone high up in UNComm, because they didn't just know I'd been talking to Renie, they knew what I had done for her, who else I'd spoken to, what files I'd accessed. And the phone-tracing gear—I came in to work one day and found someone had put it on my system. No, they weren't just some ordinary bonebreakers. They were connected.”

“So you sold Renie out,” said Joseph, unwilling to be lured from his moral high ground. “You made it so we had to run away.”

Del Ray had lost the urge to fight back. “I made it worse for myself. They told me if I didn't find her, they'd kill my wife. And when I couldn't find her, they got me fired. Then they burned down our house.”

Long Joseph nodded sagely. “They burn our house up, too. I barely pull Renie out in time.”

The younger man was not even listening. “It was something about this Martine woman—they kept asking me why Renie was talking to her, whether I had hooked them up.” He shook his head. “They burned my house down! If they hadn't started the dogs barking, Dolly and I would have both burned to death. It was so fast—some kind of incendiary grenades, the police said.”