The car finally pulled up in a suburb of decaying concrete-block homes, where a feral gang of street kids were taking turns at smashing up a derelict car across the street with a sledgehammer. They fled at the approach of the Mercedes, which parked behind an unmarked black panel van in front of a dingy house. ‘What the hell is this bloody place?’ Grobler demanded. Masango stepped out of the car and motioned for him to follow. Grobler hesitated, thought of the money and swallowed hard. There was no turning back now.
Masango led the way inside the house. Grobler, case in hand, found himself in a room with peeling walls, a single table and chair and two large black men flanking the doorway. Neither of them spoke to him as he walked in, and neither looked like a man with a Jaffa-sized uncut diamond to sell. Odours of mould and rat piss hung thick in the air.
‘Okay, so where’s your client?’ Grobler demanded, working hard to keep his composure. ‘You told me he’d be here. What kind of bullshit are you shovelling on me?’
‘I am authorised to act as his agent,’ Masango said calmly. ‘You will be dealing with me.’
‘You mean he’s not even coming? This is fucked, man. I’m not prepared to do business under these conditions, hear me? Take me back to the hotel. Right away.’
‘Mr Grobler, please. Do not make this difficult. Now, I would like to see the money.’
‘It’s all here,’ Grobler said angrily. ‘Five million US dollars. But you’re not seeing a damned penny of it until I see the diamond. Come on, man. That was the deal.’
‘Of course. We will take you to it after we finish counting the payment.’
Grobler stared. His heart was beginning to thud. ‘Now wait a minute—’
‘Please open the case,’ Masango said quietly. When Grobler hesitated just a fraction too long, Masango gave a nod to one of the heavies. The big black man reached under his jacket and pulled out a huge, wide-bladed cleaver. Masango pointed at the chain and cuff securing the case to Grobler’s wrist. ‘I am sure you would rather open it yourself than have us relieve you of it in a more unpleasant fashion.’ He wasn’t talking about cutting the chain. Meat and bone were much easier to chop with a single blow.
Blinking sweat from his eyes and in danger of letting go of his bowels, Grobler heaved the case onto the table, turned the combination dials to the number that his panicked mind had almost forgotten, and flipped open the locks. He understood enough to know that the business deal had become a robbery, but at this point he no longer cared about the diamond. The trade was now the money for his life, and he was all too willing to sacrifice five million in order to be able to walk out of here. He’d worry about the crippling financial loss later, once he was home safe with a stiff drink.
The big thug with the knife hovered menacingly while Masango stepped forward to count out the blocks of cash crammed inside. Each was tightly compressed in plastic wrap. He used a pocket knife to slice one open at random and thumbed the banknotes with a practised hand, nodded to himself and examined several more before he seemed satisfied that it was all there.
At last, Masango looked up from the table with a smile to the red-faced Grobler. The South African was dripping sweat. It was staining through his shirt. Masango said, ‘Very good. General Khosa thanks you for the donation to his cause.’
It was Khosa himself who had come up with the scheme. He’d begun this enterprise with every intention of selling the diamond on, for an accordingly reduced sum that reflected its nature as a hot item of stolen property. It was only after owning the fabulous object for a couple of days and falling in love with its beauty that he’d realised there was another, much better, way to raise revenue from it. Every criminal diamond fence in Africa would jump at the chance to acquire it at a bargain price, knowing that even as stolen goods they could pass it down the line for a vast profit margin. Its enormous size allowed it to be broken down into a good number of stones that, once cut, would each be unusually large in its own right. Being crooks themselves, they naturally would tell nobody of the wonderful opportunity that had come their way.
Idiots. The lure of the diamond would reel them in, like lambs to the slaughter, one after another. Five million dollars multiplied by the number of greedy fools who would fall for the trick could generate a sum well in excess of what the rock was actually worth, while Khosa still got to keep it for himself. It was the kind of simple, brutal little scam that the General loved.
Of course, once the money had changed hands there was the issue of making sure the fences kept their mouths shut. That was the easy part.
Grobler gaped, too winded with horror to utter a sound, as Masango picked a large empty holdall from the floor by the table and started transferring the money into it. Cramming in the last stack with some difficulty, he zipped the holdall shut and hauled it off the table. Masango then left the room, closing the door behind him. Grobler now found himself alone with Masango’s thugs. All four of them were suddenly clutching knives and advancing on him with stone faces.
And now he did let go of his bowels.
‘Please,’ he croaked, holding out his hands in supplication as he backed away, with nowhere to go. ‘Please.’
The four men closed in on him. They made it quick, not out of mercy for their victim but simply because the sooner they got it done, the sooner they would receive their tiny cut of the money.
When they’d finished with Grobler, they sheathed their knives, waited for Masango to unlock the door and then left the house. Moments after the Mercedes and the black van had gone, the street kids returned to continue bashing the derelict car. It would be a long time before anyone found the body inside the empty house. And even when whatever remains the rats had left were discovered, nobody would care. This was Africa, and no one had a deeper understanding of that fact than Jean-Pierre Khosa and his associates.
Chapter 12
It had been a long and difficult night, that first spent inside the cage. With no blanket to pull over himself, Jude curled up on the hard, bare floor mattress and hugged his sides in a futile attempt to keep warm. Sleep came and went. Some kind of night animal was calling in the distance: the plaintive howl and yip-yip-yip of a jackal or wild dog. Once Jude thought he heard an entirely different sound, the crying of a woman coming from somewhere closer, but he might have been dreaming.
When morning came and he was awoken by the harsh sunlight streaming in through the single barred window of the hut, it wasn’t long before the night chill gave way to murderous heat that ramped up throughout the day until he didn’t think he could stand it anymore. The feeble sigh of a breeze coming from the window barely reached him, even if he pressed himself right up against the bars of the cage to get close to it.
With nothing to do but sweat, Jude spent his hours staring at that small rectangle of light and listening intently for movement outside. Sometimes he could hear vehicles come and go, and the sound of boots crunching on the stony ground of the compound, and snatches of conversation that he couldn’t understand as the occasional patrol of guards did the rounds of the huts. That told him there must be other prisoners being kept here. Was one of them the woman whose crying he’d thought he’d heard, or had he just imagined it? He listened out for her voice, but didn’t hear it again.
The only person Jude saw during all of that first day was Promise. At midday, the hut door was noisily unlocked and the mute jailer came in balancing a tray on one hand; in the other hand was his Uzi submachine gun, which he kept constantly pointed at the prisoner as though Jude could squeeze through the bars and attack him. Promise was cautious that way, it seemed. He laid down the tray and carefully locked the hut door behind him, then waved the gun to indicate he wanted Jude to step back towards the rear of the cage. Promise walked around behind him, grabbed his wrists one after the other and cuffed them together through the bars.
‘What do you think I’m going to do, the Ninja death leap?’ Jude said. If Promise could have made a reply, he probably wouldn’t have. With Jude securely handcuffed
and unable to move more than half a step forwards or sideways, the cage door was opened. Still keeping the gun handy, Promise stepped inside and laid down the tray with its contents, a plastic beaker of water and a bowl of food. Next he checked the bucket that had been left for Jude to use as a latrine. Jude hadn’t gone anywhere near it. He hated the bucket, and the humiliation of having to use it, and vowed not to until it became absolutely necessary.
Promise then closed, bolted and locked the cage door and walked around to release Jude from his handcuffs. He paused. Jude felt something tug at his left wrist, and twisted his neck to see Promise slip the bead bracelet off him.
‘Hey! That’s mine! You can’t have it! Give it back!’
Promise examined the bracelet as though it was precious jewellery, then tucked it in his pocket and released Jude from the cuffs.
Jude felt violated by the theft. Even though he and Helen had gone their separate ways, that bracelet had seemed like his last connection with the world he’d left behind. He was attached to it. ‘It’s not worth anything to you,’ he protested. ‘It’s just a bunch of cheap plastic beads. Come on, give it back.’
Promise coolly ignored him. Jude realised it was futile kicking up any more of a fuss over the matter, and gave up. He looked at his first meal in captivity, a small mound of cold rice with a few beans and scraps of meat mixed in. The bowl looked exactly like the pressed-steel feeding dish he’d bought from the local Pets at Home store for his terrier Scruffy, back in England.
‘Hey,’ he called out to Promise, who was heading back towards the hut door. ‘What the hell is this? First you steal my stuff, then you expect me to eat like a dog? Bring me a knife and fork. You hear me?’
Promise seemed to ignore him, and went away. Some time later, he returned with a tablespoon that he tossed through the bars before disappearing again. It was a nasty old piece of cheap tin, but to Jude it seemed a significant victory over his captors to have his demands met, if only halfway. It filled him with energy and lifted his sagging spirits, and he set about tucking into the cold rice concoction with relish, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cage and smiling to himself as he shovelled the food into his mouth.
These people weren’t going to beat him.
The feeling of unease didn’t leave Ben for a long time after his encounter with Raphael Wakenge, the witch doctor. The strange old man’s last words to him kept ringing in his head as he was taken back to the poky room on the fourth floor.
You have saved many lost souls. As if Wakenge somehow knew about Ben’s past, and the people he had helped. As if Ben had ‘former kidnap rescue specialist’ tattooed across his forehead as a cue for soothsayers and fortune-tellers. There was no way Wakenge could know those things about him, and it was deeply unsettling. Ben had experienced the same peculiar thing with Khosa himself, on a couple of occasions when the man had seemed able to read his thoughts. He still didn’t know if that was real or imagined.
Shake it, Ben told himself irritably. You’re an idiot if you let yourself be taken in by phony hocus-pocus. He can’t read your past, any more than he can predict your death.
When the guards let Ben into the room, he found Jeff and Tuesday sitting at the table in the corner, tucking into a communal bowl of rice stew. Gerber was still in his bunk.
‘How was lunch?’ Jeff said through a mouthful of food. ‘I can only hope it was better than this shit they’ve brought us.’
‘Any of that going?’ Ben was content to eat shit, if he could eat it in good company. He pulled up a chair and Jeff let him have his fork, saying he’d had enough. Ben glanced over at the slumped form in the bunk. Jeff shook his head, as if to say that Gerber hadn’t moved all morning. Ben sighed. He was becoming increasingly worried that the veteran sailor had shut down and was going to pine away. He’d seen it happen to others.
‘What did he want?’ Tuesday asked. As he ate, Ben summed up the gist of the conversation with Khosa. Jeff listened to Ben’s account and said, ‘So in other words, it turns out that the bastard’s even more batshit crazy than we reckoned on, and meanwhile we still don’t know where they’re holding Jude, or what this bloody place is, or how the fuck we’re ever going to get out of it. Apart from that, it’s all happy days.’
‘And Gerber’s losing his mind,’ Tuesday added sullenly.
‘Yeah. That, too. Poor sod.’
‘I should have killed Khosa when I had the chance,’ Ben muttered. ‘I hesitated.’
‘Then Jude would have got the chop a minute later. No, mate. You did the right thing.’
‘I don’t know what the right thing is,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘I’m beginning to think there isn’t one.’
An hour later, Captain Xulu was back, with another announcement to make and another task to be completed. ‘The soldiers are ready for their training,’ he said.
This time, the armoured personnel carrier took them a different route from the hotel, heading east into a construction zone that was anything but deserted, with more people and activity than Ben and the others had yet come across in the strange uninhabited city.
More than that, it was the most extensive building site Ben had ever seen. One block after another was alive with men and machinery, a small army of workers in overalls and hard hats toiling hard and fast amid the heat and dust. Cranes swivelling, mixers mixing, others pouring, diggers pushing vast mounds of earth, trucks rumbling back and forth carrying sand and cement blocks, labourers running with barrows, foremen yelling orders over the noise and barking into radios. For the first time, it was possible to imagine how a whole city could have sprung up in the middle of nowhere. With this kind of intensity, they could have built London in a matter of months.
Ben took in the hectic scene from the porthole window. Not a single head turned towards them as the heavily armed military vehicle rolled by, a stone’s throw away. He blinked, thinking he was seeing things. Then turned to Jeff and saw that Jeff had noticed it, too.
‘I’m not imagining it, am I?’ Jeff said, wide-eyed.
‘No, you’re not,’ Ben said. ‘Those building workers are all Chinese. Every man jack of them.’
Chapter 13
A quarter of a mile beyond the edge of the construction zone, the APC juddered to a halt. Xulu ordered everyone out.
They’d stopped at a wide open area of what had once been forest and was now stripped to bare earth, running along the eastern edge of the inner perimeter fence. Another armoured personnel carrier was parked beside them. Next to that was a line of trucks, and beyond the trucks was assembled the biggest crowd Ben had yet seen of Khosa’s militia troops. There had to be at least four or five hundred of them, standing around smoking cigarettes and chatting and joking among themselves and waving their weapons around and kicking up clouds of dust from the loose, dry earth of the denuded wasteland.
Captain Xulu strutted towards them, waving his arms and screaming a furious order that seemed to have no effect whatsoever. Colonel Dizolele watched from a distance, leaning against the side of one of the trucks, apparently uninvolved in the proceedings.
‘So this is our army,’ Tuesday said. ‘What a hopeless rabble. And they’re only kids, for Christ’s sake. The average age must be about sixteen.’
‘The more hopeless, the better,’ Jeff grunted. ‘For us, that is.’
Ben ran his eye across the crowd. They lacked discipline, for sure, and their appearance was a mess of mismatched, cursory nods to military dress with an emphasis on wearing as many bandoliers of ammunition as could be draped around the human body, along with whatever kinds of machetes, knives, and hatchets they’d been able to scavenge along the way. They were the kind of motley crew that gave motley crews a bad name. But appearances were often deceptive. There would be many battle-hardened fighters in their midst, even among the youngest. Kids who had grown up in the most unstable and constantly war-torn region of the globe, who had seen everything, known nothing but conflict and death throughout all their formative years, an
d in many cases probably killed their first man by the age of twelve. Such kids, when they grew up to be strong and fierce warriors in the sway of a leader they believed in, weren’t to be underestimated.
As Ben watched, a large, boxy black SUV came roaring up like a twenty-one-gun salute and pulled to a dramatic halt nearby. The top-model Range Rover Sport was an incongruous sight among all the scuffed and dusty military vehicles. Its vanity plate read khosa1 and its waxed bodywork and black-tinted glass reflected dozens of dazzling little suns. This would be the General’s personal ride, then, Ben thought. Every self-respecting tyrannical warlord should have one, or at least until they could afford the bulletproof Rolls Royce.
Jean-Pierre Khosa stepped out of the front passenger seat. He was wearing the crisp uniform that Ben had seen hanging in his wardrobe, his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator shades. He showed no trace of inebriation, let alone alcohol poisoning. Either he must have the constitution of a rhino, or the witch doctor’s elixir had done its work.
Xulu and Dizolele hustled across to their leader’s side. Khosa barely acknowledged them, spotting Ben and striding towards him. ‘I call them the Leopards,’ he said, motioning grandly in the direction of his assembled troops. ‘They are the most elite regiment of my forces. As they are to be the spearhead of the offensive against our enemies, they are to receive the most rigorous training. We will meet here every afternoon for three hours of drill.’ He looked at Ben expectantly. ‘How do you wish to proceed, soldier?’
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