Luca didn’t answer, instead shoving him with both palms so hard that Katz’s head snapped back against the rear seat.
‘Shut up,’ Luca shouted. ‘Your job’s done.’
The borehole was the least of their problems. Now it was only a matter of survival.
Chapter 11
TWO DAYS AFTER her conversation with Kieran Bates, Bear found herself standing at Cape Town International Airport, staring into the face of an overweight immigration officer. The man dragged his tired gaze away from the grimy counter before him, slowly surveying the length of her body. He paused, for no other reason than to suggest he could keep her waiting there as long as he chose, before his gaze finally came to rest on her face. He then seemed to register the fleck of white in Bear’s left eye. She had always had it – a sharp streak of pure white running across the otherwise deep brown of her pupils. It made it appear as though some unseen light was constantly reflecting in her eyes.
The man sniffed loudly, dredging the phlegm into the back of his throat as Bear tried to expedite the process by flashing him a smile. He ignored it, his expression unchanged as if observing her from behind the tint of a two-way mirror. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he waved her through.
Stalking across the main foyer, Bear bypassed the multitude of taxi drivers idling around, waiting to prey on the new arrivals. As she went by they gawked at her suggestively, part business, part pleasure, but Bear kept up her stride. She knew the airport well, having been a private pilot for the last twelve years and often taking off in her little bush plane, a Cessna 206, from Cape Town International. But despite being well used to the jolts and bumps of turbulence, their descent earlier that morning had made her feel horrendously sick. Now, all she could think about was getting some fresh air.
It was six-thirty in the morning. Already smokers had grouped together outside the terminal building, clutching oversized cups of coffee and talking loudly. Over the last few days her sense of smell had heightened to such a degree that it was as if she could distinguish every one of the rancid cigarette butts in the overflowing ashtrays. She pushed past, holding her breath through the smoke and desperately trying not to be sick. A hundred yards farther on she spotted a bench and stopped to sit down, feeling too light-headed to continue.
Bear sat for several minutes, letting her eyes drift towards the view of Table Mountain. Cloud was pouring over the summit like a ceaseless waterfall, but only a few hundred feet lower down it dissolved into thin air, leaving the most expensive properties in the city basking in the morning sun. Here the whites had grouped together, their estates rimmed by electric fences and razor wire, while only a couple of miles further out from the mountain, life had an entirely different meaning.
Bear’s focus pulled back to an expanse of land called the Cape Flats. The area was hazy from the smoke of burning tyres, and the morning light glinted off thousands of corrugated-iron rooftops. The shantytowns sprawled for miles in every direction, bloated to bursting by the daily arrival of foreigners searching for a better life. But there was none to be found, only the varying shades of violence and poverty that typified each community. From the immigrants in Nyanga to the coloured gangs of Mitchell’s Plain, each district was fenced off behind broken concrete walls, as if the city itself were desperate to conceal its wounds.
Bear had travelled her entire life, and even now was amazed by Cape Town’s fusion of natural beauty and raw, unchecked violence. But it was a combination that was all too familiar to her. It was the very hallmark of her native Congo.
Feeling her phone vibrating in her handbag, Bear covered her ear against the distant sound of a plane landing before connecting through to her researcher, Louis, back in the Paris office. Since her conversation with Bates, she and Louis had worked for two days straight, delving into the background of the Antarctic science base, GARI.
For all that time, Bear had sat in her office in Paris, reading file after file dug up by Louis and his team. It was as if all the passion and decisiveness that had been so lacking in her choice of du Val’s assignments had been poured into this new venture. The old Bear was back and the whole research team had seemed renewed by her energy.
Unable to voice the real reason for the enquiry, Bear had given the researchers a wide remit. As they trawled through the background of the science base and the drilling project in general, a single name kept recurring: Richard Pearl. He had personally invested over fourteen million dollars towards the drilling project and seemed integral to almost every facet of life at the base.
Bear had heard his name before in connection with the submarine incident, but knew little more than that. Louis worked to fill in the gaps, compiling a huge dossier on the man, covering everything from his political career to recent aspects of his private life.
Aside from his position as a US senator, Pearl also owned a consortium of companies, and through one of these, called Global Change, had invested the fourteen million dollars for the Antarctic drilling project. At first glance Global Change’s mission statement seemed highly worthy, with their stated aim being ‘to restore eco-systems and reverse the process of climate change’, but as Bear and Louis delved deeper into each project, they soon realised that nearly all were only at a nascent stage or, worse, had already been decommissioned.
Every scrap of marketing information about Global Change featured photographs of Pearl. An athletic man in his early-fifties, he had light reddish hair, now greying and combed back from his tanned, but freckled face. His square jaw and perfect smile adorned nearly every page of the company brochures, with a raft of politicians and celebrities crowbarred in, just in case there was any doubt as to his social standing.
The official biography listed Pearl as an ex-naval officer and father of four children, all girls. There were personal quotations in his own handwriting, citing the cure-all of ‘positivity’ and how the ‘power of now’ had been the backbone to his success. But as interesting as Pearl was, none of the information seemed to substantiate the feeling of unease Bear had had while on the phone with Kieran Bates. The Antarctic base seemed innocuous enough and Pearl himself, although a little delusional in the scope of his ambition, appeared to be investing in projects that were at least trying to do some good.
Midway through the second day of research, Bear was about to call a halt to the whole investigation. She had been replaying the call with Bates in her mind and had come to the conclusion that she must have misjudged his tone, or simply read too much into the situation. Luca was probably just fine and had overcome his aversion to the mountains for the sake of a healthy paycheck. She’d intended to call a halt to the whole line of enquiry when Louis had suddenly burst into her office.
He had discovered that two of Global Change’s leading microbiologists had suffered untimely deaths. The first drowned while on holiday in the Maldives; the second was killed in a car crash eight months later. These two incidents could have been explained by the vagaries of fate, but not when combined with the fact that the company’s latest head microbiologist, a woman called Charlotte Bukovsky, had disappeared only two months ago. A missing persons report was still officially open with San Diego’s police department, but after some desultory enquiries the case officer there had evidently filed the report with the singular intent of letting it gather dust.
Bear had given Louis free rein in trying to track down Bukovsky, and he in turn had called in some favours with the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. The DGSE had some new and highly impressive phone-tracking software and his contact had agreed to sift through the phone records of all of Bukovsky’s immediate family. A day passed before the contact came back with an anomaly – two calls had been made to Bukovsky’s younger sister from Nairobi, Kenya. After some more digging, Louis was convinced he had a lead. As Bear had flown to Cape Town that night, he had continued trying to get through and, on the sixth attempt, actually connected to a hotel room in downtown Nairobi and Charlotte Bukovsky herself.
Now he
was calling to relay the basics of that conversation. Bear remained silent while he made his report. Finally she stood up.
‘I want to meet this woman.’
‘I knew you’d say that,’ Louis replied. ‘That’s why she’s booked on a flight via Joburg and arriving in Cape Town tonight.’
‘Tonight? She’s been off the grid for two months. How the hell did you persuade her to get on a plane?’
‘I told her you’re a journalist for Reuters. And, believe me, this woman has got a serious axe to grind.’
Bear nodded to herself. They had used the same cover several times before, but it still seemed incredible that Bukovsky would come out of hiding so readily, even to meet a journalist.
‘What’s the flight number?’ Bear grabbed the Biro pinning up her hair and scrawled the number on a ticket stub. ‘And email me anything new you’ve found.’
‘What about du Val? He was asking how your visit to Cape Town is in any way connected to the new assignments.’
‘You let me worry about him,’ Bear replied. ‘Just don’t advertise what you’re doing.’
There was a pause while Louis weighed up the trouble he would be getting into by covering her tracks, but Bear already knew what he was going to say next.
‘Leave it with me,’ came the response, and for the first time in days a smile crept across Bear’s lips.
‘Thank you, Louis. I owe you.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ And with that, he hung up.
Bear returned the phone to her handbag then made for the taxi rank. Now that she had time to think about it, she still couldn’t quite believe what she had done. Just walking out of the Paris office and on to the flight last night had been audacious, even for her. Already she was wondering how she would justify it when she got back, but fortunately last-minute travel was part of her job description and, for the moment, du Val shouldn’t be asking too many questions.
Ever since her call with Bates, she had been thinking about Cape Town almost constantly and been fighting the desperate urge to be there. Seeing her son, Nathan, plus the chance to inform Luca of her pregnancy constituted two fundamentals in her life, if not the only two fundamentals right now. And the more she had thought about this, the more she had realised that she just had to leave, no matter how unprofessional it seemed or what the cost to her future career.
As the taxi driver followed the N2 towards the City Bowl, Bear went back over the files Louis had prepared on the Antarctic base, GARI. The drilling project itself had been going for nearly three years when it looked set to stall. The Russians had been going over budget almost continually and, by the third year, the Japanese were already proposing a ‘review’ period when, suddenly, Richard Pearl stepped in.
To the delight of the scientific community, he had simply written an open-ended cheque. No matter what the cost, he declared, they must break through to the lake in the name of science. The British government had been the first to accept the donation, quickly followed by the other countries involved in the project.
In return for his contribution Pearl had already received certain ‘dispensations’. His Bombardier Global Express private jet had landed four times on the ice runway of Droning Maud Land, the only private plane to be granted permission to do so, and one scientist had even posted online a photo of the Robinson 44 helicopter that Pearl was being allowed to garage inside one of the GARI’s hangar units.
Like the politician he was, Pearl toured the Antarctic base with fanfare. He would shake everyone’s hand, from the base commander to the lowliest cook, as though he were canvassing for votes. And the tactic seemed to be working. The latest edition of Scientific Weekly had practically described him as a twenty-first-century Messiah.
But with Louis’s discovery of the microbiologists’ deaths, Bear was certain that there was a great deal more to Richard Pearl than met the eye. Whatever it was, Bukovsky would certainly have a take on it, and she was scheduled to arrive in Cape Town in under six hours’ time.
After checking in at the Cape Grace Hotel, Bear decided to go for a walk along the sea front. She still felt a little nauseous from the flight and was sure that the sea air would do her good. As she ambled along the main quayside, she watched the profusion of Cape Coloured workers blasting at the underside of the mighty ships with high-pressure hoses. The spray drifted high into the air, catching in the hot morning sun, while further along the harbour she could make out the beginnings of the V&A waterfront. The shopping mall was brimming with street entertainers, from human statues and gumboot dancers, to street merchants and touts selling dolphin-watching trips. They were all there, vying for the easy buck of the half-bored tourists as they walked laps around the canals and interlocking waterways.
As Bear passed one of the larger boats she noticed it was flying an American flag. Then, a minute later, she passed another with the Stars and Stripes gently flapping in the breeze. She stood still, eyes scanning the gun-metal grey of the vessel’s hull before tracing back up to the stern deck. Huge coils of towlines were visible above the guard rail, while neatly stacked to one side was a row of hydrophones. Bear recognised them from an offshore mining job she had done a few years back. The devices were used in seismic surveys when boats were prospecting for oil or gas.
Out on the rear deck, a sunburnt man with a black beard and balding head moved from one hydrophone to the next, checking each one meticulously. As he came close to the quay, Bear called up to him.
‘Where are you headed?’
For a moment the man didn’t realise he was being hailed, but then he craned his neck over the edge to peer down at her.
‘I said, where’s your boat headed?’ Bear shouted, remembering to flash him a smile, but the man only stared at her for a couple of seconds before returning to his work. She watched him for a moment longer, guessing that they were probably heading up to the Niger Delta. There had been another find up there last week and now all the big oil boys were throwing everything they had at it.
Glancing down at her watch, Bear realised that there were only another eight minutes to go before the scheduled call with Luca. For the last two days she had rung at precisely 18.00 GMT as Bates had suggested, but there had only been a blank tone. If only she could somehow get a message to Luca, asking him to call her instead.
Another five minutes’ walk took her to the front steps of her hotel. After the bustle and commotion of the docks, the cool interior was a welcome respite and Bear smiled gratefully at a waiter.
‘A double espresso,’ she said, before checking herself. ‘No, wait. Make that a glass of sparkling water, please.’
‘And your room number, madam?’
Bear opened her purse to check the card key and paused as her eyes settled on a picture of Nathan in the inner pouch.
‘Two hundred and four,’ she heard herself saying, while her eyes passed over every line and contour of her son’s face. He was laughing in the picture, eyes shining with pure joy. His curly brown hair was wild and unkempt. Despite her ex-husband Jamie’s continual protests, Bear had refused to keep it short. She loved her son’s hair like that; the smell of it and the soft tickle as Nathan would curl up against her chest.
Bear looked up and out towards the bank of windows. The situation with her ex-husband had to change. She had rung him from the back of the taxi that morning and been tersely informed that Nathan was still with his grandparents. Jamie had hung up, not even telling her when her son would be back.
It had been like that for several months now, with Jamie spurning her every attempt at compromise. He just couldn’t get over the residual anger. Bear knew that if this had been any other part of her life, she would have hit back, and hard, but when it came to Nathan, she found herself instinctively backing down. Her own guilt at leaving him, even for six months, had given her ex-husband the upper hand and now it played out in their every conversation.
During the long, sleepless nights of the last few months, Bear had even fantasised about kidnapping her son. She ha
d plotted routes and imagined the paper trails she would leave to throw the police off her scent. After spending so many hours staring into the dawn skies, her plotting had become ever more sophisticated, with the web of lies growing until her own head spun from the mindboggling detail. But Nathan? Could she really rip him away from Cape Town and everything he had grown up with?
The sparkling water arrived and Bear slugged it down, still desperate for a coffee.
Screw this. If Jamie didn’t get Nathan back to Cape Town by the time her flight was scheduled to leave, she would act. He had five days, although he would never know the clock was ticking.
The decision made, she signalled to the waiter again.
‘Can you get me that espresso after all?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a feeling, it’s going to be a long night.’
She then dialled Luca’s satellite phone number and waited, the minute hand on her watch just having clicked on the hour. Once again the call didn’t connect, only adding to her mounting sense of frustration. The desperate need to speak to Luca was growing with each day, and with it, her need for answers.
Chapter 12
CHARLOTTE BUKOVSKY HAD the look of a woman scorned. She walked with her shoulders hunched, accentuating her already wary body language, while her arms were kept crossed in front of her as if attempting to shield herself from some as yet unseen danger. Moving out on to the hotel veranda, her eyes darted furtively from one table to the next as she searched for the woman she was supposed to be meeting.
Bear remained still, observing her approach. Bukovsky was in her mid-forties and relatively tall, with sun-kissed blonde hair that had been scraped back from her face and secured in a tight ponytail. It pinched the skin either side of her eyes, giving her a slightly startled look. Around her tanned neck she wore a green silk scarf tied in a knot. The scarf was the only touch of colour in her otherwise drab ensemble. Bear watched her draw nearer, realising that Bukovsky must once have been quite pretty. Now, however, her looks had faded and instead, she radiated a mixture of wounded scepticism and impatience.
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