Private: Gold

by James Patterson

  He turned back to the visitor. “We’re getting out of this hellhole—we were totally misled. It was supposed to be safe, secure accommodation in a quiet area.” He snorted. “Never believe what you read on a website. I’ll be telling TripAdvisor about this as soon as we get back home. I never, ever want to go through such horror again. I can’t believe we’re still alive.”

  Emotions flickered over Mr. Taser’s face. Aggression was replaced first by doubt, and then by curiosity.

  “What happened?”

  “We were attacked by armed robbers. Two of them, both carrying guns. They must have followed us from the airport…I tried to check my mirrors as you’re supposed to do, but in the rain…” He shrugged. “I guess it made it easy for them. We locked ourselves in when we arrived, not that it made a difference.” He glanced at the broken lock. “We’d just started unpacking when we heard the noise. We weren’t sure what it was. Susan thought it was somebody knocking. She walked out of the bedroom and I heard her scream. I ran to help, and saw two armed robbers had forced this door open and were invading the house.”

  “Bastards,” the Taser-carrying man said with feeling, staring at the splintered frame. Steyn noted that his hands had relaxed.

  “All I could think of was drawing those guns away from Susan and keeping her safe. I shouted to her to run to the bathroom and lock the door. I have some karate experience—in my twenties, I got to brown belt. I was able to tackle one of the men at the door. I knocked his gun out of his hand, and it fell onto the grass outside. Then I kicked him in the groin, so he was out of the fight. But the other aimed his pistol straight at me. It was…I don’t know how to describe it. It was like everything happened in slow motion. I flung myself on the ground as he fired twice. The shots went through that window. If I’d been any slower, they would have hit me in the chest.”

  “Hell. Someone was looking after you there.”

  “Yes, somebody was. Because after that, I was lying on the ground looking up at the man, and he pointed the gun down at me. He aimed it straight at my head.”

  “Serious?”

  Steyn paused before continuing. “It was a misfire. The gun jammed. But it broke his nerve. The other robber had crawled outside to get his gun, and I think he gave us up as a bad job. He hadn’t expected a fight. He ran out, helped his accomplice into the car, and they sped off in that direction.” Steyn pointed. Mr. Taser’s eyes followed his finger. “The car was a black Toyota,” he added.

  “Did you get the license plate?”

  “I didn’t get the plate. But I could identify the guys in a heartbeat if they’re found.”

  Enough with the garrulousness, Steyn decided. A man in shock would either stay silent or babble. He’d babbled enough…it was time to end the story now.

  “Man, you had a lucky escape there.”

  Steyn nodded.

  “Have you called the police?”

  “We’ll go to the police station and report it. I’m not waiting here.”

  “Can’t say I blame you.”

  “Be careful. They may be in the area, planning to come back. I think you should stay inside, and lock up tight.”

  Mr. Taser considered this advice before nodding decisively. “I will do. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  He turned away and walked down the road. Steyn noted that his tumbledown home was behind a solid, if peeling, wall and had no direct view of this house. All the better. He didn’t have to playact any longer. He could get back to work now, and make up for the time he’d lost in spinning that ridiculous story.

  Heading toward the highway, Steyn focused on his biggest imperatives.

  It was clear where the woman was headed—he’d known that even before opening her notebook, where the coordinates were written on the very first page. So, imperative number one was to delay the approaching freight truck so that it never reached the rendezvous point. That would mean putting the emergency plan into operation—the one he’d discussed with his employer a while ago.

  Imperative number two: he was going to find out who Isobel Collins’s knight in shining armor was. It would be easy enough to do, because he’d seen the SUV’s license plate during the chase, and he could obtain the owner’s name from one of his connections. The SUV driver was posing a serious threat to the success of this job, and he would need to be neutralized. The sooner, the better, because there was a big risk that Isobel would already have told him what she knew.

  Steyn adjusted his grip on the steering wheel, noting with surprise that his palms were sweating.

  Every job came with unexpected twists. But this one was spiraling out of control, with more and more variables and delays.

  Each variable, every delay, meant a massive increase in risk. Covering one set of tracks was easy. But he had left multiple tracks so far, crisscrossing each other, all leading, ultimately, back to him.

  Dark places…cramped and airless. The thought of being arrested and locked away made him feel dizzy. He’d never spent a night in prison, but he had older memories of confinement—ones that he couldn’t remember clearly, fragments of being somewhere dark, with the only light shining in through a tiny crack above his head, while his heels drummed at the sides of the cupboard, cellar, box…wherever it was that he had been imprisoned. He remembered pain, thirst, gnawing hunger.

  Those were the only times he’d ever felt fear.

  Steyn reached the highway and put his foot down. After the storm, the evening was cool, and the car’s air-conditioning was on its lowest setting. Even so, he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  He’d always known, deep down, that one of the jobs he took on would end up being his last.

  “But not this one,” he muttered, accelerating into the misty evening. “Not this one.”

  Chapter 18

  “Are we stuck? We can get through this—can’t we?” Isobel looked anxiously at Joey.

  Joey took his foot off the gas. Buried in the sticky mud, the uselessly spinning wheels were only digging the SUV deeper. Telling himself not to panic, he looked at the clock, and as he did so, the display changed from 5:39 to 5:40 p.m.

  “We may be temporarily stuck, but we’ll get out of this,” he reassured Isobel.

  He opened the door, pushing tufts of wet grass aside, and squelched into the mire.

  There was no way around. The mud was caused by a stream that flowed through a deep channel. This was the only crossing point. Usually the stream was no more than a trickle, but the heavy rain had changed that. So, somehow he needed to gain enough traction to get his SUV through the worst of the bog.

  What to do?

  His strengths lay in creative problem-solving. He’d had a reputation for being able to achieve the impossible on short notice, back in his corporate days. Now he needed to draw on his reserves of resourcefulness and wile.

  He scanned the area. A few yards farther on were some splintered planks. He guessed that at some time past, somebody had tried to use them to cross the mud, but they hadn’t been long enough. They certainly wouldn’t be long enough to cover the mud now, but he could think of another way of using them.

  He thought again about the inventory of essentials in the trunk of his car. A change of clothes, cable ties, duct tape, a knife, and rope—generous supplies of all of them. In this situation, duct tape would be the most useful.

  “What are we doing?”

  He turned to see Isobel standing behind him. The mud was oozing over her smart white sneakers, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

  “We’re going to turn the car into a tank,” he told her.

  “How’re we going to do that?”

  Joey walked over to the planks and selected two pieces, each a little over two feet long, and a few inches wide.

  “We’re going to fasten these to the tires. That way, when the wheels turn, the planks will create more surface area and bite into the mud, just as if they were the tracks on a tank. Here, you hold the plank on top of the front wheel.
I’m going to tape it into place, and then we’ll do the other side.”

  Joey fastened the plank to the top of the tire using the duct tape, winding it round and round, before wading to the other side. The mire was deeper here, so he used the longer plank. By that stage his fingers were covered in mud, making it difficult to wrap the tape properly.

  “Let me do it.” Isobel, whose hands were drier, took over and efficiently unrolled the tape over the plank, and through the gap in the wheel.

  “Thanks,” Joey said. “Great job.”

  “Hey, no worries. It’s great to feel useful. Makes a change.”

  She smiled at him. She had dirt smudged across her cheek, and he wanted to touch her face, to wipe it gently away.

  A change from what? he wondered, deciding not to ask.

  Instead, he grinned back. “Well, now for the important part—let’s see if it works.” Squelching over to the trunk, he found an old towel to clean their hands with. Nothing short of a pressure hose was going to shift the stuff layered over their shoes and ankles.

  When Joey, Isobel, and a fair amount of the mud were back in the car, he started it up again and eased forward. The wheels spun…and then the planks bit in. With a heavy lurch, the car jerked forward. When the planks left the ground, the wheels continued spinning, but when the wood came round again, they made another jump forward.

  “Slowly does it,” he encouraged the SUV.

  “I hope the tape holds.” Isobel leaned out of the window, anxiously surveying her handiwork.

  “It should.”

  Carefully, Joey inched the car through the most treacherous section. There was something deeply satisfying about feeling the wooden planks dig into the ground, defying the drag and suck of the mud and propelling the car forward, even if only a short distance at a time.

  Gradually, the SUV’s wheels gained purchase, and its momentum increased, powering steadily up the hill. He drove for another minute before he risked stopping.

  Then he breathed a sigh of relief, because they’d done it.

  “Excellent work.” He and Isobel exchanged a grimy high-five before Joey climbed out and quickly removed the planks.

  Checking his phone, he saw he had three bars of signal. More than enough to lead them to Isobel’s coordinates that, according to the map, were four minutes away. They should be in time.

  He guessed that if her husband’s business was road freighting, the coordinates would lead to a depot, or rendezvous point of some kind near a highway. However, they were definitely more than four minutes away from any of the main roads.

  “Carry on with what you were saying,” he encouraged Isobel. “The background. You need to brief me before we arrive at wherever we’re going.”

  “After the bombshell of what Samantha told me, I became an investigator, together with her, as we tried to work out what was going on. It was a massive task. First, we had to gather all the puzzle pieces. Then we had to put them in order, analyzing the information we’d obtained. Vehicle numbers, times, load weights, drivers, routes. It felt like I was actually using my brain for the first time in years.” She laughed.

  “And why did these coordinates come up?”

  “Because we worked out that the truck driving this route always makes unscheduled stops at that point, for two or three hours at a time. Usually, the loads are lighter after the stop, when the truck is driving south. But occasionally, going north, they’re heavier again.”

  Joey nodded, wondering what the reason was for this. Smuggling goods into Johannesburg? But then why the heavier loads going north?

  “Also, we discovered there’s only one driver who does this route. All the other drivers get switched between routes and shifts so that the trucks run full time. But not this one. He drives his route back and forth, back and forth, doing trips every two weeks, and the rest of the time the truck stands idle. The route goes from Zambia in the north, down through Zimbabwe, through eastern Johannesburg and into the city center, before heading back again.”

  “Any idea what the truck brings down?”

  “Coffee loads are quite common. The beans come from a co-op in the north of Zambia, but the rest of the time the cargo varies. Wood, maize, tobacco. All from different suppliers. But no matter what goods are transported, there’s the same discrepancy in the weights every two or three trips.”

  “And your husband didn’t pick this up?” Joey asked incredulously.

  “The stats weren’t easy to interpret,” she said. “We had to do a lot of research.”

  “Did you try showing him the evidence?”

  Isobel made a face. “Yes, I tried, but he wouldn’t hear me out. He said I was wrong, and that my calculations were incorrect. He said the weight disparities were normal, and that Brogan had told him they were due to the truck’s fuel consumption because, on this route, they loaded several containers of diesel in Zambia and used it along the way.”

  Joey kept quiet, deciding it wouldn’t be prudent to offer his opinion on Dave’s response. This told him something about their marriage, though. It was clear that Isobel didn’t have a voice. Not one that her husband listened to, anyway.

  “And Dave didn’t explain why the business was bleeding profits, either,” Isobel added sadly. “So Samantha and I discussed it, and I decided I was going to travel out here to see for myself. I sent her the details of my flights and where I was staying, in case anything went wrong, but she promised me she wouldn’t say a word to anyone.”

  “And you’re sure you trust Samantha?” Joey asked, thinking about the hitman who’d come so close to killing Isobel.

  “Oh, yes, I trust her totally,” Isobel said.

  “People can sometimes give information away innocently,” Joey warned her, keeping his voice gentle. “Especially if they have no reason to be distrustful.”

  Now, looking at Isobel again, he saw the beginnings of doubt in her eyes.

  Chapter 19

  Five minutes to six, and Steyn’s tracking system, now back online, informed him that the truck was running twenty minutes late. Another truck had jackknifed in the storm, which in turn had caused heavy traffic delays north of Pretoria.

  That meant his next job was a particularly ugly one, and something he had not been looking forward to, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there was little skill involved in its execution; it was a task even a pig-ignorant muscle man could have done. And secondly, it involved going underground, which was not something Steyn would have willingly chosen.

  However, he was a professional, and this was merely another chore to perform, part of an assignment for which he was receiving an extremely high payment.

  He drove off the highway, along a tar road that turned to dirt a few kilometers later. At the end of the dirt road was a large ROAD CLOSED barrier, with faded yellow chevrons. However, somebody arriving at the barrier who took a closer look would see the signs of flattened grass where cars had driven around the sign, just as Steyn was doing now.

  A little farther along the road, which was now little more than a bumpy track, was another weathered sign. EGOLI EAST RAND GOLD MINE. ENTRANCE CLOSED. ACCESS PROHIBITED BY LAW.

  And, beyond that, Steyn noticed a third sign. This one was newer, but it had been pulled off its post and now lay, faceup, on the ground nearby.

  PREMISES SECURED BY PRIVATE JOHANNESBURG.

  At that moment, Steyn’s phone beeped. He had an incoming message—information on the SUV’s license plate, which he had requested earlier.

  He read the message.

  Then he looked down again at the sign on the ground.

  His thin lips hooked into another joyless smile. Coincidence sometimes worked in strange ways.

  Steyn parked the BMW behind a row of bushes farther on, so it was not visible from the road.

  He ducked under the chain-link fence outside the mine’s entrance, which displayed another CLOSED—WARNING—DANGER notice, rattling in the breeze.

  Beyond that was the entrance, a square tunnel
blasted in the rock. The solid wooden boards that had been nailed over the entrance to block access were now ripped away. Most of them had already been cut up and used for firewood. A few splintered pieces still lay nearby. Walking through the entrance, he breathed in the chilly, stale-smelling air and his skin prickled automatically into gooseflesh.

  The tunnel sloped gradually down into darkness, and Steyn had to switch on his phone’s flashlight. At the end of the tunnel was a shaft, where a rickety ladder had been placed to allow access to the deep.

  Steyn realized he was breathing much faster than he should have after the short walk. He was imagining the tons of rock pressing down on him. His flashlight beam bobbed over the heaps of crushed ore lining the passage. In some of them, he could see gold flecks gleaming.

  From far below, he could hear the clanging of tools and the far-off sound of voices as the workers—a team of zama zamas—chipped away at the reef.

  He lowered a thick plastic hose a few feet down the shaft. It was attached to a large machine. The zama zamas were used to the humming sound as the pump started up, removing the dusty air and replacing it with fresh air from the surface. Up until now, it had been used only for that purpose.

  This time, Steyn attached the hose to a different side of the machine.

  Now, when the pump started working, it would flood the chamber below with deadly carbon monoxide. In an hour, all fifty of the workers below would be dead.

  The rattle of the pump muffled the sound of Steyn pulling up the ladder, so that they would have no way out.

  After covering and locking the machine’s ignition switch, he loosened a rope that held a heavy steel grating against the wall. He moved the hose into a niche in the rock, because when this grating came down, it wasn’t going up again…it weighed close to half a ton.

  He pulled on the rope, hearing the grinding as it loosened and began to topple forward.

  He stepped back and squeezed his eyes shut as it crashed down, sending dust and rock fragments billowing into the air.

  A few seconds later, he opened his eyes again, and blinked the residue of dust away.