by Ian McDonald
‘Unit 12? Peter Werther’s in there as well as William?’
‘He was taken there directly from the What the Sun Said community. That is our arrangement satisfied. However, knowing you would not be content with confirmation that he has been taken, and where he has been taken to, I have been conducting further enquiries on your behalf into the nature of this Unit 12.’
‘Which you are adding to the account.’
Haran smiled. At his signal, one of Mombi’s possegirls set up a PDU on a wash-hand basin. The screen showed a green and white wireframe CAD animation of an architectural plan. It looked like three of those romantically impractical wheelie space-stations from 2002 stacked on top of each other, turning slowly in dark green cyberspace. Gaby bent to the screen, trying to decipher scales and annotations. A tiny box was balanced on top of the central spindle. She knew what it was, and the whole thing leaped into proportion.
‘We obtained the schematics for the underground structures from Nairobi Central Planning department,’ Haran said. ‘They are much more amenable to inducement than UNECTA.’
‘It’s incredible.’
‘The largest piece of civil engineering in Kenya in the past five years. I can show you the construction details and costings. They are impressive.’
‘How could they keep something this big quiet?’
‘It is not so hard when the United Nations runs your country,’ Mombi said. Her voice was high and musical, another incongruity with her huge body.
‘What is it for?’ Gaby asked. Whatever price Haran asked of her, it was worth it to bust this secret subterranean citadel wide open.
‘That is where we have run into difficulties,’ Haran said. ‘It works to different protocols and passwords from the rest of the system. My operatives cannot get direct access to it. Our information is deduced from secondary sources like revenue, accounting, power consumption, logistics. From the engineering specification, which we obtained from the firms who constructed the unit, we have concluded that it is designed to be a self-contained environment. A comparison of catering costs with wages figures reveals an interesting discrepancy. There are fifty full-time staff on the unit pay-roll—most of them have medical qualifications, significantly. The amount of consumables passing into the unit system is sufficient for many times that figure.’
‘How many times?’
‘Approximately six times.’
Three hundred people, down there under the earth, in those circular corridors, going round and round in artificial light forever. Peter Werther’s tan would have faded under the fluorescents. To him it would be just another strange place. To William, who had lived most of his life outdoors, under the sun, without walls, he would wither and despair, thinking that he would never be let out again. What had his experience of the Chaga been that they took him away and shut him up in these curving corridors?
‘Who are these people?’ Gaby asked.
‘We do not know. UNECTA keeps no lists. This place does not exist, remember.’
‘How can we get them out?’
‘You cannot,’ Haran said. ‘No one has ever come out. How can you get people out who are not officially in?’
‘Only one thing comes out,’ Mombi said. ‘Blood. Every three weeks, a consignment of two hundred and eighty-three samples is sent by courier to the Kenyatta National Hospital Department of Haematology.’
‘We know this by the shipping documents,’ Haran said. ‘One of my posse members has a relative who works in the hospital reception.’
This is how it gets done in Kenya, Gaby thought. By a relative of a friend, or a friend of a relative. They had information networking in this land long before the worldweb spun its silk lines across the globe. Blood. Two hundred and eighty-three drops.
‘Which section?’
‘The GAPU HIV 4 research section,’ Mombi said. Haran laughed. Gaby had never heard him laugh before. It was like the bark of some feral animal scavenging along the lanes and hovels of the townships.
‘For so many months, you were living in the same house as the answer to your mystery,’ he said. ‘You moved too soon.’
‘Haran’s man has gone through the records,’ Mombi said. ‘The GAPU Haematology unit has been processing samples for twenty-seven months.’
‘They are testing them for HIV 4?’
‘It seems that this is so. As my partner has said, it is difficult to penetrate the security of these organizations. We have reached the limits of what we can find out. Now you are uniquely placed to learn the truth. When you do, I hope that you will share it with me, for, unlike my friend Haran, I am a woman who loves her country.’
Haran laughed again and pushed his cane forward. At the sign, the watekni moved from their positions to the door to cover the withdrawal through the Thorn Tree bar. Mombi inclined her head to Gaby as she swept out. Haran paused a moment.
‘Most uniquely placed, Gaby. The truth may be closer even than Miriam Sondhai. If UNECTA’s Peripatetic Executive Director does not know what is happening in his own organization, who does?’
He touched the tip of his cane to his planter’s hat and Gaby was alone in the women’s room.
T.P. was at the table by the street. The others had all left. He did not look like a happy owl.
‘I can’t have this, you know.’
‘T.P., T.P., listen, it’s a conspiracy…’
‘Heard it before, Gaby. Journalists report the news. They do not become the news. It’s not professional. I don’t care who started it, but I will not have the press community thinking I’m running some kind of female mud-wrestling stable. This is a disciplinary matter, Gaby. I’ll overlook entertaining heavily armed watekni in the ladies’ jax. But you do not try to turn the senior On-line editor into Sinead O’Connor.’
‘Fuck, T.P…’
‘I’m prepared to let it ride this once, provided you donate a month’s wages to a refugee aid charity of your choice.’
‘Jesus. T.P.’
‘And I want to see the receipt. A written apology wouldn’t go amiss either. You’re dangerous, Gaby. Not just to yourself—that’s par for the course for a reporter out here—but to everyone who comes into contact with you.’
‘Trust me, T.P.’
He left some shillings on the table. ‘I can’t. That’s the trouble.’
‘T.P.!’ He stopped on the step down into the street. ‘I’ve got the diary, T.P.; She’s alive. And I think I know where I can find her.’
37
In the anonymous hired Toyota pick-up, Gaby McAslan watched the figure in the red onepiece turn out of the gateway and run along the grass verge. Fifty-five minutes. She waited until the woman turned on to Ondaatje Avenue and got out of the truck.
God, what if she has got a new code for the alarm? Gaby McAslan thought as she walked down the brick drive to the front door.
Three. Eight. Four. Four. Two. Seven. Four. Nine.
And pray.
And turn.
The door opened with the silence of aged mahogany on well-oiled hinges. It was in here. Miriam Sondhai was the icon of many virtues, but not the Madonna of memory. Her attention was turned to loftier things than the numbers that define modern life. She got her cashcard swallowed every week. As she jogged across the Dental Hospital car park toward Mandella Highway, she would have the door code tucked into the tongue pocket of her running shoes. Gaby’s entire scheme rested on the theory that Miriam was similarly lax with her passwords to the Global Aids Policy Unit system.
Where to look? The filofax on the table. Too obvious. She had a bad memory but she was not stupid. Same for the PDU. The handbag, hanging from the teak and antelope horn coat rack.
All truth is in the handbag.
She would be past the new Sirikwa Hotel now, waiting at the keepie-leftie for a gap in the traffic. Forty-five minutes.
Lip gloss. Small change. Stamps. Card for the hospital car park. Keys. Other people’s things. An envelope with a Somali stamp, franked Mogadishu. Silver
propelling pencil. Paracetamol. Madonnas do not need paracetamol, or feminine hygiene products. A little flat address book, corners reinforced with Scotch tape. On the cover a brown man with kohl and a curling black moustache groped under the dress of a brown woman with kohl and no moustache. Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book.
Madonnas certainly do not have Indian Erotic Art Birthday Books.
She took the book to the coffee table, flicked through the pages of exquisite tantric couplings and anniversaries. Don’t Forget above a miniature of a green-skinned woman having her vulva licked by a man with his little fingers crooked in a spiritual attitude. Underneath, long codes of letters and digits.
Thirty-six minutes. She would be coming up on the big intersection at the bottom of University Road.
Gaby pulled up the PDU’s rollscreen and hooked it to its frame. The liquid crystal-impregnated plastic blinked start-up icons at her. She stroked the touch panel and opened up the directory. The call connection to the Kenyatta Hospital was made in seconds. A cigarette would be desperately good, Gaby thought. For a fatal instant she almost succumbed. She clicked for the Global Aids Policy Unit. Password queries interrogated her. She typed in the first of the codes in the birthday book. She went straight through to the Virology Department. Jesus, Miriam, take more care. It’s a sharp-toothed world that you’re running through in your red lycra suit. Another interrogative. Try the next on the list.
Invalid password.
Number three, then.
Invalid password.
Sweaty palms moment. Three strikes and you are out. Dare she run the risk that the next code on the list would be wrong too and alert the firewall defences? Fuck it. She’d faced down Azeri BTR 60s and Hart Assault helicopters.
HBP37FFONLHJC162XC.
No wonder she wrote them down.
The rollscreen filled with icons. Miriam’s workspace volumes pulsed hot. The answer could be in them, or it could be in any of the other hundreds of nested files. Up to now it had all been balls and adrenalin. Now came the work, to the metronome footfalls of Miriam Sondhai on the streets of Nairobi.
Gaby pulled down a find menu and typed in blood and/or samples. Twenty two files found, the PDU told her. She picked the first from the pop-up menu. It was a database of cell culture samples from an ongoing experiment into the relationship between the HIV 4 virus and the nuclear material of helper T-cells.
File two. Monthly staff blood test results. Joseph Isangere; confirmed antibody reaction. Jesus.
File three: blood types and organ-donor registrations.
File four: a locked file on the results of staff blood and urine tests for drug use. They’ll let you know someone has caught the terrible thing they work with, but it’s top secret if they toke a little sensimilla of an evening to get the damned viruses and the things they do out of their minds.
Twenty-three minutes. Miriam Sondhai would be on Uhuru Highway, beating along the earth sidewalks past the bus queues and the matatu touts, the city on her left; the bleached, dismembered park on her right: liquid and beautiful as Gaby had seen her that first morning from T.P.’s Landcruiser.
File five. Open sesame.
HIV 4 test referrals. Promising. It was a hell of a database. Fifteen thousand entries. Gaby set up search parameters for Kajiado, UNECTA, Unit 12. She held her breath as the command Find any went through to the hospital. Do not think about how long it will take to come through the cell net onto the PDU, she told herself. Do not think that at the end of Uhuru Highway Miriam Sondhai is on the way back. Do not think that there may be a hundred watch-dogs set to bark at the scent of any of these parameters you have set.
The search failed on Kajiado and Unit 12, but on UNECTA it threw three hundred names at her. Some had been found under UNECTA as accommodation address or employer. The majority—two hundred and eighty-three—cited UNECTA as source of referral.
‘Result,’ she whispered. Seventeen minutes. Ticking clock, pounding feet, heaving breath, hammering heart. She could copy the data onto the discs she had brought and be safely back at Shepard’s before Miriam Sondhai stripped down for her shower. But if they were the wrong records, she would have to break in to the hospital system again.
Check your source before you commit, Gaby. A thousand hacks in the welfare line will tell you impatience was their downfall.
She displayed the list of names.
Naomi Rukavindi, formerly of Moshi, in Kilimanjaro District of Tanzania; you will do for a start. There was a bad Photo-Me image of a startled-looking woman with nice hair and grinning teeth, there were statistics of age and physiology, several entry points that could be opened by password and sheets of antibody counts and lymphocyte activity curves and immune response deviations. At the top of the screen a number indicated that this was page 36 of 36. Three-weekly samples, Mombi had said. One hundred and eight weeks. Over two years monitoring the progress of a disease that killed in six months. Gaby clicked up find first and on a hunch spread it beside page 36. The counts and the ratios and the histograms and the curves matched exactly. She scrolled through the file, graph after graph. There was no discrepancy.
‘You should be dead, Mrs Naomi Rukavindi,’ Gaby whispered.
She sampled other UNECTA referrals. The first file was forty-eight pages, the shortest three. None of them showed any deterioration in condition. Not one had died of the killer HIV 4.
The face at the top of that most recent three-page file belonged to William Bi, wife’s sister-in-law’s nephew to Tembo.
She glanced at her watch.
Five minutes.
Christ.
She unwrapped the disc she had brought, carefully stuffing the cellophane wrapper into her bag as the PDU formatted it. Copy file, she commanded and watched the sands run through the digital hour-glass while she imagined Miriam Sondhai coming up Nkrumah Avenue, past the chain-link fence around the primary school. What if the traffic has been light? What if she has not been held up at the junction of the keepie-leftie? At any moment she might hear the pad of running soles on red brick.
The copy completed. She checked the hard disc for fingerprints before shutting down. And don’t forget the rollscreen. Jesus, the thing’s still warm. She was out the door when she saw the Indian Erotic Art Birthday Book on the coffee table.
Had the handbag been open or closed? Knowing Miriam, she bet on closed. The mahogany door shut heavily. She was halfway to the car when she remembered to reset the alarm. The armed light winked at her.
Plus one minute. Into extra time. She got into the hired pickup, started it and as she glanced into the rearview to move off she saw Miriam Sondhai come around the corner in Nyrere Avenue. Go. Go. Go. She glanced into her mirror again at the turn into Ondaatje Avenue and saw Miriam swing off the footpath into her drive.
Five cigarettes and a quarter of a bottle of Shepard’s sacramental Wild Turkey stopped her hands shaking enough to load the disc into her PDU and open up the stolen database. The icon unfolded in a list view. Fifteen thousand HIV 4 referrals, arranged alphabetically, starting with Aa, ending with Zy.
Aa being for Aarons. Jake H.
38
She heard the first shot as she was jangling the wind-chimes outside the front door.
Jake Aarons had a very beautiful front door. He had swopped it with a Makonde carver for his 4×4 down on the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. It was seven feet high and seven feet wide and he had brought it all the way back to Nairobi on the top of a matatu. Jake was very happy about the deal. A new 4×4 was easily bought. No one in Nairobi had as beautiful a door. But he was not answering it this morning.
There was a second shot. Gaby gave up jangling and went around the side of the house. She found Jake Aarons standing knee-deep in the pool in the quadrangle between the house’s two wings. He was dressed only in a pair of shorts with a red maple leaf on the left flank. In his left hand was a bottle of tequila, in his right a revolver. On the pool edge stood a full-length mirror. Gaby watched Jake take a long pull
from the bottle, raise the gun at the mirror and blow a hole through the reflection of his own head. There were two other holes in the mirror; at groin and chest height.
‘Jake.’
He whirled, dropped the bottle, brought the gun to bear on the bridge of Gaby’s nose.
‘Jesus, Jake!’
The tequila bottle bobbed twice and went down. Jake lowered the weapon with a sigh.
‘He’s gone, Gaby. The bastard left me. Took my money, took all my fucking money, the little bitch. He packed his things and went and took my money.’
He grimaced like a silent scream and sat on the flagstone edge of the pool. The hand holding the gun dangled between his legs.
‘How did you find out, Gaby?’
‘Jake, I’m so sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. What you are is well-placed for a good career move. Over to our Chief East Africa Correspondent, Gaby McAslan. Rush around with commiserations and sympathy and brown-nose rich old uncle with the legacy.’ He brought the gun out and aimed it again at Gaby. It seemed too heavy for him to hold. ‘Unwise to contemplate blackmailing a man with a gun and absolutely nothing to lose by using it.’
‘What kind of person do you take me for, Jake?’
‘The most terrible of persons: the ignorant manipulator. You play with lives, you can’t help it. You are irresistibly drawn to those who are in a position to advance you. You don’t know this, of course, and it’s your complete innocence that makes you ultimately unrefusable. That poor bastard Shepard you’re banging; have you any idea the conflict of loyalties you’re costing him? Of course you don’t, you haven’t the first idea what a monster you are, honey, and because I’m a terminal old fruit who can say absolutely anything he likes, you’re going to have to listen to it and learn by it.’