Cloudburst

by Wilbur Smith

Langdon smiled sympathetically and said, ‘Your dad’s no fool. He’ll want to make the kidnappers think he’s cowed by them, but really he’ll just be feeling the same anger we all do, and weighing up his next move. He won’t want to provoke them by showing his steely side though.’

  ‘It’s hard to think of what his “next move” might be if he’s being held captive,’ said Xander, adding, ‘Just putting that out there.’

  ‘He’s a Courtney,’ Langdon replied. ‘Whatever the situation, he’ll work to take control of it.’

  ‘He said to pay the ransom,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Langdon. ‘For the same reason. He’s got to look as if he’s cooperating.’ Deliberately, like a man laying bricks, he went on: ‘The last thing your father would want is for us to actually pay a ransom. He wouldn’t forgive us for doing that.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to reply. Langdon hadn’t heard my father’s voice. I had, and the fear in it wasn’t made up; it was real. My fists balled up at my sides. Luckily, before I had a chance to threaten Langdon with them, Amelia spoke for me.

  ‘Hold on.’ She looked askance at my uncle. ‘You’re claiming that when Nicholas said “pay the ransom” what he actually meant was “don’t pay the ransom”?’ To me she added, ‘I know all about how people don’t say exactly what they mean, but your dad tends to be fairly straight-talking and in this instance it seems, how can I put it, unlikely.’

  Xander under his breath, chimed in: ‘What she said!’

  Langdon puffed himself up. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘one of us here is an adult with fifteen years’ experience negotiating the complexities of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The others are children, none of who, with the utmost respect, has fifteen years’ experience of anything!’ He gave me what passed for a kind smile, put an arm around my shoulders and added, ‘Trust me, Jack. I know how best to handle this.’

  The anger that had built within me withered as he said these words. I felt lost and deflated and I realised, however reluctantly, that I wanted him to be right. ‘But Friday is the day after tomorrow,’ I said lamely, ‘and I said –’

  Langdon waved away my attempt to tell him that I’d already agreed to pay the ransom. ‘That’s time enough for me to put out the word. Tell you what, let’s agree the following: we’ll decide upon a course of action on Friday at noon, in the light of what I can find out between now and then. In the meantime, sit tight and have faith. I know what I’m doing.’

  38.

  Langdon swept back to his SUV confident we’d do as he said, but there was no way on earth I could just sit back and wait for news. Now I knew the truth of my parents’ situation, and could no longer blindly pray that they’d waltz back into the hotel any minute, ‘waiting for news’ was its own special kind of torture. I paced to and fro, my mind ablaze. Perhaps Langdon’s ‘connections’ would enable him to track down the kidnappers between now and Friday. I hoped so, obviously. But if they didn’t, I had to go to the museum drop, and had no intention of going empty-handed.

  Where could I get hold of $75,000 though? The only people I knew who could access Mum’s and Dad’s money were, well, Mum and Dad. If I’d been at home I could perhaps have sold some stuff, Mum’s jewellery, some of Dad’s fancy paintings, but home was nearly ten thousand kilometres away. Even if I’d already organised flights, I could barely get there and back in two days, and anyway, I knew that there are rules about the amount of cash you can take to certain countries. I was stuck in a luxury hotel with my spending money for the trip and my parents’ restaurant tab. Though the place had a swanky pool and armed guards, there was no way they’d advance me $75,000 on the off-chance my dad would turn up and pay it back. Could I steal the money somehow? I’d risk ending up in jail myself if I did that. Which only left forcing Langdon to give me the cash. But how on earth could I do that?

  ‘You realise you’re actually walking round in circles,’ said Amelia as I passed her lounger for a third time. ‘Or rectangles at least, it being a rectangular pool.’

  ‘I can’t help it. My head’s on fire.’

  ‘You’re better off jumping into the water than walking round it if that’s the case.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it literally,’ sighed Xander.

  ‘I know that. I do though. Swimming always helps me untangle my thoughts. You should give it a try, Jack.’

  ‘Swimming up and down the pool is no more likely to produce 75,000 dollars than walking round and round it,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what you’re worried about?’ said Amelia.

  ‘Er, yes!’

  ‘But surely you can find a friend to lend it to you, someone with a rich family,’ she said, looking around offhandedly.

  For a second I thought she was referring to herself, but we both know that her mother has struggled to make ends meet since her dad left ten years ago. My parents have helped out Amelia and her mum over the years, not the other way around. They’d quietly paid for her to come on this disastrous trip, for example. But on double-checking I realised that Amelia’s eyes had settled on Xander, who’d already sat up in his seat.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What an idiot! I should have thought of it and offered to call home myself.’

  Xander’s rich. He never goes on about it, but he always seems to have access to cash. He’d brought a fair bit on this trip. Not $75,000 obviously, but might his dad be able to come up with the money? I knew he had something to do with oil fields, but I had no idea if he’d be able to lay his hands on that kind of sum at such short notice, let alone get it to us in time. Neither did Xander. He rifled his phone from his pocket and hobbled off somewhere quiet to make the call to Nigeria nonetheless.

  ‘I had another thought,’ said Amelia, while he was gone. ‘The ransom note says not to speak to the police again, but it doesn’t say anything about anyone else.’

  ‘Who else do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Detective Hubert said he’d be back in touch when he’d got hold of the travel-fixer guy, didn’t he?’

  ‘I haven’t missed a call, if that’s what you thinking,’ I said. ‘I’ve been checking five times a minute. Anyway, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t even answer him.’

  Amelia cocked her head on one side, bridling at the exaggeration, but chose to let it pass. In her spelling-it-out-slowly voice, she explained, ‘My point is that the police have already given you the name of the guy they’re trying to track down. Yannick Mugalia.’

  Unsurprised that she’d remembered the name, I saw where she was going with this train of thought and completed it for her: ‘And there’s nothing to stop us looking for him ourselves, you’re saying?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Fighting my frustration I said, ‘I have the name of a man the police haven’t yet been able to trace, who is one of eighty-two million inhabitants in a country roughly the size of western Europe. Not to mention forty-eight hours to raise 75,000 dollars!’

  Sometimes, when Amelia is a step ahead of you, which I’ll admit is quite often, she can’t help doing this compressed smile with the left side of her mouth. She was doing it now. ‘You do know Google works here, don’t you? The man’s a travel agent, not a secret agent. I found out where his office is while you were wearing out the pool decking with your pointless pacing.’

  ‘Did you call him?’ I said, trying not to get my hopes up.

  ‘Yes, but there was no reply,’ she said. ‘I looked on Maps though and the office isn’t far away. We should check it out.’

  Xander clomped back through the archway at this point. When he caught my eye he tried to look cheerful, but the words coming out of his mouth didn’t lift my spirits. ‘I got hold of Dad,’ he said, ‘and he’s really upset for you, and wants to help of course. But he thinks we should report the kidnapping to the police straight away, and I’m afraid he wasn’t optimistic about coming up with that sort of money in cash himself at such short notice. Though he’s going to try,’ he added lamely.

  �
�At least he didn’t spout Langdon’s never-pay-a-hostage-taker line,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Sure.’ Xander gave a little shrug of agreement, but I could tell from the way he avoided my eye that his father must in fact have said something pretty similar to Langdon.

  The same helpless feeling I have when I’m alone at night and fall into a Mark-shaped hole swept over me. It tastes of exhaust fumes, sounds like bottles flung into a recycling truck and is as blinding as sun bouncing off windscreens. I thought of Patience crouched over her father’s body. She’d lost him. I’d lost my parents too, for now. The prospect of making do without them, as Patience would have to make do without Innocent, forever, was too frightening to consider. I shut my eyes and tried to pull myself together, grasping for the only straw I had. ‘This Mugalia guy’s office is walkable from here?’ I asked Amelia.

  ‘People have walked across entire continents.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I do. You mean is it close. And yes, the maps app says it’s a half-hour walk. But they’re calibrated for dawdlers. It’ll take us twenty-five minutes tops.’

  ‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s pay the place a visit.’

  39.

  In fact it took Amelia and me an hour to reach the travel fixer’s office. There was a protest against the government going on that day, and our route took us straight into it, or it would have if we’d carried on blindly. Amelia wanted to cut through the crowd. But the chanting and jumping up and down had an electric, unpredictable feel to it, and the silent police chaperoning the march, with their sunglasses, batons and Perspex shields, made the whole atmosphere seem more rather than less volatile. We doubled back, cut across a dual carriageway baking in the sun and made it to the scraggy street the office was on eventually.

  Sadly the metal grille fronting the little building was pulled down, the window behind it opaque with dust. The letter box in the front door was choked with flyers, some of which it had spat back out into the street. Never mind shut, it didn’t look as if anyone had been here for days. I wouldn’t have bothered, but Amelia, apparently oblivious to the signs, pressed the door buzzer. Surprisingly, this prompted a woman to exit the next-door shop. She was smoking a cigarette. ‘Oui?’ she said, without taking it out of her mouth.

  Amelia replied, explaining in French who we’d come to visit. Had Monsieur Mugalia been here recently?

  The woman dropped her cigarette and ground it into the pavement with her flip-flop. She then began a long monologue, speaking very fast and waving her plump hands as if swatting away flies. I couldn’t follow much of what she was saying – the longer she spoke, the less I seemed to get – but I caught one phrase that she repeated: ‘tragédie familiale’. She looked agitated, angry almost. Why hadn’t I concentrated in French lessons! I was desperate to understand her. Was the woman somehow talking about a family tragedy for me? It couldn’t be possible. I turned to Amelia for help, but she was listening with her head cocked on one side, concentrating. The woman went on and on. When she finally stopped speaking, Amelia was ready with a question: ‘Ce guide, est-ce qu’il s’appelle Innocent?’

  ‘Oui! C’est Innocent, le pauvre.’

  With that the woman turned heavily on her heel and banged back through her shop’s front door. Looking at the display in the window, it seemed she sold second-hand electrical goods, mostly ancient TVs.

  ‘Innocent?’

  ‘He is – was – Yannick Mugalia’s brother,’ said Amelia quietly. ‘They ran their travel company together. It makes sense. Your parents organised the safari. Why wouldn’t they turn to the same outfit for help with their own trip?’

  ‘But where is he? Did she know?’

  ‘The last she heard he’d gone to Goma.’

  I tried to piece together the timeline. Mum and Dad had set off on their own research trip – with Yannick, presumably – before we got back. He might have heard about his brother’s tragic death en route or when he arrived in the east of the country. Could he have abandoned Mum and Dad in his grief, or even blamed them for what happened? Might he have handed them over to the kidnappers on purpose? There had been nothing about Innocent in the ransom note or on the phone, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a link. The police hadn’t been able to find Yannick yet. If he’d been taken hostage too, the note would have mentioned it, surely. And if he’d been released, wouldn’t he have raised the alarm? I smelled a rat! Standing on the dusty step in front of the Mugalia brothers’ office, I spelled my thoughts out to Amelia, only pausing when a cement mixer with the loudest exhaust pipe I’ve ever heard trundled past, blotting out what I was saying.

  She brought me down to earth with a bump when it rounded the corner: ‘That racket made more sense than you were making,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve no evidence Yannick was involved in the kidnapping. His brother died. He’s gone missing. Your parents employed both brothers and they’re missing too. That’s it – the facts.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘but until we find him we can’t rule it out.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘Marcel,’ I said. ‘He worked with Innocent. So he’ll know Yannick too. He may be able to give us a steer.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Amelia, and followed it up with something I’ve rarely heard her say: ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘What’s his number?’ I said, pulling out my phone.

  ‘He gave his card to you, not me,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t you see it?’

  Looking sheepish, she said, ‘No.’

  I couldn’t help grinding my teeth. The one time Amelia’s photographic memory would have been useful, it turned out she hadn’t looked at Marcel’s contact details when he handed them over. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘His card is with my stuff at the hotel. Let’s get back there.’

  We set off more or less at a run, headed straight for the hotel. But the demo was still going on. Maybe the crowd was quieter now, or didn’t look as intimidating, or perhaps I just thought the risk worth taking to avoid another delay: either way, this time I ignored my better instincts, grabbed Amelia’s hand and ploughed straight into it.

  Big mistake.

  We had indeed arrived during a lull. I didn’t realise how tightly packed the crowd was, or even that it was virtually all men, young and strong, and facing the same way, waiting for somebody important to start speaking at the head of the square. We’d sidestepped ten or fifteen people into the throng before the speaker emerged on the platform. The crowd erupted. It became one pulsing, cacophonous animal with Amelia and me caught in its throat. A surge from behind pulled us apart. I heard her scream, saw her stumbling sideways, her orange top immediately blotted out by a rush of protestors pushing forward. I dived after her, but I was pushing against a current of jumping, shouting people. I glimpsed Amelia’s hair and pale neck swishing between dark heads and yelled out to her, but she either didn’t hear me or couldn’t turn around. Desperately ramming my way against the flow to reach her, I was knocked to one knee by another crowd surge. For a terrifying moment I thought I was about to be trampled, but strong hands gripped me under the armpits and hauled to my feet.

  ‘Attention!’ yelled the smiling face in front of me, and the hands holding me actually lifted me from the ground. I was bouncing with the crowd, swept along with it. With my second or third jump I caught one last glimpse of Amelia heading the other way, and then she was gone.

  40.

  The quarter of an hour it took me to fight my way through that crowd felt like forever. Gnawing worry about my parents knotted into panic, not for myself, but for Amelia. The heat and the yelling and the smell of sweat and fumes swelled with the protestors, a moving mesh of limbs and backs and chests. What had I been thinking, leading her into such danger? Despite the kind hands that had stopped me from hitting the ground, the crowd felt unpredictable to the point of menacing, a pent-up force about to blow. She was pretty much the onl
y girl there, and it was all my fault. I’m not religious but I found myself murmuring, ‘Keep her safe, keep her safe …’ in time with the crowd’s chanting, and it felt like a kind of prayer.

  When I reached the far side of the square I saw that the protestors were hemmed in by a wall of riot police. Their shields were braced low and their truncheons were either folded across their chests or down at their sides for the most part. Every now and then though, if one of the demonstrators got too close, a policemen might casually poke him back with the end of his baton, or even lash out with it properly. I saw a guy take one of these blows to the side of his head, and another nearer to me already had blood pouring from his mouth.

  As the only white boy in the crowd, I obviously stood out. I could think of nothing better to do than to try and use that to my advantage. I’m tall for fourteen, but I crouched as I reached the edge of the crowd, and I did my best to look young and petrified – it wasn’t hard – in the hope one of the officers would take pity on me and let me pass.

  My pathetic plan worked, but not how I’d expected it might. A protestor, not a policeman, helped me escape. He grabbed the scruff of my T-shirt and thrust me towards the shield wall, yelling, ‘Ce garçon n’a pas de place ici!’

  I got the gist of that, and nodding, wide-eyed, I pushed forward. At first it seemed the policemen either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. But then a crack between two of the shields widened just enough for me – with the help of a kick up the backside – to stagger through.

  Once behind the police line I ran up and down it searching for Amelia in vain. I tried calling her number but she didn’t pick up. Huddles of reinforcement police were clumped along this side of the human barrier, waiting to take their turn in it. I asked one group if they’d seen a white girl my age come through, but a combination of my terrible French and the noise of the crowd drowning meant they just stared at me blankly. Should I wait and hope Amelia would be spat through a gap soon, or race back to the hotel to raise the alarm? Shaking all over and feeling like I was about to throw up, I decided on the latter, turned and ran.