Cloudburst

by Wilbur Smith

  We rode without let-up for what seemed days on end. Of course it wasn’t; I just lost track of time completely. I suffered a terrible waking dream, or out-of-body experience, in which I saw myself from afar, a speck inching across an enormous and indifferent landscape, a million miles from Mum and Dad wherever they were, the future as huge as the country we were travelling through, with nothing but a great expanse of loneliness ahead.

  I’d never cope without them. And yet did I really think I could find them? It took every ounce of my willpower to keep a tiny flame of hope alive that day. I couldn’t afford to give up. Every mile we could put between ourselves and Canonhead counted. Night fell and we battled on. Our headlights swarmed with insects. In the next village we reached, Marcel bartered us a hut for the night. We were up before dawn and would have set off on empty stomachs, but as we were packing up the woman whose hut we’d slept in popped up with three helpings of a sticky, dough-like stuff called fufu, accompanied by a savoury sauce, all served in folded banana leaves. I’ve no idea what was in the sauce. Not much meat, that’s for sure. But it filled a hole in my shrunken stomach, and helped me hang on to that bike, and Marcel’s back wheel, all morning.

  At some point he must have changed routes because we arrived at a different river crossing, this one served by a crazy motorised raft built out of barrels, bits of tree, planks, even some of those big plastic containers I’d seen people in Kinshasa carrying on their heads to market, which made the traditional dugout of our way out to the mine seem positively seaworthy. The river lapped sludge-brown between the planks as we wheeled our bikes aboard.

  There’d been no signal in the village where we’d spent the night, but I noticed – because it seemed so out of place – that one of the raft guys had a pair of headphones in his ears, and I couldn’t believe it when he began talking loudly to nobody, annoying as a commuter, halfway across that river in the middle of nowhere. I turned on my phone. Sure enough, it caught a signal. I waited, but no messages materialised. With just ten per cent battery, I hit Xander’s number, willing him to pick up, adrenalin surging when he did.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, relaxed as ever.

  ‘Have you seen the CCTV footage yet?’

  ‘Just now, yes,’ he said quickly, cottoning on to the urgency in my voice. ‘Sorry, though – the guy’s wearing a motorbike helmet throughout. He’s completely unrecognisable.’

  ‘Did you manage to take a copy for me?’

  ‘Filmed it on my phone.’

  ‘Good. Get out of the hotel,’ I said. ‘Find us somewhere else to stay. Check you’re not followed. Send us the address.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ he said.

  ‘Also, get hold of some dollars. I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And call Joseph again. Pay what it takes to have him meet us at Goma airport tomorrow.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Langdon’s mining outfit is dodgy,’ I explained. ‘Full of little kids, and spreading into the national park. He obviously didn’t want Mum and Dad to find out.’

  ‘You think he’d kidnap his own family?!’

  ‘No, but it’s convenient if they’re out of the way until after the summit. And he’s been odd about the whole thing from the start.’

  ‘Want me to contact the police again?’

  ‘Not till we get back and I’ve seen that footage myself.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, adding, ‘Hang in there, Jack.’

  57.

  Hanging in – or on – was a Herculean task that day. The track was a snake writhing through the scrub, grass and patchy forest. It went on forever. Occasionally we’d come upon other travellers, all of them baffling in their own way. Here was a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of painted sticks. Hours later, two children alone, neither of them more than three years old. The next person we saw was an old lady arguing with a donkey. It didn’t apparently want to take another step. We came to another, smaller river at one point. This one was crossed by a bridge. Quite a broad bridge, in fact, designed to take proper traffic. Marcel paused mid-span for a water break. I shut my eyes and tilted my flask to the sky; the sun broke through the clouds and warmed my face.

  ‘Who would bother to build a big bridge like this when the track either side of it is barely wide enough for a motorbike?’ I said.

  ‘The Belgians,’ said Amelia. Seeing that I was none the wiser she went on. ‘They were big into infrastructure. Sixty years ago this little track was probably a decent dirt road. Since the Belgians pulled out and the trucks stopped running, the surrounding bush has been trying to reclaim it.’

  Mother Nature had done a pretty good job of that. In places the track was no more than a wheel’s width, and occasionally it disappeared altogether. But finally it wound back into the village where we’d first picked up the bikes. I was exhausted, dead on my feet, barely had the energy to climb into Marcel’s truck. When I shut my eyes all I could see was the bike’s front wheel rolling ahead of me, and the constant juddering through the handlebars ran through my whole body long after I’d got off the bike. Marcel seemed unaffected. He put a piece of chewing gum in his mouth and fired up the pickup. I’m ashamed to say I fell straight to sleep. Amelia did too. I felt bad not keeping Marcel company for the last leg of the journey, but I couldn’t help it. The next thing I knew we’d arrived at the airport.

  We said our goodbyes to Marcel. I’m not sure I could have found the words to thank him properly in English, let alone French, but I wanted to try, and I made a right mess of it by asking Amelia to say that we were grateful to him for doing way more than we’d paid him to do. She translated his response. ‘This was never about the money. He hopes you find your parents. And he believes in what we’re trying to do. It’s what Innocent would have wanted. Get the evidence out there, he says. Do whatever it takes.’

  I offered Marcel my hand. He took it, his palm cool. ‘Bonne chance,’ he said.

  Walking through the airport made me realise what a state Amelia and I were in; I was already filthy when we left the mine and hadn’t changed my clothes since then. Joseph, in his ironed jeans and bright white shirt, did a double-take when he saw us.

  ‘Long story,’ I said.

  ‘No excuse!’ he replied, leading us to the airport toilet block. ‘Nobody flies with me so … not clean!’

  My spare T-shirt wasn’t much better than the one I was wearing, but I stripped to the waist at the sink and got the worst off myself at least. Amelia did better than me in the ladies. She emerged looking fresh-faced, tanned – she’d caught the sun – and her wet ponytail swung cheerfully from side to side as we made our way out to Joseph’s plane.

  This time our arrival back in Kinshasa really did coincide with a proper storm. The sky filled with black clouds while we were still some way from the airport, a mean weather front closing in. Joseph pushed his aviators up onto his forehead and dropped the plane a thousand metres so fast my stomach jumped. ‘We can beat it,’ he said with a sideways smile, and began arguing with air traffic control. Raindrops big as marbles whacked against the cockpit glass loud enough to be audible over the propellers. The storm front was like a lid closing on the runway. Joseph murmured, ‘No problem, no problem,’ and smiled at us as we descended further, but there were pinpricks of sweat along his hairline. We flew the last kilometre at an altitude of about two hundred metres, crabbing sideways against a horrible crosswind. Being able to see what was going on made the whole thing doubly exciting. I could tell Amelia was worried though; she was gripping the sides of her seat.

  ‘Nearly there,’ I reassured her, with the runway a rain-warped streak of grey ahead. Joseph kicked the plane straight at the last second, and the wheels kissed the tarmac amazingly gently.

  ‘Easy, as I said,’ said Joseph casually, but his relief as we taxied off the apron was obvious.

  Once Joseph had fast-tracked us through the airport to the taxi rank, Amelia dug out her phone again. Mine was dead, but she’d thought to keep h
ers switched off until we needed it. Now she turned it on and showed me the messages that had landed more or less as we did. Once again hope fluttered in my chest: might Mum or Dad have made contact? No, but Caleb had.

  His message read: ‘Heads up – my dad’s on his way. Cx’

  Despite everything, I couldn’t help flinching at that ‘Cx’. The fact that Caleb hadn’t said what had happened when Langdon came round worried me.

  ‘Message him back,’ I told Amelia. ‘Ask him how it went with his dad when he woke up. Also, ask for Langdon’s Kinshasa addresses – both home and work.’

  ‘Yessir,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Sorry, but –’

  ‘Don’t worry. In the circumstances, you’re forgiven.’

  As she was writing her reply another message landed, this one from Xander. ‘Holed up here,’ it read, followed by a link to an Airbnb. Amelia messaged him that we were on our way. I hoped he’d got to the apartment unnoticed. It seemed to be near to the Gare Centrale, so I asked the taxi driver we hailed at the airport rank to drop us there. I wanted to scope out this new place, or at least look at it from a distance and make sure nobody was watching, before going in.

  58.

  ‘Gare Centrale’ turned out to be pretty close to the Congo riverfront, and the apartment was in a boring-looking five-storey block with a balcony that looked out over the water. We walked past the building once, eyes peeled, but nothing on the street seemed out of place. A Volkswagen with a one wing mirror dangling from its broken bracket drifted by, but a tatty car didn’t seem to have anything to do with us. We took the external staircase up to the third floor and knocked on the door, which opened a crack to reveal Xander’s face. I could have hugged him, I was that pleased to see him, but made do with a fist bump.

  He showed us around, a natural on his crutches now. There was a tiny kitchen diner with a spindly modern table and chairs, a main room not much larger leading out onto the balcony, which I was pleased to see gave a view of the street as well as the river, and a couple of bedrooms with identical Christmas-themed duvets. Whatever. With the main door safely locked, I cut to the chase.

  ‘Let’s see the footage then.’

  ‘I was hoping it might show a licence plate on the motorbike or something,’ Xander said, pulling out his phone, ‘but there’s really nothing to see.’

  The original CCTV recording was in black and white, and the fact Xander had filmed it on his phone made the quality ropier still. He was right, of course – the man who delivered the ransom note had parked out of shot and kept his motorbike helmet on with the visor down right the way through the argument with the concierge. He wasn’t wearing anything unusual, no logo or badge, and I watched the short clip with a sinking heart, right up until the point when the guy was escorted out by security. Something snagged then for me. It was the way the guy walked. He was bow-legged. I’d seen that bandy gait before, recently. It took a second for the penny to drop, but once it did I was certain I knew who it was. Certain and dumbstruck.

  ‘Langdon’s driver,’ I said under my breath. ‘But it can’t be.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Amelia.

  Caleb: ‘You said on the phone that he stood to gain from having your folks out of the way.’

  ‘But kidnapping his own brother? It makes no sense. Not even he –’

  ‘Actually it makes very good sense,’ stated Amelia. ‘Particularly of the ransom. He made a big show of not wanting to pay off the kidnappers, because that’s what you’re supposed to say, and then he caved, which was weird, unless you’re right and that guy is Langdon’s driver, because if that’s the case he would literally have been paying off himself.’

  I watched that clip many times, the thoughts crowding my head ironically making it hard to think straight. Dad would surely have recognised Langdon and told him to take a hike. Except of course Langdon would have paid someone else to do the actual kidnapping. He’d never let anyone hurt Mum or Dad though, which was good. Or – seeing how he’d treated Caleb – would he? If I got to the bottom of this, and it turned out to be true, the news would break Dad from Langdon forever. Did that matter? It wasn’t as if they were that close anyway. At least I had a lead. And yes, Langdon had a motive, to stop Mum and Dad visiting his crooked mining operation and prevent them giving evidence in the environmental debate. The ransom note was presumably a stunt designed to throw me – and anyone else who cared to look – off the scent. The way Langdon hadn’t wanted us to involve the police at first now made a lot more sense.

  ‘When does the summit thing end and the Article 16 decision take place again?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Article 16B, and they’re voting tomorrow, at 3 p.m.,’ said Amelia. ‘The vote takes place in the National Assembly. That’s the lower house, or legislature. It’s situated in the People’s Palace, off Boulevard Triomphal. ‘

  Xander blew out his cheeks and looked my way, his eyes asking, How does she know this stuff?!

  Amelia raised her phone: ‘You have heard of the Internet?’

  ‘Yeah, but remembering the detail …’

  ‘It’s the detail that’s interesting.’ Amelia shrugged. ‘Also, the deadline’s kind of important. The summit wraps up in the morning. Janine and Nicholas need to present their evidence there at least three hours ahead of the vote if it’s to influence the debate.’

  ‘Midday tomorrow …’ I murmured.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’ve got to find them before then.’

  Even as I stated this simple aim, the impossibility of achieving it overwhelmed me. I was exhausted, wanted nothing more than to slide beneath one of those stupid Christmas duvets, pull it over my head and give up. But there was no time to waste thinking like that. Langdon’s driver was the lead, despite his motorcycle helmet. Two could play at that game, I thought.

  59.

  Caleb had messaged Amelia Langdon’s address. My recharged phone said it was about five kilometres away. Once she and I had washed, changed and eaten – Xander had thought to liberate a bag of bread rolls and sliced cheese from the hotel’s breakfast buffet before he jumped ship – we headed out to flag down a motorcycle taxi. I had some of Xander’s dollars safely stowed in the bottom of my backpack. The first bloke we asked wasn’t interested, but the second – an old guy with a greasy Lakers cap and remarkably white teeth – I wondered if they were real – took the offer seriously: $200 to borrow his bike.

  ‘Montrez-moi l’argent,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Go on then,’ Amelia said to me. ‘Show him.’

  I dug out some of the cash.

  Temptation played across his face.

  ‘Plus one hundred deposit,’ I said to Amelia. ‘Tell him it’s just for a day. We’ll return the bike to him outside the People’s Palace at 3 p.m. tomorrow.’

  Amelia relayed all this, but the guy seemed to be weighing up whether or not we were serious, so I added an extra $100 and said, ‘Monsieur, please.’

  The bike was a wreck: for $400 he could probably buy a better one. This sunk in. With a shrug he handed me the key.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Merci beaucoup,’ and I jumped on the saddle before he could change his mind. Amelia climbed up behind me. We left the bike’s owner in a puff of exhaust, rattling off down the broad road. This bike was heavier than the ones we’d ridden through the bush, but it worked, and let’s face it, I’d had practice. Negotiating the traffic on potholed tarmac was still a lot easier than keeping upright along that snaking dirt path. I’d checked the map on my phone before setting off, and had memorised where the police station, market and our old hotel were in relation to Langdon’s place and our hideout flat. I made for the market first, the one where we’d seen the amazing Sapeur guy all dressed up in his three-piece suit, and not because I wanted fake Nikes, sunflower seeds or a set of goat hoofs, though I was pleased to see those stalls still there. No, what I wanted was a couple of helmets, and the woman whose life’s work appeared to be selling the most battered of biking lids
possible was still at it beneath her pink-and-yellow parasol. She seemed unsurprised to see us, as if white teenagers showed up regularly to buy her recycled helmets. Although her stall was well stocked, not many of her helmets had visors. We found Amelia one that fitted. I had to make do with one that was too big. But that had its advantages. As we threaded our way back through the market on the bike, picking up speed en route to Langdon’s place, the breeze worked its way into the helmet and cooled my face.

  I found my way there easily enough, though ‘there’ was pretty unrevealing. Langdon’s house was in a side street off a clogged main road. In this little backwater the buildings were set behind gates. My heart sank on our first pass, as I couldn’t see a anything useful through the metal railings, but coming back down the street slowly on the side nearer the shuttered house I spotted a familiar black SUV tucked in a parking slot behind the railings. Amelia saw it too. She headbutted the back of my helmet, nodding in the direction of the big car. We rolled on past, and I pulled the bike in behind a scabby-barked tree further down the street.

  ‘Pretend we’ve got a problem with it,’ I said to Amelia, kneeling down beside the bike myself.

  ‘But it works fine.’

  ‘That’s why I said “pretend”.’

  I wanted to take stock, see if there was anywhere we could hole up and watch Langdon’s house to monitor who came and went. But aside from this tree there was little cover. We could fake-tinker with the bike for a bit, but do it for too long and we might arouse suspicion. My head was heating up within the helmet, which smelled of someone else’s sweat. How could we keep an eye on Langdon’s house without running the risk of being caught ourselves?

  I’d asked that last question of myself silently, or at least I thought I had, but either I’d muttered it aloud or Amelia was thinking in time with me. ‘Easy solution,’ she said.

  ‘What?’