Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within

by Patty Jansen

  “Jemiro, it is important that the Pengali can do this. I have their word that they will finish as soon as possible. If we need to speak to them again, I will do this.”

  The door to the Pengali room closed, but I could still hear their voices through the wood, although I could only imagine what they were saying.

  Jemiro met my eyes. His confused expression disturbed me. On second thoughts . . . he knew Pengali and he knew it rather well. How come I needed to lecture him on Pengali customs?

  I said, “Just go to your room, shut the door and let them play for a bit. It’s important to them. They gave me their word that they will stop.”

  Without a word, he turned and strode back up the stairs.

  Now what the heck had suddenly gotten into him?

  I went back to my room as well, where Thayu still hadn’t returned.

  I tried to ignore the drumming coming from the Pengali room, now joined by singing, and watched the news come in, but most of the mentions about the victim of the shooting were very sparse. I remembered talking to Conrad Martens. He was on the wrong side of middle age, with brown eyes and sagging cheeks. He reminded me of one of those sad-looking, loose-skinned dogs.

  From all the articles I had read about him, he was a man with a high level of integrity.

  I went over his handwritten note.

  He said he had discovered that the Pretoria Cartel had funded my trip, but it was considered to be within the “fairness of trial” guidelines. He had received death threats. He had been asked to step down. Who was the Chief Judge who had asked him to do this?

  Ms Trnkova’s documents told me that it was a woman called Maaike Hermans, and apparently she had been appointed after the election, replacing an old but well-liked judge who was retiring.

  I couldn’t find much information on her, except a dry career summary. Her name sounded Dutch, but she and her family had come to Europe as refugees from the second American civil war, which resulted in the country’s break-up into four contentious and ineffectual states. That was in the time before I had been born, when many people were on the move looking for hope and mostly finding none, unless they had lots of money. Her family might have had lots of money to let her study. I could see nothing about her personal opinions, but I bet she was of the protectionist mindset, like Sigobert Danziger, like Eva’s father. Not because of anything she’d said, but people from her type of background often were, especially if their family had money.

  I could be wrong about that, of course.

  Thayu came back, letting in a blast of sound, and the expression on her face showed me that they hadn’t made much progress on the reader. “It’s got a lot of protection and we don’t want to destroy the content with our probing,” she said, in reply to my unasked question.

  I made her tea, and she lay back on the bed with her feet up.

  Exhausted. Yet, I had to ask her more, and hated it.

  I carried the cups to the bed and sat next to her. “What about this Minke Kluysters guy? Did you find anything about him?”

  Her face lit up with the delicious, devious passion that I loved so much in her. “He is a real interesting one. For one, we’ve watched that conversation between you several times, and had a lot of trouble finding out his location, but we found it. And here is the interesting part: he was speaking to you from what I presume is his private home, which is an estate next door to Robert Davidson’s.”

  “In South Africa?”

  I met her eyes, and I could see she was thinking along the same lines that I was: what’s the chance this is someone from the Pretoria Cartel? We let the unspoken silence linger. Normally we would communicate via the feeder, but it didn’t work inside the end zone. Sometimes, I argued with Thayu, I barely needed it.

  I asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  She smiled. “Veyada was hesitant to let me tell you, because he said you would go all conservative and want to minimise risk.”

  “He said that?”

  “Veyada knows you better than you know yourself.”

  “But you didn’t agree with him?”

  “I think you should know, so that you can take precautions.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  She smiled, her eyes glittering with mirth. “I did agree with him. I also told him that you almost always see our point of view in the end.”

  “Thanks, Thay’. That’s a real . . . backhanded compliment.”

  She laughed, and I laughed, too, but then her face turned serious. “I also told him that by giving you the information, something excellent and unexpected may result, and he also agreed with that.”

  “You better be careful not to inflate my head too much.”

  She gave me a playful slap. “We let you deal with the problems. That will shut you up.”

  I hugged her. I remembered how Thayu had been mysterious and a bit aloof. Mesmerising, but always just out of reach of my understanding. Becoming Domiri, spending so much time with each other, and experiencing moments of danger together, had brought us both much closer together than we’d been when we accepted each other as partners.

  I also understood that it was highly uncommon that security personnel shared this much information with their association’s leader. The workings of the intelligence departments of Asto’s Inner Circle were a mystery even to prominent leaders. I had already been privileged to more information than most.

  We finished our tea in companionable silence with, in the background, the five-beat rhythms of the irrka drum.

  Just as I was about to remark that I’d tell the Pengali to shut up, the music stopped.

  Phew. The silence was heavenly.

  “I don’t understand why they had to bring that thing,” Thayu said.

  “There is a lot about Pengali I don’t understand. But somehow, they always manage to end up getting their stuff organised.”

  “Do they?”

  “I think so. They work it out between them, and then they all get behind it, the job gets finished and everybody is happy.”

  “You must be talking about a different kind of Pengali from what I’m seeing.”

  “What do you see, then?”

  “They never do what you want, they use everything for strange purposes and never in the way it was intended, and they have no idea how to raise their children.”

  “But they’re ready on time, they wear clothes and just now I said that they could play for a short while, and they did.”

  Thayu snorted.

  “You hate that they’re unpredictable.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  “You’re grumpy.”

  “Yes. I don’t want to talk about Pengali. I don’t want to have anything to do with them for a while.”

  I leaned against the pillows next to her. “What is the problem? This is not about Pengali, isn’t it?”

  She let out a sigh. “Tamerian or not, I should not have let that man escape.”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “Is that an excuse to be slow?”

  “It’s an excuse to be grumpy.”

  “Oh, shut up.” But she took me in her arms, and the tea was forgotten.

  We were all tired and the best thing we could do was to go to sleep so that we could be fresh tomorrow when we went to court.

  Sleep sounded easier than it was. Thayu was exhausted and fell asleep quickly, but I lay awake, listening to the rain lashing against the window, wondering if there was anything I could have done to save the life of a man I’d never met.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  I WOKE UP WITH A SHOCK.

  For a moment, I lay on my back, wondering where I was, trying to parse the unfamiliar sounds and smells. Then I remembered: the hotel, the trial today.

  Faint grey light peeped between the curtains.

  I hadn’t intended to sleep for that long. I’d wanted to get up early to see if the Pengali—

  Damn, the Pengali. I jumped out of bed and we
nt to the window. Through the crack between the curtains, I could see grey sky and a misty horizon. It was still before sunrise. There might be a sunny day ahead, but for now, a low blanket of mist hung over the ground.

  The water in the canal was perfectly still, like a mirror. I couldn’t see the Pengali, but a lone fisherman with a rod stood on the side of the canal. Instead of peacefully gazing over the water—and his bait—he kept looking to the side.

  What was the bet that the Pengali were out there where he could see them and I could not?

  I got dressed. Thayu mumbled some unintelligible words, but I left the room before she could wake up. The door to the Pengali room was closed, and when I knocked, no one opened. That proved my suspicions.

  Should I go out there by myself?

  I was sure that my association wouldn’t like it if I did, but I didn’t want to wake anyone up for what might be nothing more than just a quick peek outside. I’d come back here if there was a reason to wake them.

  There was no one in the foyer, except—wait. Jemiro. He was sitting on one of the couches in the foyer while the receptionist worked behind the counter. He just stared into the distance, not even looking in my direction when I greeted the receptionist.

  So I said, “Good morning, Jemiro.”

  Now he looked at me, a slightly confused look over his face.

  “Sleep well?” That was a bit of a silly question after he’d been threatened with a knife, but I was out of ideas for what to do about him, and through with tiptoeing around him.

  “I’m going for a walk. Coming?”

  He shook his head as if I’d suggested he’d come with me to the dentist.

  Well, suit yourself.

  I walked out of the hotel alone into the cool and misty dawn, crossed the road, walked past the bikes and the scooters, stepped over the fence that stopped the ducks crossing the rails and walked over the grass to the canal.

  I expected the Pengali to be on the jetty or the quayside, but I didn’t see them there.

  A dinghy puttered along the canal a bit further down. In it was a man in a bright yellow rain coat with buckets, an icebox and a couple of fishing rods. What was the bet the Pengali were there somewhere?

  Sure enough, they were on the walkway on the other side of the tourist boat operator, walking along the quay with the dinghy. It was not very fast, so they had no trouble keeping up. The fisherman seemed most uneasy about his unearthly following.

  “Ynggi, what are you doing?” Apart from scaring the bejesus out of the poor guy.

  “Do those . . . belong to you?” the fisherman asked.

  “These are Pengali from the Thousand Island tribe of Barresh. They are very interested in fishing and want to know how to catch fish.”

  “Oh.” He gave them an uneasy look. “It takes a bit to learn.”

  “Do you catch fish in the canal?”

  “Here? Not really. There’s a lot of rubbish in this water. You have to go out of town.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stopped, letting the dinghy pull away from us.

  “There is no fish in this water,” I translated to Coldi for the Pengali. “He says you have to go out of town, and we have no time for that, and I couldn’t teach you how to fish there. I’m very sorry, but we need to go back to the accommodation and get ready for our meeting. You were going to talk about using music as a gift. What did you decide last night?”

  “We found a solution,” Ynggi said.

  It was only then that I noticed that Kita carried a rolled-up towel from the hotel’s bathroom under her arm.

  When we were crossing the road, Abri said to me, “Our story will be heard today, yes?”

  “Yes. Today and tomorrow.”

  She said nothing and I thought she seemed smug. Whatever was in that rolled-up towel? Had they actually caught a fish? With their bare hands?

  We went back inside the hotel, where the news of the murder of Conrad Martens was everywhere. The receptionist was reading about it, the waiters were talking about it and the wall screen in the foyer showed an image of what looked like a news service announcement from the police.

  I went to sit next to Devlin, who looked tired and dishevelled.

  “Any news?”

  “Nothing that concerns us at this point. The authorities are in the dark over who murdered the judge.” The dead zone was meant to limit access to the local news, but Devlin and Amarru’s guards appeared to have rigged up some workaround so that we could at least have access to some communication. “I kept an eye on the news feed as soon as we heard who had been killed. The authorities appear to enjoy putting up communication blocks for us to get around.”

  “Does that mean you can listen in on the police communication?”

  He flicked his eyebrows. Yes, people were listening. Devlin was clearly enjoying himself, and learning lots of new and very useful things.

  “We do have some other news. I managed to crack the Tamerian’s reader.” He’d probably spent all night doing it, judging by his appearance.

  Like most people in the room, he came to the dining room with his reader on the table next to him. He dragged it over, hit the corner of the screen with his thumb and showed it to me.

  It displayed, in Isla, a list of documents. The first was a list of locations, which Devlin had plugged into a map, showing our hotel, the shops we had visited yesterday, the tram line and the cafe at the beach. It included the cafe we had visited on our first day here.

  Yes, I’d known that we would be followed, but it was a bit disturbing to see it in front of me.

  The next document was another map that showed certain zones in red: the forecourt of the court building and the adjacent street, and another street that was unfamiliar to me. I guessed this was where we were not allowed to go.

  There were a lot more notes, including details about each of us, what we looked like, what we usually wore. It pained me to see that even good old Eirani had a file, although they had rated her as “non-essential, harmless”. About Jemiro, they said suspiciously little. Was this because he was their mole or because he was as impenetrable to them as he was to us?

  There were a lot of other documents, and I didn’t have the time to look at them all.

  “Do you have an executive summary yet?” I asked him.

  “We’ve studied a good number of them. It contains orders about what to do, a list of vantage points and a chain of command that goes to a couple of addresses in town, one of which is in the tall buildings over there.” He jerked his head at the window where the tall buildings poked from over the treetops. My team had already established that people were watching us from there. “Also, there are external links to a place here.” He showed me the map. Of course. South Africa.

  “What is there?”

  “A shed on the edge of a town, it seems.” He brought up a satellite image with a yard that contained a couple of buildings, with concrete between them. The yard was tidy, almost empty, except for a single truck. There were trees and a strip of grass where the yard faced the street.

  “What sort of place is this?” I asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Devlin said. “It seems a storage place but I have no idea what they could be storing. It belongs to a farmer.”

  “You said they were transmitting things from this place. What sort of things?”

  He shook his head. “It’s in code. We’re working on it, but so far it looks like a repeat of the orders.”

  “So this place is where the orders come from?”

  “It looks like it. It looks like someone here sorts the orders and decides who does what.”

  And Tamerians, of course, were nothing without orders.

  I asked, “Did you check how far this is from Robert Davidson’s house?” And from the house of Minke Kluysters, whom I hadn’t yet contacted about his consulting job offer.

  “It’s not terribly close. There is an area of forest in between. Not many people live there. Thayu says it’s rogue country.
”

  I studied the images. There seemed to be a smaller shed where someone was walking across the yard carrying something. I enlarged the image of the yard, but it grew so grainy that I couldn’t make out any more detail.

  While I was looking at Devlin’s reader, a message came in to my reader from Ms Trnkova. At the top it said 21 May 2121, today’s date, and then it said western courtroom. Then there was a code and underneath it said Number: Admit 2.

  Surely that had to be a mistake. This was our admission for the courtroom. Were they only going to allow two of us in the public gallery?

  I showed Veyada. He gave me a dark look. “We’re going to have to talk to them about this.”

  “That is just ridiculous,” Mereeni said.

  Then she and Veyada gave each other a look, as if surprised they had agreed with each other.

  Abri and the others had gone upstairs, and they came to breakfast fully attired in the official gamra clothing I had given them. Their expressions were morose and dejected. Even Idda sat quietly through breakfast, reducing a bread roll to hundreds of little pieces, but eating none of them. She only squealed a bit, not even very loudly, when a waiter came with a broom to sweep up the mess from under her chair.

  In contrast, Ayshada was full of beans, and he even attempted to “help” the waiter by wheeling the trolley. Nicha had to intervene to prevent accidents involving the waiter’s bruised shins.

  It was an odd party, with a chunk of our association missing, and had anyone heard from Sheydu and the others? Weren’t they supposed to have met us yesterday when we went to the beach?

  Or did their absence have something to do with the attack on Conrad Martens?

  A chill crept over my back.

  Thayu had come to breakfast and sat with Nicha, Eirani and Karana; the latter two were both talking excitedly about things they still wanted to look at and buy.

  Thayu, though, stared morosely at her plate. I briefly sat down at the table, wishing I had more time to spend with her.

  She looked up, and those pretty eyes looked so tired. I wanted to tell her to go back to bed. Did Coldi women get morning sickness? I had no idea. They didn’t tend to speak about pregnancy much. I wasn’t sure if, apart from Xinanu, Ayshada’s mother, I’d ever seen a pregnant Coldi woman and I hoped Xinanu’s terrible behaviour was not typical. Did Coldi women in Barresh hide it, did they not go outside, or did they, once they were pregnant, go back to Asto?