‘Don’t move,’ she hissed.
Clay stopped.
‘There it is,’ she said, her voice hoarse, as if she was choking. ‘The reason for all our pain.’
He took another step, not understanding. For a moment he thought she might accept him. But then she looked up into his eyes. Fury swirled there.
‘No,’ she shouted, jerking back and away from him. ‘Get back. Don’t touch me.’
Clay stopped dead, a cold spline piercing his chest. He raised his hands, backed away. Heat drained from his body, leaving him cold and shrivelled. Inept and inexperienced, he’d read the signs all wrong. He grabbed another towel from the rack, covered himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I thought…’
She looked as if she’d just been pulled back from the edge of some deep chasm, her eyes stretched wide and red-rimmed. Dark veins pulsed beneath the pale skin above her cheekbones, spread brittle across the surface of her bone-thin arms. She looked as if she’d been living on starvation rations. She was shivering.
‘Jesus, Vivian, what’s wrong?’ he whispered, stupid, clumsy. As if there was an answer that could be put into words. As if the answer wasn’t entirely evident.
He closed his eyes and moved towards her and this time she didn’t push him away. He wrapped his arms around her and felt the tremors birthing deep inside her and held her tight. And when she started to cry he could feel her relax into him and then she was sobbing hard and deep, the shudders ripping through her body. He stood and tried to absorb them all. And this time it was he who would help her. He let her collapse into his arms, scooped her up and carried her to her bedroom, laying her carefully on the bed and covering her with the blanket. He looked down at her for a moment as she curled up like a child, and then he turned away, picked up his clothes and left her there, closing the door behind him.
Vivian slept through the evening and all through the night. By the time she emerged from the bedroom, it was morning. Clay was fixing breakfast using a few eggs he’d found in the fridge.
She’d showered and changed. Gone was the black makeup, the funeral clothes.
‘You okay?’ he said, knowing she wasn’t.
‘Where did you sleep?’
Clay pointed to the couch.
She sat at the kitchen table. ‘You bandaged yourself.’
‘Not very well.’ Clay flipped the eggs.
‘How is the pain?’
‘Getting better,’ he said.
‘You heal fast.’
‘Hungry?’
She nodded, a little bob of her chin.
‘Good.’ He wasn’t going to ask her about what had happened the previous night. Everyone breaks. He knew that now, had seen far too many examples of it already. And everyone does it differently.
Of course, he wouldn’t learn until much later that the breaking usually comes as a delayed reaction, a time bomb hidden away in some dark corner of yourself, waiting to go off when you least expect it, when you are least prepared. For him, it was more like a slow leak than an explosion, a drip-feed of poison that eroded every part of him, the half-life of the toxins measured in years, the release steady and continuous. And it would be with him still, all those years later, closer to the end than the beginning, even after he’d done the one thing that he’d thought would end it.
Clay poured her a cup of tea and one for himself. She sipped in silence. He put a plate in front of her, deciding not to apologise for his cooking, and sat across from her.
After a while he said: ‘What’s in that room, Vivian? The locked one.’
She looked at him as if deciding what to tell him. Then she placed her knife and fork carefully side by side in the middle of the plate, folded her hands in her lap, and took three quick shallow breaths. ‘Botha came to the hospital yesterday,’ she said.
The words grabbed Clay by the throat.
‘He had your file, Clay. Your service record. He said he wanted to see your death certificate and interview those who had signed it. Me.’
‘Jesus,’ breathed Clay.
‘I asked him for identification.’
Clay held his breath.
‘He’s BOSS, Clay.’
Fear took a trek down Clay’s spine, down through his legs. Unlimited access, unlimited mobility. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I showed him the hospital records. Told him that we’d tried to revive you but couldn’t, that you’d died of your wounds.’
‘Did he speak to the nurse, too?’
Vivian nodded ‘She told me she’d stuck to the story.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘I have to, don’t I? She was terrified.’
‘We can’t take that chance, Vivian. We have to assume she talked.’
She continued as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘He also went to the morgue and demanded to see the ashes, the documentation. My friend told him he’d already shipped the remains to the next of kin. Botha checked all of the manifests, everything.
‘Do you think he believes it – that I’m dead?’
Vivian shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Clay. He seemed satisfied. He thanked me and everyone, then he left.’
Clay pondered this, but the fear held tight.
‘I’ve been doing some checking into Roodeplaat Research Laboratories,’ said Vivian.
Clay leaned forwards.
‘The building used to be occupied by a contract medical lab. They did blood work, that kind of thing. I think I may have even used them once or twice, years ago. Apparently, a little over a year ago, the lab was sold to RRL. It does work exclusively for the government. Eight months ago, it was declared a secure facility, restricted access. No one I spoke to seemed to know what its purpose is, or who runs it.’
‘I hope you’re being careful.’
‘I went there yesterday on my lunch break. I sat in my car across the street, watched the entrance.’
‘And?’
‘There was razor wire all around. Armed guards posted at the front entrance. Everyone who came and went was ID-checked, searched, and sent through metal detectors.’
‘Seems unusual for a lab.’
‘Not if they’re producing stuff like formulation 13B.’
Clay said nothing.
‘After a while I went around to the back service entrance. There was the same high security.’
‘Jesus, Vivian. Did anyone see you?’
‘The building backs onto a wooded ravine. I hid in the bush.’
Clay looked into her eyes, new respect budding inside him.
‘Just before I was going to leave, a lorry arrived. The guards checked the driver’s documents and then they opened the back of the lorry and inspected the cargo. I was close enough. As they opened the doors, I could hear them. I could smell them, Clay.’ Her face disappeared behind her hands.
He reached for her. ‘What was inside?’
She looked up at him. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She opened her mouth but nothing came.
Clay waited, squeezed her hand.
‘Animals,’ she gasped through a constricted windpipe. ‘Monkeys, apes.’
‘Jesus.’
Vivian wiped her eyes. ‘And there’s one more thing. After what you told me about Botha, I decided to check your friend’s effects before I left the hospital.’ She reached down beside her. ‘I found this,’ she said, placing a book on the table. ‘He had it with him when he was brought in.’
‘Eben.’
She nodded.
Clay caught a breath. It was the notebook he’d buried under the floorboards in his tent – the one they’d taken from O Medico de Morte’s assistant in the dunes.
25
A Part of Who He Was
They didn’t really have a choice. And they both knew it.
Later that same evening they’d decided. If they had any hope of finding the truth about Operation COAST, they needed to get inside that laboratory.
But they were running out of time. The longer they wa
ited, the worse their position became. How long until someone cracked, went to the authorities, succumbed to Botha’s probings? As soon as they learned that Clay was still alive – and it seemed to him almost certain that they would – he and Vivian would both be in mortal danger, her coconspirators too: Joseph, the other nurse, her friend who ran the morgue.
There, in her kitchen, they went through what they knew (not much) and what they didn’t (a lot). Cleary, UNITA, South Africa’s erstwhile allies – or at least that part of UNITA run by O Coletor, Colonel Mbdele – were doing a lot more than fighting a guerrilla war in Angola. The diamonds, ivory and hardwoods Clay had seen them loading onto Cobra’s C-130 were evidence of that. But what were they getting in return for the plunder? Weapons and ammunition, military support to continue the fight? It was certainly plausible; in Africa, commonplace. But Zulaika had been convinced there was more to it. The poor bastards they’d seen injected that night at the temporary airstrip in Angola probably would have had the same view. Eben, too. The only thing that linked any of this to Operation COAST was the document he’d found on Doctor Death’s assistant out there in the dune-lands. Formulation 13B, the same foul shit Botha had used to try to kill Clay that night in the hospital. Vivian’s Torch cell inside SAMS had suspected for some time that experimental drugs were being shipped to combat zones and used for unauthorised field trials. Until now, they had been uncertain about exactly what was being tested. Based on anecdotal evidence, Vivian and her colleagues had surmised that the drugs were most likely designed to aid in the pacification and interrogation of prisoners. Certainly, there were much more effective ways to kill people. But every time they had tried to trace these activities they’d come up against the same wall: a classified military operation code-named COAST. All they knew about COAST’s structure was that it was run by one Doctor Grasson, an ex-cardiologist, apparently well connected within the upper levels of government. When Vivian had heard Clay’s stories the first time they’d met in 1-Mil, she had immediately made the connection and decided to cultivate him as a source. She’d tried with others before, but they had never yielded any useful information. It was about that time that she started to suspect BOSS was watching them.
Vivian’s analysis of the contents of the notebook, matched with Clay’s observations from the night at the makeshift airstrip in Angola, confirmed that the tests were both systematic and extensive. The details of trials on more than two hundred test subjects were catalogued in the blood-stained pages. And Formulation 13B was the link between Cobra, Botha, Doctor Death (were Grasson and O Medico de Morte the same person?) and Colonel Mbdele – the first real breakthrough they’d had. Were they Operation COAST? And was this thing legally sanctioned, as it appeared – supported by the Bureau of State Security and thus the government itself, or was it a private operation, run for profit by some kind of fucked-up consortium? Based on the documents and the information in the notebook, the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories were where the stuff – some of it anyway – appeared to originate. That’s where they had to go.
They both knew, there and then, that from here on their lives would be very different, that everything they had come to know as normal, as theirs, would be lost. Was already lost. Gone like childhood. And there was no route back, no way to reverse the flow of time and events.
That night Vivian slipped out the back way, told Clay to stay at the house, to keep alert. Clay offered her the Beretta, but she refused. ‘I’m a doctor,’ was all she’d said.
A doctor.
An activist.
A rebel.
A widow.
And Crowbar and Steyn and DuPlessis, all of them – out there somewhere tonight in the Angolan bush, staring deep into death’s enchanting eyes – would call her a communist, a traitor. Her, alone here in this place of ghosts, this shrine, every night curled up small and so vulnerable in that big, cold bed. He thought back to their encounter in the bathroom, her in mourning, even her hair now the colour of the longest night, the years and miles between them, despite his nakedness. And then the way she’d held him there, as if on some threshold, deciding perhaps, before crushing his arousal. Had it been an attempt to break free, to fight her way back to warmth and connection? Or was she trying to pull him into her vortex, into that dark ocean already lapping at his knees? Did she even know?
And now here he was, dead, seduced, plotting against his country, the country he’d sworn to defend against all enemies, the country of his birth. He filled his lungs, stood, walked to the kitchen and got a glass of water. Maybe he could still get out. If he left now, under the cover of darkness, he could hitch his way north, make his way back to the platoon. He’d tell Crowbar the death certificate had been an error. He’d be safe there, with his fellow parabats. Crowbar would protect him. All he’d done was follow orders. Sure, they’d rescued Zulaika from UNITA that night in the bunker, but they’d just been doing the right thing. Wade had ordered him and Eben on the recon patrol with Brigade. Yes, he’d killed Doctor Death’s assistant out there in the dunes, but no one could prove it. By now the body would be buried under thousands of tons of shifting sand, and the only witnesses were dead; or dead enough. He could burn the notebook, destroy the evidence. Crowbar would know what to do. They needed good soldiers. There would have to be an enquiry, of course. If he stayed quiet about what he’d seen – the rape, the injections, the bodies thrown into the ocean – BOSS would have no reason to question his loyalty. He might get a few months confinement, lose a stripe, but he’d be okay, be allowed to stay with his unit. Vivian had a network, contacts. She could look after herself.
He had to force the lock to get into the room. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The first thing that hit him was the smell: must, old books, undertones of rust, steel, pinewood, browning paper. And something else. The lightest of perfumes. Her.
He switched on a lamp, cast its light around the room. A thick layer of dust covered every surface: the ceiling-to-floor bookshelves, the old Corona typewriter on the paper-strewn oak desk, the ranks of model airplanes lining two, long pine shelves against the inside wall. Framed photographs covered the other part of the wall. Dust ridged the tops of each frame. A younger version of the man in the photograph on the bedroom chest of drawers stared out into the lamplight. He was all in white, holding his cricket bat aloft. To his left, a dozen young men in flight suits and sunglasses giving the thumbs up. John grinning in the cockpit of a Mirage, helmet on, oxygen mask dangling open beneath his chin. Vivian in a bathing suit, smiling big, one hand up as if waving the photographer away, blue sky and bluer ocean behind her. A Bianci racing bicycle was propped up against the bookshelf. Next to it on the floor, a set of dumbbells loaded up, fifty pounds each, a stack of aeronautical supplements. And there, nestled cocoon-like between stacks of books and flight manuals, a sleeping bag laid out on an inflatable mattress, a head-dented pillow pushed up against the desk.
Clay opened the big cupboards. Inside, another sleeping bag rolled into its sack, a pair of backcountry backpacks, ropes and carabiners, climbing boots, ice axes and pitons. A 35 millimetre camera with extra lenses packed into a snug black case. Clay grabbed one of the backpacks and started loading it up with everything he might need.
When she returned a few hours later, just before dawn, Clay was sitting in the main room, the backpack next to him in the big lounge chair, the Beretta in his lap, the copy of Catch-22 folded open, cover-up on one knee.
She stood before him. She looked as if she’d spent a night in the wilderness. Her coat was torn in two places. There were red scratches on her face and hands, leaves in her hair.
‘Where are you going?’ she said.
‘Wherever you are,’ he said.
Loyalty is a crazy thing. He’d already been out the front door, halfway to the street, when he’d decided. Loyalty isn’t exclusive. Being true to a person, to a country, to an idea, does not preclude other equally valid loyalties. And it can’t be blind. This woman had not only saved his life b
ut had brought him back from the edge of a death apparently prescribed by the authorities of his own country. If Botha was acting legitimately in the name of the nation – and something deep inside him still doubted this – the nation was wrong. He could see that now. His loyalty to this place, this beautiful land, was absolute. But this system, a system that would do such things, did not deserve his loyalty. In fact, he could see now, as clearly as a high-veldt sunrise, that his loyalty to this place demanded that he rescue her from this corruption, this travesty. Crowbar would understand. And Eben would be proud.
She sat next to him and explained the plan.
She’d met an associate on the edge of town – someone high up in the medical service. One of us, she called him. He’d been nervous, twitchy, not his usual composed self. He’d been surprised when she’d asked him about Roodeplaat, questioned why she’d called him, used the emergency code word, for something so inconsequential. He had made to leave, but she’d managed to convince him to listen, had assured him it was important.
There were, they’d determined, only two ways in – through the front door, or perhaps the rear service entry. But it had to be in the open. Any sort of break-in would jeopardise more people, expose more of their network. Her contact had made a few calls. Evening was the best time, he reported. Most of the staff would be gone. Late-evening deliveries under the cover of darkness were common. He could provide her a high-level SAMS identification badge, and a special pass that would get her through security and into the building. It would take him a day, perhaps two. She would have to get in and out quickly, leave everything as she found it.
She sank back into the couch, hugging her arms around herself. ‘So, that’s it,’ she said. ‘As soon as he gets me the badge, I’m going in.’
‘I’m going with you,’ said Clay.
She looked at him a moment, open mouthed. ‘You can hardly walk,’ she said.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m not letting you do this on your own. What if something goes wrong?’
Reconciliation for the Dead Page 22