Catacombs (20 page)

From somewhere farther along the hall the gaunt one spoke sharply.

"Fool! Do her. Provide!"

The chubby assassin stepped cautiously into the of-flee, quivering with stifled merriment. She raised the knife and reached down to pull the desk drawer off Raun. She hesitated again, not quite believing the small revolver she saw raised up at her in Raun's two hands.

"Oh shit," the black girl said crossly. "Zola? She–" A little too late she lunged, awkwardly, with the knife.

A
s they drove into the prison, John Guy Gibson glanced at the small band of sodden young people huddled beneath umbrellas and pieces of tarp, the legends nearly rain-washed from their hand-painted signs demanding clemency for Raun Hardie.

He said sourly to Jade, "She does have her admirers.

Jade
 
was looking elsewhere, at armed guards converging on a long two-story building
 
on the other side of the recreational grounds, playing fields and courts. He ignored the sign pointing the way to the administration building and gunned his Custom Bronco toward the scene of the disturbance.

"There's a scram," he murmured. "Better get out Your ID, Gibby."

"A
ll the talk in the world won't do no good now," said the gaunt black woman named Zola.

She was crouched in the hall of the dispensary a few feet shy of the door to the nurse's office. But she spoke softly, unhurriedly, as if they were neighbors passing a boring summer's day on a front porch somewhere. In her right hand she held a straight razor. Behind her was the body of nurse Madsden, which she ignored. From her position she could see a muddy double image of Raun in the glass above the desk.

Inside, Raun sat trembling with her back against a wall, bleeding (she didn't know how seriously) from a knife slash low on her right side. The revolver she had used to blow apart the fat assassin's head was still clutched in her two hands. The corpse lay between her and the door. Either there was one bullet left in the revolver or there was none. Neither she nor Zola was sure of that, which was all that had kept her alive this long.

Zola, by her account, had already resigned from this life; she knew she was a goner no matter what happened in the next five minutes or so. She claimed to be at peace. Her only concern was that Raun might kill her with that single remaining bullet before she had the chance to cleanly cut Raun's throat, and so Provide.

During the precious minutes she had stood the woman off, and gained hope from the commotion of guards and prison officials outside, and lost hope when they seemed reluctant to shoot their ways in and take a chance on accidentally killing her, Raun had tried to put the two of them on a first-name basis, desperately postponing that inevitable moment when Zola would rush in wildly and try to do the job her companion had bungled.

"Zola, I still don't understand what you 'Provide' by killing me. Who do you Provide for? How can you sacrifice your own life this way? I guess I'm just confused. I know you don't hate me, I've never done anything to you."

"Of course not, girl."

"Raun Hardie? Can you hear me in there? Let me know you're all right."

Zola sighed, and sounded annoyed when she spoke again to Raun.

"Fools. Better tell them, Miss Hardie, it come down to just you and me, and no kind of trickery, like that tear gas, make a difference. I'm no big talker. Quiet all my life, just a handmaiden, I just do and Provide, according to the will of the Messengers, the holiest beings ever lived on this earth. To Provide is to be Elect in the coming life. Crucify and testify. Allah-lala-la! I come chaste to my Election, weeping tears of joy. This life stinks of sin. They say to me in this place, Zola, eat the flesh of swine. Fools. Water don't wash away your sins neither. And another thing, this life is filled with beasts who walk and talk like men. Shed blood! Blood is the righteous way to Election. No way do I walk out of here alive. Tell them, Fools. Make it plain."

"What Messengers? Is this some kind of religious–"

"Shut them up out there! Or I get too fussed to talk. Wesley, I put up with his drinking ways. His blows and meanness. But the child, the child, don't you see, went under the bus. Three years old. Wesley sprawled out drunk upstairs. I melted down all the brown sugar 'til it was bubbling in the pot. Threw it in his demon's face. Now I told you already, don't want to hear them mens no more!"

"Okay, I'm okay!" Raun shouted. "Just leave us alone, you're upsetting Zola!"

"Better," Zola muttered "I truly don't mind to talk with you awhile longer, now I gets to know you. What you should understand, it don't hurt 'specially, not if the razor's plenty sharp and that first cut be deep. No pain to speak of. You just black out in a minute or two, drift off to sleep. Peaceful. 'Stead of you puts up a fight and gets butchered real bad."

"Zola, Zola, please listen to me! I don't want to die. I don't want to shoot you, either. But I can do it. My father taught me to handle a pistol a long time ago. If you try to come in here then I'll kill you."

"I don't hold that 'gainst you," Zola said generously. "Course you gone do your best." She pondered their dilemma again. "What it come down to, if you got a little bitty purse-type gun, which it sounded to me, then you needs to be lucky and good, 'cause one shot won't serve to knock me down, 'less it catchin' me smack in the head. Now what I think, it get to be just a little too quiet around here to suit me, and that's bad, so maybe–"

"Stay put," Matthew Jade said, as Zola began slowly to rise.

Zola stiffened and looked around with extreme caution. She could just make him out, standing barefoot twenty feet behind her, in the center of the hall.

"Where you come from? Nobody else in here, I made sure."

"We pried off a window grate out back."

"So. Where the rest of you? Machine guns, shoot me down like a mongrel dog. Huh?"

"The more troops, the more noise. I came in alone."

"Shoot me yourself then, Mr. Big."

"What the hell, I forgot to bring a gun."

"Lyin' fool. How do you think to stop me then?"

"I'll stop you, Mama."

Zola showed a savage grin.

"No you ain't. I got Miss Raun Hardie, right in there, closer to my razor than you is to me. You do any sudden moves, reckon I slice you both, thin off the bone."

"Who is that, Zola?" Raun cried anxiously. "Who're you talking to?"

"Just a man," Zola said contemptuously. "Sneak in here behind my back. Got him a cowboy hat, looks like." Zola resumed her rise, still watching Jade, who stood relaxed with his hands at his sides. "All right, hat man."

"You'll never make it."

"Zola! No!" Raun Hardie screamed.

"Allah-la-la-lal." Zola cried ecstatically, and she flung herself at the doorway, razor held high.

A split second before she moved, Jade's left arm described a full circle; he pitched in an eccentric but powerful three-quarter sidearm motion a double-edged throwing knife of his own design. It traveled the twenty feet between Zola and himself at nearly ninety miles an hour and chunked solidly into her right ear just as she appeared before Raun.

The impact knocked Zola off balance and against the jamb. Raun pulled the trigger of the small revolver, and the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

She continued to point the revolver high, sighting, earnestly snapping the trigger again and again, as Zola took a staggered step into the room and collapsed, skewered, her head tilting forward decisively at the last moment as if from the weight of the cold steel embedded behind
 
her eyes.

49 COURTEMANCHE STREET

Johannesburg, South Africa

May 8

O
n a cold smoggy fall evening Lourens Todt observed, from a second-story window of his home in Hillbrow, the prompt arrival of the young man he had come to think of as his son.

While Jan-Nic Pretorius was giving his hat and coat to one of the servants, Todt came halfway down the mahogany staircase to greet him. As usual only an austere handshake passed between them; but Todt unexpectedly allowed himself the indulgence of a quick cheek pat of approval with his left hand. Jan-Nic could not have been more astonished if the tough, dour old man had kissed him.

"Extraordinary planning, Nico," Todt murmured.

"Thank you, sir."

"If Ndzotyana had slipped away from us again, I hesitate to think of the effect this escape would have had on these militant Bantu, so soon after the Ikwezi disturbances."

"The PNF is pretty well demoralized today."

"I'll go further than that; we've smashed them. There's only Solomon Mkhize to consider now, and he can't be effective in exile."

They walked up the stairs together, Todt holding tightly to the railing, his eyes betraying no sign of the pain he felt in his arthritic, all-but-immobile left knee.

He was too proud to install an elevator within the mansion, or to walk with the aid of a cane. On his worst days he now stayed home, and conducted the affairs of the Department of National Security from two small, windowless, maximum-security offices reconstructed from unused bedrooms at the rear of the second floor.

They settled down with tea served by one of the special officers on duty. Todt, a full elder of the Dutch Reformed Church, neither drank nor smoked, nor allowed anyone else to do so in his home.

Jan-Nic was red around the eyes and his hands trembled slightly, but otherwise he did not betray the fact that he'd done without sleep for nearly seventy hours. He'd had his suit pressed and was still operating on his abundant nervous energy, further exhilarated by the triumph of his career.

At the age of thirty-seven Jan-Nic Pretorius was already acknowledged to be the man who would succeed his father-in-law; even his enemies, who called him the Golden Greyhound and found him too social, too aggressively self-serving, conceded that he would someday have a cabinet post. Jan-Nic had conceived and was in charge of the OB branch of the Department, named in tribute to the original Ossewa Brandwag, a rabidly anti-British, pro-Nazi group which his father and Lourens Todt had helped establish before World War Two. The covert OB branch, composed entirely of Broederbond zealots within the department, was the instrument of apartheid most feared, because of its apparent omniscience and total ruthlessness, by South Africa's blacks. For three years OB branch had concentrated on eliminating the insurrectionists of the Patriotic National Front; with the capture of Robert Ndzotyana, the PNF's best organizer and most articulate spokesman, Jan-Nic had fully justified Todt's confidence in him.

"What's the latest word?" Jan-Nic asked. "Will Ndzotyana recover?"

"He was severely burned over fifty percent of his body. But he's a strong young man, who can tell?"

"While he lingers, he's dangerous. A living martyr is more of an incitement than a dead one. I should have shot him when he came out of the shafts."

"We aren't savages or sadists, Nico, no matter what the rest of the world wishes to believe."

They drank their tea in silence for a few moments. Robert Ndzotyana, the lone survivor when his meeting place in an abandoned shaft in the Witwatersrand gold-mining district was invaded by OB agents equipped with flamethrowers, had been taken to the nearby Baragwanath General Hospital, a two thousand-bed facility for blacks in Soweto. Neither man mentioned that the hospital had no intensive-care unit for burn victims, thereby lowering Ndzotyana's chances for survival to the minimum.

"Well, Nico, I realize you haven't been inside your own home for nearly a week, and I shan't keep you long. Unfortunately, fragments of the letter which Ndzotyana was carrying on his person have caused some anxiety. I've been in touch with the prime minister, who believes an investigation should be conducted, and at once."

Jan-Nic shook off the fatigue that was stealthily tugging at his eyelids in the overheated office.

"How much of the letter was readable?"

"Nearly two full paragraphs. And all of the signature."

"You're convinced it's authentic? Jumbe Kinyati wrote it?"

"Ja. We have numerous samples of his handwriting for comparison. The laboratory did an excellent job of reconstructing the charred portions. If Ndzotyana hadn't folded the letter into rather a small packet and pushed it deep into his trousers, I doubt that any of it would have survived."

Jan-Nic
 
nodded, recalling the smoking, screaming, nearly naked man who had tumbled, weaponless, from a flame-seared passage of the honeycomb mine.

He wondered again why he hadn't automatically pulled the trigger of his own weapon. But he knew the answer. He hadn't wanted to be there in the first place. He lacked a certain essential coldness, a willingness to come to grips with the realities which his meticulous planning produced. He was simply not a killer. Physical violence dismayed him. He had channeled his youthful athletic ability into solitary sports and forced himself to excel to overcome the pain of a poor self-image. He had always been a skilled emulator, first of his dashing father, then of the pragmatic, stolidly courageous Todt, whose exceptionally plain daughter he had married in a demonstration of devotion to the old man. He was strongly sexual, unresponsive to Anna-Marie, and terrified of extramarital involvements; one slip could ruin him, in this arch-conservative society where he strove to make of himself a monument no man could pass by without tipping his hat.