Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) (12 page)

Jack paused as he tried to give the impression that he wasn’t in the
ordered to take
detectives who

“The boss would like a
quick chat with you. I will have you back
in the city in no time at all,” added the cop.
Jack looked at the man through the rear view
mirror and he nodded his
head yes to indicate that
he was happy with the situation;
nothing could be further from the truth. A short time later they pulled
off the main highway and they drove down a dusty concrete, side road.
Up ahead lay
the
shell
of an abandoned industrial
complex. Jack
couldn’t
put a name to the place but he was absolutely
certain that
he recognised it—though in truth,
one
old industrial complex looked
pretty much like another.
“What is this place?” Jack asked, with genuine interest in the tone
of his voice.
There was a brief moment of hesitation from the cop; almost as if
he was deciding if he should tell his backseat passenger anything at all.
“It’s the old SACHEM fertiliser plant,” explained the cop. “They have
moved to a smaller, more modern unit twenty miles south of the cape.
This place has been earmarked for redevelopment. It is going to be a
power plant. It is supposed to provide power to the townships,
but
they will be doing well to keep the lights on in the real houses of
the city.”
Jack suddenly recognised where they were. It was
one of the proposed sites for the power plants that the company was going to build.
He didn’t react to the new insight that he had, nor did he react to the
undertone in what the cop had just said about the real homes in the
city. By real homes the man clearly meant the houses that belonged to
the white families and those which belonged to Blacks
of high standing. This was just another way the
old regime was trying to keep
some control
over the country that they very
much still considered
their
own.
Keep the
new
ruling
Black
elite in
comfort
and they
would be
easy to manipulate—the people living in the slums would be
left to rot
in the filth and disease that they had become accustomed to.
It would
be some years before they realised that a change of colour
of
skin in their political masters meant no change for them; even longer
before they got organised enough to rise up and do something about it.
Until
that
day arrived the
country
would amble
on in
much the
same way

The short trip to the abandoned fertiliser plant
did not justify it
in any way, but Jack had no option; he stopped walking to deal with
a feigned cramp. The cop sighed as he immediately
sensed that this
was nothing more than a delaying tactic
on Jack’s part. Jack used the
brief
window
of
opportunity
to
get
a
better
sense
of
his
surroundings. Unarmed and unsure where a sniper might be hiding in
the warren of
high buildings which surrounded him, Jack decided that
it was probably sensible not to push his luck too far. He began to walk
again;
a
slow
pace
building
quickly
into a
confident
stride—if
he
wasn’t going
to fight his way
out of this situation then the only option
left open to him was to try to bluff his way out.

Everything
about
the
structures
around
him,
which
stretched
towards the unpolluted night
sky
like a
man
made forest,
spoke
of
menace. He wondered just how many
before him had made the same
ominous journey to that
same location;
never to return, with their
bodies being left to the jackals in the eastern wastelands,
or buried in
a shallow grave beneath the hot desert sands.

The complex was made up from a series of differently sized buildings that covered an enormous range
of sizes. There was a large nitration unit
clad in stainless steel that towered above everything

else; the top of which caught the very last
had already
dipped below the horizon,
out
ground level. The
unit would
have
made the
perfect
lookout
spot
for any
potential sniper—at least that’s where Jack would have gone
had he been tasked with that role. His only comfort at that particular
consideration was the fact that he was still alive. If they had wanted
him dead then the charade would have been ended much sooner. They
would never willingly have brought him inside to do the deed as there
were too many things that could have gone wrong—Jack could have
made a run for it; he could have used some piece of industrial debris
to mount a counter attack;
bullets could bounce
off any
of the hard
surfaces inside the complex, injuring one of the would-be assassins.

Jack’s highly trained brain then
moved
quickly
on to the reason
why he was being brought inside at all. His conclusions were anything
but reassuring. The cop overtook Jack as they approached a small door
leading into one of the smaller buildings. Jack figured that the building was some kind of administration unit, but as he followed the cop
inside, he quickly realised that he was mistaken. A second door
on the
inside opened into a lab.
All kinds
of
dated laboratory
equipment sat
undisturbed on dusty benches. Located so close to such crippling poverty, Jack wondered why this
expensive looking
equipment
had not
been looted the very
day that the plant closed
operations. His
mind
could reach
only
one conclusion—the plant was
owned
by
someone
who was not to be messed with. It was the fear that the poverty stricken, human waste, back in the townships respected so very
much that
they did not dare assault such an easy and obvious target, and it was
that unidentified owner who now held Jack’s life in his hands.

The cop moved to the back of the room and Jack followed him. If
the bullets did start to fly then he wanted to be as close to the cop as
possible—turning the man from abductor to human shield would
not
cause Jack a second thought, if it came to that. The cop indicated with
a
nod
of
his
head
that
Jack
should
take
a
seat.
Jack
promptly
obeyed as he dusted off a lab stool before sitting down.
As he sat down
Jack noticed that there was a large plastic basin sitting
on the bench.
Beside the basin there were three large bottles filled with chemicals.
Jack tried to look as unconcerned as he possibly could as he read the