Mosaic (6 page)

Vanderbilt was confident that no one would approach the cottage by the natural route without giving him time to act. At the first sign of movement in the lane he would drug Grant and release him; if the owners of the cottage turned up to evict him he would go, taking his junkie friend with him, and no one would take them for other than social outcasts using a squat. Only if a serious attempt was made to detain them, which probably meant a policeman, did Vanderbilt intend using violence.

But he anticipated no such problems, any more than he expected the cottage to be rushed from the back. In all likelihood he would leave here with Grant towards the end of this same day without anyone being any the wiser; but even if someone saw them there was nothing to connect them with the incident in Sorley. Possibly three days from now, when some bright policeman had all the pieces on his desk, he might put them together—the kidnapping, the cottage that was used as a refuge, the helicopter that landed briefly on the fell at dusk and the abandoned hire car found by a shepherd next morning—but by then Vanderbilt would be safely back in his own country, and Grant … well, whatever.

Vanderbilt was a professional, which meant that by and large he concerned himself with the hows and left the whys to other people. He did not know why Pretoria wanted Grant back now, after so long, and he did not very much care. He knew the order came from higher up than Botha so he was fairly confident that there was a good reason: his government did not risk confrontation with those few other governments that were less than overtly hostile merely on a whim.

He would have been happier still if the job had been handed down by De Witte, in whom he and his colleagues had an unshakable faith, but he knew that De Witte was, for the present at least, sidelined. There was even talk that the old bastard was dying. Vanderbilt, who had seen him in the hospital after the knifing, remained to be convinced. He did not think that the colonel was anything like ready to swap certain power in the here-and-now for doubtful authority in the hereafter; but perhaps he would not be offered the choice. It was like a man saying that if there were blacks in heaven he would not go. If it turned out there were blacks in heaven, neither De Witte nor Vanderbilt nor most of their compatriots would be invited.

Vanderbilt shrugged inside. He had long ago come to the conclusion that if God was capable of knowing everything a man had done, He should also be able to divine his motives. He did not consider himself, or any of them, evil men, only men charged with the almost superhuman task of keeping entropy at bay and given only flawed tools to work with. There were aspects of South African affairs he was not overly fond of himself, but he did not see anything demonstrably finer or fairer when he looked to the governments of his country's black neighbours. There seemed to be something in the African soil that begot violence and butchery: that beautiful, vibrant, bloody land. The only choice for white South Africans was between riding the tiger and dismounting.

Outside the cobweb-curtained window the fell was grey and brown, the wind was cold, the sky was low and heavy with the threat of more rain. The only sign of life as far as the eye could see was a sprinkle of white on the far hillside, and Vanderbilt knew that no matter how long he watched no sudden explosion of tawny power, no fleet and spotted courser with the long legs and serpentine body of a greyhound, no tireless pace of pied nomads would come to set the sheep in dizzy motion. Danny Vanderbilt suffered a sharp pang of homesickness. He did not want to be here; and if he thought about it, though it was generally wiser not to, he did not much want to be doing what he was doing here—dragging a bound and frightened boy back to one kind of death or another in a Pretoria basement.

Grant was shivering more violently than before. When the links chaining him were just barely touching they rang out tinily, like a miniature tattoo or a distant tambourine, the meter of his tremors. Vanderbilt wondered if he was really sick—wondered, indeed, how anyone stayed healthy in such a climate—and why Botha had put that unusual emphasis on preserving his prisoner's well-being. He left the window and quietly walked over to the bed, picking up the flung coat as he passed.

Grant appeared to be sleeping. His sunk eyes were all but closed, only a thin white line showing under each lid, and his breathing was ragged but unchanging. His skin was cold and damp to the touch, his face waxy. Vanderbilt spread the coat over him.

The gentle touch, the weight of the coat, or perhaps only the proximity of the big man wakened him. He woke with a wordless cry woven of sounds of anger and despair, his unfettered arm flailing. Metal clashed as he snatched repeatedly at the short chain. The wildness of his struggle, like a man trapped in madness or epilepsy, startled Vanderbilt who pressed the writhing man firmly back against the bed, the coat tucked under his chin. Suppressed by hands like sandbags his struggles grew weaker. At length the only movement under the coat was the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

Bending over him, pinning him still, Vanderbilt said grimly, “Sonny, I told you, if I have to I'll tie you down good. This is bloody cold country, you got to keep covered up.”

Something odd happened. Vanderbilt was bending over Joel Grant, looking into his face from a range of inches, and then—without warning and just for a moment—it was not Grant he was seeing at all but someone else, someone else's eyes and expression, someone he knew. He snatched a startled breath, his senses groping, but the illusion was already gone, dissolved as quickly as it had formed, leaving the cognitive portion of his brain dry-spinning and his eyes searching Grant's eyes with an intensity that did not reflect what had actually passed between them.

Grant gasped, “You're crazy. You're going to kill me, and you're worrying I might catch cold?”

Vanderbilt straightened up slowly. The phantom recognition had jolted through him, mind and body, like an electric shock. He did not understand what had happened—he was a pragmatic, unimaginative man—and, it disturbed him. He said, “Have I seen you someplace before?”

Grant sat up awkwardly, levering himself up one-handed, pulling the coat about him with a bad grace. “Were you De Witte's understudy in the black hole of Pretoria two years ago?”

Vanderbilt acknowledged the description with a sardonic twitch of the lip. He shook his head. He had slightly long dark blond hair. “It wasn't there.”

Grant's lip curled thinly. “Then it wasn't anywhere, because I remember the other bits of my life and I don't know you from Adam.”

Vanderbilt shrugged and moved back to the window, but he could not shrug off the feeling of unease which lingered in the wake of his small, unlikely aberration. Outside the sun was higher but nothing else had changed.

On her way up to her husband's hospital room Elinor De Witte was waylaid by his doctor and steered gently into his office. Her heart turned over once and then went racing with the expectation of tragedy, but it was not that. Harry Keppler smiled reassuringly as he guided her to a seat; a tray with cups and a steaming pot was waiting on his desk. She had known him well for thirty years. She knew what he was going to say. She wished one of them might die before he said it.

Dr. Keppler poured the coffee confidently with fine strong hands, not needing to ask how she preferred it, and passed it to her. She put it down quickly before he should hear her agitation rattling cup against saucer. Keppler smiled again and laid his cool hand on her forearm.

“Tomorrow, Elinor; or as soon as the courier can get here. It's time Joachim was told.”

Her skin crawled. The fine hairs along the back of her neck stood up. It was as if he did not know the circumstances, that what the courier was bringing was a living man with a human soul. But of course he knew, it was relevant medical information, he was just trying to keep it professional and impersonal, to save her feelings. He need not have troubled: she would never feel clean again. She wished he would not touch her.

“I thought you might like to tell him yourself.”

“No!” Her hand flew to her throat; she felt the pulse flutter there like the heart of a captive bird. “Harry, don't ask that of me.”

He drew his own chair closer and sat down. “You know I won't force you to do anything you don't want. I know how difficult this has been for you—traumatic, even. But think of Joachim. In a few minutes someone is going to go into his room to tell him that in the course of the next twenty-four hours he's going to undergo major surgery with no guarantee of success. He knows the situation: he knows he can die under the knife, in the recovery room, or of any of a thousand complications that can come up without warning over the next several months. Think how he must feel. He needs all the support he can get, and you and I both know that all my professional expertise will mean nothing to him compared with you sitting there holding his hand. Don't you owe him that much?”

She jerked to her feet; the full cup went tumbling from its perch on the arm of her chair and she paid it no heed. “Harry Keppler, don't you presume to tell me what I owe my husband. I
love
my husband; I love him so much I have done a terrible, evil thing to keep him with me. I can't afford to think too much about what I've done, and I can't afford to talk to him about it because I just might tell him the truth.

“Harry, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've lied to Joachim. The last big lie was twenty years ago, and that was about this boy too. I haven't practised enough to become good at it. If he came to suspect the truth, or even half of it, he'd put a stop to the whole monstrous business, and then I would lose him and so would this country. So if you've any sense, Harry, you'll go in there and tell him yourself, just what you want him to know, and I'll come in afterwards and sit by his bed and hold his hand, and I won't say a word until you come for him. And may God forgive us all.”

Nathan Shola spent the morning on the telephone. He made calls to Europe, to America, to various places in Africa and repeatedly to London. From time to time he received calls in return. He was cashing in old favours. By lunchtime he had found a name to go with Liz Fallon's description of the Boer, and had identified him with an élite direct action office run personally by De Witte but for the present by a man called Botha. He knew that Vanderbilt was respected as an effective operative and was credited with two kills outside South Africa. One was a reluctant informant who died under interrogation in a disused tobacco shed in Angola, the other a defector who thought himself safe in Miami under the protection of the FBI.

He had also learned about the attack on De Witte, that the damage had been repaired but that he was still in hospital. He had heard the rumour that the big man was dying anyway, and the other rumour that the hospital was standing by for a last-ditch attempt to save him with a heart transplant. However, Shola's informant discounted this as unlikely: there had been difficulty in locating enough blood of the right type for him after the stabbing, which suggested that the search for a compatible donor organ would probably take longer than a man with a bad heart had got.

“There's something wrong here,” Liz said thoughtfully when Shola had finished his report. “I grant you, if they wanted Joel back for a show trial, Vanderbilt is the man they would send and he would go about it pretty much as he has. But is it the kind of operation that would be initiated by De Witte's stand-in? Look at it from his point of view. He's probably wanted the job for years; finally he sees it within his grasp. He knows that a permanent decision will depend largely on how he acts now. So
is
he going to stake his career on an operation as unnecessary and prone to failure as this one? How much prestige is there in the show trial of a sick man when, whatever the court decides, it's bound to result in an international incident?”

Hamlin was nodding. “She's right, Nathan. They can't put him on trial. Grant is a
bona fide
resident here, entitled to the full protection of British law. Pretoria can't admit openly to having sent an operative to kidnap him. The British Government may make a show from time to time of disapproving of the Republic, but by and large relations between them are equable. South Africa hasn't so many friends on the world stage that she would deliberately set out to alienate one. If they do take him back, they'll have to keep him under wraps for the rest of his life and then bury him in an unmarked grave. And what good will that do them?”

Shola indicated agreement with a slow inclination of his narrow head. There was nothing he could add: their reasoning was good. With all their special knowledge of the situation, the more they thought about Joel Grant's kidnapping the less sense it made.

The atmosphere in the small front room had grown thick with breathing and frustration, and with the smell of cold coffee from the several cups shouldering for space on the table. None of them had felt like eating; none of them had felt much like coffee either, but periodically Liz or Will had got up to make some, primarily to occupy their hands. The idea of occupying them with some washing-up never seemed to occur to them. They seemed to have been sitting together in that room for days, not hours. They were all tired.

Shola stood up abruptly, stretching to dislodge the tension and fatigue gathering in his muscles. “Then it is something he knows that they're after.”

“And we've already agreed that makes no sense,” said Liz, a shade testily.

“Then we were wrong,” replied Nathan Shola. “Or more correctly, there's something we don't know about that makes sense of the apparently absurd.”

“Perhaps we're assuming too much,” offered Hamlin. “Can we be quite sure that this is to do with Grant's guerrilla activities in South Africa?”

Liz blinked at him. Shola stared with frank surprise. “I would have said it was a fairly safe assumption.”