Moxyland (25 page)

   And then Zuko comes back, staggering in, half-fucked on glue, which would be a red card, but under the circumstances, I'll let it slide. Because he's a true believer. And there's work to do today, as skyward* keeps reminding me, the msgs coming in incessantly, like jabs with a sharp stick.

I don't know how he knew where to find me.

 

An incessant bleeping with an undertone of tango drags me rudely from the depths of REMsleep. I've been dreaming about cars loaded down on their axles with trickle castles, like the kind you make dribbling mud between your fingers at the beach, like Toby and I did a couple of years ago. Sturdier than dry sand, but still only sand, and when it dries out it all crumbles, like the castles on the cars, toppling around me.

   At first I think Jane's accidentally set off the burglar alarm again and I'm going to have to fend off the security Aitos bounding in to the rescue, but then I realise home™ is playing Buster Mzeke's
Asphalt Sonata
, the song I assigned to work-related calls. I turn it off, roll over and go back to sleep for another twenty minutes. It is fucking Sunday.

   When I get up, the apartment is oddly quiet. Jane is usually up by now, curled up on the lounger on the balcony with the Sunday papers and a chocolate hazelnut croissant fresh from the Communique bakery.

   'Jane? You want some ultra?' I call, the volume of my own voice making me wince. On the Richter scale of hangovers, this one could have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. I check her room. No sign of her. Maybe she got laid after her big meeting. What are the chances?

   She left the TV on, the menu open to her catalogue of soaps, which means she was up all night watching them instead of getting laid. We're really gonna have to talk. I flick across to the cartoons while I wait for the coffee to brew.

   But I'm feeling restless. I get up from the couch, go back to my room and throw open the cupboards. Soon I'm going to have to think about packing in anticipation of my brand-new life. I'll have to shed a lot of it; even Jane would notice if I started emptying my room. I'll take the special items: my music drive, of course, the Joey HiFi print I bought myself to celebrate my first-ever defection at the tender age of fifteen, the Miyazaki necklace a boyfriend bought back from Japan. Stash it all at Toby's apartment for the duration. The furniture I've accumulated over the last couple of years, the Twenties medicine cabinet, the Nash couch, my books and most of my wardrobe are going to have to fly. It's all about knowing when to let go. Because once it's official, I won't be allowed back on the property.

   I'm not going to miss this place at all.

   It's only after I've had my coffee and the greasiest protein combo the kitchen can deliver that I get round to checking my message. It's from Rathebe. Her hyperbole suggests some national crisis, without getting into any of the details. What I think is that it better be a new outbreak of the superdemic to force me into the office on the weekend. If it's some baby stroller issue, I'm going to flip.

 

When the swivel grinds through its rotate to open onto the landing, there is an audio notice stuck to the outside of the door that activates as soon as it senses us.

   
'For your convenience, please find enclosed a digi
map to your nearest immunity centre. This is a South
African Police Services public service announcement.'

   'Cunts. Jesus. Mother
fuck
.' Toby wipes his nose with his sleeve, rips off the GPS chip and scrunches it under his heel, only it doesn't scrunch. 'Fuck!' He picks it up and hurls it across the corridor, but it's so light it drifts to the left and ricochets off the wall with a dull plastic ting. He kicks the wall, then punches it for good measure.

   He comes away shaking out his hand and still swearing. He looks shocking. His eyes are pouchy and bloodshot, and he's pale under his scrag of beard. I still haven't been able to face myself in the mirror. I'm grateful that I don't feel like he looks. He's already taken three painkillers this morning.

   He cringes as we step outside the building, and tries to turn back for his sunglasses.

   'There isn't time, Toby.'

   'Are you chaffing me? We still got thirty-two, thirty-three hours at least. And if we don't make it, they can always come get us. They'll have a roving unit. Door-to-door delivery. Now that's servicing the community.' But he tags along anyway.

   We still don't have a phone between us. When we tried to log in this morning, his connection was down. 'The cabling in this fucking building,' he muttered.

   'Does it go down a lot?'

   'Murphy's law, innit mate?' he says, putting on a jokey Brit accent. 'It's exactly the kind of crap that would go down today.' But I can tell he's unsettled.

   Before we found the warning on the door, the plan was to find a public terminal, to get hold of his corporate friend, but now I don't know. We might just be bringing the shit to her.

   'She can handle it,' Toby says. 'She's a big girl.' He spits a glob of phlegm onto the street in front of Truworths. A young house spouse coming out pulls her black leather handbag against her and steps pointedly around us.

   'Yeah, fuck you too,' snarls Toby and starts coughing so badly, he has to lean against the window. Inside, there is a flurry of motion, and I grab his arm and pull him away before the security guard lumbers out to chase us away.

   Glancing back over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of the window among the moto-mannequins in gleaming fabrics. My face is totally healed.

 

The thing is, transparency only works as a policy if you can still find a way to make the stuff you don't want people to see invisible – especially when it's out in the open. We're here to make sure there's no possibility of hiding what has happened.

   Who would have thought that so many were ready to give it up, turn turtle before it even kicks in, before they even know it's going to kick in at all? Traitors to the cause.

   And cowards, adds skywards* in yet another msg.

   The emergency room at Chris Barnard Memorial is street level, a glass box beside the ambulance parking with a ramp that leads up and away to the parkade. There is already a queue of people outside, rumpled like they've been up all night, so everyone looks homeless. They're pale and shocked and some of the more pathetic ones have convinced themselves they're sick for real, doubled over and coughing, psyching themselves out, buying in, pushing to get to the front. There's no sign of the media.

   But there will be.

   There's been nothing on any of the newscasts, not even a suggestion on the alt channels, which implies that the clampdown on info is already in force. There are probably S&D teams working round the clock, scanning every blog, censoring every streamcast. Suppress and destroy.

   'Here?' Zuko asks. We're standing across the road, at the edge of the parking lot for the chichi restaurants in Heritage Square. He tosses a soccer ball deftly from foot to foot, ignoring the carguard, who is beckoning that he must skop the ball over here, have a little game, man. But this is not the time for play.

   We'll already have been picked up by the security cams outside the hospital, but I don't think it's worth pointing this out to Zuko, who is tensely eager underneath his cool, still fucked on glue, and wound up from watching the Grand Parade light up in pyrotechnics.

   'Yeah. It's the most accessible.' We've already checked out two other temporary vaccine locations, one in the CBD police centre, the other set up at the main entrance to Adderley Station, but there were dogs lurking at both of those, and they started barking when we came too close, picking up some residue of the chem scent.

   No one will get seriously hurt. The explosive is low-capacity RDX. Limited 'blast phenomena' according to the instructions from Amsterdam. The nearest people will suffer flash burns, maybe. But they're right next to the ER. They'll be able to get medical treatment on the spot. Sometimes small sacrifices are necessary. It's collateral damage. And there is zero chance Ashraf will be here. He'll have gone to a more convenient clinic, closer to Khayelitsha. Definitely.

   Zuko shrugs, always the team player, and strolls across the road, dribbling expertly, dodging a car, while still keeping the ball going, casually following it towards the ER doors, like goal posts. Just a kid messing around. The security guard is too preoccupied with managing the line to hassle him.

   Zuko bounces the ball off his knees a couple of times, fearlessly, as if it were not packed to capacity with RDX, then lets it drop. Before it has a chance to touch the ground, with a swift and perfect sideswipe, he lobs it at the automatic doors.

   The motion sensors pick up the ball and slide open to swallow it up.

   I click the detonator in my pocket, subtly as possible, already walking away.

   The bomb rips through the building with a shudder of glass and concrete.

   I don't look back for Zuko.

 

There is a weird vibe on the underway on the way in to the office, an undercurrent frisson even though there's almost no one around, just a few people coming home from partying, a couple of churchgoers. But the controlled clampdown means I'm oblivious to the reality, until I actually reach the office and find out what has gone off overnight.

   Communique's offices are a study in controlled frenzy. The ultra-caffeine baristas are doing overtime. I don't even make it as far as the lifts before I am whipped away to join Rathebe's emergency task team, which has commandeered the boardroom and an additional coffee machine. There are twenty-three people crammed in with their laptops, all monitoring the datalines, killing the most damaging of commentary before it gets out, because anything is allowable when it comes to national security, and the government is a big Communique contract. To my disgust, Mpho is already in the thick of it.

   I pull up a chair next to him. I'm dying to slide into my backdoor to get the full story, but it's insanely risky with the kind of scrutiny going on right now.

   When the first bomb reports start coming in, I don't have a choice. The techniques are so inventive, they leave me breathless and everyone else clutching for information and something to do with it, before it gets out on the newslines – and worse, the streamcasts. There's no way to contain this one, only spin it. We're shutting down large parts of the network with service errors to try and keep it contained. Later, we'll blame this on an underground cable being damaged by the bombs. Of course, I recognise the signature. Soccer balls and graffiti aren't exactly Terrorism 101.

   I have to be circumspect.

   Despite all the caffeine being consumed in the clean-up marathon inside, it's luck or fate that I'm the only one in the stairwell bathroom. The red mosaic tiles seem menacingly shiny, but I know I'm just tired and hung over and not thinking clearly. I take the third cubicle, in case the one on the end is too conspicuous and click my back-up SIM into my phone, which is not, surprise, surprise, coded to my identity.

   Communique is willing to indulge us our whims and little vices, just about anything to appease the talent, lest we defect. But a fake SIM ID is serious contraband. Two years' jailtime if I'm bust with it. I'm mad to use it here.

   The phone powers up on silent, logging on to the maintenance subnet which controls the building's cleaning bots. A neat little loophole I discovered by accident rewiring the VIMbot Toby stole from my apartment block. It doesn't work unless you can connect to a booster site to get the signal out of the building, but I already have that set up in every Communique billboard Tendeka and friends have hit with their smear boxes.

   It takes me a minute to track the reroute msg Tendeka sent out via a mirror in Singapore, tracing the trajectory all the way back to the Cheaptime Trip Bar in Little Angola, terminal fourteen, sent at 23h18. It helps that I know his hangouts, that I know who he was sending to, and can backwards engineer it. At least he was using a fake SIM. User ID chipped as Rutger Hoffman, German nursing student, twentyfour, resident in UCT's Slovo Res.

   Still, can't be too many people hanging around at that time in Cheaptime Trip, and the cams would have picked him up in the vicinity. Sloppy work: the guy shouldn't risk tech on his own. But it's not his solo ops that worry me.

   It takes another two minutes to crack Cheaptime's time-clock database and delete all the records. I take their server down too, just for good measure. I just hope they're sufficiently small-time that they don't have back-ups, or at least that it will take them several hours to restore. It's a hack job, but there's not enough time to finesse it, with twenty-three other people in the room across the hallway, all on a similar tack, trying to dig out the terrorists, and it's only a matter of time. Although hey, if anyone does stumble across this, hopefully they'll just assume it's Tendeka and his pals trying to cover their tracks, that they're clumsy amateurs.

   I consider sending Tendeka a warning via his loxion soccer club's fan board, something obtuse enough to be innocent, but I figure he's probably not smart enough to pick it up. I can't risk anything that will link me to him.

   It's absurd how sloppy he's been, the sticky fingerprints he's left over everything. He accessed his banking at the Cheaptime Trip, wired cash from one account to another, so I follow the trail, closing down the links, deleting the cache, covering his tracks, because it's all here, an underway map of connections.

   The Cheaptime leads to a soccer game, by way of his checking on the match scores, which leads to his underprivileged kids' soccer club in Khayelitsha, which leads, via one of the kids, Zuko Sephuma, to the sponsored graffiti project with street kids on Grand Parade, where a wall just happens to have exploded, causing minimal damage but a lot of fright. Enough to bury Tendeka, even if he's managed to miraculously avoid the cams.