Why You Were Taken (28 page)

  HBG>> Et voila.

  KK> So the barcodes threaten them. The list of abducted kids threaten them.

  HBG>> Yebo, hence your hitlist, + any1 else who gets in / way.

  KK>> We wouldn’t have known there was a connection if they didn’t react to Keke.

  HBG>> Thy were too careful.

  KK> Who R people in the photo / Trinity?

  HBG>> I’m running thr faces / my FusiformG now. Will have a match in hour/so.

  KK> An HOUR? Keke’s SugarApp says only 5 hours left.

  HBG>> It’s going as fast as it can.

  KK> Can we come over?

  HBG>> Who is ‘we’?

  KK> Seth (no.5) and I?

  HBG>> I dn’t allow visitors. Esp 1s assoc / kidnapping & grim reaper.

  KK> We hve nowhere else 2 go.

  HBG>> Police?

  KK> No police.

  HBG>> Cape Town Republic? Mexico? Bali?

He is quiet for a while.

  KK> Just till we can work out who the Trinity are / how 2 find Keke.

  HBG>> U being follwed?

  KK> Don’t think so.

  HBG>> Dn’t think so? Tht’s reassuring.

Kirsten logs out and gets Marko’s GPS co-ordinates; directs Seth out of Little Lagos in between telling him about GeniX. When she tells him about Fontus he hits the top of the steering wheel.

  ‘SHUT the front door,’ he says. He has the face of someone who has just won the Lotto. Or found Jesus. ‘I knew it,’ he says.

  ‘You knew that the creeps responsible for abducting us are the same creeps you were grinding for?’

  ‘No. I just knew they were dirty. I knew that they were fuckers. Fucking fuckers. Capital fucking F.’

  ‘Look, that sentence didn’t even make sense.’

  ‘Fucking Fontus,’ he exhales, shaking his head.

  ‘Do you still think that the Genesis Project is a myth?’

Seth’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t answer. He takes his bottle of pills out of his pocket, is about to take one, and throws them out of the car window.

*                  *                  *

Marko is drumming his fingers on his knees, then his desk, then his knees again. Hundreds of thousands of faces are flying through his FusiformG software, trying to recognise a pattern. He can’t sit still. He stuffs a doughnut past his lips, but his mouth is so dry that he chokes. He looks around his room, picks up a vinyl toy and pretends to shoot another toy with it. He makes laser sound effects and then kicks the other toy over. In his head, crowds cheer.

The computer chirrups: it has matched one of the three faces. Marko looks at the screen and drops the rest of the doughnut.

  ‘Go home FusiformG,’ he says, ‘you’re drunk.’

*                  *                  *

Marko’s place is more of a bunker than a house.
Fort Knox would have been more welcoming
, Kirsten thinks, looking at the giant gate and 8m walls frosted with the glitter of electrified barbed wire. The kinesecurity cameras follow their movements to the gate. She buzzes the intercom but there is no answer. She buzzes again.

  ‘You think he changed his mind?’ she asks Seth. ‘He really didn’t want us to come.’

Seth is inspecting the gate. He pushes on it, as if to test the lock, and it swings open. Kirsten’s glad – now they can get in! – but then her heart sinks. Oh, she thinks. Oh, this is bad.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ she says. ‘It’s impossible that they found him. That they got here before us. I was online with him 15 minutes ago.’

  ‘You sure it was him?’

They look around, notice some broken glass on the driveway, some damaged plants. Seth heads back to the car, unlocks it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she says.

  ‘Getting the hell out of here.’

  ‘We have to go inside,’ she says, ‘it’s the only way.’

  ‘It’s a bad idea,’ he says, but closes the car door anyway. Once they step inside the property and are halfway to the house the gate swings closed, and the lock mechanism clicks into place. The electric wire that circles the property like a malevolent halo begins to hum. They hear vicious dogs barking, but there is nowhere to run.

  ‘It’s a trap.’

THE UNHOLY

TRINITY

32

Johannesburg, 2021

The dogs’ barking is deafening now, but there’s not a dog in sight. White spikes etch into Kirsten’s vision and she has to close her eyes.

  ‘It was him online, I was sure!’

  ‘Maybe it was him, but with a gun to his head.’

Seth realises that the sound is a recording, playing on loop. There must be speakers hidden in the unkempt garden. The front door opens, the security gate is unlocked in three different places, and out walks a chubby young cappuccino-skinned man with tinted spectacles. He pushes them up on his nose and squints at his guests. He’s carrying a game console that he touches, and the barking stops. Another button turns on calming white noise: a waterfall, birds, a rumble of thunder.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘sorry about the dogs, and the gate. I programmed it myself and I’m still ironing out some of the kinks. Or, I was. I’m a procrastinator. A paranoid procrastinator.’ When they still don’t move or talk, he comes out further along the driveway, looking left to right as if to cross the road. His hands remain on the console.

  ‘I’m Marko,’ he says to Kirsten, then blushes. ‘Obviously.’

He’s wearing a Talking Tee shirt a size too small that stretches over his doughy belly. It has a simple animation of a panting Chihauhau and says: ‘My favourite frequency is 50,000 Hz’. When he turns around to lead them inside the back of the shirt says: ‘You’ve probably never heard it before.’

  ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

His room – the basement – is wall-to-wall glass screens, blinking projector lights, drives, processors. There is a constant white hum and it smells like powdered sugar. The walls are papered with posters of T-Rex jokes, incomprehensible maths formulae, and one with a picture of a pretty planet. It says: ‘God created Saturn and he liked it, so he put a ring on it.’

  Nerdgasm,
thinks Kirsten, nudging Seth.

  ‘Your kind of guy.’

He makes a ha-ha face. She spots a brooding woman on the wall, black and white, thinks she kind of recognises her.

  ‘Vintage movie star?’ she asks Marko. He momentarily stops smashing his keyboard with his stubby fingers.

  ‘That,’ he says, ‘is Hedy Lemarr.’

  Her face is blank.

  ‘Lemarr was a remarkable woman and I will love her forever.’

  Okay, that’s not weird, thinks Kirsten.

  ‘She was the most beautiful woman in Europe in the 40s, starred in 35 films, one of which was the first portrayal of a female orgasm ever, and a math genius. She invented frequency hopping spread!’

  ‘That’s wifi,’ says Seth. ‘Wireless internet.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Kirsten says, but is impressed nonetheless, specifically at the intensity of his geekdom. She is surprised he doesn’t have a neckbeard, or giant gaming thumbs.

  ‘So your timing is excellent,’ he says, using his handset as a wireless pointer to open a browser on the main projection, revealing the photo of the college students and allowing the program to run, showing which facial features were isolated to run a match.

  ‘This FusiformG has the most amazing features baked in. You won’t believe the results. Who the creeps are, in the photo, I mean.’ He pushes his glasses up again. ‘It’s huge. It’s, like, cosmic. No wonder they’re trying to cover it up.’

  ‘Marko?’ comes a feminine, distinctly Hindi voice from the top of the stairs. Marko rolls his eyes.

  ‘Not now, Ma!’ he says. ‘I’m having a meeting!’

  ‘Marko?’ she calls, closer now.

  ‘Ma!’ he says, ‘I’m busy!’

An eruption of gold-trimmed indigo at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I
thought
I heard voices!’ she beams. A handsome woman in a sari bright enough to spike your eyes out, holding a silver tray full of deep-fried goodness. Smoky ribbons of scent: cumin, turmeric, cardamom billow towards them. Kirsten blinks, wonders briefly if she is hallucinating.

‘Marko, you should have told me you were expecting visitors. I would have cooked
dosa!’

He blushes, stalks up to her, takes the tray, bangs it down on a crowded desk. A designer toy – a Murakami – falls over. Kirsten gently rights it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘It’s just a little plate of eats, nothing special,’ the woman smiles.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ Marko mutters, steering her towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’

  ‘You’re too skinny!’ she says, pointing to Seth. ‘I’m making beans, if you want to stay for dinner.’

Once Seth sees samoosas on the platter he laughs out loud. It was refreshing to see an old cultural stereotype played out in real life. South Africa had become so cosmopolitan that it was rare to see, say, an Afrikaner farmer in a two-tone shirt wearing a comb in his khaki socks, or a coloured fisherman missing his front teeth. He celebrates this by eating a samoosa that burns his mouth. Excellent, he thinks.

  ‘As I was saying,’ Marko sighs, then looks excited again: ‘Cosmic.’

FusiformG automatically opens browsers on three of the other screens, one for each of the faces, and the first two identities are revealed: blip, blip. The software is still searching for the third face. Cross-referenced with hundreds of televised interviews, PR shots and virtual news articles. Kirsten and Seth stare at the matches.

  ‘Shut the front door,’ whispers Kirsten.

The first man, good looking, smiles back at them with his perfect teeth.

  ‘This is …’ begins Marko, but Seth cuts him off.

  ‘Christopher Walden,’ says Seth, ‘Founder and CEO of Fontus.’

  ‘Then,’ continues Marko: ‘Thabile Siceka, the Minister of Health.’

  ‘No,’ says Kirsten, in disbelief.

  ‘The third face is taking a while … could be that the third person isn’t as well known or photographed as much as the first two. Maybe the shy one, staying out of the limelight.’

‘So, we have the CEO of one of the biggest, most successful corporates in the country, and the minister of fucking health. Industry, government, and what we can probably guess is some kind of academic, doctor or scientist. Reach and power to do anything. The Trinity.’

  ‘The Holy Trinity,’ says Marko.

  ‘More like the Fucking Unholy Trinity,’ says Kirsten.

  ‘But we still don’t know WHY. Why the kidnappings, why the murders,’ says Seth, ‘and why now?’

‘We need to focus on finding Keke. She’s got,’ Kirsten looks at her watch, ‘maybe three hours left before she …’

  ‘That’s if they haven’t killed her already,’ says Seth, and they both glare at him. He spins the ring on his finger.

  ‘Where do we even start?’

  The room is quiet.

  ‘Marko?’ comes his mother’s voice from up the stairs again. ‘Marko? Would your friends like a mango lassi?’

  ‘There’s one person that can help us find the Trinity HQ,’ says Kirsten, as they jog to the car. ‘Someone that’s not involved in the Genesis Project. Someone who would want justice done.’

The gate opens and the barking starts again. Once they’re on the road, Kirsten takes her mother’s letter out of her pocket and reads it to Seth.

  ‘Ed Miller is his name. There’s an address. Melville. He has the packet of information. Everything we need to know about what the Genesis Project is and why we were taken.’

The car is redolent with curried potato and coriander. Marko’s mother wouldn’t let them leave empty-handed and packed them a Tupperware take-away, along with some gold-coloured paper serviettes, despite her son’s embarrassed protestations.

Kirsten is quiet, anxious they won’t find Keke in time, or, as Seth had said, worried that the worst had already happened. Tears sting her eyes but she blinks them away, opens the window to get some fresh air. It’s a strange sensation to her: tears. Little lines like pins dance in the top half of her vision. She doesn’t remember the last time she cried. Had she ever cried? She breathes in deeply, swallows the warm lead in her throat, looks out the window at the ChinaCity/Sandton skyline. Seth catches himself thinking about the future. He wouldn’t be able to go back to his ordinary life after this. What would he do? What would it be like?

  That’s if we survive today,
thinks Kirsten,
which is looking increasingly unlikely.

They stop at a red light in the middle of the CBD. A man dressed in filth appears out of nowhere and peers into the passenger side, giving Kirsten a shock.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says, in fright, ‘I’m not used to seeing beggars anymore.’ A gun appears in the ragman’s hand.

  Oh,
she thinks.

His wrist is inked with prison scrawls. A Crim Colony graduate. In other words: an ex-con, or in this case: a con.

  ‘Out,’ he barks, shaking the weapon at her. She tries to go for her handbag, reach for her own gun, but the man loads the mechanism and something tells her that he won’t hesitate to put a bullet in her brain. She puts her hands up.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ shouts Seth, flames in his cheeks. ‘Not today!’ he shouts at the hijacker, ‘not today! You can fucking HAVE the car tomorrow, but not today!’

  ‘Out,’ says the man, his voice iced with violence.

  ‘Fuck!’ shouts Seth, hitting the steering wheel, ‘Fuck you!’ he gets out, slams the door, sending a lightning bolt of silver through Kirsten. Kicks the car door, kicks the tyre.