Minute Zero (12 page)

Mufakose Suburb, Harare, Zimbabwe
Saturday, 12:12 p.m. Central Africa Time

T
he line of people wound all the way down Mbizi Road, past the roadside shops hanging dried meat, the tall pyramids of oranges, and the rolling mounds of fresh tomatoes and onions.

Tinashe fidgeted with two stones in his hand and danced in place. He craned his neck to try to see the front of the voting line. He couldn’t. Only hundreds of people waiting patiently in the midday sun to cast a vote.

“Ah! Tssss! Calm yourself,” urged Tsitsi, who was holding an open red-and-white-striped umbrella. “Our turn will come.”

“I want to vote,” he replied. “I am ready.”

“Be patient, Tinashe. You are always in a rush.”

Tinashe ignored her scolding but he knew she was right. Tsitsi was always right. He paced back and forth and scanned up and down the line again.

“I don’t see any Tino boys. Only Gugu’s people. Only our people,” he said.

“
Zvakanaka
, very good.” She spun the umbrella handle between her fingers.

“Ehe
,
zvakanaka.”

“Police?” she asked.

Tinashe gestured toward a hill in the distance. A small crowd of uniformed policemen with batons stood under an acacia tree.

“
Zvakanaka
, very good.”

“Perhaps, Tsitsi, the police are with us today?”

She shrugged.

“I have to see,” he said, ducking away.

A few moments later an old woman in a red and purple wrap dress approached. “Little Tsitsi! Yesterday you were running down Mbizi Road, playing with the boys. Today you are a woman! You are old enough to vote?”

“Ehe.
Yes,
ambuya,”
she said, bowing her head and averting her eyes in deference. “I am a woman.”

“How is your day?” the old woman asked.

Tsitsi clapped her hands in the polite form of Shona greetings. “My day is well if your day is well.”

The old woman clapped her hands in response and nodded. “My day is well.”

“Then so is mine.”

“
Zvakanaka.
Very good.”

“Zvakanaka.”

“How is your father, Tsitsi?”

“He was sick, but now he is better.”

“God willing, he will recover,” the old woman said.

“Thank you,
ambuya
. How are your sons?”

“All down south. They all are in Johannesburg. They send me money. It’s the only way I survive.”

“Survive. That is good,” Tsitsi said.

“Now you are a woman, little Tsitsi, why no children?”

“Not yet,
ambuya
,” she replied, hiding her annoyance out of respect.

“God willing, soon.”

“Yes, God willing,” Tsitsi said, scanning the long voting line, which hadn’t moved during their conversation.

“How long have you been queueing, Tsitsi?”

“All morning,
ambuya
.”

“I am too old to stand in queues like this.”

“Fambai zvakanaka.
Go well,
ambuya.”

“Fambai zvakanaka.”

As the old woman shuffled off, Tinashe returned excited. “No Tino boys, Tsitsi. Only Gugu’s people. I don’t see how Gugu can lose!”

“The people are with her.”

“We are ready. I am ready!” he said quickly.

She looked up again at the long, unmoving line and, against her better judgment, allowed herself a brief moment of delight. “Our turn will come.”

Johannesburg, South Africa
Saturday, 12:24 p.m. Central Africa Time

L
ucky Magombe peered over his reading glasses, out the window of his office, at a cluster of modern steel-and-glass office towers. Black Star Capital’s new headquarters, on the urban edge of northern Johannesburg, was the high-tech hub of his operation.

In the next room was the company’s modest trading floor. Five days a week, two dozen young African men and women worked the trading floor, each wearing a headset and staring at a computer screen, watching for tiny movements in share prices to exploit. When Lucky’s traders discovered discrepancies of some kind, they would shout their orders into their headsets. These orders would be executed nearly instantaneously by other Black Star employees sitting in Harare or Nairobi or Accra. It wasn’t New York or London, he knew, but it was something. The growth of Lucky’s net worth could attest to that.

On this Saturday, the trading floor was empty and money was far from Lucky’s mind. Instead he was pondering his options. Despite his wealth and professional success, Lucky was unhappy. His friends and colleagues in South Africa sensed a deep sadness he carried with him. But he never spoke of it.

Lucky Magombe was most comfortable when surrounded by numbers and blinking trading screens. It hadn’t always been like this. There’d been no electronic screens at all when he was a young trainee just out of technical college in Harare and ecstatic to have his first job as a runner for the stockbroker Carrington & Cobb.

Back then the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange had been all paper and chalk. Clients would call in their orders by phone or, more often, send a houseboy from the northern suburbs on a bus downtown to the brokerage office. The broker would write down the buy or sell order with a dull pencil on a small pale blue memo pad, tear off the top sheet, and then shout, “Lucky!” His job was to run the order slip down the street, across African Unity Square—around the brokerage, it was still known by its pre-independence name, Cecil Square—to a squat office building over on Union Avenue. Then he’d run up four flights of stairs to the stock exchange floor and hand the paper slip to Carrington & Cobb’s floor trader.

The traders—on a normal day there were six or seven of them—sat at a long U-shaped table. At the end of the room was a blackboard with the list of stocks traded on the ZSE, the latest prices, and the current bid-ask prices all written in chalk. After a sale, the floor manager would erase the price with an efficient swipe and scribble the new price. Once the trade was complete, the other broker would countersign the blue order slip and, victorious, Lucky would run the paper back to the Carrington & Cobb head office. That had more or less been the system since the ZSE first started trading in 1946.

But these days there was no paper and no chalk. The ZSE brokers, who had grown to more than twenty, still called out the trades aloud, but the exchange’s trading board was a giant electronic screen and the records were all kept on a secure computer network.

Lucky Magombe’s big break was seeing the technological changes coming. After only a few months on the job, he’d noticed the paper-and-runner system was full of errors. Sometimes the original order was incorrect or a trader would make a mistake. Occasionally, a runner would lose the slip altogether.

He soon discovered that not all of the errors were accidental. When the manipulation of prices might make someone extra money, he quickly learned, foul play was inevitable. Lucky started keeping track of the mistakes. Eventually, he found patterns and concluded, to his horror, that the fraud was not the occasional slippery work of one or two corrupt individuals. He realized Carrington & Cobb was padding its profits by systematically cheating its own customers.

That was when Lucky had quit and started Black Star Capital. His idea was to turn the old system against itself, to make money by arbitraging inefficiencies. The Black Star model would be leaner, quicker, and especially more accurate than all the other brokers.

Lucky’s firm had started small. He was the first to use cell phones as a parallel reporting system to double-check all trades. Then Black Star Capital stopped using runners and instead directed the floor trader by mobile phone and confirmed all activities via e-mail. As an early adopter, Black Star quickly gained a reputation for using the latest technology to get the best price. And with a zero-error guarantee, clients started pouring in.

Black Star Capital was also the first to develop online trading for its clients and to provide analytical data tools on all the listed companies. Then Lucky deployed cloud computing to store records and to run algorithms on all trading data to search for anomalies in the market. Lucky had realized using the latest technology would not only give him a competitive edge but allowed him to police the entire trading system. Which led him to other uses for the technology . . .

As Lucky Magombe pondered the best course of action today, he recognized the irony of his own success: Black Star Capital had been born by eliminating the very job that had given him his start.
Progress often requires destruction,
he thought.

Just then his phone rang. He answered quickly without checking the caller ID. “Magombe,” he said, like a punch.

“I am calling for Cannonball,” said a deep voice.

“What is it?” Lucky asked.

“Are you ready to join the Canterbury Cricket Club? Your membership has been prepared. It will be available this Sunday. At noon.”

Lucky pondered the question, his mind racing.

“Sir?” the voice asked again.

“Not yet,” Lucky finally answered. “Wait for my word.”

“Shall we continue with your membership preparations for the Canterbury Cricket Club?”

“Yes,” he said before hanging up.

The truth was that Lucky Magombe was sad, because despite all his wealth and apparent success, he could not do the one thing he most longed to do: go home.

Harare, Zimbabwe
Saturday, 12:38 p.m. Central Africa Time

A
s their vehicle crossed over a highway bridge, the driver turned to Judd Ryker and Isabella Espinosa in the backseat and said, “Welcome to Mbare.”

Colonel Bull Durham, in the front seat, asked, “What is this place?”

“Mbare is a high-density neighborhood of Harare.”

“High-density? You mean it’s a slum?”

“We prefer ‘high-density.’ Mbare is famous. It’s the neighborhood where the British put the most rebellious Africans. It became a forward base for the anticolonial struggle. Today it is a base of the opposition.”

“It’s Gugu Mutonga country,” Judd said.

The shops were all closed, since election day was an official holiday, but the streets were filled with people selling biscuits, bottles of Coca-Cola, phone cards, and plastic shoes. As they drove deeper into Mbare, the traffic slowed. Judd noticed Durham adjust the rearview mirror.

“What is it, Bull?”

“Two cars back. They’re following us.”

“Who?” asked Isabella, spinning around in her seat.

“Don’t be alarmed,” offered the driver with a chuckle. “They always tail embassy vehicles. When we catch them, they claim it’s for our own safety.”

‘Who’s ‘they’?” asked Isabella.

“Probably the Central Intelligence Organization,” said Durham. “CIO is responsible for tracking the opposition and monitoring foreign embassies.”

“Yes, but don’t worry,” said the driver.

“Well, I don’t like it,” Isabella said.

“We’re almost there,” said the driver, pointing ahead to stadium lights. “There is Rufaro.”

“Gugu Mutonga is holding her final campaign rally in Rufaro Stadium,” explained Judd. “It’s right in the heart of Mbare. And it’s the same place Bob Marley played on Zimbabwe’s independence day.”

As they approached the stadium, the crowds grew so thick that traffic ground to a halt.

“Let’s walk,” suggested Durham. He directed the driver to stay with the car, and the three Americans stepped out of their air-conditioning and into the throng. The crowds all flowed like a giant river in one direction toward the stadium entrance.

As they struggled to stay together, Judd grabbed Durham’s arm and pulled him in close. “Are they still tailing us?”

“Yep.”

Judd strained to try to spot their pursuers, but it was a sea of unfamiliar faces.

“Mauya,
murungu!”
a boy yelled at Judd before disappearing into the crowd. Then another shouted, “Hello,
murungu
! You are welcome!”

“Murungu!”
yelled a third child, before giggling and running off.

“Murungu?”
asked Bull.

“White guy,” said Judd. “Brock told me kids would yell that at me when we entered the townships. He says it’s not meant as an insult. More matter-of-fact.”

“Okay,
murungu
,” Durham said.

Once they reached the stadium entrance, Durham found a side corridor and eventually led them to a door marked
PRIVATE
. Judd knocked. A large man with thick sunglasses opened the door. “We are from the American embassy. Mariana Leibowitz called ahead,” Judd explained. The door slammed closed.

They waited for a few moments, then the door swung wide-open.

“You are welcome,” said the guard, with a bow and a sweep of the hand. He led them down a long corridor underneath the stadium. The crowd was cheering and stomping their feet. Judd could feel the vibrations in the floor and wondered if the old stadium could withstand the pounding.

They arrived at another door. “The Americans are here,” said the guard, who then pushed the door open. Inside, sitting on a plastic chair, was a handsome middle-aged woman in a well-pressed business suit. Her hair was pinned back tightly and her rectangular designer glasses were low on her nose.

“Dr. Ryker,” she said with a warm smile and firm handshake. “A pleasure to finally meet you. Mariana Leibowitz has told me much about you. Welcome to Zimbabwe.”

“Thank you, Ms. Mutonga.”

“Call me Gugu.”

“Thank you, Gugu. I’d like you to meet Colonel Durham and Special Agent Espinosa. They are from the Departments of Defense and Justice.”

“You are also welcome,” she said with a friendly bow. “When the Democracy Union of Zimbabwe wins this election today and our party has the opportunity to rebuild our beautiful country, we will need your help. Today we have no security. We have no justice. We have neither here in this place. We will need our American friends.”

“We are here today to do what we can to try to prevent trouble,” offered Judd.

“Very good. You are welcome. We need you to be here to witness what is happening. To ensure the will of the people is revealed. We need you here to do a very simple thing: to tell the truth.”

The truth. Seems so simple,
thought Judd,
but it never is.

“How is the voting going?” Isabella asked.

“The government is attacking our people in too many places. But we are confident we can still win. We are optimistic. We are certain if the rules are followed, the DUZ will be victorious. The people are with us. Can you hear them?”

Gugu Mutonga opened her palms and looked up to the ceiling. The tremors of the stomping crowd could be felt through the floor, and the din of the chanting filled their ears.

“My friends, I’m sorry. I beg you to excuse me. I’m expected outside.”

—

A
few minutes later Gugu Mutonga walked onto the stage and the masses erupted. Judd, watching from the side of the stage alongside Bull and Isabella, instinctively ducked his head, expecting the stadium to collapse from the crowd’s exploding energy.

“GU-GUUUUUUUUU!” chanted the crowd. Thousands of raised hands formed the letter
G
, as if they were squeezing oranges. “GU-GUUUUUUUUU! GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”

Gugu Mutonga, now pacing the stage, clapped her hands over her head in appreciation, then opened her palms and bench-pressed the sky as if holding the country on her shoulders. This ignited another round of frenzied “GU-GUUUUUUUUU! GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”

When the chanting finally slowed, Gugu took the microphone. “Who is ready for a new Zimbabwe?”

“WE ARE!” shouted the crowd.

“Who is tired of the past built on hatred and fear?”

“WE ARE!”

“Who is ready for a better life for our mothers and our fathers?”

“WE ARE!”

“Who is ready for a brighter future for our sons and our daughters?”

“WE ARE!”

“Who can deliver on a new Zimbabwe?”

“GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”

“Who can lead a new Zimbabwe?”

“GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”

“Who believes in you?”

“GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”

“Who will win today?

“GU-GUUUUUUUUU!”