Mosaic (10 page)

Joel Grant said, “I'll make it worth your while to help me.” His voice was low and breathy, unenlivened by much hope.

The pilot eyed him with curiosity and dislike. “Get in.”

“They're going to kill me. If that mad bastard gets me back to Pretoria, they'll kill me slowly.”

“I think you're confusing me with someone who cares.”

Grant's head rocked back and he laughed. There was not, in truth, much humour in it, it had a hollow graveyard ring, but from a man in his position it was undeniably impressive. It impressed Piet. It also disguised the fact that Grant was subtly shifting his position relative to the helicopter.

Vanderbilt had thought of danger and looked up. Grant, more cunning or perhaps only more needy, saw another weapon. He was not sure what would happen when he tried to use it, only what would happen if he did not. It would be difficult: the projection of a stabilizer from the tapering fuselage made the angle critical. But he would contrive a way of using it—if not on the pilot, then on himself. One way or another, unless Vanderbilt got psychic and turned back now, one of them was going to take a dive into the tail rotor.

He backed away: away from the open door, but more importantly towards the rear of the machine. “I'm not getting in that plane.” He let his voice run up thin and ready, as if with fear. It required almost no acting at all. Stumbling backwards he waited until he was behind the guarding fin, then deliberately turned one ankle under him. The ground came up to hit him again and he accepted the blow with resignation.

The pilot moved towards him automatically. “Get up, for Christ's sake.” Grant rolled clumsily onto his face, leaving Vanderbilt's heavy coat behind, and got his knees under him. He hauled his body upright with muscles he did not know he had, and then he waited.

Vanderbilt may have been a little psychic, for he turned then and looked back down the hill. He saw Grant kneeling, head bowed, in the grass and Piet moving towards him. It was a big field, from halfway up the hill the figures looked like dolls; even the big machine looked like a toy. For a moment, frowning, he studied what they were doing, down where the shadows were gathering.

Before he was aware of having solved the puzzle he was running, driving down the hill as fast as his strong legs could push his big body, mouth agape with a shout the slipstream threw back in his throat, a warning that had no chance of reaching its mark and which would anyway have been too late.

When the pilot was between him and the rotor Grant launched himself from his crouch like a hundred-metre runner from his blocks. The crown of his head pitched into the pit of Piet's stomach with a force that drove all the wind out of him in a surprised grunt. He staggered back, folding, but Grant kept coming, hands tied back and head low, still pushing hard, so that their two bodies described an attenuated parabola, a seemingly endless fall.

Vanderbilt, watching spellbound even as he ran, could not believe that reality could be so long suspended as to allow it. The pilot had to fall, or Grant to weaken, or one of them to realize the enormity of what was happening. It was too improbable, too bizarre: like watching a crazy old man weaving magic with a couple of sticks only to have the magic confirmed by a shovelful of wet sand.

The long fall and Vanderbilt's certainty that the laws of physics would intervene in time ended together with a shrill clatter and a thump.

Grant lay face down in the grass, still except for the heaving of his shoulders over his labouring lungs.

The damaged rotor had gone on turning until the bent ends had hacked enough from their tips and from the skin of the tail that they could turn freely and without screaming once more.

The pilot died where he had fallen, cartwheeled by the spinning blade; not then but soon, before Vanderbilt had to consider his obligations to a man whose life might possibly be saved.

After he was dead Vanderbilt, feeling ten years older and twenty pounds heavier, rose stiffly from where he had been kneeling at his friend's head, helpless to comfort in the face of appalling injury, and walked towards Grant. Grant had rolled onto his side in order to watch. Vanderbilt walked slowly, giving himself time to refine a response. He felt an urgent, almost rapine desire to lay into Grant—bound and downed as he was—with his boots and his fists and anything he could lay his hands on, and reduce him to a bloody pulp. But Pretoria wanted him unharmed. He had thought that odd at the time: in the light of subsequent events it seemed insane. Pretoria's demands—together, Vanderbilt was willing to admit, for he was no more blind to his faults than to those of other people, with his own mistakes—had cost a good and useful man his life.

Towering silently over the man on the ground, quaking gently with quiet rage, Vanderbilt watched the fear in Grant's eyes. Apart from the time he had been unconscious, it had been there all the fourteen hours they had known each other. It was still there, but changed—hysterical terror transmuted into a wholly rational fear of likely and imminent assault. Beside that there was a kind of grim satisfaction. He was breathing fast but mostly with exertion.

Vanderbilt said woodenly, “You aren't going to tell me that was an accident.”

“Damn sure it was no accident.”

“Then
why?
”

“You're kidding. That bastard was going to get me killed. I got him first.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Vanderbilt. “He was a
pilot. I
can get you killed; he could only get you delivered.”

“You can only get me killed here. He'd have got me killed in Pretoria. That's two separate propositions. I told you—I'm not going back.”

Vanderbilt passed a hand across his face. It shook very slightly, but neither Grant nor anyone else would have mistaken the tremor for weakness. “Sonny, I could get very tired of hearing what you are and are not going to do.”

“Then cut me loose and I won't bother you again.”

Vanderbilt regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said, “Can you get up?”

“Yes.” He had managed when it mattered. Grant began the clumsy caterpillar manoeuvre that would bring him to his feet.

Vanderbilt let him get halfway before launching a vicious, measured kick that took him in the side of the knee. Grant's head snapped back and pain whistled through his teeth. He crashed on his side on the ground, rolling, lacking the hands to comfort himself.

Vanderbilt nodded slowly. “That should keep you in one place for a while.” He turned his back on Grant and bent over the sprawled body of the pilot, and began the horrid task of stripping it.

Nathan Shola spent most of the night on the phone. At first he was calling his people, members of his army in exile, semi-retired warriors, some of whom were bus-drivers and some of whom were surgeons, and then they were calling him back with what they had been able to discover. By dawn he had compiled a list of people in the UK—South Africans, South African sympathizers, people with business interests in the country—to whom Vanderbilt could turn for assistance. It was not a fully comprehensive list, but it did include all the most likely names, especially those with access to air transport. The bus-men called in sick and the surgeons rescheduled their operations, and by breakfast time each of the people on the list was under surveillance.

Except a company pilot named Jan-Pieter van Dam, who was already being sought by his employers on the grounds that not only was he inexplicably absent but so was his machine.

Shola was about to telephone chief Inspector Corner with a description of the helicopter when Chief Inspector Corner rang him to say a police car was on its way round to him. Something had turned up on which he would like Mr. Shola's opinion.

“Not Joel?”

“Not as far as we can make out,” the policeman replied ominously.

The car climbed quickly onto the backbone of England, moorland filling in behind it like a rising tide. The driver knew no more than that he had been given directions he had grave doubts about being able to follow.

Shola presumed they had arrived when the car left the rutted road to drive across two fields, and in the third were several vehicles and a helicopter. A number of men were scattered about the field; Shola recognized the chief inspector in a small knot clustered around a tartan rug on the grass close by the helicopter. The car stopped nearby and he walked over to join them.

The thing under the rug was evidently a body. Shola tried to estimate its proportions. He decided it was too short to be Grant, but that could have been how it was lying. Or, if he had interpreted Chief Inspector Corner's remark correctly, how much of it was left.

When they peeled the rug stickily back he knew it was not Grant, although he could not have said why he was so sure. It was not the face: there was not enough of it to judge.

The chief inspector indicated the battered rotor. “He seems to have walked into that.”

“Did he walk, or was he pushed?”

“Ah. Well, if he isn't Grant he's probably the pilot, and if he's the pilot he almost certainly didn't walk.”

Shola said, with conviction and surprise and quite a lot of pride, “Then Joel did this.”

Corner had also reached that conclusion. “What makes you think so?”

“Joel didn't bring that helicopter here, the Boer did. Vanderbilt. It was his ride out. By the same token, Joel needs desperately to stay in this country. Killing the pilot and bending the machine bought him time. As long as it takes Vanderbilt to set up another meet, that's how long we have to find him. This”—he indicated the mess on the grass—”won't happen again. If Joel is fighting, he'll get no more chances. By now he'll be trussed up hand and foot, blindfolded, gagged and probably with a couple of ribs stove in for good measure.”

“But not dead?”

“There's only one body here, Mr. Corner. If Vanderbilt had killed Joel it would have been here, while he was angry; and he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of stripping a corpse for his benefit.”

Chief Inspector Corner gave him a wan smile. “You aren't exactly new to the business of deduction, are you, Mr. Shola?”

The black man smiled back. “Terrorism is a hard school. An ability to draw inferences accurately is essential. Without it one would be wiser to stick to clerking.”

They moved away from the tartan rug. Two men with a stretcher took their places. The policeman said, “Is that what you did, before?”

“Before I became a terrorist, you mean?”

Corner permitted himself a weary sigh. “Mr. Shola, if you think I am unaware of your background, and that of Joel Grant, your logic is serving you less well than you believe. I think we might make better progress if you stop trying to shock me.”

Shola accepted the rebuke gracefully. “I was a legal clerk in Port Elizabeth. One day my principal asked why I was depressed: wasn't the money good enough or what? The money was pretty good, for a black clerk, but we weren't winning many cases—not the cases I was interested in. He agreed. But he couldn't think what more he could do: the system was loaded against what he and I, and you, would call justice for blacks. He had already tried everything short of blowing things up. If I had any suggestions he would be interested to hear them. I gave a lot of thought to what he had said. Then I gave him my resignation and started blowing things up.” He watched the policeman with a quizzical half-smile.

Corner said gently, “If you're waiting for a round of applause we could be here some time.”

Shola laughed aloud, drawing curious glances. “Don't worry, Chief Inspector, I know better than to expect you to condone armed struggle. But things are different in my country. Here my friend is abducted in violent and mysterious circumstances and the police search for him. In South Africa it would be the police who had him.”

Corner sniffed. “I'm so glad you're happy with our work,” he said dryly. “If you were happy enough to leave it to us I'd be ecstatic.”

Shola feigned incomprehension. “I'm sorry?”

Corner breathed heavily. “For the last four hours, every line of enquiry my men have tried to follow up they have had an audience. Dusky gentlemen of non-indigenous antecedents have watched them go in and watched them come out. Once or twice could be a coincidence, but it's getting ridiculous.”

Shola grinned. “We're only trying to be helpful.”

“I dare say,” said Corner. “But another of our national characteristics, besides not liking our policemen abducting political embarrassments, is this general aversion to private armies.”

“A double handful of ex-patriot Africans hardly amounts to a private army. We're just trying to give you an edge. We all have experience of these people, and for Joel's sake we want you to have the benefit of it. For instance, I may be able to tell you two things you don't yet know about the man under that rug. One is his name.”

“I know his name,” Corner growled.

“I knew his name before I knew you'd found him. The other thing is that that helicopter is a short-range job—four hundred odd miles. Nobody would set off across two continents in it. Nor does the company which owns it and employed the pilot have a long-haul aircraft.”

It was true that Chief Inspector Corner had not yet received that information. No doubt somebody was getting it together for him now, but he was too good a policeman to stick to channels when a short cut could get him to the same place quicker. He latched onto Shola's train of thought without missing a beat. “So our macerated friend wasn't flying them out of the country, or at least not this trip. He was taking them to a rendezvous—with a bigger plane, or maybe a ship. My God, we'd have to freeze up every airfield and harbour in the land to be sure of stopping them.”

“Theoretically. But it would be logical”—Shola smiled very faintly—“to start with airports close to London and the south coast ports. Anywhere north of Birmingham and Vanderbilt would have driven there: it wouldn't have been worth his while waiting for the helicopter. Also, until he found Suzanne he didn't even know where I was, let alone where Joel was; but his escape route would have been set up before he left Pretoria. They would work on the statistical probability of finding us in the largest centre of population: whatever plans they laid were based on London. But they knew they could be unlucky, so the helicopter was laid on in case it was needed. Look south, Mr. Corner.”