The Devil's breath

15

Kallie van Reenen had a suspicious mind. She blamed her father for that. He might have been a war hero but, as he always told her, the Angolan war was a bad war, waged for the wrong reasons, instigated by greed. After he had criticized the government openly they began to harass him and he moved to Namibia, away from the unforgiving South African government of the day. Now all that was over, but her father had an intrinsic distrust of bureaucracy. And as far as Kallie was concerned, when she had discovered that Mike Kapuo was involved with Mr. Peterson in England, that distrust now included the police-the very people she had gone to for help. So when they took her back to her plane and the police air mechanic sorted out the problems, she logged her flight plan for home and flew to an airfield south of Walvis Bay. That at least gave the illusion that she was flying back to the farm. Five hours later, when she landed at a desert airstrip for refueling, a fingertip search confirmed her suspicions. She found the satellite tracking device.

Half an hour later, a plane that was returning from safari and which would be sitting on the apron at Windhoek for a few days, carried the electronic tag.

The plane’s pilot turned up only moments after she had planted the small transponder. “You’re van Reenen’s daughter, aren’t you?” the pilot said.

“That’s right,” she said, barely managing to conceal her embarrassment. Moments earlier he would have seen her acting suspiciously around his aircraft.

“If you’re flying up to see your dad, better be careful,” he said, slinging his overnight bag into the plane. “IATA’s just blacklisted Namibian airspace, the relay station at Outjo has gone down. There’s no ATC anywhere.”

“Oh. Right. Thanks. I hadn’t heard.”

“Happened this morning. I’m heading home. The tourist industry ever hears about this, we’ll all be out of work. Take it easy.” He began his preflight checks as she drifted away, barely able to conceal her elation at the good news he had given her.

The International Air Transport Association, which controlled everything to do with aviation, had blacklisted the Namibian government’s air traffic control system. With its major relay station broken down, aircraft would not be able to see each other in the sky or land safely. And if air traffic control was not working, they would not be able to see her on their radar screens.

From now on she would fly low without logging any flight plans.

* * *

Kallie needed to contact Sayid; the best way to do that was through Tobias, and there was only one way she could get his full cooperation: through guilt.

The small airstrips in the desert and at farms had no control towers. They were as informal as garages. Most had a fuel pump, a couple of mechanics and a shop; maybe a bar. When she landed, there was only one other plane needing refueling and no sign of the bogus mechanic who had sabotaged her plane. She pushed the bar’s doors open and strode towards Tobias, who was busy connecting a barrel of beer. The moment he saw her, he reached for the till and snatched a piece of paper. “Boy, did you con me! Do you know what that phone call to England cost? Your father would skin me alive if I gave him this!”

She sat on a barstool; there was no one else in the room. “Tobias, you nearly killed me,” she said with a straight face. Tobias’s mouth opened in an unspoken moment of uncertainty and confusion. “You remember that Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special you made me?” she said.

“Yes. There was no booze in it. Honest.”

“I know.” She waited, wanting to draw out his suffering a little longer.

“I blended the fruit and mix myself. You got sick? Food poisoning? Maybe it was something else you ate.”

“It was the old flask, Tobias. Your Desert Buster must have had fermented fruit in it. It blew up.”

“Blew up?” He was trying to picture the moment when his concoction escaped the confines of the flask. “Did the flask hurt you?”

Kallie grabbed ice cubes from the bucket, dropped them into a glass, reached for the lemonade dispenser and filled the glass. “It’s all right if I have a drink, is it?” she asked.

He nodded, still trying to put together how his actions might have caused her harm.

“It exploded, drenched me and the cockpit, soaked the integrated electronic circuit relay and short-circuited the solenoid on the hydraulic steering mechanism.” She said the first thing that came into her head. Tobias knew how to make every drink under the sun but nothing about airplanes. “I barely made it. I had to report it but I didn’t mention you or the Desert Buster.”

“Thank you. Kallie, I’m sorry, I had no idea a soft drink could cause so much trouble.”

“An exploding soft drink, Tobias.”

“Right.”

“In a container unsuitable for the use for which it was intended.” She remembered the words from a consumer rights report in a magazine.

“It was an old flask, but it was a flask, so it must have been suitable because that’s what flasks are for,” he said.

Kallie realized she might have gone a bit too far in trying to con Tobias on the Trade Description Act. She needed to give him a reality check.

“I could have died, Tobias.”

He nodded gravely.

“But I didn’t. So I just thought I’d come back and let you know. So you didn’t worry.”

Tobias considered this for a moment. “But I would not have worried, because I would not have known if you had not come back and told me.”

“Listen. Do you want my dad to hear about this?”

He shook his head. That was a confrontation no one in their right mind would want.

“No. Course not. And believe me, I have no intention of telling him.”

“Thank you, Kallie.”

“It’s all right. You’re a friend.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes it is. And friends are here to help each other.”

Tobias nodded soberly. “So, how much is this going to cost me?”

“I’m hurt and shocked that you think I would ask you for anything,” she said, refilling her glass. She sipped the lemonade. He waited. She shrugged. “Only the cost of a phone call.”

Sayid was on ablution block cleaning duty. The boys worked by rota, swabbing out the showers, making sure the toilets were clean, wiping tiles, cleaning mirrors, checking if loo rolls needed replacing. No one liked doing it, and deals could be made with other boys to take over a weekly duty which interfered-not with school lessons, because that would mean it would have an abundance of volunteers-but with a much more important matter known as TT, or Town Time, on Wednesday afternoons. The school bus would take them to the city, where afternoon movies, coffee shops, record stores and bookshops beckoned, and where some of the older boys inexplicably spent time chatting up girls. But Sayid had volunteered to swap with one of his friends, making the excuse that he needed to build up some free Wednesdays later in the year. What Sayid really wanted was some undisturbed time to work on the mystery phone number that Mr. Peterson had rung and which was proving to be totally untraceable.

Sayid had never had so much trouble hacking as he had now with the codes for the telephone exchange routing system. This was supposed to be a straightforward procurement of an encrypted telephone number. He had tried a reverse number look-up, but that didn’t work because it was an unlisted number. A GUI on his computer screen had shown a London location, but then it had blanked out. Where the relay stations for the telephone connections should have flashed up in a nice big box with an orange background and kebonged a tone for his attention, the screen had remained still and silent. Sayid, like most hackers, was self-taught, but he had enough skills to go a long way. He had started programming with Python, then Java, and over time progressed to C, but that always needed debugging, so he updated his hardware and went back to Python. He knew he had to eventually get to grips with one of the oldest programming languages, LISP, the name derived from “List Processing,” but it needed time and experience to write properly although it was the preferred choice for artificial intelligence research. Among the cyberspace community Sayid’s reputation was slowly becoming established. It was a love of programming that kept the hacker community in touch with each other. There were people in America who spent their lives underground in basements, surrounded by computers, absorbed in the endless possibilities at their fingertips. Sayid knew a few who worked in research and development of major computer companies and, although their names were buried deeply in code, he had sent an urgent help request to one of them. That was yesterday.

He ran the squeegee across the floor one more time: the place sparkled. He had done a good job quickly. Now he needed to get back to his room. He left the floor marker warning that the floor was wet, propped the mop, bucket, squeegee and cleaning materials as a small assault course in case any of the teachers got nosy-they were bound to knock something over, then he could be out of his room and down the corridor in time to cover his absence.

The small figure of a whirling dervish danced across his computer screen. This was a message from America. To connect to the message, he had to double-click on the dervish icon. Once he had done that, a page of code clogged the screen and he tapped in a previously agreed-upon access number. Like harpoons, these numbers shot out from the base of the screen, grabbed letters and words from the code page, rejumbled the letters and decrypted the message.

hey bro, this is your Code King Buddy. how you doin? this is big, kid that number forget the exchange that’s no good to you anyway. doesn’t mean nuthin. he could be anywhere and reroute. this number. cool. no time for guessing games. your man is high clearance. this is defense-code-scrambled. don’t have a name. he’s MI6. tread careful, pal. peace and goodwill. except to the bad guys.

The British Secret Intelligence Service; the words sounded like a huge pyramid of power in Sayid’s head. He stared at the screen for a moment, then erased everything. If MI6 was hunting Max’s dad, then he must have done something pretty serious and Peterson had connections in much higher places than your bog-standard geography teacher. Sayid tried to make some sense of it all. Max’s dad was missing, someone tried to kill Max, then Peterson had Max followed to the airport. The police in Namibia were in touch with Peterson, and Peterson was asking for help from MI6. Whatever Max’s dad had discovered, it had everybody scared and they were trying to stop Max from discovering his father and his secret. Sayid stopped his mind going down the wrong route. This was not an MI6 operation. The state was not involved. This was Peterson asking for help from a well-placed contact who would be untouchable. Peterson was owed a favor, so maybe Peterson had done dirty work for MI6 in the past. That made more sense. And it was also more frightening. How did Peterson come to be teaching at Dartmoor High? Just what kind of clout did he have to get help from a foreign police force?

His cell rang; the screen showed it was an unknown name but the number was familiar.

“Sayid, it’s me.”

“Kallie. Have you found Max?”

“No, he’s still missing. I don’t know whether no news is good news or not. But things are going a bit crazy.” She explained everything that had happened to her and how she was trying to keep out of everyone’s sight. She was convinced that the Walvis Bay docks, Shaka Chang’s shipping line and his warehouse were connected to Tom Gordon’s disappearance and Anton Leopold’s death. Somehow the whole mess would lead them to Max.

“Listen, Kallie, Max is my best mate, but I think you should back off,” Sayid said, beginning to realize how completely out of their depth they all were now.

“No way. Someone tried to kill me. I’m involved and this whole thing with the cops and your Mr. Peterson stinks. Something’s being hushed up big time and I’m going to find out what it is-and when I do, I need you to alert the British authorities, the Foreign Office or someone, because I don’t know who I can trust out here.”

“I don’t know who to trust either. I did a bit of illegal snooping. Peterson is getting help from MI6.”

“Who? Oh, the spooks?”

“Yeah. This is even bigger than we imagined, Kallie.”

There was a pause at the end of the phone and Sayid guessed that, like him, Kallie was trying to think what to do.

“I don’t care, Sayid, I’m going ahead with my plan.”

“Which is?”

“I’m flying over the route from Walvis Bay towards the mountains. Shaka Chang has trucks shipping machinery from the docks. Anton Leopold was killed at the docks. I can’t get in, but they must be bringing something out. I’ll be following them.”

“That’s dangerous, Kallie. They might have guns. If they spot you, you could be like a fat pigeon on a duck shoot.”

“I’ll fly high enough,” she lied, knowing that over a certain height one or two of the military control towers might pick her up.

“I hate this business of not being able to stay in touch,” Sayid said.

“There’s nothing we can do about that. I don’t have a satellite phone.”

“Me neither.”

“So. That’s it then.”

Her words sounded so final, prodding his conscience. “I have to be able to do more than just sit here,” he said. Beyond all their fears, a simple fact remained: a father and his son were missing in a hostile environment. They were both British subjects and Sayid remembered his own citizenship ceremony after Max’s father had sponsored him and his mother. They had been given a new life, a place of safety away from the terror of war, and he was not going to stay silent. “I’m going to the police, Kallie. What’s happening isn’t right. It’s just not right. I’m going to tell them everything I’ve found out. The cops can make a fuss of their own, and if they don’t I’ll go to the papers.”

“The cops might throw the book at you. And the spooks might just lock you away in a dark hole somewhere. Sayid, that’s a crazy thing to do.”

“And what you’re doing isn’t? This way, at least one of us might get through to somebody who cares and who can do something. I won’t mention you when I talk to whoever.”

“And if I get nabbed I won’t say anything about you being my contact in England.” She paused a moment. “Hey, I hope we get to meet one day.”

“Me too.”

“And Max.”

“Definitely. We can do this.”

“We’re on our own then,” she said.

“No. There’s three of us in this thing, and Max is strong and he’s really determined about everything he does, and even if he had both legs broken he’d crawl to get to where he wanted to be. We have to be as brave as he is, Kallie. I have to tell someone.”

Those final words brought the realization that he was risking everything he had been given. And not just him: they could repatriate his mother as well. They might both be sent back to the place that had claimed his own father’s life at the hands of assassins.

“Let’s talk when we can,” he said.

“Sure. Good luck, Sayid.”

“You too.” Sayid switched off the phone. He had reached a point of no return.

A few minutes later, he stood outside his mother’s room. He knocked, heard her call “Yes?”

He opened the door. His mother sat, marking term papers. Sayid didn’t move. She gazed at him for a moment and saw the boy’s uncertainty.

“What is it?” she said gently.

* * *

Kallie gazed across the heat-baked landing strip, mentally plotting her route. There would be a lot of flying and she was tired, having already been in the air for hours. Tobias moved next to her and shared the view. He sipped a beer and said quietly, “Tell your father. He’ll know what to do.”

She shook her head, wishing it could be otherwise, knowing she could not take the risk. Her father loved her, she was in no doubt of that, but his reaction could start a small war, and she did not want to be caught in the middle.

Someone had run into a Dartmoor foal and killed it. The high moor road was not only a scenic drive for tourists but also a rat-run for villagers getting across the moor to one of the major roads. Drivers didn’t usually stop when they killed an animal, be it a sheep or a Dartmoor pony, and this incident was no different. Special Police Constable Debbie Shilton closed the door of the village substation’s small office, having arranged for the hill farmer to remove the poor creature’s body. The death of the foal saddened her. There was a callousness in some people that she could not comprehend. Leaving any animal suffering after causing it an injury was not on so far as she was concerned, and she wished that if the culprits were ever caught, the law would prosecute and make an example of them. However, that seldom happened, even when troublemakers were caught red-handed. There were times when people’s behavior sickened her. Maybe she was not cut out to be even a part-time copper.

A car driven by a woman pulled up. There was a young boy with her. The boy looked anguished and the woman seemed scared.

“Please, officer, can you help us?” the woman said.

Shilton cast aside the momentary self-doubt; that was what she was here for, to help. Though she guessed, by the look of the young boy, that this was probably no more than a missing family pet. She smiled compassionately at Sayid.