Tom Cain - Dictator

He turned to see Brianna Latrelle striding towards him, her head darting from side to side as she made sure there was no one else around to see her.

‘Did you agree?’ she whispered again, even more quietly, when she’d caught up with Carver. She reached out a slender brown arm and grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. ‘Whatever they asked you to do, did you agree?’

‘I’m leaving,’ said Carver. ‘I have a plane to catch.’

‘So you said no?’ She relaxed her hand a fraction and her shoulders dropped as the tension in them abated. ‘I hope so… for your sake.’ Her hand tightened again. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is you guys have been talking about. But just the way everyone’s been acting, it gives me a real bad feeling. Before you arrived, Wendell and Tshonga were shut away for hours, no one else allowed near the room. Then Zalika, dressing up like that, faking you out… I can’t tell you why it bothers me. I mean, Wendell has meetings all the time. Why should this be any different? I guess it’s just my female intuition. Silly, huh?’

Carver removed her hand from his arm as gently as he could. Brianna Latrelle meant well, but she wasn’t in any position to know what had really been going on.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, not unkindly.

By the time he’d walked through the doors, he’d already put Brianna Latrelle out of his mind and switched his attention to his travel plans.

The last flight out of Luton to Geneva was already about to leave by the time Carver’s taxi pulled away. He went online, checked the schedules and found a British Airways flight out of Heathrow leaving in two hours’ time. There were seats left in business class. Carver bought one and checked in online.

Heathrow Terminal Five was a hundred and eleven miles from Klerk’s front door. He took four fifty-pound notes from his wallet.

‘Yours if you get me there in eighty minutes or less,’ he told the driver, who was called Asif.

The money made no difference. There were roadworks on the M11 with a forty-mile-an-hour limit and speedcams. Then they hit traffic on the M25. Asif clocked a hundred and twenty trying to make up for lost time, but arrived fractionally too late for Carver to make the plane. He gave him the two hundred anyway, and got another ticket at the airport: a Swissair flight to Zurich.

By the time he got there, the only way of getting to Geneva was the train. It left at four minutes past eleven and arrived a little before half-past two in the morning. Carver caught a cab from the station to the Old Town, went up to his apartment and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

He had turned off his mobile as he got on the Zurich flight and had not bothered to turn it back on. He had a feeling Zalika might call him to try to persuade him to change his mind about the Gushungo job, or just give him hell for saying no. His refusal of Klerk’s offer must have felt to her like a personal rejection. She’d offered herself and he’d walked away. She wasn’t likely to be too happy about that. And if he told her the truth, that his decision was nothing personal, it was only likely to make matters worse.

It wasn’t till he woke up around nine that he finally opened up his connection to the outside world again and heard Justus’s message.

And his first reaction was that he’d made a mistake. It wasn’t Zalika playing tricks. It was Wendell Klerk.

They came back for Justus Iluko in the morning. He wasn’t surprised. Even the ignorant apes who ran the local branch of the National Intelligence Organization, the secret police who enforced Gushungo’s never-ending campaign of fear and oppression, would have worked out that if they had a man’s children, they would not be safe until they had him too. Justus let them come. He took it for granted that he was a dead man. And he reasoned that the nearest jail was at Buweku, some thirty miles away. Canaan and Farayi were almost certainly being held there. If he were taken to Buweku too, that would be his best chance of getting close to them, however fleetingly, before they all vanished for good.

All he wanted was to speak to Carver first. Justus knew that there was nothing his friend could do now. But perhaps, if he could only tell Carver what had happened, that might, in the end, give him some hope of revenge.

‘I know you’re a ruthless bastard, Klerk, but I never thought you’d stoop that low.’

‘What the fuck, Carver – what’s this “stoop that low”? What are you talking about, man?’

Carver stopped pacing round his living room and spoke with steely clarity. ‘I’m talking about the message I got from Justus Iluko.’

‘Justus who?’

‘Iluko. He worked for you, remember? You fought together in the war. He helped me get Zalika away from Moses Mabeki.’

‘Ah shit, that Justus. Sure I remember him. Good man, quit working for me a while back. But what’s this about a message?’

‘He called me last night – someone who claimed to be him, anyway. The connection was crap and the guy’s voice was shot to hell, could have been anyone. He said his wife was dead and his kids had been taken by Gushungo’s men. He was begging me to help. So you’re telling me this isn’t some stunt you’re trying to pull, faking some tragedy with a family I know, trying to get me to change my mind? Because it’s a helluva bloody coincidence. I walk out on you and a few hours later, hey presto, there’s one of your old employees calling me up-’

‘Hey, I swear, I had nothing to do with it. And to prove it, I’ll get my guys in Malemba to check this out, find out what the fuck’s going on. All right?’

There was a bleeping in Carver’s ear.

‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘someone on the other line. Shit, it’s Justus’s number. I’ll call you right back.’

‘Samuel, is that you?’

The voice on the other end was tight and high-pitched with anxiety and the reception was terrible, but now that Carver could hear him live he was in no doubt: this was Justus Iluko.

‘Yeah, I’m here. What’s happening?’

‘They are coming for me. They killed my wife and took my children. Now they are here for me too.’

Down the line, Carver could hear shouting and a hammering noise – someone trying to batter down a door. He felt a desperate sense of helplessness and guilt at his inability to change any of what was about to happen.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked, though he knew it was a futile question.

‘Do not worry about me, I am a dead man,’ came the reply. ‘But please, Sam, I beg you, if there is anything you can do for my children… anything… I…’

Justus’s final words were drowned in the crash of the splintering door and a cacophony of heavy boots and raised voices as the room was invaded and Justus was seized.

There was one last despairing cry of ‘Sam, please!’ then a brief burst of feedback and static before the line went dead.

Carver stood alone in his Geneva flat, surrounded by all the possessions and comforts that many years in a lucrative trade had bought him, shamed by the ease of his existence; shamed, too, by his initial scepticism about Justus’s call. While Carver had been tucking into breakfast and shooting at clay pigeons on Klerk’s estate, Justus and his family had been torn apart, their lives destroyed on a madman’s whim. He thought back to the psychiatrist Karlheinz Geisel, who had baulked at the idea of doing something that would cause the death of a few specific individuals, even if it might save many more faceless, unknown people. Now Carver faced the precise opposite situation: people he knew would die if he did not do something. There was a moral imperative to act.

The children whose education Carver had supported and whose father had saved his life were imprisoned, facing interrogation, torture, even execution. Every year Canaan and Farayi had sent him hand-drawn cards at Christmas, along with letters earnestly describing their progress at school. In the past few years, childish descriptions had given way to growing maturity. He had seen them blossom as individuals with minds and opinions of their own, young people of the kind Malemba desperately needed if it had any hope of recovering from the devastation wrought by Henderson Gushungo. How could he stand by and let such promise go to waste?