The Protector, page 33
Doc tried to picture the scene. ‘So, one minute there’s no phone, and the next, he exclaims that he’s found a phone.’
‘Yes. Odd, right?’
Not unless Moses had staged a burglary, stolen her phone, then scrolled through it looking for relevant personal details and messages that might give him or his brother some insight into her life. Had he then taken the phone on his sordid stroll in the bush, removed it from his pocket and dropped it on the trail while he and Zola were doing whatever it was they were doing?
Zola’s eyes were wide. ‘You think he was the one who broke into your chalet?’
‘Could he have? Were you together all the time?’
Zola seemed to think for a moment. ‘Of course, we had separate chalets . . .’
‘Of course.’
‘But I remember I wanted to do some reading, some research, for half an hour, and he said he was going to take a nap. That would have been just before we went for . . . for our stroll.’
Plenty of time for him to sneak into her chalet. Doc felt her anger rise, but she knew there would be no way to prove her theory. By his own admission, Moses had picked the phone up on the trail, so that accounted for his fingerprints being on it.
‘Shit,’ Doc said.
‘What are you going to do?’ Zola asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She had to let Zola go back up to the deck, or Moses would come looking for her.
‘I want to help,’ Zola said. She leaned in closer to her and lowered her voice. ‘I can check his phone sometime, when he’s asleep, or distracted.’
‘Zola, I can’t ask you to put yourself at risk.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I want to. Even if it’s just to prove that he’s not a criminal, or not conspiring to hurt you, or, worse, have people killed. I need to know the truth. And if Big Joe is up to something, he may have confided in Moses.’
Doc put her hand out and touched Zola’s forearm. ‘I can’t ask you to do something like that, but if you do, please be careful, Zola.’
She nodded. ‘I will. I must go.’
Chapter 28
‘Good man, we’ve got to keep your strength up,’ Deep Voice said as he picked up Ian’s plate, cutlery and the tin mug. ‘This scoff mightn’t be what a rich Australian like you would normally order at a fancy restaurant, but pap ’n’ sauce will keep you going.’
Ian didn’t care that the food wasn’t to his liking, but the starchy white substance – which he guessed was the ‘pap’ – had filled him and the rich meaty gravy had warmed him. There was no light at all coming in through the obscured window, and it was cold – well into the night.
‘Hello?’ a man’s voice called from outside.
Deep Voice froze and, like Ian, turned his face to the window. ‘Shit.’
His captor was rattled. There was an unexpected noise from outside.
‘Kanjani?’ the same person called from outside. Ian heard the thud of running feet and then the clomp of footsteps coming up stairs.
Deep Voice moved to the door to Ian’s room, balancing the tray with the dirty dishes in one hand as he opened it. The man outside was now banging on the front door of the house. Deep Voice flicked off the light.
‘Don’t you fokken dare switch this light on until I come back to you,’ he said to Ian.
‘Hello, hello, hello!’ the man bellowed from outside, and continued pounding on the door.
Deep Voice left the room and closed the door, but something clattered to the floor as he did so. From outside the door Ian heard the sound of the tray being half dropped, half set down, and the sound of the bolts and padlock being applied. Ian moved towards the door and knelt down in the darkness. As his fingers moved over the floorboards, searching in case Deep Voice had actually dropped something, he put his ear close to the door.
‘Hello?’ the stranger called once more, but now his footsteps were echoing through the house. ‘There was a light on. I know there’s someone here; please, you have to help me. I’m sorry it is so late, but I need assistance.’
‘Get out of my house,’ Deep Voice said. ‘It’s midnight already.’
Ian stayed still so he could hear the conversation. At least he had an idea of the time.
‘Hello, boss, sorry,’ the visitor said. ‘Please, you have to help. I was in a bus. It crashed, just by your front gate on the road. There’s no one else around. There are four people hurt. There is a woman, she is pregnant, she is bleeding badly, and there is her other child, a little boy, his leg is broken.’
‘Fok,’ Deep Voice said.
‘Please, sir. I see your two vehicles. You have to take us to the clinic now-now.’
There had been two men there when Ian first regained consciousness, he recalled, and it sounded like Deep Voice and his accomplice both had vehicles. But where was the other man now?
‘Call an ambulance.’
‘There is no signal, sir. There must be something wrong with the phone tower. Please, you have to help us. The pregnant woman – she is losing too much blood.’
‘Shit.’
‘Maybe there is someone else here who can help us?’
‘No,’ Deep Voice said. ‘I’m alone.’
‘Please, sir . . .’
‘All right. Let’s go.’ Deep Voice had lowered his voice, as if worried that Ian might hear him.
There was the sound of footsteps, then car doors slamming and an engine coming to life. Deep Voice floored the accelerator and revved high in each gear. He was clearly in a rush, and not just because of the injured people. When the sound of the vehicle faded, Ian switched on the light.
On the floor, by the door, was the spoon Ian had used to eat a bowl of tinned fruit Deep Voice had served with the pap and sauce. Ian snatched it up, fearful this might all be some sort of cruel ruse, and slipped the spoon into the back pocket of his trousers.
He tested the door, heaving against it with his shoulder. He was under no illusion that bursting through a door was as easy as it appeared on TV, and he had heard Deep Voice sliding home one, if not two, bolts on the other side. As he moved away from the door, a floorboard creaked. He shifted his stance, putting all his weight on his right foot. He felt the floorboard give a little.
Ian dropped to one knee and took a closer look at the floorboards. They were old. His eye was drawn to the hole where Deep Voice had fired his pistol, narrowly missing Ian’s toe. The bullet had gone exactly between two planks. Ian took out the spoon, reversed it and put the handle into the hole. He pushed down on it, using one of the planks as a fulcrum, and the other board creaked and started to move. Ian paused, head up, listening for any sound that might indicate, again, that this was a setup, but he heard nothing but cicadas outside in the night.
Ian went back to work. He took off one of his shoes and placed it under the spoon handle to give him more leverage. Then, with a loud crack, the floorboard he was working on came away from the joist it was nailed to. Ian stood, feet astride the loosened plank, and got his fingers under it. He heaved and started to stand, then nearly lost his balance as the board snapped in two.
Looking down, he could see that the supporting beam was honeycombed with termite damage, and so, too, was the plank in his hand. He jammed the spoon handle under the plank next to the newly created hole, and, with more room to work, the plank came away from the joist easily.
He worked as fast as he could, removing the second floorboard, then a third, a fourth and a fifth. He put his face down to the newly created aperture and felt a cool breeze. The house, or at least this part of it, was on raised foundations. When he’d removed one more length of rotten timber, he was able to drop down into the black void.
The earth under his fingers was cool and damp and it smelled musty. It was too dark to see his hand in front of his face, but he had descended facing the window in his room. He felt a faint breath of cool air from that direction. As soon as he started to crawl, his face and shoulders were enshrouded with spider web. Did Zimbabwe have venomous spiders? Fortunately, he’d never been an arachnophobe. Ian crawled on, ignoring a sharp pain in his palm when he put his hand down on an old nail or a splinter. He could feel the breeze in his face getting cooler and stronger. He moved as fast as he could, grazing his back on the timber supports above, but carrying on.
Eventually his path was blocked by timber latticework, but it, too, was rotten with ant damage, and when he pushed and punched at it, the decorative surround came free. Ian leopard-crawled out through a garden bed overgrown with weeds, ripping his shirt and scratching himself on some kind of spiky plant. He didn’t care. He was free.
Ian hauled himself to his feet and looked around. He saw his prison properly now, a farmhouse in need of repair. The tin roof was rusted and sagging in places and the rest of the garden was a jungle. The room he had been in looked like an add-on, part of an enclosed timber deck that ran around the old house. Parked out the front was a red Volkswagen hatchback car. He ran to it, grateful to be able to move his legs. The car was a Golf. Like the roof, it sported patches of rust and he guessed it might be twenty or more years old. He tried the driver’s-side door and felt a moment of elation as it opened. Of course, it was too much to expect to find keys in the ignition.
Ian doubled back to the house and ran up the stairs and through the front door – in his haste, Deep Voice had not locked it.
He went in, found a light switch and looked around. It looked like all the furniture and fittings had been removed – his illumination came from a bare bulb swinging on a cord. Deep Voice’s lair comprised a fold-out table, a metal-framed director’s chair and a roll-out black foam camping mat with a military-green sleeping bag on it. There was a camouflage pack at the foot of the Spartan sleeping setup. Had Deep Voice been a soldier?
On the table was a set of keys on a ring with a Volkswagen badge on a leather tag, and a piece of paper with some numbers written on it. The sheet was weighted down with a Samsung smartphone.
Ian tapped on the phone screen and while it came to life, there was, as the visiting man had said, no signal. He put the phone and the piece of paper in his pocket. Also on the table was a cardboard box. Ian picked it up; it was the packaging for a Hughes portable satellite modem. He looked around the room, which must have once been the lounge room, and in the dilapidated kitchen and two neighbouring bedrooms. There was no sign of the device. Maybe Deep Voice kept it secreted in his vehicle.
Finally, Ian went to the kitchen. A camping fridge sat on the floor, humming. Ian opened the lid. He took out a plastic shopping bag containing three oranges, two cans of Coca-Cola and a packet of chocolate. Taking it with him, Ian ran out into the night.
He opened the door of the Golf and climbed in, slinging his bag onto the passenger seat, where he also saw a tattered road atlas of Zimbabwe – that would help him. He inserted the key into the ignition and turned it. The starter motor whined a little, but the engine caught.
‘Yes!’
Ian rammed the car into first gear and took off. The tail of the little car swung as he took a bend in the dirt road in third, his speed already passing sixty kilometres per hour as he went up through the gears. The vehicle lurched in and out of a dip and Ian felt his heart pounding as he came to a tar road and braked.
He looked to his right. In the distance he could see orange hazard lights flashing. That must have been where the accident was, so he turned left. He kept his headlights turned off and accelerated hard into the night.
As he rounded a bend, now out of sight of anyone who might be watching from the crash scene, he switched on his headlights. A cow loomed in front of him and he braked and swerved. The car felt like it was going up onto its two driver’s-side wheels. For a terrifying moment he thought he was going to roll.
Take your foot off the brake and the accelerator, he told himself. He missed the cow and let the vehicle slow and settle itself. Shaken, he planted his right foot again. Ian turned the headlights to high beam and scanned the road ahead for any sign that might tell him where he was. There were no streetlights.
He passed a cluster of mudbrick circular huts with thatch roofs. Pale lights, maybe paraffin lanterns, cast a weak glow through the windows. He would not risk stopping so soon. The small engine whined as he raced along the road. He swerved to miss a pothole, which would have been big enough to destroy the Golf’s suspension if he’d gone into it.
How much time did he have? He pulled Deep Voice’s phone from his pocket and tapped the screen. There was signal here – four bars’ worth. ‘Yes.’
Ian kept his eyes on the road as he tried to work out who he could call. It was dark here in Zimbabwe; the phone’s clock said 12.32 am. He was tired, but forced himself to calculate the time in Australia. It would be just after eight-thirty in the morning. He’d have to think of someone whose number he could remember off the top of his head.
He punched in the number for his ex, Katrina. The phone beeped in his ear and when he checked the screen it said Call Failed.
‘Shit.’ Deep Voice had been using a portable satellite modem, which meant he probably didn’t need or want mobile phone data. Also, using the mobile network might have meant the criminal’s phone could be tracked.
Ian drove on, hoping he would see the lights of a twenty-four-hour fuel station, or a police station, somewhere he could report what had happened and hopefully get access to a phone that worked, to call for help. There was nothing.
He rubbed a hand down his face, trying to wipe away his fatigue. Ian blinked and then noticed a flicker of light. It was in his rear-view mirror.
There were headlights behind him. He accelerated and the other vehicle started to recede from sight. He looked up again a short time later and saw the lights again; he guessed the other car was about three hundred metres behind him, matching his speed.
Ian licked his lips. He could stop and flag down the other driver to ask for help. He felt a shiver. Maybe it was Deep Voice, following him. Ian took his foot off the accelerator. The speed bled away and the headlights loomed larger in his rear-view mirror.
He had dropped from 100 kilometres per hour down to 70. The road was straight, visibility was fine, and there was no other traffic. The person behind him should have overtaken him.
Instead, the following vehicle slowed, keeping the same distance behind him.
Ian drove on through the night, fear and paranoia more than overcoming his tiredness.
A few times, he thought the vehicle following him had stopped or turned off, because there were periods when there were no headlights in his rear-view mirror, but when he slowed down to check, the lights returned.
If it was Deep Voice, what was he doing? Toying with him? Perhaps Deep Voice didn’t want to risk running him off the road. Ian shook his head; no, Deep Voice had a gun, he could just pull up alongside him and point the gun at him. Then what would Ian do – try and ram him and run him off the road? He didn’t know if he was skilled or brave enough to try something like that.
Ian wondered if Doc had received his video message, and if she had been able to track down his accountant and lawyer. Cassie had also handled all his company work, and had been taken on by the new owners, Goldberg PR, to look after their Australian affairs after Ian sold to them. One of the things that had surprised Ian when the new owners took over was that all of their senior staff were covered by kidnap and ransom insurance. He remembered thinking it a waste of money for a country like Australia, but Goldberg was a multinational, and its policies applied to all of its operations. Ian had sat through a virtual crisis management exercise once, in which Goldberg’s K & R agency, Limited Risk, based in London, was included, as the scenario concerned a wealthy fictitious client who had been kidnapped. Limited Risk’s personnel were ex–law enforcement and military, many of them ex–special forces. Ian wondered if a team was en route from London to Africa already.
Ian picked up Deep Voice’s phone while he drove. In Australia he would not have dared check a phone while driving, but here in Zimbabwe it didn’t seem like the normal rules applied.
There was only one app on the screen: Telegram. It was a messaging service that Ian had heard of, but never used. Deep Voice had deactivated the need for a passcode or facial or fingerprint security on his phone and, likewise, when Ian tapped on Telegram, the app opened straight away. Ian guessed that lack of security and other apps was because this was a burner phone the man had bought for this one job, after which he would jettison in. He looked back at the road and saw a pothole looming in his headlights. He swerved.
He risked a quick glance at the phone screen again, and saw references to the ‘lady professor’, and ‘Rado’ and the need to keep her afraid. He was right – his kidnapping was as much about Doc as it was him and his bank account.
‘Bloody hell,’ Ian said when he saw a familiar name in one of the messages. It was addressed to ‘Ralph’. He recalled that Ralph was the name of Doc’s mysterious online admirer, who she had been in touch with before and since Jurie’s death.
Off to Ian’s right, the sky was beginning to turn pink. He shook his head to stay awake and focused.
Ian had driven through the night and wanted to stop and look carefully through all the messages on the phone belonging to the man he now knew as Ralph. However, the mysterious headlights continued to appear and disappear in his mirror. On straight stretches where the road was in good repair he checked the road atlas he had found in the car. The first small town he had passed through was called Banket, and when he’d seen a sign giving him the distance to Chinhoyi, he worked out that he was travelling northwest. If he stayed on this road it would take him, eventually, to Mana Pools National Park, where Doc and the others had gone. Ian tried to calculate where they would be now, but he’d been guilty of not paying enough attention to the itinerary. Although he had been travelling for some time the fuel tank showed just under half-full; the little car’s fuel economy was good, so he had no immediate need to stop for petrol. He resolved to try and find a police station in either Chinhoyi, which looked on the map to be a large town, or further along, once day broke.
