East London, South Africa
November 11, 7:02 P.M.
Nahoon Beach is a miles-long stretch of sand with spectacular waves that caught the fading light.
Cold and weary from her shoulders to her soul, Katinka watched as the silhouette of the southern bluff cut a dark, familiar shape against the twilight sky.
The beach was deserted at this hour, in this season. She swept in like a battle-worn Valkyrie, the vessel caught in a sudden wind that caused her to turn suddenly toward her left. A soft landing was out of the question. She needed to set down. She did so with a spine-jarring thump.
Though exhausted, Katinka did not linger. The police would find and wonder about the autogyro, and would contact MEASE—but not before she reached him. Tourists and tourist helicopters frequented the area and no one would bother reporting one that had landed on the beach.
The wind was strong but not as biting as it had been farther south. She lived a short walk past Beach Road, on quiet, modest suburban Plymouth Drive. She owned a small cottage in this flat landscape dotted with closely built homes and shielded from sun and wind by palm trees and sturdier oaks.
She had grown up in a mud hut with a thatched roof not far from here, raised by a single father who still worked as an automobile mechanic. His endless hours of hard work—and a certain skill for dice, which frequently cost him protection money from the local police which just as frequently wiped out his winnings—put her through school and she longed to return that love and kindness. Though she cherished her comfortable retreat it was not where she wanted to spend the rest of her life. There were mansions in Cape Town, Western Cape. Foster had a place on Val Du Lac, Franschhoek. It wasn’t one of the bigger mansions but it was comfortable. That was where she yearned to be. Perhaps when he moved up, she would have earned enough to move in.
You can always hope, she thought.
Though there was a ceiling to her dreams. She sometimes fancied—usually while chopping or dissolving rock, away from any distractions—that Foster would one day realize what a bright, eager, intelligent woman she was and they could be more than boss and worker. But he had shown no interest in her or any woman, save for those models he occasionally dated. Katinka did not want to know about them. They were the enemy.
The families all knew her but the location was about more than any of that. From here, she was able to walk to the less thunderous sections of Nahoon, near the estuary of the river, where the dinghy from the Teri Wheel would always meet her. She could also ride her motor scooter to the MEASE office, where she would be driven to whatever site she was to work on or else to the helipad.
There was another reason for living here. Katinka knew her way in the dark. Given the work she did, that was essential. Foster was insistent on that and on other clandestine skills, such as saying as little as possible on phone calls or in texts or e-mails.
The house consisted of a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom with a shower. There was a shed out back on the small lot where she kept her scooter and garden supplies. She turned up the heater in the shed and let the water tank warm before stepping in. It held enough for five minutes of a modest stream. The woman did not want to waste a moment of warmth.
After plugging in her near-dead cell phone, Katinka took off her clothes, checked for blood spatters. There were none. Her exit had been careful. Most of the crew had DNA on file as part of their criminal records. She was a MEASE employee. If investigators came to question her, there was nothing to connect her to the boat. That done, she stood in the fine spray and considered her plan. She had told Foster that core samples were recovered. That meant either lying about the total or telling him the truth: that she was keeping one.
She would lie. If he ever found out, it would not go well. When it came to honesty it, like loyalty, had to be absolute.
The sun was just beginning to emerge from the sea as Katinka snatched up her phone and stepped in the wood-fenced backyard. She was dressed in a warm wool coat and fur-lined boots. She had transferred the two samples to a backpack and carried the third.
She went to the large shed out back. Katinka had it built with the expectation that one day she would own a motorboat and store it here. There had not, as yet, been time for that. She blamed it on what she called “the hustle.” It was a disease, and she knew it, but there was no avoiding it. Growing up, anyone who was poor and found a way out was also a victim: the fear that if you ever stopped hustling, you would slide back to poverty. And then it would be worse because there had been a path out. She kept promising herself she would get the boat “tomorrow.” Yet each tomorrow was the same as every yesterday.
The hustle.
There are worse habits than working, she told herself whenever she saw this big empty space. If nothing else, the shed was a reminder that there was a reason for working so hard.
Katinka tugged the string of the bare overhead light. Her Sym Blaze 200 motor scooter had a platform on back with a case for holding rock samples. She put the two samples inside, still in the backpack to cushion them from being knocked about. She looked for a place to hide the other container.
A bag of fertilizer that she used for her small rose garden.
“From the earth you came, to the earth you return,” she said as she removed the cord that bound the top of the plastic sack and gently screwed the sample down into the mulch.
She walked the scooter outside through the back door of the shed where she would have better cell phone reception. The woman had no doubt that Foster had remained at the radio all night—not just waiting to hear from someone on the boat but listening to communications of the harbormaster and the NSRI. The National Sea Rescue Institute was staffed by 980 volunteers and had a total of 32 coastal bases. If anyone had seen the fire, boats would have been dispatched.
“Katinka!” the voice burst from the phone. “Is—is that you?”
“It’s me. I’m home and coming over.”
“We had a distress call from—”
“I know. The boat is gone. I came ashore on the autogyro, in case anyone asks. I’ll explain everything, Chief. I’ll see you soon.”
“But the call—the reason for the call!”
“It’s under control.” She sat on the bike and started the engine. “I’ll see you soon.”
She hung up. Two minutes later, having strapped on her beige cap helmet and slipped into her sunglasses, Katinka Kettle was headed down the street, rousing dogs one after the other, the morning and evening heralds, as she made her way to the coastal road and East London.
MEASE was located on the top floor of a small, modern, unassuming two-story gray office building on Old Transkei Road. Occupying the bottom floor were a car dealership and travel agency, also owned by Claude Foster. Both allowed him to move people, machinery, and cash to wherever it was needed for MEASE business.
Parking was in a small lot behind, with a chain-link fence. On the opposite side of the fence was a repair shop that handled everything from motorcycles to airplane engines. Foster owned that as well.
The forty-eight-year-old college-educated accountant and football enthusiast was savvy and confident in a way that attracted devoted employees. In a nation where racial discrimination was illegal but old biases remained, the son of a white father and black mother was extremely generous with every member of his diverse team, in all of his operations. The man himself had no political or social worldview. His older brother, Aaron, was a trade union activist in the 1980s—rare for a white man. He was shot in the spine and died two years later, a paraplegic. Foster lived in the modest Val Du Lac mansion alone, save for the occasional escort he brought for a visit. He did not believe in relationships. He could not afford a moment of weakness in which he would trust anyone.
For Foster, success was the only cause that mattered. To achieve it, there was not a day that he defied a socially unbalanced system that had replaced a racially unjust system in which mining and wealth were the only constant. And that was controlled by powerful interests that ruthlessly stamped out entrepreneurs.
The MEASE office itself was a large open area with no walls, just workstations. Foster’s office was a glass cubicle. It wasn’t that he did not trust any of his employees. It was that he could not afford to. Security cameras were trained on every computer and on every landline. Smartphone calls were not permitted. Everything remained logged, recorded, or stored in the office.
The glass was also bulletproof. He was dealing with mercenaries. By their very nature, they were greedy and untrustworthy. Even Dawid Aucamp, his oldest employee, could be double-dealing. There were other illegal mining concerns throughout the nation. Aucamp rarely identified sites in the Northern Cape Province. Perhaps he was selling information to them as well.
Just now, Foster was not thinking about what he might be missing. Everyone had gone home but he had remained before the incident on the Teri Wheel. He had remained, napping at his desk and ordering food from the café across the street. He made his own strong coffee, a lifelong habit.
The call from Katinka was like a jolt of caffeine.
Hearing her terse explanation, his first reaction was relief. The organization was safe.
“The boat is gone.”
Hearing that, after Krog’s frantic call, there was no self-reproach. If some act of God had brought this on, there was nothing he could have done to prevent or even anticipate it. If the destruction had been willful, then Katinka—who was smart and resourceful—had done what had to be done.
He would know very soon. At least there was nothing about the boat on the Internet. All the news was about the South African airliner that went down.
Security was always Foster’s primary concern on these expeditions. Not the loss of a vehicle or even the crew. Insurance would cover one, and the others—they knew the job was dangerous. Society would not miss them. He would not miss them. He could always hire more. Like cockroaches they were everywhere and defied eradication.
What worried him was the investigation that would follow. The cover story he maintained—that MEASE exported only collectible rocks such as crystals, meteorites, and trilobite fossils—would not bear up under careful scrutiny. Not everyone could be bribed. Or cleanly removed.
One of the reasons Foster had bought this building was that, from this spot, he could hear the elevator mechanism or footfalls on the stairs. Security cameras had since replaced what he called his “early warning system,” but he was still attuned to every sound from outside the office.
Katinka had entered the building using the keypad then walked with uncommon heaviness up the stairs. Whatever was in the backpack sagged; it no doubt added to the burden she carried inside. Plus exhaustion. The crossing from where the yacht was back to shore would not have taken long but the wind, cold, and waves would not have been pleasant.
But Katinka Kettle is tough and ambitious. Otherwise, she would not be working for me.
The main door to the office opened with a beep. Foster rose from behind his desk. He waited until the door had clicked shut behind the gemologist before emerging from his office.
He was surprised by the woman’s expression. Her brown eyes were open very wide and her mouth had an exultant set that emphasized her naturally feline look. Foster noticed one thing at once. She did not swing her backpack off with a catlike dip of her shoulder, as she usually did. She removed it with deliberate care and set it on her desk.
Foster’s gray eyes caught the light and seemed to glow within their deep eye sockets. His long face showed salt-and-pepper stubble. He was examining the young woman carefully, her puzzling expression.
The man eyed the contours of the bag. “Two core samples.”
“That’s right.”
“What did you find on the island?”
“The better question is what did we unleash?”
“Krog spoke of a malady.”
“Like a man receiving last rites, he finally spoke the truth,” she said.
That, too, was new—God-fearing Katinka making light of death and misadventure. She was always the cautious scientist, reserved with her opinions.
“We found diamond dust, but something underneath it was instantly deadly, communicable by air, and held safe within these samples. A microbe, I suspect, because something like uranium-235 would have killed me long before I got here. I was closer to it than anyone on the boat yet I alone survived.”
“You were using filtration because of the dust.”
“That’s right. Consider it, Mr. Foster. The entire crew infected and dead in less than a quarter hour. I blew up the boat to sink any evidence—whatever particles remain will be corrupted or destroyed by the sea.”
The lean man of medium height did consider it.
“You chose not to destroy the samples,” he said.
“No.” She pointed to the bag. “Whatever this is can make us rich.”
He regarded the gemologist. She went to church, she believed in prayer—yet a superficial part of her had always been a bit of a carnivore, a little hungry. As much as she spoke of faith, there was something feral in the eyes.
A baptism of reality, he thought. Greed is theoretical until suddenly wealth is attainable.
This was a leap to something bigger. He needed to think. The man walked back to his office, returned with coffee for himself and Katinka.
“You are aware of the commercial jetliner that went down?” he said.
“Yes. Where?”
“Marion Island.”
“We heard an impact—did not know until later what it was,” she said. She looked at him strangely. “I’m tired, Mr. Foster. Are you saying the drill team did that?”
“There is talk, serious talk, of bioterror. I was listening to the maritime channels, seeing if there was any news of the Teri Wheel. People were talking about a report from investigators in New York. It must be somewhat credible, because the aviation rescue and recovery people are gearing up accordingly. Hazmat suits, the works.”
Katinka’s wide eyes grew larger as she turned back to the bag. “A biological agent.”
“How could something that deadly just have been lying around?” Foster asked. “Your team didn’t—you couldn’t—go very deep. Not with a hand auger.”
“The acid,” Katinka thought aloud. “I had to use two quarts to get through the ice, the ground, the rock. It may have gone deeper. We may have hit a primeval air pocket, a frozen bog.”
“But you’re alive.”
“I was wearing my acute toxicity inhaler because of the acid. I only had the one mask so everyone else was back at the dinghy, sheltered from the wind.”
Foster regarded the bag with a blend of fear and awe. “I heard Krog’s descriptions. People vomiting blood, tissue—”
“That’s what I saw. Here’s something curious, though. If it was a microbe, it may have clung to my clothing as I made my way to the ship.”
Katinka noticed Foster start.
“Don’t worry, I took them off, they’re back at the house,” she said. “That’s not the point. If something did get snared in the fibers, it was dormant or dead. This may be airborne but the germ has a narrow life span in that medium.”
Foster returned to what Katinka had said earlier. He was rich but he was a big player in a very small game. Legally and with force of arms, the gem consortia kept him and others away from the large deposits. This find would allow him to leapfrog over everyone, like a lanky kid who was suddenly and to everyone’s surprise the top player in Confederation Football.
Surprise and horror, he thought. This wasn’t just about elevating him but crushing those diamond bastards and the bureaucrats. Under apartheid, people were kept down because of their skin color. After apartheid, they were kept down if they could not pass wads of cash under the table. The system was still rotten, only in a different way.
Katinka had perched her tired body on the edge of her desk. She stiffened, stared out the window. “I just realized something. We have to move very, very fast.”
“Why?”
“The excavation point—it’s still open. Investigators will see it, possibly the navy outpost on Marion. Maybe someone will die from it. We will no longer have a monopoly.”
Foster smiled. “You were thinking of selling the samples for weaponization.”
“Yes. Those are international waters with sophisticated vessels. Someone certainly heard Krog’s broadcast.”
“Even in his panic, he was vague—but you’re correct. He may have been overheard. We have to act quickly. But why sell? What is wrong with blackmail?”
The woman remained sharply upright as her eyes turned to him.
“Why would anyone believe you?”
He replied, “We will show them.”
Foster excused himself as he called the police to let them know his autogyro had experienced mechanical trouble and had set down on Nahoon Beach.
They did not seem overly concerned, except for the well-being of the aircraft when the tides came in.
Katinka assured him it was parked well enough inland.
Foster was not concerned.