East London, South Africa
November 12, 8:49 A.M.
The door to the office was closed. Seated behind his desk, rocking slightly in his office chair, Foster sipped coffee and turned to Katinka.
The young woman sat stiffly in the corner of a leather couch to his right. There were hazmat masks in a plastic bin that usually held mail. She wanted to be numb, feeling nothing, but she had gotten a good rest and could not stop thinking. And that made her alternately scared, sick, and depressed to the point of tears. She did not let Foster see her weep, artfully turning her face and finding some way to sweep them away.
Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he did not.
Employees were arriving for work. They chatted as they did, no doubt discussing the Terror at Batting Bridge, as the headlines called it. No one bothered the boss when his door was shut, though the eight office workers all looked at him now and then as if taking a cue from his expression as to what they should feel.
Apparently, nothing. His face was expressionless and still.
“I have been staring at the phone, thinking,” Foster said after a long silence. “I may not want to sell this to our government.”
“Sell protection, you mean,” she said. It was not an accusation but a clarification.
“That’s right. What would Pretoria do with a weaponized core sample? Force whites to give up the seventy percent of farmable land we own?”
Now Katinka looked at him accusingly. “Is that what’s behind this?”
“Is what behind this, Katinka?”
“You know damn well.”
“A reactionary attack on a system that has gone from being lopsided one way to aslant another way? You mistake me for my brother. Have I ever seemed political to you?”
“No, but that comment—”
“Is fact. It’s about the deep stupidity of our people, isn’t it? In the name of equality, they would be, are, eager to kill skilled farmers because of their color and replace them with unqualified farmers because of their color.” He set his mug down hard and swiveled to her. “But you are right as far as this goes. I would do a great deal to keep the idiots from interfering in my life and my work any further. They have forced me, you, us to work in secret with their idiotic regulations and payoffs from monopolies. Frankly, I don’t care if things fall apart, again, and have to be rebuilt. The man or woman or group that controls something to force true equality, not retribution—he or she or they would be great patriots!”
Foster turned back to his desk.
“What I wanted to do with my first call, I did. I let the world know that someone controls this extraordinary power. Now we must decide what to do with it. Do we justly enrich ourselves by terrorizing a venal system, or justly enrich ourselves by offering that power to someone else?” He shook his head. “I’m unable to decide that, Katinka. Do you still think we should sell it to an arms dealer or a foreign military?”
“When I realized what we had, I thought—that. Selling it. Negotiating. But nothing more.”
“Surely you realized that a buyer would have tried it.”
She shook her head.
“Really, Katinka. How did you expect this would go? Beijing or Tehran were just going to take your word that what you had brought down the plane? You don’t think they would have tried it on prisoners? Some remote village somewhere?”
“I realize now … I didn’t think,” she admitted.
“Of course. I have always been here to do that. And I’m not criticizing you. That was my function, just as digging and analyzing was yours. And so here we are.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “To hell with Pretoria. Let’s take it somewhere else. I will contact Nicus Dumisa. He has connections in every world capital. Then I’ll call Mila to get us out of here.”
The names alone made Katinka feel sicker than she already did—especially Mila Merch, who offered impoverished young women “positions” in the homes of well-to-do men. They compounded the self-rebuke going on in her brain, her idiotic idea that their relationship could be more than her being just an educated laborer.
God, how stupid you’ve been.
But a sudden self-epiphany did not change the fact that Foster was right. She was in this now. Even if Katinka had turned him in she would not have gotten away free. She’d broken numerous laws, not the least of which was abetting mass murder, and she would have had to tell authorities where she had been digging. Others would go there.
They would get a sample, carry it off, repeat. Just as Foster had said.
There was only one way through this, and that was ahead. Like it or not, she was still attached to the man who was even now placing a call to Swaziland.
He did not get to finish that call as unexpected visitors came to the front door.
Nearly a dozen of them.