12

Johannesburg

She follows the lead of strangers.

Luhabe uses the notes of Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens as a jumping off point and discovers enough to make her cry. The trades in Hong Kong, Dubai, Rio, and now Dublin. All shorts. All out of Berlin. All except hers ending with the death of the trader. Somehow they didn’t get her. Somehow, for the time being, she’s managed to survive.

It’s obvious that these are not random coincidences, but as hard as she tries to make a connection, she can’t find a motive or any clue as to where this is all going, to what happens next.

It’s after 9 P.M. She slept through the afternoon and woke at 6:45 to see her brother sitting on her bed. They had a snack in her room, and clearly he wanted to talk, to have some sort of confessional moment with her, but even while freeloading in his gangster compound, she refused to indulge him. “I have work to do, Muntukayise,” she said.

“My name is Jolly.”

“I don’t know any Jolly.”

“Yet you’re willing to sleep under Jolly’s roof, with the protection of Jolly’s guns.”

“I have work to do.”

He reached out and stroked her cheek. “It is good to see you, sister. I hope you will stay and see that I am a better man than the people you work with, the criminals who hide behind the shields of corporate logos.”

When she runs out of leads she decides to make a list. A memo, called What I Know Now. She describes everything that has happened to her in the last forty-eight hours, from when she left for work Tuesday morning through all that she has discovered up until now. Of course, she leaves out the part about taking her family to Swaziland, and staying with her gangster brother here in Hillbrow. At the end of the note she cuts and pastes the e-mails that she has received from agent Cara Sobieski and Drew Havens.

After rereading it, she decides she should share it with them. Why not? She’s researched both and they both appear to be who they said they are. She’s typing the first address, Sobieski’s, when she hears the initial gunshots in front of the house.

She rolls off the bed and rushes to her window. The armed guard in the back courtyard moves in a crouch along the edge of the concrete wall and then out of view, toward the front entrance.

Seconds later she hears more gunfire. The staccato bursts of automatic weapons. The roar of a shotgun blast. The same guard has scrambled back into the courtyard and stooped behind a stone barbecue chimney, when a single pistol shot tears into his hip and takes him down. She abandons the window and jogs to the door. Cups an ear to listen before opening it. Men shouting, also in bursts. Then more gunfire.

Inside the house the guns sound different. A deeper register, like guns that kill rather than toys.

Above the gunfire she hears the voice of her brother. He’s at the base of the stairs.

“Come on!” he yells. “Come and get it!”

These people may think that they are gangsters, but they didn’t know that they were raiding the house of the gangster Jolly Luhabe. She steps across the room and opens the door. Through the railing posts at the bottom of the stairs she sees his legs bending and straightening. When they straighten he reels off a burst of gunfire. When they bend he takes cover behind the stairway. “Jolly!” she calls.

“Go, sister!” he calls. “Back stair.” He looks up the stairs, and when he sees her, he smiles. Sensing that this will be the last she’ll see of her brother, she smiles back.

“Jolly, come . . .”

“Go!” he yells. “You can’t stay here after this. Go now!” He punctuates the last word with another machine gun burst.

As she heads back to the bed for the computer, she hears a wounded man groaning downstairs, she guesses in the living room. After a short volley, the groaning stops. Then, more gunfire from other parts of the house, inside and out.

She scrolls up to the top of the document and clicks on SEND. Then she quickly snaps shut the laptop and shoves it inside her bag. When her hand comes out of the bag it is holding her husband’s gun.

Halfway down the hall to the back stairway she stops. Jolly is still shooting and shouting at the bottom of the main stairway. She carefully steps down three stairs during another exchange of gunfire. Jolly has moved behind the edge of a doorway and is still aiming at one or more assailants in the living room.

Jolly looks up and sees his sister again. His eyes widen and a smile begins to form until he sees her raise the pistol in his direction. He ducks as she squeezes off the first of nine shots. Three find their mark, one in the temple of the man who had come in through the back door and was about to kill her brother.