The pride, p.23
The Pride, page 23
I’m here.
A minute later the phone vibrated. Walk towards the One&Only Hotel.
She looked around, saw the building, hitched up the bag’s straps and started walking.
*
Bryce Duffy had driven a short distance, to Mouille Point. He parked, quickly opened the back of the Land Rover and took out the cases containing his commercial-grade drone and camera gear.
A couple of families with small children stopped their walk along the coastal path to watch as the machine raced up into the sky, its four battery-powered motors bearing the weight of a high-definition video camera. Bryce fitted Bluetooth earbuds and connected them to his phone as he worked the drone’s controls and watched the screen of his iPad, which was linked to the now-airborne camera. Bryce had the iPad slung around his neck in a harness. Keeping the drone steady with one hand, he took out his phone and searched WhatsApp for Hudson Brand’s number. He dialled.
‘Bryce Duffy,’ Hudson said. ‘How the hell are you, buddy? It’s been a long time.’
‘Fine, Hudson, but I’m sorry, man, I don’t have time for pleasantries. You know a woman called Emma Kurtz?’
‘Shoot, Bryce. Have you seen her? Where the hell is she?’
‘Cape Town.’
‘Figures. You with her now?’
‘Not exactly; I can . . . yes, I can see her now. She’s got a big green bag of something and she’s set off into the crowds at the V&A looking for someone. I only just got to know her and she says she knows you –’
‘You get hold of her, Bryce, please, for me. Round her up and tie her down if you have to.’
‘I think that’s going to be a little difficult, Hudson. Is she in some kind of trouble?’
‘Plenty. So’s her mom, a . . . friend of mine. She’s gone missing.’
‘Ja,’ Bryce said. ‘She said something about her mother.’
‘She needs to get to the cops, Bryce, turn herself in, along with the stuff she’s carrying. You may as well know, there’s millions of rands’ worth of drugs in that bag she’s toting. She’s going to try and do a deal with a Cape Town gangster and a Chinese guy to get her mom back.’
‘Eish.’
‘Exactly. You say you can see her?’
‘I’ve got a drone, with a camera on her. She’s walking along the dock, heading towards the hotel, the One&Only.’
‘Yeah, I know it. Bryce, listen to me, these people aren’t going to play nice. If they’ve got the mom, they want the daughter. The only way they’ll be able to hurt Sonja – the mother – or get anything out of her, is if they take Emma.’
‘So, what do you want me to do?’
Hudson paused. ‘Hell, call the cops, Bryce. Emma’s better off in prison, cooling her heels in a cell than out there at the mercy of these people. I feel bad. I was banged up – Emma and I were in a car wreck – and I kind of gave her the green light to go off-reservation. I was concussed.’
‘She’s moving down a laneway, out the back of the hotel.’
Bryce had his phone in his pocket now, talking to Hudson on Bluetooth. He concentrated on steering the drone, which he had to fly between buildings in order to follow Emma.
‘What do you want me to do,’ Bryce said to Hudson. ‘Stay on her or call the police?’
‘Keep her in sight, Bryce. I’ll contact the cops.’
Hudson rang off, then called back a few minutes later. ‘Tell me what you’re seeing, buddy,’ he said.
‘There’s a black van, a Sprinter, tinted windows, at the end of an alley.’
‘Shoot. What’s she doing?’
‘She’s put the bag down, stepping back from it.’
‘How many bad guys?’
‘One, no, make that two, getting out of the van, coming towards her.’
‘Any sign of anyone else in the van, like maybe a hostage? Woman, around fifty.’
Bryce manoeuvred the controls, bringing the drone down lower. He didn’t want to alert the men in the alley to its presence, nor have Emma look up and give him away, but he needed a lower angle to see inside the van. ‘Could be. Wait a minute, yes, I can see a leg or something. Some movement in the van. Just checking. Yes, there is someone, but I think it’s a man. I can see him holding an iPad or some other tablet.’
Bryce changed the drone’s position.
‘What’s Emma doing? Talk to me, Bryce.’
‘OK, she’s made contact. One of the men is pointing inside the open door of the van, like he’s telling her there’s something or someone inside. She’s shaking her head. She’s picking up the bag again.’
‘Darn it, she should just leave that shit there.’
‘I can’t get word to her, Hudson. You want me to head there now?’
There was another pause. ‘Bryce, you stay out of that situation, you hear? You got a wife and kid now. I don’t want any more collateral damage from this war.’
‘Sheesh, Hudson, one of the guys has just pulled a gun on Emma. She’s dropped the bag.’
‘Pistol?’
Bryce lowered the drone some more and zoomed in. ‘Yes, with silencer. Shit.’
Bryce stared intently at his screen. The man was taking aim at Emma.
Just then, a black blur flashed across the screen of Bryce’s iPad. For a moment he thought it was a bird, swooping past, but when he pulled the focus back out again, he saw, to his surprise, another drone.
*
‘You see?’ Hendricks said to Sonja, gesturing to the large monitor. ‘The game’s up. We now have your daughter.’ Carrington Wu was by Hendricks’s side, arms folded, smiling.
She’d been kept locked up through the night and the next day. Before he and Wu left for the night, Hendricks had ordered one of his men to toss a paper bag into her cage, after she had been hosed down. In it, she had found red satin boxing trunks and a black tank top. Dlamini had been given new clothes as well, all-white shorts and a T-shirt. They had been fed, takeaway from a Spur restaurant.
‘You’ll both need your strength,’ was all a henchman had said to her.
Sonja looked at Emma, her image captured from above, most likely via drone camera. Emma was walking down an alleyway of some kind, carrying a dive bag. Sonja gripped the bars of the cage and wanted to wail, just like Jacob Dlamini had, when she saw her daughter put the bag down and raise her hands. Hendricks had obviously put Jacob’s family under guard as soon as they nabbed him, so that his wife could not alert the authorities to him being missing, and Hendricks could exert maximum pressure on Jacob. She now fully understood what Jacob had been going through.
Hendricks took his phone out of the inside pocket of his overcoat and dialled a number. He hit the speaker function and turned up the volume. Sonja could see the man on the screen, holding the pistol with a suppressor screwed to the end, covering Emma. With his other hand the man took his phone out and answered it.
‘Boss?’
‘Reuben, I see you have her.’
The man gave a little laugh and Sonja saw him shrug his shoulders as he did so. ‘It was too easy, boss.’
‘Good work, Reuben. Is there anyone around you?’
Reuben shook his head. ‘No, boss, just us. We can do it now, if you want.’
Hendricks looked to Sonja. ‘What do you say? Quick and clean? I can’t promise you that we’ll be kind to Emma if you don’t do what I want.’
Part of her wanted to scream, but a bigger part of her wanted to kill.
‘Talk to me, Sonja,’ Hendricks said. ‘I don’t have all day.’
‘Still got a clean shot, boss,’ Reuben said. ‘She’s asking for her mother, for proof of life.’
The drone had shifted and Sonja could see Emma’s face, and her lips moving. The sight of her felt like a bayonet piercing the scar tissue of her heart. Sonja looked across to the other cage, to Jacob. It was the big man’s turn to see her anguish, her impossible dilemma.
Sonja moistened her lips with her tongue.
‘You look like a cobra, sniffing out its prey,’ Hendricks said.
‘I’ll do what you want.’
Now Hendricks looked to Jacob, then back to her, his eyebrows raised in a question.
‘Yes,’ Sonja said, ‘and I’ll swear my loyalty to you. In exchange for my daughter’s life, and no contract on her head, from you or Wu.’
Hendricks turned to Wu, who nodded.
‘Boss?’ Reuben said, the phone still clamped to one ear.
‘Yes, Reuben?’
‘I can hear sirens. I’m sure no one’s seen us, but what must we do with her now?’
‘Put her in the van. Bring her.’
On the screen Reuben advanced towards Emma.
Sonja snarled, like a leopardess, at Hendricks.
*
‘They’re grabbing her, Hudson!’ Bryce flew the drone to the left and used his controls to swing the camera around. Having phoned the police, Brand was back on the line. ‘They’re using a drone as well – it’s right below mine.’
‘Cops are on the way,’ Hudson said. ‘That drone’s the bad guys’ eyes and ears. Can you take it down somehow?’
‘I can see it. They’re bringing it down. It’s close. The guy who was hiding in the van is coming out now, probably to guide it in.’
‘Don’t let them get away, Bryce. The cops just messaged me. Two minutes out.’
The man with the gun had Emma by the arm now, his pistol pointed at her. He dragged her to the van and said something to her. She turned, put her hands against the van and spread her legs. The third man came towards Emma, obviously planning to frisk her.
‘You owe me, Hudson,’ Bryce said.
‘What?’
Bryce ignored Hudson. He used the controls to send his drone, bigger and heavier than the other, hurtling downwards on a forty-five-degree angle. He watched as the other drone and, now, the upturned face of its operator, both grew larger on his iPad screen. The operator had his mouth open, yelling a warning as the gunman came closer to the door of the van.
*
Emma screamed as the tangle of wreckage of two disabled drones clipped her shoulder and then slammed into the man holding the gun.
The one who had been about to frisk her stumbled backwards.
She had been cursing herself, knowing they would find the .45 tucked into her jeans. She reached around, pulled it out and brought it up into the stomach of the gunman who, even though his face and neck were bleeding and he was on his knees, a tangle of shattered machinery around him, was bringing his gun up to shoot her.
Emma fired first and he doubled over.
The man who had been going to search her was reaching for a pistol stuffed in his pants. Emma put two shots, a double tap, into his chest.
A third, younger man with a wispy beard and long hair was emerging from the van.
He put his hands up. ‘Don’t shoot. I’m just the geek. I don’t even have a gun.’
Emma pointed the barrel at him, the foresight wavering; her heart was pounding.
‘Where’s my mother?’
‘Who?’
‘The woman, the one they took prisoner.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I was just here to work the drone and the feed.’ He pointed to the wreckage on the ground.
Emma heard sirens, getting closer.
‘I’ll leave you to the cops. You can explain to them where my mother is.’
‘Please,’ he said, and she saw what looked like real fear in his eyes, ‘I don’t know where your mom is. But let me tell you, don’t trust the cops. The boss – he’s got them in his pocket. Anything you or I say to them will get back to him, I promise you.’
Emma heard a car’s engine and turned. A black four-wheel drive, a boxy-looking luxury model, was turning into the alley towards them. It had dark tinted windows. There was something sinister about it.
‘Where would he be?’
‘They don’t tell me anything. He has properties all over Cape Town. I know that some high-end screens and sound gear was delivered to some place at Duncan Dock, a wharf near here. They asked me if I knew anyone who could rent or sell some big AV around here for a rush job.’
She wanted to ask him the company name, but at that moment the driver of the vehicle coming towards her gunned his engine.
Emma ran off down a side alleyway. As she fled, she heard a single gunshot.
As Emma sprinted, she barely had time to process everything that had happened. Bryce must have been watching her with his drone, she realised. He’d saved her, but she had no idea where he was. One of the two phones she was carrying was vibrating in her pocket, but she didn’t have Bryce’s number, so it couldn’t be him, and nor could she stop to check it.
She’d left the bag of drugs behind and in it was Johnsy’s pistol. Shit. She had hidden it there in case something had gone wrong during her transaction and she had an opportunity to reach into the bag. Now the police would find a stolen gun, with her prints and Johnsy’s on it, in a bag full of ice. Even if she did find the police she’d be tied up for hours.
Emma ducked left down another laneway and came back out onto the main promenade along the water. Shoppers and tourists were going about their business, although she could see the flash of blue lights from the first alley she had headed down.
She slowed to a walk so as not to attract attention, the .45 once more hidden under her shirt. Think, she told herself. The gangsters had had a drone up in the air, presumably filming her, and the geek she had bailed up had said they had ordered high-quality screens and sound gear to be delivered to a place at the docks.
Why?
It had to be because of Sonja, she told herself. Emma knew that she was no threat to criminal gangs or the triads, but she also knew that if Sonja had one weakness it was probably her. They had filmed her approaching with the bag of drugs and they also wanted to get video of her being abducted. The young guy had talked of ‘the feed’. Did that mean Sonja was somewhere, maybe nearby, watching Emma’s supposed kidnapping live?
‘Shit.’ By evading them, and killing two men in the process, had she just signed her mother’s death warrant?
One of the phones rang again. It was hers, not Wu’s driver’s.
‘Hudson,’ she said.
‘Thank God you’re alive.’
‘There was a guy, Bryce –’
‘Duffy. Good guy, I know him. He and I were just talking. Where are you? I’ll send him to come get you.’
‘No, Bra– Hudson.’ For goodness’ sake, she thought to herself. She didn’t want to start sounding like her mother. ‘Like you said, he’s a goodie. I don’t want him dragged into this any more. He’s got a wife and kid. He saved me.’
‘I heard he went kamikaze with his drone.’
‘Yeah. She’s alive, Hudson, I know it.’ Emma told him about the geek who she suspected had been live-streaming from the other drone, and her theory about Sonja.
‘Dammit, wish I was there.’
‘Well, you’re not. You’re in Botswana with a broken leg.’
‘I called the cops, in Cape Town.’
Emma nodded to herself. ‘OK. I wondered about that. One of the guys who tried to kidnap me – he was their tech guy – told me Hendricks has cops on his payroll.’
‘Figures,’ Hudson said, ‘but you’d be safer in custody. Your mom’s got enough money to get you the best lawyers in the country.’
‘We might be waiting for her will to be read if I don’t find her soon. Also, someone else turned up, before the cops arrived.’
‘More gangsters?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. It was a black four-by-four. Not a Land Rover or a Cruiser.’
‘Mercedes?’
‘Could have been, I’m not an expert on cars, but it looked big and boxy. How did you guess?’
‘Remember how I asked if you’d seen a Mercedes in Botswana? Well, I saw a black G-Class with dark tinted windows racing past the ambulance after I got picked up. Goodness Khumalo, the police inspector from Zimbabwe, came and interviewed me in hospital, along with a local detective. They told me that the driver of Wu’s overland vehicle was dead, Emma, shot in the back of the head.’
Emma tried to take this in. ‘But he was alive when I left. You know that wasn’t me, Hudson.’
‘The Merc man, maybe?’
Emma remembered hearing the single shot after she’d left the alleyway.
‘Let me call my contact in the police at Cape Town, Emma,’ Hudson said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Also, I can try audio-visual sales and rental places around Cape Town, tell them I’m waiting for my shipment of big-screen TVs and get them to check the address. I can’t think of any other way to find out where your mom is. Can you?’
‘Sounds good. I’ll call you back.’
Emma ended the call before Hudson could protest.
Her other phone rang.
‘The Cape Town police have just been sent some stills from footage taken by a destroyed drone. They show you at the scene of a crime in which three harmless delivery drivers were killed, by their van,’ Wu said.
Emma thought fast. She had shot one man in the stomach and definitely killed the second – she shuddered at the memory and suppressed a wave of nausea. She had left the third, the geek, alive, but then she’d heard a gunshot as she left.
‘The police are at the scene,’ Wu continued. ‘You’ll be in jail soon. We’ll make sure of it.’
So what? she thought to herself. Wu was in business with Hendricks and, according to the hipster technical guy, the gangster had the cops in his pocket. This was not news.
‘We will kill your mother.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Emma said, ‘especially now that you don’t have a video of me crying and begging for my life.’
