‘Here?’ Zuko asks. We’re standing across the road, at the edge of the parking lot for the chichi restaurants in Heritage Square. He tosses a soccer ball deftly from foot to foot, ignoring the carguard, who is beckoning that he must skop the ball over here, have a little game, man. But this is not the time for play.
We’ll already have been picked up by the security cams outside the hospital, but I don’t think it’s worth pointing this out to Zuko, who is tensely eager underneath his cool, still fucked on glue, and wound up from watching the Grand Parade light up in pyrotechnics.
‘Yeah. It’s the most accessible.’ We’ve already checked out two other temporary vaccine locations, one in the CBD police centre, the other set up at the main entrance to Adderley Station, but there were dogs lurking at both of those, and they started barking when we came too close, picking up some residue of the chem scent.
No one will get seriously hurt. The explosive is low-capacity RDX. Limited ‘blast phenomena’ according to the instructions from Amsterdam. The nearest people will suffer flash burns, maybe. But they’re right next to the ER. They’ll be able to get medical treatment on the spot. Sometimes small sacrifices are necessary. It’s collateral damage. And there is zero chance Ashraf will be here. He’ll have gone to a more convenient clinic, closer to Khayelitsha. Definitely.
Zuko shrugs, always the team player, and strolls across the road, dribbling expertly, dodging a car, while still keeping the ball going, casually following it towards the ER doors, like goal posts. Just a kid messing around. The security guard is too preoccupied with managing the line to hassle him.
Zuko bounces the ball off his knees a couple of times, fearlessly, as if it were not packed to capacity with RDX, then lets it drop. Before it has a chance to touch the ground, with a swift and perfect sideswipe, he lobs it at the automatic doors.
The motion sensors pick up the ball and slide open to swallow it up.
I click the detonator in my pocket, subtly as possible, already walking away.
The bomb rips through the building with a shudder of glass and concrete.
I don’t look back for Zuko.
Lerato
There is a weird vibe on the underway on the way in to the office, an undercurrent frisson even though there’s almost no one around, just a few people coming home from partying, a couple of churchgoers. But the controlled clampdown means I’m oblivious to the reality, until I actually reach the office and find out what has gone off overnight.
Communique’s offices are a study in controlled frenzy. The ultra-caffeine baristas are doing overtime. I don’t even make it as far as the lifts before I am whipped away to join Rathebe’s emergency task team, which has commandeered the boardroom and an additional coffee machine. There are twenty-three people crammed in with their laptops, all monitoring the datalines, killing the most damaging of commentary before it gets out, because anything is allowable when it comes to national security, and the government is a big Communique contract. To my disgust, Mpho is already in the thick of it.
I pull up a chair next to him. I’m dying to slide into my backdoor to get the full story, but it’s insanely risky with the kind of scrutiny going on right now.
When the first bomb reports start coming in, I don’t have a choice. The techniques are so inventive, they leave me breathless and everyone else clutching for information and something to do with it, before it gets out on the newslines – and worse, the streamcasts. There’s no way to contain this one, only spin it. We’re shutting down large parts of the network with service errors to try and keep it contained. Later, we’ll blame this on an underground cable being damaged by the bombs. Of course, I recognise the signature. Soccer balls and graffiti aren’t exactly Terrorism 101.
I have to be circumspect.
Despite all the caffeine being consumed in the clean-up marathon inside, it’s luck or fate that I’m the only one in the stairwell bathroom. The red mosaic tiles seem menacingly shiny, but I know I’m just tired and hung over and not thinking clearly. I take the third cubicle, in case the one on the end is too conspicuous and click my back-up SIM into my phone, which is not, surprise, surprise, coded to my identity.
Communique is willing to indulge us our whims and little vices, just about anything to appease the talent, lest we defect. But a fake SIM ID is serious contraband. Two years’ jailtime if I’m bust with it. I’m mad to use it here.
The phone powers up on silent, logging on to the maintenance subnet which controls the building’s cleaning bots. A neat little loophole I discovered by accident rewiring the VIMbot Toby stole from my apartment block. It doesn’t work unless you can connect to a booster site to get the signal out of the building, but I already have that set up in every Communique billboard Tendeka and friends have hit with their smear boxes.
It takes me a minute to track the reroute msg Tendeka sent out via a mirror in Singapore, tracing the trajectory all the way back to the Cheaptime Trip Bar in Little Angola, terminal fourteen, sent at 23h18. It helps that I know his hangouts, that I know who he was sending to, and can backwards engineer it. At least he was using a fake SIM. User ID chipped as Rutger Hoffman, German nursing student, twentyfour, resident in UCT’s Slovo Res.
Still, can’t be too many people hanging around at that time in Cheaptime Trip, and the cams would have picked him up in the vicinity. Sloppy work: the guy shouldn’t risk tech on his own. But it’s not his solo ops that worry me.
It takes another two minutes to crack Cheaptime’s time-clock database and delete all the records. I take their server down too, just for good measure. I just hope they’re sufficiently small-time that they don’t have back-ups, or at least that it will take them several hours to restore. It’s a hack job, but there’s not enough time to finesse it, with twenty-three other people in the room across the hallway, all on a similar tack, trying to dig out the terrorists, and it’s only a matter of time. Although hey, if anyone does stumble across this, hopefully they’ll just assume it’s Tendeka and his pals trying to cover their tracks, that they’re clumsy amateurs.
I consider sending Tendeka a warning via his loxion soccer club’s fan board, something obtuse enough to be innocent, but I figure he’s probably not smart enough to pick it up. I can’t risk anything that will link me to him.
It’s absurd how sloppy he’s been, the sticky fingerprints he’s left over everything. He accessed his banking at the Cheaptime Trip, wired cash from one account to another, so I follow the trail, closing down the links, deleting the cache, covering his tracks, because it’s all here, an underway map of connections.
The Cheaptime leads to a soccer game, by way of his checking on the match scores, which leads to his underprivileged kids’ soccer club in Khayelitsha, which leads, via one of the kids, Zuko Sephuma, to the sponsored graffiti project with street kids on Grand Parade, where a wall just happens to have exploded, causing minimal damage but a lot of fright. Enough to bury Tendeka, even if he’s managed to miraculously avoid the cams.
Tracking that kid, Sephuma, who is the common denominator, leads to a streamcast on future*renovate, some anti-corporate community in Amsterdam, and the impenetrable moniker ‘10’. Christ, Tendeka.
Lots of postings from 10, IP address links back to the Cheaptime, couple of phone access logins, and back to the soccer club. Rants on the board, video clips of some of the ‘hits’ posted as instructional guides. I didn’t realise he was filming any of it. I feel ill. And I’m running out of time, before someone else comes into the bathroom or wonders where I am.