Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) (10 page)

part of the city—the young rich of the city were often to be seen nipping around on bikes so powerful that they would have been better
suited to a racetrack.

Everything about what Jack was looking at
made
perfect sense.
There was nothing
out
of
place. The emergency workers were doing
what they were supposed to be doing, at least the ones who were hanging around were doing what they were supposed to be doing, and the
frightened crowd was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Everything was as it should be, given the extreme circumstances. Jack’s eyes
moved up and down the street, and up and down, and up and down
again. Nothing. He was about to cross back to the building when he
noticed something
out
of the corner
of his eye.
At first it barely registered. It was almost imperceptible, but his eye caught it and his mind
gave it a context just in time, as a large crowd of people ran towards
one of the side streets about fifty yards from where Jack was standing.
A slow
moving
bottleneck had developed,
but it was
moving. That’s
when Jack spotted him. The man was dressed in jeans and a leather
jacket. His choice of wardrobe was odd enough given the stifling temperature that was
oppressing the city,
but the fact that
he was not
moving was the more interesting thing about the man. Jack observed
the man for a few
moments just to be certain that he wasn’t waiting
for a friend or colleague. The man
didn’t move—he remained fixated
by what was going on in the car park. He was either an extreme rubbernecker or he had something to do with the blast.

Jack stepped out onto the street. The calm expression that had been
on his face was replaced by a deliberate look of concern as he joined the
tail end of people as they rushed away from the scene of the explosions.
Jack avoided looking at the man as
much as possible—if Jack could
spot him then there was every possibility that the man could also spot
Jack. The distance between them closed rapidly—twenty yards; fifteen
yards; ten yards. Jack looked the man right in the face when there were
only a couple of yards separating them. Jack’s brain locked in
on the
man’s features. He was familiar to Jack, but he couldn’t instantly place
him. Just as Jack was about to confront the man a policeman stepped
in between them. The policeman confronted Jack.

Jack smiled briefly at the policeman and he nodded his head to
indicate that
he understood. Jack walked around the
policeman to
where the
man had been standing; the man was gone. Jack quickly
pushed his way through the crowd as it snaked its way
down the side
street. So caught up was he with recognising the
man’s face, he had
not paid any attention to the colour of his hair; something that would
have been very handy at that moment as all he could see, for the most
part, was the back
of
people’s heads. The leather jacket was all that
Jack had to work with. He frantically looked for that leather jacket
amongst the crowd but there wasn’t a single
man, woman
or
child
with such a jacket to be seen.
After a few minutes of frantic searching
Jack gave up—in front
of him, neatly folded and placed with care on
top of a bin, was the jacket. He could have followed the crowd but something told him that the man would not be found.

Jack cursed himself for
not acting
more
quickly as he
made his
way
back towards the
office. He cursed himself again as he couldn’t
place the man’s face. He was so familiar; but from where? Initially Jack
thought that he had seen the man with Robert at
one of the previous
business
meetings—perhaps a
minder
of some kind? That wasn’t it.
The context was all wrong. The man and South Africa was all wrong.
He knew the man and from the look on the stranger’s face when their
eyes locked
out
on the street, it seemed clear to Jack that the
man
knew him too.

When
he got
back to the
office
building the
police had
done a
much
more rigorous job
of
securing the scene. Jack
explained who
he was but that cut no ice with the two officers who were standing
guard at the main
entrance.
As Jack argued his case another
officer
approached them.

“Sir, I
have been given instructions to take you in to provide a
statement. I
believe you knew some
of the victims?” said the policeman.

“Very
good sir. If you would like to come with
me. It
shouldn’t
take too long.”
Jack followed the policeman to a waiting Landrover.

stories told of how some of the corrupt officers would kidnap foreign
nationals and threaten them with violence, or death, if a “security fee”
was not forthcoming. Jack suspected that such stories were more fiction than fact, but they were always there in the back of his mind, no
matter how unrealistic he believed them to be.

The police officer
opened a door to the back of the vehicle and he
smiled warmly at Jack as he waited for
him to climb inside. In the
context
of the bomb in his building, it wasn’t so farfetched to believe
that the police would want to speak to him at some point, and so he
climbed into the vehicle without
pause for thought. The door closed
firmly and as it
did Jack noticed that there were no handles
on the
doors in the
back
of the Land
Rover. A thick iron
mesh separated
Jack from the officer sitting behind the wheel in the front, completing
the appearance
of the Land Rover
being nothing
more than a small
prison on wheels.
As uneasy feeling came over Jack for a moment but
it
quickly dissipated once he reassured himself that such a set up was
not uncommon for a
police vehicle. A little warning from the officer
about what to expect
once he was inside the Land Rover would have
been nice, but given the circumstances, it was understandable that the
oversight was
made. Besides, the police in any country were trained
to make the experience of tangling with the law, in any capacity, an
uncomfortable one. The more a suspect
or potential witness could be
knocked
off guard, the better was the chance for the truth to be revealed during the interview stage.

They
drove away from the crime scene at a sober
pace,
passing
more
emergency vehicles which were heading in the
opposite direction as they
continued towards the
police station, as well as an increasingly swelling crowd of onlookers who were once again calling up
enough bravery to move in towards the source of the explosions for a
better look. There was nothing about the policeman’s actions that gave
Jack any reason to doubt his sincerity—the cop was the very
epitome
of calm and collected.

Jack liked crowds, for the
most
part, as they
anonymity
and
cover,
but
this
crowd
was
a
number
of them were looking right at him as he sat in the back
of
the Land Rover, and in his line of business it was never a good idea to
draw too
much attention to
one’s self. A man in suit in the back
of a
cop car

provided him with
little
different—a