Mativi nodded. “THIS MEANS I HAVE TO PAY YOU DOUBLE.” He fished in his wallet for a fistful of United Nations scrip.
After all, why shouldn’t I pay you? None of this money is going to be worth anything if these things destroy the world tomorrow.
“I’m telling you, there are at least forty of them. I counted them. Five rows by eight…I didn’t go to the hotel because I didn’t want to call you in the clear. We have to be the only people who know about this…Because if anyone wanders into that site, anyone at all, and does anything they shouldn’t, we will all die. I’m not saying they, I’m saying we, and I’m not saying might die, I’m saying will die…Yes, this is a Heavy Weapons alert…No, I can’t tell you what that means…All I can tell you is that you must comply with the alert to the letter if you’re interested in handing on the planet to your children…Your children will grow out of that, that hating their father thing. All teenagers go through that phase. And credit where credit’s due, you really shouldn’t have slept with their mother’s sister in the first place…No, I do not want ‘an inspection team’. I want troops. Armed troops with a mandate to shoot to kill, not a detachment of graduates in Peace Studies from liechtenstein in a white APC. And when I put the phone down on you, I want to know that you’re going to be picking up your phone again and dialling the IAEA. I am serious about this, louis…All right. All right. I’ll see you at the site tomorrow.”
When he laid the handset down, he was trembling. In a day when there were over a hundred permanent websites on the Antarctic ice shelf, it had taken him five hours to find a digital phone line in a city of five million people. Which, to be fair, fifteen years ago, had been a city of ten million people.
Of course, his search for a phone line compatible with his encryption software would probably be for nothing. If there were this few digital lines in the city, there was probably a retrotech transistor microphone planted somewhere in the booth he was sitting in, feeding data back to a mainframe at police headquarters. But at least that meant the police would be the only ones who knew. If he’d gone through the baroque network of emergency analogue lines, every housewife in the citй would have known by morning.
He got up from the booth, walked to the desk, and paid the geek
- the geek with a submachinegun - who was manning it. There was no secret police car waiting outside - the car would have been unmarked, but extremely obvious due to the fact that no one but the government could afford to travel around in cars. The Congolese sun came up like a jack in a box and it was a short walk through the zero tolerance district back to his hotel, which had once been a Hilton. He fell into the mattress, which bludgeoned him compliantly unconscious.
When he opened his hotel room door in the morning to go to the one functioning bathroom, a man was standing outside with a gun.
Neither the man nor the gun were particularly impressive - the gun because it appeared to be a pre-War cased ammunition model that hadn’t been cleaned since the Armistice, and the man because his hand was shaking like a masturbator’s just before orgasm, and because Mativi knew him to be a paterfamilias with three kids in kindergarten and a passion for N gauge model railways.
However, the gun still fired big, horrid bullets that made holes in stuff, and it was pointing at Mativi.
“I’m sorry, Chet, I can’t let you do it.” The safety catch, Mativi noted, was off.
“Do what?” said Mativi.
“You’re taking away my livelihood. You know you are.”
“I’m sorry, Jean, I don’t understand any of this. Maybe you should explain a little more?” Jean-Baptiste Ngoyi, an unremarkable functionary in the United Nations Temporary Administration Service (Former People’s Democratic Republic of Congo), appeared to have put on his very best work clothes to murder Mativi. The blue UNTASFORDEMRECONG logo was embroidered smartly (and widely) on his chest pocket.
“I can’t let you take them away.” There were actually tears in the little man’s eyes.
“Take what away?”
“You know what. everybody knows. They heard you talking to Grosjean.”
Mativi’s eyes popped. “ No. Ohhh shit. No.” He leaned back against crumbling postmodernist plasterwork. “Jean, don’t take this personally, but if someone as far down the food chain as you knows, everyone in the city with an email address and a heartbeat knows.” He looked up at Ngoyi. “There was a microphone in the comms booth, right?”
“No, the geek who mans the desk is President lissouba’s police chief ’s half brother. The police are full of lissouba men who were exonerated by the General Amnesty after the Armistice.”
“Shit. Shit. What are they doing, now they know?”
“‘Emergency measures are being put in place to contain the problem’. That’s all they’d say. Oh, and there are already orders out for your arrest For Your Own Safety. But they didn’t know which hotel you were staying in. One of them was trying to find out when he rang me.”
Mativi walked in aimless circles, holding his head to stop his thoughts from wandering. “I’ll bet he was. God, god. And you didn’t tell them where I was. Does that mean you’re, um, not particularly serious about killing me?” He stared at Ngoyi ingratiatingly. But the gun didn’t waver - at least, not any more than it had been wavering already. Never mind. It had been worth a try.
“It means I couldn’t take the chance that they really did want you arrested for your own safety,” said Ngoyi. “If a UN Weapons Inspector died in Kinshasa, that would throw the hand grenade well and truly in the muck spreader for the police chiefs, after all.”
“I take it some of them are the men who originally installed the containers. If so, they know very well full amnesties are available for war crimes - ”
Ngoyi shook his head. “Not for crimes committed after the war.”
Mativi was alarmed. “After?”
“They’ve been using the machines as execution devices,” said Ngoyi. “No mess, no body, no incriminating evidence. And they work, too. The bacheques are terrified of them, will do anything to avoid being killed that way. They think they’re the homes of demons - ”
“They’re not far wrong,” muttered Mativi.
“ - and then there are the undertakers,” continued Ngoyi. “They’ve been using the machines for mass burials. Otherwise the bodies would just have piled up in the streets in the epidemics. And the domestic waste trucks, about five of them stop there several times a week and dump stuff in through the skylights. And my own trucks - ”
“Your own trucks?”
“Yes. Three times a week, sometimes four or five.” Ngoyi returned Mativi’s accusing stare. “Oh, sure, the UN gives us Geiger counters and that bacterial foam that fixes fallout, and the special vehicles for sucking up the fixed material and casting it into lead glass bricks - ”
“Which you’re supposed to then arrange for disposal by the IAEA by burial underground in the Devil’s Brickyard in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica,” finished Mativi. “Only you haven’t been doing that, have you? You thought you’d cut a few corners.”
“The UN gives us a budget of only five million a year!” complained Ngoyi. “And by the time that reaches us, it has, by the magic of African mathematics, become half a million. Have you any idea what it costs to ship a single kilo of hazardous waste to Antarctica?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” repeated Mativi, staring up the barrel of the gun, which somehow did not matter quite so much now.
“We were talking astrophysics in the Bar B Doll only the other night. You told me then that once something crosses the Event Horizon, it never comes out!” said the civil servant, mortified. “You promised!”
“That’s absolutely correct,” said Mativi. “Absolutely, totally and utterly correct.”
“Then,” said Ngoyi, his face brightening insanely, “then there is no problem. We can throw as much stuff in as we want to.”
“Each one of those containers,” said Mativi, “is designed to hold a magnetically charged object that weighs more than ten battleships. Hence the reinforced concrete floor, hence the magnetized metal casing that attracts every bit of ferrous metal in the room. Now, what do you think is going to happen if you keep piling in extra uncharged mass? Nothing that crosses the Event Horizon comes out, Jean. Nothing. ever. Including you, including me, including Makemba and Kimbareta and little laurent.”
Ngoyi’s face fell. Then, momentarily, it rose again. “But our stuff is only a few hundred kilos a week,” he began. “Much less than what the domestic waste people put in.”
