yell, but Max smothered it with a grubby hand. “You say a word and I’ll send you and your wheelchair down there,” he said, nodding towards the railed slipway that swept down to the river and the crocodiles. “If anyone hears you cry out, it’ll be too late. Understand?”
Zhernastyn nodded vigorously.
Max eased his hand away. “I’ll give you one chance, and only one.”
“Listen, my young friend, you are so out of your depth you cannot even comprehend it.” Zhernastyn indicated the DVD in Max’s hand. “If that is what we have been seeking, you are too late. You understand? You would be wise to consider your position. You cannot save the thousands of people who will die. You have no comprehension of what Shaka Chang has done.” Zhernastyn enjoyed the status that having access to secrets often gave people. “You can never escape from this place, you know that.”
“Can you access this computer system?”
“Yes. It’s an open system, providing you have the password.”
“And do you have a password?”
Zhernastyn hesitated for a second. Max scowled at him. The not-so-good doctor was caught in a deadly dilemma. If he didn’t give Max the password, he would be fed to the crocodiles. If he did, and Chang discovered what he’d done, then Chang would definitely feed him to the crocodiles.
Would this boy really do that? Could he? He looked at Max. Dirt-streaked, no sign of any teenage fat, no pimples, burnished by the sun, nails broken and dirty, as sinewy as coiled rope, and blue eyes that were unflinchingly crystal clear beneath the scruffy mop of sun-bleached hair.
Only a boy. But he looked more than capable, and Zhernastyn had tortured his father. No question about it, Max had the look. He would do it. Better the devil you know. “Aleyssia Petrovna,” he said.
“Aleyssia Petrovna?”
“A woman I loved once. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Spell it!”
Zhernastyn spelled out his lost love’s name as Max typed in the letters. He hit the Return button-and he was in.
“One day, when you are older, you will meet such a woman, she will beguile you with her-”
Max wrapped more tape across Zhernastyn’s mouth.
“I really don’t want to hear about your sad, pathetic love life, Doctor.”
Frantically he searched for a disc drawer. There wasn’t one, but a cable led to a sleek, snake-mouthed box, a curved, toothless grin that beckoned to be fed. Max slid in the DVD and prayed it wasn’t corrupted.
The computer had blitzing power. Images, data charts, photographs, statistics, pictures of dead Bushmen, samples of water with crude, handwritten field data beneath each one, all flashed rapidly across the screen. Snatches of information bombarded his brain: drug companies and money, millions, and his father’s face, talking on camera. More pictures of dead Bushmen, twenty or thirty bodies, men, women and children. And then Max’s dad filming himself again. Telling his secret.
“Everything I have compiled here is the most damning evidence of multinational companies’ corruption and one man’s intention to murder thousands of people in his quest for power.”
Max froze the image on the screen and sat for a moment, transfixed by the man he remembered as his father. That strong, softly spoken man looked him directly in the eye, his voice firm and convincing, the words chosen carefully. It was not the emaciated, shuffling man he had held in his arms, minutes before. He released the image on the screen and listened as his father reported, like a war correspondent telling a news camera everything he had discovered. How, for many years, Western pharmaceutical companies had been obliged by law to dispose of all their unwanted drugs. The cost was huge, the quantity enormous, massive beyond belief. And governments still gave the companies millions in tax breaks to dispose of these often toxic drugs in a legal manner.
Max muttered under his breath, “So how does Chang fit into this?” And, as if in answer, his father’s voice continued.
“For years, ever since the dam project first started, Shaka Chang has offered these companies a means of disposal. He buries these vast quantities of lethal drugs by the shipload. As far as the drug companies are concerned, they have delivered the unwanted drugs to someone who can take the problem off their hands. Shaka Chang has fooled the southern African governments. They think he’s shipping in materials for the dam project, and corrupt customs officers and government officials are helping him, but they don’t know the consequences of their complicity. My field assistant, Anton Leopold, and I discovered his shipping route into Walvis Bay. Chang then has the containers taken to a vast underground site that everyone thinks is part of the dam project. The drug companies pay him more money than it cost to build the dam. Everyone is happy.”
Max’s father appeared to be under pressure, he kept stopping and moving away from the camera, then coming back into frame. The next time he appeared, he was more hurried. “They’re looking for me. I left Anton in Walvis Bay to see if he can get more evidence, after we found out why the Bushmen were dying. I don’t know what’s happened to him, but we do know some of the drugs have seeped into the underground water system and when Chang opens the floodgates it will flush the chemicals through every watercourse in southern Africa. The only clean water will be controlled by him. Everyone, governments and industry, will be at his mercy. But worse than that, he will kill everything that drinks from these natural watercourses, including wildlife and thousands of people. I’ll do what I can to get this information out …”
Max’s father suddenly stopped, ducking in a defensive position. Max saw him reach for an automatic pistol in his waistband, and then he noticed for the first time that he had a roughly tied bandage around his leg. The video must have been filmed after they attacked his plane. His father didn’t look at the lens again, his eyes scanning somewhere off-camera. His hand reached out and grabbed it, the picture wobbled, feet running, sky, ground- blackness.
The silent, blank screen sat waiting for a response from Max.
The chill he felt was not fear but an ice-cold anger. He was in the belly of the beast all right, he was right there with the murderer, Shaka Chang. And everything that needed to be done to stop this catastrophe rested on Max’s shoulders. This time he didn’t ask when he ripped the tape off Zhernastyn’s face.
Zhernastyn cried out.
“Is there still time for me to stop Chang?”
Zhernastyn smiled, a macabre sneer on his swollen, half-whiskered face. “It’s tomorrow, my young friend. He’s opening the floodgates tomorrow.”
“When?”
Zhernastyn shook his head. That was the key to Chang’s success and if Chang ever discovered …
Max snarled at him and heaved the wheelchair towards the ramp. It ran free like a runaway pram, and Zhernastyn screamed. Max had thrown caution to the wind, the threat of Zhernastyn’s terror being heard was a risk he had to take.
“AllrightallrightallrightALLRIGHT!” Zhernastyn screamed.
Max grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and dug in his heels to stop it tipping down the ramp, barely a couple of meters away.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Zhernastyn gasped. “Tomorrow at sunset, sunset, that’s when he’ll open the floodgates…. It’s a week earlier than planned … before everyone arrives for the grand opening ceremony.”
Zhernastyn looked desperately at Max. He was teetering on the edge of that slope. If Max had a mean streak in him, Zhernastyn would be torn apart in a few seconds.
“Don’t worry, Doctor, I need you for a little while longer. I have to get back through security to get to my father. If you had thought that through, you could have kept quiet.”
Max hauled him back to the computer console and tweaked the mouse, found the email page, knowing that Shaka Chang would have the fastest-ever satellite broadband at his disposal. He typed in Sayid’s address and a few words to accompany the contents of his father’s DVD:
He clicked on the Send button.
It was gone in a flash. He just prayed Sayid was waiting as he had promised. Now all Max had to do was rescue his father, stop the dam gates being opened and escape.
That was all.
