Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
I start to offer another thought or word or… something, but I can’t conceive of anything that might be even remotely worth saying, much less Lars hearing, so I just turn and head down the long driveway that leads to the front gate. As I’m starting off, I notice a look between Lars and Christine. Something kindred, perhaps. They are closer in age and share an unbridled spirit and a hard and fast desire not to be seen as children. As anyone’s inferior. Ever. She nods to him, placatingly, but he just huffs as she and Danny follow behind me.
“I’ll tell Dad,” he yells after us.
“All right,” I call back without turning to look. He won’t. I know he won’t. Lars is showing himself to be many things as he grows older, but a betrayer of secrets is not one. I don’t know my younger brother as well as I might, but I can already tell that he is the type of laaitie who will carry a confidence to his grave.
Besides… even if he does tell our father that we stole his precious diamond, so what? Our father will already know. There’s no one else it could be. And when Zander van den Berg asks me why I did it, I’ll tell him the truth:
He’s not as powerful as he thinks he is. Everyone can be touched. And more than that, as he told me when I was a boy… the world is mine.
Christine, Danny, and I amble past the menagerie of vervet monkeys Father keeps about the property, I rub one on its furry head, and we drift off into the night.
THEN.
The memory comes to me unbidden. Spontaneously and alarmingly.
I don’t recognize the man on the stage in front of us. The one sitting my daughter on his lap and stroking her hair. The one with the scar. The one with all the guards who are there to protect him. I don’t recognize him.
But I know him.
A crashing wave of images, thoughts, and half-remembered history strikes hard onto the shores of my mind.
— Solomon Bophela, the Zulu laaitie who was with me in Cape Town when I got the call from Lars that Christine had taken a tumble. The one I didn’t hire and who Lars said he hadn’t either.
— Liam, the Afrikaner laaitie who was just here, telling me that whilst I was in the country estate, “he” instructed them all to ensure I was “proper cared for.”
— The sniper rifle that ended the days of Brasil Lynch on the bridge in Belfast.
— The phone calls from the one called Anton. The one who seems to know our every move.
— The car, the train, the castle, the monkeys.
— The sheer grandeur and opulence and pageantry in service to something so malevolent and unnecessary.
— The utter level of sociopathy required to see it all through…
I feel as though I might faint, but then I remember something else.
The advice given to me a long, long time ago.
Advice that, while fundamentally useful in certain situations, is a cold and insincere way to travel life’s journeys. But that, in this instance, is very much necessary and appropriate advice to employ. Even if everyone in the current situation knows it will be a superficial application of that advice rather than a sincere ownership of it.
Nonetheless…
“If, in the face of mortal danger, you look like you’re not frightened, it will cause the other oke to take up that fear in compensation. And then you will hold the advantage and he will be made weak and vulnerable.”
So, even though the odds are far, far from being in my favor, I heed that advice.
Because sitting before me now—I realize amidst this bewildering set of revelations that would very likely cripple a mind less well equipped to handle them than mine own—is the very person who, once upon a time, tendered it.
I take a breath, compel myself to stop perspiring and, feeling the weight of a quite literally impossible reality bearing down upon me, look right into the eyes of this man who wears a face that looks nothing like the face I once knew, but in whose eyes I am able to see the inimitable life force that cannot be masked or changed no matter how the rest of him may have been altered...
… and I smile.
“Hello, Dad. Glad to see you looking so well.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The man calling himself Alexei Gorny smiles back at Alec. It’s not a pleasant smile. The skin around his lips and eyes seems too tight. Artificial. And I recall that I thought the same thing the other time I met him. Maybe a year, year and a half ago? Longer?
Time doesn’t really mean anything anymore.
He places Andra down from his knee, gently, and gestures to the guy called Anton to come up to the stage.