Solo

walked unconcernedly down the corridor to the restrooms. He was through the service door in a second and clattered down the stairs. He found himself in a storeroom full of cleaning equipment and rubbish bins. He threw his hat and his glasses into a bin, took off his jacket, turned it inside out and folded it over his arm. He opened another door and emerged at the rear of the elevator banks. Looking straight ahead he made his way through the people waiting for the elevators, strolled easily across the marble lobby with its spinning mobile and walked out into the weak sunshine that was bathing Milford Plaza.
    He could still feel the heart-thud of alarm and adrenalin. Breed in Washington DC? Breed summoned to confront this unknown visitor to Gabriel Adeka . . . He had been wearing a dark business suit and a red tie – very smart. Bond remembered that was how he had complimented him in the control tower at Janjaville. Perhaps that suit he’d been wearing that night was the first indication of his new life as an executive of a global charitable foundation.
    Bond began to relax, glancing back as he left the plaza – no one was after him and he had learned a lot from his visit. His request to meet Adeka had brought Kobus Breed from wherever he was residing to investigate. AfricaKIN Inc. had nothing to do with the modest grubby shop in Bayswater. Something much bigger was taking place. Something bigger and very wrong.

·4·
     

SWITCHBLADE
     
    That night Bond went to see a film called
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
but found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He left before the end and walked slowly back to the Fairview, smoking a cigarette, his mind working, trying to analyse all the permutations that might make up AfricaKIN Inc. Gabriel Adeka, Colonel Denga and now Breed . . . What kind of strange alliance was this?
    He realised he hadn’t been paying attention and had taken a wrong turn. He could see the top of the lucent tower that was the Fairview a few blocks away and also the floodlit dome of the Capitol on the hill. He reset his bearings and headed off again, aware that he had wandered into a neighbourhood of near-derelict housing, with many windows boarded up, some of them seemingly damaged by fire. He passed a burnt-out car with no wheels; half the street lights weren’t working; stray cats prowled the alleyways. This could happen so easily in DC. One wrong turning and you found yourself in—
    ‘Hey, man, you got a light?’
    Bond looked round slowly. Behind him, on the edge of a yellow semicircle thrown by a lamp above a shuttered thrift-store doorway, three young men stood – teenagers, Bond thought. They were wearing jeans and T-shirts and were all smoking, so the need for a light was redundant. Two black kids and a white guy, slightly older. Bond glanced behind him – no one – so just these three to deal with, then. All right, come and get me.
    They started to walk purposefully towards him flicking away their cigarettes, numbed and heroic with speed, Bond reckoned. The white kid took something out of his pocket and Bond heard the
whish-chunk
of a switchblade being sprung.
    ‘So you need a light,’ Bond said taking out his Ronson and clicking it on. He turned the small wheel that governed the gas valve and the flame flared up three inches.
    ‘Hey, funny guy,’ one of them said as they fanned out to surround him.
    Bond tossed the flaring lighter at the boy with the switchblade. Reflexively, he ducked and swore and in that moment of inattention Bond grabbed his wrist and dislocated it with a brutal jerk. The boy screamed and the knife dropped with a clatter on the sidewalk. Bond turned on the black kid who was rushing him and kicked him heavily in the groin. He fell to the ground, bellowing and writhing in agony – Bond’s loafers were fitted with steel caps at the toe. The other black kid began to back off. Bond stooped and picked up the switchblade and held it out.
    ‘You want this?’ he said.
    The boy turned and ran away into the night.
    Bond found his Ronson and pocketed it – then considered his two assailants. The boy with the dislocated wrist was kneeling, holding his wrist with his good hand and sobbing with the pain, his hand hanging limply and at the wrong angle. The other kid was still on the ground clutching his smashed groin and keening in a high-pitched whine of misery, his knees drawn up to his chest.
    Bond stamped down hard on his ribcage and kicked the other kneeling boy in