Выбрать главу

“I see.” Prudence spoke with the wondering voice of a small child.

“As well as rotating your circles, it’s also necessary to keep moving the inner circle to the left. This means that, instead of coinciding once a day, your inner point will begin travelling further and further outside the outer point.”

“It’s beautiful,” Prudence breathed. “It all^w.”

“I know.” Again, Ambrose was gratified.

“Are you first with this theory?”

Ambrose laughed. “Before I left home I wrote a couple of letters staking a claim to it, but it will soon be in the public domain. You see, the ghosts are going to spread. Before long they’ll be visible on the surface—there’ll be no need to go down a diamond mine—then the circle of emergence will grow quite rapidly. At first the sightings will be confined to the equatorial regions, places like Borneo and Peru, then they’ll spread north and south through the tropics into the temperate zones.”

Prudence looked thoughtful. “That’s going to cause some excitement.”

“You,” Ambrose said, finishing his drink, “are a master of the art of understatement.”

Chapter Six

Snook’s telephone began to ring and, at the same instant, somebody knocked loudly on the front door of his bungalow.

He went to the living-room window, parted two slats of the blind and peered out. Three black soldiers were standing on the verandah—a lieutenant, a corporal and a private—all wearing the black-and-tan spotted berets of the Leopard Regiment. The corporal and the private had the inevitable submachine guns slung on their shoulders, and they also wore expressions that Snook had seen many times before in other parts of the world. They were examining his house with the appraising, faintly proprietory looks of men who had been authorised to use any degree of force necessary to accomplish their mission. As he watched, the lieutenant pounded the door again and took one step backwards, waiting for it to be opened.

“Hold on a minute,” Snook shouted as he went to the telephone, picked it up and gave his name.

“This is Doctor Boyce Ambrose,” the caller said. “I’ve just arrived in Barandi from the States. Has my secretary been in touch with you to explain why I’m here?”

“No. International communications don’t operate too well in these parts.”

“Oh, well—I expect you can guess what brought me to Barandi, Mister Snook. May I come out to the mine to see you? I’m very much…” Ambrose’s words were lost in an even louder hammering on the front door. It sounded as though a gun butt was being used, and Snook guessed that the next step would be to burst the door open.

“Are you in Kisumu?” he snapped into the phone.

“Yes.”

“At the Commodore?”

“Yes.”

“Hang on there and I’ll try to contact you—right now I’ve got some visitors at the door.”

Snook heard the beginnings of a protest as he set the phone down, but his principal concern was with the impatient group on his doorstep. He had been expecting some kind of reaction to his publicity campaign from Colonel Freeborn and it remained to be seen how violent the storm was going to be. He hurried to the door and flung it open, blinking in the mid-morning sun.

“You are Gilbert Snook?” The lieutenant was a haughty young man with an angry stare.

“I am.”

“It took you a long time to come to the door.”

“Well—you were knocking at it for a long time,” Snook said with the tricky obtuseness he had been practising for years and which he knew to infuriate officials, especially those whose native tongue was not English.

“That’s not the…” The lieutenant paused, recognising the danger of involving himself in verbal exchanges. “Come with us.”

“Where to?”

“I am not required to give that information.”

Snook smiled like a teacher disappointed by a child’s lack of comprehension. “Son, I have just required it of you.”

The lieutenant glanced at his two men, and his face showed he was reaching a difficult decision. “My orders are to bring you to Kisumu to see President Ogilvie,” he said finally. “We must leave at once.”

“You should have said so at the beginning,” Snook chided. He took a lightweight jacket from a hook, stepped out and closed the door behind him. They went to a canvas-topped jeep, Snook was given a rear seat beside the corporal and the vehicle surged away immediately. Almost at once, Snook saw two Land-Rovers emblazoned with the sign “Pan-African News Services’. As they passed the minehead enclosure he was interested to see that the four armoured cars which had been sitting at the fence the night before were now absent. A number of men were moving through the mine buildings, but the vacuum tubes which snaked away to the south were translucent—instead of opaque with speeding dust—which showed that no excavation was taking place below ground.

Snook knew the mine had never before ceased production for as much as a single day, and he guessed that economic pressures were building up somewhere. The conflict was between the new Africans and the old; between modern ambitions and ancient fears. President Paul Ogilvie and Colonel Freeborn were men of the same breed, adventurers whose nerve and lack of scruples had enabled them to hack a prime cut from the carcase of Africa. Ogilvie, in particular, promoted the notion that Barandi had a wide-based economy—with its exports of pyrethrum flowers and extract, coffee, soda ash and some electronic products—but the diamond mines were what had brought the country into being and were what kept it in existence. Snook could imagine the President’s growing rage at the closure of National Mine No. 3.

The interesting thing, however, was that Ogilvie and Freebom still had no true idea of what they were up against, of the strength of the miners’ determination not to go underground again. It was one thing to dismiss the ghosts as a product of mass hysteria, without having seen them; but it was something else to stand in a dark tunnel, kilometres below the surface, and watch the procession of silent, glowing figures with their slow-turning heads and mouths which warped in response to unknown emotions. With the bright morning air flowing around him, and the ambience of a motor vehicle with its sounds and smells and chipped paintwork—the essence of human normalcy, even Snook found it difficult to believe in the ghosts.

He sat without speaking for the whole of the jolting ride into Kisumu and beyond it to the new complex of governmental offices which sprawled over eighty hectares of parkland. The cubist architecture was softened and modified by islands of jacarandas, palms and Cape chestnuts. Positioned near the centre of the complex was the presidential residence. It was surrounded by a small lake which was sufficiently ornamental to disguise the fact that it served the same function as a moat. The jeep passed across a bridge, stopped at the main entrance to the residence, and a minute later Snook was ushered into a room of high windows, oiled woods and Murano glass. President Ogilvie was standing at a desk near one of the windows. He was a man of about fifty, with a thin-lipped, narrow-nosed cast of features which, to Snook’s eyes, made him look like a Caucasian in dark stage make-up. His clothing was exactly as in all the pictures Snook had seen of him—blue business suit, white stiff-collared shirt, narrow tie of blue silk. Snook, normally not susceptible to such things, abruptly became aware of the sloppiness of his own clothes.