Newton Bundi was livid.
He had been back to CU for less than a day, only to hear this nonsense about some print.
He gulped down his scotch, his hand shaking, his breath ragged. Mr. Bundi was a disciplined man; he never touched alcohol unless in a crisis. This isn’t a crisis, Newton told himself, swallowing his third shot in a row. His Chief of Security cowed in a seat in the corner of his home office.
“It’s just a rumour, isn’t it, Jared?”
“No, sir,” he said. “As I already explained—”
“Yes, you have explained how incompetent you are.”
Rumours had a way of unsettling Newton Bundi. They always made him feel like he had missed a small but crucial piece of a puzzle, and in his younger years in the family business he could stay up for days, tracing its origins, finding its kernel of truth. It was a crucial job, finding truth and quashing it before it touched his father’s legacy.
But he was not the man that he used to be—Newton felt his age in his bones nowadays. Instead, he got himself the best PR, and the best security, and paid them more than enough for their sleepless nights.
Best security, he scoffed. Newton could not believe that the man had blamed the equipment for his stupid mistake, which happened to be the best goddamn equipment on this side of Eastern Africa that Bundi money could buy. So what if there was a networking problem or whatever? He did not need to be a tech guru to recognise a spineless dog when he saw one.
“Did I have to hear it from Catherine?”
The Tangani conferences had been a success; Newton had reeled in some new partners, made some new deals for his Conglomerate, and Catherine, his Petite, would be pleased. She had met him for the routine briefing upon his return, wearing his favourite lingerie to welcome him home. On her way out of the mansion, after thoroughly satisfying him, Petite had asked him to go easy on Jared.
“Why?” he asked.
“Oh, he’s going through some issues with his equipment. Things were a little slow the other day.”
“Slow?”
“Yeah,” Petite chimed. He loved her soprano voice, but he knew when she used it to hide something from him.
When she told him about the rumour, Newton exploded.
“What the hell am I paying him for?!”
That is exactly what he wanted to know from his security chief.
“You know my stance on prints,” Newton seethed.
Mr. Omondi knew it intimately. He had been working at CU for two years when that infernal cyberattack occurred. That was his professional trial by fire, a crash course in cybersecurity, a sharpening of his intelligence skills: it was often just as important to handle the humans behind the machines as fixing faulty equipment. With Kendi’s invaluable help, the threat had been eliminated, but the crisis had knocked the wind out of Mr. Bundi. A month later, he handed over the chancellorship to his young and unwilling daughter.
Jared looked down at his hands clasped on his lap. He let Kendi’s little betrayal slide; she was only doing her job, and his was rightly under fire.
How would the old man take it if he knew what was really going on? Mr. Bundi had always blamed the prints for all his misfortunes, although Jared was hard-pressed to see what misfortunes the billionaire could possibly have. The prints were only part of it, the rest were very… private: his wife’s drinking, his daughter’s childishness, his lack of a proper successor… And if he was this angry about a delay in communication—
Jared’s S-Mini beeped at him from his pocket, to Newton’s further annoyance.
It was exactly as he had suspected.
“Well? What is it this time?” Newton demanded.
“Sir…”
“Say it, dammit!”
“The print, the boy…” he shook his head. Just get it over with, Jared. “The Union is back.”
Mr. Omondi watched his boss crumple in his chair behind the great oak desk.
“There’s more,” he said.
Newton looked up at Jared.
“The boy is Mugambi Njema’s son.”
***
Makena Njema sat among the mothers and wives of her village at the mid-week worship service under the Ndoro tree. They all had congratulated her on her son’s departure to the great university, gently patting her back, proclaiming his future greatness, how they were all so proud of him. She had smiled and mumbled her thanks. All for show, because they were in church.
“The Creator is always speaking,” began the pastor, “but we hardly ever listen.” The congregants murmured their agreement. Makena tuned the pastor out.
The Creator was not loud enough when she met Mugambi.
He had been a strapping youth, herself a shy, devout teen. He had just returned from his studies in the Capital; she had seldom left her home in Kiama Village. His father had decided that it was time that he married; her own father agreed. She was nineteen, he was twenty-nine; the dowry was settled, and a few months later, she was pregnant with her first and only child.
Then the trouble began.
Mugambi was always a kind man, the exact opposite of his father. Makena was lucky, everyone said, to be married to a learned man. Behind her back, they added, “Whatever good that will do.”
He was to finish his studies, return to Ndoro, and help his aging mother to set up a village school. His two sisters had married into distant villages and had children of their own. His father, Moses, was away in the Capital a lot: his son filled the gap he left behind. One day Moses unexpectedly returned, and demanded all of Mugambi’s time. Who was Makena to interfere? Her husband had bartered a sewing machine for her, after all. That was more than the other village wives ever got.
Mugambi changed then, but it was so gradual that it caught Makena unawares. Her husband would spend nights and days with his father, speaking in hushed tones, travelling the day’s journey to neighbouring villages, meeting with people that Makena never knew. All the...