Jared Omondi finished the last of his lunch at his desk in the CU Administration Complex. He tossed the plastic plate into a waste bin beside the door, wiped his lips and fingers clean with a paper napkin, and tossed it expertly, too. He swivelled in his chair and looked across the parking lot through his panoramic window: not the greatest view, but he was not one to complain.
That he still had a job was not much relief. It had taken the best part of three hours to convince the irate Mr. Bundi of his plan. The old man had wanted to resort to the old ways, but the old ways couldn’t work this time.
“You sound just like Amira,” Newton had roared. “Just seize the print, threaten its bearer, make an example of him.”
“An example to whom?” Jared asked.
Wrong question, apparently. Newton had flared up again, foaming at the mouth.
The lesson had been learned ages ago. Nobody could be bothered with prints anymore, or even their destruction, not if they knew what was good for them. Kirimara had adjusted well to a paperless economy and prints were very old news, fading from thought and speech altogether. In any case, so much conditioning and brute force had reduced the collective memory of Kirimarans to two weeks max. Incidentally, it made Kendi’s job so much easier, Jared almost envied her.
The lesson would certainly be lost to the CU student body that only cared about staying high and inheriting fortunes. But he couldn’t dare say so lest he point a finger at his boss: wasn’t that the exact same situation between himself and his daughter?
No, the presence of the Manifesto—just the mention of its name made Newton furious again—was an unprecedented opportunity. It had to be. Jared had a healthy respect for serendipity. The boy who had brought the print with him was a direct descendant of the menaces that were Moses and Mugambi Njema, the former taken care of, the latter still at large. Newton still considered Mugambi the infernal one that got away. Jared believed this was finally the chance to find him.
Oh, there had been many little sinister jabs at the CU mainframe from the Union over the years, all thwarted by yours truly, but still, a message had sneaked through the network to the boy’s Silvertouch, without immediate detection. Mugambi must be getting smarter in his cyber assaults.
Jared would have upped the security on the entire system in response, to keep further breaches out, give the Union a hard time, but he didn’t. He chose to leave everything as is, because if a message had been sent once, another would very soon follow. Hackers were people. People were predictable.
Mr. Bundi called him a bleeding idiot for the idea.
“Hear me out, sir,” he had said. “The boy is our bait. He could lead us straight to the heart of the movement.”
The boy’s presence was no accident.
First, CU had defeated the terrorists’ attack, swept them out of their systems, recovered the damage, and even made significant profits from it. CU had humiliated the Union. Then, Moses Njema was killed. The glorious founder of the movement was captured by the Authorities and died of a heart attack. Well, that was the story that the Union swallowed. Moses had passed through Jared’s hands before the Authorities took him away. The poor bastard was too old to survive Jared’s unorthodox interrogations. Newton still blamed Jared for the loss; he liked to keep his rivals where he could see them.
His successor, Mugambi, took on mythical status, his whereabouts unknown... just what the Union needed, to get even more psychotic about the destruction of the Bundis. The number of Union recruits was growing steadily. Jared knew that there were Unionites among the Clarence staff, possibly even among the students, just biding their time. In the deep web, the underground grapevine, word was that Mugambi, now called Leader—hilarious—had a plan, a card in hand that would be the decisive end of Clarence University. The same grapevine revealed uncertainty, impatience among the Union followers: whatever this card was, it was taking too long to be dealt.
And then, Mugambi’s own son receives the scholarship, enters the university legitimately, wielding a very rare, valuable, physical copy of the unholy print that created the movement. Of course, e-copies of the Manifesto did their rounds online—the print itself was banned from circulation decades ago, so the real thing would command a premium. To the Union, though, the print, and the boy, were the saviours that they desperately needed.
It was only logical that the Union would communicate once more with the boy, and this time, Jared would be ready to trace its source.
Of course, it would be a bit more complicated than that, but Jared had to get Newton on board with the plan, or else the opportunity would be gone, CU left defenceless.
Newton had mulled it over. It was the longest minute of Jared’s career.
“One week,” grumbled Mr. Bundi. “I want the print in my hands and the boy gone in a week, or I will eliminate both of them myself. You have already wasted three of the seven days, so chop-chop.”
Four days was better than nothing, Jared thought, as he turned back to his view-screens mounted end-to-end on his wall. Fourteen red dots undulated on the CU campus map on the largest central display. Beside each dot a student code hovered; Jared eyed just the one: JMN4735.
At this moment—he glanced at the time: 13:50—the dot should be around the cafeteria area, or en route to class. He frowned, clicked on the dot, revealing the route. Wrong trajectory.
The dot was moving towards the classes, as it should, but it had come from the Virtual Library. Now, why would a kibarua go to the library on his own?
He pulled up the library’s surveillance, and sure enough, there was Joseph at the help desk. Jared turned up the volume and caught his voice mid-sentence:
“…a Native Wordlist?”
“Yes,” said the librarian airily. She thought it was a prank, a kibarua at the CBVL. “It would be...