Freedom?

A fictional, thriller short story relevant to my home country, South Africa.

My warm breath condensed before my face to form the mist that signalled the ruthless cold. Cold was always the best weather for a robbery " everyone would be snuggled up together by the fireplace, unaware of what was beyond their little bubble of comfort and warmth. Breathing slowly, to nullify the adrenaline aching to break my concentration, I tied the scarf carefully around my mouth and drew the strings at my hood to tighten its grip about my frozen face.

 

A light drizzle of rain wafted in eagerly from the east, as if suddenly aware of the sun’s recent disappearance. The moonlight was weak and shivering from high above, the kind that lengthens and distorts shadows. All the better to conceal me from probing eyes.

 

Checking both holsters and dagger-sheath, I slipped round the corner and took a hasty shot at the nearest camera. The silenced sound of gunfire somehow managed to pierce the ambient night-time noises better that night. Whipping back to the safety of the corner, I rechecked both pistol silencers. With my reputation and the bounty hanging overhead, I couldn’t afford to let anything threaten my success.

 

I reloaded, just for the sake of it, and dashed to the gate of the house that was to be my quarry that night. It was a black, Tuscan-style gate with orangey-brown walls beside it and shining brazier-like lamps on either side.

 

But I knew that already. I had been observing that property for almost a week, from a nearby rented room, through a series of advanced binoculars and close-range telescopes. My findings during that time had told me that the architect of the house must have been the regular idiot, or the requests he had been given were near entirely unreasonable. The house’s exterior was fashionably Tuscan and painted welcomingly with warm, earthy colours. Yet the inside was designed like a cold, space-age toilet cubicle. Devoid of the interesting detail that I favoured so much; the place was full of slick, angular shapes and cold, harsh colours. I knew so much about the building that I wouldn’t have needed to be shown around if I were an invited guest.

 

No shots for the gate-side lights. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself just then. After all, security was at its highest there. I had made a recent habit of stealing from the valuables of strictly high-ranking government heads, such as from that household, home to South Africa’s head of intelligence. I despised the government.

 

I slipped off one of the several black ropes looped around my shoulders and unwound it. Tying a lasso into one end, I cast it over the gate-side lamp and began to pull myself up to the high wall’s spiked top. Once there, carefully avoiding those spikes, I dropped onto the clean brick driveway beyond, with a smooth, forward roll to break my fall. Three rapid shots to each nearby camera before someone could have seen me. Spying out the motion sensors, I neutralized those as well.

 

That was the point of no return. With so many cameras and sensors taken out, the security guard on duty was already alerted to my intrusion. Biding my time patiently, still suppressing my breath, I waited for him to materialize from somewhere, with his shotgun at the ready.

 

I counted to three and there he was, jogging pathetically about the expanse of the garden, calling for whoever was there to show himself. I lifted my beloved pistol and calculated the shot, pulling the trigger at the ideal moment. That silent sound, like a supersonic arrow passing through the air, and he was lying, motionless on the dew-sparkled grass.

 

“Damnit, Karabo!” came a shrill squeak from within the Tuscan fortress that was my partial envy of a home, “Where are you, Karabo?! Brett, call the police!”

“Don’t be stupid, Shelly, there’s no-one there,” was the dismissive, but equally nervous, reply.

“Then where the hell is Karabo?! These b******s have got silencers or something!”

“Shelly, stop shouting, you’re making the kids nervous.”

“I’m nervous for god’s sake!! There’s someone out there!”

“Fine, I’ll go check.”

“Brett!” it was a typically whiny wife-call, “just call the police.”

 

And so the argument continued while a small weeping broke out from one of the ‘kids’. I quelled my bubbling emotions of guilt and sorrow and waited for the drama to dry itself out. By the end of it, Brett agreed to call the security company. Four minutes. That was ADT’s promised response time.

 

So I bided my time for yet another four minutes. When the diminutive response vehicle with its lone, half-asleep, entirely-reluctant security guard appeared, a single shot was all that was needed. The very second that ADT was no longer a threat, I progressed. Firing first at the alarm system’s siren speaker, then at the front door’s lock, rather than wasting time picking it, I entered the house.

 

The effects of the robbery fear, so common in South Africa, still lingered heavily within the home; all was silent and its inhabitants were still only speaking in hushed voices. When I came across Brett, he was holding a fiercely large revolver, which might have helped, was it in properly trained hands; however he chose instead to drop it and gawp at me. I wasted no time in knocking his forehead with the butt my pistol’s handle. He might still have proven to be useful for hostage purposes, should the need have arisen.

 

Shelly was an even easier target " she conveniently fainted into my arms for me to calmly tie up and gag. The couple’s children, twin boys, had somehow managed to cry themselves to sleep amidst the commotion and were whistling quietly together on the couch in the living room, with the cartoons still on mute. I left them to sleep peacefully, poor souls.

 

I proceeded to unfold my loot bag " a padded Kevlar sack that would cushion any blows it might receive and protect its valuable contents from stray bullets " and fill it with delightful electronics and jewellery from predetermined locations within the house. I never stole cash, for cash had a knack of being marked in houses like this, and it had a selling price which couldn’t be negotiated; where is the sport in that?

 

A single object still awaited theft. The prized Vassily Kandinsky artwork hanging above the still active and still muted plasma-screen television. Scanning its edges for any alarm-sounding circuit-breakers, I let my breath speed up for just a moment. That would be the last robbery I would ever need to commit. Such an artwork would easily fetch over fifteen million rand in Europe. My vision blurred momentarily with the exciting prospect and my otherwise flawlessly vigilant eyes overlooked a minute thread-thin cable running from the painting’s centre to the wall behind.

 

How could I have believed, for an instance, that a Kandinsky would be left unsecured?

 

As I cautiously lifted the framed beauty from its hanging hooks, the tiniest of electronic chirps sounded as the thread was broken. My ears were throbbing too much to make anything of it and I made no move to quicken my escape. Striding arrogantly from the living room, down the double flight of stairs, to the freely open front door, I made my way to the exit rope, bearing both artwork and loot bag.

 

Then the noise, that is naturally a thief’s worst nightmare, sounded fearlessly from beyond the gate. The sirens howled like a pack of wild dogs advertising their kill and warning others away from it. My pistols were drawn in the blink of an eye and I was backed up against the bullet-proof walls.

 

These men weren’t normal cops; they were special operative ‘brawn’ policemen, commonly known as the flying squad, assigned to guarding the international artefact that was the painting, for the night. They wasted no time in ramming through the gate with their heavy vehicles and sweeping the area with their automatic rifles.

 

Dual shots to each helmeted head and they were falling like the rest. But numbers can sometimes be greater than skill and I was overwhelmed. However, the moment they recognized me, they shot to immobilize rather than to kill. They were ordered to. And they stopped even that when they saw that my ammunition was depleted. Even then, delusions of my grandeur blurred the defined edges of reason and I drew my dagger to fight to the death like a crazed soldier from medieval times.

 

“Put your weapon down, Dews, you’ve lost,” one officer called over the megaphone.

I obeyed, dropping the dagger disdainfully.

“Now put your hands high in the air, I don’t know what you could have left but I’m not taking any risks.”

I obeyed, proudly stabbing the middle finger of each hand towards the heavens, as much in defiance of God, as of the men pointing their assault rifles at me.

“That’s the spirit, little b*****d,” growled the nearest, brawniest, fattest cop at seeing my gesture.

 

The captain strode up to me and slammed his rifle-butt into my temple. No man, no matter how sturdy, can go through that and remain conscious.

 

*           *           *           *

 

Following the time of my waking, in the holding cell with a dozen rapists and violent criminals, everything was little more than a blur. The court case. The sentence to death, despite our laws against it, due to ‘extreme’ cases of armed robbery, assault and murder. The months in prison, waiting as the only person, in South Africa, ever to be on death row.

 

Men who’ve raped a hundred women and killed all their husbands and children, men who’ve sodomised their own baby sons and men who’ve gang-raped their own baby daughters walk free in this country. But I, who has killed, yes, who has robbed, yes, who has assaulted, yes, got sentenced to death. Not for my crimes, but for the fact that I stole from the government. Billions of their precious rands have passed in and out of my pockets to never see their faces again and that is why I must pay the price that ought to be paid by so many more from this country.

 

There I sat. Mere minutes before the predestined moment where lethal injection would be used for the first time in South Africa, while I ate my supposed last meal and wrote my supposed last message to the world, a man came to me. Not an unusual or conspicuous man, not someone I’d met before, not someone I recognized. Just a man, in a navy blue suit, carrying a black leather suitcase and wearing an absurd Bugs Bunny tie. His hair was short and neat, combed to form perfect, off-centre parting, and his eyes were uninterestingly brown.

 

“Mister Dews?” he said to me as if he didn’t already know.

“Mister?” I replied unwaveringly.

“My name isn’t important but if you really want to know it, it’s van Rooyen.”

He had a normal surname as well.

“So what do you want?” I said blandly to him.

“I, personally, want nothing from you but I believe I have something you might want.”

This man was beating around the bush and I was beginning to feel my patience taper.

“Just tell me what’s going on,” I growled, heavily reminding him of the hundreds I’d killed.

“I offer you freedom,” he said, showing no sign of nervousness or shock.

“Freedom?”

“Yes, freedom, but I think you know very well that freedom isn’t free.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then,” van Rooyen replied, smiling such a fake, inhospitable smile.

“Name your price,” I hissed.

“The government is well aware of your talents, Dews, and we wish to make use of them. We think you’ve suffered enough here for your crimes against us and now we want you to work for us.”

“So the government’s actually going in headfirst and admitting that they like crime?”

“There’s the thing. Crime in South Africa does make money for certain governmental bodies and I’m not here to deny that, but the real people involved are starting to realize that if crime continues on its current path, it will, inevitably destroy this beloved land. So we are going to hire you to assassinate major crime lords and cripple the crime world, bit by bit.”

“We have a deal.”

 

I value my life highly. I would never deny that nor suggest that death is a better option, excepting maybe when my pride and honour are threatened and, in that case, they were not.

 

I was released and some random rapist was killed in my place, just to silence the press. I was provided with money to spend, a house to live in and flats all over the country. Above that, they paid me handsomely for each successful elimination of the so-called ‘crime lords’.

 

Months passed with assassination after assassination and South Africa’s infamous crime rate showed few signs of dropping. Always, my orders came through sourceless connections. Hidden identity text messages and anonymous telephone calls dropped locations, names and descriptions and were never found again. In fact, the only person that I actually met was van Rooyen and all the while, I worked blindly.

 

Killing became my life more than remaining uncaught and executing successful robberies, which is what it once was. My inner human feelings and consciences took constant, brutal battering until the point where they fragmented and dissolved altogether. I felt empty and devoid of the thrill and excitement, and sorrow I valued so much in the life that was mine alone before that bastardly circuit-breaker behind the Kandinsky.

 

Countless murders piled up on the tallies and the faces of those I’d killed merged and fused and became a single entity " the being that stood between me and true freedom. Van Rooyen promised utter salvation when our steadily notorious crime rate diminished to ‘survivable’ levels. And it never did, so, always, I worked harder to kill more. My free time was dominated by stalking the streets and slaying all who, in my eyes, appeared suspicious, in a hope of grazing a few marks off the regularly updated graph in van Rooyen’s office.

 

Never did I consider that the statistics van Rooyen fed me might have been false and never did I consider the implications of my actions. Families might have been torn apart, businesses might have been crippled and there was a time when I would have cared about such things but the tattered remains of my heart were wholly selfish by that stage.

 

Then came an order from the one at the top. One of those anonymous orders. An order to dispatch a woman and her twin children. It made no sense, but somehow I found no reason to retaliate with " I only walked blindly to the location I was given.

 

The whole process of infiltration was like a second nature, it was a ritual I conducted absent-mindedly, yet with perfect deliberation and precision. I silently killed the roaming guards between me and the final targets and I smoothly picked my way through the building to reach the bedroom where such a woman slept silently with her twin sons that could not have been older than nine years old.

 

Something about her face dredged up a fragment of a significant memory from my rotten past. Something about the way the boys whistled when they slept stirred some wisp of emotion floating aimlessly within me. I cocked my primary pistol and aimed carefully at the woman, prepared to pull the trigger when a draft of sleep-talk drifted up from her shivering lips.

 

“Brett… call the police…” she whimpered quietly.

 

I dropped my weapon and staggered backwards, knocking into the white-painted closet behind me. Every detail around me came alive suddenly, waking me from my dream-like life, from the trance of recurrences that condensed my mind. The remorse, the sadness and guilt of ten thousand murders crashed into my chest, driving the breath from inside it. The walls’ stark grey colour and the angular, harsh designs of the bedside tables called upon a distant memory that held volumes of importance.

 

This was Shelly, wife of Brett and mother of twin sons, the one who had once before lived in the house where the Kandinsky had hung.

 

“Well, kill them!” came a hiss from behind me.

 

Swinging round, the nose of my second pistol met the forehead of Brett, standing there matter-of-factly.

 

“I gave you an order, Dews!”

 

My firearm dropped involuntarily from my shaking grip.

 

“What’s going on?” I breathed, choking myself on the words.

“I’m your boss, you idiot!” Brett snapped silently, desperate not to wake the sleeping woman and children, “All the orders, all the marks, all the info was from me! You think the president is in charge of this country? No my friend, it’s really me. Why’d you think I had the Kandinsky and not him?! Now she’s leaving me and you will kill her.”

 

I felt sick to my stomach. This man was the one in charge of my anti-crime assassinations. Brett, the one I could have slain and gone free so many months ago was the one commanding me.

 

“Dews!” he spat, “kill her!”

“Why?” reason was flooding back to me.

“Because she’s leaving me and I have the authority to make her die!”

“And the others, the ones I’ve already killed without a second thought?”

“They were and are for the sake of reducing crime. You’re the reason I started that project. You shook my beloved family up so much with your sneaking in and taking the Kandinsky that I swore to end crime… for her sake. I loved her so much so I hired you to take them out. You! The reason! And now she wants a divorce! That’s what I get for giving my life up for her. Now kill her!”

 

“I will be…” I whispered as I picked up my gun and aimed it directly between Brett’s eyes, to pull the trigger and ultimately end my endless line of horrific services in the astonished face of this sick man who was orchestrating them,

 

“free.”

© GILAD LEVANON 2010