The Disappeared Read Online Free Page A

this morning. She couldn’t escape the steely inner
cold that lined her soul. She tried hard not to think about the dream ... about
the hideous images that flashed through her mind even now. And the thing. The
huge nagging terrible thing inside. The thing that told her that told her that
the images that had shattered her sleep that morning were much more than just a
bad dream.

 
    From:               Special
Envoy (Africa) –
    US Department of State
    CODE:            00X
– 1STY - alpha
    CABLE:          Secured
    Priority:           HIGH
    To:                   Directorate
– Project Obsidian
    Subject:           Request
for INCURSION TEAM
    Status:             Approved
    Order:              Q3-345
    Classification:
Classified - Level 9
    Target:             District
of Bishop
    (South Africa)
     
                            BEGIN
ENCRYPTION
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    Request for special
incursion unit ALPHA Team 9 received. Authorisation confirmed. ETA 07h00.
    Incursion team
fully briefed on Target Area BISHOP and CODE 6 incident.
    PLEASE NOTE:
ALPHA Team 9 operates and exists under plausible deniability, provision 6.2.3.
Please make concomitant arrangements. Ensure effective infrastructure for
clinical exit strategy
    Please be
advised that in addition to neutralisation and assessment of Target Area BISHOP,
ALPHA Team 9 will be tasked with the retrieval of sensitive documents and items.
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                            END
ENCRYPTION
    ...
    END CABLE

Chapter Two
     
     
5:47
     
    Lindiwe awoke
with a start.
    Her eyes
flipped open and she stared at the stained white ceiling of her caravan. One of
the caravan’s two air vents was located just above her head. It was one of
those air vents housed in a little square canopy on the caravan’s roof; a little
white gazebo that allowed air to move through ducts located on its four sides.
The interior of the air vent bore an ancient stain that she had studied
obsessively for a thousand torturous hours while lying in bed. Again and again.
Now – once again – the stain held her attention. It looked like a chicken
feather and even had a spine running up its centre; just like a real feather.
As Lindiwe had done a million times before, she wondered exactly how anyone
managed to get a stain in that particular location.
    Lindiwe was
awake. But she was dead tired. She felt as if she hadn’t been sleeping at all.
As if she had been merely simmering in an attenuated state of mind, just below
wakefulness – or just above sleep – for hours. This state engendered no dreams.
Just a thousand delirious unresolved thoughts. Thoughts whose dying embers
sizzled uncomfortably in her consciousness.
    It felt like a
battery had leaked in her mind.
    This was
nothing new to Lindiwe. But this morning it felt particularly prickly. She
rubbed her forehead trying to assuage the muddy thickness that lay just beneath
her skull.
    As she lay on
the dishevelled sheets, she felt that old familiar feeling. Rising slowly. From
within the dark waters of her soul. She felt the anxiety slowly rise to the surface.
    Anxiety.
    That old
overbearing friend she knew so well.
    It should have
been a happy day. No. An ecstatic day. Today she was six months clean ...
without a single drop to drink. Not one single little drop. Six months. God,
it felt like an eternity.
    Today was six
months. Yet she felt so empty. And scared. It was the same old undefined
anxiety. Unrelated and impalpable. The more you probed its origins the more it
became like a drop of dye in a bucket of water – spreading until it became
indistinct yet having coloured all the water a slightly darker shade.
    Yet. Today – mixed
in with the anxiety – there was something else. Something she