Deon Meyer (17 page)

 

 

“I am so sorry to bother you so late, but can I speak to Thobela, please?”

 

 

Every time the same response: a sleepy voice saying, “Who?”

 

 

Just to be sure, she had searched with Ananzi and Google on the Internet, typed in “Thobela Mpayipheli” and to be thorough, “Thobela Mpayipeli” and clicked on SEARCH .

 

 

Your search— Thobela Mpayipheli— does not appear in any documents.

 

 

So she had turned off the computer, took her handbag, said good-bye to the few colleagues still at work, and come home to a long hot bath, half a glass of red wine, her skin-care routine, music, and a last cigarette.

 

 

She rose to pack away the bottles and jars in the bathroom and returned to lie back in the chair, drawing deeply on the tobacco, closing her eyes to let Johnson’s “As the Years Go Passing By” flow over her. It evoked nostalgia in her, for Nic, for the intensity of those moments. No. Longing for a journey. To the smoky blues bars of Chicago. To a world of pulsing, moaning rhythms, sensual voices, and strange new experiences, a new uncontaminated life.

 

 

Focused on the music. Sleep was near. The prospect of a long, well-deserved rest. She wasn’t due back at work until noon.

 

 

Where was he now, the big, bad Xhosa biker?

 

 

* * *

He was two kilometers from Leeu-Gamka, the headlights turned off, the GS standing in the veld a few hundred meters from the road. He stripped off the suit, locked it in one luggage case, put the helmet in the other, and began walking toward the lights.

 

 

The night air was sharp and cool, carrying the pungent scent of Karoo shrubs crushed under his boots. The weariness of the last fifty or sixty kilometers had invaded his body, his eyes were red and scratchy, he was thirsty and sleepy.

 

 

No longer twenty, his body complained. He knew he had been running on adrenaline, but the levels were running low. He knew the next few hours till dawn would be the most difficult. He walked briskly to get his circulation going, his boots crunched gravel on the road verge rhythmically. Lights from the petrol station on the right and the police station on the left of the highway came steadily closer. There was no movement, no sign of life, no roadblock or other indications of a search. Had the petrol jockey in Laingsburg said nothing? He owed him, he thought. It was so difficult to read people, how oddly they behaved. Why did the man not tell him he would keep quiet? Why keep him worrying? Was he still making up his mind?

 

 

He walked into the petrol station. There was a twenty-four-hour kiosk, a tiny café. Behind the counter was a black woman, fast asleep with her chin dropped onto her chest, mouth half open. He took two cans of Coca-Cola from the fridge, a few chocolate bars from the shelf. Behind her on the wall he saw the rack of road map books.

 

 

He cleared his throat. Her eyes opened.

 

 

“Sorry, sister,” he said softly, smiling sympathetically at her.

 

 

“Was I asleep?” she asked, baffled.

 

 

“Just resting a bit,” he said.

 

 

“What time is it?”

 

 

“Just after three,” he said.

 

 

She took the cool drinks and chocolate and rang them up. He asked for a map book.

 

 

“Are you lost?”

 

 

“No, sister, we are looking for a shortcut.”

 

 

“From here? There are no shortcuts here.” But she took the book down from the shelf and put it in the plastic bag with the other things.

 

 

He paid and left.

 

 

“Drive safely,” she called after him, and settled back in her chair.

 

 

He looked back once he was a little way off. He could see through the window that her head had dropped again. He wondered if she would remember he was there, in case anyone asked.

 

 

Halfway back to the bike he popped open a can of Coke, drinking deeply, burped the gas, drank again. The sugar would do him good. He emptied the can, opened a Milo bar, pushing the chunks into his mouth. A white Mercedes flashed past on the highway, spoiling his night vision for a while. He put the empty can and candy wrappers back into the plastic bag.

 

 

He would have to inspect the map book. He had no flashlight. The moon gave less light now, almost setting in the west. He should have bought a flashlight.

 

 

Perhaps the moonlight was sufficient. He left the road, cutting across the veld, for the first time thinking of puff adders. The night was cold, they shouldn’t be active. He reached the GS and took the book out of the bag.

 

 

The routes and roads were a spiderweb of alternatives, spooky-looking in the dim light. He strained to see, the moon cast a shadow of his head over the page, forcing him to shift around, his eyes irritatingly close to the page. He found the right page.

 

 

There was a road from there, from Leeu-Gamka to Fraserburg.

 

 

Fraserburg?

 

 

The direction was wrong, too far west, too few possibilities. He must go north.

 

 

He saw there were two additional routes from Beaufort West, snaking threads to Aberdeen in the east and Loxton approximately north-northwest. That might do. He turned to the next page to follow it. Loxton, Carnarvon, Prieska. Too far west.

 

 

Paging back, he followed the N1 to Three Sisters. The road forked there. To Bloemfontein or Kimberley Paging on, he found the Kimberley route, traced it with his finger. Promising. Many more options.

 

 

In a game of chess, your opponent is looking for patterns of play. Give him the pattern. Then change it.

 

 

“We will change it at Three Sisters, herr obergruppenführer,” he said softly.

 

 

He would have to fill up in Beaufort West. He would ask how far it was to Bloemfontein, what the road was like. With any luck, the spooks would hear about it. And at Three Sisters he would take the road to Kimberley.

 

 

He took out the second can of Coke.

 

 

* * *

It was raining in the Great Karoo. The weather had rolled in over the plains, rumbling and spitting like some giant primordial predator, visible in the night sky only when lightning came searching in fantastic forms, and now here it was above them, the rains of Africa, extravagant and pitiless.

 

 

Captain Tiger Mazibuko cursed, splashing through ankle-deep puddles, wiping water from his face. The rain fell in dark sheets; thunder growled continuously.

 

 

He had been checking the maps in the traffic officer’s car. There were at least two side roads they would have to block. Halfway between the roadblock and Beaufort West one turned east to Nelspoort, the other was closer, forking west to Wage-naarskraal. Unfamiliar routes, but alternatives available to a fugitive. And they had too few men and too few vehicles. He would have to deploy four RU members; the police van would have to drop them off, minimizing the effect of his roadblock here. They would have to guard the roads in pairs. They would be on foot, while he had a motorbike. Visibility was terrible in this weather. It was a fucking fiasco. But that was typical. Backward. Everything was backward. You could say what you liked about the Americans, but if the FBI Hostage Rescue Team had been here, it would have been four-wheel drives and armored vehicles and helicopters. He knew because he had been there, in Quantico, Virginia, for four months; he had seen it with his own eyes. But no, in Africa things worked differently; here, we fucked up. Here, we putter around with a bloody bakkie and a Corolla and a frightened traffic cop and two Boers who worry about their caps getting rained on and just one fucking middle-aged Xhosa on a motorbike— jissis, couldn’t the fucker get a more respectable form of transport? Even the bad guys were backward in Africa.

 

 

He shook his fist at the heavens, which for a moment were still. He screamed his frustration, an uncanny sound, but the rain drowned it out.

 

 

He pushed his head into the tent. Four soldiers looked dumbstruck at him.

 

 

“I have to send you out,” he said, calm and under control.

 

 

* * *

The early hours began to take their toll in the Ops Room; urgency had leaked away.

 

 

She struggled to decide whether to send people to Derek Late-gan and Quartus Naudé tonight.

 

 

They weren’t compelled to cooperate. They were retired agents, had taken the package, probably not benign to the present government. A visit at this time of night would just complicate matters. She weighed that against the need for information. What could they contribute? Could they confirm that Mpayipheli had worked for the KGB? What difference would that make to the investigation?

 

 

Let it wait,
she thought. She looked up at the big chart of southern Africa on the wall.

 

 

Where are you, Mpayipheli?

 

 

Are you on the Ni? How strong is your motivation? Are you sleeping somewhere in a hotel room while we make the wrong assumptions about you?

 

 

No. He was out there, somewhere; he couldn’t be far from Maz-ibuko now. Contact. That is what they needed to shake off the lethargy, to regain momentum, to be in control again.

 

 

Contact. Action. Control.

 

 

Where was Thobela Mpayipheli?

 

 

She stood up. There was another job to do.

 

 

“May I have your attention, everyone,” she said.

 

 

Unhurried, they turned to her.

 

 

“This time of night is always the worst,” she said. “I know you’ve had a long day and a long night, but if our calculations are right, we can finish this before eight o’clock.”

 

 

There was little response. Blank faces gazed back at her.

 

 

“I think we must see how many people we can relieve for an hour or two. But before we decide who is going to take a nap, there are some who wonder why we regard this fugitive as a criminal. I can understand why.”

 

 

Bloodshot eyes looked back at her. She knew she was making no impression.

 

 

“But we must also wonder where all that money came from. We must remember he worked for organized crime. Remember that he hired out his talents for the purpose of violence and intimidation. That he stole two firearms, after rejecting the chance to work with the state. See the nature of the man.”

 

 

Here and there a head nodded.

 

 

“We must be professional. There are too many gaps in our knowledge, too many questions unanswered. We have a very good idea now of what is on that hard drive. And that news is not good. We are talking about information on a mole at the highest level, code name Inkululeko. We are talking about very, very sensitive information that can cause untold damage in the wrong hands. Our job is to protect the state. Sympathy has no place in this. If we put everything into the balance, there is only one choice: be professional. Keep focused. Look at the facts, not the people behind them.”

 

 

She looked over the room.

 

 

“Have you any questions?”

 

 

No reaction.

 

 

But no matter. She had planted the seed. She had to force herself not to look up at the ceiling where she knew the microphones were hidden.

 

 

 

15.

H
is thoughts roamed freely, for this road did not require much concentration. He thought of this and that, knowing he must get some sleep but not wanting to waste the darkness. Somewhere beyond Three Sisters once the sun was up he would find a screened and shaded place in the veld for a few hours’ rest. He was familiar with the landscape of sleep deprivation, knew the greatest danger was poor judgment, bad decisions. His thoughts jumped around: Who were the spooks that were after him? How desperate were they? What was the whole purpose, the stuff on the drive that cast a hex over him?

 

 

In one month’s time Pakamile would be finished with grade one. They could leave the township. How long had they been talking of this?

 

 

She didn’t want to. She always wanted to stick to the known, afraid of change. As she had been with him, when he had started courting her. When he had first seen her, that time in the investment consultant’s office, her hands— such deft, slim hands— her grace and pride, had been like a beacon to him. She wasn’t even aware of him, but he could barely hear what the man was saying, she had consumed him so. He had been in love before, now and then, sometimes lust, sometimes more than that, but never absolutely right, never the way it was with Miriam, and she wanted nothing to do with him at first. The father of her child had put her off men, but he couldn’t think of anything but her— Lord, to be in love like a teenager at his age, sweaty palms and heart beating haywire when he sat with her in Thibault Square in the bright sun and watched the cloud on the mountain grow and shrink and grow and he tried to hide the longing, afraid to scare her, his desire to touch her, to hold her hand, to press her against him and say, “I love you, you belong to me, let me keep you safe, I will chase away your fears like an evil spirit, I will cherish you, hold you and honor you.”

 

 

He had to wait a year before he could make love to her, a year, twelve months of sighs and dreams, not at all what he had expected, soft and slow, quenching, and later his fingers on her body, no longer a young woman’s body, found the traces of motherhood and he was overwhelmed with compassion, his hands traced the marks in awe at this thing that she had accomplished, the life she had created and carried and borne; in her and on her she carried the fullness of her vocation, and he could only trace it with his fingertips, so conscious of his incompleteness, so filled with the urge to find his own.