Dictator (24 page)

Within days of buying their house, the Gushungos had set their bodyguards on to reporters and photographers who had attempted to get close to them. One reporter was taken to hospital suffering from concussion, a broken nose and two cracked ribs following a beating by Gushungo’s thugs. Faith herself had lashed out at another newsman who had followed her on a shopping expedition, slapping and scratching his face, and had only stopped when physically hauled away, still screaming obscene abuse, by her own guards. Dollond ministered to a peaceful, respectable, family-friendly congregation. He did not need that kind of aggravation.

Nor, it had transpired, did the Gushungos. When Dollond and his assistant priest Tony Gibson were invited to meet the couple in their home, they were delighted to discover that Henderson Gushungo felt that for reasons of age and ill health he might not be able to manage the rigours of a full church service. Ignoring for a moment the many parishioners far more frail than Gushungo who managed to attend every week despite being blind or incapable of walking unaided, Dollond nodded thoughtfully and said that he quite understood. It was therefore decided that the Reverend Gibson would make a personal visit every Sunday after the church service was over to administer communion in the Gushungos’ living room. There was nothing unusual about this: communion was often given in hospitals, rest homes and private houses to the dying or infirm. It was no trouble at all to add one more stop to Rev. Gibson’s weekly round.

Shortly after nine o’clock on this particular Sunday morning, however, Simon Dollond received a call from Faith Gushungo’s personal assistant informing him that the First Lady and President had both been afflicted by food poisoning and would not be able to receive communion as usual. Rev. Dollond sympathized with the Gushungos’ plight, agreeing that few things were more unpleasant than food poisoning and assuring the PA that he would make sure Tony Gibson got the message and would not disturb them.

‘I hope that the President and Mrs Gushungo feel much better next week,’ Dollond concluded.

‘Oh yes, sir, I am quite sure that they will be greatly improved,’ agreed Zalika.

‘That’s the general idea, certainly,’ Carver muttered under his breath.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said, having put down the phone.

‘God bless you, my child,’ he replied.

Carver wasn’t a big believer in elaborate disguises. He was blessed with a face that was neither pretty-boy handsome nor memorably ugly. His height was somewhat above average, but not so much as to make him stand out. He carried very little spare weight, so his jawline was not blurred by excess fat or sagging skin, and there was no bloating in his cheeks. When people described him, they could have been talking about a million other guys in their thirties or forties. The one feature that marked him out most clearly, the greenness of his eyes, could easily be dealt with using contact lenses. The combination of toughness, competence and relentless determination that gave his character its strength he camouflaged just as easily by hiding it below the surface of his personality like a shark lurking beneath the waters of a cheery tourist beach.

He’d entered Hong Kong using a Canadian passport in the name of Bowen Erikson, an alias he’d used for many years. For the job itself, though, he’d be using another of his identities, Roderick Wishart. It seemed right, somehow, for the character he had in mind.

Carver slipped on the grey wig and covered his eyes with brown contacts and the tortoiseshell spectacles. He put on the second-hand dark-grey suit and a black T-shirt, over which went an item of clothing he had bought at Vanpoulles: a dove-grey vicar’s bib with a white dog-collar. Carver then slipped Wishart’s wallet into the right inside pocket of his suit jacket. It contained the vicar’s passport and a couple of his unimpressive-looking credit cards: it would take a lot more than a cursory search to uncover that they were directly linked to Panamanian bank accounts with hundreds of thousands of US dollars in credit. Three clean SIM cards were stitched into the lining of the wallet. Into the other inside pocket he slipped a small leather-bound prayer book. Its centre had been hollowed out to provide room for the Erikson passport and another set of cards. Carver never left home without the means to get anywhere in the world, fast.

Six days earlier in Tunbridge Wells, Carver had acquired a scuffed old briefcase with a flap-top secured by two buckled straps. Into it went a glass cruet – a glass flask with a silver screw top, filled with communion wine – and a silver-plate chalice from which to drink it. Whoever had owned the case before him had obviously not taken the trouble to screw his cruets tightly enough, because the fabric lining was dotted with purple wine stains, which gave off a faint vinegary smell. Then came a small, round silver box with a hinged snap-shut top, which contained twenty communion wafers. This was the pyx.

Carver had also bought a gold-plated crucifix on a plinth. It was about a foot high. A figure of Jesus hung on the cross. He’d been advised that it was normal to provide one of these to give a religious feel to the secular space in which the communion would be held. For himself, he had a red silk stole. It would be draped round his neck like a long scarf, reaching to his waist. A golden cross was embroidered at either end of the stole, with a red and gold fringe beneath it.

The last items to go in the case were a Book of Common Worship, which contained all the words of the prayers and responses he would require, along with A4 sheets of paper on which were printed the readings for the day.

Carver was sticking to his no-gun policy. He expected that he would be searched on arrival at the house: it was inconceivable to him that a man with as many enemies as Henderson Gushungo, protected by a sidekick as devious as Moses Mabeki, would not take such basic security precautions. Guns and knives would, in any case, be superfluous. If his plan was going to work, it would do so silently, quickly, before his targets even knew they had been attacked. Gunfire would be a mark of failure.

Carver made a final run-through to confirm that he had everything he needed. Zalika was still in the bathroom, getting ready.

‘You done yet?’ he called through the door. ‘Because in exactly ten minutes I’ll be going down the emergency stairs and out through the service exit. If you’re not ready, I won’t wait for you.’

56

The security guard at the main gate of the Hon Ka Mansions development waved Carver’s car through without a second glance. It was Sunday morning. An Englishman wearing the costume of one of their clergymen had arrived to see the Gushungos. There was nothing unusual about that. If this one had brought a young woman with him that was none of the guard’s concern.

Carver drove uphill along a winding drive that ran between two lines of newly built villas, each standing in its own grounds, discreetly hidden from its neighbours. Shortly before he reached the Gushungo property, he stopped and let Zalika out of the car. Then he continued up the drive, turned into the Gushungos’ semicircular forecourt and parked his scuffed and battered old Honda next to a gleaming silver Rolls-Royce. From the way it sat fractionally low on its wheels, he guessed it had been given the full security treatment and was now as impregnable as a very fast, ultra-luxurious tank. It was a beautiful machine, all right, but it had been put to an ugly purpose that embodied the absolute contempt held by so many African dictators for their people’s poverty. Carver thought of Justus and his children. They were sweating in prison cells, and here was Gushungo swanning around in a Roller.

Well, not for very much longer.

The front door to the house was raised a few feet and reached by a short flight of steps. One of the presidential bodyguards opened it and glared suspiciously at his visitor. He was half a head taller than Carver and fifty pounds heavier. His neck strained against the tightly buttoned collar of his white shirt. His shaved head glinted with sweat.

‘Good morning,’ said Carver, holding out a hand. ‘My name is Wishart. I’m an assistant priest at St George’s Church. I’ve come to give Holy Communion to Mr and Mrs … well, to President and, ah … well, the Gushungos, anyway.’

‘Wait here,’ the guard said, and disappeared into the house.

Half a minute later, Moses Mabeki was standing by the door, the guard looming massively behind him. Carver felt his skin prickle with a combination of tension and disgust. The memory of that night in Mozambique came back to him so vividly that he could not believe Mabeki would not know that he was the man who had caused his disfigurement. He had to remind himself that he had been wearing a mask over his face, that Mabeki could not possibly recognize him. And yet he could not escape the instinctive sense that Mabeki knew, by some force of intuition, precisely who he was.

If he did know, however, Mabeki gave no outward sign of it.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, not attempting even a veneer of civility.

‘I’m Wishart, the Reverend Roderick Wishart if one’s being formal. I’m afraid poor Tony Gibson isn’t feeling terribly well this morning. Food poisoning. You know how ghastly that is …’

Mabeki gave no sign of knowing or caring anything about food poisoning, one way or the other.

‘Well, anyway,’ Carver continued, ‘he couldn’t make it, so Simon Dollond asked me to step in for him, as it were.’

Mabeki did not acknowledge Carver’s words. He looked past him at the car, studying it, assessing it as a possible threat. Carver thought of the Terminator films, the data flashing up before the cyborg’s eyes as he scanned the world around him. Mabeki seemed barely more human.

He looked back at Carver. ‘Come in,’ he said. Then he glanced at the guard and said, ‘Search him.’

57

An hour before dawn on Sunday morning, South Africa time, three black couples, dressed up to the nines and waving bottles of Dom Perignon in the air, came laughing and flirting out of the huge, opulent and achingly fashionable Taboo club on West Street in the wealthy Sandton district of Johannesburg. As they tumbled into a massive white stretch Hummer, they certainly attracted attention. But that was only because the young women were wearing exceptionally tiny dresses, even by the proudly sinful standards of Taboo.

The uniformed driver closed the limo door behind his last passenger and drove away. Behind the blacked-out windows, two of the women wriggled out of their frocks, as party girls do in the backs of limousines. There was, though, nothing remotely sexual about the way they undressed. The giggling had stopped, as had the pretence of being drunk. The party clothes and skyscraper heels were discarded and immediately replaced by black combat fatigues, bulletproof vests and rubber-soled military boots, handed out by the third woman from one of four plastic storage boxes that had been placed on the floor of the passenger compartment. The three men put on identical uniforms, taken from the second box. The third contained a variety of automatic weapons, all with noise-suppressors, knives and small-scale explosive charges. In the fourth and smallest box were radio headsets and night-vision equipment. Swiftly, without needing to be told, the five black-uniformed figures checked their weapons and tested their radios.

The car left the central business district and headed into Sandhurst, a top-of-the-market residential area where palatial mansions stood in grounds covering acres, on blocks that measured a quarter of a mile on every side. It was followed all the way by a dusty white minivan that remained at least a hundred yards behind it at all times. The two vehicles passed houses barricaded behind high walls and heavy gates, and watched over by CCTV cameras. Every property seemed to bear a metal plate by the entrance, stating that it was guarded by XPT Security. The company liked to boast that it had reduced the local crime-rate to zero, thanks to its combination of regular armed patrols and constant video surveillance. Its cars were a round-the-clock presence on the streets and its customers were assured that the company’s response time, coordinated from a control room that operated for twenty-four hours of every day in the year, would never exceed six minutes, under any circumstances.

The white van pulled up in the moonshadow cast by a large jacaranda tree growing by the side of the road. Up ahead, the limo had stopped in front of a gate that would not have looked out of place outside a maximum-security prison. It rose at least twelve feet into the air and was made of thick stainless-steel plates, topped with four rows of barbed wire, angled outwards to prevent anyone climbing over the top. The gate opened by sliding across the entrance from left to right, from the point of view of the road. To the left-hand side of the gate, a guardhouse was built into the property’s thick concrete-covered wall. South Africans drive on the left, so anyone driving into the property would therefore pass directly by the guardhouse and the gate would only need to be half-opened to let them in.

This was Wendell Klerk’s principal South African townhouse. Its protective features befitted a man of his wealth, prominence and exposure to possible threat.

There were always two men in the guardhouse, working eight-hour shifts round the clock. One acted as the sentry and gatekeeper, watching the world go by through a thick plate-glass window; the other monitored the network of cameras, motion detectors and other alarms that covered the entire house and grounds. The feeds from all the properties’ cameras were also available to staff back at the corporate control room. And just in case anyone should somehow get into the grounds, a kennel to the rear of the guardhouse contained three German Shepherds, bred for speed, strength and aggression. They could be released at any moment without the guards having to leave their post.

The men and women in the back of the limo knew all this, just as they knew about the maximum six minutes that would elapse between the first alarm sounding and the arrival of the XPT personnel, guns out and sirens blaring. They would be long gone by then.

One of the passenger doors opened and the woman who’d kept her party clothes on almost fell out on to the pavement. She was a fine-looking girl, and her micro-skirted, backless, halter-necked excuse for a dress revealed every inch of her toned, glossy-skinned figure. She paused for a moment on the pavement to gather her wits, then teetered towards the guardhouse, brushing away the tumbling waves of golden-brown hair extensions from her face then holding a hand to her mouth to stifle her giggles.