Dictator (28 page)

Mabeki shot four rounds in quick succession. One went straight through the giant window on the far side of the room. Two ploughed into the marble floor, one so close to Carver that he could feel the stabs of tiny, needle-sharp splinters of stone against the side of his face. The fourth hit the glossy bald head of the man whose hand was clasped round Carver’s ankle, entering just above his nose and blowing away the back of his skull.

The fingers jerked open with a convulsive twitch.

Carver jumped to his feet, ran to the wall next to the door and pressed his back to it. Then, with his newly acquired gun held vertically next to his head, he slid sideways along the wall towards the door.

That was when he heard the single word ‘Carver!’

Zalika had survived!

Carver could make out the sound of feet scrabbling for purchase on the marble floor. Now he too had to move fast. He abandoned his cautious progress and dashed to the door, throwing himself forward into the hall then rolling to one side as Mabeki fired into the space where he had just been.

Carver came to rest by the body of Tina Wong. She was lying next to the other servant, so close that the blood from their wounds was mingling into a single pool on the floor. Wong’s eyes were open, looking straight into his in mute accusation: ‘I’m dead because of you.’

He looked up and brought his gun to bear. Mabeki was silhouetted against the light from the open front door. Carver’s gun was pointing right at him. Or rather, it was pointing right at Zalika Stratten, who was standing there, directly in front of Mabeki, his arm round her throat.

Her eyes looked dull. There was blood trickling from a cut on her left temple. A decade after Moses Mabeki had first kidnapped her, he had her at his mercy once again. And this time Carver had no clear shot, no answer as Mabeki rasped, ‘You try to shoot, she dies. You come after me, she dies.’

Zalika herself was silent now. But Carver could clearly see her mouth the words ‘Help me … help me!’

Carver lay on the cold marble tiles, beneath the vulgar wallpaper. The blood from the two women’s bodies was slowly spreading towards him. He cursed himself: why had he let himself be persuaded to bring an amateur, however capable, on a mission as important as this? Eaten up by frustration and helplessness, paralysed with fear for the woman he was supposed to have protected, Carver barely moved a muscle as Mabeki hustled Zalika out of the door. Only when he heard the sound of two car doors slamming shut and an engine coming to life did he get to his feet, hurdle the pathetic corpses in their blood-soaked grey dresses and start running frantically down the hall.

65

As he ran out of the house, Carver pressed ‘send’ on his phone’s text-message screen and sent the ‘OK’ signal to the number he’d been given. It felt like a lie. Yes, the Gushungos were dead. But that was where the good news ended. Everything else was going more pear-shaped by the second.

Outside, the Rolls-Royce was cruising out of the forecourt with none of the frantic speed Carver would have expected from a kidnapper making a getaway. It paused for a second as a small white delivery van covered in Chinese characters pottered past the entrance to the property and drove away down the road. The Rolls moved forward again, still going gently. Even at this sedate pace, however, it would only be a matter of a second or two before Mabeki turned left and followed the little van back down the hill towards the main entrance.

Carver could clearly see Mabeki in the driver’s seat, but there was no sign of Zalika. Either he’d shoved her down out of sight or … No, that wasn’t it. Carver hadn’t heard the sound of two doors closing. The first sound he’d heard had been the lid slamming shut. The bastard had shoved her in the boot. That was why Mabeki was going so gingerly. Any sudden movements and she’d be rattling around in there like a cat in a tumble-dryer. He didn’t want to damage the goods.

Mabeki’s caution gave Carver a fractional window of opportunity. He stood on the top step, just outside the front door, braced his legs and held the bodyguard’s pistol out in front of him in a two-handed grip. It was a Chinese model, with a communist star stamped on the grip: a QSZ-92 with fifteen nine-millimetre rounds in the magazine. The Rolls was side-on to him now – as clear a shot as he would ever have, and as safe as it would ever be. This was his one chance to end it fast.

He aimed. His finger curled round the trigger, gently squeezing it …

Carver put the gun down. Firing a nine-millimetre round at an armoured vehicle was an entirely futile activity. The bodywork was impenetrable. Even the windows would repel a bullet without so much as a scratch. He would achieve nothing except make a lot of noise and attract unwanted attention.

Mabeki knew it, too. He turned his head, leaning forward in his seat and peering out through the passenger window. Then he wrenched his mouth into the closest thing he could manage to a broad grin, gave a brief mocking wave of his hand, and hit the accelerator. The Rolls’s massive 6.7-litre engine did not exactly roar into life. A Rolls-Royce never does anything so crude. But though the noise was not spectacular, the effect certainly was. The massive car leapt forward. An instant later, it had disappeared from sight.

Carver’s instinct was to race to the Honda and give chase right away, but again he resisted the temptation. Instead, he went back into the house, past the two bodies in the hall, and returned to the living room. There, amid the lingering stench of cordite and shit, he gathered up the communion kit and put it back in the leather briefcase. No sense in leaving fingerprint-rich evidence if he didn’t have to.

On the other hand, it did make sense to leave the gun behind where it could mislead police investigators. Carver wiped down the handle and trigger then, holding it by the barrel, his hand covered by a handkerchief, replaced it in the hand of the dead bodyguard. In total, he spent thirty seconds in the room before leaving again. Keeping the handkerchief over his hand, he closed the front door then walked briskly to his car. He got in and placed his briefcase with its flap open in the footwell of the passenger seat. Then he switched applications on his phone and, for the first time all day, gave a silent, heartfelt, entirely genuine prayer of thanks: Zalika’s phone was on, and it was heading steadily up the road away from the estate. For the time being there was no need to panic. He could follow Mabeki at a distance.

Carver went back downhill to the main entrance and drove away. The road was little more than a twisting, narrow country lane, lined on either side by trees and heavy undergrowth, with no traffic to be seen in either direction. When he’d gone about a mile, Carver stopped the car by the side of the road and got out, taking the case with him. He looked around to check that no one could see him, then walked about twenty paces into the woodland and shoved the case into the heart of a large bush. Satisfied that it was completely invisible, he walked back towards the road, paused for a moment to listen for approaching engines, then stepped out on to the tarmac and round to the driver’s side of the car.

He looked at his phone display and frowned. Mabeki had reached the Tolo Highway, but instead of turning right, back towards the city, as Carver had expected, he had turned left and was heading north, towards the Chinese border.

That could complicate things. Suddenly Carver couldn’t afford to be quite so casual. When the Honda pulled away again, he had the accelerator down hard.

66

Nearly seven thousand miles to the west of Hong Kong stood the Malemban capital of Sindele. It still pretended, at least, to be the heart of a modern, functioning state. It had a central business district ringed by motorways. Their intersections led to broad four-lane boulevards, criss-crossing blocks filled with office buildings ten or even twenty storeys high. It had splendid government buildings left over from colonial times, lavishly appointed, department stores, banks with marble halls, and parks laid out with rolling lawns, shady trees and herbaceous borders.

These days, however, the roads were virtually empty, there being almost no petrol anywhere, nor spare parts for broken-down vehicles. The office buildings frequently lacked electric power or running water. The department stores were empty for want of goods to sell or customers to buy, and the banks had long since ceased to function in an economy bereft of meaningful currency. As for the parks, the lawns were now parched and bare, with just the occasional straggly weed or rusting soft drink can to break up the monotony of scorched earth. The trees had all been cut down for firewood and the empty herbaceous borders were indistinguishable from the rest of the barren terrain.

But Major Rodney Madziko of the Malemban National Army’s élite Reconnaissance Squadron had no time to contemplate the passing cityscape or bemoan its decline. He was standing in the open hatch of an amphibious BRDM-1 scout car, an old Soviet model, bought second-hand from the Russians almost thirty years ago. Its body-armour was now more rust than metal, its engine propelled it in a random combination of lurches, kangaroo-hops and staggers, and its belching exhaust pipes created their very own black smokescreen. But the 7.62mm machine gun mounted above the front crew compartment still fired live ammunition, as did those on the four other scout cars that were following Madziko’s as it made its way through the deserted streets of downtown Sindele.

It was half-past five on a Sunday morning, a perfect time to cross the city uninterrupted and unobserved. A perfect time for a coup.

Madziko’s instructions were simple: on the ‘go’ signal, get to the headquarters of the Malemban Broadcasting Corporation, secure the building and hold it until Patrick Tshonga arrived at seven to make the simultaneous announcement of Henderson Gushungo’s death and his own assumption of power on the MBC’s solitary TV channel and all four of its national radio stations. His men had been ready since long before dawn. The signal had been received. So now, as the rising sun split the streets into long expanses of deep shadow and dazzling shafts of burnished gold, the Reconnaissance Squadron was on its way.

Madziko had sworn a solemn oath in the sight of God to uphold the state of Malemba and preserve it against all its enemies, foreign and internal. So far as he was concerned, he was upholding that oath more loyally now than at any other time in his fifteen-year career as an army officer. He had been raised to believe in the essential virtues of democracy and free speech. He did not accept that oppression was any more acceptable just because a black man, rather than a white man, had imposed it. To be in the vanguard of establishing true freedom in his country was thus, to Rodney Madziko, the greatest honour he could possibly be granted.

Up ahead, he saw Broadcasting House, the MBC headquarters, named after the London home of the British Broadcasting Corporation in colonial times and unchanged ever since. It was a heavy-set, redbrick thirties office block that occupied three sides of a large courtyard, in the middle of which stood a modernist white marble fountain that had long since run dry. The fourth side of the courtyard consisted of a high metal fence that ran along the street, pierced by the building’s main entrance. A guard-hut stood by a lowered barrier. The hut was empty, nor were there any signs of life in the building itself. It was, after all, first thing on a Sunday morning. Only the bare minimum of staff would be at work at this hour.

Major Madziko could easily have ordered his driver to burst straight through the barrier, but he did not want to act like a violent oaf. They were supposed to be there in the interests of a fair, law-abiding society. So he ordered one of his men to raise the barrier then led his troop of scout cars into the courtyard, the sound of their engines echoing raucously off the building’s plain brick facade. They proceeded round the fountain, three to one side, two to the other, so that Madziko’s vehicle ended up in the middle of a line of five, all facing the main entrance. He ordered the drivers to cut their engines and jumped down from his car. His men followed him, clambering out on to the tarmac courtyard until only the gunners standing behind their machine guns remained.

Inside Broadcasting House, another major, from the army’s paratroop battalion, was watching events down below from the vantage point of a first-floor window. He was holding a walkie-talkie to his lips. He spoke very quietly into the mouthpiece, and a dozen windows slid open. From each, a round metallic snout slid forward.

‘Fire at will,’ said the major.

The moving window frames caught Madziko’s eye in an instant, but the totally unexpected shock of impending disaster took him a couple of seconds to process. Too late, he turned back to his gunner, pointed at the dark interruptions in the facade caused by the raised glass and shouted, ‘The windows! Shoot!’

By the time the first machine gun was raised, the triggers on the grenade-launchers had been pulled, the rocket flames were spurting and the grenades were on their way. A fraction of a second later, the scout cars were obliterated. The force of the blast and the thousands of razor-sharp shards of metal that filled the air blew Madziko and his men apart. In the time it takes to swat a mosquito, they were destroyed, and with them all hope of a peaceful coup.

The ambush was repeated with equal finality at the Parliament Building, the Central Bank, Police Headquarters and the President’s official residence. Wherever Patrick Tshonga’s forces went, government men were waiting for them. The rebels who had counted on the element of surprise were the ones receiving a rude and terminal shock.

67

Mabeki wasn’t making for the border. He left the highway at the first possible interchange, turned hard left, almost doubling back on himself, and drove away to the southwest. He was driving smoothly, not too fast.

Carver unconsciously clenched his jaw as the tension and concentration built inside him. Where was Mabeki going? He mentally pictured the maps of Hong Kong he’d studied, and skimmed the books he’d read. A name came to mind: Shek Kong, a former RAF base now part-used by the Chinese air force. Private aviation was allowed there, which it wasn’t at the main international airport. If Mabeki had arranged a plane to get him out of Hong Kong fast, on the first leg of the journey to Malemba, he’d very likely fly from Shek Kong.