Mosaic (2 page)

Increasingly De Witte found the days long, the work tiring. He wondered sometimes, waiting wearily in the dark for his car, if age was finally catching up on him. He was fifty-nine, a strong and vigorous man, and his command of the business of counter-terrorism had never been fuller, defter or more effective. Only sometimes he wondered if the energy and enthusiasm he invested in the job were as great now as they had once been.

It had to be age. Certainly he felt no less passionate a commitment to the defence of his country. He considered himself fortunate to have been able to serve that passion, in one capacity or another, all his adult life. He was proud of his contribution; not boastful, but quietly satisfied with his record of service to his people and his land. He knew, as no one else could, the number of times his instincts and his professionalism had averted disaster. It was a cause for pride. He also knew what the wider world thought of him: not only black Africa but the querulous white liberals of Europe and America. He could contemplate their self-righteous disapproval with absolute equanimity, even at the end of a long day. There were only four million people in all the world whose opinions he cared about, and all of them were South Africans and all of them were white.

A small sound reached him from across the dark road. There were doorways there too, also belonging to government offices, though the doors were never used: De Witte could not remember when he last saw someone come or go through one. They were no more than black alcoves off the dark street, but in one of them tonight something was crying. It was a tiny sound, barely audible, and he could not be sure if it was a child or a woman, or even an animal in pain. He peered into the shadows. “Hey there: you got trouble?”

The sound stopped abruptly. Then it began again: a faint keening. De Witte, frowning, looked up the street. His car was just nosing round the corner, fifty metres away. What he ought to do depended on who it could be. Not a ter—you couldn't get that sort of sound out of them by nailing them to the wall—so although caution was a necessary part of his life-style De Witte did not feel threatened. He could call the police, in which case some hungry child or woman who'd got herself in trouble would find herself going through the official mill with very likely a charge at the end of it. He could wait for his driver; but he did not care to be dependent on a servant for any more than his contracted work. Or he could do nothing. But he was not an uncaring man. He did his job, and did it thoroughly, because he cared so much about certain tilings, not because he cared too little. While the car was still half a street away he crossed over, following the thin threads of sound until he found the huddled shape in one of the doorways from which they issued.

It was a woman, swathed in a tattered dress whose print pattern grew clearer in the lights of the approaching car and a rag of a shawl. Her head was also swathed and he could not see her face. He touched her with his toe. “Hey, poppy, you wanting something?”

The glint of eyes put her black face in perspective and she shuffled hurriedly to her feet. She did not look towards the car. She said, “I got what I want,” and both the words and the tone were so at variance with the abject manner of her that De Witte straightened, instantly on his guard. But as he stepped back she went with him, her step as elastic as a cat's, and polished metal winked between them in the headlamps'gleam; for only a moment. Then the blade the woman had snatched from her ragged clothes was hilt-deep in De Witte's chest, the woman was lithely running and De Witte was slowly, slowly railing.

He was not aware of hitting the ground, but an incalculable time later he opened his eyes on an oblique view of the dark and dusty street punctuated, somewhat surrealistically, by the white-wall tyres of his car and the shiny boots of his chauffeur. Detachedly, he considered the possibility that Jacob made a better job of boots than any servant in Pretoria. As a kind of afterthought he wondered if a man with a knife stuck in his chest should be worrying about shoes. The knife did not actually hurt; or if it did, it hurt so much that shock was preventing him from registering it. He knew more about the relationship of shock to pain than most doctors, he thought sagely. It was part of his job.

None of this showed in his face. Jacob Sithole, bending over the body of the man who was his employer and thought himself his master, saw only the large still body lying stiffly, almost primly, on its side, the slack face ashy-white in the wash of the head-lights, the brilliant-cut diamond eyes half open, vacant and fading. He had to bend close enough to hear the rattle of breath in De Witte's throat to know that he was alive. He looked up the empty street after the vanished woman.

“Oh you bad bastard man,” he murmured, more to himself than to De Witte. “So finally you hurt somebody who found a way of hurting you back. So now I guess you think I'm going to bust my gut getting some kind of help for you. For why? So you can get well and hurt some more people? Man, man—you ask a lot.”

He gazed down at the man on the ground, and up the street to where there were lights and people and telephones. He began, almost reluctantly to walk. After a pace or two he began to run.

While the big man with the white moustache lay in a hospital room, battling with the pain of healing which seemed to him far worse than that of the injury itself, and wondering if he should tell Jacob that his soliloquy had been overheard, his doctor was serving coffee in his office to Elinor De Witte and trying to explain why, although the repair operation had been wholly successful and her husband appeared to be making a good recovery, there was in fact little doubt but that she would soon be his widow.

“The knife wound is no longer the problem,” he said. “Though the point actually entered the heart, the damage really wasn't that great: granted that we got to him before he bled to death. But while we were in there stitching him up, we found other problems. Elinor, I don't know how he's kept up the pace as long as he has. He should have been in here talking to me three years ago. Then I could have told him: slow down, take holidays, enjoy your life and your heart will do you till you're eighty. Now? There's nothing I can tell him, or you, except that he has the heart of a sick old man.

“If he gets over this, as he should, and if he never does another day's work, he could enjoy reasonable health for maybe ten years. But if he goes back to his job—any job, really, but his job in particular—Elinor, he'll be dead in a matter of months. I'm sorry, there is no gentler way of putting it, we might as well have the cards face up from the start. He has to choose between being an old man twenty years before his time, or acting his age and dying.

“If he'll let us, we can give him a life worth looking forward to. But that's the choice he'll have to make, and you and I both know him too well, Elinor, to suppose he'll choose as we'd wish him to.”

Elinor De Witte sat for a long time in the comfortable, very slightly shabby surroundings of her own drawing-room. The familiarity of her belongings, which waymarked her life with Joachim De Witte through three decades, was of more support to her than a close family. She looked at the curios and the photographs, and when a swift velot dusk swallowed the golden afternoon it did not matter that the room was dark because she knew everything in it intimately.

She thought about Joachim: the fierce red lion of a man he had been in his twenties, defending his land with his gun and the strength of his arm and his determination. In those days South Africa was a land of sun and blood, and a man was judged on his ability to hold what was his. In their determination to hold and prosper men like Joachim De Witte dragged the country out of the tribal morning into the full day of nationhood. Now their youth was gone and they were still holding it with strength and determination, and sometimes also with guns, because the young men who should have taken their place had not the same vision, the sense of purpose.

But of all the strong men, and they were all better known than De Witte, both at home and abroad, none had made as great a contribution to the survival of the Republic. A nation under siege, from within and without, depends utterly on the quality of its intelligence, and De Witte had created an intelligence service that was the grudging envy of half the world.

And it was because of his massive importance to his country, and not because of his incalculable worth to her, that Elinor De Witte was even contemplating what she was. It was a thing too terrible to undertake from even the most loving selfishness.

She had essayed the idea—tentatively, covertly—with Joachim's doctor. He had ruled it out, kindly but totally. De Witte was a rare D-type, he said, explaining what that meant: that the chances of finding a suitable match in the time that Joachim had left were so vastly remote that she should dismiss the possibility from her mind.

Except that Elinor knew something which the doctor did not, something that even Joachim did not know—and which he must never know, whatever she did and whatever the consequences. In the dark room, surrounded by the shadowy pictures her thought-blind eyes needed no help to see, she wrestled with the appalling dilemma her twenty-five-year-old secret had become. She dared not seek help or advice. Anyone capable of advising her in this would have a vested interest, and if she shared her secret with those who needed De Witte even more than she did it would be too late for tears, too late for conscience: the terrible thing would be done. Only while she kept silent could she choose to do nothing; but through the long black night the aching within her pushed her steadily, and at last unresistingly, towards that ultimate act of love and betrayal, and when the clear pale light of dawn crept into the quiet room, from which the agony and the turmoil were finally gone, she picked up the telephone.

The man who was De Witte's deputy was unable to fill the big man's shoes. Danny Vanderbilt, regarding him woodenly across the acacia expanse of the desk, was conscious for the first time of the actual size of the office, the size of the furniture, most of all the size of the vacancy left by the man by whom and around whom the department had been constructed. But he nodded politely enough in the gaps left by what Botha was saying. He knew that his opinion was not being sought.

Nor was his discretion being trusted very far, which was another change. If Botha found himself running the department permanently, which God forbid, he would have to learn to confide in his operatives. He had got all this need-to-know nonsense from the Americans he was so taken with, but Vanderbilt saw nothing in the results obtained by the CIA to justify emulating their methods.

“All you need to know,” said Botha, and Vanderbilt nodded politely, “is that Colonel De Witte is depending on you finding the man whose file you have there and bringing him in.”

Vanderbilt lifted the cardboard cover and considered the photograph. The face was unfamiliar to him. “Who is he?”

“He's a ter,” said Botha. He seldom used a proper word if a colloquialism would do. “Listen, I've got better things to do with my day than telling you what you can read. The information's all there: study it. There should be enough there to put you on his track. Find him and bring him in.”

That easy, hey? thought Vanderbilt. Aloud he said, “What if he's out of the country?”

A little yellow fire sparked in Botha's jaundiced eye. “He
is
out of the country. He got out, or more accurately was got out, via Rhodesia”—Ian Smith may have capitulated but there would be no Zimbabwe in Walter Botha's lifetime—”five weeks after the Mpani raid and near as we can make out a scant ten minutes ahead of the Army. He went to England. Will you read the damned file?”

Vanderbilt gave a soft low whistle. Impressed in spite of himself, he leafed through the flimsy sheets. “So he was one of the six.”

In a celebrated incident two years previously a terror gang had shot its way into the building where they were now talking, killing two security men and a secretary, and released seventeen prisoners from the detention cells in the basement. As most of those detained were suspected associates of Joshua Mpani the raid was widely beheved to have been instigated by him, a rumour which was never refuted by the rebel group or its leader. It would probably have been claimed as a victory of considerable propaganda and practical value had the escape proved as successful as the raid.

But De Witte, spitting tacks, had saturated the borderlands with army patrols and put the squeeze on communities known to be sympathetic to the Mpani group. Eight of the seventeen detainees were recovered, another three were killed resisting arrest; fourteen terrorists were taken prisoner, five terrorists were killed. Joshua Mpani was one of them. Six men rescued from government detention reached the safety of the border, but to all intents and purposes it had cost an entire rebel unit to get them there. One of those expensive men was Joel Grant.

“If he's still in England,” said Vanderbilt thoughtfully, still skimming through the papers, “how am I supposed to get him out?”

Botha sniffed and jerked his chair forward in a petulant little gesture meant to convey to his subordinate that the audience was over. “You're an experienced man, Vanderbilt. It says so on your record, presumably to explain the ludicrous salary we pay you. You'll think of something.”

Vanderbilt elevated a sardonic eyebrow but declined to chase the hare. Sticking stubbornly to the point he said, “Can I hurt him?”

Botha rocked a hand ambivalently. “So long as you don't actually injure him. That is important.”

Great, thought Vanderbilt sourly. “Then can I—?”

Botha cut him off, inadvertently answering the question he had forestalled. “All I ask,” he said, “is that you don't involve the embassy.”

Two days later Danny Vanderbilt was driving a hired car up a wet road, shivering intermittently in his too light clothing, reflecting on the amazingly dismal nature of the main highway linking the city of London with its chief international airport. He bad been here once before, more than ten years before, and he had thought the same thing then. Also, it was still raining.