Silent Predator (53 page)

Tom heard a moan from inside the lodge.

He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. Khan had stopped his crying – for good, he thought. Tom looked up over the raised deck of the verandah and heard the groaning again.

He’d tried three times to get a number for the Malawian police, first at Cape Maclear, and then at headquarters in Lilongwe, but each time he’d got one – from UK directory assistance who put him through to Malawi – the number was either wrong or simply rang off.

Janet Greeves had shown she was ready to kill, and he didn’t fancy going into a darkened building to flush her out. His strategy was to sit tight until daylight and try either to negotiate with her, then take her into custody, or keep trying until he made contact with the local police. The other unknown was Nick Roberts. He was supposedly en route, and Tom tightened his
hand on the pistol grip of Khan’s AK 47 in anticipation of that showdown.

The satellite phone rang.

Tom looked at the screen and saw the caller identification had been blocked.

‘Hello,’ he said into the handset.

‘Khan?’

There was a noise behind the voice, like the whining of a motor. Tom turned the phone away from him slightly, to muffle his voice. ‘Yes.’

‘The sun will shine on those who stand.’

Shit, Tom thought. It was obviously a coded challenge, and Tom had no idea of what the reply was. ‘What did you say?’

‘Is that you, Furey?’

Tom said nothing.

Nick laughed on the other end of the crackly satellite connection. ‘I heard the gunfire. I wondered if it had all gone pear-shaped. If you’ve got Khan’s phone, then he’s dead. Have you met our Janet yet?’

‘It’s over, Nick.’

‘Yes, right, Mr Bruce Willis, sir. Next you’ll be telling me you’ve got me surrounded and a crack Malawian police weapons team are on their way.’ Nick laughed again.

Tom heard the motor die, then held the handset away from him. He was getting the noise in stereo. ‘You’re close, aren’t you,’ he said. ‘I can hear you.’

‘Well, if you’ve got the phone, you’ve probably got Khan’s AK as well, so I ain’t coming ashore. Is Janet still alive?’

Tom said nothing. He raised his head to look out
over the lake and saw a darkened boat, betrayed by the glimmer of its wake, which hadn’t yet settled. It shone like a pathway leading back to the mainland. Tom moved at a crouch, to the trees between the lodge and the first bungalow, and followed the cover down towards the water.

‘If she isn’t dead, you should kill her. That way, those spoiled brats of hers will inherit their millions and think both their dear old mum and their sick-fuck old man were killed by the big bad terrorists. Everyone will be happy.’

Tom was near the shoreline. He could see Nick now, silhouetted against the sky, talking on his phone.

‘Where are you, Tom? She’s paying me a lot of money, matey. I could give you a share if you keep quiet. You want to know the rest of that password “the sun will shine on those who stand”? The rest of it is: “before it shines on those who kneel under them”. I’m still standing, Tom, and you’re still fucking kneeling. Come stand with me.’

Tom wanted to keep Nick standing, talking in the boat. ‘Why, Nick? Was it just the money? Was it Janet?’

‘Hah! Nice try. It was both – and neither.’

Tom paused. The way Nick had tailed off into silence made him think the man wanted to talk, to unburden himself.

‘The wife was desperate – horny as a fucking rabbit – and also determined to keep Greeves in politics. I didn’t say no to the sex, and I needed the money after my missus split. But there was more to it.
Crossing the line. Knowing I could now get away with whatever the fuck I wanted to when on tour – booze, coke, women. More. And no one could hold me accountable. If Khan’s dead – or Greeves, or Janet, or all of them – then you know what I’m talking about when I say it’s a rush. It’s the fucking ultimate, isn’t it? The power to take life. I’ll tell you what, Tom … if you keep quiet about me I’ll give you a hundred grand. Pounds, not dollars.’

Tom stayed silent.

‘Of course, Thomas, if you shop me, I’ll find you. I’ll fucking do you, and I’ll rape that stuck-up cunt Van Rensburg in front of her children before I cut her throat. What’ll it be?’

‘Come into shore. Let’s talk about it,’ Tom said. He understood now – Nick was mad.

There was silence for a few seconds. ‘Nah. Tommy’s a good boy, aren’t you, Tommy? Wouldn’t be here other wise. The others would have offered you money, too. You’re the white knight, aren’t you, Tommy? Nope. I’m going to have to go to South Africa now and finish that bitch off myself.’

Tom heard the engine start. Nick would get back to the mainland before he could. If the Malawian police didn’t catch him, it was feasible that he could get back to South Africa – to Sannie and her children – before Tom could reach them.

Tom placed the phone down beside him and raised the assault rifle to his shoulder. He looked down the open sights and took a breath. It was a long shot, but not
impossible. About two hundred metres, he reckoned. He’d put a bullet into the centre mass of a target at longer ranges. He took a breath and curled his finger around the trigger. Nick bent to reach for something, and Tom heard the boat’s engine roar to life.

As Nick stood straight again, Tom started to squeeze. Before he could fire the shot he was knocked forwards, as if a prize fighter had come up behind him and punched him square between the shoulderblades.

Janet Greeves shuffled along the verandah of Pervez Khan’s luxury lodge, the two-two silenced pistol hanging limply by her side. ‘Nick …’ she croaked.

The nose of the speedboat lifted and the pitch of the engine escalated to a whine as it left a fantail of spray behind it.

Tom gasped for air, trying to refill his winded lungs. Each gulp brought a new stab of pain. He tried to reach up his back with his hand, to feel for blood. His fingertips touched a piece of still-hot metal, but there was no wetness.

From Christo van Rensburg Snr’s stash of security gear in the garage, Tom had also borrowed a slimline body armour vest, which he’d donned under his long-sleeve T-shirt. It couldn’t have stopped a shot from an AK 47, but the two-two round had done little more than wind and bruise him. Tom rolled painfully over onto his side and picked up his AK 47.

‘Put down your weapon, Janet,’ he called to her, the words causing him more pain.

She looked at him. ‘He’s gone.’ She coughed, and blood oozed from her mouth, down her chin.

Tom saw the soaking red stain on the right side of
her blouse. He must have hit her with his first spray of fire from the AK, while he was wrestling with Khan. ‘Let me get you to a doctor, Janet. Put the gun down.’

She turned to him and dropped the pistol. Tom stood, his strength returning, and jogged across to her. When he was three steps short, she collapsed to her knees. She had an arm outstretched, towards the lake, and the disappearing boat.

‘I lied,’ she croaked, as Tom took her in his arms.

‘Hush.’

‘I loved him. Not Robert …’

Tom held her as she died.

‘Farming life agrees with you,’ Sannie said as she ran a hand over his bare tanned bicep.

Dressed in a short-sleeve blue and tan bush shirt and khaki shorts, Tom was at least starting to look the part of a lowveld farmer. ‘It certainly agrees with you,’ he said, dropping a hand to her firm bottom, caressing it through the thin cotton of her sundress. She giggled and slapped his hand away, then turned her face to his so he could kiss her.

They resumed trudging up the hill, the rich red earth clinging to Tom’s boots and squelching through Sannie’s toes. Since he’d seen his first cobra he always wore hiking boots on the farm, but no amount of persuasion could get Sannie or the kids to follow suit.

It had been two months since the shoot-out in Malawi and Sannie’s harrowing fight with Wessels. Christo had been to see a child psychologist a few times but, apart from an occasional nightmare, he seemed to be coping. Both Tom and Sannie had told him over and over that he had saved his mother’s
and sister’s lives, and that his father would have been proud of him.

Still, Tom knew the boy would wrestle with his demons for some time, perhaps for the rest of his life in some form or another.

Tom had returned to England as soon as he knew Sannie, Elise and the kids were safely ensconced on the banana farm they had bought outside Hazyview, not far from the one Sannie had grown up on. Even so, he had spent the bare minimum amount of time in London, where the first snows had fallen more as grey, gritty sleet.

Shuttleworth had escorted him to a meeting with the Prime Minister in which he had been assured that, subject to signing a confidentiality agreement in which he promised not to mention any of the circumstances of Greeves’s death, he would be reinstated in his old job and considered favourably for promotion.

Tom had declined, settling instead for early retirement. When his home in Highgate was sold they would be able to pay off the bridging loan on the farm and live very comfortably for many years to come. Tom bagged his cold-weather clothes for charity and packed the album of pictures of him and Alexandra, which Sannie had said she wanted to see. He’d kissed the silver-framed photo of her taken on their wedding day and said, ‘You’d like her, Alex.’ He’d boarded the evening BA flight to Johannesburg with no regrets.

He knew nothing about banana farming, but Sannie and Elise were teaching him what they knew, and their neighbours were filling in the gaps. He’d thought they would eventually move to the coast – perhaps
Durban or Cape Town – but Sannie had rejected both of those options. The longer he stayed, however, the more he thought of the farm as somewhere he could live, rather than just hide out.

‘When are you going to stop wearing this?’ Sannie asked, lifting the tail of his shirt which he habitually wore hanging out to hide the Glock in its holster.

‘You know when,’ he said.

Tom slept fitfully.

The electricity was out – again. Whether it was load-shedding or the failure of an ageing substation, he wouldn’t know until the morning, but either way it annoyed him. He had no regrets about moving to Africa, but it was sometimes not easy learning to live without things he took for granted in England.

A mosquito buzzed around his ears. No matter how often he slapped himself, he never hit it.

Sannie lay on her back, her chest rising and falling rhythmically. Her golden hair was in disarray, one bare leg sticking out from under the sheet. They had made love when they’d gone to bed. If she’d said she wanted to move to a malarial swamp in the upper reaches of the Amazon, he would have gone with her. He loved her.

He smacked his cheek again, swore quietly, then got up.

He padded on bare feet to the farmhouse’s kitchen. Instinctively he flicked the light switch, but nothing happened. He turned on the rechargeable battery-powered camping lantern on the bench. Inside the
fridge was a bottle of water that was still cold. He poured a glass and moved to the window to drink it. He looked out over the seemingly endless rows of banana trees and marvelled at how his life had changed. For the better.

Roxy’s basket was empty. He wondered if she was off chasing a bush baby – one of the small, bushy-tailed primates that lived in the native trees near the house and cried like human babies most nights. But all was quiet.

Normally the big Rhodesian ridgeback was good at sensing movement, and would have been at the kitchen door, tail wagging, hoping for a midnight snack. She only barked at black people – a legacy of the former white owners of the farm who had trained her – but she was usually alert to anyone who was up and about after hours.

Tom took the keys from their hook inside the pantry and unlocked the door. He reached for a mosquito that had hitched a ride on his shoulder blade, missed and scratched. ‘Roxy?’ he called softly.

He walked along the verandah that surrounded the nineteen-fifties whitewashed house. He loved sitting out here with Sannie in the afternoons, watching over the rim of his beer glass the sun go down. He didn’t want to wake the children, but he was sure Roxy would find him by the time he reached Ilana’s bedroom.

He was about to turn back towards the kitchen, giving up on the stupid dog, when he saw the curtain.

Ilana’s window was open.

He lengthened his stride. The fabric hung limply out of the window. The sliding flyscreen should have
been down, and the strut that held the window open latched firmly in place. Sannie checked it every night. She was more careful about protecting her children than her husband-to-be from insects.

Tom felt his heart beat faster. He held the curtain to one side and looked in.

‘Ilana!’

He retraced his steps and ran inside. Sannie already had her shorts on and was sitting on the bed pulling a T-shirt over her head when he entered the room. ‘What’s wrong, Tom? Did you call me?’

Tom moved to his side and pulled the Glock from under his pillow. As always, it was already racked. He took a breath. ‘Ilana’s gone.’

Sannie put a hand to her mouth. ‘My baby! Christo?’

‘He’s …’

‘Mommy? Where’s Ilana?’ Christo walked into their room. ‘She’s not in her bed.’

Tom saw the dawning fear and realisation on the little boy’s face. ‘Is it that man?’

Tom had his mobile phone out and was dialling a number. He held it up to his ear as Sannie opened her wardrobe and reached under a pile of winter jerseys. She slapped a magazine into the butt of her RAP 401 and cocked it.

‘Mommy?’

‘Mommy and Tom are going to look for Ilana, Christo. I want you to …’

Elise walked into the bedroom, tying a robe in front.

Tom had the phone to his ear and was waiting for
an answer. ‘Sannie, you’re not thinking straight. You stay here and look after Christo. I’ll get …’ He held up a hand to silence her protest. ‘Hello, Duncan? You’re awake already?’

Duncan Nyari had left his job as a guide at Tinga and was helping Tom and Sannie out on the farm, and running a small freelance tour business from the old manager’s house, where he now lived. ‘Birds making too much noise down the fence, Tom. Thought it might be that leopard that killed the dog on old Du Toit’s farm.’