Trackers (53 page)

There were three identical OPBC
signboards in white on the high, neglected wire fence, as though one was not
enough to convince visitors.

It did look temporary, primitive,
shabby, like a hidden building site - bare gravel, ships' containers scattered
randomly, a long, nondescript flat-roofed building with a single light burning
at one corner. Right at the back, a high breakwater of concrete dolosse, huge
jumbled Xs like a giant child's carelessly thrown jacks, outlined against the
phosphor glow of the sea. The double gates were locked, all was quiet and
deserted.

They stood in the deep shadow just to
the left of the gate. Milla watched Lukas's body change subtly, his shoulders
and neck and head, as though he were making himself smaller, hiding, alert. His
eyes took in everything, in front of them, around them, assessing and
measuring.

'I need to know what it looks like
inside,' he murmured. He started walking along the fence to the right.

'Tell Tiger to split his team in
two,' Janina Mentz told Quinn. 'I want half of them at Ysterplaat, the
helicopters will be ready in an hour. The other half must go to Simonstown, the
captain of the Corvette SAS
Amatola
is expecting
them. Raj says he should have the information ...' she checked her watch, 'by
two o'clock.'

Quinn wanted to ask her how sure she
was that the ship was coming to Cape Town, but he assumed it was a calculated,
optimistic guess. The Americans had the same dilemma, if they traced the ship
first, they had to cover the same distance.

'Anything on the stolen Nissan?'
Mentz asked.

'Nothing,' said Quinn. 'Absolutely
nothing.'

They followed the fence for a hundred
metres down to the sea. The wire ended there, before the steep slope down to
the water and the chaos of the heaped up triangular dolosse. To the left was a
way through to the Oceana Power Boat Club - a narrow sill, overgrown with
weeds, along the short side of a ship's container. He began to shuffle along
it, chest against the container, using the metal ridges for hand grips. He
looked back at her. 'Come. It's easy.'

She followed him.

On the other side of the container
there was a small, sheltered bay. The slipway into the sea was barely ten
metres across, the bay itself just big enough to accommodate six or eight
motorboats at a time. In the middle there was a narrow quay of cheap wood,
floating on steel drums. Beyond that, a concrete surface with a gradual upward
slope away from the water.

From here the club's shabby
simplicity formed an even greater contrast. To the right the highest levels of
luxury apartments were visible at the yacht marina, to the left the glow of the
Waterfront. To the south, 500 metres beyond a grass bank on the other side of
Strand Road, the new soccer stadium towered, spectacular, surreal, a glowing
spaceship floating against the darkness of Signal Hill.

He stood considering it with a
calculating eye. 'They know what they're doing,' he said.

'Why?'

'This is an almost perfect smugglers'
cove; looks like something about to be demolished, no one would look twice if
they drove past it. If your boat comes in here - you are practically invisible.
But you have a good view over everything, you can see anyone coming 200 metres
away. And you're five minutes from the Nl, ten minutes from the N2, you're
right in Sea Point and the city, get in quick, get out quick ...'

'How are we going to ... ?' She
didn't know how to complete the sentence, because she didn't know how you would
steal a missile and exchange it for money.

'It's nearly perfect. Look there ...'
He pointed at the two half-moon arms of the dolosse-breakwater. 'Easy to hide
there. From that point you control the whole area. The big problem is there are
only two exits, and both are narrow: the gate, to the street, and the slipway,
to the sea.' He checked his watch, suddenly hasty. 'We have nearly two hours.
Let's go and get coffee.'

'Another four
hours,' she said.

'No.' He
walked back to the narrow ledge.

On the table between the computers,
tools, and equipment, the hard drive lay, incredibly small, connected to two
thin wires.

'The drive is slightly buckled, so we
had to get it out of the casing first,' said Rajkumar, and he picked up the
dented black metal box, showed it to Mentz. 'And then we built a new, modified
casing, to accommodate the warp, because the drive still needs to spin. It's
the only way to get to the data quickly. Problem is, the disk is definitely
damaged ...'

'How much?'

'We just don't know. Depends on how
full the disk was, how often he defragged ...We're going to need a bit of
luck.'

Mentz looked at him without
expression.

'Wheel of fortune's got to turn,
ma'am. Sooner or later, wheel's got to turn.'

They sat in the Mugg & Bean and
drank coffee. She asked: 'Why do we only have two hours?'

'The rendezvous is at two o'clock. If
they arrive too early, the wait is long, the people get bored and impatient.
Careless. The risk is greater - security patrols, the police, a club member who
has forgotten something. You send a couple of men around about one o'clock to
secure the place, to have eyes on the look-out. And the rest of the team, along
with the trucks or bakkies or whatever they use, only turn up at a quarter to
two. But these are Muslim extremists, extra cautious, since their laptop has
been stolen. They might send their eyes from twelve o'clock. Maybe earlier. We
shall see.'

'What are we going to do?'

'We are going to take the money.'

'What money?'

'There is always money, at this kind
of transaction. Cash. This is a world where no one trusts anyone, you don't pay
in advance, you don't pay by cheque, you don't believe it when a guy says he
will make an electronic transfer. You want to see the money in your hand and
you want to count it. One guy will bring something in, the other inspects the
goods and hands over the money. Always. And if it is weapons, they will pay in
dollars.'

'There are only two of us.'

'We're going to wait until the deal
is done. We aren't interested in the weapons, we're after the guys who are
going out with the boat again. Through that narrow slipway. They will have the
money ...'

He took a pen out of a side pocket of
his rucksack. He pulled the serviette closer, drew on it, quick lines for
streets, the sea, the breakwater.

'I'll be here in front, on the point
of the breakwater. You'll be here on the other side of Strand Road, behind the
grass bank. That way we will cover both exits. The way this sort of thing
usually works, the bringers in and the takers out all help to transfer the
goods, it's in everybody's interest that it happens quickly, that the goods are
delivered safely ...' 'Why?'

He smiled again at her compulsion to
understand everything. 'Because they want to do more business in future, there
are reputations to protect, a code of honour. So, with a bit of luck, the boat
will go back to the ship with the money at the same time as the load goes out
the gates. I will stop them at the breakwater. All you have to do is fire off a
few rounds. Here, in the direction of the gate, low, into the ground ... It's
dark, it's a hell of a surprise, we want to create the impression that we are
many. I'll fire a burst with the AK, then with the H&K. You take the other
AK and the pistol. Wait till I fire, then shoot first one then the other,
single shots, five or six, completely different sounds, create the impression
of superior numbers. That's all we need.'

He picked up his cup and took a big gulp. 'Lord, Lukas,' she
said.

Extract:
A Theory of Chaos, Coronet, 2010, pp. 312-313

He made the logical assumption. He
thought my concern and uncertainty was about what lay ahead, he put his hand on
mine and he said, 'If everything goes haywire, leave the weapons there and walk
away. Go to the lights. To the hotel. Wash your hands and your clothes to
remove the residue. Wait there for me.'

'No,' I said, because I couldn't
contain it any longer. 'I wrote your report. I know what you learned in the
Navy. How . . . ? Why do you know about things like everyone helping to
offload, and about shaking off tails and buying cellphones without ID and
getting guns in the Cape and about stealing cars, ripping parts off and
connecting the right wires? And washing residue off your hands?'

Later, on the
grass bank, I felt ashamed of my fervour and how badly I had expressed it. I
found the words that I had wanted: 'It doesn't matter where all your knowledge
comes from, it doesn't matter where you were and how you learned it. But why
won't you trust me with the truth? Why don't you trust my love?' But it was too
late by then.

I watched how he
first looked past me at an invisible horizon. His face slowly changed. It
became softer, like someone who was bringing sad tidings. In a voice the colour
of a rainy day, he said the strangest thing: 'I went to study to find out when
we lost our innocence. And I did.'

Only then did he
look at me. 'For fourteen thousand years we have been heading for chaos, Milla.
From the first settlement, the first town, the first city. So slowly that no
one noticed it. But that's changed. It's pushing up like a tide, everywhere. In
America, in Europe, here, ever faster, ever closer. In ten years, twenty, maybe
fifty, it's going to swallow us up. You saw it, you know now. You will regret
that, yet, you will still wonder whether it is better to be blissfully
ignorant. You just have to get to the point where you realise the chaos is
inevitable. Then you have to ask yourself, what are your choices? Can you
afford to ignore it? Or should you utilise the chaos to escape it?

He picked up his
coffee cup, drank the last of his coffee. He said, 'That's what I did. I
learned from the chaos, so I could use it. And soon you will do that with me.'

He lay beside her on the grassy bank, the soccer stadium
behind them, the street in front of them, the boat club to the other side. He
held to his eyes a small pair of binoculars that he had dug out of his
rucksack. He scanned the Oceana Power Boat Club, slowly, from end to end. Then
he said, 'They're not here yet,' and he explained to her exactly what he wanted
her to do. He told her how time stood still, how it disappeared when adrenaline
flowed, a minute could feel like eternity,
she must not be
misled by that. She must look at her watch when she heard the first volley.
They had easily ten, maybe twenty minutes before the police would arrive. Stay
aware of the time, keep your cool. When she saw he had the money, when he was
out of the gate, she must not go to him. Walk along behind the grass bank. To
the light. To the hotel.

She nodded, a frown of great
seriousness on her face.

He said the most difficult time would
be the two hours of waiting. It was hard to lie still, so make sure you're
comfortable, scratch open a place to lie in. Your greatest enemy is your mind.
You're going to feel sleepy, you're going to doubt, you will see phantoms, you
will think of everything that could go wrong. Just stick to the plan, forget
about everything else: just stay awake, and stick to the plan.

He let her go through the rifle drill
of the AK-47 one more time. Just before he got up and jogged expertly down the
slope, he put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her in the neck and then
on the temple. 'See you soon.'

She followed him with her eyes,
across Strand Road, to the OPBC gate, until he disappeared in the shadows along
the fence.

In the coordinating office, at a
quarter to one in the morning, Masilo watched Bruno Burzynski. The CIA man
walked up and down the opposite wall, restlessly, holding his cellphone to his
ear. He kept repeating, 'Uh-huh', with varying pauses, his face betraying
nothing.

He rang off, turned back to the table
and sat down. His elbows on the table, his hands open in a gesture of
conciliation. 'You have to talk to her, Tau.'

'She won't budge, Bruno. Not unless
you tell her what the cargo is.'

For the first time the tension showed
on Burzynski's face. He made a gesture of frustration and helplessness: 'I
can't, it's not my decision, and this thing is so fucking politicised, so
fucking
invested . . .'