Vortex (53 page)

Afrikaans speaker.

He tried playing for time.

“I don’t know what documents you are talking about. No such papers exist.”

The woman’s words were cold and uncompromising.

“That’s a great pity,

Mencer Muller. Then I’m very much afraid that the videotape of your ‘indiscretion’ will find its way into the hands of your superiors.”

Muller gripped the phone tighter, feeling dizzy as his office seemed to swirl around him. Time. He needed more time to consider his options.

She dashed any hope of finding that time.

“You have ten seconds, meneer. If I hear nothing from you by then, I will ring off-and the matter will be out of my hands.”

The bitch! Muller sagged back in his chair. Whoever these blackmailers were, they had him in an unshakable grip. He had no illusions about how

Karl Vorster would react to seeing his intelligence chief in bed with a black man.

He swallowed hard and croaked, “All right, damn you. I agree. You’ll have the papers you want.”

“An eminently sensible decision,” the woman approved.

“Now here is how the exchange will be made. At ten tonight, you will come alone to the . ”

Muller jotted down her instructions with a shaking hand and then sat motionless holding the phone for long minutes after she’d hung up. His mind wandered back and forth, figuratively tugging at the bars of the cage in which he found himself. There seemed to be no way out-no exit that did not lead to inevitable disaster. Either he betrayed his leader or he betrayed himself. Unless … Muller looked down at his notes. For all the cool, calm professionalism shown by the woman who’d called, the rendezvous site and procedures she’d outlined displayed a certain amateur touch. An amateurishness that might let him evade the noose he already felt tightening around his neck.

He made a decision and dialed a three-digit internal number. Even a slim chance of survival was better than none.

NETWORK
STUDIOS
,
JOHANNESBURG

Four people crowded the cubbyhole that served as Ian Sheffield’s

Johannesburg office. Emily van der Heijden and Sam Knowles sat in a pair of chairs in front of his desk and Matthew Sibena stood behind them, still appearing faintly scandalized that the cameraman had offered him his seat.

The notion that white men might actually regard him as an equal partner still seemed impossible for the young man to comprehend fully.

Ian glanced at his watch. Two hours to go before their scheduled meeting with Erik Muller.

Their gear for the night’s outing stood in a separate pile on his desk.

A pair of walkie-talkies, binoculars, the videotape, a small pen flashlight, and a set of keys to the car Emily had rented under a phony name. Not much to challenge one of the leaders of South Africa’s state security services.

He unfolded a tattered city map showing Johannesburg and its surrounding suburbs.

“Okay, here’s how we’ll run this show tonight. The three of you will follow me out to the site in our pool car. Make sure you stop a couple hundred meters or so away and stay out of sight. ” He circled an area around the map.

“Probably about here-near the N-three interchange.

From there you could make a quick getaway onto either the expressway or

Lombardy Link if this stunt doesn’t work out the way we planned.”

He pointed to the walkie-talkies.

“We’ll use these to stay in touch. See any problems?”

Knowles nodded vigorously.

“You bet I do. One big one. You can’t be the guy who makes contact with Muller.”

“Why the hell not?” Ian winced at the way that came out. Sounding like a petulant child wasn’t the way to win arguments with either Emily or Sam

Knowles.

The other man jabbed a finger at his face.

“Your ugly mug is why, boyo.

You’re the on-camera talent in our little team. Odds are that this bastard’s even seen one or two of your censored reports. You show up tonight trying to exchange dirty videos for secret papers and whammo—he smacked his hands together-” we’re all heading for jail and a bullet in the back of the neck.”

Emily chimed in, “Sam is right, Ian. I will go in your place. Muller has heard my voice before anyway.”

Knowles shook his head.

“Nope. That’s no good either.”

Now it was Emily’s turn to sound like a child deprived of its favorite toy.

“And why not, Mr. Knowles?”

The cameraman smiled mirthlessly. ”

“Cause our boy’s just as likely to have seen your picture before, too. Your dad’s his number one enemy inside the government, right?”

Emily frowned and then nodded reluctantly.

“So there’s really only one person who can do this … and that’s me.”

Knowles tapped himself on the chest.

Sibena cleared his throat and spoke, looking frightened but strangely determined.

“That is not quite so, Sam. I could go in your place.”

Knowles turned sideways in his chair to look the young black man in the face.

“I’m afraid not, Matt. Muller’s not only a bastard and a thug, he’s a racist bastard and a thug. I doubt if he’d ever agree to hand anything important over to you.”

Damn it. Ian clenched his hands below the level of his desk. Much as he hated to admit it, Knowles was absolutely, undeniably right. He was the only one of the four of them who had any chance at all of successfully pulling off this clandestine swap. Besides, the South African intelligence chief had already had a glimpse of Knowles once before in his guise as an annoying American tourist back at the Cascades Hotel.

Letting him see Knowles again wouldn’t expose them to any additional risk.

He swore one more time under his breath before looking up and catching his friend’s eye.

“All right, Sam, you win. You’ll be the one who gets to go pick up our prize.”

Ian just hoped there really was a prize for Knowles to collect.

MADDERFONTEIN
MUNICIPAL
REFUSE
DUMP
,
JUST

OUTSIDE
JOHANNESBURG

A chain link fence surrounded the Madderfontein Municipal Refuse Dump, enclosing mounds of broken furniture, rusting food tins, old tires, and all the other assorted scraps left by a wealthy civilization. A flat, featureless plain stretched northeast beyond the dump-a plain marked only by scattered small reservoirs and the distant, floodlit smokestacks of the

Klipfontein Organic Products Factory.

To the west, a multi lane highway, the N3 Motor Route, paralleled the dump. Glaring headlights revealed traffic moving north and south along the highway at high speed. To the east, only a few of Madderfontein’s separate, single family homes showed dim lights glowing from behind drawn

curtains. And barely one in three of the suburb’s streetlamps were lit, leaving dark pools of shadow at regular intervals.

A battered Ford Escort sat idling quietly in one of the patches of darkness-parked near a collection of scarred and rusting trash haulers and maintenance sheds used by the refuse dump’s work force. A man and a woman stood on either side of the Escort, their attention riveted on a car two hundred meters farther down the road.

Ian adjusted the focus on his binoculars, trying to make out more than the faint silvery outline of Knowles’s rented Mercedes as it sat under one of the few lit streetlamps. Nothing, damn it. The stretch of two-lane road running alongside the garbage dump was just too dark.

On the other side of the Escort, Emily stirred as the walkie talkie she held in her hand crackled into life.

“You guys awake? I think we’ve got company. Coming off the freeway ..

. ”

Ian swiveled his binoculars right, scanning the exit ramp. There. The twin headlights of another car moving off the highway, fast at first but visibly slowing. He nodded abruptly. It had to be Muller.

Emily pressed the talk button.

“We see it, Sam. We’re ready. ”

Ready. Sure they were, Ian thought bitterly. He’d had two hours to think of all the things that could go wrong with this secretive exchange. Two hours to realize just how much trouble they could be in if Muller didn’t come through with his end of the bargain or tried to double-cross them.

The other car, a Jaguar, turned left off the ramp and pulled alongside

Knowles’s Mercedes.

Emily’s walkie-talkie crackled again.

“It’s him. I can see him through the windshield.” Knowles sounded calm, with only the clipped endings of his words revealing any anxiety. Static hissed over the radio.

“He’s rolling his window down. Stand by.”

Ian tensed and stared hard through the binoculars. No good. He still couldn’t see anything but the bare shapes of the two parked cars. Seconds passed, dragging first into one minute and then into two. He could hear Emily whispering what he suspected was a prayer.

“I’m back-Did you miss me?” Beneath the banter, both of them could hear the relief in the cameraman’s voice.

“Transaction completed. Looks good so far.”

Thank God. Ian felt his back and neck muscles starting to un knot

Muller’s Jaguar pulled out from the curb, turned left again, and rolled away down the dimly lit Lombardy Link-heading for the ramp leading back onto the highway. Ian followed the Jag with his binoculars until it vanished among the stream of other cars and trucks moving north to

Pretoria. He turned and nodded to Emily.

She pressed the talk button again.

“It’s clear, Sam.”

“Far out! I’m on my way. Get ready to pop the champagne corks, ‘cause it looks like little Mrs. Knowles’s boy has hit the frigging jackpot this time! Names. Dates. The whole schmear! ”

Ian laughed aloud, caught up in Knowles’s infectious enthusiasm.

Two hundred meters down the road, the Mercedes shifted gears and turned through a smooth half-circle to end up moving straight at them. Ian bent closer to the Escort’s open driver’s-side window.

“We’re almost ready to head for home, Matt. No fuss and no muss.”

Sibena smiled up at him from behind the wheel.

Suddenly the Mercedes braked and came to a complete stop while still twenty meters away.

Emily thumbed the walkie-talkie button.

“What’s wrong, Sam? Why have you stopped?”

Knowles sounded puzzled.

“I’m not really sure, There’s something rattling around in the back. I’m going to check it out. Hang on for a sec.” They both heard the click as his car door opened.

The Mercedes blew up in a spectacular rolling, billowing ball of fire-throwing pieces of glass, shards of metal, and shreds of rubber high into the air. For a split second, the explosion turned the night inside out-lighting up the surrounding landscape as though it were day.

Before the flash faded away, a roaring wall of superheated air knocked fan off his feet and rolled him hard against the Escort’s underbody. From the other side of the car, Emily cried out in terror as the shock wave threw her to the ground. Fragments pattered down all around, spanging off the

Escort’s chassis and starring its windshield in half a dozen places.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the noise of the explosion died away-leaving only a crackling roar as the Mercedes burned. Ian and Emily climbed shakily to their feet and stared in horror at the flames leaping high into the night sky.

Sam Knowles was gone, and the evidence of Vorster’s treachery had gone with him.

ALONG
THE
N3
MOTOR
ROUTE
,
NORTH
OF

JOHANNESBURG

Erik Muller pulled onto the shoulder and braked sharply. Then he slid out from behind the wheel of his Jaguar and got out to smile in satisfaction at the funeral pyre blazing brightly to the south. He stood watching the flames with his hands planted squarely on his hips. Good riddance. The mind-numbing fear that had been his constant companion since he’d first seen the videotape was already vanishing.

A dark-colored sedan turned off the highway and halted ten meters behind his car. Its driver’s-side door popped open and a tall, burly man clambered out. He glanced briefly at the fiery glow staining the southern sky and then trudged through the loose gravel until he stood before Muller.

“A fine job, Reynders. Very professional. I’ll see that you get a commendation for this night’s work.” Muller resisted the temptation to pat the taller man on the shoulder.

Field Agent Paul Reynders acknowledged the compliment with a brief, almost bored nod. In truth, it hadn’t been a terribly difficult or even interesting mission. The heaped mounds of trash had provided more than a dozen perfect hiding places within easy reach of what he had been told was an
ANC
agent’s parked car.

He frowned.

“There was another car, Director, with two or three occupants. But no one else.” Reynders shrugged.

“Definitely amateurs. I detected no signs of any other backups or surveillance teams.”

He glanced again at the fire still burning fiercely.

“I hadn’t expected the second car, but I changed the timer to catch it inside the blast as well. We should have no more problems with these spies.” He said it flatly, absolutely convinced that he spoke the truth.

Unfortunately for Erik Muller, Reynders couldn’t have been more mistaken.

NETWORK
STUDIOS
,
JOHANNESBURG

The studio’s offices, workrooms, and broadcast facilities lay wrapped in silence and darkness-apparently utterly empty, abandoned for the night by a fast-shrinking American staff. Even the South African security guards who normally patrolled the hallways guarding valuable electronic gear were safe at home in bed.

The lights flickered on in the main editing room and stayed on-revealing banks of racked VCRs, monitors, reel-to-reel machines, and the squat, white-eased shape of the studio’s computerized-imaging system. Ian shut the door leading into the main hallway and sagged back against the wall.

“We’re clear. ”

Emily looked up at him, her cheeks still stained by new dried tears.