Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “He’s gone.”

  “Already? She probably slept with him only last night.”

  Snyman looked at the phone on his office desk, next to the picture of Danelle in a bikini on a beach in Mauritius.

  “We need to find him.”

  “Find him alive?” asked Nels.

  “It doesn’t matter. If he had an unfortunate accident it might make things easier.”

  Nels grinned into the phone.

  “Get some help if you need it,” said Snyman.

  He did some calculations on a large desktop machine, the numbers blinking at him rapidly.

  “Blackie was very cautious with the money. He didn’t do much with it.”

  Snyman remembered the arguments he’d had with Blackie about how it should be invested, the schemes he could have participated in, the sure-fire stocks bound to win. Blackie had ignored him.

  “Elanza inherited just under seventy-seven million dollars when Blackie died. It’s kept pace with inflation at least. I’d say Ralph Phillips of England is wandering around sitting on about a hundred and thirty million.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Of course dollars.”

  Nels said he knew someone.

  *

  Nick Roux enjoyed Sunday mornings at the Dutch Reform Church in Waterkloof Pretoria, a quiet time after the strain of a week travelling around the country, firefighting one mess after another and playing catch-up in the office on a Saturday. Sunday was a time for God and family.

  His home on Albert Street, almost exactly halfway between the church on Dey Street and the Pretoria Country Club, made it easy for his wife: close to good schools for the kids and in a comfortable safe neighbourhood. He had an easy commute to work at the Bureau for State Security, as it had been known but was now the National Intelligence Service, reporting to Gabriël Lombard, doing important work as Deputy Director of the South African spy agency, work which he tried hard to forget at weekends.

  He recognised the square man waiting outside the church and sighed. He turned to his wife.

  “You carry on and I’ll meet you at home.”

  Roux’s wife looked with distaste at the man ruining her husband’s weekend.

  “There’s tennis for the girls this afternoon at the club. Don’t forget.”

  Roux watched them go.

  “Mr Nels, one-time Military Intelligence liaison with the Bureau for State Security. Good morning. What are you doing here?”

  Nels had driven early on a Wednesday morning from Johannesburg to Pretoria only to find that Roux was away on business and not expected back until the end of the week. He’d kicked his heels sullenly in Snyman’s office for three days, leering at Lizette, knowing he’d be sure to find Roux at the Sunday service.

  “Good morning to you, sir. I’m doing private work now. Hopefully useful. And rewarding.” He smiled and gave Roux a business card: “Research Associates.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about that.”

  Roux wasn’t impressed. Nels had been on the rough side of Military Intelligence, and Roux remembered him from one particularly brutal operation, aware there had probably been many in Nels’ career.

  Military Intelligence had always been a problem and continued with unauthorised renegade activities; it was suspected of a recent bombing against the African National Congress at their headquarters in London. Lombard had been furious, and the National Intelligence Service had been forced to deny any knowledge, which had been easy as they’d known nothing about it. Roux assumed that Military Intelligence had done it in retaliation for an attack on a military base outside Pretoria in which two British citizens may have been involved – exactly the type of unapproved vigilante operation that Lombard and Roux had been tasked by the Prime Minister to prevent.

  “How can I help you on this fine Sunday morning?”

  Roux hoped Nels would take the hint.

  Nels smiled.

  “We need help following a boy. We need to keep tabs on him. There’s a girl who’s dying.”

  “That’s very sad, Nels, but National Intelligence is not a detective agency for girls who have lost their boyfriends.”

  Nels looked around at the affluent, ordered community.

  “There’s a catch. The girl’s father was a very good friend of PW Botha. They went right back to the Ossewabrandwag. Doing that sort of favour for the Prime Minister might help any man’s career at NIS.”

  *

  Nels walked to his car. He hated the way things seemed to be developing in South Africa. For a long time there had been a jockeying for influence among the three security agencies. The Bureau for State Security, the South African Police Security Branch and the South African Defence Force Directorate of Military Intelligence had been fighting each other for influence, budget and control of their own agenda. All three had been operating covertly in South Africa, on the African continent and overseas, with very little cooperation. It became well known to everyone from the Prime Minister down that duplication and intra-service rivalries could destroy South Africa’s security apparatus. The recent overhaul of BOSS to NIS would hopefully bring some control to these three internally warring factions. Nels became aware that of the three agencies NIS would soon become the most favoured, the first among equals. Its remit, to supply analysis, interpretation and intelligence, made it more appropriate for a ‘negotiating’ President. To Nels, negotiation resembled a word for treason. He believed in destabilisation using force so that if negotiation became inevitable it could be from a position of strength. It wasn’t an opinion held only by Nels.

  Nels opened the car door and sat in the seat watching the church empty. Cheerful families, privileged, confident and safe, smiled and held hands. Nels looked away. He didn’t feel part of their contented world full of light and hope. The South Africa Nels inhabited was one of darkness and despair.

  He decided he wouldn’t enjoy working with Roux again, but NIS had foreign assets he couldn’t otherwise access. An agreement between the three security agencies at the naval headquarters in Simon’s Town had made NIS responsible for intelligence gathering outside South Africa’s borders. He could have asked colleagues at his employer Military Intelligence to help but he now had his own reasons for distancing them from his out-of-office hours’ activities at his second job with Research Associates, especially in relation to this case of a missing English boy. He didn’t want any of his colleagues at Military Intelligence to know about the millions of dollars at stake and to muscle in on this, the golden opportunity he’d been waiting for. He’d let NIS find him using their resources but make his own enquiries domestically within South Africa, in case the boy hadn’t yet left the country. He knew just where he’d start as well: with Elanza. It was the one thought that cheered him.

  *

  The road from Pretoria led north-east after the town of Naboomspruit, towards Messina and Zimbabwe. Little traffic ran on a highway built deliberately straight and wide with no central barrier so that any part of it could be used by fighter jets as an emergency runway – an impressive example of cooperation as civil government projects considered military implications. Ralph remained uncertain if that made it impressive or xenophobic.

  Either way, it made for easy walking and Ralph smiled, enjoying himself. He had left the city behind and seen giraffe in the wild. The sun shone warmly on the side of his face and he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, four hundred of it from a single day’s work. He wasn’t a virgin.

  He stepped cheerfully towards the border.

  Six

  Director General Gabriël Lombard, an academic, had an accurate moniker. At age twenty-seven he had been the youngest Doctor of Economics and Political Science ever appointed at the University of Pretoria, and in the National Intelligence Service he’d become known as The Professor.

  It had been an unlikely appointment by the
new Prime Minister, PW Botha, when he poached Lombard in 1979 to lead the Service, newly born from the mire that the old one had created for itself. Botha realised that South Africa needed a more analytical intelligence gathering security service, and the new National Intelligence Service delivered a fundamental shift in emphasis from the old Bureau of State Security’s core belief of ‘state’ security to one of ‘national’ security. State implied the apartheid state. National meant everyone, of whatever colour, in the nation.

  It may have been exactly because he didn’t have any experience in that field that Botha recruited Lombard for the job. Lombard’s deputy director, Nick Roux, had come from BOSS but had always been moderate, religious and experienced in national security. Lombard and Roux were a combination that worked well. Lombard, by nature a hawk favouring entry into war, had been convinced when he’d joined NIS that the might of the powerful South African military machine would prevail over security threats foreign and domestic. Roux, more dove-like than Lombard and opposed to military pressure, had educated him with products from the research department, and now Lombard couldn’t be so sure of his conviction. There didn’t seem to be a military solution. He’d quietly realised, as had Botha, that the only way to find lasting security in South Africa required them to develop a nation. At some point that would mean renegotiating the South African constitution to include all South Africans in the nation, irrespective of race.

  Lombard, accustomed to taking Roux’s advice, quietly closed his office door so that no one could hear them.

  “Let me get it straight, as I’m going to have to take this to the Union Buildings, to the Prime Minister.”

  Lombard closed his eyes as he talked. He hated Monday mornings.

  “The Prime Minister’s oldest friend sold his farm for a fortune to a prestigious state-owned company who paid in valuable US dollars to an offshore bank. I’ll leave out the bit about the Prime Minister being responsible when Minister of Defence for agreeing the purchase price. We can’t stop the money being sent out of the country as it’s already gone, but until now we had hoped to have some influence on what it might be spent on as all the beneficiaries are here in South Africa. Am I right so far?”

  Roux nodded.

  “His old friend died and left the entire fortune to his only relation, a drug addict daughter who is now dying of some sort of plague. She has made a new will with a slimy lawyer who is trustee to her father’s estate and has left it all to an English boy she met, just once, and who has since disappeared. We guess that the Prime Minister’s dead friend, being Ossewabrandwag, would not have been happy with this and we want the Prime Minister to be aware that the sum of money is now huge. If things remain unchanged it will eventually be leaving South Africa for good and be outside of our control. We are going to put our best man on finding and following the boy.”

  He stopped.

  “Why, Nick? Why do we need to follow him? No one has done anything wrong. This girl can leave her money to whomever she likes.”

  “Our view is that it is South Africa’s money. We are concerned because we believe Mr Botha might prefer that the money benefits South African taxpayers, the same South African taxpayers who paid for his friend’s farm. We need to find the boy in case the Prime Minister decides he wants to have some influence over the outcome.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In case Mr Botha wants us to encourage the boy to use his inheritance for the good of South Africa.”

  Lombard, unconvinced, looked puzzled.

  “How would we do that?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why we are sending our best man.”

  “Hmm… Do you have anyone in mind?”

  Roux tossed Lombard a file.

  “He’s the best I’ve got.”

  Lombard looked at the front and read the name questioningly.

  “Angel Rots?”

  Both knew Angel’s file. In 1971, aged twenty, and partly thanks to the Open Universities Statement of 1957 but mostly because of his British passport and money from his mother, he had attended the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, an undergraduate studying African Languages in the Faculty of Humanities. In 1974 he did a masters and in ’76 a doctorate and, despite a commitment to spend nineteen days a year with part-time soldiers in Citizen Force, a life in academia and teaching lay in front of him.

  He became a formidable linguist. Of the family of 535 Bantu languages in Africa, 250 were mutually intelligible. Angel spoke ten of them with fluency and together they covered much of central and southern Africa: Xhosa and Zulu in South Africa; Swati in Swaziland of course; Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe; Bemba and Tonga in Zambia, where there were seventy languages alone; Kirundi, similar to Zulu, in Burundi; a Bantu vernacular in Rwanda; Ganda in Uganda; and Swahili in Kenya. With Arabic he covered the continent from Cape to Cairo, and with English from Sherborne School, Afrikaans from the Parabats, and Spanish from his Puerto Rican nanny, much of the world.

  In 1977 his Citizen Force commitment increased to thirty days a year, and in 1978 aged twenty-seven his teaching was unexpectedly disrupted by a call-up for the Cassinga Raid, a South African airborne attack on SWAPO deep inside Angola, arguably a ‘jewel of military craftsmanship’ if there hadn’t been six hundred defenceless refugees slaughtered. Certainly, what Angel witnessed changed him. He didn’t easily settle back into teaching and academia. The sheltered University of Witwatersrand never felt the same again.

  Aged twenty-nine his PhD thesis came to the attention of Nick Roux, who poached him in February 1980. Angel was pleased to go. He had no obligation to Citizen Force while with the National Intelligence Service. At the new NIS, the old Bureau of State Security’s aggressive offensive operational and policing role had changed to one of analysis and evaluation. Many of the BOSS personnel left but Angel thrived in the newly named Central Evaluation Unit.

  Angel had never been used in an operational capacity by NIS and Roux often thought that was a waste, believing he could have been very useful to them in the field as a protector of apartheid South Africa. He’d had a near Special Forces background, had become an expert linguist, and he had a genuine alternative identity thanks to his place of birth. More importantly, he looked black.

  “Send Rots up,” Lombard asked a secretary.

  *

  In an office below, an overweight senior officer from the South African police talked to the wall.

  “I don’t understand. All along they’ve been chattering about next year.”

  Angel sat on a desk then stood up abruptly. As usual, when in a meeting with colleagues, all deferred to him when he spoke.

  “He’s not saying that,” said Angel. “Play it again.”

  An operator rewound a tape and played a man talking above background traffic noise.

  “He’s in Lusaka. We’re lucky. They’re talking Bemba. From time to time they slip into some local dialect we can’t catch.”

  They looked at Angel as he gave a wide hand gesture, a professorial wave as though giving a lecture.

  “He could be using one of fifty or more other Zambian Bantu derivatives. We don’t have them all.”

  The tape played the sounds of someone singing far away, a lorry changing gear, faint voices.

  “But here. Stop. Again.”

  The operator stopped and rewound. On the tape the man said “kusasa”.

  “That’s not Bemba. He’s getting excited and slips up. That’s his own language. He’s talking Zulu. He didn’t mean to but it slipped out.”

  A junior police officer scratched his head, mystified.

  “Kusasa?”

  His chief answered.

  “Kusasa. Tomorrow. Kak.”

  The phone rang and the tape operator picked it up. He looked at Angel.

  “It’s the Director General’s office. He wants to see you.”

 
“Christ,” said Angel. “Excuse me.”

  The police officer laughed.

  “Tell him you thought the police were beating up your dad.”

  Angel smiled but said nothing, aware that his dad had probably been whiter than the pink faced policeman.

  *

  Angel entered Lombard’s office, surprised to see Roux there.

  “Sir, if it’s about that morning on the way to work…”

  Lombard stared at him, his fists balling, his eyebrows raised and twitching through stress and fatigue.

  “What morning? Is that the morning you put two policemen in hospital?”

  Roux tried to cut Lombard off but failed.

  “When was that, Nick?” Lombard asked.

  “Nearly three months ago. Before Christmas. I’ve already talked to him about that, Professor.”

  Roux looked at Angel.

  “We have a job for you.”

  Angel tried to be polite.

  “I’m working on the Lusaka thing right now. It’s…”

  Roux held up his hands.

  “It’s a field job. We need you to find someone.”

  Angel shrugged.

  “I’m an analyst. I’m with Central Evaluation, not Operations.”

  Lombard, already thinking of bigger problems, looked around the room like a don interrupted from contemplating an intangible problem by a dim student, as if he’d just realised he wasn’t in the senior common room at Tukkies anymore, surprised to find himself sitting in a government office.

  “That’s all we’re asking you to do. Evaluate where someone might be.”

  Lombard looked at Roux.

  “I’ve got some questions, Nick.”

  He turned back to Angel.

  “You did two years’ national service at a time when you could have done only nine months. Why? Nowhere to go?”