The Harbinger

by Mark Graham

  Suddenly alert, the excited policeman bounded for the door. Three minutes later, he reported back. “He took the second artery toward N4, Inspector. He was nice and legal going through town, but the second he hit R539, he was flying.”

  R539 via R37, Mansell thought, the route he’d used heading for Pilgrim’s Rest. That left two options: the freeway west to Pretoria, and back to Nelspruit. Or a hundred turnoffs in between, he reminded himself. Still, the rider wasn’t yet aware that he was being pursued, and that was Mansell’s one advantage.

  “Is there a faster route back to Nelspruit than the R37 exchange, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “If he takes R37, he’ll lose three or four minutes,” Mouton replied quickly. “The map’s deceiving, sir. The quickest route is R539 straight down to the N4 freeway. Nelspruit is twenty-six kilometers due east from there.”

  Mansell negotiated the turn onto R539 with both hands. The car shuddered, tires protesting. He punched the accelerator and gave Mouton a final instruction. “Contact the nearest district office, Sergeant. Have them spread the word. Roadblock N4 in both directions. Any other artery as well.”

  “Will do, Inspector. Good luck to you, sir.”

  The two-lane road wound interminably through hairpin turns and steep grades, gradually releasing the pursuer from the grasp of the mountains. The N4 freeway, by comparison, was wide and straight, and Mansell covered the twenty-six kilometers to Nelspruit in half as many minutes. He saw no evidence of the Highway Police, but, this being the eastern Transvaal, hadn’t really expected it.

  Nelspruit lay at the base of the Drakensberg foothills, and thus Mansell approached the city from the top of a sweeping gradient. From the peak of this last hill, he could see acres of orange groves and solitary farmhouses that ended abruptly with the dim glow of truck stops and motels at the city limits. The R37 truck route bisected these groves and eventually merged with the freeway a half kilometer outside of town beneath a halo of yellow highway lamps.

  Mansell sighted the motorcycle as it shot down the on-ramp onto the highway, pressing but not out of control. Between the military sedan and the cycle were two semis, a pickup truck, and less than a kilometer. Mansell depressed the accelerator. He passed the pickup and then the first semi, a moving van. He fell in behind the other semi as they approached the outskirts of Nelspruit.

  At the edge of town, the truck pulled off at the required weigh-in station. Two hundred meters further on, much to Mansell’s surprise, the motorcycle slowed down as well. He saw brake lights. The rider steered the cycle onto a frontage road called Airport Drive. He cruised past the Air Africa maintenance center, the Transport Service building, the rent-a-car lot, and the close-in parking garage. He drew up in front of the main terminal. He parked the cycle in a no-parking section in front of South African Airways and dismounted.

  He ran inside the terminal shedding a riding jacket and helmet. Mansell parked at the curb behind the motorcycle and set out in pursuit.

  At the west end of the terminal he saw the rider jog through an unattended gate marked PRIVATE CARRIERS ONLY. Mansell hurdled the silver turnstile, pushed aside a glass door, and raced down a long staircase to the airfield.

  The rider stopped next to a single-winged Cessna. He reached up for the door, opened it, and a narrow ramp dropped down from the side of the plane to the tarmac. He started up the ramp.

  Mansell raised his gun. “Police. That’s as far as you go,” he shouted, gasping for breath. The rider froze. His shoulders sagged. “Let’s see your hands. Turn. Slow. Very slow.”

  Deflated, the rider faced him. Mansell’s eyes narrowed; the slender face, the sad eyes, the sandy complexion.

  “It’s not that I underestimated you, Inspector Mansell,” he said.

  And the voice, Mansell thought. My God. He heard the voice ringing in his ears. He touched the cassette in his coat pocket. The gun wavered unsteadily.

  “Koster,” he uttered. “Jan Koster. You.”

  “Yes,” Koster answered. “The end of a race. Someone tires, someone inches ahead. I congratulate you.”

  “Even a blind donkey can follow the carrots if they’re dangled close enough to his nose,” answered Mansell coarsely.

  “To argue that would be useless,” replied Koster.

  “Tell that to Merry Gosani. Tell it to Ian Elgin and Anthony Mabasu and Sylvia Mabasu.”

  “Ian’s fate was not a plan of my devising, Inspector. It was a plan which I could not forestall, only use.”

  Mansell tipped his head forward. Their eyes dueled. “Then it was Leistner? And Terreblanche was his? . . .”

  Koster nodded. “Yes. Leistner’s plan.” He broke away, sighing. “The implant scar, Inspector. The scar on Leistner’s right cheek. The screw implant which I imagine must have so perplexed the good dentist in Pampoenpoort?”

  “You imagine correctly. He’d never done a screw implant.”

  “Of course not. It was a European technique,” Koster said. “I noticed the implant scar during my first meeting with Leistner, seven years ago in Pretoria. His fatal flaw. The forged dental record seemed a good way to get your attention, Inspector. You see, my brother, my real brother, had been the recipient of a screw implant in the late 1940s, too.”

  “In the late forties? In Europe? In Russia?”

  “Your instincts serve you well, Inspector, though where is not important. However, I think we understand each other,” Koster replied. He leaned heavily on the guardrail.

  “But you were part of the East Fields scheme from the beginning.” “Yes. No. The plan itself was an unlikely scenario laid in my lap by some fool in Moscow. But I wrote the script. I chose the ending.”

  “Why?” demanded Mansell. “Why this whole . . . bloody thing?” Koster shrugged. Then he set his shoulders straight.

  “Survival, Inspector. History. Change. A dose of revenge, perhaps, against the madmen who sent me here twenty-three years ago. I was their creation. But their creation went astray.” He shrugged again. “Had I tried to abort the situation before it was completed, I would have accomplished nothing. Who would have believed me?”

  “Why in the hell didn’t you just walk into the prime minister’s office and spill the whole bloody mess?”

  Koster shook his head. “The prime minister? His addiction to power and his fear of losing it are as warped as Cecil Leistner’s were. No, I would have been hunted down and killed, and a new plan would have evolved. No one would have gained, and the losers would still be the losers. Now there are lessons to be learned. History that cannot be ignored. Leistner could never have seen it that way. And his way . . . Well.”

  It struck Mansell then that Koster knew exactly what was happening at East Fields this very minute. He knew. Had he planned it that way from the beginning?

  Koster must have seen the question on his face, and he added, “Zuma and Becker were the essential links, Inspector. Becker being a well-considered gamble. Time and history will be my judge, I suppose.”

  “Time has a way of spitting out its useless footnotes, Koster, and the deaths of four people will be conveniently tossed into the scrap bucket once someone gets around to writing down this little bit of history.”

  “A heavy price to pay, I admit.” Koster stepped to the end of the ramp, but Mansell didn’t have the strength to lift his gun. “Ian Elgin was a fool to think he could manipulate the minister of justice, but it wasn’t worth his life. Yet, as I said, I couldn’t prevent it, Inspector, so I used it.

  “I must admit,” Koster added, “that after several trips to Pietermaritzburg, East London, and Port Elizabeth, I grew to know you quite well, Inspector Nigel Mansell. As you can well imagine, that summer you spent exploring caves in Royal Natal stood out in my mind.” A light flickered in Mansell’s eyes. His lungs filled with the cool night air and he took a step forward. “A man in a three-piece suit enters a sporting goods store in Port Elizabeth and buys a length of nylon-rayon rope. He makes a point of telling the clerk he intends exploring cav
es in an area where no such caves exist. You. It was you. A week before Elgin was murdered.”

  “You’ll find the rope in my garage, at the house in Cape Town,” Koster answered. “I believe you’ll find it still in its original wrap, more than likely in the very bag the sales clerk first put it in. And the typewriter? The antique portable with the mis-set “e,” high left? Surely your forensic chief mentioned it?”

  “The business card we found on Fredrik Steiner’s body,” Mansell replied. “The Caves of the Womb.”

  “Yes, the caves. My personal signature, you might say. I couldn’t resist. And it did seem to catch your attention.” The memory fixed itself momentarily upon Koster’s tired face. “As for the typewriter. It also is in the garage in Cape Town.”

  A moment of silence was broken when a jetliner with a flying springbok painted on its fin swept into the air behind them, and Koster watched it disappear behind a wall of black clouds.

  He glanced back at Mansell, hesitated, and then said, “I tried to save your friend, the detective. I was too late. I’m sorry for that, more so than anything, perhaps. He was a courageous . . .”

  There was a shuffling sound at the door of the Cessna. Mansell jerked the Browning up. He spread his feet. A little girl appeared at the landing. Blond, petite, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  “Daddy,” she called out. “Can we go yet?”

  The gun dropped to Mansell’s side.

  “This is Hannah. My youngest.”

  “I’m nine,” Hannah announced.

  Mansell gazed up at her. Her round face stretched into a wide yawn. A woman appeared at the door next to her, hurriedly drawing the child into her arms. Another girl peeked out from behind the mother, surely Hannah’s sister. Mansell slipped the gun back into the shoulder harness beneath his jacket. From the breast pocket he drew out the cassette tape he’d taken from the Clavers’ telephone machine--the recording of Merry’s death, Koster’s own warning.

  He tossed the tape to Koster. “The first time you find yourself going to sleep without a few agonizing memories,” said the chief inspector, “listen to the first part of that tape.”

  Then he glanced back at Hannah. He said, “Maybe she’ll go back to sleep once you’re in the air.”

  Mansell turned away. From a window inside the terminal, he watched the tiny plane lift off.

  By four A.M. the morning of the twenty-third, he was aboard a much larger plane headed south for Port Elizabeth.

  At 7:2 5, Mansell climbed the steps to the Hall of Justice on Chapel Street.

  Inside, he flashed his I.D. at the main desk and passed through the metal detector. He felt comfortably buoyant now without the shoulder harness and the gun. He rode the elevator to Security Branch headquarters on the eighth floor. He pushed past the sergeant at arms, tossed his shield on the reception desk, and asked to see Lieutenant Colonel Richard Jones, the head of Security in the Thirty-second District.

  When Jones emerged from his office, Mansell presented him with the executive order clearing himself and Delaney of all federal charges.

  “Very good,” Jones said, taking the order. He raised an eyebrow at the officer behind the desk. “Sergeant?”

  “I passed a copy of the order on to Major Wolfe last night, sir, but—”

  “That’s fine. And?”

  “Well, sir. . . .”

  “Where is she?” Mansell demanded.

  The desk sergeant exchanged a distressed look with the lieutenant colonel, and Mansell had his answer.

  He swept aside the swinging gates. He raced past the counter into an open office area cluttered with desks, typewriters, and bent heads. A sign pasted across a metal door at the back of the room read, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Mansell pushed past the door to the stairwell. He took the steps two at a time to the tenth floor.

  The interrogation rooms were located in the north wing. Rushing down the narrow, sterile corridor, Mansell threw open every door. Finally, he heard a low groan coming from the end of the corridor. The official notice on the door read, SECTOR #6. KEEP OUT.

  Mansell burst through the door. He saw the hulking torso of Major Hymie Wolffe, a sleeveless T-shirt yellow with sweat, the back of his neck fever-red with exertion, a bamboo stave raised over his head. Delaney was slumped before him. Her arms were extended above her head, lashed with rope hung from the ceiling. Her hair was tangled and matted, her blouse torn. Blood oozed from her nose.

  “Wolfe!” The word escaped Mansell’s mouth like the cry of a wild animal. He charged forward, grabbing Wolffe by the back of his shirt, propelling him face-first into the concrete wall. He drove his fist into Wolffe’s kidney. A second and third blow drove the Security officer to the floor.

  “No, Nigel, don’t.” The words came to him as an echo cutting through a thick fog. Delaney’s voice. “Please don’t.”

  Mansell pulled himself away, panting. He grabbed Wolffe by his shirt straps and hoisted him to his feet.

  “I should kill you right now, Wolfe.”

  “Not you, Mansell,” Wolffe hissed. His breathing was labored, his eyes touched with pain and hysteria. “You’re too civilized.”

  Mansell saw the bamboo stave lying on the cell floor at Wolffe’s feet, and he swept it up. He held the slender stick at eye level, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Civilized, you say.” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “No, Major, a civilized man would shoot you right where you stand, the demented animal that you are.”

  The stave went suddenly still in his hand. He moved it slowly toward Wolffe’s face, drawing the tip within an inch of his eye. Wolfe pressed himself against the cell wall. A sheen of sweat washed over his chalky skin.

  “No, Major. I’m going to take your toys away from you,” Mansell said. “I’m going to see to it that you never hold a bamboo stave in your hand again. You ignored an executive order of the Prime Minister, Wolfe. Are you aware of the penalty for that offense?”

  “That order was a lie, Mansell.” Wolffe’s voice was shrill and broken. “It was a lie.”

  Mansell’s pale eyes hardened. The room was, all at once, very still. Only the sound of Delaney’s breathing disturbed it. Mansell pressed the stave closer still. The bamboo touched Wolffe’s fluttering eyelid, and he gasped. A moment later, the stave dropped from Mansell’s hand. He released his grip from Wolffe’s shirt straps, pushing him away. Wolffe slid down the face of the wall to the floor, covering his eyes as Mansell hurried across the cell to Delaney.

  “It’s over now,” he whispered. He freed her hands, dabbed blood from her face, and wrapped his jacket around her shoulders. “It’s over now, I promise. Let’s go home.”

  At last, Mansell lifted her into his arms. He kicked open the interrogation-room door. He carried her down the corridor to the stairs. On the eighth floor, they pushed through a line of stunned Security policemen.

  They stepped into the elevator, but as the doors were closing round them, Mansell remembered his chief inspector’s shield lying on the reception desk. He punched the hold button instinctively. The doors parted. The wallet was there, open on the counter. The gold shield stared back at him. He couldn’t leave it, there was no question of that, and yet he hesitated, felt the sudden weariness of the past twenty-four hours wrapping its arms around him.

  It would have been easy to blame the encounter with Wolffe, but there was more to it than fatigue and indecision. Mansell knew that the media had already picked up on the successful takeover of the mines. The car radio had given a verbatim account of demands released earlier this morning by Christopher Zuma. Glaring headlines in this morning’s Bulletin had confirmed the walkout of nearly a million miners nationwide. A sympathy strike by dockers, stevedores, and railroad workers had, according to the page-one account, brought the country to a virtual standstill. Rumor had it that the prime minister would respond to the crisis on national television sometime this afternoon. Yet it wasn’t over. Despite his promise to Delaney, it wasn’t over. He wo
ndered now if it would ever be.

  He heard the sound of shuffling feet, hushed conversation. He saw the others, the Security policemen, their attention turning to the badge. And then, at the very moment when the urge to walk away was at its strongest, he felt Delaney’s hand on his face. Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was bruised a ghastly shade of purple, but there was a calmness in her eyes, a warmth to her touch. Why? He wanted to ask her. But he had given up asking her foolish questions. What he saw in her eyes, and what he felt in her touch, was something far more permanent. He stepped out of the elevator then and snatched the wallet from the counter.

  When they were outside on the walk, Mansell stopped again. He glanced overhead to the tenth floor. A new pane of glass had replaced the broken one. Bars covered every window now. He looked back at the sidewalk. The concrete below the window had taken on a dull, grayish hue. In the distance, Mansell heard the carillon of bells chiming in the Campanile. To the west, the promise of rain filled the sky.

  The End

  Also By Mark Graham

  The Missing Sixth

  The Fire Theft

  Live Strong

  Blog Link

  http://www.authormarkgraham.com/