Her potential promotion won the day. She jammed the key back into the door, swung it open, lumbered over to the desk and stretched for the receiver. She caught the call on the eighth ring. “Mweli speaking.”
No answer. The line sounded open, but nobody was saying a word.
“Mweli speaking,” she said again.
Still only silence.
Running out of patience, she slammed the receiver down again. Her pizza was calling, and it wouldn’t wait forever. As she locked the security door, she heard the faint sound of the telephone ringing again. This time, she ignored it.
Twenty minutes later, Mweli was heading home with the pizza on the passenger’s seat. She’d chosen the Quattro Formaggio, but in order to avoid hunger after this vegetarian main dish, she’d added a small portion of crispy potato wedges to the order.
The smell of melted cheese and fried potato permeated the truck. Driving one-handedly, she prized open the lid of the box and removed a slice. Strings of warm cheese stretched and snapped. She folded the slice over and took a large bite.
Gooey topping, crispy crust, a hint of flavor from the tomato-and-herb base. An excellent choice.
Turning onto the road that led to home, Mweli checked her mirrors before reaching into the box for another slice. She’d been sure that the road behind her would be clear, and was surprised to see twin beams in her view.
She eased the slice out of the box, slowing down while she munched on it. She’d expected that the other car would pass, allowing her to enjoy her starters in peace, but to her annoyance, it remained behind hers.
In her mind, alarm bells started to sound—faint but persistent.
The strangeness of this case. The phone call she’d taken before leaving the station. And now this.
It was probably nothing to worry about, but it was better to be sure.
Instead of heading straight down the road, which became gravel after a steep dip, Mweli turned right at the only crossroad.
The car behind her turned, too.
Her hunger forgotten, Mweli carefully wiped her fingers on the napkin wedged into the corner of the box. Then, putting both hands on the wheel, she sped up, driving purposefully down the dark road and checking behind her as she went. Still she could see the headlights there.
What was interesting about this street was that it looped back onto itself and joined the main road again farther up. In fact, it would have been quicker and easier for any local going home to have taken the first turnoff, which they had passed earlier on.
Now she reached the main road and, once again, indicated right.
She eased off on the accelerator, and in due course saw the other driver’s lights appear at the intersection. This time, whoever it was turned the other way, back toward town.
Had somebody been following her?
Or was she just becoming paranoid?
Hoping neither was true, Mweli reached into the paper bag and snagged a potato wedge before turning her full attention to the road home.
Chapter Thirteen
“Botha!” Jade yelled. She ran over to his Porsche, which had rocked to a stop and was wedged against the curb. Smoke seethed from its undercarriage, and her feet crunched over shards of shattered glass. For the second time that day, she was treading on glass at the scene of an accident. The fact spun unwanted through her mind.
No time to worry about whether there might be another blast still to come. She grabbed the door handle, even as it was pushed open. “Are you okay?”
Botha was alive but dazed. He was breathing hard, and his face was bloodied from a gash on his eyebrow. The interior of the car wasn’t badly damaged. She guessed the blast had been directed downward. He was able to nod in response to her shouted question. She grasped his shoulder and helped him scramble out. None of his bones seemed to be broken, thankfully.
“Come on,” she urged, leaning back in to grab his laptop bag. Then she helped him stumble over to her car. They climbed inside, and she burned rubber on their getaway as two gunshots split the air behind them.
“Get down,” she ordered, but he refused to listen, instead craning around to look through the rear window.
“They’re following us,” he said, and her heart sank. She checked her mirror and saw headlights in pursuit, dazzlingly bright. There wouldn’t have been time for the two men on foot to go back and get their car. That meant there must have been a third waiting behind the wheel.
“Go left,” Botha gasped. He face was covered in blood, and he had one hand pressed to his forehead, trying to stem the bleeding with his sleeve.
Jade complied, swinging the car onto the side street. “You know this area?” she asked through a clenched jaw, flicking her high beams on as she sped down the narrow road.
“No. I don’t have a clue.”
“Why the hell did you tell me to go left, then?”
“Because that car was gaining on you. It would have caught up. Now it’s getting closer again.” He twisted around, peering behind him as the headlights flared once more in her mirrors.
“If you don’t know the area,” Jade snapped, “you should be careful where you turn. Minor roads like this are dangerous. Next thing you get trapped in a cul-de-sac.”
“Okay. Sorry. ’Scuse me for trying to get us away from guys who just blew up my car!”
Jade gritted her teeth in lieu of a response and focused on steering.
“You need to drive faster,” Botha implored, panic in his voice.
What part of “I’m already going as fast as I goddamned can” was he not understanding? Jade wrenched the wheel right again at the next crossroad. Behind her, the wailing of tires told her that the heavier car following wasn’t as nippy through the turns.
Nothing for it but to carry on zigzagging and pray she didn’t get unlucky with a dead end.
“Go left again,” Botha yelled over the howl of the engine.
Jade barely made the turn, hearing tires scream, feeling the car fishtail as it lost traction on the bend. She couldn’t keep this up; she wasn’t a race car driver. They desperately needed a lucky break. To have the other driver lose control. Or to find help—a security vehicle, a traffic light turning red with cars waiting at the cross street.
She saw the signpost out of the corner of her eye at exactly the same moment Botha shouted, “Go right! There’s a police station down this way.”
“I’m on it.” She swung the wheel sharply to avoid a deep, gaping pothole near the side of the road, hating the glare of the blinding headlights they couldn’t outrun.
She squinted ahead, only to see the sign she’d feared the most.
The road she was on was a dead end.
“Where the hell is this cop shop?” The road looked devoid of police stations. Perhaps the sign was outdated, and they were hurtling into a trap. She needed a new plan. Out of the car might be better than in. They could split up, run in opposite directions . . .
“Careful of this turn,” Botha warned.
She hadn’t even noticed the chevrons ahead indicating the sharp bend in the road.
“We’re not going to make it,” Jade gasped. No time for a hard brake; it would send them spinning off. Every muscle in her body felt as taut as steel while she steered the speeding car around the curve.
Just stay on the road, she silently begged the sedan. What irony it would be if they crashed now. She felt everything start to slide. The tires wailed, and sweat made her palms slick as she forced herself to keep her foot down and power it through the skid and into the straight section ahead.
“Here it is! On the left!” Botha said.
She would have missed it. In the dark, it was not clearly marked. Only as she ripped the wheel around and sent the car skidding into the driveway did she see the modest sign on the gatepost which informed the public that this was the Randfontein branch of th
e South African Police Service.
The headlights were no longer in her rearview mirror, blinding her. In fact, she couldn’t recall the driver following her around the bend.
Perhaps he hadn’t made it. Or maybe he, too, had seen the signpost and guessed where they were heading.
At any rate, they’d bought some time. She released her death grip on the wheel at the same time Botha leaned away from the dashboard.
He touched a hand to his forehead, and it came away wet with blood.
“Let me see that cut,” she said.
It was bleeding freely, but it didn’t look too deep. He’d been incredibly lucky. Lucky that the Porsche was a tough, strong car, and that he hadn’t been going too fast when the explosion occurred.
She grabbed the last packet of tissues from the glove compartment, ripped it open and handed a wad to Botha. Her hands were shaking badly. When he took the tissues, she saw that his were, too.
There was still no sign of the car that had been following them, and Jade started to wonder whether the driver had turned back to get reinforcements.
She wanted to walk with Botha into the safety of the police station. But the longer they spent there, the better their chances would be of getting ambushed when they left.
She started the car again.
“We’re not going inside?” Botha sounded incredulous.
“They’ll be expecting us to.”
“So we leave now?”
“Before the three of them come back and trap us here.” She reversed, swung the wheel left and headed for the gate once again.
“You’re crazy,” Botha hissed. “That driver’s waiting on the other side of the bend.”
“He’s not. He’s gone back to get the others.” Jade tried to sound sure of herself, even though her legs were quivering so badly that she worried she might stall the car.
She drove cautiously around the bend. Headlights blinded them, and they both flinched, but the passing car was only a small truck with a security logo on its side.
Jade breathed out again. The road ahead was clear.
“Now we go the other way,” she said as they exited the cul-de-sac.
She drove carefully, spending as much time watching her mirrors as she did looking ahead. In twenty minutes, they were on the N1 highway, heading back toward Johannesburg.
The closer they drove toward the city, the safer she felt. Traffic was her friend. On busier roads, in the dazzle of headlights and taillights, it would be much more difficult to single out any one vehicle.
She remembered that there was a late-night pharmacy in Woodmead, so they switched highways, took the next exit and a few minutes later had stopped and bought disinfectant, gauze and dressing.
Jade took care of Botha’s face right there in the car. She switched on the light, drenched the gauze in disinfectant and dabbed it on the cut, carefully removing the crusted blood before taking a better look at the injury.
The damage wasn’t as bad as she had feared. Head wounds always bled more. She tried to be gentle, but she knew it must be stinging like hell. Even so, Botha did not move a muscle or even catch his breath. He simply sat, eyes closed, face still.
She cut a strip of gauze, pressed it onto the cut, taped it down with narrow pieces of sticking plaster and finally placed a white dressing on top of that. It looked neat, and she thought it should heal well. Assuming Botha stayed alive long enough.
Then she handed more disinfectant-soaked gauze to Botha so that he could rub the blood off his hands and face.
“Thank you,” he said in a low voice when she’d finished.
“No worries.” Jade cleared her throat. For a moment, she’d thought of Botha as a friend . . . an ally. But he was her surveillance target, charged with malicious damage to property and possibly involved in a serious incident of sabotage. And now she’d fled with him from a crime scene after helping him survive a hit.
She had no idea how far the reach of their pursuers was. They’d escaped immediate danger, but Jade was sure the gunmen wouldn’t be giving up.
She pulled into a gas station near the pharmacy. While she filled the car up, Botha went into the twenty-four-hour convenience store and bought some bottles of water and fruit juice, dried fruit bars, packets of chocolate and nuts. When you were on the run, you needed supplies.
The roads were quieter at this hour, but there was still traffic heading toward Sandton. Safety in numbers. The Central Business District would be a good place to spend what remained of the night. She merged onto the highway, driving cautiously and frequently checking her mirrors.
“Why were you meeting Wouter Loodts?” she asked Botha. “He’s an ex-government minister, right?”
“He is—was. He was also my boss. And I wanted to discuss something urgent with him.”
“I need more information,” she insisted.
“Okay. I’ll tell you more.” Shifting in his seat, Botha gently touched his forehead with his fingertips. She guessed that, with his adrenaline ebbing, the wound must be throbbing painfully now. “I’ve been working on contract at Inkomfe Nuclear Research Center, helping with security upgrades.”
“Okay,” Jade said.
“Loodts used to be in charge of Inkomfe, and he’s still a decision maker there. I called him yesterday, hoping to discuss a very serious and confidential matter.”
“What was this matter, exactly?”
“Long story. Probably too long for this drive.”
They were passing the Marlboro Road turnoff—Sandton was five minutes away. He was right. No time for a long story at the moment.
Jade noticed a pair of headlights that had been close behind her for a while. It was starting to make her jumpy. She slowed down and waited for the car to pass. “Why did you meet Loodts at that motel? It’s really out of the way. Is it close to where either of you live?”
The car was passing them now. She glimpsed the driver, an elderly man frowning ahead as he gripped the wheel. He must’ve been following her taillights because they offered security in the darkness. She silently wished him a safe journey as he headed onward into the night.
“I suggested meeting in Sandton, at the Da Vinci Hotel lounge. Then, just before I left, I got a text message from him saying the venue had changed to the Best Western,” Botha said. “I thought it was strange, but I didn’t argue. I was grateful he’d agreed to meet me at all.”
Jade wondered whether Loodts had really sent that message himself.
“Traffic was a nightmare with the load shedding,” Botha continued. “It took me an hour and a half just to get across town. I tried calling him when I was close to the motel, but his phone was turned off.”
Jade glanced at Botha, but he was staring straight ahead. “So you checked in to wait for him?”
“I thought I’d stay there awhile and see if he called me back. Then I saw the police outside that room and knew something had happened. I called reception and asked them to put me through to Mr. Loodts, and they said they couldn’t, because the police were investigating a crime scene in that room.”
“So you went across the road to the pub?”
“I needed a drink, and to try and think things over. I probably should have left straight away.” She sensed, rather than saw, his shrug. “Coulda, woulda, shoulda. As it turned out, I’d already stayed too long.”
“I see,” Jade said. If Botha was telling her the truth, his actions seemed reasonable. But she had little reason to trust him, even if they had narrowly escaped a set of killers together.
Botha could have gone to number twelve after he arrived and murdered Loodts and the blonde himself. She wasn’t going to view anything as truth until she had hard evidence to back it up.
Chapter Fourteen
Eleven p.m. Warrant Officer Mweli was comfortably installed on her corduroy couch. The pizza and wedges were a me
mory now, their packaging folded and crammed into the trash can. The nearby chair was occupied by Chakalaka, the ugly tabby cat who’d adopted her three years ago, soon after her husband’s fatal heart attack. She’d tried to chase him out at first, because he’d broken glasses on the drying rack while jumping through the kitchen window to steal her bread, but he was thin and young and pitiful, and eventually she’d found herself in the pet food aisle of the supermarket, loading up bags of the best stuff she could find. Chakalaka had showed his gratitude a few days later by scratching her arm bone-deep while she’d struggled to get him into a basket and off to the vet to get all the necessary done.
Now he was grooming himself in a focused way, so noisily that Mweli was forced to turn up the sound on the television. Deadliest Catch was playing on the DVR, and Mweli was watching Sig Hansen haul in pots that were crawling with Alaskan king crab.
“He’s a magician,” she muttered to herself, her eyes glued to the screen as giant waves crashed into the boat’s iced-over hull.
Then she and Chakalaka both jumped as her cell phone started to ring.
It was Constable Theron, who was on night duty at the station. “Evening, ma’am,” he said.
“What’s up, Constable?” Mweli stabbed at the DVR’s mute button and then, after a moment’s thought, the pause button. She needed her full attention for this conversation, but more importantly, she would need it for Hansen’s haul.
“Someone called in a report of a one-car accident on West Street, near the Best Western motel. A white Porsche. Metro police have just arrived on the scene.”
“Mm-hmm?” Mweli supposed this was going somewhere. Theron wouldn’t have contacted her for a bumper bashing. And the mention of the Best Western had her instincts prickling. She’d barely heard of West Street before today, but it sure was making a lot of paperwork for them now.
“Cops called it in because it looks like something in the car’s undercarriage exploded.”
“Accidental? Or an explosive device?” Mweli sat bolt upright, causing the couch to creak in protest and Chakalaka to stare at her inquiringly.
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