Golden Fox c-12

by Wilbur Smith

  "One down,' she whispered. 'Two thousand more to go." She marched across the street to the door of number eleven, and a child opened the door.

  "Is your mummy at home?" The child was a freckle-faced little boy with curly blond hair and sticky lips. He held a half-devoured slice of bread and jam in one hand, and smiled at her shyly. He was at least five years old, but she thought of Nicky, and her resolve hardened.

  "I am Isabella Courtney,' she said, as the mother came to the door, 'and I am your National Party candidate in next month's by-election." After the third call she found to her astonishment that she was starting to enjoy herself. She was seeing a side of life that she had never imagined existed. She found herself warming to these ordinary simple folk, and developing an understanding and concern for their problems and fears and their way of life which was so alien from her own existence.

  "Privilege carries responsibilities.' She had heard her father say it so often. 'Noblesse oblige.' She had not thought deeply about it, but believed that she understood the concept. Not that she had ever intended doing anything about it, of course. Up until now, life had been too busy. Her own needs and desires had been too pressing to care or worry about other, insignificant, people such as these.

  Now she felt herself drawn to them. She felt a genuine warmth for them, a sympathy and a desire to understand and protect them.

  Perhaps motherhood has mellowed me a little, she thought, and the ache of her loss immediately followed the thought. Was this some displacement emotion, a diversion of her frustrated maternal instincts? She did not know, and also she did not really care. All that was important was that she wanted to do this, she truly wanted to help these people. She wanted very strongly to win a seat in Parliament, and to put her time and her talents to good unselfish use.

  She felt a genuine regret when after the eighth call she checked her wristwatch and found that it was time to meet Nana and call it a day.

  Centaine was waiting for her at the rendezvous at the street-comer. She looked fresh and alert, bubbling with the energy of a much younger woman.

  "How did you go, Bella?' she demanded briskly. 'How many calls?" "Eight,' Bella told her with satisfaction. 'Two "Yesses" and a "Maybe". How about you, Nana?" 'Fourteen calls and five "Yesses". I don't count "Maybes" or "Might have beens". Never have." She took Isabella's arm as the yellow Daimler came into view and slowed to pick them up.

  "Now, as soon as we get home you will send them each a personal handwritten note - I hope you noted their children's names and ages, and some personal details about each of them." 'Do I have to write to all of them?" 'All of them,' Centaine confirmed. "'Yesses", "Noes" and "Maybes". Then we will follow it up with another note a few days before polling, just to remind them." 'You make it such hard work, Nana," Isabella protested mildly.

  "Nothing of value is ever achieved without hard work, missy.' She stepped into the Daimler and settled on to the cream leather seat. 'And don't forget the meeting this evening. Have you got your speech written yet?

  We'll go over it together." 'Nana, I've still got a pile of work to do for Pater." 'Keep you out of mischief,' Centaine agreed complacently. "Home to Weltevreden, Klonkie,' she told the chauffeur.

  Isabella cheated a little. She had her secretary type a standard letter to all of the constituents that she and Nana had visited, but she checked and signed each of these personally. By exercising these little economies of time she was able to discharge her political aspirations and also keep abreast of the work that her father piled upon her desk.

  Shasa had given her a corner suite of offices in Centaine House. Her new secretary was one of the stalwarts who had worked for Courtney Enterprises for twenty years. She occupied the outer office of the suite. Isabella's inner office was panelled in indigenous yellow wood that Shasa had salvaged from a two-hundred-year-old building that had been demolished to make way for a block of modem apartments in Sea Point. The wood had a glorious buttery glow. Shasa had loaned her four paintings from his collection, two Pierneefs and a pair of landscapes by Hugo Naude. Their colours stood out very well on the light-toned panels. All the books on the shelves were fully bound in royal blue calf leather, though Isabella doubted that she would have much call for thirty years' worth of Hansard's parliamentary reports.

  The windows of her suite looked out on to the park and St. George's Cathedral, with a backdrop of Table Mountain beyond. There was a saying that you hadn't arrived in Cape Town unless you had a view of the mountain from your window.

  She signed the last of her form letters to her prospective constituents and carried the batch through to her secretary's office. The secretary's office was empty, and the cover was on the Underwood typewriter. Isabella checked her wristwatch.

  "Good grief - it's after five already." She felt a quick relief in the fact that time had passed so swiftly and painlessly. It hadn't always been like that since she had lost Nicky. She had come to rely on hard work and long hours as the opiate for the deep gnawing pain of her bereavement.

  Dinner at Weltevreden was at eight-thirty sharp, cocktails thirty minutes before. She had time to fill, so she went back to her own desk. Shasa had left a draft copy of his report on her desk with a note: 'I need it back tomorrow a. m. Love you, Pater." During their time together at the embassy they had fallen into this routine in which she checked his speeches and written reports for style and syntax.

  Shasa did not truly need such assistance. He could craft a telling phrase with the best of them. However, the custom gave them both pleasure, and Shasa occasionally went over the top with a metaphor or let an unseemly clichd creep into his compositions. At the very least he enjoyed her praises.

  She read the twelve-page report through carefully, and suggested one change. Then she wrote 'What a clever father I chosev on the foot of it, and took it down to his office at the end of the long carpeted corridor.

  His office was locked. She had a key and let herself in.

  Shasa's office was four times larger and grander than 22e hers was. His desk was reputed to have come from the Dauphin's apartments at Versailles. He had an original auctioneer's receipt dated 1791 which showed that provenance.

  Isabella placed the corrected report in the centre of the delicate marquetry desk-top, and then changed her mind. The report was destined to be read only by the prime minister and members of his cabinet. Some of the facts and figures that it contained were highly confidential, and crucial to the nation's security. Shasa should not have left it unprotected on her desk but, then, he was often careless with important documents.

  She retrieved the report and took it to his personal safe. The safe was concealed behind a false bookcase. The mechanism was incorporated into the lamp on its wallbracket above the bookcase. The release was in the shape of a bronze nymph in art deco style, holding the lightbulb, above her head like a torch.

  Isabella rotated the bracket on its hinge, and the false bookcase slid noiselessly aside, revealing the massive green-painted steel Chubb door.

  Shasa's choice of numerals for the combination lacked either subtlety or originality. It was simply his own birthdate in inverted sequence. Apart from Shasa himself, Isabella, in her capacity as his personal assistant, was the only one who had the combination. He had not even given it to Nana or Garry.

  She set the combination, swung the heavy steel door open and walked into the cavernous strongroom. She often had to nag her father to keep the room tidy, and now she clucked her tongue with disapproval as she saw two green Armscor files piled haphazardly on the central table. She tidied up quickly, locked the strongroom and then stopped in the ladies' washroom on her way back to her own office.

  As she settled into the driving-seat of the Mini, she sighed. It had been a long day, and she still had the election meeting after dinner. She wouldn't. be in bed until long after midnight.

  For a moment she considered the shortest route back to Weltevreden.

  However, the Mini took the road up the slope of the mountain almost of it
s own volition, and fifteen minutes later she parked in the side-street round the comer from the Camps Bay post office.

  She felt that familiar heavy rock of dread in the pit of her stomach as she approached her post-box. Would it be empty, as it had been for so many weeks? Would she never have word of Nicky again?

  She opened the box, and her heart seemed to bounce against her ribs with a single wild lunge. Like a thief she snatched out the slim envelope and thrust it deep into her jacket pocket.

  As was her habit she parked above the beach, under the palms, and read the four lines of typewritten instruction with a mixture of dread and anticipation.

  This was something new.

  In strict accordance with her standing instructions she memorized the contents of the letter and then burnt it and crushed the ashes to dust.

  On the Friday morning three days after receiving the Red Rose letter, Isabella left the Mini in the car park of the new Pick 'n' Pay supermarket in the suburb of Claremont.

  She locked the driver's door, but left the side-window open an inch at the top as she had been instructed. She entered the back door of the bustling supermarket. It was the last Friday of the month, and pay-day for tens of thousands of office workers and civil servants. The queues at the checkout tills were scores long.

  Isabella passed quickly out through the front entrance into the main street of the suburb and turned left. She pushed her way along the crowded pavements until she reached the new post office building. There was a pair of teenage girls in the glass cubicle of the first public telephone booth from the left. They giggled into the receiver and 228 jangled their fake gold ear-rings and rolled their eyes at each other as they listened to the boy on the other end of the line, sharing the earpiece of the telephone.

  Isabella checked her watch. It was five minutes short of the hour, and she felt a stab of anxiety. She tapped imperiously on the glass door, and one of the girls pushed out her tongue at her and went on speaking.

  A minute later Isabella tapped again. With ill grace the pair hung. up the receiver and flounced away angrily. Isabella darted into the booth and closed the door. She did not lift the receiver, but made a show of searching for small change in her purse. She was watching the minute-hand of her wristwatch. As it touched the pip at the top of the dial the telephone rang and she snatched it up.

  "Red Rose,' she whispered breathlessly, and a voice said: 'Return immediately to your vehicle.' The connection was broken and the burr of the dialling tone echoed in her ears. Even in her perplexity, Isabella thought she had recognized the heavy accent of the large powerful woman who had picked her up in the closed van on the Thames Embankment almost three years previously.

  Isabella dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and fled from the booth. It took her three minutes to reach the Mini in the Pick 'n' Pay car park. As she inserted the key in the door-lock she saw the envelope lying on the driver's seat, and she understood. She had read the books of Le Carrd and Len Deighton, and she realized that this was a dead-letter drop.

  She knew that she was almost certainly under observation at that moment.

  She glanced around the car park furtively. It was almost two acres in extent, and there were several hundred other vehicles parked around her.

  Dozens of shoppers pushed their laden shopping-trolleys to the waiting motor-cars, and beggars and off-duty schoolchildren loitered and idled about the car park. Cars pulled in and out of the gates in a steady two-way stream. It would be impossible to pick out the watcher from this crowd.

  She slipped behind the wheel and drove carefully back to Weltevreden. The letter was obviously too important to be entrusted to the postal service. This was an ingenious form of hand delivery. Locked in the safety of her own private bedroom suite she at last opened the envelope.

  First, there was a recent colour photograph of Nicky. He was dressed in bathing-trunks.- He had developed into a sturdy and beautiful child of nearly three years of age. He stood on a beach of white coral sand with the blue ocean behind him.

  The letter that accompanied the photograph was terse and unequivocal: As soon as possible, you will acquire full technical specifications of the new Siemens computer-linked coastal radar network presently being installed by Armscor at Silver Mine naval headquarters on the Cape peninsula.

  Inform us in the usual way once these plans are in your possession. After you have delivered, arrangements will be made for your first meeting with your son.

  There was no signature.

  Standing over the toilet-bowl in her bathroom, Isabella burnt the letter and, as the flames scorched her fingertips, dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ashes away. She closed the toilet-cover and sat upon it, staring at the tiled wall opposite.

  So it had come at last - as she had known it must. For three years she had waited for the order to commit an act that would finally put her beyond the pale.

  Up until now she had been instructed merely to inveigle herself into her father's complete confidence. She had been told to make herself indispensable to him, and she had done so. She had been ordered to join the National Party and seek election to parliamentary office. With Nana's help and guidance, she had done so.

  However, this was different. She recognized that she had at last reached the point of no return. She could turn back from treason - and abandon her son; or she could go forward into the dangerous unknown.

  "Oh, God help me,' she whispered aloud. 'What can I do - what must I do?" She felt the great serpentine coils of dread and guilt tighten about her.

  She knew what the answer to her question must be.

  A copy of the Siemens radar installation report was in her father's strongroom in Centaine House at this moment. On Monday the file would be returned by special courier to naval headquarters in the nuclear-proof bunker complex built into Silver Mine mountain.

  However, her father was flying up to the sheep ranch at Camdeboo over the weekend. She had already refused the invitation to accompany him on the excuse that she had so much work to catch up on. On Saturday and Sunday, Nana was judging the Cape gun-dog trials. Garry was in Europe with Holly and the children. Isabella would have the top floor of Centaine House to herself for the entire weekend. She had full security clearance, and the guards at the front door knew her well.

  The wind was out of the north. The first snowflakes eddied down, silver bright against the grey sow's belly of the sky.

  There were a dozen men at the graveside, no women. There had been no women in Joe Cicero's life, just as now there was none at his death. All the mourners were officers from the department. They had been delegated to this duty. They stood stolidly to attention in a single rank. All of them wore uniform greatcoats and scarlet-piped dress caps. All their noses were red, with cold rather than with grief. Joe Cicero had no friends. He had seldom evoked any emotion in his peers other than envious admiration or fear.

  The honour guard stepped smartly forward and, at the order, raised their rifles and pointed them to the sky. The volleys rang out, punctuated by the rattle of the bolts. At the next order they shouldered their weapons and marched away, boots slamming into the gravel path and clenched fists swinging high across the chest.

  The official mourners broke their ranks, shook hands briefly and expressionlessly then hurried to the waiting vehicles.

  Ramsey Machado was the only one left at the graveside. He also wore the full-dress uniform of a KGB colonel, and beneath his greatcoat the gaudy lines of his decorations reached below his ribcage.

  "And so, you old bastard, for you the game is over at last - but it took you long enough to clear the stage.' Although Ramsey had been head of section for two years now, he had never truly felt that he had succeeded to the title while Joe Cicero was still alive.

  The old man had died grudgingly. He had held the cancer in remission for long agonizing months. He had even kept his office in the Lubyanka right up to the last day. His gaunt spectral presence had presided at every meeting of section heads, his wi
ll and his enmity had inhibited Ramsey at every turn, right to the last.