“So when Washington asked about the five dead South African expats, you told them about the Trustees,” Ray added.
“Yes, and only then did Washington tell us about the flash. Eight weeks earlier it had been. Eight weeks and you did not tell us.” She looked like steam might soon come from her ears.
“So you also think the events are related?” Ray asked.
“You know they are. That is why you are here, Mr. Bowman,” she said, sounding more South African than British now.
“It’s one theory we have, but it’s odd that no nuclear bombs have shown up in the months since the flash. No rumors of bombs, at least not that we have heard,” he said, half asking if they had heard any and not told Washington.
“Last week, when our embassy in Washington reported to us that your government’s theory is that South African expats may have had nuclear bombs for the last twenty-five years and now they sold some of them, Mr. Bowman, that caused a very great panic here at a very high level, the highest. My boss wanted to know how I could be following the Trustees so closely and miss that they had nuclears in storage all these years. It is now our only priority to find those bombs, before they go off in Soweto, and Joburg, and here on Table Mountain.”
Ray squinted in the darkened room, puzzled. “You think that they would detonate them here? Why would anybody want to do that? The folks back home think they will be detonated in Washington and New York just before our presidential election.”
“Tell that to my President, who has been having us do a secret search of all sorts of places—ships, airplanes with Geiger counters. He thinks if the expats had nukes, they had them to cripple black-run South Africa, to create some white breakaway nation, some white Bantustan. He is obsessed with the possibility of these bombs going off here. And if he’s not calmed down, it will leak out and there will be a huge panic.”
Now Ray sat back in his wingback chair. “Well, it would seem that our two Presidents have at least that much in common.”
“So, if you, the ex-bartender, are Washington’s answer to how we find the bombs, then I will be like the termite. I will stick with you until you find these bombs and the people who stole them or bought them.” She put down her wineglass and stood up. “So, we begin in the morning. Get some sleep. You look like you need it. I will send Marcus and the truck for you at nine. Call my Ops Room if you need anything before then. Here’s the number.” She dropped a card on the table and for the second time, she was extending her hand.
“Sala kahle, ukuthula,” she said.
“I’m sorry, my Zulu is rusty,” Ray replied.
“Sala kahle means good-bye and ukuthula, peace,” she said.
Ray stood. “Ukuthula. I will see you tomorrow.” He shook her hand and she promptly moved to the door.
“Cammil, next time we try the Delheim ’99. It aged longer in the wood.” She was gone.
Then the penny dropped and Raymond Bowman laughed aloud. Termite walks into a bar. Is the bartender here? Wow, this was going to be a ride.
9
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21
CAMPS BAY
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
He woke early and ran on the beach, barefoot, then dove into the waves to cool down. It was summer in South Africa and he was reminded again of Malibu. As he showered, it occurred to him that if the South African media ever reported that the security services here were searching containers with Geiger counters, it would be less than forty-eight hours before the story broke in Washington that Homeland Security wanted to do the same thing in the United States, but the White House had delayed them. The Great Panic would then occur. It could happen at any time, just as the bombs could detonate at any time, and yet he had gotten nowhere in figuring out who had the bombs. He didn’t really even know yet if there actually were loose nuclear bombs.
As he dressed in his gray summer weight suit, he realized that he was feeling excited, anticipating what it would be like to spend the day with Mbali. She was a professional of the type he enjoyed working with. He had a feeling that the day wouldn’t be boring. As the doors of the elevator opened on to the lobby, he spotted a man in a black suit with a sign reading BRAD RADFORD. Nice, they were using the cover name he had for the visit to South Africa.
“Good morning, sir. I’m Lesedi from Mbali’s office. Hope you had a good night. We have your car in the underground parking. Right this way,” the driver said, leading him to a different elevator bank. “We’ll have you downtown in no time.”
In the basement, the driver had pulled the Mercedes S-Class up as close to the elevator bank as he could get it. A driver and an escort, Bowman noted.
“Hi, I’m Brad Radford,” Bowman said to the driver as he sat down in the backseat. “What’s your name?”
The driver hesitated, “Thaba. Thaba my name, sir.” Lesedi got in next to Bowman and the car pulled toward the ticket gate. The doors locked.
“Where’s Marcus this morning?” Ray asked.
Lesedi smiled, “He’ll be meeting you at the office.” The gate at the ticket booth rose. Thaba gunned the car up the ramp. Then he hit the brakes. Ray lurched forward. A truck had just pulled across the ramp entrance. There was a deafening noise, another, more, and bits were flying through the air inside the car. Then, just as quickly, it was over, but there was a heavy smell and smoke in the car, a painful noise ringing in his ears. Ray was covered in shattered glass. Blood had spattered in the passenger compartment, Thaba’s blood and Lesedi’s. Ray could see that Thaba had an entry wound in his forehead.
Before Bowman could react, there were men at each of the car’s four doors. One was reaching in the shattered window on the driver’s door, hitting the door lock control. Ray’s door was opened and a white man with a gun in his hand was saying, “Special Services, Mr. Bowman. You’re safe now. Please step out of the car.”
Ray dusted the glass off himself and got out. He didn’t see any blood on him, but there were stains of something. “Marcus Stroh,” the man said, holstering the Sig Sauer. “We need to get you out of here before the police and the press show up. The truck is this way.” Ray walked up the ramp toward a white Mercedes Sprinter step van, wondering whether the dead men or their killers were really there to protect him. Something about the man who called himself Marcus Stroh said he was to be trusted. Two black men in suits stood by the van door, holding automatic weapons. Inside, the van was rigged up with a VIP interior that looked like it had been ripped from a private jet. “I’m sorry, sir, we should have spotted their team before they got you. I also should have met you at your room. This is my fault.”
As Ray sat in his leather chair in the truck and strapped in, he exhaled. His pulse was still racing. The truck began moving as Marcus closed the side door. “Thank you,” Ray managed to get out. His mouth was as dry as it had ever been. He suppressed the urge to vomit. “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have fallen for it. Who were they?”
“Don’t know. We weren’t advised that there was a threat to you or we would have been set up a lot differently,” Stroh replied. “We’ll find out though. Now that we have the bodies, the car, the guns. We’ll figure it out quickly. If I may ask, sir, who do you think they were?”
“Well, they didn’t look like al Qaeda,” Ray said, “but then, you never know, do you?”
Stroh nodded. “I’ll have my boys collect your kit from the hotel and check you out. We’ll put you up at the Service’s guesthouse. It’s at our training camp. Very nice. And secure.” They were moving quickly through traffic, but in the windowless compartment, Ray had no idea where they were. After what Ray guessed was about half an hour, the truck pulled up to a security gate and then down into the basement of a building. As the side door of the truck opened, Mbali Hlanganani appeared in a gray business pantsuit. “Mr. Bowman, my abject apology. Really, Cape Town is not typically like this. Are you all right?”
Bowman stepped out of the Mercedes Sprinter. “I seem to be, thanks to Marcus and his team. Sorry, I’m not
a field guy, not used to people being shot to death three feet from me.”
“You never get used to that,” she said.
“I would like to know who sent them.”
“So would I, Raymond, so would I,” she said. “But we shall, soon enough. Come, let’s go up to my office and get you cleaned up and maybe a little something to calm you down a bit.”
Fifteen minutes later he joined Mbali in her wood-paneled conference room. “Good as new,” he proclaimed. He had declined the sedative the doctor had offered. He had taken the vodka shot. “Shall we get to work?”
One wall of the conference room had a flat screen and a whiteboard and Mbali looked something like a professor standing between them. “Truly, Raymond, I am so sorry,” she began. “But, yes, to work. Here on the screen are photos of the Trustees, all of whom were killed. Karl Potgeiter was hit by the trolley in Vienna at 0503 Greenwich Mean Time that day, or as you Americans say, Zulu time.” She smiled for the first time since meeting Bowman at the truck. “I like calling it Zulu time, for obvious reasons.”
Bowman chuckled, forgetting for the moment what had happened an hour before.
Mbali continued, “Potgeiter had been the Director of Weapon Design at Pelindaba.”
“Pelindaba?” Bowman asked.
“Where they built the nuclear bombs. After Madiba’s election, President Mandela’s election, Potgeiter moved to Vienna and landed a job with the IAEA. Partially retired from there a few years back, but worked every day on the Trustee’s fund he managed. His son, Johann has replaced him, but then you met him, didn’t you? Viennese police didn’t think there was any chance of murder, until you showed up. Now they have reopened the case.”
Click. A face appeared on the screen, Dawid Steyn.
“Dawid was the successor as a Trustee to his father, who had directed the nuclear delivery program at ARMSCOR in the eighties and early nineties. It was really a version of the Israeli Jericho missile, with a lot of help from Tel Aviv. He is succeeded as a Trustee by his wife, Rachel. Dawid fell under a train at 0528 Zulu that day. Tel Aviv police have video of a man pushing Steyn off the platform, but they have made no progress figuring out who the man was.”
Click. “Marius Plessis,” Mbali said as the next face appeared. “Fell from a high balcony in Dubai at 0620 Zulu, an hour after the previous death in Tel Aviv. He had been the Treasurer, what we would now call the Chief Financial Officer, at ARMSCOR until 1993. Dubai police also have a video, showing an unknown man in a waiter’s uniform entering the room. No leads. Plessis’s daughter who lives in Toronto has started to manage his accounts. She has an MBA from MIT. I am told that is quite an accomplishment?”
“Sure is,” Ray responded. “Big quant program. Math, numbers. Digit heads.”
Click. “Cornelius Coetzee took a bullet in Singapore at 0540 Zulu, a rare occurrence there,” Mbali said consulting a file. “Singapore Police and also their Internal Security have turned the city upside down, but so far nothing. He had been the Deputy Director for Foreign Operations in the Apartheid Security Service. Was also close to Mossad and to the Taiwanese service. His brother Robert in Hong Kong now has the keys to the kingdom. Robert’s a bit younger, manages a hotel chain they own. He had been in the Special Forces in the eighties and early nineties.”
“I wonder if he wants to avenge his brother’s death?” Ray asked.
Mbali shrugged and continued on with the next victim.
Click. “Willem Merwe fell off a ferry boat in Sydney Harbour at 0525 Zulu. He had become a Trustee after his father died. Dad had been a young Admiral in the Apartheid Navy, last job was as Director of Plans for the South African Defence Ministry. New South Wales Police had no reason to believe foul play. We have asked them to reopen the case and they have agreed to. Willem has been replaced by a Paul Wyk, who is an investment banker in Wellington, New Zealand. Wyk’s father had been an Army General in charge of weapons development.” She clicked the projector off and the lights rose.
“So, with the exception of the guy in Dubai, whoever did this pulled off four murders in four cities within twenty minutes, making most of them look like accidents,” Ray observed.
“Dubai guy slept in,” Mbali added. “Otherwise it would have been five in less than half an hour. This is not the work of some group of schoolboys.”
“It would be very difficult for any American intelligence or military unit to do that, especially without getting caught. Could your service do that, not that you did?” he asked.
“I would like to say we did, but alas no one would let me and, of course, we are not that good.” She poured herself coffee and sat down opposite Bowman. “It took extensive planning, area knowledge, coordination, communications. We would have used teams of twenty or more per target, watchers, comms guys, drivers, safe house landlords, documents men. I don’t have one hundred people to deploy overseas. I might be able to field one team like that, but not five. Who could?”
“If the U.S. used the Agency’s Clandestine Service and military Special Ops, I suppose we could in a pinch. Otherwise? Russia, maybe Israel. Nobody else,” Bowman thought out loud.
“Our conclusion as well. We ruled you out for lack of motive and because the only people you seem to be allowed to kill are al Qaeda and ISIS,” she said, pouring him a coffee. “We haven’t been able to imagine a motive that would get the SVR out doing this sort of thing. What would be in it for Russia?”
“Which leaves Israel?” Bowman asked.
“Maybe, they could be cleaning up loose ends. Didn’t want the story coming out that old South African nuclear weapons in their control had suddenly disappeared?” Mbali offered.
Ray shook his head, no. “First, we don’t really know that the Israelis had old South African nukes or, if they did, that anybody took them from them. All I really have is the guy at the IAEA who was told over twenty years ago that the weapons went to Israel. So, we think the bombs were not destroyed. We think one of them went off in August in the Indian Ocean, just like the test South Africa or Israel did in 1979. We think that the Trustees may have had the bombs and sold them and that, whoever bought the bombs, then killed the sellers.”
Mbali folderd her arms across her chest and looked at Ray Bowman. “You say it like it’s just a theory, but it has both your President and mine convinced and both of them are about to go to battle stations looking for these loose nukes. So, for what it’s worth, I am buying the theory. I like my job.”
Ray nodded. “It’s plausible. And, therefore, we have to operate as if we knew with a certainty that it were true. Because, if it is true and we don’t do everything we can to get these before the nukes go off somewhere or the new owners threaten to set them off…” He let the thought hang in the air.
She stood and looked Ray in the eye. “If they exist, Mr. Bowman, I am going to find those bombs, and soon. That is what I told my President and I intend to fulfill that promise.”
“Right, so back to the possibilities then,” he said and turned to face the whiteboard. “If the Israelis did get the bombs back then, in the nineties, there is no way that they would have preserved them. They don’t need them and they wouldn’t want old designs like that anyway. They would have harvested the enriched uranium.
“Besides, no one is getting a nuclear weapon out of Israel and no Israeli agency is going to throw one of their own citizens under a train in Tel Aviv. No, I don’t buy it.”
Mbali leaned back in her leather chair. “Well, you know the Israelis better than we do. We’ve never really reestablished close ties. So, if not America, South Africa, Russia, or Israel, who?”
Ray moved to the whiteboard and listed those four nations with a blue marker. “We question our assumptions. Even though it makes no sense, maybe it was one of those four. Or, it was the fifth alternative.”
“Martians?” she asked.
“Nonstate actor,” he said and wrote it on the board. “Terrorist group? The White House thinks it must be al Qaeda. Narco-criminal cartel? Me
ga corporation?”
“You mean like Google?” Mbali laughed.
“They don’t do evil, just ask them, but there are lots of big companies that have their own little intelligence services and security teams, with ex–Special Forces, ex-spooks,” he suggested. “Chinese companies, Russian, Korean, even Saudi, Mexican, and Brazilian.”
“Like Carlos Slim, the Mexican phone billionaire. What’s he going to do with a nuclear weapon?” she asked. “I think it’s far more likely that it was a coup within the Afrikaner world, some offshoot of the Trustees, some parallel group we didn’t know about. My President is not entirely nuts to think that there may be some group of weird white folk who want to re-create their old South Africa somehow. Maybe they take over Namibia and threaten to blow us up if there is resistance or if South Africa threatens to invade.”
Bowman looked at his new South African colleague for a minute, as he stood in front of the whiteboard and she spun about in her chair. “If there were some coup within the Afrikaner expat world, you would know. It’s your expertise, your raison d’être to know what the crazier whites are up to. You don’t believe that scenario for a minute, do you?”
“No, not really. We’d have heard something,” she agreed. “But there is a guy who might know what’s going on. He’s one of them, could have become one the Trustees, but didn’t. He stayed here. Instead he and his two boys opened a winery. He’s never really helped us very much, but he’s agreed to see you. Still loves America.”
The telephone rang and Mbali answered, “Hlanganani.” She listened for a second, “Send him in.” Marcus Stroh joined them. “Who were they? Who were Mr. Bowman’s attempted kidnappers?” she asked without preliminaries.
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