by Deon Meyer
'Se ke...He let go of her suddenly, raised his hand to slap her, but stopped himself, and went over to the door.
'Nkwenyane,' he said, out of breath. 'What a fishwife!'
'I quit,' Milla screamed, her blood still boiling. 'You can keep your job.'
Masilo, gingerly probing his cheekbone, looked at her and smiled slowly.
'Very well,' he said and took the key out of his pocket. 'Let me get someone to escort you, and you can pack up your things.'
The Director phoned Rajkumar in his office. 'I need to know what the weather is like in the North Atlantic right now. The Grand Banks area.'
'Call you back?'
'I'll hold.'
'OK.'
She heard the click of Raj's mouse, his laboured breathing. 'Getting there ... getting there ... OK. I have a satellite image of... twenty minutes ago ... looks pretty good ...'
'No bad weather? No clouds?'
'Just a second ... Weatheronline in the UK says ... nope, no bad weather, let me just check the NASA Earth Science Office ...'
She waited.
'Clear as a bell, a few clouds off Canada, but that's it.'
'Could you double-check and get back to me?'
'Absolutely.'
She put down the phone.
Why would Burzynski lie?
With anger and shame burning inside her, and two muscular officials walking behind her, Milla collected her handbag and the few items in her drawer.
Dead silence hung over the Report Squad, only Donald MacFarland challenging the two escorts with a look, and then giving her a slight nod, in sympathy. The others avoided her eyes and only later, when she sat beside the sea at Milnerton, did she realise someone must have talked to them. She wondered what they had been told.
But now she put only the personal items in her handbag, gave Mac one last look, and walked out.
At the security door one said, 'Your card, please.'
She took it out and threw it down in front of him.
The other one opened the door for her.
In the flat Milla found chaos. Cupboard doors stood wide, the floor was strewn with articles.
In her bedroom she saw they had taken her diaries. And her laptop. Helplessness and rage and injustice overwhelmed her, but she knew there were microphones somewhere in this place, and she wept silently, her fists clenched.
She suddenly had to get out, this space was polluted now. She picked up her handbag, took out the things she had packed up at the office, threw them hastily down on her writing table and left. Just before she got to her car, she stopped with a sudden anxiety. She opened her handbag, searched furiously for her purse, found it. She opened it carefully, to see whether there was evidence of some other fingers going through it.
Lukas's letter was there, beside the banknotes, still folded up as she had placed it there that morning.
She took it out and thought back, her handbag had been in the office, hanging over the back of her chair.
Would they have searched it?
She was going to memorise the number, get rid of the letter.
Quinn and Masilo watched the screen, saw over the video feed how Miss Jenny suddenly stopped to look in her handbag.
It was Quinn who read her body language, put her urgency and the object of her interest together.
'We didn't search her handbag,' he said, in self-reproach. 'It was here, in the office.'
'Ay, ay,' said Masilo, and touched the slight swelling on his cheek with his fingertips.
'Looks like it's a piece of paper.'
They saw her fold it up again, put it back in her purse, and continue to the car. He picked up the radio and said: 'Stand by, Miss Jenny is on the move.'
'How many teams?' Masilo asked.
'All three who were following Becker.'
'And lost him.' No reproach, just a statement of fact.
'And they know how unacceptable that is. Becker was on foot, in the early hours, he knew we were tailing him, and he is a pro. She isn't. We have GPS on her car, we are plotting her cellphone for position, we hear every call, we have microphones in her flat...'
'OK,' said Masilo. He watched the screen where Milla's car was now a moving arrow on the map. 'Where is she going?'
At first she just drove, instinctively, in the direction of Durbanville. Until she realised what she was doing, and why. A sense of panic came over her, she turned off at the Koeberg exit, not knowing where she could go, no place was safe, she must phone Lukas now, right now. She reached out her hand for the phone in her bag, found it, the number in her head, typed in the first three digits.
A car beside her hooted, shrill and sudden. She looked up, shocked, saw she was veering across the lane, jerked the Renault back, looked across at the other car: a man grimacing, arm waving, finger raised, angry words forming soundlessly.
Then he was past and her hands were trembling. She knew she must stop, first stop and then phone. She saw the Caltex service station beyond the traffic lights, she would turn in there. And only then, from somewhere, a voice in her head said don't phone, they're listening.
The realisation reverberated right through her.
Lagoon Beach was the first place she could park, she turned off without thinking, she just wanted to get off the road, get out of the car. She got out, locked the Renault, and walked blindly, her handbag over her shoulder, her hand clutching it desperately, as though it were her sole possession.
Masilo's allegations were flickering, blinding lights that obscured everything, so that she could not think at first, could neither recall her conversations with Lukas nor the content of the reports she had read, only see the fireworks that had just exploded into her life.
She walked for six kilometres, past the golf course, the houses, past other people, unaware of the four men trailing her on foot. Then she sat down without warning, in the sand some distance from the sea, handbag on her lap, chin in her hands, eyes gazing over the ocean, and she thought, long and hard.
The agent lowered his binoculars and told Quinn over the cellphone: 'No, she's just sitting there.'
'Listen carefully: we suspect she is waiting for Becker. You all know what he looks like. Let me know immediately you see him, but lie low. He's a professional, and most likely armed.'
'Roger.'
'The reaction unit is on the way. If Becker comes, they will bring him in. Stand by.'
It was the knowledge that she had come so close to phoning Lukas that forced Milla to try to calm down.
She sat with her eyes closed, trying despairingly and at first in vain to suppress everything: the fears, emotion, the doubt, the humiliation and self-pity.
It was the pain in the knuckle of her right hand that gradually penetrated, shifting her focus: why was it so sore? Then she remembered how she had hit Masilo, and recalled the sudden, deep sense of injustice that she had experienced at that moment. She saw herself again, striking out at him. 'What a fishwife.' And she couldn't help smiling; Lord, Milla, was that you, the little housewife from Durbanville?
It lifted the awful tension - not entirely, just enough for her to breathe out slowly and deliberately, find a foothold against the storm in her head. She thought, I have made progress after all, I have grown: in that blow-striking moment I fought back, instinctively. And it was good.
She clung to the positive thoughts, she tried to recall others, like the entry in her diary, This morning I found a piece of myself I have a habit. To suppress fears, to hide them from myself. And then to do strange things. And, Milla, the anxious cat, takes anxious leaps, and mostly I don't know that I am anxious.
She decided she wasn't going to suppress these fears. She wasn't going to deny these anxieties, she was going to tackle them head-on, she was going to plan her leaps. She was going to find the truth, she was going to make a plan. In the words of Lukas Becker and Voltaire, she was going to play the cards that life dealt her in a reasoned way.
She sat there for over an hour, a lonely figure on
a wide beach.
65
'She's standing up, she's walking back to her car,' the agent said.
'Nobody came near her?' Quinn asked.
'No one. Hold on ... Looks like she's phoning ...'
Quinn turned to one of the team members in the Ops Room. 'I want to hear the call.'
The technician nodded and made the adjustments.
'Yes, she has the cellphone to her ear ...' the agent on Milnerton Beach confirmed.
Milla's voice came over the sound system. 'This is Milla Strachan, may I speak to Gus, please?'
'Hold on,' said an unfamiliar voice.
Music on the line.
'I want to know whose number this is,' Quinn said to his team.
'Milla, how are you?' A male voice.
'Fine, thanks. Gus, I need your help ...'
'Don't tell me Christo is giving you trouble?'
'No, this is work related. The place I began working at on the first of September is the PIA, the Presidential Intelligence Agency. Their offices ...'
'The PIA, the spy guys?'
'Yes. Their address is ...'
'You became a spy?'
'No, I just wrote reports. Their offices are in the Wale Street Chambers, on the corner of Wale and Long Street...'
'Hold on, I want to write this down.'
Someone whispered to Quinn: 'The number belongs to a firm of attorneys in Durbanville. Smuts, Kemp and Smal.'
'Get one of the surveillance teams to drive in that direction.'
'OK,' the man's voice said over the phone.
Milla's voice: 'I will SMS you the telephone number of their switchboard, and the name of the Deputy Director involved. They broke into my flat this morning and stole my laptop and all my diaries. I want them back, Gus ...'
'Jissis,' someone in the Ops Room whispered.
Quinn raised his hand to request silence. It was the calm in Milla Strachan's voice that worried him the most.
'... and then I want someone to come and remove the bugs that they have planted.'
'Fuck, Milla,' said the one she called 'Gus'. And then, a short, hard laugh.
'And I want you to know,' said Milla, 'the chances are good that they are listening to this call, but it doesn't really matter. I want my things back, and the more public and open the process is to get them, the better. Gus, they mustn't be able to hide.'
'An urgent interdict is completely public. If you want I can phone one of my buddies at Media24 ... but you must know, tomorrow it will be all over the papers.'
'Let me just call Barend first and tell him that his mother is going to be in the news.'
Masilo told Mentz about Miss Jenny's call to Kemp, the attorney, and ended with: 'She SMSed my name to him. I think it's personal because I told her about Becker's misdeeds.'
Then he waited for the explosion, but it didn't erupt. Mentz stared at him. For a long time. Then she said coldly: 'The Americans are lying to us.'
He had to make the mental leap first. 'What about?' 'About the weather in the North Atlantic Ocean. It's a delaying tactic, Tau. It has something to do with the fact that Becker has given them Osman, or that they still haven't retrieved what was stolen from Becker. We will have to get Becker. And fast.' 'Miss Jenny is the way to him.'
'And the little bitch is phoning her lawyer,' said Janina Mentz, but without venom.
'I should have read the signs better when she assaulted me,' said Masilo, and he stroked his cheekbone again. 'I miscalculated.'
'We should have read the signs better when we employed her. She had the courage to walk out of her marriage ...'
Masilo thought back to the rumour that Mentz, too, a decade ago, had left behind an unhappy marriage with a straying husband, and wondered how much the Director identified with Milla Strachan.
Operation Shawwal
Transcription: Audio surveillance, M. Strachan. No 14 Daven Court,
Davenport Street, Vredehoek
Date and Time: 7 October 2009. 23.19
LB: Why did you wait so long?
MS: I wonder about that every day. But then ... I think it was ... there are so many reasons. I didn't know how a functional marriage worked, I only knew my parents' one and I knew, at least, that that was not normal. But what isnormal? I mean ... When I looked around, everyone had a marriage like that, the man and his career, the wife at home complaining she didn't get enough attention. Two worlds, it was the norm, everyone experienced it, everyone just got on with it. But it was more than that. If you are depressed, if you lose your self-confidence, if you live in this daze, if you don't have meaning and purpose, then every day just slips through your fingers. It's the routine as well, so soul-destroying ... You don't think, you don't really feel, even, I don't know ... if you've never experienced it, it's probably hard to ... I... It's such a slow, silent process, like the lobster in the pot of boiling water, you get used to it, you don't realise it. And even if you ... I think Christo had his first big affair ten years ago, but I was too naive then. Or maybe I didn't want to ... I only realised last year, when ... Lord, it is all so suburban...
LB: If you would rather not. . .
MS: No, no, I want to, I've written about it in my diary, but when I read it again lately, it's just so ... pathetic. I... all the signs were there, I was just... blind is not the right word. Blunted? Absent? I don't know, I was so awfully introverted ... He was in the shower, one evening, he had to go out again for a business dinner, his cellphone was lying on the table, downstairs. I heard the SMS. I still don't know what made me look, I had never... It was just so banal. About what she wanted to do with Christo, that night. I remember how I thought it must have been sent to the wrong number, it wasn't Christo. I mean, our sex ... when it still happened was so ... proper.
LB: Milla . . .
MS: I drove after him. To the Tyger Waterfront. Not even far away. Just around the corner. Out in the open, at a restaurant. She looked so ... I don't know, ordinary, younger than him, but not... not someone who would send an SMS like that. I still wonder if she knew she wasn't the only one, that he had three or four others, Barend saw him with another one, a blonde, even younger, that's how he knew . . .
'Are we going to negotiate with her?' Tau Masilo asked.
'Absolutely not,' said Mentz. 'Let Mrs Killian call her. And say something like "You've been cleared, but we had to be sure. We will deliver everything to your flat this evening".' 'And the microphones?' 'Leave them. Let's see how many they find.'
Milla drove through Table View in the five o'clock traffic. She kept an eye on her rear-view mirror with the strong suspicion that they were behind her, somewhere. But she saw nothing.
She crossed the N7. At Bothasig she turned left onto the N13. She still couldn't spot any tails. It meant either that they weren't there, or a bit further behind, and that was all she needed. She accelerated, driving as fast as the traffic allowed, flashing her lights at slow cars, shooting past.
At the Altydgedacht junction, as she was about to turn right to Tyger Valley, her cellphone rang.
'Hello?'
'Hello, Milla, this is Betsy Killian.'
Milla remained silent.
'I just want to say that the team and I are very sorry about what happened.'
'Thank you.'
'And I can also tell you, your diaries and your laptop will be delivered to your flat this evening.'
'So they are listening to my phone calls.'
'Excuse me?'
'It doesn't matter. Mrs Killian, thank you for phoning. Just ask them to tidy up everything, please.'
'I will pass the message on. They want you to sign for delivery. What time will you be home?'
'No, Mrs Killian,' Milla said. 'I don't know when I will be home. Tell them to put everything back where it belongs. They know how to get in. Oh, and tell Advocate Masilo, if they return everything, I will drop the interdict.'
'I will tell him.'
When she rang off, Milla wondered whether there was any other rea
son for the call. She knew, from the operator's reports, that it was possible to determine someone's position from a cellphone signal.
It didn't matter either. She would leave the phone in the car when she went to call Lukas.
Transcription: Interrogation of Enoch Mangope by 5. Kgomo. Safe House,Parkview, Johannesburg
Date and Time: 9 October 2009, 14.14
SK: You were one of those who hijacked Becker's car on 13 September.
EM: (No response.)
SK: I am not from the police, it doesn't matter.
EM: (No response.)
SK: So, afterwards, where did Becker find you?
EM: Joel Road. Berea.
SK: Was he armed?
EM: Yebo.
SK: With a shotgun?
EM: HhayiI iSistela.
SK: A pistol.
EM: Yebo.
SK: And then?
EM: Then he said, come with me.
SK: Where did he take you?
EM: Indlu. In Randburg. A town house.
SK: Would you find the place again?
EM: Kungaba . . .
SK: Then, what did he do?
EM: He tied me up. To the chair. Then he talked a lot.
SK: What did he say?
EM: He wanted his money.
SK: What money?
EM: The money that was in his bag.
SK: Did you see the money?
EM: (No response.)
SK: Come on, Enoch, I told you, we are after Becker, not you. Did youthe money?
EM: Yebo.
SK: How much was it?
EM: Lots. English money. Pounds.
SK: So, what did you tell him?
EM: I didn't have his money.
SK: And then?
EM: He asked me, who did?
SK: Yes?
EM: Then I said nothing.
SK: And then?
EM: Then he didn't talk again, the whole night. No food, no water. He keptme awake, kaningi, I couldn't sleep, because I was sitting like this.
SK: When did you tell him Enoch? About Shabangu. Inkunzi.
EM: The third day. He took me to the amaphoyisa.