‘I can’t wait.’ Paul banged the glass on the bedside table. ‘But first tell me how you found me.’
‘Ponte City is guarded by a group that works with the local police,’ said Dingane. ‘They’re called the Stockbroke Boyz. There are lots of illegal Africans living in that building.’
‘You don’t say,’ Paul mumbled.
‘They have to pay exorbitant rents to gangs who control many of the floors. The Stockbroke Boyz patrol there. One of them saw a man taking a dive off the fiftieth floor.’
‘I’ll have to thank those boys, ‘Paul said. ‘If they hadn’t got to me so fast, they probably would’ve found me lying on top of Zhulongu.’
‘Murdering foreign journalists isn’t a good strategy. Too much of a ruckus, politicians wanting to stick their noses into it, ministries sounding the alarm and, again, loyal colleagues delving into the whole thing. It was a warning, Paul. I’m interested in the man who gave you that warning in Ponte City.’
‘Ah! El condor pasa! ‘Paul said, grinning.
‘We fed your description of him into our system,’ said Dingane, ‘and we came up with a profile of Arseni Vakurov.’
‘Okay, and what’s his story?’
‘Vakurov is the right hand of Valentin Lavrov.’
‘Lavrov,’ Paul muttered. ‘So Zhulongu must have had some seriously incriminating material with him. But he slipped up at some point. Someone got wind of our appointment.’
‘That’s for sure,’ Dingane said. ‘What do you know about Valentin Lavrov?’
‘He’s a Russian tycoon with more than twenty billion euros socked away in the bank. He came to South Africa with a shovel and suitcases full of black-market dollars, intent on digging for uranium. He negotiated with Nkoane in secret about this.’
‘And what kind of info did Zhulongu have for you?’
‘Probably about the deal the two of them made. A deal that was not only favourable for Lavrov.’
There was a silence.
‘We’re not out to get Valentin Lavrov,’ Dingane finally said.
‘I understand,’ Paul said, closely following Dingane, who was now pacing around the room. Paul could feel that more was coming.
‘Ever heard of Grigori Michailov?’
‘Michailov was a prominent figure,’ replied Paul. ‘He received the Medalj zolotaja Zvezda, the medal of the Gold Star. If they pin that on you, you automatically become a Hero of the Soviet Union. When I lived in Kabul as a boy, the Saur Revolution took place. It was an uprising of the communist army units predominantly supported by leftist students at the universities. Russia wanted Afghanistan as a buffer state. America had its sphere of influence in Persia and Russia feared that the Americans would pull the same stunt in Afghanistan and gradually close in on Russia. It’s claimed that Grigori Michailov was the Russian genius behind that coup. I know all of this because my father was conducting an investigation at that time.’
‘Raylan Chapelle, the American Vietnam journalist?’
‘You’ve done your homework, Dingane,’ Paul said with a grin. ‘But what does this Michailov have to do with Lavrov?’
‘Grigori Michailov is the link between Lavrov and Vakurov,’ said Dingane. ‘Vakurov once served in the Russian 40th Army. A legendary corps because during the Second World War they drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union. The army was re-established in May 1979 in the Turkmenistan Military District on the border of Afghanistan. The 40th Army was commanded by General Grigori Michailov. Vakurov was his second in command. After their return to the former Soviet Union, Michailov benefited considerably from his glory and along with a number of political and mafia pals caused the fall of Gorbachev. And Vakurov was always nearby, in the wings, the ever-reliable assistant. When Michailov was killed in a bomb attack in the middle of Moscow, Vakurov went looking for another boss. He apparently chose the much younger Valentin Lavrov. If Vakurov came to Ponte City personally, it means that Zhulongu must have had incriminating information not only about Valentin Lavrov but also about Jacob Nkoane.’
Paul stared straight ahead. He remembered the condor with his mirrored glasses standing in front of him on the fiftieth floor of Ponte City and heard the echo of his words. Paul repeated them to himself under his breath.
‘I like clear agreements.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Who?’
‘Vakurov.’
‘I like clear agreements,’ he’d said. ‘Well, that beating was more than clear.’ Paul sighed. ‘Besides that, he knew my father.’
‘Who?’
‘The condor. So it must have been Vakurov.’
Elvin Dingane was standing at the foot of Paul’s bed, his hands clutching the steel frame. ‘Leave the matter to us. Leave Jo’burg for a time. Don’t stay in South Africa. Not only is Nkoane your enemy now, but there is also a wealthy Russian who has a notorious hitman at his beck and call.’
‘First you tell me to stop doing my job and now you’re telling me to bugger off.’
‘It’s your choice, Paul.’
‘It certainly is, yes! So mind your own business.’
Dingane remained remarkably calm. ‘Your life is in danger here, Paul. Anyway, for the time being no major newspaper is interested in your articles.’ He hesitated a moment, then headed towards the doorway. ‘Hope you’re up and about soon.’
‘Oh really?’
Dingane stopped and looked at Paul as if he’d just done him a great injustice.
‘Yes, I mean it.’ Then he strode out of the room. Paul called him back.
‘You’d better stay clear of politics,’ he said when Dingane stuck his head back around the doorframe.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you’re too honest.’
A smile appeared on Dingane’s face and then he disappeared behind the wall with its peeling paint.
22
Danielle was now on the ferry, travelling from the north side of the River IJ back to the heart of town. She gazed up at Centraal Station’s elongated glass dome with the huge letters AMSTERDAM increasing in size as the boat got closer.
After her phone call with Farah, Danielle had no longer been in the mood for a relaxing bath. She’d put on her sports gear and gone out for a run. It was the only way to clear her head. As she covered ground, she weighed her options. To what extent had publicizing the boy’s story compromised his safety? Was her upcoming media appearance in line with her principles, that as a doctor you had to tackle people’s problems and not try to save the entire world – or start a revolution, for that matter? Did she have a clear conscience when it came to the boy and was she sure she wasn’t using him to compensate for her guilt feelings about Africa?
By the time she’d reached her front door again, she had her answers.
It was dusk and the muggy wind wafted from the IJ through downtown. The ferry docked and she biked at rapid speed along the quay, past the new DoubleTree Hotel, across the wide bridge, towards the Schreierstoren. In her haste, she almost ran down a man who unexpectedly stepped on to the road. For a split second she thought he was one of the two detectives she’d met yesterday morning in the WMC. After passing the grand Victoria Hotel, she turned on to Haarlemmerstraat and rode straight to the former Westergas complex where IRIS TV’s studios were located. As she crossed the small drawbridge, a woman jumped out in front of her bike. She braked, cursed and seconds later realized it was Farah, completely out of breath, now grabbing her handlebars with trembling hands.
‘I promise to help you if you don’t do this,’ Farah gasped.
‘How the hell are you going to help me now?’ Danielle exclaimed. ‘Do you think there’s a way back? That I enjoyed seeing those two idiotic celebs hovering over the boy this morning? With their so-called compassion! You think I like appearing on a TV programme like this? I can’t go back, Farah. Not after this morning. If I do that, Faber and his hysterical wife will have their story and I’ll be left empty-han
ded!’
Farah had caught her breath. ‘You’re making a mistake, Danielle.’
‘Maybe. But then at least I tried!’
‘But have you considered all the consequences?’
‘No, I haven’t, but neither have you. So let go, Farah, I’m late.’
‘Wait. I have a proposal.’
‘They’re waiting for me. I really have to go.’
‘An entire article about you, your motivations, your experience, the injustices you’ve seen.’
‘Isn’t it a bit too late for that? Let go of my bike!’
Farah released the handlebars. She shook her head.
‘I hope it goes well, Danielle. Good luck. I mean it, really.’
At the entrance of the Zuiveringshal someone else jumped in front of her, this time an exceedingly hyper young woman.
‘Dr Bernson?’
‘Am I very late?’ Danielle asked, as she locked her bike, still slightly out of breath.
‘Thank goodness!’ the girl exclaimed, laying on the pathos. She had such white hair that it looked like someone had emptied a carton of yogurt on her head.
‘We were getting worried. I texted you quite a few times. Wrong number or you don’t do it? Send texts, I mean?’
Danielle now remembered that she’d put her phone on silent after talking with Farah earlier in the day. She could have kicked herself.
The girl stuck out her hand. ‘Karlijn,’ she panted her name. ‘I’ll be assisting you this evening. The other guests have already arrived!’
Another thing Danielle hadn’t taken into account. There were always several guests on The Headlines Show, mostly people from politics, culture and entertainment. Given she wasn’t from any of these three fields, she wondered what other surprises awaited her. She didn’t have much time to worry because Karlijn, wearing boots with ridiculously high heels, strode into the studio ahead of her. An army of cameramen, lighting and sound technicians, along with the rest of the crew, had assembled for the camera rehearsal. She shouted, ‘She’s here!’
As everybody turned towards her, an embarrassed Danielle focused her attention on the jumble of bulky cables, cameras the size of small tanks and colossal lamps on the iron grating above her head.
‘Danielle! Wasn’t the article wonderful?’ As if she’d been pulled out of a magician’s hat, Cathy Marant was suddenly right there in front of her. She shook her hand and showered her with the proverbial clichés. ‘So super that you’re giving us this opportunity. Glad you’re finally here. Break a leg.’ And she was gone again.
A bit overwhelmed by it all, Danielle let Karlijn drag her into a room where a weary make-up artist grabbed a tiny sponge and routinely covered her face in a thin layer of brownish foundation. Meanwhile, on a small monitor without any sound, the camera rehearsal unfolded in front of her. It was total chaos.
‘Is it always like this?’ she asked.
‘Nervous?’ asked the make-up artist while rubbing some gel into Danielle’s hair. ‘Don’t be. It’s no big deal. Just sit at the table and don’t forget to open your mouth. It’s like being at the pub.’
With one difference, Danielle thought, there’s a million viewers watching my every move. She wished it wasn’t too late to still take Farah’s advice, so she could run outside, jump on her bike again and at breakneck speed race home to sink deeply into the pillows on the sofa and see how the live broadcast would go without her.
‘I’ll check you one more time before you go on,’ said the make-up artist after she’d made her look like someone who’d just returned from a week-long cruise in the Caribbean. Karlijn then coaxed a reluctant Danielle to the studio floor.
‘Who are the other guests?’ Danielle asked, somewhat uncertain. Karlijn mentioned a name that sounded like ‘DJ Maestro’, who according to her made a ‘super-cool’ comeback. Another guest was a model and former football WAG, who was apparently battered for years behind closed doors so her husband could refine his footwork.
When she suddenly bumped into a security guard wearing an earpiece at the entrance to the studio, Karlijn fell silent. Behind the bodyguard Danielle saw an attractive man in his forties wearing a fashionable pinstriped suit. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. They shared the same artificial brown tint.
‘Are you also a guest?’ she asked a bit timidly.
‘Yes,’ he said, sounding almost apologetic as he extended his hand.
‘Vincent.’
‘Danielle.’
In the studio itself there was no trace of the earlier rehearsal chaos. Only the chaos in Danielle’s head remained. As she stepped on to the platform to take a place at the table, it felt like she was ascending the executioner’s scaffold. With a shrill buzzing in her ears, she sat down in the seat the floor manager pointed to and a sound techie started to fiddle with her blouse to pin a microphone on it. Danielle held her breath while he was doing this – the man had bad breath – and looked around anxiously, like a cat up a tree. She caught Vincent standing a bit too close to Cathy Marant, consulting with her. They were both looking in Danielle’s direction.
When she heard the floor manager call ‘one minute’, she suddenly remembered where she’d seen Vincent before: behind the rostrum in parliament, where he’d sharply spoken against the Cabinet’s immigration policy.
Danielle braced herself, as if she was sitting in a plane with roaring engines that was ready to take off. There was a reason this image popped to mind. It had just occurred to her that she wasn’t only afraid of flying, but also of speaking in public.
As she wiped the first beads of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, she caught Vincent Coronel’s icy-blue eyes gazing at her from across the table, and under her breath she repeated the mantra that reminded her never to flee from anything ever again.
23
Straight after her meeting with Joshua in the Sky Lounge, Farah had hurried over to the Westergas Studios in the hope of averting any potential disaster that Danielle might bring down on the whole affair. She had a new proposal. She would offer to write a profile, homing in on Danielle’s experiences in various war-torn African countries and her fight against the injustice done to children there. The focus on Africa would relegate the boy to the background. But she hadn’t counted on Danielle’s icy stubbornness.
Farah watched her go and then went to lick her wounds at Grand Café IRIS where the evening’s edition of The Headlines Show would be shown on large screens. She ordered mineral water and a tuna sandwich and checked her messages. According to her iPhone she had an email from Sander, the cameraman.
Hey Farah, we continued our Mi-ka-lov quest over here and I may have something for you. See att. Gr, Sander. P.S. Let me know if it’s useful.
She opened the attachment. It was a Wikipedia article about a certain Grigori Michailov, who was born on 23 October 1943 in Saratov, Russia, and who died in 1996 after being blown up in his limo right outside his flat in Moscow.
How’s this relevant, Farah wondered. She was about to close the attachment when it became clear why Sander had sent her an article about this particular man. Michailov, it turned out, had been a prominent Afghanistan veteran, widely decorated for his ‘services’ as commander-in-chief of the Khad, the dreaded secret police at the time of Afghanistan’s communist regime between 1979 and 1989.
So Parwaiz may have had a brutal encounter with Michailov in Kabul. But even if that were the case, why had Parwaiz whispered his name? What connection was there between the name of a dead Russian and the man in the Bentley in The Hague? Farah knew that ghosts from the past could manifest themselves. They were always there, floating around you unseen, and at the most unexpected moments they would assume their former human forms and scare the living daylights out of you. But it was absurd to think that Parwaiz had seen the ghost of his long-deceased torturer from Kabul sitting in the back of a passing limo.
It was high time to inform Edward of her failed attempt to stop Danielle and tell him about the li
nk to AtlasNet Joshua had told her about.
She hit the speed dial on her phone.
‘How do you do it, Hafez?’ he said after listening to her findings.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not only do you get a detective to give you confidential information, but that information turns out to implicate AtlasNet. And when you say AtlasNet, you’re saying Valentin Lavrov. And when you say Valentin Lavrov, you’re saying …?’
That’s when another piece of the puzzle fell into place for Farah.
‘Armin Lazonder!’
‘Well done, Hafez. And in no time at all. Ten points!’ Edward said, laughing. ‘Lavrov is the chief investor in Lazonder’s New Golden Age Project. I don’t know how you pull it off, but I feel like I’ve ended up on a giant rollercoaster with you. But I never ride the things because they make me sick!’
‘And that’s not all,’ Farah said, and told Edward about Sander’s email.
Edward whistled through his teeth. ‘Michailov was the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, did you know that? Before the eyes of the global media he walked from Afghanistan to Russia via the Friendship Bridge across the Amu Darya river. Michailov was a fierce opponent of the pull-out. But he had no choice. President Gorbachev had ordered it. Raylan Chapelle actually clashed with him once after the Saur Revolution. Raylan said he had proof that Russia was behind the coup and that Michailov was the puppeteer controlling the Afghan officers and their troops.’
‘But Michailov is dead,’ Farah replied. ‘The Chechens blew him up in the nineties, car and all.’
‘Yes, that’s correct. You won’t find him driving around in a Bentley any more,’ Edward agreed.
‘And yet there must be a reason for Parwaiz mentioning his name before he died. Assuming he was referring to Michailov, that is.’
‘It’s too bizarre for words,’ Edward said. ‘There’s this little Afghan boy who was left for dead, which is all we know about him, and yet we’re already juggling names from the extreme other end of the spectrum. A Russian billionaire with worldwide connections, a Dutch property tycoon with global ambitions and a dead commander-in-chief of the Russian army who, if he hadn’t died in a car bombing, would have collapsed under the weight of his military decorations. But whatever it all amounts to, we mustn’t get carried away, Hafez.’
Butterfly on the Storm Page 25