Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  Sowetan,

  that damned assistant editor’s piece, he was with Mpayipheli at school, he talked to the man’s mother. How does that make us look?

  The minister was the torchbearer of the president’s anger and she let it burn high, sparing no one, focusing on no one; she addressed them collectively, and Janina Mentz sat there thinking it was all in vain because there were twenty agents in Lusaka and within the hour they would storm the Republican Hotel and put an end to it. And sometime today, Tiger Mazibuko would shoot the big, bad biker from his celebrated fucking BMW and then it would no longer matter that the woman was dead and the child gone and it would be business as usual again in Africa. Tomorrow, the day after, there would be other news, the Congo or Somalia or Zimbabwe, it was just another death in Africa; did the minister think America cared? Did she think the European Union kept count?

  The telephone rang on the minister’s desk and she glared at it; Janina was amazed that the phone neither shrank nor melted. The minister went to the door and yelled, “Did I not tell you to hold all calls?” and a nervous male voice answered. The minister said, “What?” and an explanation followed. She slammed the door and the telephone continued to ring and the minister went to her desk and in a tone lost between despair and madness said, “The boy. They have the boy. The newspaper. And they want to know if the mother is dead.”

  CIA

  EYES ONLY

  FOR ATTENTION:

  Assistant Deputy Director (Middle East and Africa) CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia

  PREPARED BY:

  Luke John Powell (Senior Agent in Charge— Southern Africa) Cape Town, South Africa

  SUBJECT:

  Operation Safeguard: the loss of four agents in the protection of South African source Inkululeko

  I. BACKGROUND TO OPERATION SAFEGUARD

  Inkululeko is the code name for a source the CIA acquired in 1996 in the South African government. The source was secured after tentative signals from subject during an embassy function were explored. Subject’s motivation at the time was stated as disillusionment with SA government’s continued support of rogue states, including Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Libya. This author recruited subject personally, as it was the first acquisition inside the ANC/Cosatu Alliance that was not previously Nationalist government-aligned. Subject’s motivation was suspicious at the time, but has since proved valuable as a source.

  Exact motivation still unknown.

  It took the leader of the operation seven minutes and five thousand American dollars to buy over the manager of the Republican Hotel and pinpoint the room where Johnny Kleintjes was being held.

  He had a team of twenty agents, but he chose just five to accompany him to 227. The others were ordered to man the entrances, the fire escape, and elevators, to watch windows and balconies from outside, or to sit in one of the vehicles with engines idling, ready for the unpredictable.

  The leader had a key in his hand, but he sprayed silicon in the keyhole, using a yellow can with a thin red pipe on the cap. His colleagues stood ready at his back with firearms pointing at the roof. The leader fitted the key carefully and quietly turned it. The lubricated mechanism opened soundlessly. The leader gave the signal and opened the door in one smooth motion, and the first two agents rolled into the room, but all they saw was the body of an old colored man with gruesome wounds all over his body.

  On Johnny Kleintjes’s lap lay two hard drives and on his chest a word was carved with a sharp instrument.

  KAATHIEB.

  “Leave him with me,” said the black male secretary of the minister, and Allison Healy bent down and said to Pakamile Nzulul-wazi, who gripped her hand, “We have to go and talk in there, Pakamile. Will you stay with this nice man for a while?” The child’s body expressed anxiety, and her heart contracted. He looked at the secretary and shook his head. “I want to stay with you.” She hugged him to her, not knowing what to do.

  The secretary said something in Xhosa, in a quiet voice, and she said sharply, “Talk so I can understand.”

  “I only said I will tell him a story.”

  Pakamile shook his head. “I want to stay with you.” She had become his anchor when Radebe handed him over to her; he was confused, afraid, and alone. He had asked for his mother a hundred times, and she didn’'t know how much more of this she could stand.

  “He had better come along,” said her editor to the secretary.

  They were a delegation of four, not counting the boy. The editor and her and the managing director and the news editor, not one of whom had ever been there before. The door opened and the minister stood there and looked at Pakamile and there was so much compassion in her eyes.

  She held the door for them, and Allison and the child walked ahead, the men behind. Inside, a white woman and a black man were already seated. The man stood up and she saw he was small and there was the bulge of a hump at his neck.

  * * *

  He stopped at Mahalapye for petrol and crossed over to the small café in search of a newspaper, but the small local paper had nothing and so he went on. The African heat reflected sharply from the blacktop and the sun was without mercy. He ought to have taken more pills, as the pain of the wound was paralyzing him. How badly was he damaged?

  Huts, small farmers, children cavorting carefree beside the road, two Boer goats sauntering to greener pastures across the road— oh, Botswana, why couldn'’t his own country lie across the landscape as easily, so without fuss? Why couldn'’t the faces of his people remain as carefree, as easily laughing, as at peace? What made the difference? Not the artificially drawn lines through the savannah that said this country ends here and that one begins there.

  Less blood had flowed here, for sure; their history was less fraught. But why?

  Perhaps they had fewer reasons to shed blood. Fewer gripping vistas, less succulent pastures, fewer hotheads, less valuable minerals. Perhaps that was the curse of South Africa, the land where God’s hand had slipped, where He had spilled from the cup of plenty— green mountains and valleys, long waving grass as far as the eye could see, precious metals, priceless stones, minerals. And He looked over it and thought,

  I will leave it so, let it be a test, a temptation; I will put people here with a great thirst, I will let them come out of Africa and the white north and I will see what they do with this paradise.

  Or perhaps Botswana’s salvation was merely that the gap between rich and poor was so much smaller. Less envy, less hatred. Less blood.

  His thoughts were invaded again.

  Gone missing:

  the refrain ran in his mind;

  gone missing:

  it blended with the monotonous drone of the GS’s engine, the wind that hissed on his helmet, the rhythms of his heart pushing blood painfully through his hip. He sweated; the heat increased with every kilometer, and it came from inside him. He would have to be careful, keep his wits; he would need to rest, take in fluids, shake the dullness from his head. His body was very sick. He counted the kilometers, concentrated on calculations of average speed, so many kilometers per minute, so many hours left.

  He eventually stopped at Francistown.

  He dismounted with difficulty at the petrol station, put the bike on its stand. There was a slippery feel to the wound, as if it was opening up.

  The petrol jockey’s voice was distant. “Your friend was looking for you early today.”

  “My friend?”

  “He went through here early this morning in a Golf.” As if that explained everything.

  “I don'’t have a friend with a Golf.”

  “He asked if we’d seen you. A black man on a big orange BMW motorbike.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He’s a lion. Big and strong.”

  “Which way did he go?”

  “That way.” The man pointed his finger to the north.

  40.

  A

  llison the onlooker.

  She was always good at that, to look on from the outside, to be part of a group but in her head to be apart.
She had worried about it, thought it over for hours at a time, analyzed it for years, and the best conclusion she had come to was that that was how the gears and springs and levers of her brain were put together, a strange and accidental product, no one’s fault. Yesterday afternoon already she had known that he was like that, too. Two freaks who had sniffed each other out in a sea of normality, two islands that had improbably collided. But once again she found herself with that distance separating her from others, the itch of it was a gnawing voice of conscience that it was a form of fraud, to pretend you were part when you did not fit. You knew you did not belong here. The advantage was that it made her a good reporter because she saw what others were blind to.

  There was an undercurrent to the negotiations.

  The communication was stilted, in English, grown-ups speaking grown-up language so the child would be protected and the painful truths delayed.

  The conversation was not for the record, the minister said. The nature of it was too sensitive, and she wanted agreement on that from all the parties.

  One after another they nodded.

  Good, she said. We will proceed. There was a child psychologist on the way. Also two women from the day-care center, as the therapist said familiar figures would be a cushion when the news was broken to him. Also a man and a woman from Child Welfare would be arriving soon. Senior people, very experienced.

  Everything would be done, everything the state had access to, and the full machinery would be turned on, because what we had here was a tragedy.

  Allison read the subtext. The minister watched the other woman, not continuously, but as staccato punctuation in the discourse, as if she were checking that she was on the right path.

  This other woman. Not officially introduced. Sat there in her business suit like a finalist for Businesswoman of the Year, gray trousers, black shoes, white blouse, gray jacket, hands manicured but without color on the nails, makeup soft and subtle, hair tied back, eyes without expression, a hint of beauty in a face with stern, unapproachable lines, but it was the body language that spoke louder, of control, a figure of authority, driven, self-assured.

  Who was she?

  A tragedy, the minister was saying, carefully choosing adult words and phrases, euphemisms and figuratI've speech to spare the child. Innocent people who were involved through chance. She wished she could tell the media everything, but that was impossible, so she had to make an appeal. They would have to trust her that you couldn'’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that made Allison shI'ver; we live in a dangerous world, a complicated world, and to help this young democracy to survI've was much more difficult than the press could ever imagine.

  There was the operation, a sensitive, necessary, well-planned operation, fully within the stipulation of the National Strategic Intelligence Act of 1994 (Act 94-38, 2 December 1994, as amended) and in the national interest; she did not use the term lightly, knowing how often it had been abused in the past, but they would have to take her word for it. National interest.

  She wanted to make one thing clear: the operation as planned by the intelligence services did not require the involvement of innocent parties. To be frank, great efforts were made to avoid that. But things had gone wrong. Things that nobody could have foreseen. The operation that had run so smoothly had been derailed. Civilians were drawn in by underhanded methods; an innocent bystander was sucked into the vortex by an evil force, a third party, resulting in tragedy. If she could turn back the clock and change it, she would, but they all knew that was beyond the realm of possibility. A tragedy, because a civilian had died, possibly by her own hand; the motivation, the precise circumstances were not wholly clear, but for the minister that was one civilian too many and she mourned, she could tell them she mourned for that life that had been blotted out. But (a) it had nothing to do with any weapons scandal, of that she was absolutely sure; (b) there would be a complete, official, and rigorous inquiry into the great loss; (c) if there was any responsibility or negligence on the part of any official, they would proceed relentlessly with a disciplinary hearing according to Article 15 of the Intelligence Services Act of 1994 (as amended); and (d) the young dependent would receive the best care available, after ascertaining beyond a doubt whether any relatI'ves existed, and if there were none, the state would fulfill its responsibilities, that was her personal promise, she would stake her entire reputation, her career even, on that.

  The minister looked at everyone, and Allison knew she was trying to gauge whether they accepted her explanation.

  What would have happened if Pakamile had not been dropped off at the

  Cape Times

  offices? She knew the answer. It would have been hushed up. Wife and child? What wife and child? We know nothing about that. But there was a righteousness in the minister, a desperation to her honor.

  “Madam Minister,” said the editor, the bespectacled, dignified colored man whom Allison greatly respected. “Let me just say that we are not the monsters politicians always make us out to be.”

  “Of course,” said the minister.

  “We have sympathy for your role and your position.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But we do have one small problem. Having now gone on record that these two civilians have gone missing, and in the light of the huge tragedy that is, to some extent at least, public knowledge, if you are going to involve two ladies from the child-care center, we cannot write absolutely nothing.”

  Inkululeko

  is the Zulu word for “freedom,” and there’s an interesting historical footnote to this code name: apparently, there were constant rumors in the seventies and eighties that a mole of Zulu origin existed in the echelons of the ANC/SA Communist Party Alliance— a mole who allegedly leaked information to both the CIA and the SA apartheid government. As you may know, there was no truth to this rumor. We had no reliable source within the Movement at the time. Although several low-key attempts to acquire one was made, the CIA did not regard it as a high priority, due to the intelligence available through Eastern bloc entities at the time, and the view that the ANC/SACP did not constitute a threat to the USA or NATO.

  However, when a code name had to be assigned after the 1996 recruitment, the subject suggested “Inkululeko” and pointed out the potential disinformation value thereof, as she had no Zulu ties whatsoever, being of European extraction.

  The importance of this source multiplied wonderfully in 2000 when she was approached and recruited for the position of operations chief of staff for a newly created governmental agency, the PIU, or Presidential Intelligence Agency We believe the PIU was set up in an effort to counter the never-ending infighting, the legacy of jealousy and politics of the other three arms of the SA intelligence community the National Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, and Military Intelligence. All PIU staff were drawn from nonintelligence sources, with the sole exception of the director, an ANC and Umkhonto veteran.

  2. ORIGIN OF OPERATION SAFEGUARD

  In March of this year, a known member of a Cape-based militant Muslim splinter group with suspected ties to al Qaeda and Iranian strongman Ismail Khan was arrested by the SAPS on charges of the illegal possession of firearms.

  During interrogation, the suspect, one Ismail Mohammed, indicated that he had information that could be of use to the SA intelligence community, and intended to use this information as plea-bargain leverage.

  As luck would have it, a member of the PIU conducted an interview with the suspect. The information regarded the identity of Inkululeko.

  Her heart was full when she walked out into the sun and the southeaster. Pakamile was inside, being clucked over by two black ladies from the day care who had taken him to their bosom. The child psychologist, a short dapper white man in his thirties with put-on caring and an inflated idea of his importance, was waiting for his five minutes of fame. The Welfare people with their forms and files knew their place in the hierarchy of bureaucracy and so sat outside on a wooden bench.

  Allison He
aly walked with her male colleagues down the steps and over the street as Van Heerden once more invaded her thoughts. She said, “You go ahead,” because she wanted to turn on her cell phone, maybe there was a message. She dawdled as the wind plucked at her dress, punching in her PIN number and waiting for the phone to pick up a signal.

  She saw the woman in the gray suit leave the building with the small hunchbacked man.

  She looked down at the phone again. YOU HAVE TWO MESSAGES. PLEASE DIAL 121.