by Tom Cain
Faith Gushungo focused the full force of her disapproval upon the poor girl. Her voiced lowered in volume and pitch, but became all the more menacing as she replied, ‘Oh really? You think you cleaned the room, do you? Well, listen to me, you little yellow monkey. You may be used to living in filth and squalor, but I am not. I demand the highest standards and I insist on absolute obedience from my staff. So unless you wish to lose your job, you will go to the room right now and you will sweep and polish and dust every single square inch of it to the standard expected. And you will not go home until I am satisfied with your work. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, Missy, yes … very clear. I will get everything I need, be there in one minute.’
‘You had better be,’ the First Lady of Malemba snarled, stepping away from the table. ‘One minute, and not a second longer.’ Then she turned on a stiletto heel and strode from the room, her heels clacking on the marble floor as she went.
Tina Wong waited until Faith Gushungo was out of sight and hearing, then placed a consoling hand on the back of the crying servant. ‘I am sorry, little sister,’ she said, speaking Cantonese Chinese. ‘It is my fault that you had to endure such a terrible, undeserved humiliation.’
The servant stopped crying as quickly as she had begun. ‘Do not worry, big sister. That evil witch cannot hurt me. It is bad enough to lose face from the shouts and screams of a civilized person, but much worse from a barbarian … and worst of all from an animal like that!’ She gave a snort of disgust and picked up her cleaning things. ‘I will go now and see if I can make that room of hers smell less foul.’
‘Impossible!’ said Wong with an encouraging smile as the younger woman departed.
When she was alone in the kitchen, Wong reached into the plastic bucket in which she kept her bottles of cleaning liquid and polish, her duster and her cloths, and took out a rolled-up piece of clear plastic. She peeled a protective backing layer away from it, then set the plastic down on the table, exactly where Faith Gushungo had placed her right hand. She then peeled it away from the table and covered it again with the protective layer.
After work, Wong took a train from Tai Po to Monkok, the heart of Kowloon, where the population is said to be packed together more tightly than anywhere else on earth. She went to the fourth floor of a rundown apartment building and knocked on a door covered in faded, peeling red paint. It was opened by a thin, bespectacled man wearing a tatty old white lab coat. He grinned when he saw it was Wong at the door and ushered his former Hong Kong Police colleague into the small apartment.
The perfectly maintained equipment inside was worth far, far more than the dingy property in which it sat. There were computers linked to every significant police database, scanners, laser printers, spectrometers, centrifuges – in short, the apartment was a miniature forensic lab.
The man took the plastic sheet Wong handed over to him and placed it on a scanner. Seconds later, a larger-than-life image of Faith Gushungo’s handprint appeared on a thirty-two-inch monitor screen. The man looked at it for a second then turned to Wong with an even bigger smile on his face.
‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘I will be able to give you exactly what you need.’
49
‘Again!’ Carver’s command echoed around the cavernous interior of the barn.
From above him came the sound of Zalika Stratten’s tired, frustrated voice: ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, what now?’
‘You were blundering around like a herd of elephants up there. The idea, in case you hadn’t noticed, is to do this without anyone being able to hear you.’
Zalika’s face appeared, leaning over the railing that surrounded the crude platform that represented the Gushungos’ master bedroom in Hong Kong.
‘Are you suggesting I’m fat?’
‘Not at all,’ Carver replied, deadpan. ‘Just clumsy and heavy-footed.’
‘Oh!’ Her voice went up an octave in sheer outrage. ‘I’ll kill you for that, Samuel Carver!’
‘Not yet, you won’t. We’ve got a job to do. So, one more time, from the top.’
Zalika stomped very deliberately across the planking, down the stairs and out of the barn. When she got outside, she walked precisely thirty-two metres, then stopped, stood still and waited.
In the barn, Carver started talking apparent gibberish: ‘Bla-blah, yadda-yadda, waffle-waffle, now.’
Both he and Zalika were wearing miniature earpieces linked to their mobile phones. When she heard the word ‘now’ she started walking at a steady pace, came back in through the barn door and made her way – very, very quietly – up the stairs.
It was Wednesday afternoon. She’d been doing this for most of the last twenty-four hours, repeating the same apparently simple routine until it was grooved so deep that she could do the whole thing almost without thinking, as if she were operating purely by muscle memory. Carver had rounded up a handful of Klerk’s staff to act as bodyguards and maids. They had no idea why they were getting involved in this strange game of make-believe, but it made a fun break from their daily routine. Every so often Carver used one or two of the staff to throw in variations. What if there was someone in the hall when Zalika walked in? What if she were interrupted when trying to get into the safe? What if she had to fight or talk her way out?
Carver was no longer surprised by the range of Zalika’s abilities. The previous day, they’d sparred a little on a large judo mat, working on kicks, punches, blocks and throws. They’d gone at it hard, working up a sweat. When he’d complimented her on being able to keep up with him, she’d pulled a stray strand of hair off her face and, in between gasps for air, panted, ‘Are you kidding? I’m a Stratten. I had my first self-defence class when I was six.’
When he’d commented on her amazing ability to come up with an almost infinite number of excuses, explanations and charming little deceits, she giggled and said, ‘I’m a girl. I’ve been doing that all my life!’
Even in his guise as the tough taskmaster, Carver couldn’t stop himself laughing. He could feel the two of them getting closer, heading towards a destination they both knew was inevitable. Just a few more run-throughs and he would be certain of her. Then they could relax and have some fun.
Zalika went through the operation again, and again, and then, after one more run-through, which was perfect, just as the previous half-dozen had in fact been, Carver said, ‘That’ll do it. Thanks, everyone.’ And then, so that only Zalika could hear, ‘You’re ready. And you’re going to be good. Bloody good.’
She smirked cheekily. ‘But darling, I always am …’
They wandered back to the house together, and when Carver put his arm round her, Zalika nestled closer to him, moulding herself to his body.
Klerk watched them from the French windows to his drawing room as they ambled across the lawn.
‘Hey, you two,’ he called out, ‘come over here. I’ve got some things that might interest you.’
Klerk ushered the two of them into the room and then handed Carver a sealed aluminium flask, roughly the size and shape of a packet of Pringles. The contents, however, were a lot less savoury.
‘This is the recipe you asked for,’ Klerk said. ‘Flown in on my personal jet today. It was a rush-job, to put it mildly. But my boys are good. They say they got it right and I trust them. You can too. So now will you tell me what you’re going to do with it?’
‘Of course.’
Carver spelled out the key elements of his plan; the finer points of detail could wait till he and Zalika were in Hong Kong. At the end, Klerk nodded his assent.
‘The timing is the key to it,’ he said. ‘Hong Kong is six hours ahead of Malemba. What time do you expect the job to be completed?’
‘Around eleven-thirty on Sunday.’
‘So that’s about sun-up in Malemba: perfect. Most of the cops and soldiers will still be nursing the sore heads they got on Saturday night. I’m meeting Patrick Tshonga in South Africa tomorrow. I’ll fill him in on what you’ve got planned.
He’s got senior police and military commanders loyal to him. They will make sure their men are rested and sober. Keep me posted over the next few days on any developments. I want to know exactly what you’ve got planned. When the job is completed, you will text OK, just that, to a number I will provide. That will be the go-signal. By breakfast time the country will be under new management.’
‘I just hope Justus and his kids are alive to see it.’
‘I’ve done something about that,’ said Klerk. ‘I put the head of security for my southern Africa operations, Sonny Parkes, on to it. He made a few calls, called in some favours and tracked them down to the remand cells at Buweku jail. Then he organized a lawyer for the family and some food – they don’t get fed in the jails now, you know. He’s a good man, Parkes, a man you can trust.’ Klerk handed Carver a business card for one of his corporations with Parkes’s name printed on it. ‘His contact details are all on that. If you call him, he’ll keep you posted on any developments. I have something else for you, too.’
A large, plain brown envelope was lying on a side-table. Klerk picked it up and pulled out a folder of documents.
‘These are the contracts making you a five per cent shareholder in the Kamativi Mining Corporation. I’ve given you a non-executive directorship, too. You never know, one day you might want to settle down, find yourself a good woman and start earning a respectable living. I think you’d be a damn good businessman, Sam, if you ever put your mind to it.’
‘Do you have a wife in mind for me, too?’
Klerk grinned. ‘Ach, Sam, I’m not that crazy. You’ll make your own choice on that score. Though I might make one suggestion …’
Klerk pointedly looked across the room at his niece.
‘Wendell, stop that!’ Zalika Stratten’s indignation was mixed with laughter. She touched Carver’s arm and said, ‘Forgive my uncle, Sam. He has a terrible sense of humour.’
‘Maybe I do,’ rumbled Klerk, ‘but the only men I’ve ever seen you with have been gutless, namby-pamby playboys. Not one of them has had the balls to stand up to you. But this man has your measure, young lady. And you know it.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said Zalika, trying to cover her embarrassment.
Carver had never seen her flustered before. Suddenly she seemed softer, more vulnerable and, yes, more desirable. He wondered what she would be like as a wife, the mother of his children, and then had to suppress a laugh of his own. Klerk liked to portray himself as a simple, straightforward, hard-nosed businessman, but he was a cunning old bastard … and a sentimental one, too.
‘Now be off with you,’ Zalika was saying to her uncle. ‘You’ve got to be on a BA flight to Jo’burg. You know how Brianna hates to be late. And they won’t hold the plane for ever. Not even for you.’
Klerk kissed his niece goodbye, shook Carver’s hand, wished them both luck and left.
‘Fancy a swim?’ asked Zalika, when she and Carver were alone.
‘I don’t have any swimming trunks.’
‘Why would you need them?’
The pool at Campden Hall had a glazed roof, which retracted at the touch of a button, and walls whose glass panels slid away until the two swimmers were entirely open to the warm spring evening. The sky was still light and would be for a few hours to come, and the only noise to be heard was birdsong and the gentle whisper of wind through the trees.
Zalika dived into the water leaving barely a ripple on the surface, swam a length of fast front-crawl, performed the most outrageously sexy racing turn Carver had ever seen in his life – a tumbling, sparkling flicker of tanned wet legs and ass – and then returned to the end where he was still standing, watching her.
She rested her arms on the side of the pool. ‘Aren’t you going to join me?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Underwater combat is my specialist skill.’
‘You’ll have to catch me first.’
Carver was faster – just – and stronger, but she was elusive and agile. He was out of breath by the time he caught her, from the laughter as much as the exercise. But catch her he did, and hold her and kiss her with a pent-up passion whose intensity overwhelmed them both.
They stumbled in a tangle of intertwined limbs from the pool back to the house, Zalika clutching a towel to her gleaming wet body and squealing with laughter as they tried to get upstairs without being spotted by the staff. They stood for a while, wrapped in each other’s arms beneath a steaming shower, and then tumbled into bed. And it seemed to Carver as though he was fighting Zalika as much as loving her. He wasn’t sure whether this was just a hangover from his initial refusal to take the job she had so carefully researched, or a deeper, more intrinsic part of her personality. But she seemed compelled to resist him – wrestling as much as caressing him, fighting to be on top and raking her nails down his back – testing him to the very limit before she could finally relax into ecstasy and accept her own surrender.
50
London is arguably the most racially diverse city in the world. Heathrow handles more international passengers than any other airport, anywhere. It follows that there is nowhere on earth with as rich and concentrated a tapestry of ethnicities as the airport’s overcrowded passenger terminals: they are their very own rainbow nation. It would take a very unusual human being indeed to warrant a second glance. So neither Samuel Carver nor Zalika Stratten paid any attention whatsoever to the tall, shaven-headed African standing by a suitcase a few steps away with a telephone pressed to his face as they checked in their baggage for the Thursday-morning Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.
Carver’s mind was torn between the beautiful woman standing in line next to him and the job he was preparing to undertake. He had never visited Hong Kong before and spent much of the flight engrossed in maps and guidebooks: partly a professional familiarizing himself with the surroundings of his next mission, partly a tourist intrigued by one of the world’s most fascinating cities, a tiny oasis of something approaching capitalist democracy within the great totalitarian monolith of communist China.
Although it was surrounded by a mass of small outlying islands, the heart of Hong Kong consisted of three sections. The first was Hong Kong Island, the site of the first British occupation in 1841 and still the political and financial heart of the city. Across Victoria Harbour, on the Chinese mainland, stood Kowloon, one of the most crowded places on the planet, where up to a hundred thousand people squeezed into every square mile. North of Kowloon, past a band of hills now preserved as a string of country parks and lakes, came the New Territories, land acquired by the British from the Chinese in 1898. Here, in the outlying district of Tai Po, was where the Gushungos had their bolthole. Carver took a good long look at the maps, memorizing every route in and out of Tai Po, by road, rail, air and sea.
The flight arrived at breakfast time on Friday morning. They checked in to a hotel on the Kowloon side of the water – the location chosen for ease of access to Tai Po. Once unpacked, showered and changed, they headed out into the city’s incomparable atmosphere of energy, enterprise and tightly packed humanity, all jostling, arguing, bantering and sweating in the sweltering heat and humidity. Everywhere Carver looked, familiarity and strangeness collided with each other in a mesmerizing cultural confusion. Most of the signs were in Chinese characters that were totally incomprehensible to him. Yet among them English words would suddenly pop out: ‘Tom Lee Music’, ‘Stockwell Securities’, ‘Classic Beauty’, and even, on a shopfront that could have been pulled straight from an English high street, ‘Body Shop’. More than a decade after the end of British rule, Pitt Street, Knutsford Terrace and Jordan Path still jostled for space with Tak Shing Street and Yan Cheung Road, traffic drove on the left, and the buses were double-deckers.
On one corner, there’d been some kind of incident in a grocery store. A handful of police were on the scene. They were all Chinese, but they wore olive-green short-sleeved tropical uniforms, with fatigue trousers tucked into gleaming black boots that could have c
ome straight from a British Army quartermaster’s stores, right down to their berets and cap badges. Carver passed one policeman speaking into his radio. A blizzard of Mandarin dialect was followed by ‘Yes, sir. Over.’
Zalika insisted on stopping for a bite to eat at a white-tiled, neon-lit restaurant where the menu was in Chinese and they ordered by pointing at pictures of dishes and the numbers next to them. But the label on Carver’s beer read ‘Carlsberg’.
By then he’d already found a tailor to make the alterations to his suit trousers. Two hours later he had a car. He needed something that looked dowdy and unexceptional, but was still quick enough to get him out of trouble if any should arise. After twenty minutes online, a cab through the Cross Harbour Tunnel from Kowloon on to Hong Kong Island took him to the showroom of Vin’s Motors in Tin Hau Temple Road, North Point, not far from the Happy Valley racecourse.
When Carver walked in, neatly dressed with a beautiful young woman on his arm, the salesman’s eyes gleamed. Here, surely, was a man with the need and the means to impress. A fat commission would soon be on the way. His enthusiasm waned, to be replaced by disappointment, bafflement and then unfettered curiosity, as Carver spent a mere twenty-two thousand Hong Kong dollars – roughly seventeen hundred pounds – on one of the oldest, cheapest cars on the premises: a faded maroon-coloured 1998 Honda Civic EF9. It was a model beloved by petrolheads for the astounding horsepower the engineers at Honda had squeezed from its modest 1.6-litre engine – the most power per cc of any engine ever, some maintained.
That satisfied Carver’s requirement for speed, but the downside was that Honda’s stylists had tried to signal the car’s capabilities by fitting it with red Recaro sports seats, a titanium knob on the gear-stick and fancy aluminium pedals. Carver politely requested that all these should be replaced by much drabber parts and bought a second, even shabbier Civic to provide them. He also asked for the bodywork to be scuffed and dented. The engine, meanwhile, had to be tuned to the highest possible spec, irrespective of the cost or number of components that needed replacing. He handed the salesman an incentive payment of twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars, cash, to make sure that the job was done within twenty-four hours. Then he answered all the questions he could see the man was dying to ask by winking and saying that a friend of his had just bought a new Porsche 911. He intended to turn up in his tatty old car, offer to race him, put a lot of money on the outcome, then watch his face as the Honda won. This, it was agreed, was a brilliant joke, and Carver was made to promise that he would come back on Monday and tell all the lads in the service department about the victory they had won for him.