by Tom Cain
56
The security guard at the main gate of the Hon Ka Mansions development waved Carver’s car through without a second glance. It was Sunday morning. An Englishman wearing the costume of one of their clergymen had arrived to see the Gushungos. There was nothing unusual about that. If this one had brought a young woman with him that was none of the guard’s concern.
Carver drove uphill along a winding drive that ran between two lines of newly built villas, each standing in its own grounds, discreetly hidden from its neighbours. Shortly before he reached the Gushungo property, he stopped and let Zalika out of the car. Then he continued up the drive, turned into the Gushungos’ semicircular forecourt and parked his scuffed and battered old Honda next to a gleaming silver Rolls-Royce. From the way it sat fractionally low on its wheels, he guessed it had been given the full security treatment and was now as impregnable as a very fast, ultra-luxurious tank. It was a beautiful machine, all right, but it had been put to an ugly purpose that embodied the absolute contempt held by so many African dictators for their people’s poverty. Carver thought of Justus and his children. They were sweating in prison cells, and here was Gushungo swanning around in a Roller.
Well, not for very much longer.
The front door to the house was raised a few feet and reached by a short flight of steps. One of the presidential bodyguards opened it and glared suspiciously at his visitor. He was half a head taller than Carver and fifty pounds heavier. His neck strained against the tightly buttoned collar of his white shirt. His shaved head glinted with sweat.
‘Good morning,’ said Carver, holding out a hand. ‘My name is Wishart. I’m an assistant priest at St George’s Church. I’ve come to give Holy Communion to Mr and Mrs … well, to President and, ah … well, the Gushungos, anyway.’
‘Wait here,’ the guard said, and disappeared into the house.
Half a minute later, Moses Mabeki was standing by the door, the guard looming massively behind him. Carver felt his skin prickle with a combination of tension and disgust. The memory of that night in Mozambique came back to him so vividly that he could not believe Mabeki would not know that he was the man who had caused his disfigurement. He had to remind himself that he had been wearing a mask over his face, that Mabeki could not possibly recognize him. And yet he could not escape the instinctive sense that Mabeki knew, by some force of intuition, precisely who he was.
If he did know, however, Mabeki gave no outward sign of it.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, not attempting even a veneer of civility.
‘I’m Wishart, the Reverend Roderick Wishart if one’s being formal. I’m afraid poor Tony Gibson isn’t feeling terribly well this morning. Food poisoning. You know how ghastly that is …’
Mabeki gave no sign of knowing or caring anything about food poisoning, one way or the other.
‘Well, anyway,’ Carver continued, ‘he couldn’t make it, so Simon Dollond asked me to step in for him, as it were.’
Mabeki did not acknowledge Carver’s words. He looked past him at the car, studying it, assessing it as a possible threat. Carver thought of the Terminator films, the data flashing up before the cyborg’s eyes as he scanned the world around him. Mabeki seemed barely more human.
He looked back at Carver. ‘Come in,’ he said. Then he glanced at the guard and said, ‘Search him.’
57
An hour before dawn on Sunday morning, South Africa time, three black couples, dressed up to the nines and waving bottles of Dom Perignon in the air, came laughing and flirting out of the huge, opulent and achingly fashionable Taboo club on West Street in the wealthy Sandton district of Johannesburg. As they tumbled into a massive white stretch Hummer, they certainly attracted attention. But that was only because the young women were wearing exceptionally tiny dresses, even by the proudly sinful standards of Taboo.
The uniformed driver closed the limo door behind his last passenger and drove away. Behind the blacked-out windows, two of the women wriggled out of their frocks, as party girls do in the backs of limousines. There was, though, nothing remotely sexual about the way they undressed. The giggling had stopped, as had the pretence of being drunk. The party clothes and skyscraper heels were discarded and immediately replaced by black combat fatigues, bulletproof vests and rubber-soled military boots, handed out by the third woman from one of four plastic storage boxes that had been placed on the floor of the passenger compartment. The three men put on identical uniforms, taken from the second box. The third contained a variety of automatic weapons, all with noise-suppressors, knives and small-scale explosive charges. In the fourth and smallest box were radio headsets and night-vision equipment. Swiftly, without needing to be told, the five black-uniformed figures checked their weapons and tested their radios.
The car left the central business district and headed into Sandhurst, a top-of-the-market residential area where palatial mansions stood in grounds covering acres, on blocks that measured a quarter of a mile on every side. It was followed all the way by a dusty white minivan that remained at least a hundred yards behind it at all times. The two vehicles passed houses barricaded behind high walls and heavy gates, and watched over by CCTV cameras. Every property seemed to bear a metal plate by the entrance, stating that it was guarded by XPT Security. The company liked to boast that it had reduced the local crime-rate to zero, thanks to its combination of regular armed patrols and constant video surveillance. Its cars were a round-the-clock presence on the streets and its customers were assured that the company’s response time, coordinated from a control room that operated for twenty-four hours of every day in the year, would never exceed six minutes, under any circumstances.
The white van pulled up in the moonshadow cast by a large jacaranda tree growing by the side of the road. Up ahead, the limo had stopped in front of a gate that would not have looked out of place outside a maximum-security prison. It rose at least twelve feet into the air and was made of thick stainless-steel plates, topped with four rows of barbed wire, angled outwards to prevent anyone climbing over the top. The gate opened by sliding across the entrance from left to right, from the point of view of the road. To the left-hand side of the gate, a guardhouse was built into the property’s thick concrete-covered wall. South Africans drive on the left, so anyone driving into the property would therefore pass directly by the guardhouse and the gate would only need to be half-opened to let them in.
This was Wendell Klerk’s principal South African townhouse. Its protective features befitted a man of his wealth, prominence and exposure to possible threat.
There were always two men in the guardhouse, working eight-hour shifts round the clock. One acted as the sentry and gatekeeper, watching the world go by through a thick plate-glass window; the other monitored the network of cameras, motion detectors and other alarms that covered the entire house and grounds. The feeds from all the properties’ cameras were also available to staff back at the corporate control room. And just in case anyone should somehow get into the grounds, a kennel to the rear of the guardhouse contained three German Shepherds, bred for speed, strength and aggression. They could be released at any moment without the guards having to leave their post.
The men and women in the back of the limo knew all this, just as they knew about the maximum six minutes that would elapse between the first alarm sounding and the arrival of the XPT personnel, guns out and sirens blaring. They would be long gone by then.
One of the passenger doors opened and the woman who’d kept her party clothes on almost fell out on to the pavement. She was a fine-looking girl, and her micro-skirted, backless, halter-necked excuse for a dress revealed every inch of her toned, glossy-skinned figure. She paused for a moment on the pavement to gather her wits, then teetered towards the guardhouse, brushing away the tumbling waves of golden-brown hair extensions from her face then holding a hand to her mouth to stifle her giggles.
The two men in the guardhouse were entering the sixth hour of a shift in which precisely nothing had happ
ened. The boss and his woman had stayed home. No one had come to visit them. Almost no one had even driven by. They were bored out of their minds, and their body-clocks were telling them they really ought to be asleep. When the guard on sentry duty saw the girl, he sighed, grinned cheerfully and waved his mate over to feast his eyes, too.
The girl tapped a finger on the window, smiled alluringly and started speaking. She appeared to be trying to ask some kind of question. Maybe she and her friends were lost: it was impossible to hear her through the thick glass.
The guard held a hand up to his ear and shook his head.
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, but very prettily.
The guard had a bright idea. He gestured to her to come round to the side of the guardhouse where there was a window that opened, allowing staff to speak to anyone waiting by the gate.
The girl smiled and nodded then walked round to the window.
The guard slid it up and leaned out of the opening to get the fullest possible view of every inch of the woman in front of him. He was not disappointed. Putting on his most charming, debonair smile, he said, ‘How can I help you, Miss?’
His pal was standing just behind him, peering over his shoulder to get a good look, too.
The girl gave a coy, embarrassed smile. ‘We’re lost.’ She giggled.
‘Ahh …’ said the guard, nodding, his suspicions confirmed. ‘So where is your destination?’
‘Coronation Road,’ she said. ‘I have the address in my bag. Wait a moment.’
She was carrying a small gold sequinned clutch-bag. She opened it, rummaged inside and pulled out a Walther TPH pistol, a ‘pocket-gun’ barely five inches long that fires just six .22 calibre rounds.
The party girl used four of them to put a pair of head-shots into the guard closest to her, then shifted her aim and put two more in the one behind. From the first shot to the last took less than three seconds.
The only entrance to the guardhouse was at the back, on the far side of the gate. So the woman kicked off her shoes, pushed the first guard’s dead body out of the opening and clambered through the window.
The .22 is a very neat bullet. Being such a small calibre, and especially when fired from a gun as modest as the TPH, it lacks the power to pass right through a human skull and instead ricochets around the brain. This causes appalling damage to the victim while avoiding the mess of bone, brain and blood-spatter caused by a through-and-through round. There was thus no obvious carnage for the woman to step through on her way to the guardhouse control panel. Not that she would have been put off if there had been. She had seen a great deal worse in her time.
She turned off all the alarm systems and opened the gate. The other five passengers got out of the limo, taking care to shut the doors silently behind them, and slipped through the gate, which closed behind them. The limo gently eased into motion and drove away. Then the road was silent again. As silent as the grave.
58
Carver had read a magazine story once about Ike and Tina Turner. Back in the late sixties, they bought a big mansion in LA and did it up in the kind of style Ike felt was appropriate for a legendary soulman and his red-hot wife. A guy from their record company came over one day. Ike told him the decorations had cost seventy thousand dollars, serious money back then. The guy replied, ‘You mean you can actually spend seventy grand in Woolworths?’
The Gushungos’ Hong Kong residence reminded Carver of that story. He was led down a hall floored with polished black marble tiles. They were edged in white and laid in diagonal lines, so that the white edges joined together to form a diamond-shaped pattern that criss-crossed the floor. Some kind of optical illusion made it look as though the white lines were raised from the black tiles, so that he constantly felt like he was just about to trip over them. Two glossy ceramic tigers, as tall as Carver’s waist, sat on either side of the door, each baring its teeth and waving a claw in his direction. The walls were decorated with a paper that featured a swirling metallic silver pattern on a black velveteen background. Maybe it was the other way round. Maybe the black velveteen was the pattern. It was hard to tell, and Carver didn’t bother to look closely enough to find out. He didn’t want to risk getting a headache. He just looked dead ahead and thought about Jesus.
On the right-hand side of the hall, a staircase led upstairs to the bedrooms and bathrooms, and down to the servants’ quarters. The main living room, however, was at the back of the building, looking out across a valley towards a jagged line of steep, thickly wooded hills. The land between Kowloon and Tai Po was mostly set aside as parkland, a rural oasis in the heart of the city-state, and the Gushungos’ villa took full advantage of the stunning views.
The inside of the living room was spectacular too, in its own absurdly gaudy way. The floor tiles were the same as the hall, but the paper switched to a burnished gold colour. Carver looked to his right and saw a life-size double portrait of Henderson and Faith Gushungo, posing in their wedding clothes in front of an impossibly lush landscape of African savannah, teeming with wild animals of every kind – the kind, for example, that no longer existed in the arid wastelands of Malemba. The artist had taken about thirty years off the President’s age and turned his skin the purple-black colour of an aubergine. He was standing with his shoulders squared, staring manfully into the distance, while his beautiful, submissive bride gazed up at him with adoring cow eyes.
Beneath the painting was a sofa strewn with richly patterned silk cushions. Its vivid purple-leather upholstery almost matched the mauve curtains draped on either side of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of the room. The rest of the armchairs in the room were bright scarlet, and the light fittings were all gold-plated, as was the frame of the glass-topped coffee table, littered with copies of Vogue and Architectural Digest, that stood in front of the sofa. The other paintings scattered around the walls made the one of the Gushungos look like a masterpiece of aristocratic portraiture by Gainsborough.
At the far end of the room stood a bar with a white marble top. Beneath it, the side of the bar had been divided into three panels. The outer edge of each panel was black. The inner heart of it was bright pillar-box red. The two colours were divided by a rectangle of white beading. The style was Nazi Nouveau.
‘Do you have a cross?’ Mabeki asked him.
‘Of course.’
Carver reached into his briefcase and took out his crucifix. He regretted now buying one with Jesus hanging on the cross. It made him feel like he was being watched.
‘Put it on here,’ said Mabeki, patting the bar counter. ‘Your colleague, Gibson, uses this as the altar.’
‘Does he really?’ said Carver. Either Gibson was too saintly to notice his physical surroundings, or he was taking the piss.
There was an ashtray sitting on the bar just a few inches from the cross, filled with lipstick-ringed cigarette butts.
‘Could you move that, please?’ Carver asked.
Mabeki gave him a bleak, spidery stare, then clapped his hands and shouted a few words in a language Carver could not understand. One of the bodyguards came in, was treated to a sharp burst of spittle-flecked orders, grabbed the ashtray and disappeared into another room. A few seconds later he was back again, this time with a colleague, to move the coffee table out of the way. More commands were issued. The two men hurried away and reappeared once more carrying two ornate gilt dining chairs, which were placed about six feet from the bar, facing the cross.
‘The President and the First Lady will take communion sitting on these chairs. The President’s health makes it difficult for him to kneel. Other members of the household will kneel in a row behind them.’
‘Will you be joining us, Mr …? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Mabeki. And no, I will not be taking part in this ridiculous charade.’ He came right up to Carver, standing over him. Then he twisted his body so that his face was thrust towards Carver’s, almost daring Carver to look away from the mangled wreckage of h
is scarred skin, twisted lips and glistening gums. ‘Do I look like I should believe in a just and merciful God?’
It suddenly struck Carver just how all-consuming Mabeki’s hunger for power must be, that he would choose to remain the way he was, with the effect that he caused, rather than have the surgery that could have repaired the worst, at least, of the damage. Mabeki actually wanted to look that deformed, that repellent. To him it was a source of strength.
‘Well,’ Carver replied, hoping that his face conveyed a suitable look of understanding and concern, ‘it is not for us to judge God’s purpose in afflicting us as he sometimes does. But you may be sure that he has one, and that it is filled with love and compassion for you.’
He ended with his face wreathed in a smug, patronizing smile and watched as Mabeki struggled to control the rage that constantly festered within him.
‘Believe that if you like, Reverend. I do not. And if God exists, let him prove me wrong.’
‘God does not have to prove anything, Mr Mabeki.’
Mabeki gave a dismissive grunt then took a pace back, breaking the tension between them. He took one last look at Carver – a man assessing the threat posed by another.
‘Will you be taking communion as well?’ Mabeki asked.
‘Of course. The meal is shared between the celebrant and the congregation.’
‘You will consume the same bread and wine as everyone else?’
Carver had been wondering when these questions would be asked. Mabeki was the kind of man who never, ever stopped seeing potential threats in everything and everyone around him. Would he now want Carver to taste everything to prove it was safe?
‘Naturally,’ Carver replied. ‘There is one chalice of wine, shared by all. The wafers, too, are the same for everyone.’