The Cull

by Tony Park

  Sonja reached for him, her hand extended. ‘Please, my love.’

  He wanted to take her hand, to forgive her, to start again and pretend this had never happened. The trouble was, he couldn’t.

  ‘Adios.’

  Chapter 26

  Tema felt quite OK on the boat, a little calmer and less queasy than she had on the trip over to Kipili. It was a beautiful morning. At the same time, she found working undercover exciting and it gave her a natural buzz.

  Nikola had given her a seasickness pill and it was starting to work, she thought. His boat was bigger than the one she and Mario had come over in, and the lake was calmer, which helped.

  He showed her how to steer and she stood on the top deck, aiming at a mountain peak on the horizon. Her hair was wrapped up in a brightly printed turban and she thought she looked quite sexy in her white top and navy shorts. Nikola had complimented her on how she looked this morning, in a non-sleazy way. She was genuinely enjoying his company. He talked about his time in the UN, the places he’d visited, and mentioned more than once how he loved wildlife. He was interested in her part of the world, but she hadn’t let on that she had spent time in the bush. Whether he knew it or not, it was very unusual for any of her girlfriends to have ever visited the Kruger National Park – except maybe on a school field trip when they were little – even though the vast reserve was on her doorstep. She told Nikola she had been studying at a secretarial college in Hazyview when Mario had come visiting friends from across the border in Mozambique.

  At one point Nikola went downstairs and returned to the bridge a short while later carefully balancing two champagne flutes. ‘You are doing a marvellous job, Beauty. You’re a natural skipper.’

  She smiled. She thought she really ought not be drinking champagne at this time of the morning after taking a pill, but the sun was bright, the breeze warm, and the water still glassy. If this was undercover work, she wanted more of it. She hoped, secretly, that Nikola would turn out to be the person he seemed to be: the former aid worker who loved the environment and owned what would soon be a successful lakeside resort.

  ‘I never asked you about your name. What does it mean?’ he asked, as she stepped aside and allowed him to take over the helm.

  Tema leaned against the dashboard, or whatever it was called on a boat. She sipped her drink and loved the feel of the cold bubbles on her tongue. ‘Um, it just means Beauty, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  Tema laughed. She felt pleasantly light-headed. She didn’t drink a great deal, but this champagne must be very strong, she thought. She was pleased she hadn’t used her real name. Why, she wondered, had Nikola asked what her undercover name meant?

  ‘What happened last night, with your husband and that other mzungu?’

  Tema had learned very early in her visit to East Africa that the word meant ‘white person’; it was similar to the Zulu word, uMlungu. ‘Ag, I don’t know. I do know that Mario is a pig and that he must have picked a fight with the other guy and ended up second best. That’s what the barman told me.’

  ‘Yes, he told me the same thing.’ Nikola set down his glass. ‘Except your husband’s name is Marius, I thought?’

  Tema felt woozy. She blinked. ‘Oh, yes, sorry . . .’ She was finding it hard to form her words. She had made a mistake, that much she registered, but they had all practised their cover stories and committed each other’s fake names to memory. Why was she having so much trouble remembering them? Sonja was Ursula, Hudson was . . . Hudson was . . .

  Nikola reached over and took her glass from her. ‘Who are you, Tema?’

  ‘Um, I’m not Tema, I’m Beauty. For real. That’s my name.’

  ‘But not Mario? That’s not his name.’

  ‘No . . . he’s . . .’

  ‘Mario.’

  ‘No, no. He’s Marius, like you said. I’m just, I’m just maybe a little tipsy I think, Nikola.’

  ‘He’s Mario Machado, a former mercenary. Your South African friend who showed up here like some unwashed smelly backpacker in that old Land Rover is Sonja Kurtz, and her supposed boyfriend is Hudson Brand, a private investigator. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m, I’m Beauty.’ She felt properly sick now and very afraid. She blinked, but Nikola was getting blurrier. ‘I’m . . .’

  Nikola grabbed her left forearm, hard enough for her to register some mild pain through the fog that overtook her. ‘I’m . . .’

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what you are, young lady, and make no mistake about it. You’re finished, Tema.’

  *

  Sonja looked around again and, seeing no one, slipped into Nikola’s private suite. She remembered the layout from her first visit and went straight to Peves’s home office, where his computer sat on a masculine, dark wood writing desk with a green leather blotter.

  A carved African face mask, Congolese she thought, grimaced down at her from the wall behind the swivel chair. Sonja sat at the desk and started going through the drawers methodically. There were chequebooks, receipts, a petty cash tin and a diary. She opened the little leather-bound book and flicked through it. Peves was old-school, preferring to use a paper diary rather than an electronic one, or perhaps both. She turned back to the time when this whole mess had begun, when she had been training the Leopards in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve. Peves was in Mozambique, just across the border, at the time, and in Johannesburg a few days earlier.

  Sonja remembered the days with Hudson, how the loss of the women on the patrol that night had quietly freaked her out. She had tried to convince herself she could just live in the moment, just enjoy being in Hudson’s arms, and not think about Sam or all the other people she had known in her life who had been killed in action.

  She shook her head, to clear it. Now was not the time.

  Peves, she saw, had been in Harare, Zimbabwe, at the same time she and Mario and the others had been killing poachers in Mana Pools National Park. The timing correlations were unnerving, but, again, that was why they were here. It seemed like it wouldn’t take too much to confirm Paterson’s supposition that Peves, who spoke Russian, was the man in charge of the Scorpions.

  Sonja slid the hiking pack off her shoulders and took out the first bug. Peves would be no fool, though she suspected he felt secure enough in this remote little slice of paradise not to worry about electronically scanning for bugs. She stood, lifted the mask from its hook on the wall, and secured the device with double-sided tape to the back of the carving before replacing it.

  The laptop on the desk was in sleep mode so she sat and pressed the power button. As she suspected, the Mac needed a password to wake it up. Sonja was no hacker so she didn’t even bother trying.

  She stood and walked out of the office, along the polished concrete floor of the hallway to the master bedroom.

  The bed, like the desk, was dark and carved, a four-poster with a big mosquito net suspended from a frame. The maid had already made it up. Sonja went into the walk-in open closet. Peves had a lot of clothes and shoes, for a man. He was single and rich.

  Sonja went to the bathroom and looked out the small window. The camping ground was empty. Hudson had packed the Land Rover and driven away. An attendant was raking the dirt where they had parked.

  Sonja sighed.

  She forced her thoughts back to the job. Peves would notice the missing vehicle as soon as he and Tema got back. How plausible would it be, she wondered, for a hotelier to have two couples, guests, break up in the course of a few days? They had to get the information they needed on him and get out of here quick.

  If Sonja’s suspicion about Julianne Clyde-Smith running a hit squad was true, then as soon as they did prove Peves was the head of the Scorpions Sonja was fairly sure Julianne would order Mario to kill him.

  Given what had happened to Sam, part of Sonja didn’t care what Julianne was up to. It was illegal
, running an ex officio hit squad outside of the law, and as much as some people might applaud Julianne for taking such a stand, Sonja did not want to be a part of that sort of operation. She had killed plenty of people in her life, but had nearly always been able to justify her actions to herself as morally acceptable.

  The one exception to this had been the Vietnamese man, Tran Van Ngo.

  Sonja had no problem shooting poachers if they were firing at her, and while she did, in fact, want revenge for the deaths of the two women in her team, she would not kill a man in cold blood again to achieve that.

  Quite what she would do with Julianne if she found out she was running a murder squad, she didn’t know. One thing was for sure: she would get Tema away from this toxic environment and do her best to find her employment somewhere else.

  Her mission would be harder without Hudson, and her life would be emptier.

  Try as she might she could not focus solely on placing the bugs in Nikola’s house. Her thoughts kept going back to Hudson. She remembered when she was a young soldier in the British Army, undergoing a gruelling selection course to join 14 Intelligence Company, for service in Northern Ireland. Almost as tough as overcoming the physical obstacles on the course was the battle against the mindset of some of the male soldiers and officers she dealt with. 14 Company was at that time as close as female soldiers could get to being in harm’s way in a front line, albeit undercover, unit.

  The opponents of the concept of women being placed in situations where they might be compromised and face the prospect of having to shoot their way out fell back on an age-old excuse for keeping women off the battlefield: that their male counterparts might become too attached to their female comrades and take foolish risks to protect the weaker sex.

  It was nonsense, Sonja thought.

  The fact was that most of the acts of heroism she’d seen in her years on the world’s battlefields were not about soldiers slaughtering scores of the enemy, but of individual men – and women – putting their lives at risk to rescue or help fellow human beings, regardless of their sex.

  If anything, the argument had got the genders wrong when it came to people forming attachments. Sonja found herself right now unable to concentrate on her mission because of the man she was now fairly sure she loved, Hudson Brand.

  The very thought of being in love again scared her, and she hated to admit that a very small part of her might be pleased that he was gone. Nevertheless, in her mind she composed the explanation she would have given to him, if he had listened, and if she had been brave enough to say it to him.

  Believe it or not, she might have said, there is a nice, soft, gooey part inside of me that makes me human and makes me able to love. She would have had to pause there, she was fairly sure, to wait for his laughter to subside. She was well aware of how she presented to others, how most people only ever saw her tough exterior and the work she did rather than the person inside the uniform.

  Hudson Brand had seen all of her, laid bare, had touched every part of her, kissed every part. But that part of me, she thought, trying hard to find the words for herself, even if he would never hear them, gets bruised very easily and can’t deal with anything that looks like abandonment.

  She had been hurt, in her life, by her alcoholic father, by the mother who had left her, in Africa, to fly back to England where she came from. Sonja had joined her, eventually, after being incapable of dealing with her father’s condition. She hadn’t understood at the time – she did now – that his problems were a product of his military service in South West Africa, now Namibia, and his exposure to and participation in the worst things soldiers at war could do.

  And then there is the strong, hard, mind-over-matter part of me, the soldier in me, that can deal with disappointment, is trained to ignore pain and carry on, but only by shutting down my heart, my feelings, my emotions.

  Right now, the hard side of her wanted to do just that, to pull on the armour to protect the vulnerable core. She wondered if that had been part of her foolish motivation for having sex with Mario, to cauterise her feelings for Hudson, whether or not she had truly believed he had been unfaithful. Perhaps, deep down, it didn’t matter if Hudson hadn’t slept with Rosie, because the tough part of her didn’t care; it just wanted to keep him away in case her growing love for him didn’t work out.

  ‘I am so fucked up,’ she whispered to herself in Peves’s bedroom.

  She placed a bug behind his bedhead, shifted the bed back into place, and walked through to the lounge area.

  Sonja paused and looked around the living room. It was stylish, tasteful and impressive without being ostentatious. It was, she had to admit, better than she could do, despite the wealth she had inherited. She wondered if Peves had paid a designer, perhaps the same person who had furnished his beachfront lodge, or if he just naturally had good taste.

  She started to wonder what a house that she and Hudson Brand shared might look like. But, no, that was never going to happen. She looked out the windows and saw three of Peves’s blue-uniformed maintenance or grounds staff walking towards her, from the direction of the workshops.

  As they came closer she recognised one of them as Godwin, the mechanic she had gone to, ostensibly for advice on Hudson’s battered Land Rover. Funny, she almost missed the vehicle now, as well as him. Her heart felt empty.

  And then it lurched.

  Godwin, she now realised, like the other two men, was carrying a green canvas bag. The man just behind him stopped, set his bag down and unzipped it.

  The mechanic turned and waved his hand in a frantic, chopping motion, telling him to stop what he was doing, but it was too late. The man, who Sonja now realised was the gardener who had just been tending the lawn, pulled an AK-47 out of the bag and cocked it.

  ‘Shit.’ Sonja shrugged off her daypack and took out a walkie-talkie. From under her T-shirt she slid the Makarov pistol from the holster clipped to her belt.

  ‘Cobra, this is Mamba,’ Sonja said, calling Paterson using their agreed call-signs. ‘I’ve been compromised, three tangos heading my way, all with long guns.’

  She didn’t wait for his reply. The men had all unsheathed their weapons now and were moving in on Peves’s chalet at a jog, rifles up. Sonja had all the proof she needed that there was something wrong going on here, but still she had to be sure. She stepped out onto the verandah, in plain sight of all three. The mechanic paused, raised his rifle and fired a burst of three rounds.

  ‘Thank you.’ Sonja brought her pistol up and fired a double tap, at the gardener, who was now a few metres ahead of the mechanic. It was long range for a pistol, but she’d been practising all her life. At least one of the rounds found its mark and the man fell. Sonja ducked back inside and dropped beneath the sill of the nearest window.

  The phone on Nikola Pesev’s desk rang. She ignored it and risked a peep through the window.

  The man she had shot was writhing on the ground, calling out in pain. It took her a moment to locate the other two.

  One, the mechanic, she thought, had taken cover behind a parked Land Rover Discovery, Peves’s vehicle, or one of them, she assumed. The third man was lying down behind a tree. She fired two shots at the latter as he was closer than the mechanic, who seemed to be in charge, hanging back and directing the others.

  The phone on Peves’s antique desk rang out, but a few seconds later it started ringing again.

  One of the men was shouting something. She peeked over the windowsill again and saw the mechanic waving his rifle in the air over the bonnet of the Discovery.

  ‘Don’t shoot.’

  Sonja put two rounds through the truck’s side windows. The man placed his AK-47 on the ground in front of the nose of the vehicle, where she could see it.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’

  ‘What do you want?’ she called.

  ‘Answer the phone.’

  �
�What?’

  ‘The boss’s phone, answer it.’

  It was still ringing. It could be a simple trick, Sonja thought, designed to give them enough time to close the gap between their isolated places of cover and Peves’s home.

  Something had gone terribly wrong here. The phone’s chirping grated on her nerves. She moved so that she could see the approach to the chalet, obliquely, out of the window, but without exposing herself to fire from the two men. She picked up the cordless phone, but didn’t answer it straight away. She moved so that she could see the Discovery, and the AK-47 still on the ground in front of it.

  She lifted the handset. ‘Kurtz.’

  ‘Go to my computer and open it. It will connect to the wi-fi immediately and I’m logged into Skype. Turn on the camera.’

  ‘Sure. And then your goons rush me and kill me.’

  ‘No,’ Peves said into her ear. ‘I’ve told them to stay where they are. There are more of them, by the way, ready to come for you in case these first three screwed up, which they did, of course, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I have Paterson in my custody.’

  ‘What’s your password?’ Sonja asked.

  He laughed. ‘“Password”, of course.’

  She scanned the spots where the two able-bodied henchmen were still hiding. The one she had hit was still and quiet, either dead or passed out. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘The obvious is sometimes the best, like hiding in plain view. I’d have thought you would have realised that by now.’

  Sonja ended the call and went to the desk. She unplugged the laptop from its power cord and moved back to the window. She placed the computer on the floor and angled the screen back so she could glance down at it while still keeping the gunmen under observation. She trusted no one any more.

  True to his word, the password worked. Sonja clicked on Skype and waited for the connection.

  She saw a movement by the tree where one of the men had taken cover so she fired a shot at him, to make him keep his head down.