by Arthur Kerns
“His what?”
“A South African term for one’s buddies.”
“Should I have seen Asuty?”
Lange stood and stepped to the window. Keeping to the side, he carefully tilted one of the blinds. “I spotted them just after I got a glimpse of you. You were wandering around Victoria Wharf for me to make contact. Yes?”
She mumbled a yes, went over to the other side of the window, and looked down from the second floor onto the walkway bordering the moored boats. Her instincts had proved right. Lange had spotted her and had waited to make contact. Whether Nabeel was looking for her or not, more importantly, he was in the area.
“Where did you see them last?” she asked.
“Two blocks from here.” He pulled out a phone. “Pardon, while I make a call to my partner.” He talked with a fellow operative and flipped the phone closed. “Nabeel and his boys will pass by in a jiff.”
Down below, only a few people sauntered by, most holding something to eat or drink. Directly across from the window, not twenty yards away, two bearded men stood in the stern of a motorboat that needed a fresh coat of paint. They were watching the passersby intently.
“There they are,” Lange said. “Uh. Oh. What’s that all about?” He took his phone from his pocket and spoke to his contact.
Sandra saw five men coming from the left, appearing to head for the boat where the two bearded men waited. One of the five men was Farley Durrell. Something was wrong—Asuty held Farley’s right arm, a large thuggish-looking man with a prominent bald spot grasped the other. He was being taken for a reluctant boat ride.
She heard Lange’s phone click shut. “That fellow down there is in a bit of a bind. Doesn’t look Middle Eastern.”
“He’s Polish-American. One of ours. He’s in deep shit.”
Now Lange yanked the blinds apart. “I have only one chap to assist. Don’t know if the three of us have the time. Could call the Harbor Police—”
“Forget it. Help me open the window.” She pulled out her gun. “Just a few inches.”
“What?”
“No time. He must have blown his cover. He’s a dead man if we don’t do something now.” She watched the group below prepare to board. One of the two waiting men went forward in the boat and started the engines. White diesel smoke rose from the stern.
“We can’t start a firefight with all these tourists here!” Lange clutched her arm. She pulled free.
“Only one shot is necessary,” Sandra said, amazed at what she was about to do. “I’m shooting Farley.”
“Good God! You people will take out one of your own?”
Sandra knelt, rested the Glock on the windowsill to steady her aim, judged the distance, held her breath, and fired. She watched the bullet tear a chunk of cloth from Farley Durrell’s right pant leg. “Not kill him. Just shoot him in the leg.”
“Good shot! Can’t believe my bloody eyes.”
Down along the walkway, people scattered at the sound of the shot. Asuty’s men drew their weapons and looked in all directions except up at them. Farley Durrell had fallen, but rose and hobbled away from the group. Two of Asuty’s men jumped into the boat. Police whistles sounded from both directions. A siren wailed.
“We best be out of here,” Lange urged. “Good thing you didn’t unpack.” He hurried over to the couch and threw her clothes into the open suitcase. “I’ll check the bath for any of your belongings.”
Sandra watched Farley, who had distanced himself from Asuty’s thugs, stumble into the arms of a large redheaded policewoman, who held him upright. She grimaced. “Typical Farley.”
“Where to, maat?” Lange called.
“Stone’s room. Downstairs at the other end of the hotel.” Sandra shut the window and closed her suitcase. Where was Stone when she needed him? With some old squeeze?
At the seaside villa of Abdul Wahab, the butler, Dingane, observed the girl dust Lady Beatrice’s grand piano with haphazard flips of her wrist. She stared off to some distant place. Dreaming into the eyes of her new boyfriend, Dingane surmised.
He startled her, speaking in Fanagalo, the half Zulu, half pidgin English spoken in the mines where her parents lived. “If the mistress of the house, Lady Beatrice, catches you slacking, lazy girl, it’s the end. Hand me that.” He took the feather duster from her and demonstrated how she should use it. He thrust it back. “Now do it correctly.”
The girl returned to her task, now chastened. Dingane continued on his rounds of the villa, assuring that the staff was not shirking its duties. His wife remained in bed this morning. She said her stomach had cramps, blaming the tokoloshe, ground-hugging night gremlins. “He visited last night when I slept, I’m sure,” she moaned. “Build me a bed of bricks to stay off the floor to keep him away.”
He berated her for bringing up old myths, reminding her they were Christians. However, this afternoon he would arrange to get bricks from his cousin, who worked at the villa down the road. Building a traditional brick bed was preferable to her going to that old hag witch doctor.
He paused in the foyer, inspected the floor for dirt and the two Greek marble busts for dust. None. He stopped and sighed. His family had become a strain. Lady Beatrice had arranged a scholarship for their son, but the boy was more interested in playing his igopogo, the oil can guitar contraption favored by the South African bands. The young men in this new South Africa had many temptations. He was the only child who lived after his beloved wife’s six pregnancies, and Dingane knew they spoiled him. He must watch his son, or he would become a tsotsis, a young gangster roaming the streets.
Noise from outside interrupted his thoughts. From behind the carved oak door, he heard a car stop in front of the house and two doors open and slam shut. A hard knock on the door immediately followed. Must be rude visitors for madame’s husband. He looked in the TV monitor covering the outside entrance and saw that despicable man, Nabeel Asuty, with another ugly Middle Easterner. Both men looked around nervously as if they were fleeing from someone or thing. Dingane took his time opening the door.
“I want to speak with Abdul Wahab,” Nabeel said, not looking at Dingane. “I must see him.”
Dingane arched his back, as he had seen the British butlers do in old films, and said, using his best English diction, “I shall see if the master is receiving guests.” As he turned to go to the sitting room, he noted with humor the man’s face contort with anger.
He found Abdul Wahab and Lady Beatrice sitting on the opposite sides of the room, both reading portions of The Star, the Cape Town daily newspaper. Beatrice lifted her eyes and asked who was at the door. When told, she shouted at Wahab. “Damn it to hell, Abdul. I told you to keep those swarthy buggers out of my home.” Wahab rushed from the room.
She called after Dingane. “Keep an eye on them.”
He nodded and went back to the foyer where Wahab was leading an agitated Nabeel to the library. The other man, who had a prominent bald spot, remained standing. Dingane motioned for him to sit. The man scowled and sat roughly into a chair. Dingane couldn’t help thinking how inappropriate it was that the delicate French armchair should host the backsides of such a crude person. Intending to keep a watch on him, Dingane busied himself sorting the morning mail on the table.
“Ureed ma’,” the man shouted in Arabic.
Dingane feigned ignorance, but knew the man had asked for water.
The order came again as if he, Dingane, was the inferior, only there to do this man’s bidding. Again, Dingane acted as if he didn’t understand, and the man rose, making a cupping motion with his hands. At this, Dingane’s wife appeared.
“My dear. How do you feel?” he asked in Zulu.
She made various faces that said she felt better, but not much better, and glowering at the visitor, asked in Zulu, “What is this pig doing here?”
“Fouling the place,” Dingane said. “He has ordered water.”
“Shall I get it while you wait here wi
th him?”
“Yes. Take your time. Make it warm and dirty it.”
Dingane leaned on the opposite wall and motioned to the man that his water would come. The man looked away, not bothering to conceal the pistol in his belt. Perspiration ran down his neck.
Dingane heard the faint voices of Wahab and Nabeel coming from the library. Obviously, something was amiss, as Lady Beatrice was wont to say. That husband of hers was trouble. Much trouble. He remembered the time Lady Beatrice and he had that short conversation out in the gardens.
“You Zulus don’t have problems with multiple wives, do you?” she had asked.
Somehow, he had always thought it odd that she had mentioned the fact that Wahab had another wife in Saudi Arabia. However, from the time he had told her that his blood was royal Zulu, the two of them had formed an understanding.
He had answered her, “Not with Zulus, no, mum, but one must remember it was allowed in the holy book, the Old Testament.”
She had thrown her head back and laughed. “But Dingane, my good man, that helps me not. I’m all New Testament.”
From down the hallway the pantry door creaked, then closed. Without seeing, he knew Lady Beatrice had switched on the recorder hidden behind the side panel. Later on today, she would retrieve a little black object from the machine, which no doubt held the conversation of her husband and that vile man, Nabeel Asuty.
Before dinnertime, Dingane could expect to be paid a visit from his friend in the South African Secret Service wanting to know about the visit of these two Arabs. Two days ago his friend said he would bring another person from the SASS who was interested in questioning him about both Wahab and Lady Beatrice. Dingane had no trouble providing information on Wahab; however, they need not know about Lady Beatrice’s suspicions of her husband and things like her electronic device. The SASS people would be happy enough when he handed them the water glass with the fingerprint impressions of this bald-headed thug.
Abdul Wahab allowed Nabeel to rant. Both remained standing in the middle of the book-lined library. Nabeel’s dark face glistened with sweat, which in Wahab’s mind made him appear even more unctuous. They spoke in Arabic.
“We were infiltrated! They placed this man within our group. This, this Englishman.”
“Who is they?” Wahab demanded. “And who is this man?”
“The British MI6. I’m certain.” Nabeel paced and wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. “He is English. A convert to our faith, he insisted.”
“Who allowed this Englishman into the group? Why was he allowed in? Why was I not informed?”
The number of questions appeared to slow Nabeel’s fuming. He ceased pacing. “Our group decided he was of value. He had contacts with airlines and shipping companies. He was very devout.”
Wahab eased into his chair at the desk and studied the man standing before him. In a way, it was a pleasure to watch him squirm. Truth of the matter, he neither knew nor cared about Nabeel’s group of thugs. They were all uneducated, except for their reading the Koran, and had one-track minds—jihad and the destruction of Western civilization. He asked again, “Why was I not informed about bringing in a Westerner?”
Nabeel shrugged. “It seemed of little consequence at the time.”
“Let me go over this again. You discovered this man was a spy. You neglected to say how you found out, but that matters little right now. You planned to take him in a boat to the middle of the bay and kill him. What happened at the wharf?”
“Someone shot him.”
“Your people shot him on the pier? Why?”
“No. Most strange. None of my people fired. Someone else did. The police came and arrested two of my men because they found they were carrying guns. Mohammed, sitting outside, and I escaped and came here.”
“You came directly here, you idiot!”
“No. We took a roundabout route. One other member of our group escaped. Don’t know his whereabouts.” Nabeel folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t like being called an idiot. “The Englishman was taken away by the police.”
Wahab leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. His beautiful plan for a major terrorist blow was unraveling. Van Wartt demanded that he take possession of the nuclear device within the next few days. Now they were minus two men and didn’t have sufficient manpower to transport the nuclear weapon.
“When we take possession of the bomb, we need at least six people to transport it to … Where have you planned to take it?” Wahab asked, realizing that he had mistakenly placed a great deal of the plan in the hands of this fool.
Nabeel regained his composure. “Where is the bomb now?”
“Up north in the desert. How and to where will we move it?”
“We were thinking to Douala, Cameroon.”
“Who are we?”
“The Englishman had contacts with a shipping company. Now, that plan is—”
“How did you discover he was a spy?”
“By chance. He wanted a woman and we all went to a whorehouse he knew. We caught him passing a piece of paper, a message of some kind, to one of the prostitutes. A fight broke out between the Englishman and two of our men. We were thrown out by the pimps.”
“Where were you at the time?”
Nabeel looked down at the floor. “In one of the rooms. Busy.”
That poor woman, thought Wahab. Having to share a bed with this slime. He gathered himself. “My good friend. Things have gone astray, but we shall prevail. The greatest strike against the infidel is in our grasp. Go. Stay alert and await my call.”
Nabeel blinked, turned, and hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. “One more thing. That man Hayden Stone is in Cape Town. I will find him and kill him.”
“I told you before, Stone is mine.” Wahab rose. “I’ll show you out.”
After he watched Nabeel and his man drive off, Wahab asked Dingane to bring him a cup of fresh coffee. Back in the library, he eased the door shut, hoping his wife would not interrupt him with a tirade on Nabeel’s visit. He needed time and quiet to think. The plan to explode the nuclear device off the shores of Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Tel Aviv needed immediate fixing. After an hour the realization came that his control of events was tenuous. Perhaps, control had never been in his hands.
Wahab thought back to the events on the Riviera and how all his plans, organization, and contacts had been lost. The support and trust of his benefactor, the prince, father of his first wife, had vanished. Saudi Arabia barred him from his homeland. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups mistrusted him. The French intelligence service made him flee his beloved South of France. The CIA wanted retribution for his hand in the deaths of two of their operatives, and they had sent Hayden Stone to settle the score. As for Stone, the man had constantly hounded him from Afghanistan, to the Riviera, to here in Africa.
Perhaps Stone was not the jinn he had believed, haunting and hounding him. The fault might lie within. He picked up his worn copy of the Canterbury Tales from the table, opened it, and saw the Middle English text. He thought of his Oxford don in the worn cardigan sweater and his days as a student in England. A young Arab in a strange, fascinating world that he had reluctantly grown to love.
Wahab laid the book on the desk, keeping his hand on the leather binding. He heard his English wife’s voice from beyond the closed door. He closed his eyes and wondered, who was he, really?
Chapter Twenty
Cape Town—August 18, 2002
As Dawid van Wartt maneuvered the curves of Kloof Road, he pressed down on the accelerator, enjoying the power of his new Bentley coupe. The way the car held to the road impressed him. At least something was going well today.
The first thing that morning, he had received an urgent telephone call from the manager of his real estate firm. A sizable group of trade unionists were demonstrating in front of his main commercial building downtown. The reason given by the strikers to the press was “inadequate wages�
�� for their maintenance people. What had really happened was Van Wartt’s corporation had been late and parsimonious with the requisite omkoop, the bribes to the union leaders. A second phone call determined that certain politicians had offered to help in easing tensions—that meant more bribes. Such was the cost of doing business in South Africa.
The visit later that morning from his friend from Namibia, Bull Rhyton, concerned him most. A little before noon, Bull had phoned and said he was outside the gate of Van Wartt’s villa and had to speak to him. Van Wartt met the burly, unshaven man and led him to the garden. They sat in the warm sun on a concrete garden bench. In the cooled winter ground, a few flowers gave off weak fragrances while a brown and black bird fluttered in the bladdernut tree directly above them. Stretching below, the houses and buildings of Cape Town sparkled. Farther out, ships crisscrossed a calm bay.
Quick pleasantries were exchanged and at last Bull got to the point of his visit. His voice carried an edge. In Afrikaans, he addressed Van Wartt using his nickname. “Dawie, this morning my nephew phoned me. He said two weeks ago he saw two men by the boxcar. They broke inside.”
“Two weeks ago? You just came from Bruin Karas. You hear this now?”
“He knew he was to stay away from the boxcar. His mother found out and made him call me.”
“Did these two men who broke inside take anything out?”
“No. Corneliu said when they came out of the boxcar, they acted concerned. One had an instrument in his hand. I suppose it was a Geiger counter.”
Van Wartt frowned. “Then what?”
“They left on an ATV. Headed west, Corneliu said. Out of sight. However, going back home, my nephew saw a helicopter fly.”
“The two men weren’t locals?” Van Wartt guessed the answer.
Bull shook his head. “Do you know who they were?”
An unexpected turn of events. Van Wartt searched for the right words. He knew that however he explained it, Bull would be unhappy, disappointed. “I neglected to tell you. I formulated a backup plan. I reasoned we must get rid of the bomb quickly, one way or another.”
