by Tony Park
Suddenly, he was weaving. The steering wheel went slack in his hands and he turned hard, overcorrecting. The Land Cruiser had been sitting on close to a hundred kilometres per hour and it nearly rolled before he wrestled the wheel back the other way. He started to slow, and heard the slap of burst rubber beneath him. The gunman in the other car had shot out at least one of the rear tyres. Alex pressed on despite the deafening shriek of his bare left rear rim cutting into the tar of the road, but he could gain no further ground on the Corolla when the traffic ahead started to pick up speed once more. To seal his defeat the right rear tyre exploded after another burst of gunfire.
Alex veered to the left onto a steep grassy embankment. Once more the four-wheel drive would go where no town car could follow. The brakes seemed useless as he careened over the lip and hurtled down the near vertical drop.
The phone in George’s suite rang and rang, but there was no answer.
It was one o’clock in the morning. Hardly a civilised time to be calling someone, but Jane had known George to take calls far later than this from the UK. He’d told her he was a borderline insomniac. Perhaps he had turned down the volume on the phone’s ringer in order to try to get some sleep. Not like George, but possible.
Despite the hard line she’d taken with Alex, she felt terrible about what had happened to Lisa Novak. Still dressed, and fortified by a half-bottle of white from the minibar in her hotel room, she had resolved to tell all she knew to George, and to hear, from him, just what was in the package that Iain MacGregor had entrusted to her.
She could no longer afford to give him the benefit of the doubt, nor wait to check for herself what was in the pouch she had hidden on board the Penfold Son before the pirates seized her. Too many lives were at risk.
She didn’t regret standing up to Alex, though. He had charmed her, and she was a little disturbed at how easily she had fallen for his advances, but he had also abducted her and held her on the island against her will.
Jane put her high heels back on and checked her hair in the mirror, tidying a couple of loose strands. On impulse, she decided to try the phone one more time before knocking on his door.
This time it was busy. ‘Oh, bugger it,’ she said aloud. She hung up and marched out of her room to the lifts. At least he was in his room now.
George was staying a floor above her. She imagined he had avoided booking her next door to him so as not to give the other company executives anything to gossip about. They were staying on the same level as her. The lift doors opened and Jane followed the room numbers down a corridor to her right.
Counting the doors ahead, she had already identified George’s, but thought she must have made a mistake when it opened and a woman emerged. She was early thirties, Jane guessed, with a jet-black bob and breasts that seemed out of proportion to her skinny build. She wore a red lycra singlet top and a black miniskirt. She tottered into the hallway on impossibly high stilettos. Dressed like that, Jane thought she was either going to a rave or else she was a prostitute. She couldn’t hear any house music coming from the room, which, as she got closer, she saw was definitely George’s suite.
Jane stopped in front of the woman as she was pulling the door closed. She was thumbing through a wad of red two-hundred rand notes. Jane was rewarded with a look of shock and surprise on the woman’s face when she looked up.
Jane stood there, hands on hips in the hallway, staring at the stranger.
The woman regained her composure and tossed her head, flicking her hair out of her eye. ‘Hello . . . I’m afraid I got my room number wrong. All these doors look alike, don’t they?’
Jane thought it a pathetic attempt at covering up. She could hear George talking from inside the room. The door was still not pulled closed and she didn’t want to cause a fuss and alert him just yet. Her mind raced. Perhaps the woman was telling the truth, although the handful of cash that she hurriedly stuffed in a large patent leather shoulder bag indicated otherwise. ‘Don’t worry.’ Jane winked. ‘I’m not the wife, just a friend. He told me you’d be coming and invited me to join you if I made it back to the hotel early enough.’
The woman let out an audible hiss of air. ‘God, you had me worried there for a moment. Thought you might have been a work colleague or something. I knew you weren’t the wife,’ she nodded back towards George’s room, ‘because she’s on the phone.’
Jane smiled, even though she felt dizzy. She thought she might throw up, so she swallowed hard.
The woman flicked her hair from her face. ‘He didn’t mention anything about anyone joining us. I’d be happy to stay for a bit, if you like, though it’ll cost him extra.’ She looked Jane up and down and ran the tip of her tongue around her full red lips.
If the gesture was meant to turn her on, it had precisely the opposite effect. Jane hid her revulsion and said, ‘No, thanks anyway.’
The woman shrugged. ‘Maybe next time?’
‘Perhaps. Just out of interest, how was he?’
‘Rough. Nasty. I’ve got bruises that’ll last a week, but he got what he paid for. But I suppose you know all about that side of him?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Jane said. ‘Night.’
Jane waited in the shadow of the doorway until the woman had rounded the bend in the corridor and she heard the lift bell chime. She stood there, leaning against the door frame for support, listening to George talking to his wife.
‘No, I told you before, you can call any time, day or night, my love,’ he said. ‘Especially when it’s about the kids. I’m glad she’s all right now, though. Poor pet. Give her all my love.’
Jane frowned. This was supposedly a woman George had blazing rows with every night, and who made him sleep in a separate room. The same woman who had supposedly granted him a divorce.
‘I love you too Liz,’ he said. ‘And I miss you terribly.’ He chuckled loudly. ‘Yes, you naughty minx, I miss that too. I can’t wait to get home and give you a jolly good seeing-to, my bad girl. Love you. Night night.’
It amazed her that George would risk sneaking a hooker into the hotel when she – the woman he had proposed to – was staying in the same hotel. Maybe risky two-timing was part of the sexual thrill for him. If that was the case, then he probably got the same kick out of sleeping with her back in the UK.
Jane felt sick to her stomach. She pulled the door closed softly and turned and walked down the hotel corridor.
20
Alex called Janine Novak’s cell phone and told her to ask her father, quietly so that the police officers couldn’t hear, to call him when he had a chance. He hung up, ran some water in the hotel bathroom’s washbasin and shaved, carefully and painfully, with a disposable razor.
His seat belt had saved his life, though his chest felt as though it had been kicked by a horse and his face was flecked with dried blood from where the windscreen had shattered and sprayed him when the Land Cruiser had landed, nose first, in the bottom of the deep concrete stormwater culvert.
He’d passed out – for how long he didn’t know – and when he came to he was surprised to find himself alive. He guessed that the police had probably been hot on his tail after he’d left the hospital, and the man who had shot out his rear tyres had not had the chance to stay and finish the job.
The men in the BMW had probably been hiding elsewhere in the hospital car cark, waiting to pick up the gunman; but the shooter had had to change his plan quickly when Alex followed him out of the ICU window. Alex recalled, as he shaved, how the man had been talking on a mobile phone while driving.
Almost as miraculous as the fact that he had survived the shootout and the totalling of his four-by-four was that someone had stopped to assist him soon after his crash. Good Samaritans were a rarity in a country where hijackers often pretended to be roadside breakdown victims. The man who had come to Alex’s rescue was a security guard on his way home. He had perhaps been more willing to stop than the average motorist by virtue of the semiautomatic shotgun he toted with him to t
he crash scene.
The guard, a Zulu named Doctor – whose parents presumably had loftier career goals in mind for him – gave him a lift to the Garden Court Hotel near OR Tambo International Airport, in the industrial suburb of Isando. When Doctor had asked Alex if he wanted to call the police, Alex had said no, and the security guard had just shrugged. He’d also said nothing when Alex had searched the floor of his Land Cruiser until he found his pistol.
Alex smiled in the mirror as he remembered Doctor’s thanks for the handful of rand notes Alex had palmed him as they shook hands in the hotel car park at two in the morning. ‘One more thing,’ Alex had said.
‘What’s that, my brother?’
‘Have you got any spare nine-mill ammo on you, bru?’
‘The company counts all my rounds, man, for my service pistol.’ He patted the Browning slung low on his right thigh. ‘But fortunately I always carry a back-up.’ He pulled his second pistol from the rear of his trouser waistband, thumbed the magazine release catch and emptied ten bullets into his palm. ‘Hamba gahle,’ he said to Alex as he handed him the glittering pile of brass and copper.
‘And you go well yourself, Doctor.’
Alex gingerly fingered the sash-like bruise across his chest. Fortunately there were no ribs broken. His mobile rang and he picked it up without checking the caller identification on the screen. ‘Novak?’
‘It’s Jane.’
‘Oh.’
He was tempted to hang up on her. He told himself he was finished with her, and didn’t care what happened to the selfish bloody woman. But something made him hold on. He waited through four long seconds of silence.
‘I was wrong,’ she said.
Again, he said nothing.
‘And I feel terrible for Lisa. How is she? Any better?’
He broke his silence and told her about the second attempt on Lisa’s life during the night, and his wounding and pursuit of the unknown gunman. Alex walked out of the bathroom and sat on the bed, a towel around his waist.
‘Which arm did you shoot the man in?’ Jane asked.
The scene replayed itself in his mind. The shooter was right-handed and had dropped his pistol on the ICU ward floor, before retrieving it and jumping out the window. ‘Right. But it couldn’t have been a serious hit as the guy was up and firing back at me a couple of minutes later.’
‘The man who headed the security detachment on the Penfold Son, Piet van Zyl, had a breakfast meeting with George this morning. I didn’t speak to him, but he looked pretty ropey – like he’d been up all night. He had a bandage around his right wrist, just behind the thumb, and some scratches on his arms and face.’
‘I must have grazed him before he jumped through the window.’
‘How’s Novak?’
Alex had told her about Novak being shot while protecting his wife. ‘He’s OK. The police have given him a grilling, but your boss can rest assured Novak hasn’t said anything about hijacking Penfold’s ships in the Indian Ocean. Lisa has got a round-the-clock police guard in an isolated ward and Novak is sitting next to her with two guns. One thing’s for sure: if Penfold’s hired guns go into that hospital again, they won’t come out alive.’
Alex didn’t tell her the best news of the night – the only good news, in fact. The force of Novak’s fall on his wife had pushed her body towards the metal bedhead and she had bumped the tubular steel hard. A few minutes after Alex and the gunman had exited via the window, Lisa had opened her eyes. The blow had caused her to regain consciousness. Lisa was talking, but was having trouble remembering anything about either shooting.
‘Do you know where Van Zyl is now?’
‘No, although I do know he and his men are flying somewhere. After breakfast they checked out and I overheard them booking a car from the hotel to the airport.’
‘Did they have any firearms with them, any gun bags?’
‘No. Not that I could see. All my stuff is still stuck on board the Penfold Son in Cape Town. The local customs and police people wouldn’t allow access to it – so I imagine Van Zyl’s arsenal is on board too. George says he expects workmen to be allowed on board in a couple of days’ time. He told them he wants her ready to sail asap, so perhaps Van Zyl’s flying to Cape Town. We’re all going down there to continue the negotiations and inspect the De Witt fleet before the takeover. It’s why I called you.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘I hid the package Captain MacGregor gave me somewhere on the Penfold Son.’
‘I guessed as much. So why don’t you just get it, have a look at it and confront George once and for all.’
‘I want to get it before George and the others board the ship and I can’t do that by myself. It’s berthed at the Duncan Dock at Cape Town and with security the way it is these days I can’t just walk on board. If I use my Penfold ID, George will find out about it.
‘What’s in it for me?’ Alex asked. As he sat on the hotel bed next to the dive bag he’d salvaged from his wrecked Land Cruiser, a plan was already forming in his mind.
She paused. ‘If there’s stolen property, or something else illegal in that package, I can’t be a party to its sale or profit from its disposal.’
‘Spoken like a true lawyer. Why don’t you just tell George where the package is, so he and his goons can lay off my guys?’
‘For the same reason you won’t go to the police and tell them Piet van Zyl probably shot Lisa Novak. Because you want to get even yourself, and you want to know what’s in that package as much as I do.’
‘You’re right. What made you change your mind about George?’
‘I found out some stuff about him. He’s been lying to me since I met him. At least you came clean about being a criminal.’
‘Thanks. I think. OK, I’ll come to Cape Town and help you find the package.’ There was another reason he would go with her, instead of returning to Mozambique immediately and planning the ivory heist. He wanted to see her again.
Alex no longer had a car, so he couldn’t drive to Cape Town, and as he was carrying a pistol and had no contacts in the Mother City who could sell him some hardware at short notice, he couldn’t fly. Jane, with her pathological fear of flying, was catching the train. And not just any train.
She and George Penfold were travelling in luxury, on board the Pride of Africa, a rolling five-star hotel that would take the best part of three days to reach Cape Town. Alex had called Rovos Rail’s bookings office and been lucky enough to get a berth on the train. It was expensive, but he had some fat in the expenses budget he’d drawn up for Valiant Chan.
It was raining as he stepped out under the portico in front of the hotel after settling his account, with cash. The taxi the concierge had arranged flashed his lights and pulled up. Although summer was approaching, the Highveld rain had a chill to it. Alex was wearing a brown leather suit coat to hide the Glock tucked in his jeans, as well as to ward off the cold.
‘Alexandra,’ he said.
The driver raised his eyebrows with a ‘you’re sure?’ look, but then just said, ‘Yebo.’
The driver cut through the back streets of Edenvale and eventually navigated his way onto the multi-lane N3 for the short hop to London Road, the entrance way to Alexandra.
More commonly known as ‘Alex’, the township was set up to house the black workers of northern Johannesburg. These days more than three hundred thousand souls lived there in shanties, modest houses and imposing multistorey hostels that loomed like prison blocks over the bustling eight hundred hectares of humanity.
Few whites had business here, but Alex had visited a man he knew only as Sipho on half-a-dozen occasions. He gave directions to the driver as they crossed the Jukskei River. Things were changing here, slowly but for the better, and the Alexandra Renewal Program had had a few wins since his last visit. There were more new houses, a new primary school he hadn’t noticed last time, and the stadium was coming along. Even the river didn’t smell as bad.
He had
to call Sipho’s mobile phone to make sure he had the right house.
‘Yes, this is my home. You are welcome. I can see your car and I am coming now,’ Sipho said into the phone.
Alex recognised the short, hunchbacked African man waving to him from behind a stout grilled security door, but not the house around him. What had once been a drab single-storey grey house with a flat iron roof was now a two-storey dwelling with angular, sloping lines, its walls painted a bright ochre. There was the struggling beginnings of a garden in front, which looked like it could desperately use the fat drops of rain that were now pinging the top of the Mercedes. ‘Wait here,’ he told the driver. The man looked up and down the narrow street. Half-a-dozen young men were sitting in the gutter opposite them, eyeing the shiny black sedan, but Alex said, ‘Don’t worry. Once they see where I’m going, no one will touch you.’ The driver nodded, though he plainly wasn’t convinced.
Sipho held open the security door for Alex, looked left and right, and across to the youths, who nodded back at him. Alex guessed they were his lookouts. They shook hands in the African way, raising their palms to interlock thumbs halfway through. ‘How are you, my friend?’ Sipho asked.
‘Fine, and you? You seem to have prospered since my last visit.’
Sipho smiled, following Alex’s gaze around his new home. The house was starkly furnished, though spotlessly clean, and Sipho proudly showed Alex the three bedrooms and the indoor flushing toilet, which he also demonstrated with obvious pride. ‘You probably take these things for granted.’
‘Not in Mozambique, believe me.’
‘What can I do for you, my friend?’
Sipho already knew why he was here, even though they hadn’t discussed it over the phone, and he led Alex into the back yard, where there was a much smaller brick building, with a flat roof like Sipho’s old house. It had a solid steel door, which squeaked noisily when Sipho unlocked a padlock as big as Alex’s fist. The windows, he saw, were blocked with more steel plate behind the original burglar bars.
