Dictator sc-4

by Tom Cain

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have outbuildings up at that place of yours in Suffolk?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Right then. Get the target house mocked up inside a barn or something. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy: chalk marks on the floor, some stairs and a first floor made out of planks and scaffolding. Just so long as the dimensions are right. Try and get a copy of the safe, or as near as dammit, too. We’re not going to go in blasting on this. No guns, no smoke, no bombs. It’s all about timing, and that has to be perfect. If Zalika shows me she can do it, she can come. Otherwise I’ll take my chances with your undercover cop. All right?’

  ‘Ja,’ said Klerk. ‘But now let me give you my condition for doing the job. I’ve got great things planned for that young lady, so you just listen to me. You brought her back safely once. You damn well bring her back again.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘No, Carver, just do it.’

  43

  Within half an hour of Klerk and Carver ending their conversation, Moses Mabeki received another call from within the grounds of Campden Hall.

  ‘That’s good news,’ he said. ‘I had considered remaining in Malemba while the Gushungos went abroad, so that I would be well placed to respond in the event of any…’ Mabeki chuckled to himself as he searched for the right words. ‘Any unforeseen emergencies. But on reflection, I think the best course of action would be to accompany the President and First Lady to Hong Kong, so that I can offer any assistance that might be required there. Yes, that is certainly the better option.’

  44

  Carver was not a religious man, though there had been times when he was grateful for the words of comfort offered by military chaplains in the hours before battle, or at the gravesides of recently dead friends. But that afternoon he took a short drive out of town, along Route 1, parallel to the north shore of Lake Geneva. At the Nyon exit he turned left, away from the lake, up towards the village of Gingins. A little oasis of Englishness in the heart of Switzerland, it possessed both a cricket club and a beautiful old church where the Anglican parish of La Cote held a service at four o’clock every Sunday afternoon.

  Carver took communion there for the first time in more than a decade. The words of the service, ingrained in him by years of compulsory religious attendance at school, came back to him with all the familiarity of an old friend encountered by chance after many years of absence. The ritual played out with comforting predictability, and the prayers retained a strange, potent poetry for all the many attempts of the Church’s modernizers to strip them of their mystery and magic.

  The moments of silence and contemplation enabled him to think about what he was planning to do. Was he committing a murder, he wondered, or casting out a devil? As always, however, Carver did not waste too much energy on metaphysical speculation. His focus had to remain on the here and now, and that meant concentrating on the words printed in the Order of Service he was holding in his hand: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.

  Amen.

  When the prayer was over and the vicar’s preparations complete, Carver left his pew and joined the line of worshippers waiting for communion. Finally, he approached the altar and knelt to receive the bread and wine. He watched every movement the vicar made, noted the precise sequence of events and the words that accompanied each of them. And when the service was over, just to make sure he’d got it right, he drove straight back to Geneva, went out to evensong at Holy Trinity Church, which the locals called l’eglise anglaise, and took communion all over again.

  45

  For the rest of the day after Justus Iluko had been taken away, his house remained undisturbed. It was as if the violence and suffering that had occurred in its vicinity had created some kind of force field that held the mass of dispossessed who clustered around it at bay. It was not until the final light of the dying sun had been extinguished and the purple-black African night, heavy with the spicy scent of warm earth, had descended that the first scavengers started edging towards the walls of whitewashed concrete blocks.

  This was no more than the law of nature in action. When an animal died in the bush, its carcass provided carrion for hyenas, vultures and all manner of insects until nothing remained but its bare bones. Even they provided marrow for truly enterprising scavengers. And so it was with the house. It too was a corpse from which the spirit of life had been extinguished. Its inhabitants had no more use for the beds on which they had slept, the tables at which they had worked and eaten, or the countless little possessions that spoke of a man and woman working together to raise the children they loved. This was neither a moral issue nor a sentimental one. Better that these belongings should be recycled for the benefit of those still alive and present than rot away to no purpose.

  The larder was emptied of all its contents. The floorboards, joists, doors, window frames and shutters were taken for firewood and building materials. The corrugated iron panels were stripped from the roof. By dawn, only the walls remained. And with the rising sun came men with hammers, chisels and pickaxes to hack and chip away at the blocks themselves.

  By noon, the house that Justus Iluko had built with such sweat and devotion, and occupied with such pride, had vanished as if it had never been. The land on which it stood was covered with brand-new huts and improvised tents, filled with the never-ending stream of people being transported to this once bountiful farm, now a dusty, barren hell.

  46

  As a religious man, Justus would not have described his new conditions in Buweku jail as hellish. They were more like a form of purgatory, a waiting room filled with other lost souls awaiting their day of judgement.

  The cell to which he’d been taken was intended for all the remand prisoners who were awaiting trial. One of its sides faced a corridor and consisted of iron bars and crosspieces, so that the inmates were at all times visible to any passing guard. The other three sides comprised concrete walls into which concrete bunks had been fitted in three rows, rising several feet towards the roof. Justus had to reach up to grab the top bunk: it must have been seven feet off the ground. The only sanitation was a hole in the floor, ringed with cracked tiles, stained with the faeces of inmates from years and generations gone by. There was a solitary standpipe from which an intermittent dribble of water flowed, regardless of whether the tap was turned on or off. A single bare bulb, hanging from the ceiling in a wire-mesh cage, provided light to the cell, in theory at least. But it, too, worked only sporadically, and at times over which the men beneath it had no control whatsoever.

  There were thirty-four men crammed into this hot, airless, fetid space. One of them was Justus’s son Canaan. They hugged each other with a mixture of relief at being reunited, profound sorrow at the loss of Nyasha and the fierce desperation of men who know their days are numbered.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Justus asked, stepping back to look his boy in the eyes.

  Canaan nodded. ‘Yes, Father.’

  Justus looked around at the eyes watching them, scanning them for signs of threat.

  ‘Have you been treated well?’ he asked.

  Again his son nodded. This time he said nothing, just gave a nervous lick of his top lip. The boy’s former princely demeanour had entirely disappeared and Justus felt certain he was hiding something, but knew that there was no point in pursuing the matter. If someone had attacked or abused him, it would only invite further trouble to mention it.

  ‘Do you know what they have done with Farayi?’ Justus asked. ‘Is she all right? Have you seen her, or spoken to her?’

  Canaan shook his head slowly. ‘She is here somewhere, in a women’s cell. But that is all I know.’

  Justus nodded, trying to remain calm. He was Farayi’s father. He should be protecting her, keeping her safe. Instead he w
as locked behind bars, unable to do anything to help his little girl. He sighed, then did his best to smile and put a cheerful tone in his voice as he asked, ‘So, what have they been feeding you? Is the menu good at this establishment?’

  Canaan shrugged, again saying nothing.

  ‘The jailers,’ Justus persisted, ‘they must give you meals of some kind. I am sure the food is terrible, but-’

  ‘There is no food, father.’

  ‘No food? Don’t be ridiculous! They must give you something.’

  ‘The boy is right. There is no food.’

  A man moved out of the shadows beneath one of the concrete bunks, wincing as he got to his feet. His body was emaciated, his hair matted and grey.

  ‘I see you are not familiar with the ways of our prison system,’ he said. Not waiting for Justus to respond, he continued, ‘The rules are very simple. All food must be brought to the jail by the friends or families of the men inside. In order to get it from the front door of the prison to these cells, a bribe must be paid to the guards. Sometimes this is money, sometimes it is food. They need to eat too, after all.’

  ‘But we have no family,’ said Justus. ‘There is no one left to bring us food.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the man, ‘prepare to starve.’

  47

  Early on the Monday morning, Carver flew back to England. Before he left Geneva, he stood by his kitchen island and reached into the wine rack that had been installed along one side. In the second row from the top, three spaces along, there was a hidden switch. He pressed it, then waited while the centre of the island’s granite worksurface rose, revealing a metal frame containing a large plastic toolbox divided into six trays of varying depths.

  Carver ignored the bottom tray, which contained his personal firearms: with a number of flights between now and the Gushungo job there was simply no point in bringing them along. In any event, he did not plan to do any shooting. Instead, he opened one of the shallower trays and removed an apparently random selection of items: a piece of wood, about six inches square, with a number of holes drilled through it; a set of AA batteries; and an assortment of nuts, bolts, washers and wires attached to crocodile clips.

  From the kitchen he went to his bedroom wardrobe, took down a suitcase from the top shelf and picked out a couple of accessories he thought would come in handy: a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles with plain glass lenses and a short grey wig. When he was in the Special Boat Service, Carver had known another officer, not much older than him, who went prematurely grey in his early thirties. The officer’s face, as if to compensate, remained unusually youthful and unlined. These contradictory signals made it very difficult for anyone who did not know him to judge his age. Carver was aiming for a similar effect.

  All he needed now was an assortment of passports, driving licences, credit cards and SIM cards. He was ready to go.

  He came in through Gatwick this time, rented a car at the airport and drove five miles to the West Sussex town of Crawley. On an industrial estate not far from the town’s station he found a specialist suppliers called Vanpoulles and explained his particular requirements to a sales assistant, who was happy to go through Carver’s list and recommend which of the various items he should purchase. Neither a chasuble nor a patten would be necessary, he was told.

  Carver also mentioned that he was looking for a very particular kind of case to carry everything in, preferably second-hand and well worn-in. The salesman conferred with a colleague and mentioned an old customer who had just retired and might be able to supply just what Carver was looking for. He was down in Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells.

  The journey there and back took the best part of three hours, but was well worth the diversion. While he was there, Carver took advantage of Tunbridge Wells’s reputation for being populated by elderly conservative gentlefolk. He went to a charity shop and found a lightweight dark-grey suit, tailor-made but just beginning to get a hint of that gloss around the elbows, knees and backside that comes from regular use. The trousers were cut for a man who ate more and exercised less than Carver, but a half-decent Hong Kong tailor would sort that out easily enough.

  By late afternoon, Carver was battling the rush-hour traffic on the M25, heading up to Campden Hall. The tedious crawl round the eastern perimeter of London was enough to try the patience of a far more saintly man than him, but despite it Carver still felt that his day had been very well spent.

  48

  Faith Gushungo stormed into the kitchen of her Hong Kong property and screamed at the two servants cowering on the far side of the table in the middle of the room, stabbing a bejewelled finger at her underlings. ‘My bedroom is a pigsty! I ordered you to have it spotlessly tidy when the President and I arrived, but the beds are not made! There is dirt everywhere! The bathroom is like an open sewer!’

  She leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the table. In her red-soled Louboutin heels she stood over six feet tall, a giantess compared to the smaller figures of the Chinese women in their pale-grey uniforms and white aprons.

  ‘But… but… I cleaned it, Missy,’ the younger of the servants blurted out between sobs of fear and humiliation.

  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.