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Dictator sc-4

Page 24

by Tom Cain


  As he walked back out through the bar, attracting no more attention than he had on the way in, Carver considered trying to find Mabeki, but dismissed the thought at once. By now he would have disappeared into the apartment blocks on the Aberdeen shore, or, much more likely, the boats crammed in its harbour. Wherever Mabeki was, there, too, Zalika would be. Carver could not believe he would kill the girl, not before he’d extracted his full helping of pleasure at her expense. And he wouldn’t do that in Hong Kong, either; not when there was work to be done and power to be grabbed in Malemba.

  Mabeki had known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Gushungo hit was going down that day. He’d known, too, that Carver and Zalika would be doing the job. All that being the case, it followed that he’d known about the coup in Malemba. Carver was prepared to bet every cent in his offshore bank accounts that the coup had not succeeded – or not in the way he had been told about, anyway.

  Someone had tipped Mabeki off about the entire plan, someone who had been willing to sell out Carver and Zalika. But who? Had Klerk been lying all along about his love for his niece? If Mabeki had offered him a better deal than Patrick Tshonga had done, would Klerk have put money before family? Carver didn’t want to believe that, but he had long since learned the hard way that men who truly love money always value it more highly than any mere human affection. And what of Tshonga himself? Had he just been playing Klerk, leading him on with the promise of easy money, when all along he’d cut a deal with Mabeki? It would be an abdication of all Tshonga’s principles to ally himself with Gushungo’s right-hand man. But for anyone who really wanted power in Malemba that might be the smart, cynical move to make.

  Whatever had happened, the answer to the puzzle lay in the same place to which Moses Mabeki was certainly travelling, and where he would hide Zalika Stratten until he had done with her: Malemba. Carver had no choice. He had to go there, even if it meant going alone and unprotected against overwhelming odds. He thought of calling Klerk and Tshonga, but decided against it. If one of them really had double-crossed him, letting them know he was on his way was the last thing he should do.

  When he got back out on the street, Carver walked down to the harbour promenade. Taxis were dropping off tourists. He hailed one of them.

  ‘Take me to the airport,’ he said.

  74

  The timing had been split second, and even then it had been a close-run thing. But with the help of two of Fisherman Zheng’s men, both armed and ready to use their weapons, Moses Mabeki had managed to get Zalika Stratten into the delivery van parked just outside the Gushungos’ house before Carver came out of the building. From that point on it had been a simple case of misdirection. He’d made a show of slamming the boot shut loud enough for Carver to hear, and standing right by it so that the Englishman would come to the obvious conclusion that the girl was in there. Then he’d taken the scenic route, leading Carver down Route Twisk, while the van went on the fastest possible highways from Hon Ka Mansions to Aberdeen.

  It had gone straight to the waterfront where Zheng’s men opened up the rear cargo, removed Zalika Stratten and led her down a flight of quayside steps to a small motorboat that was bobbing on the water below. She’d lost her ridiculous sunglasses as well as her phone. Her hair had come unpinned and now hung round her shoulders. She looked much more like her true self, but dressed more cheaply than usual.

  The boat had sped away, jinking between the other craft crammed into the narrow stretch of water between Aberdeen and Ap Lei Chau island on the other side of the harbour. It had pulled up alongside the streamlined, dart-like hull of a Sunseeker Predator 52 performance motoryacht moored off the Aberdeen Marina Club. Once again, there were armed men all around Zalika as she was led aboard.

  The motorboat had then sped away again, only to return fifteen minutes later with Moses Mabeki.

  The Sunseeker weighed anchor, eased its way through the harbour and then, when it reached the open sea, the skipper opened up the throttle and it raced away westwards, hitting thirty knots as it ate up the twenty-five-mile journey to the former Portuguese colony of Macau.

  The boat was one of Fishermen Zheng’s favourite toys, and this voyage gave him particular pleasure. He had brought a diamond dealer along to inspect the stones Mabeki had agreed to sell him. The dealer assured him, in a Hoklo dialect incomprehensible even to the vast majority of Chinese, that they were worth almost twenty million US dollars. On Friday night, Zheng and Mabeki had shaken hands at six million, subject to delivery and acceptance. Now the money was paid directly into Mabeki’s personal account in the Cayman Islands. Everyone was happy.

  Mabeki made his excuses and went to the cabin where the next stage of the extraction plan he had agreed with Zheng was due to take place. A doctor – Hoklo, like all Zheng’s associates, and thus guaranteed to keep his silence – injected Zalika with a heavy dose of nitrazepam, which knocked her out cold.

  They were met at the Macau shore by an ambulance driven by two more of Zheng’s men, dressed as uniformed paramedics. The ambulance took Mabeki and his unconscious companion to Macau International Airport, which is specifically geared to the private aviation needs of the high-rollers who gamble their money at Macau’s twenty-eight casinos. There, a Gulfstream 550 ultra-long-range jet, equipped with medical facilities and with a doctor and nurse on its crew, was waiting to fly Mabeki and the comatose Zalika to a medical facility near Paris. No one enquired why she needed to travel so far for treatment. The airport’s officials had long since become accustomed to the foibles of the rich.

  An hour into the flight, the pilot was re-routed on to a new southwesterly course, towards Sindele airport, Malemba.

  They were barely two thousand miles from their destination when Zalika Stratten began very groggily to wake up. She cast bleary eyes around the cabin and asked where on earth she was.

  75

  Gatekeeper Wu had been told very clearly where his duties lay. At half-past ten on Sunday morning, when the delivery van had first pulled up by the barricade at the entrance to Hon Ka Mansions, the two men inside had assured him that they knew precisely where he, his wife and three small children lived. They’d made it plain that not only his life but those of his family were at stake. If he wished to live, he would turn his eyes from anyone who came in or out of the development over the next ninety minutes. If he was approached by any policemen, he should play dumb and claim not to remember anything about any of the cars or people who’d gone past his post. It was made very clear that the boss for whom the men worked had contacts within the police who would tell him in an instant if Wu had told them anything of interest. On the other hand, his discretion would be much appreciated and his family would be greatly rewarded.

  Wu had got the message.

  The first police car had arrived shortly after midday. The officers inside told Wu they were responding to a report of gunfire. Wu assured them, truthfully, that he had heard none. One of the cops had shrugged and told him he didn’t expect there was any reason to be concerned. The woman who had reported it said she and her husband had waited for more than half an hour before calling the police because they were arguing about what the sound had been.

  It took the two cops almost ten minutes to determine that the noise had come from the Gushungo entrance and another five to decide they should force their way into the house. Twenty seconds later, they discovered the two bodies of the maids in the hallway, followed by the Gushungos and their four bodyguards in the living room.

  The cops reported back to their station. The chief inspector, who was the senior duty officer, took the instant decision that he did not wish to be in any way responsible for the investigation of a head of state’s violent death on Hong Kong soil. He got straight on to the Hong Kong Police Force’s headquarters, where a chief superintendent went straight to the top, disturbing the Commissioner of Police, who was standing over a tricky putt on the fourth hole of the Ocean Nine course at the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club.

 
By happy chance, the commissioner’s playing partner was the Secretary for Security, a member of the Executive Council that assisted the Chief Executive of Hong Kong in governing the territory. The two men immediately decided that every available police resource would be devoted to investigating the deaths at Hon Ka Mansions. They also agreed that it would be most unwise to alarm the public, or jeopardize the international reputation of Hong Kong, by making any statement whatsoever until the perpetrators responsible had been identified and, if possible, apprehended.

  Around two in the afternoon, the first detectives came to interview Gatekeeper Wu. Like Zheng’s men, they told him not to tell anyone about what he had seen if he knew what was good for him.

  To any Chinese, a threat from a government official is at least as terrifying, if not more so, than one from a gangster. No gangster, after all, has killed even a tiny fraction of the Chinese citizens sacrificed by their own state over the past sixty-odd years. That night, Wu ordered his wife to gather together the family’s pitiful quantity of possessions. On Monday morning they were getting on a train and heading back to their old fishing village, two hundred miles away on the coast of Guangdong province. The family Wu had had enough of Hong Kong.

  76

  Carver’s flight got into Johannesburg at quarter-past seven on Monday morning. As soon as he’d made it through immigration and customs he sat down in an airport cafe with a double espresso and his iPhone. Then he logged on to the BBC news pages and looked for headlines about Malemba.

  It didn’t take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. The whole Gushungo operation had been blown and Tshonga’s supposedly peaceful takeover had collapsed in a swift series of massacres. Meanwhile, there were rumours of a simultaneous attack on President Gushungo and his wife at their home in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong authorities were remaining tight-lipped, but neither the President nor his wife had been seen in more than twenty-four hours and although a local vicar reported that he had been told that they were suffering from a stomach-bug, some Hong Kong bloggers were suggesting that they were dead and that local authorities were engaged in a massive cover-up. Carver liked the sound of that. The more the truth was glossed over, the less chance there was that anything would ever be traced to him.

  Malemba itself was now under the control of a self-proclaimed Committee of National Security, a group of senior military officers who had decreed a state of emergency pending the reestablishment of civilian government. The committee members, like the Hong Kong authorities, refused to comment on stories that Henderson Gushungo was dead. They preferred to focus on Patrick Tshonga, who was described as a traitor, an anarchist and a threat to peace. He was being hunted without mercy, one general stated, and would soon be cornered like a rat. In the meantime, a press conference was being scheduled for the following morning, Tuesday, at which time the people would get a chance to hear the committee’s plans for the country.

  The timing seemed about right, Carver thought. If Mabeki had flown direct to Sindele, he would have arrived at roughly the same time as Carver got to Johannesburg. He’d need a day to get his feet under the table, prepare the various bribes, threats and blackmails with which he’d bend everyone to his will, and then appoint whichever stooges would nominally run the country. He’d also have to decide what to do with Zalika. Assuming she was still alive.

  In any case, Carver now had his deadline. His best, maybe only chance of killing Mabeki and rescuing Zalika was to do it before Mabeki had the chance to assemble and announce his new regime. Once that African Machiavelli had the full resources of the Malemban police state at his beck and call, he would be almost impossible to touch. It had to be now.

  First, though, he had to confront Klerk. He leaned back in his chair, wanting to think through the best approach, one that would give him the flexibility to respond equally effectively, whether Klerk had betrayed the plan or not. Then something caught his eye, a copy of the Johannesburg Star discarded along with the empty coffee cups on a nearby table. The front-page headline screamed ‘Slaughter in Sandton’. Next to it was a sub-head: ‘Death toll rises to seven in billionaire mansion shoot-out’.

  A nauseous sense of dread and apprehension clawed at Carver’s guts. He reached across to pick up the paper. Two minutes later, he was on the phone to Sonny Parkes, Wendell Klerk’s head of security.

  ‘It’s Carver,’ he said. ‘We need to meet. Now.’

  77

  Half an hour later, Carver was standing in the street outside Klerk’s mansion while Sonny Parkes talked their way past the police guard manning the barricades and crime-scene tape round the entrance to the house. One look at Parkes told Carver why Klerk had trusted him so much. Sonny Parkes had a prop-forward’s body, a boxer’s nose, a balding skinhead’s haircut and a redneck’s complexion. Plenty of men who look like that are no better than drunken thugs, and that’s on a good day. Others, though – the ones blessed with intelligence, courage and a sound temperament – are the warriors you want fighting beside you in the trenches. It’s a common enough cliche, but Carver had been there for real, and he knew just by looking at him that Parkes had too.

  ‘They pitched up just here,’ Parkes was saying, ‘at five-oh-two yesterday morning. Six of them, we reckon, with a seventh as the driver. The vehicle they used was one of those crazy bloody stretch Hummers: white, hired from a rental company on an account we’ve traced back to a shell company, registered in the Dutch Antilles. No way of knowing who owns it.’

  ‘My guess, there’s no need to ask,’ said Carver. ‘It’ll be Moses Mabeki.’

  ‘What, that ugly fucker from Malemba, the one who hangs around Henderson Gushungo? What’s he got to do with this?’

  The puzzlement in Parkes’s voice was genuine. Klerk had involved his security chief in getting Justus Iluko and his kids the help they needed, but he hadn’t been let in on the rest of the Malemban operation. That was useful to know.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Carver. ‘Just go on with what happened here.’

  Parkes shrugged. ‘One of the passengers, a young woman, gets out the car and comes over to the guardhouse over here, all giggly, flirtatious, pretending to be drunk: a real come-and-get-me act. We know this because it’s all on tape from the CCTV camera up there. She persuades the guys on duty to come round to the side and open up the communication hatch here. Then she walks right up and shoots them, cool as you like. Double-tap to the head, both times.’

  ‘The gun?’

  ‘Walther TPH, a real lady’s gun.’

  ‘Professional’s gun, too. Perfect for close-range work. No mess.’

  ‘True enough, and she was a professional all right, a real cold-blooded piece of work. She took out both guards before either of them could even get their guns out of their holsters.’

  ‘Or their thumbs from their arses.’

  Parkes gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Exactly. Then she climbed through the window, over the bodies and went over to the control panel. Can you see it in there?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, that’s where she switched off all the cameras and alarms and cut the feed to XPT headquarters.’

  ‘So you weren’t running the actual security operation at the house.’

  ‘No, I was not.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why not?’

  Parkes sighed bitterly. ‘Outsourcing. Cost-cutting. All the usual corporate crap. The theory is that the organization has a helluva lot of properties around the world that it needs to protect. Not just Klerk’s houses, but offices, factories, mines, you name it. It’s cheaper and easier to hire local contractors for each of them, instead of hiring, paying and looking after full-time employees. I’m responsible for keeping tabs on all the different companies we use in this part of the world. And I’ve got a separate team of my own. We provide close protection whenever one of the Klerk household is out and about.’

  ‘So XPT had plans of the house and the grounds?’

  ‘Ja.’

&nbs
p; ‘Who else?’

  ‘The house is only four years old, so there are the architects, contractors and sub-contractors who worked on the place; the civic authorities, planning department and so forth – a lot of people, man.’

  ‘And you think one of them gave the plans to whoever did this?’

  ‘Someone did, that’s for damn sure. Anyway, once the guards are dead, at least five people get out of the limo and come this way.’

  ‘How do you know there were five?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Parker walked through the gate, gesturing to Carver to follow, talking as he went.

  ‘The gate closes behind them so no one outside can see what’s happening. The limo drives away. We know this because a local resident who’d been out for the night drove past at around five past five and he’s absolutely certain there was no white Hummer parked here.’

  ‘It would be pretty hard to miss.’

  ‘Exactly. Now, the five walk towards the house.’

  As they came up the drive, Carver got his first proper view of the Klerk residence. It was a two-storey, flat-roofed modernist building, massed in a series of linked boxes. Plain walls of olive-grey concrete were pierced by wide expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass.

  The geometric starkness of the construction was offset by the lush greenery all around it. Palms and other trees stood among impeccably trimmed hedges and brightly coloured flowers spilled from huge concrete planting boxes. The drive swept up to a formal entrance but Parkes ignored it and kept walking round the side of the building.

  ‘They came round here to the back of the building.’

  Carver followed him to an expanse of flagstones, framing the turquoise water of the house’s swimming-pool. A set of steps ran from the pool area up to the back of the house. Parkes set off up the stairs. At the top, he stopped in front of a wall made up of wooden-framed glass panels, one of which had been smashed.

 

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