by Tom Cain
‘Who is the first to eat and drink?’
‘I am. The celebrant is always the first to receive the sacrament.’
Mabeki thought for a moment.
‘Is there a problem?’ Carver asked, feigning bemusement at this line of questioning. ‘I’m sure I conduct the service in very much the same style as the Reverend Gibson. The text is taken from the Book of Common Worship. The procedure is absolutely standard. Well, I say that, but of course there will be some difference between those who prefer the traditional form of words and the more modern version. Personally, I confess I hanker after the poetry of—’
‘I get the point,’ hissed Mabeki. ‘Now, make your preparations. The President and the First Lady will be with you in five minutes.’
He stalked out of the room, leaving Carver with the two bodyguards watching over him as he busied himself with his briefcase filled with holiness and death.
59
In Sandton, Wendell Klerk had woken early, keen to see the text flash on his screen that would tell him Carver had succeeded in his mission. He lay in bed with the lights off and curtains drawn, so as not to disturb the sleeping figure of Brianna Latrelle beside him, clutching his phone and snatching glances at its screen as anxiously as a nervous adulterer waiting for a message from his lover.
Because he was awake, he heard the sound of the .22 being fired. An average civilian could easily have mistaken those rounds fired in very quick succession for the popping of a backfiring engine. Wendell Klerk, however, was not an average civilian. He had fought in a vicious civil war and the instincts he acquired then had never entirely deserted him, even in his sleep.
He sat up in bed and listened for a moment. His gate had been designed and engineered to be as noiseless as possible, so as not to disturb anyone in the house. Yet he thought he could hear the soft sound of its rubber wheels rolling over the tarmac of his drive and the barely audible purr of an engine. Then nothing.
Klerk did not hesitate. He pressed the emergency button by his bed. He had always allowed for the possibility that his guardhouse might be overrun. The emergency button was linked by its own dedicated line direct to the control room at XPT Security’s headquarters, and it required immediate armed response. From the moment he touched it, the clock was running. Six minutes, maximum, was all he now needed to survive.
He leaned across his kingsize bed and shook Brianna’s shoulder. She moaned softly and shrugged his hand away. He shook her again.
‘Go ’way,’ she mumbled.
Klerk gripped more tightly and gave her a single, much rougher shake. ‘Get up,’ he hissed. ‘Do it! Now!’
She raised her body on one elbow and peered at him blearily through the darkness. ‘What’s happening?’ There was an edge of alarm to her voice.
‘I don’t know,’ Klerk replied, ‘but I want you to go to the panic room. Don’t argue. Just go. Now!’
Brianna didn’t make a fuss. She knew her man well enough to realize that he wouldn’t give that kind of order without a very good reason. But as she stopped to grab the satin dressing gown she kept draped over the end of the bed, she asked, ‘What about you?’
Klerk was out of bed now, too. He slept in a pair of pyjama trousers, worn for precisely this sort of occasion. He liked to tell dinner guests that he never wanted to be stark bollock naked when he came face to face with an intruder: ‘I wouldn’t want to frighten the bastard too much.’ Now he walked over to Brianna, gave her a quick, fierce hug, kissed her cheek and said, ‘Don’t worry about me, worry about the other guy. Now get out of here!’
She raised a hand to touch his face, then sped across the room to her walk-in wardrobe. At the back, hidden behind her ballgowns, was a small touchscreen. She placed her hand against it and a hitherto-invisible door in the back wall of the wardrobe swung open, like the entrance to Narnia. It did not lead to a magic kingdom but a small chamber, roughly ten feet square, that was essentially an air-conditioned, bullet- and bombproof bank vault designed to safeguard humans rather then cash. When she swung the door closed behind her she was as safe as a gold bar at Fort Knox.
Wendell Klerk had never intended to use the panic room himself. The reason he gave in public – true as far as it went – was that he didn’t want to be hidden away like a coward while someone was violating his property. It offended his manly pride. His private reason was never revealed to anyone, Brianna and Zalika included. He’d once been in the room just to see what it was like. He’d closed the door and suddenly found himself so overwhelmed by claustrophobia that it made his heart race, his body break out in a muck sweat and his chest heave as he desperately tried to breathe. The panic room felt to him like a tomb, and it scared him far more than any human ever could. Under no circumstances would he ever go in there again.
Once he knew Brianna was safe, Klerk switched his attention to the defence of his property. The panic room was not the only secret hidden in the walk-in wardrobe. On the single wall reserved for his clothes stood a large chest of drawers, in which he kept underwear, T-shirts, sweatshirts and sweaters. From the bottom drawer, hidden beneath two piles of neatly folded wool and cashmere jumpers, he removed a brutally simple, almost crude-looking black shotgun. Then he got out a circular drum magazine containing thirty-two twelve-gauge cartridges and attached it beneath the gun. What he now had was a fully loaded AA-12 automatic shotgun, capable of firing at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute.
Klerk had once met the man who’d developed it, a silver-haired engineer from Piney Flats, Tennessee, by the name of Jerry Baber. Baber hadn’t minced his words when he described the AA-12. He’d simply said, ‘It’s probably the most powerful weapon in the world. There’s no way that anyone within two hundred yards could face this weapon and survive it. There’s so much lead in the air that it destroys everything in its path.’ Klerk had immediately bought one for every property, yacht and jet he owned in the world.
Now, holding it in his hands, he felt like a human tank. As he eased open the door that led from the master bedroom suite to the first-floor landing, he heard a crash of glass from downstairs. A greedy, wolfish grin spread across his face. ‘Bring it on,’ he whispered to himself. He almost felt sorry for anyone in his path.
Wendell Klerk went back to war. He used his familiarity with the house to choose his killing ground and occupy the best firing position. He waited until his enemy, four of them, had come within range and then he hit them with overwhelming firepower.
He just didn’t account for the possibility that there were five intruders in his home that morning.
60
Carver kissed the red silk stole and draped it round his neck. He took out the cruet filled with wine, the chalice and finally the pyx, the weapon with which he would carry out the killing.
As he took out his service book, Carver began to feel nervous for the first time; but these were the nerves any performer – actor, athlete or assassin – needs if they are to do their best work. They sharpened Carver’s senses and honed his concentration. He had no doubt now about the rights or wrongs of what he was about to do. Once the decision to take the job had been made, the argument was over so far as he was concerned. He had made up his mind and he would stick with it.
From outside the room, Carver could hear the sound of footsteps and respectfully lowered voices coming down the stairs. His stomach tightened. The action was about to begin. The door of the living room opened and the bodyguards snapped to attention as Moses Mabeki came in, then stood to one side to let his master and mistress through.
Faith Gushungo caught Carver’s eye first. She was much taller than he had expected, at least as tall as Carver himself, her height exaggerated by a brightly patterned silk headdress. Her eyes were hidden behind impenetrable dark glasses and her mouth was set in a downward curve of stony disapproval.
‘Why is Gibson not here?’ she snapped, not waiting for any introductions.
Carver adopted the ingratiating manner of a meek and easily intimidated vicar.
‘I’m awfully sorry, but he’s suffering an attack of food poisoning.’
The First Lady gave a dismissive ‘Pah!’ And only then did Carver realize that she had so dominated the past few seconds that he had paid no attention whatsoever to her husband.
‘The President of Malemba, the Honourable Henderson Gushungo,’ said Mabeki.
The man who stepped forward, his hand outstretched, was as surprising in appearance as his wife, but in the opposite direction. Carver had expected a man exuding the same sense of power and malice as Mabeki, but magnified a hundredfold. This, after all, was the dictator who had maintained an iron grip on his country for three decades; who had torn down its economy around his ears; tortured his people, destroyed his enemies, outraged global opinion, yet left it impotent to harm him.
And all that was left was a wizened husk.
Gushungo’s face was as wrinkled and shrivelled as a dessicated prune. Just a few thin tufts of curly silver hair clung to his scalp. His body had shrunk to the point where he wore his suit like a child dressing up in his father’s clothes. The hand he offered Carver was visibly quivering. The other hand clung to an ivory-topped walking stick.
This doddery old geezer was the man Carver had travelled halfway round the world to kill.
For a second he wondered why he should bother. Gushungo’s life expectancy could surely be measured in months, even weeks, rather than years. But then he thought about Canaan and Farayi Iluko, rotting in their Malemban cells, and realized that their life expectancies were shorter still.
In any case, it was clear that, as Patrick Tshonga had suggested, Faith Gushungo was now the real power in the room. She was his primary target. And then he caught something between her and Mabeki – a fractional turning of her head towards him; the faintest twisting of his lips – and thought, ‘They’re in this together.’ And then other thoughts, half-formed, crowded into his mind, bringing with them a jumbled, inarticulate sense of danger, something not quite right. But there was no time to follow them because Carver was shaking Gushungo’s hand, murmuring ‘Mr President’ and making his way to the bar, to stand in front of the cross, as Mabeki ushered the Gushungos to their seats.
The two bodyguards, joined now by another pair of men, took their places, standing behind the Gushungos. And then, even though it was still open, there was a gentle tap on the living-room door and a pair of young Chinese women wearing housemaids’ grey cotton dresses and starched white aprons tiptoed into the room and formed a third line of worshippers behind the bodyguards. Carver recognized one of them as Tina Wong. She did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Either she did not recognize him through the disguise or, more likely, she was just as good a professional as she’d seemed when they’d met on the ferry thirty-six hours earlier.
Carver had to repress the urge to shout out, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ It had never occurred to him that the Chinese staff would be required to take communion as well as everyone else. Was Faith Gushungo really that much of a religious maniac? Or were Wong and her colleague simply Christians themselves? It was possible, Carver supposed. Hong Kong had been British for a hundred and fifty years. Why shouldn’t ex-colonies people choose to worship in the Church of England? He cursed himself for not thinking of that sooner.
Mabeki took up his position, standing by the door, watching over the service. He nodded at Carver to start.
‘Good morning,’ said Carver, trying to think of his next lines. His mind was momentarily blank. His concentration was awry. He had not yet even begun and things were already going wrong.
61
‘Today,’ said Carver, ‘is the festival of Pentecost, or Whit Sunday as it is traditionally known in the Anglican Church, when we commemorate the appearance of the Holy Ghost among the apostles and its bestowal of the gift of tongues. I shall only be giving one reading, from Acts, if that is acceptable to you, sir, and will be using the traditional King James version. I find the poetry of the language far outweighs any loss of comprehension.’
Carver looked at Gushungo, who nodded his assent.
‘Very well,’ Carver continued, ‘then let us now begin our worship.’
In the road outside the house, Zalika Stratten started walking.
Carver read the words from his service book: ‘May grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.’
‘And also with you,’ the congregation of eight replied, with a far greater intensity than the mumbled responses Carver was used to from his British churchgoing.
The next item in his book was referred to as the Prayer of Preparation. The Gushungos and their staff seemed to know it by heart, joining in as he declaimed,
Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, Carver mused. Now there was a line. How many people in the room could even pretend that their hearts were unsullied?
They moved on to the Confession, and Carver wondered what the Gushungos thought of when they told God that they had sinned against him and against their neighbours in thought and word and deed. Did they believe that? How could they then go right back and sin all over again? Perhaps the words were a sort of expiation, wiping the slate of atrocities clean and freeing the Gushungos to go back and commit more.
He read the collect for Pentecost, the special prayer dedicated to that day. It asked God to give his people ‘the right judgement in all things’. Carver was about to act as judge, jury and executioner. Never in his life had he been in such close, intimate contact with his targets so soon before their deaths. Even for someone without much religious feeling there was something very special about the act of joining together in prayer. It made them all complicit, in some way he could not quite define. It made the cold finality of what he was about to do all the more stark in its cold-blooded calculation.
Zalika was at the front door now. She pushed it gently and it swung open noiselessly on hinges oiled earlier that morning by Tina Wong. Zalika was equally soundless as she made her way across the marble floor, heading for the stairs.
The reading for the day was taken from Acts, chapter two, verses one to eleven. It spoke of the Holy Ghost entering the building where the apostles were gathered.
Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
Carver felt like a ghost himself, slipping into this house and falling upon its inhabitants. He was quite calm now, dispassionate, the nerves having begun to vanish as soon as he set about his business.
When the reading was done, he led them all in the Creed, that confident declaration of a belief he could not quite share. It spoke of Jesus coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead. As he read those words from the service book, Carver happened to look up for a second and catch Moses Mabeki’s eye. There was a look of utter contempt on his face – the look of a man who had long since abandoned any concept of right and wrong in favour of calculation and expediency.
Carver was making his calculations, too. Very soon now he would have to find a way of killing Mabeki, independently of the rest. He assumed the guards would be carrying guns. If they were not, he would need another weapon. There must be a corkscrew behind the bar; held between the knuckles with its point slashing at Mabeki’s skin, it could be a useful weapon. The curtains had tie-backs; wrapped round a neck and pulled tight they would serve to strangle him. Wherever Carver found himself, there were always weapons to be found if he looked hard enough.
He was thinking t
his even as he brought the Creed to a close with an invocation of ‘God the giver of life’, and at that point even he could not deny the sacrilege, even the obscenity, of what he was about to do. But that knowledge did not stop him, any more than the Confession altered the Gushungos’ behaviour.
Now they were beginning the prayers that led to communion itself. Carver found himself laying a hand on the pyx filled with wafers, the chalice and the cruet of wine, to consecrate them. He led them all in the Lord’s Prayer, almost wincing as he said some of the words: ‘forgive us our trespasses … lead us not into temptation … deliver us from evil’.
Once they’d all intoned ‘Amen’, Carver said, ‘We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.’
And the Gushungos, their bodyguards and their servant-girls replied, ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’
Carver opened the pyx and looked very carefully at the small round communion wafers inside it. He picked out one of the wafers, said, ‘The body of Christ,’ and popped it into his mouth. It was arid, flavourless, and stuck like a cream cracker to the roof of his mouth, forcing him to prise it away with his tongue.
Carrying the pyx, Carver stepped forward to the Gushungos’ two chairs. The old man was sitting with his eyes closed and his hands held out, slightly cupped, in front of him.
‘The body of Christ,’ Carver repeated, placing another wafer into Henderson Gushungo’s hands.
‘Amen,’ Gushungo murmured.
He lifted his hands to his mouth and consumed the wafer. And from that moment, the President of Malemba, the Father of the Nation, the most notorious dictator in a continent filled with psychopathic leaders, was, irrevocably, a dead man.
62
