From Cape Town with Love (41 page)

“He's going to the house!” I said. “Screw your team.”

“That red SUV says this isn't a two-person job.” I'd never heard Marsha so anxious.

“Call whoever you want,” I said, “but I'm going in for Nandi. You can stay here.”

“Going in by yourself doesn't help Nandi. You need me.”

“Maybe I do. But I can't ask you to risk your life over this.”

“You didn't ask,” she said. “I offered.”

“Then we're already in this, Marsha. You should have made your call in San Diego.”

Marsha shook her head, sighing. She glanced at the sky. “Twenty minutes, and we can go in. But that's pushing it. It's safer to wait another hour.”

“We can't wait an hour.”

“We probably can't wait twenty minutes.”

We left it at that—a plan neither of us liked.

“What are we up against in that SUV?” I said.

“If I'm right? Three or four armed men, maybe more. Well trained.
That's in addition to however many others are already here. It might be you and me against an army, Ten. This is about recon, not engagement. Engaging is our last resort. If we engage, we get zapped. These guys aren't shy about pulling the trigger.”

The odds didn't feel good for any of us suddenly. The air in the parked car was thin. We hadn't thought to turn on the air conditioner.

“Do you have a number?” I said. “Someone I call if this doesn't work out?”

“Yeah, I'll give you my boss's number. And his email address, his Social Security number, and a map to his house.” Marsha gave me a sarcastic sneer. “No more wine for you.”

“Your
family,
Marsha,” I said. “You know how to reach mine.”

Marsha's face was still in the day's last light. “No thanks.” A quiet beat. “Just look up my family. You're the detective. It would almost be worth getting killed to be a fly on the wall.”

“Not by a knife,” I said, stretching to relieve the pressure against the wound across my lower back. “B'lieve dat, mon.”

“Hell no. Definitely not a knife.”

If and when I saw Spider again, there would be no question of knives: I would shoot him dead at ten paces.

Marsha and I waited for the dark.

The sun finally slipped past the edge of the sky, a dim pink ghost. Marsha's dark features blurred if she walked too far from me, and her bland clothes lost their color. Holes appeared in mounds of parched soil as we walked, trying to swallow our feet.

By the time Marsha and I walked back to the Happy Cellars driveway, the hunters' pickup and a Volvo were the only vehicles left in the business parking lot. It wasn't closing time yet. There was no light except a single one on the porch that lit up the front door. In the light from the window, I saw Granny Hippie lean over to serve a table. But she didn't see us.

We walked past at a brisk, nonchalant pace.
Now you see us, now you don't.

There was no way they would keep Nandi near the tasting room, since so many outsiders came and went. If Nandi was on the property, she was either in one of the outbuildings, or somewhere inside the main house. Our instincts led us to the place where we were most likely to find answers: the house on the hill.

The brick colonial house loomed above us, waiting. Two stories. A big house to search.

We left the gravel driveway leading up to the house. It dead-ended into fence and gate. The fence was topped with razor wire, and light from the house painted the top edge a dull yellow. We'd be bloody targets trying to climb that. The gate was chained, and the chains were joined with a nasty-looking Master Lock padlock. It looked to be high end, one of the ones they market as “unpickable.” Marsha
tsk'd
and reached into the backpack.

“What do you have in there?” I said. “Some kind of pick gun?”

She gave me a smug smile. “Better. A cigarette lighter.”

“Hell of a time for a smoke.”

It wasn't really a cigarette lighter. The little gold cylinder was more like a mini blowtorch.

“And . . . a Brymill Cry-AC liquid nitrogen storage system,” Marsha said. Next, she pulled a silver cylinder about the size of a small hairspray can from the bag, and handed it to me. It weighed about two pounds, and felt warm.

Was it a bomb? I held my breath. “What . . . ?”

She thumbed the torch, and played its blue flame over the lock. “Now watch carefully, in case you need to do this. You heat the metal up for about a minute. The torch will raise the temperature to almost three hundred degrees.” I watched in fascination. After about a minute, she raised the second cylinder, and flipped up the four-inch spout with her thumb. “Watch what happens when hot metal meets minus two hundred degrees.”

“What is that?”

I heard a hiss, saw whitish fluid or vapor gush out in a stream. “Liquid nitro,” she said. “Warts, skin tags, skin cancer. Plastic surgeons love this stuff, and so do I.”

The lock was covered with hissing frost. She smacked it with the base of the blowtorch . . . and the lock fell into pieces, like broken glass.

I seriously reconsidered the harsh words I had directed at God. Marsha might be my guardian angel after all.

She bagged her equipment, and we opened the gate and slipped into the vineyard. We left the road and waded into the sea of leaves and stakes pointing high. Without venturing too far in, we had a passage roughly parallel with the path to the house. The scent of grapes was sweet perfume all around us.

We didn't dare use flashlights, so we trusted our eyes to guide us through the maze of plants, which grew up above our waists. I'd noticed that a portion of the vineyard had nets over the grapes, which would make movement more difficult. There would be no avoiding the nets if the main driveway was closed to us while we were escaping with Nandi.

And we would get that far only if we were lucky.

Marsha hummed “One Love” softly to herself as she dodged stakes and branches. Sometimes she whispered the lyrics, her voice almost playful. Marsha seemed to have made peace with dying in the field a long time ago. She'd risked her life for a lot less than a beautiful African child. Shit, she might have thought dying this way would erase a truckload of sins. I've got my own trucks lumbering behind me.

The vineyard rows stopped within three yards of the fence around the main house. The last part of our approach would be in the open.

“Wait,” Marsha said, crouching. She produced night vision binoculars, which reminded me of Roman. I hoped she would have better luck with them. I saw a prick of light ahead.

“There's a guy smoking in the red SUV parked out front,” Marsha said. “Probably a lookout. The people we've been tracking are very cautious.”

“Good thing we don't plan to use the front door,” I said, reaching for the binoculars.

The profile in the vehicle's driver's seat was surprisingly crisp, although he sat a football field away from us. He was an overweight man nursing a cigarette, two fingers near his face, his elbow propped in the open window.

He didn't look South African. More like Asian. Chinese, maybe?

Surprise, surprise,
I thought.
An Asian connection.

I didn't call Marsha on her bullshit about the Asian man I'd seen her tracking at Club Skylight. I had heavier business on my mind right then.

Up close, the dignified estate looked more like a castle, impenetrable. We had to find a way inside or we couldn't help Nandi.

“There's probably a rear garage door,” I said. “Kitchen door?”

“Or open windows,” Marsha said. “Maybe they let in the cool air after dark.”

I took another peek through the binoculars: The living-room windows behind the white porch swing looked like they were open—directly in view of the red SUV. Off-limits.

Still, if those windows were open, maybe some others were, too. The side of the house closest to us was windowless on the ground floor because of the garage, but there would be more windows in the rear.

“Let's go get our hands dirty,” I said.

The run to the house was steep, at least fifty yards, most of it uphill. The ranch-style fence circling the house was only decorative, without any wires between the boards. We squeezed through the fence easily, barely slowing down.

We should be the FBI,
I thought.
We should have let them send a team.
But it was too late for second-guessing. The feds had lost Paki, and I had found him. Marsha's people, whatever shadowy alphabits they hid behind, hadn't known about Happy Cellars.

At the rear of the house, there was a large open patio with a shaded table and six chairs under the yard's sole two trees, both large oaks. An old plastic wading pool was full of water that looked clean. The pool made my heart leap.
Please please let Nandi be here . . .
On the far side of the patio, the wall jutted outward to create space for a dining room or sunroom with banks of shuttered windows. Were people moving beyond the shutters?

Daylight suddenly sprayed across the lawn in our corner of the yard. We were within five feet of the rear wall, and we'd tripped a motion-detecting security light. It would have been smart to run back toward the vineyard, out of the light's way. Instead, we both ran toward the house—and the light. No turning back.

We hid against a crevice in the wall just beyond the light's reach, close to the patio but out of view if anyone peeked out of a shutter in the sun
room. An oak tree helped shelter us. We were both breathing hard from our uphill sprint. My heart caught as I braced for the sound of a warning siren. A bell. A barking dog.

Blessed quiet.

The light glared down from a corner of the house's rear. I hoped it was on a timer and would go off by itself. The mounted light's motion-sensing panel was pointed in our direction, but we could dodge it as long as we hugged the wall. I was sure there was a matching light on the other side of the house, near the sunroom. If
that
one came on, someone would see it.

I took advantage of the light while we hid, glancing
up,
A second-story window almost directly above us was halfway open, with room to be pushed higher. An easy fit.

Could I climb in from the tree? I took a step closer to the tree to try to map the patterns of its branches. The top branches had been sawed away from the window, but I could get close enough to put my foot on the ledge. If plan A didn't work on the ground floor, I had a plan B.

The security light suddenly switched off. Darkness again.

Beside me, Marsha exhaled with relief.

There was definitely movement behind the windows.

To avoid tripping motion sensors, we stuck to the wall and stayed low to the ground as we inched across the rear patio toward the sunroom.

A door! It was slightly recessed into the wall, so we hadn't spotted it at first glance, but it appeared like the promise of hope. I gestured for Marsha to stay back, and put my ear to the door, listening for voices or movement. Nothing. With a silent prayer, I tested the knob.

Locked. I was about to ask Marsha to repeat her freeze trick when two men came into view in the adjacent window, lighting cigarettes as they spoke in anxious Xhosa or Zulu. They were in the kitchen, I guessed, and we were at the rear kitchen door.

“So much for the easy way . . . ,” Marsha whispered behind me.

We pushed on toward the sunroom, crouching to avoid being seen. The rectangular kitchen window came next, well lighted with fluorescent bulbs. The kitchen was large, with a chef's island and bar stools, the counters covered in plastic produce bags. Two men unloaded food from the refrigerator, their backs facing us.

I saw movement in the far-left corner, inside the adjoining butler's pantry. At the butler's pantry window, I finally heard a man's voice, and the loud
clinking
sound in what might be a sink.

“. . . think they came all this way for excuses and bullshit?” an angry man's voice said, laden with a South African accent. But he was not an Afrikaner. His voice was lower pitched than Paki's, but their accents were similar. “Do you know how you look to them now? You look like a fool who can't do business without tripping over your feet. A silly winemaker!”

Marsha joined me, pressing her ear close, too.

“Leave her at a gas station toilet in Santa Barbara,” another man said. “What's the difference?” His voice had a similar accent, triggering strong recognition in my mind, but I couldn't place it. Not yet.

“The difference between
HAVING
a
witness
and
NOT
having a witness. You've seen how clever she is! You surprise me, really!”

“Paki says they will pay anything, as long as—”

“Paki is a fool! She is the noose they will hang us all by, boss. And now, of all times, you look like another greedy
tsotsi.
Like a small-time kaffir back in Cape Flats!”

“But . . . ,” the boss said, lowering his voice tenderly, out of hearing, “. . . is almost the same age.”

The other man spoke angrily in Xhosa, I guessed, and the only word I recognized was
Mhambi.
Spider. It was the only word I needed to hear. My heart raced into the house without me while I listened at the window. A trusted adviser was pushing to have their boss give Nandi's execution order. And Spider and Nandi were inside. I was sure of it.

The voices suddenly grew fainter as they walked away.

“. . . can compensate Paki for his loss . . . ,” the boss was saying, casting off his doubts.

And they were gone.

“Damnit . . . ,” I whispered. I motioned Marsha forward, and we crawled closer to the sunroom. Traces of muffled conversation led me to the sunroom's windows.

Under the cover of darkness, beside a hibiscus hedge, we risked taking a peek.

There were eight men in the large sunroom, where a long outdoor patio table doubled as a conference table. But no one was sitting down.
Everyone ignored the fruit-and-cheese plate and wine bottles on the table. The room looked restless.