He didn't see the man behind the counter collapse on the floor. As he fell, his head smacked hard against the concrete floor. The man was dead. His heart had not been able to cope with the shock. Afterwards, they would decide that the thief had knocked him down.
As Mabasha ran out of the store, his bandage caught in the door handle. He had no time gently to untangle it, so he gritted his teeth against the pain and jerked his hand free.
Then he saw a girl staring at him. She was perhaps 13, and wide-eyed. She stared at his bloodstained hand.
I'll have to kill her, he thought. There can't be any witnesses. He drew his pistol and aimed it at her, but he couldn't bring himself to shoot her. He ran to the car and drove away.
He knew he would have the police after him now. They would start looking for a black man with a wounded hand. The girl he hadn't killed would talk. He gave himself four hours at the most before he would be forced to change cars.
He stopped at an unmanned petrol station and filled his tank. He followed a signpost for Stockholm. Somewhere along the way he would have to sleep. He hoped he could find another lake with still, black water.
He found one south of Linkoping. He had changed cars by then. He turned into a motel near Huskvarna and managed to crack the door lock and short-circuit the ignition of another Mercedes. He drove on until his strength ran out. Still south of Linkoping, just before midnight, he turned onto a minor road, then onto a smaller one still, and eventually came upon a lake stretched out before him, its surface like black glass. He got into the wide rear seat, curled up, and fell asleep.
He awoke with a start. It was almost 5 a.m. He could hear a bird singing in a way he had never heard before. He continued his journey northwards. Shortly before 11 a.m. he was in Stockholm.
It was Wednesday, April 29, the day before Walpurgis Eve.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Three masked men appeared as dessert was being served. They fired 300 rounds from automatic weapons and then ran out to a waiting car.
After a moment of silence the restaurant was filled with the screams of the wounded and the terrified.
It had been the annual meeting of the venerable wine-tasting club of Durban. The dining committee had most carefully considered security before deciding to hold the banquet at the golf club in Pinetown. Pinetown had so far escaped the violence that was increasingly widespread in Natal. Moreover, the restaurant manager had undertaken to double the usual security for the evening. But the guards were struck down before they could raise the alarm. The fence surrounding the restaurant had been broken through with wire-cutters. The assailants had also managed to throttle an Alsatian.
There were 50 people in the restaurant when the men burst in. The membership of the wine-tasting club was exclusively white. There were five black waiters, four men and one woman. The black chefs and kitchen hands fled through the back door with the Portuguese head chef the instant the shooting started.
When order was restored, nine people lay dead among the upturned tables and chairs, the shattered crockery, and fallen chandeliers. Seventeen more were seriously wounded, and all the elderly survivors were in shock, among them an old lady who would later die from a heart attack.
Dozens of wine bottles had been smashed. The police had a hard time distinguishing blood from red wine.
Chief Inspector Samuel de Beer from the Durban homicide squad was one of the first to reach the restaurant. He had with him Inspector Harry Sibande, who was black. Although de Beer made no attempt to conceal his racial prejudice, Sibande had learnt to tolerate it. This was due not least to the fact that Sibande had realised long ago that he was a much better policeman than de Beer could ever be.
They surveyed the devastation, and watched the wounded being carried to the ambulances.
The badly shocked witnesses who remained did not have much to say. There had been three men, all masked. But their hands were black. De Beer called Intelligence in Pretoria. They promised him that the army's special unit for political assassinations and terrorist actions would place an experienced investigator at his disposal first thing in the morning.
President de Klerk was informed about the incident shortly before midnight. His foreign minister, Pik Botha, could tell that de Klerk was annoyed at being disturbed.
"Innocent people get murdered every day," he said. "What's so special about this incident?"
"The scale," the foreign minister said. "It's too big, too crude, too brutal. There'll be a violent reaction within the party unless you make a very firm statement tomorrow morning. I'm convinced that the ANC leadership, presumably Mandela himself, will condemn what's happened. It won't look good if you have nothing to say."
Botha was one of the very few who had President de Klerk's ear. The President generally acted on his advice.
"I'll do as you suggest," de Klerk said. "Put something together, please. See that I get it by 7 a.m."
Later that evening, Malan took a call from his colleague in NIS, Kleyn. Both of them had been told of the massacre in Pinetown. Both reacted with dismay and disgust. They played their roles like the old hands they were. The Pinetown massacre was part of a strategy to raise the level of insecurity across the country. At the end of it all, the final link in a chain of increasingly frequent and serious attacks and murders, was the liquidation the Committee had ordained.
Kleyn called Malan about an entirely different matter, however. He had discovered earlier in the day that someone had hacked into his private computer files at work. After a few hours of pondering and a process of elimination, he had worked out who it must be that was keeping them under scrutiny. He also realised the discovery was a vital threat to their immediate plans.
They never used their names when they telephoned each other. They recognised each other's voices. If they ever had a bad line, they had a code to identify themselves.
"We have to meet," Kleyn said. "You know where I'm going tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Be sure you do the same," Kleyn said.
Malan had been told that a Captain Breytenbach would represent his own secret unit in the investigation of the massacre, but he only needed to call Breytenbach to ensure that he could take the assignment himself. Malan had a dispensation to alter any assignment without the need to consult his superiors.
"I'll be there," he said. That was the end of the conversation. Malan called Captain Breytenbach and told him that he would be flying to Durban himself in the morning. Then he considered what could have upset Kleyn. It must have something to do with the major operation. He just hoped their plans were not unravelling.
At 4 a.m. on May 1, Kleyn skirted Johannesburg and soon joined the E3 highway to Durban. He expected to get there by 8 a.m. He enjoyed driving. He could have had a helicopter take him to Durban, but the journey would have been over too quickly. Alone in the car, with the countryside flashing past, he would have time to reflect.
He expected the problems in Sweden would be swiftly solved. For some days he had been wondering if Konovalenko really was as skilful and cold-blooded as he had counted on. Had he made a mistake employing him? He decided not. Konovalenko would do whatever was necessary. Mabasha would soon be dealt with. Indeed, it might have happened already. A man called Tsiki, number two on his original list, would take his place and Konovalenko would give him the same training.
The only thing that still struck Kleyn as odd was the incident that brought on Mabasha's breakdown. How could a man with his background react in such a volatile way to the death of a total stranger, this Swedish woman? Had there been a weak point of sentimentality in him after all? In that case it was a good job they found out in time. If they hadn't, there was no knowing what might have happened when Mabasha had his victim in his sights.
He brushed all thought of Mabasha aside and concentrated instead on the surveillance he had uncovered. There were no incriminating details, no names in his computer files. A skilful intelligence specialist would, even so, be able to draw certain conclusions, chief among which would obviously be that preparations were well advanced for a dramatic assassination that would have far-reaching political consequences.
He concluded that he had been lucky. He had discovered the penetration of his computer files in time, and would be able to take the neecessary precautions.
Colonel Malan climbed aboard the helicopter at the army airfield near Johannesburg. It was 7.15 a.m.; he would be in Durban by about 8 a.m. He nodded to the pilots, fastened his seat belt, and contemplated the ground below as they rose into the sky.
He gazed thoughtfully at the African township they were flying over. He could see the ramshackle houses, the smoke from the fires.
How could those people defeat us? All we need is to be stubborn and show them we mean business. It will cost blood, even white blood, as in Pinetown last night. But continued white rule in South Africa would not come without cost. It required sacrifices.
He leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.
Soon he would discover what had been so disconcerting to Kleyn.
They reached the cordoned-off restaurant in Pinetown within ten minutes of each other. They spent a little over an hour in the blood-stained rooms, together with the local investigators led by Inspector de Beer. The attackers had done a good job. They had expected the death toll to be higher than nine, but that was of minor importance. The killing of the innocent wine-tasters had had the expected effect. Blind fury and demands for revenge from the whites had already been forthcoming. Kleyn heard both Mandela and President de Klerk on his car radio condemning the incident. De Klerk even threatened the killers with violent revenge.
"Is there any trace of who may have carried out this monstrous attack?" Kleyn said.
"Not yet," de Beer said. "We haven't even found anyone who saw the escape car."
"The government should offer a reward right away," Malan said. "I shall ask the Minister of Defence to propose that at the next cabinet meeting."
As he spoke there came the sound of a disturbance on the street, where a crowd of whites had gathered. Many of them were brandishing shotguns or rifles, and blacks who saw the crowd turned off and went another way. The restaurant door burst open and a white woman in her 30s barged in. She was dishevelled and hysterical. When she saw Inspector Sibande, the only black man on the premises, she drew a pistol and fired a shot in his direction. Harry Sibande managed to take refuge behind an upturned table. But the woman kept on going, still firing the pistol which she held stiffly in both hands. All the time she was screeching in Afrikaans that she would avenge her brother who had been killed in the massacre. She would not rest, she cried, until every last
kaffir
had been executed.
De Beer came up behind her and hammered the weapon from her grasp. Then he led her outside. Sibande stood up behind the table. He was shaken. One of the bullets had penetrated the table top and torn through the sleeve of his uniform.
Kleyn and Malan had observed the incident. It happened very quickly, but both of them were thinking the same thing. The white woman's reaction was exactly what the previous night's slaughter had been intended to provoke. Only on a larger scale.
De Beer returned, wiping sweat and blood from his face. "You can't help but sympathise with her," he said. Sibande said nothing.
Kleyn promised to supply all the assistance de Beer thought he needed. They concluded the conversation by assuring one another that the culprits of this terrorist outrage must and would be quickly run to ground. They left the restaurant together and drove in Kleyn's car out of Pinetown. They went north along the N2 and turned towards the sea at a sign for Umhlanga Rocks. Kleyn pulled up at a little seafood restaurant on the oceanfront. They would be undisturbed here. They ordered langoustine and drank mineral water. Malan took off his jacket and hung it up.
"According to my information, de Beer is an outstandingly incompetent detective," he said. "His
kaffir
colleague is supposed to be much brighter. Persistent as well."
"Yes, that's what I've heard," Kleyn said. "The investigation will go around and around in circles until all the relatives have tired of pursuing it."
He put his knife down and wiped his mouth with a napkin.
"Death is never pleasant," he went on. "Nobody causes a bloodbath unless it's really necessary. On the other hand, there are no winners, only losers. Nor are there any victors without sacrifices. I suppose I'm basically a very primitive Darwinist. Survival of the fittest. When a house is on fire, no-one asks where the fire started before putting it out."
"What'll happen to the three men?" Malan said. "I don't remember seeing what was decided."
"Let's take a walk when we've finished eating," Kleyn said with a smile. Malan knew that was the nearest he would get to an answer for the time being.
Over coffee Kleyn started to explain the reason for this meeting with Malan. "As you know, those of us who work undercover for whichever intelligence organisation live by certain unwritten rules and assumptions," he said. "One of them is that we keep an eye on everybody else. The trust we place in our colleagues has to be limited. We all take our own measures to ensure our personal security. We make sure nobody trespasses too far into our territory. We lay a minefield around us, and we do so because everybody else does the same. In this way we strike a balance, and everybody can get on with his job. Unhappily, I find that somebody has been taking an interest in my computer files. Somebody has obviously been given the job of checking me out. That assignment can only have come from very high up."
Malan turned pale. "Have our plans been compromised?"
Kleyn regarded him with eyes as cold as ice. "I am not as careless as that. Nothing in my computer files could reveal the plan. There are no names, nothing. On the other hand, one has to accept that a sufficiently intelligent person could draw conclusions which might point him in the right direction. That makes it serious."
"It will be difficult to find out who it is," Malan said.
"Not at all. I already know who it is."
Malan stared at him in astonishment.
"I started to find my way forward by going backward," Kleyn said. "That's often an excellent way of getting results. I asked myself where the assignment could have come from. It didn't take long to see that there are only two persons who can really be interested in finding out what I'm up to. The President and the Foreign Minister."
Malan wanted to say something.
"Let me go on," Kleyn said. "Think for a moment and you'll see that's obvious. There is a fear of conspiracy in this country, and rightly so. De Klerk has every reason to be afraid of the current of opinion in some parts of the military high command. Nor can he be sure of the loyalty of those in charge of the state intelligence service. There's a lot of uncertainty in the country today. Not much can be taken for granted. That means there's no limit to the amount of information that needs to be collected. There's only one member of the cabinet the President can trust absolutely, and that is Pik Botha. All I needed to do was to go through the feasible candidates for the role of secret messenger to the President. For reasons I don't need to go into, it soon boiled down to a shortlist of one: Pieter van Heerden."