Deon Meyer (47 page)

 

 

So brilliant. Those were Luke Powell’s words.
You are brilliant.

 

 

He had appreciated her from the beginning. Sincerely. With each piece of intelligence that she sent to him through the secret channels, the message came back.
You are-priceless. You are wonderful. You are brilliant. You are making a real difference.

 

 

And here she sat. Eight months later. Priceless and wonderful and brilliant, with a traitor’s identity that was probably secured, but heads would roll and chances were good that one would be hers.

 

 

And that could not happen.

 

 

There must be a scapegoat. And there was one.

 

 

Ready to sacrifice.

 

 

She was not finished. She was not nearly finished.

 

 

She smoothed her hair down and pulled the fax nearer.

 

 

This was the story the minister was talking about. The one that had appeared in the
Sowetan.
She did not want to read it. She wanted to move on; in her mind this chapter was closed.

 

 

MPAYIPHELI— THE PRINCE FROM THE PAST

 

 

By Matthew Mtimkulu, assistant editor

 

 

Isn’t it strange how much power two words can have? Just two random words, sixteen simple letters, and when I heard them over the radio in my car, it opened the floodgates of the past, and the memories came rushing back like rippling white water.

 

 

Thobela Mpayipheli.

 

 

I did not think about the meaning of the words— that came later, as I sat down to write this piece: Thobela means “mannered” or “respectful.” Mpayipheli is Xhosa for “one who does not stop fighting”— a warrior, if you will.

 

 

My people like to give our children names with a positive meaning, a sort of head start to life, a potential self-fulfilling prophecy. (Our white fellow-citizens attempt the same sort of thing— only opting not for meaning but for sophistication, the exotic or cool to do the job. And my colored brothers seem to choose names that sound as much uncolored as possible.)

 

 

What really matters, I suppose, is the meaning the person gives to the name in the course of his life.

 

 

So, what I remembered as I negotiated early-morning rush hour was the man. Or the boy, as I knew him, for Thobela and I are children of the Ciskei; we briefly shared one of the most beautiful places on earth: the Kat River valley, described by historian Noël Mostert in his heartbreaking book
Frontiers
as “a narrow, beautiful stream that descended from the mountainous heights of the Great Escarpment and flowed through a broad, fertile valley towards the Fish river.”

 

 

We were teenagers and it was the blackest decade of the century, the tumultuous seventies: Soweto was burning, and the heat of the flames could be felt in our little hidden hamlet, our forgotten valley. There was something in the air in the spring of 1976, an anticipation of change, of things to come.

 

 

Thobela Mpayipheli, like me, was fourteen. A natural athlete, the son of the Muruti of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, and it was well known that his father was a descendant of Phalo along the Maqoma lineage. Xhosa royalty, if you will.

 

 

And there was something princely about him, perhaps in his bearing, most definitely in the fact that he was a bit of a loner, a brooding, handsome outsider of a boy One day in late September, I was witness to a rare event. I saw Mpayipheli beat Mtetwa, a huge, mean, scowling kid two years his senior. It was a long time coming between the two of them, and when it happened, it was a thing of beauty. On a sliver of river sand in a bend of the Kat, Thobela was a matador, calm and cool and elegant and quick. He took some shuddering punches, because Mtetwa was no slouch, but Thobela absorbed it and kept on coming. The thing that fascinated me most was not his awesome deftness, his speed or agility, but his detachment. As if he were measuring himself. As if he had to know if he was ready, confirmation of some inner belief.

 

 

Just three years later he was gone, and the whispers up and down the valley said he had joined the Struggle, he had left for the front, he was to be a soldier, a carrier of the Spear of the Nation.

 

 

And here his name was on the radio, a man on a motorcycle, a fugitive, a common laborer, and I wondered what had happened in the past twenty years. What had gone wrong? The prince should have been a king— of industry, or the military, perhaps a member of Parliament, although, for all his presence, he lacked the gift of the gab, the oily slick-ness of a politician.

 

 

So I called his mother. It took some time to track them down, a retired couple in a town called Alice.

 

 

She didn’t know. She had not seen her son in more than two decades. His journey was as much a mystery to her as it was to me. She cried, of course. For all that was lost— the expectations, the possibilities, the potential. The longing, the void in a mother’s heart.

 

 

But she also cried for our country and our history that so cruelly conspired to reduce the prince to a pauper.

 

 

 

43.

T
he late afternoon brought a turning point. With every hour his frustration and impatience grew. He no longer wished to wait there; he wanted to know where the dog was, how far off, how long to wait. His eyes were tired from staring down the road, his body stiff from sitting and standing and leaning against the car. His head was dulled by continually running through his calculations, from speculation and guesswork.

 

 

But above all it was the anger that exhausted him; the stoking of the raging flames consumed his energy.

 

 

Eventually when the shadows began to lengthen, Captain Tiger Mazibuko leaped from the Golf and picked up a rock and hurled it at the thorn trees where the finches were chittering irritably and he roared something unintelligible and turned and kicked the wheel of the car, threw another stone at the tree, another and another and another, until he was out of breath. He blew down with a hiss of air through his teeth and calm returned.

 

 

Mpayipheli was not coming.

 

 

He had taken another road. Or the wounds perhaps … No, he was not going to start speculating again— it was irrelevant; his plan had failed and he accepted it. Sometimes you took a chance and you won, and sometimes you lost. He made a decision, he would wait till sunset, relax, watch the day fade to twilight and the twilight to dark, and then he was done.

 

 

When he climbed back in the car they came for him.

 

 

Three police vehicles full of officials in uniform. He saw the three vehicles approaching, but it registered only when they stopped. He realized what was going on only when they poured out of the doors. He sat tight, hands on the steering wheel, until one shouted at him to get out with his hands behind his head.

 

 

He did that slowly and methodically, to prevent misunderstandings.

 

 

What the hell?

 

 

He stood by the Golf, and a pair of them ducked into the car. One emerged triumphant with the Heckler & Koch. Another searched him with busy hands, pulled his hands behind his back, and clamped the handcuffs around his wrists.

 

 

Sold out. He knew it. But how? And by whom?

 

 

4. THE EXECUTION OF OPERATION SAFEGUARD

 

 

After Johnny Kleintjes had visited the U.S. embassy, we set up contact with him and agreed to meet him in Lusaka.

 

 

Inkululeko kept her side of the bargain by duly recording the embassy visit, as well as starting a surveillance program of Kleintjes.

 

 

The operation went perfectly according to plan.

 

 

Because of the controlled nature of Safeguard, this office did not deem it necessary to allocate more than two people for the Zambia leg. And agents Len Fortenso and Peter Blum from the Nairobi office were drafted for the Lusaka “sale” of the data.

 

 

I acted as supervisor from Cape Town and take full responsibility for subsequent events.

 

 

Fortenso and Blum confirmed their arrival in Lusaka after a chartered flight from Nairobi. That was the last contact we had with them. Their bodies were found on the outskirts of Lusaka two days later. The cause of death was gunshot wounds to the back of the head.

 

 

Allison Healy wrote the lead article with great difficulty. Her concentration was divided between anger at Van Heerden and sadness for the lot of Pakamile.

 

 

She had cried when she left him behind, she had hugged him tight, and the ironic part that broke her heart was the way the child had comforted her.

 

 

“Don’t be sad. Thobela is coming back tomorrow.” For the sake of the child, she had called every contact and informant who might possibly know something.

 

 

“It depends who you believe,” Rassie had said from Laings-burg. “One rumor says he’s wounded. The other says they have shot him dead in Botswana, but I don’t believe either of them.”

 

 

“Shot dead, you say?”

 

 

“It’s a lie, Allison. If the Botswana police had shot him, it would have been headline news.”

 

 

“And what about the wounding story?”

 

 

“Also a load of rubbish. They say a chopper pilot shot him but not with the chopper, you know what I mean. With this kind of thing rumors run wild. All I know is that the RU have gone home, and the whole operation in the Northern Cape has been called off.”

 

 

“That is not good news.”

 

 

“How do you mean?”

 

 

“It could mean that it’s all over. That he is dead.”

 

 

“Or that he is over the border.”

 

 

“That’s true. Thanks, Rassie. Phone me if you hear something.”

 

 

And that was the sum total of information. The other sources knew or said even less, so at last she began with the story, building it paragraph by paragraph, without enthusiasm and with Van Heerden’s betrayal hanging over her like a shadow.

 

 

A member of the Presidential Intelligence Unit’s operational staff is under house arrest and awaiting an internal disciplinary hearing after the tragic accidental death of Mrs. Miriam Nzululwazi last night.

 

 

The rest was more of a review than anything else because they had laid down guidelines for the report, she and the news editor and the editor. The final agreement with the minister was that they would break this news exclusively but sympathetically, sensitive to the nuances of national interest and covert operations. When she was finished she went outside to smoke in the St. George’s Mall and watched the rest of the world on their way home. Streams of people so determined, so serious, so stern, going home just to journey back tomorrow morning, a never-ending cycle to keep body and soul together until the Reaper came. This useless, meaningless life went on with gray efficiency, pitiless: tomorrow there would be other news, the day after, another scandal, another matter dished up to the people in big black sans serif lettering.

 

 

Damn Van Heerden. Damn him for being like all other men, damn him for a shoplifter, a swindler.

 

 

Damn Thobela Mpayipheli, for deserting a woman and child for a pointless chase across this bloody country. All it would leave was yellowing front pages in newspaper archives. Didn’t he know that next month, next year, no one would even remember except Pakamile Nzululwazi living somewhere in a bloody orphanage, staring out the window every evening, hoping, until that too, like other hopes, faded irrevocably and left nothing but the vicious cycle of waking up and going to sleep.

 

 

She crushed the cigarette under her heel.

 

 

Fuck them all.

 

 

And she knew how to do it.

 

 

5. MUSLIM EXTREMIST INVOLVEMENT

 

 

Johnny Kleintjes was found executed in a room in the Republican Hotel in Lusaka, the word “KAATHIEB” slashed with a sharp pointed object into his chest— Arabic for “liar.”

 

 

This obviously indicates Muslim extremist involvement, and the big question is how local or foreign groups gained knowledge of the operation. The most likely explanation is a leak within the Presidential Intelligence Unit itself— and there are several facts that substantiate this suspicion:

 

 

i. The operation was infiltrated at an early stage— the Muslims were in Lusaka, waiting for Kleintjes and the CIA operatives. The PIU was the only agency with knowledge of Kleintjes’s involvement.

 

 

ii. After eliminating Fortenso and Blum, the unknown operatives blackmailed Kleintjes’s daughter in Cape Town to bring a specific hard drive to Lusaka. (She asked one Thobela Mpayipheli, a former friend and colleague of Kleintjes Senior, to do this on her behalf, as she is physically challenged— see below.) The suspected Muslim group, I believe, was not after the fabricated Kleintjes data but the information he had allegedly secreted during the 1994 integration process.

 

 

iii. From this follows the obvious: the extremists have a mole within the PIU and suspected the mole’s identity was going to be compromised by the data.

 

 

iv Kleintjes himself was known for his Middle Eastern sympathies and could have been protecting the Muslim mole.

 

 

v. Furthermore, the PIU member arrested by Botswana police was waiting in ambush to intercept Mpayipheli and the hard drive, close to the Zambian border. We believe the Botswana authorities were tipped off to stop the drive (containing the information about the Muslim mole) from falling into the hands of the PIU. The only people who knew he was waiting in Botswana are part of a small, exclusive group within the PIU.