Deon Meyer (48 page)

 

 

The only remaining question, in my opinion, is not if Islamic extremists have an operative within the SA Presidential Intelligence Unit, but who it is. From this, it naturally follows that the original data might shed some light on the Muslim mole within the South African intelligence community

 

 

At this time, the hard drive is still missing.

 

 

6. THE MATTER OF UMZINGELI

 

 

In 1984 a top CIA field agent and a decorated, much valued veteran, Marion Dorffling, was eliminated in Paris. The modus operandi of the assassin was similar to at least eleven (11) similar executions of U.S. assets and operatives.

 

 

The CIA had enough intelligence from Russian and Eastern European sources to conclude, or at least strongly suspect, that one Thobela Mpayipheli, code name Umzingeli (a Xhosa word for “hunter”) was responsible for the murder. According to available information, Mpayipheli was an MK soldier on loan from the ANC/SACP alliance to the KGB and Stasi as a wet work specialist.

 

 

Coincidently I was a rookie member of the CIA team in Paris at the time.

 

 

When Mpayipheli’s involvement in Operation Safeguard became public knowledge, I filed a request to the field office in Berlin for possible documentation from former Stasi files to confirm the 1984 suspicions.

 

 

Our colleagues in Germany obliged within hours (for which I can only commend them).

 

 

The Stasi records confirmed that Mpayipheli/Umzingeli was Marion Dorffling’s assassin.

 

 

I notified Langley and the response from deputy director’s level was that the Firm was still very much interested in leveling the score. Two specialized field agents from the London office were dispatched to deal with the matter.

 

 

Allison Healy’s fingers danced lightly but intensely across the keyboard. Her passion appeared in the words on the screen.

 

 

Fugitive motorcyclist Thobela Mpayipheli was a ruthless assassin for the KGB during the Cold War, responsible for the deaths of at least fifteen people.

 

 

According to his longtime friend and former policeman, Dr. Zatopek van Heerden, Mpayipheli was recruited by the Soviets during MK training in what was then the USSR. Van Heerden is currently a staff member of the UCT Department of Psychology.

 

 

She scanned it quickly before continuing, suppressing with difficulty the impulse to write, “his longtime friend, the world-class asshole Dr. Zatopek van Heerden.”

 

 

In an exclusive and frank interview, Dr. Van Heerden disclosed that…

 

 

The phone rang and she grabbed it up angrily and said, “Allison Healy” and Van Heerden asked, “Have you got a passport?” and she said, “What?”

 

 

“Have you got a passport?”

 

 

“You asshole,” she said.

 

 

“What?”

 

 

“You are a total, complete, utter asshole,” she said before realizing her voice was so loud that her colleagues could hear. She took the cell phone and walked toward the bathrooms, speaking in a whisper now, “You think you can fuck me and run off like a … like a…”

 

 

“Are you cross because I didn’t leave a message?”

 

 

“You could have phoned, you bastard. What would it have taken to make one call? What would it have cost to say thank you and good-bye, it was good, but it’s over. You men are all the same, too fucking cowardly—”

 

 

“Allison—”

 

 

“But not last night, oh no, last night you couldn’t talk enough, all the things that you said, and today not a bloody word. Couldn’t you lift a finger to press a telephone button?”

 

 

“Allison, are you interested in—”

 

 

“I am interested in nothing to do with you.”

 

 

“Would you like to meet Thobela Mpayipheli?”

 

 

The words were queuing up behind her tongue, but she swallowed them down. He had taken the wind from her sails.

 

 

“Thobela?”

 

 

“If you have a passport, you can come along.”

 

 

“Where to?”

 

 

“Botswana. We are leaving in … er … seventy minutes.”

 

 

“We?”

 

 

“Do you want to come, or not?”

 

 

 

44.

H
e had to give her the last directions over the cell phone, as it was an obscure route at the Cape Town International Airport behind hangars and office buildings and between small single-propeller airplanes that looked like children’s toys left around in loose rows. Eventually she found the Beechcraft King Air ambulance with its Pratt & Whitney engines already running.

 

 

Van Heerden was standing in the door of the plane, waving to her, and she grabbed the overnight bag from the backseat, locked the car, and ran.

 

 

He stood aside so she could climb the steps and then he pulled the door shut behind her, signaling to the pilot. The Beechcraft began to move.

 

 

He took her bag and showed her where to sit— on one of the three seats at the back. After making sure her seat belt was fastened, he sat down beside her with a sigh. He leaned over and kissed her full on the lips before she could pull away, and then he grinned at her like a naughty schoolboy.

 

 

“I should—,” she began seriously, but he stopped her with a hand.

 

 

“May I explain first?” His voice was loud, to be heard over the engine noise.

 

 

“It’s not about us. It’s about Miriam Nzululwazi.”

 

 

“Miriam,” he said with grim foreboding.

 

 

“She’s dead, Zatopek. Last night.”

 

 

“How?”

 

 

“All they say is that it was an accident. She fell. Five stories down.”

 

 

“Good Lord,” he said, and let his head drop back against the cushion of the seat. He sat like that for a long time, staring ahead, and she wondered what his thoughts were. Then just before the Beechcraft sped down the runway, he said something she couldn’t hear and shook his head.

 

 

* * *

“You have a terrible temper,” he said as the roar of the engines quieted at cruising altitude and he loosened his safety belt. “Do you want some coffee?”

 

 

“And you are a bastard,” she said without conviction.

 

 

“I was in conference all day.”

 

 

“Without tea or lunch breaks?”

 

 

“I meant to phone you in the afternoon, when it was more quiet.”

 

 

“And so?”

 

 

“Then I had a call from a Dr. Pillay of Kasane, who said he had found my telephone number in the pocket of a badly injured black man who had fallen off his motorbike in northern Botswana.”

 

 

“Oh.”

 

 

“Coffee?”

 

 

She nodded, watching him as he made the same offer to the doctor and pilot in the cockpit. She thought how close she had come to putting the article into the system. She had been at the door of the editorial office when she turned and ran back to delete it. She had a temper. That was true.

 

 

* * *

“What is his condition?” she asked Van Heerden when he came back.

 

 

“Serious but stable. The doctor said he has lost a lot of blood. They gave him transfusions, but he is going to need more and blood is in short supply up there.”

 

 

“What happened to him?”

 

 

“Nobody knows. He has two bullet wounds in the hip, and his left shoulder was badly bruised in the fall. Some locals found him beside the road near the Mpandamatenga turnoff. By the grace of God, no one phoned the authorities; they just loaded him on a bakkie and took him to Kasane.”

 

 

She absorbed the news, and another question arose. “Why are you doing this?”

 

 

“He is my friend.” Before she could respond, he added, “My only friend, to be honest,” and she wondered about him, who he was and what made him this way.

 

 

“And this”— she indicated the medical equipment—“what is all this going to cost?”

 

 

“I don’t know. Ten or twenty thousand.”

 

 

“Who is going to pay?”

 

 

He shrugged. “I will. Or Thobela.”

 

 

“Just like that?”

 

 

He grinned but without humor.

 

 

“What?”

 

 

“Perception and reality,” he said. “I find it very interesting.”

 

 

“Oh?”

 

 

“Your perception is that he is black— and a laborer, from Guguletu. Therefore, he must be poor. That is the logical view, a reasonable conclusion. But things are not always what we expect.”

 

 

“So he has money? Is that from the drugs or the assassinations?”

 

 

“A valid question. But the answer is ‘not from either of those.’ ”

 

 

He saw her shake her head dubiously, and he said, “I had better tell you the whole story. About me and Orlando and Thobela and more American dollars than most people see in a lifetime. It was two years ago. I was moonlighting as a private investigator, probing a murder case the cops couldn’t crack. In a nutshell, it came out that the victim was involved in a clandestine army operation, weapons transactions for UNITA in Angola, diamonds and dollars…”

 

 

* * *

He finished the story by the time they landed in Johannesburg to refuel. When they took off again, she pushed up the armrest between them and leaned against him. “Am I still a bastard?” he asked.

 

 

“Yes. But you are my bastard,” and she pressed her face in his neck and inhaled his smell with her eyes shut.

 

 

That afternoon she had thought she had lost him.

 

 

Before they flew over the N
i
somewhere east of Warmbad, she was asleep.

 

 

* * *

She stayed in the plane, looking out the oval window of the Beechcraft. The air coming in the open door was hot and rich in exotic scents. Outside the night was lit up by car lights, the moving people casting long deep shadows, and then four appeared from behind a vehicle with a stretcher between them, and she wondered what he looked like, this assassin, drug soldier, the man for whom Miriam Nzululwazi had wept in her arms, the man who had dodged the entire country’s law enforcers for two thousand kilometers to do a friend a favor. What did he look like? Were there marks, recognizable features on his face that would reveal his character?

 

 

They struggled up the steps with the weighty burden. She went to sit at the back, out of the way, her eyes searching, but he was hidden by the bearers, Van Heerden, the doctor who had flown with them, Dr. Pillay and one other. They shifted him carefully onto the bed in the aircraft. The white doctor connected a tube to the thick black arm, the Indian said something softly into the patient’s ear, pressing the big hand that lay still, and then they went out and someone pulled the door up and the pilot started the engines.

 

 

She stood up to see his face. The eyes caught hers, like a searchlight finding a buck, black-brown and frighteningly intense, so that she could see nothing else, and she felt a thrill of fear and enormous relief. Fear for what he could do, and relief that he would not do it to her.

 

 

* * *

The black man slept and Van Heerden sat with her again and she asked, “Have you told him?”

 

 

“It was the first thing he wanted to know when he saw me.”

 

 

“You told him?”

 

 

He nodded.

 

 

She looked at the still figure, the dark brown skin of his chest and arms against the white bedding, the undulations of caged power.

 

 

William Blake,
she thought.

 

 

What immortal hand or eye

 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

 

“What did he say?” she asked.

 

 

“He hasn’t said a word since.”

 

 

Now she understood the intensity of those eyes.

 

 

In what distant deeps or skies

 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

 

 

“Do you think he will…”

 

 

She looked at Van Heerden and for the first time saw the worry.

 

 

“How else?” he said in frustration.

 

 

On what wings dare he aspire?

 

What the hand dare seize the fire?

 

 

“But you can help him. There must be a legal—” “It is not he who will need help.”

 

 

That’s when she grasped what Van Heerden was afraid of, and she looked at Mpayipheli and shivered.

 

 

When the stars threw down their spears,

 

And water’d heaven with their tears,

 

Did he smile his work to see?

 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

 

 

On the last leg to Cape Town she woke with a heavy body and a stiff neck and she saw Van Heerden sitting next to Mpayipheli, his white hand holding the Xhosa’s, and she heard the deep bass voice, soft, the words nearly inaudible to her above the engines, and she closed her eyes again and listened.

 

 

“… go away, Van Heerden? Is that part of our genetic makeup, too? Is that what makes us men? Always off somewhere?” He spoke in slow, measured tones.

 

 

“Why was it that I could not say no? She knew, from the beginning. She said men go away. She said that is our nature, and I argued with her, but she was right. We are like that. I am like that.”