Ivory (24 page)

Bloody hell, but the man had balls. Van Zyl had failed at every turn, and here he was blackmailing him. George liked the idea of direct action against the pirates on their island lair. If he was twenty years younger and without the responsibilities of running a shipping business, he might have offered to join in the raid. The phone in his pocket vibrated. ‘Penfold.'

‘Sir, it's Gillian, good morning. I'm sorry to disturb you, but reception has just put through a call to me from a man currently in Johannesburg – an American. He wouldn't give me his name but he said he had information about the identities of the men who raided the
Penfold Son
. He said he would speak only with the owner of the company. I have a number, sir.'

George took out his Mont Blanc and wrote the telephone number down on the back of a serviette. He slid it across the table to Van Zyl. ‘It appears I must do most of your work for you, Mister Van Zyl, now that we are prospective business partners. Call this man and tell him you're acting on my authority. Set up a meeting.'

J
ane stank.

‘Would you like a beer?' said the sweating Afrikaner sitting next to her in the Toyota Hilux, not for the first time.

It was times like this – not to mention the time the ship she'd been sailing on had been hijacked by pirates – that she wished she wasn't terrified of flying. ‘No thank you.'

At least six in the evening was a civilised hour for drinking. The three men she was sharing the vehicle with had been taking turns at driving, drinking and snoring throughout the entire gruelling fifteen-hour trip. Jane had offered to drive, partly out of fear for her own safety as whoever was behind the wheel was likely to be fatigued or drunk at any one time, but the South Africans wouldn't hear of it.

They were all coalminers from Witbank, huge men with huge hands and huge beer bellies. Weynand, Christo and Dirk were gentlemen – none had made a pass at her and Christo had offered to ‘
klap
', which Jane assumed meant hit, ‘the Englishman' she had told them she was running away from. She'd assured them that it was just a tiff and that she needed her own space. No klapping was required.

They were in South Africa now and according to Weynand, who was behind the wheel again, rubbing his reddened eyes, only three hours
from Johannesburg. All the men had agreed, despite her telling them that she would catch a bus or hitch a ride from Witbank, that they would travel the extra two hours to see her deposited safely at her hotel. ‘You don't want to hitchhike on South African roads, hey,' Christo had told her solemnly. ‘We all go, and that way we can keep each other awake and have an extra
dop
or two before we gets home to our wives.' A ‘
dop
' she had learned, was a drink.

‘On second thoughts, I think I will have a beer please, Dirk.' True to form, he popped the can of Castle Lager for her, and even slipped it into a neoprene cooler.

Jane thought about Alex as she drank, and what she would say to George when she met him in Johannesburg. She had slept very little during the evening, after she had returned to her bungalow in Chitengo Camp, alone. He hadn't touched her during or after dinner, not even a goodnight kiss, but even now in the truck she could still feel the softness of his lips on hers. She remembered the spontaneous arousal his kiss had drawn from her body and her mix of excitement and shame. It was confusing that she might feel guilty about the possibility of betraying a man who was already married. Alex had stared at her during dinner and she'd seen the desire in his eyes.

He was a criminal and she was a lawyer. She had questions for George, both as his lawyer and mistress, and no doubt there were difficult decisions to come, but a pirate could not help her, nor be her moral compass. Besides, she had to keep reminding herself, Alex had probably only wanted to bed her in order to find out what she'd done with the package.

She'd dressed, quickly, and walked to the camp ground, following the sound of clanging pots and half-muted conversations in Afrikaans. The South Africans they had seen the previous evening had been on a fishing holiday to Inhassoro and had decided, on the spur of the moment, to take an overnight detour to Gorongosa National Park. They were breaking camp when she found them, and planning on driving the long road back to Witbank in one hit. She'd told them a tale of a lover's tiff and a holiday that hadn't worked out. They'd been happy to offer her a lift.

She'd slept through a lot of the drive south on the EN1 down the coast of Mozambique. When she'd woken she'd glimpsed palm trees and sugar plantations, gangly boys on the roadside holding up huge crayfish and plastic bags of cashew nuts for sale. The South Africans had stopped only to urinate and restock their cold box with ice for their beer, of which they seemed to have an unending supply. The border crossing had caused her some problems, given that she didn't have an entry stamp or visa for Mozambique. She'd concocted another story, about having two passports. She said she'd been robbed of her Australian passport and been told by immigration that she would have to report to the immigration authorities in the capital, Maputo. Weynand had whispered to her to pull out some cash, and that had settled the visa problem, though it had cleaned her out of the two hundred US dollars she'd kept in her money belt for emergencies. She smiled to herself as she drank her beer. An officious Mozambican civil servant was the least worrying incident that had happened to her lately.

The Toyota's engine whined under the weight of the fishing boat it towed, yet they climbed steadily out of what the men called the Lowveld into the Highveld. It was as different to the hot, humid coast of Mozambique as could be. They sped on good roads through wide open rolling hills of crops and grazing land that stretched to the horizon. Like her travel companions, everything seemed bigger than in England. They passed a turnoff to a place called Emalahleni, which Weynand explained was the new name for his home town, Witbank. ‘It means “place of coal” in Zulu, but I'm not a Zulu, so I'm going to call it Witbank until I die,' he said. The monotony of the landscape was broken by enormous coal-fired power stations, which the miners explained they supplied, and towering man-made mountains of mine waste as they neared the golden city of Johannesburg.

All the men were awake as they entered the outskirts of the city. As they passed the nondescript suburb of Benoni, which Christo explained with some pride was the birthplace of the Academy-Award winning actress Charlize Theron, Weynand said something in Afrikaans to Dirk, who then opened the glove compartment and drew out a nickel-plated
hand gun. Jane thought of the moment when she had pulled the trigger and the shock in Mitch's wide eyes, distorted by the eyepieces of his mask, as the bullet punched him backwards onto the deck.

‘Don't worry,' Weynand said to her in English, seeing but misreading her expression. He held the pistol up. ‘We're safe with “the equaliser”.'

The locals called the city
Egoli
, city of Gold, and for a moment its buildings were bathed in a pale yellow as the sun slid behind a mine dump. The men said it was smoke from cooking fires and car exhaust fumes that softened the light, and the smell, when she cracked the window a little, confirmed it. She'd heard it was a dangerous place and had been warned by Harvey Reynolds, before leaving London, not to walk or sightsee by herself while staying there on business. After what she'd been through on the high seas and in Mozambique she wondered how bad it could be. The men, however, started exchanging stories of friends of friends who had been robbed, car-jacked, assaulted or murdered on the streets they were now driving.

Was Alex Tremain, she wondered, in the same league as a black man who shot a white for his BMW or executed the owners of the house he robbed to eliminate witnesses? Was one less of a criminal than another? Alex had tried to explain that he and his gang used firearms as a tool to coerce cooperation from those they robbed. They would never, he assured her, fire unless to save their own lives, as had happened on the
Penfold Son
.

She shook her head, ignoring the sideways glance from Dirk, and drained the rest of her beer. Alex went on board those ships armed to the teeth and trained and ready to kill to get what he wanted. That was wrong, and she had been wrong to be tempted by his kiss, though even now she could still feel his lips on hers.

‘Where are we dropping you?' Weynand asked.

‘Oh, sorry. I must have been half asleep again. It's a place called Melrose Arch. Do you know it?'

‘
Ja?
It's where the rich fat cats hang out. I thought you was a pommie tourist, a backpacker or something?'

‘It's complicated.'

‘You not in trouble with the law, are you?'

‘No,' she assured him.

‘Wouldn't have mattered if you were. We couldn't leave you stranded with that creep in Mozambique, whatever is going on.'

She wanted to tell them that Alex wasn't a creep, just a pirate, but couldn't think of a way to do so without having a long complicated conversation. ‘Actually I'm here on business. The holiday in Mozambique was just a side trip that went wrong. This is where I'm supposed to be now. This is where I belong.'

And, as the reflective glass towers of the corporate sanctuary of Melrose Arch loomed canyon-like around them, she wished to God that was true.

 

Alex was in a philosophical mood as he drove back to Vilanculos from Gorongosa National Park.

He tried to put her out of his mind, but failed. He told himself he should let her go, that he would be risking far too much by pursuing her and the package she had hidden. He had come to the conclusion that she had left it somewhere on the
Penfold Son
before climbing into the lifeboat. Whether she would tell him where it was or not was something he would never know. She had been concerned that her boss, George Penfold, appeared to know of the exchange that had occurred between the
Peng Cheng
and
Penfold Son
. That obviously worried her, but if her employer was involved in something criminal, what would she, as a lawyer, do about it? He'd hoped that he could get close enough to her for her to lead him, willingly or not, to the stones. That was before last night.

He'd awoken feeling as he did now, that he was more concerned for her than he was for the missing treasure.

It was something of an epiphany for him. He still missed Danielle's financial and organisational skills, and Lord knew they'd be lucky to find a diesel and marine mechanic to match Sarah, but both women were lost to him now. He hadn't thought of pursuing them, nor given
a thought to whether they'd arrived at their next destination safely. He was, however, worried for Jane.

She was attractive – though so were the other girls – so there had been more to his growing attraction to her than her physical beauty. Although clearly shaken by the trauma she'd gone through on the
Penfold Son
, she had gone down fighting in the lifeboat and then set off on the kayak and discovered the island's secret. She'd also taken the time to get her payback against Mitch before leaving. She was clever and tough and she had let him take her as far as the mainland before escaping. Jane hadn't fallen for him, as other women had. She had bested him, and while he respected her for it he was still concerned for her safety. It was a long way to Johannesburg.

But he also had his men to think of, and others on Ilha dos Sonhos who relied on them. To some of the Mozambicans he was, though he felt uncomfortable about it, their
padrao
, the father figure cum employer that his own father had been in the resort's heyday. He wasn't comfortable with the almost feudal connotations, but he couldn't escape the fact that without him they had little to look forward to other than a life of subsistence fishing.

Mark and Lisa Novak wanted to retire somewhere in Mozambique, and Alex had offered the reliable former warrant officer a stake in the hotel, perhaps running the dive business or fishing charters once they went straight. Heinrich had said on many occasions that there was no way he would want to live in Germany. Henri and his lover might stay, or might move to the mainland, and Kevin was a free agent, though Alex sensed that all of them would, given the chance, make a life for themselves on the island. Jose wanted to be the richest bartender in Mozambique and Alex was quite happy to help his childhood friend's dream come true – if he could.

Removing Mitch from the team was like excising cancerous tissue. Things might be all right from now on, but the poison he'd spread might also have taken hold in some small measure. His were men of action and without it – and money – they would grow restless and either leave or try to depose him.

Money. With another million US dollars he reckoned he could have two full floors renovated and the restaurant open and staffed. Then he could implement the marketing plan Danielle had written for him. There would be travel agents and journalists to be feted before paying customers were enticed back to Ilha dos Sonhos, but a quick injection of cash could see them in business before the onset of the next wet season.

Despite the Triad leader's laissez-faire attitude to the
Peng Cheng
and its crew, Alex was sure Chan would cough up at least a hundred grand for the return of his ship. That, however, would barely cover the cost of the appliances for the new commercial kitchen for the gutted restaurant. Alex needed more cash, which was why he would travel to Johannesburg and listen to Chan's offer. If it was drugs he wouldn't touch it, likewise wildlife or people smuggling, or the illegal export of timber.

He crossed the Limpopo River at Mapai. The water was low this time of year – barely ankle deep – so he waved away the boys with a span of oxen who made their money during the wet season towing South African tourist vehicles.