The White Lioness (18 page)

"Sentimental?" He knew what it meant. But he was not sure just what significance Konovalenko was attaching to the word.

"You didn't like me shooting that woman," Konovalenko said. "These last few days you've been absent-minded and you've been shooting badly. I'll point out this weakness in my final report to Kleyn. It worries me."

"It worries me to think that a man can be as brutal as you are," Mabasha said.

At that there was no turning back. He knew he was going to have to tell Konovalenko what he was thinking.

"You're dumber than I thought," Konovalenko said. "I guess that's the way black men are."

Mabasha let the words sink into his consciousness. Then he rose slowly to his feet. "I'm going to kill you," he said.

Konovalenko shook his head with a smile. "No, you're not," he said.

Mabasha drew the pistol and aimed it at Konovalenko. "You shouldn't have killed her," he said. "You degraded both me and yourself."

He saw that Konovalenko was scared.

"You're crazy," he said. "You can't kill me."

"There's nothing I'm better at than doing what needs to be done," Mabasha said. "Get up. Slowly. Hands up. Turn around."

Konovalenko did as he was told.

Mabasha had just enough time to register that something was wrong before Konovalenko flung himself to one side with prodigious speed. Mabasha pulled the trigger, but the bullet smashed into a bookcase. Where the knife came from he had no idea, but Konovalenko had it in his hand when he hurled himself at him, faster even than he could aim a second shot. Their combined weight broke a table beneath them. Mabasha was strong, but so was Konovalenko. Mabasha could see the knife being forced closer and closer to his face. Only when he managed to kick Konovalenko in the back did he loosen his grip. He had dropped the pistol. He thumped Konovalenko with his fist, but there was no reaction. Before he broke loose he felt a sudden stinging sensation in his left hand. His whole arm went numb. But he managed to grab Konovalenko's bottle of vodka, turn around and smash it over his head. Konovalenko collapsed and stayed down.

At the same moment Mabasha realised the index finger of his left hand had been sliced off and was hanging on to his hand by a thin piece of skin.

He staggered out of the house. He had no doubt he had smashed Konovalenko's skull. He looked at the blood pouring out of his hand. Then he gritted his teeth and tore off the scrap of skin. The finger fell onto the gravel. He went back into the house, wrapped a cloth round his bleeding hand, flung some clothes into his suitcase and then retrieved the pistol. He closed the door behind him, opened the doors of the out-building, started the Mercedes, and hurtled out of the driveway. He drove far too fast for the narrow dirt road. At one point he narrowly avoided a collision with a car coming in the other direction. Then he found his way onto a bigger road and forced himself to slow down.

My finger, he thought. It's for you,
sangoma
. Guide me home now. Kleyn will understand. He is a clever
nkosi
. He knows he can trust me. I shall do what he wants me to do. Even if I don't use a rifle that can be accurate over more than 800 metres. I shall do what he wants me to do and he'll give me a million rand. But I need your help now,
sangoma
. That's why I have sacrificed my finger.

Konovalenko sat in one of the leather chairs. His head was throbbing. If the bottle had hit his temple in front rather than from the side, he would have been dead. Now and then he pressed a handkerchief filled with ice cubes against his temple. He forced himself to think clearly despite the pain. This was not the first time Konovalenko had found himself in a crisis.

After an hour he had considered all the alternatives and knew what he was going to do. He looked at his watch. He could call South Africa twice each day and be in direct touch with Kleyn. There were 20 minutes to go before the next transmission. He went to the kitchen for more ice cubes.

When he called South Africa, using the radio transmitter, it took a few minutes before Kleyn came on the line. They used no names when they talked to each other.

Konovalenko reported what had happened.
The cage was open and the bird has disappeared. It hasn't managed to learn how to sing.

It took a while for Kleyn to absorb what had happened. But once he had grasped the situation, his response was unequivocal.
The bird must be caught. Another bird will be sent as a substitute. More information about this later.

When the conversation was over, Konovalenko felt satisfied. Kleyn had understood that he had done what had been asked of him.

"Try him out," he had said when they met in Nairobi to plan Mabasha's training. "Test his staying power, look for his weaknesses. We have to know if he really can hold out. There's too much at stake for anything to be left to chance. If he's not up to it, he'll have to be replaced."

Mabasha was not up to it, was Konovalenko's verdict. Behind the tough facade and skilled marksman was a dangerously sentimental African. Now it was Konovalenko's job to find and kill him. Then he would train the new candidate.

What he had to do next would not be all that easy. Mabasha was wounded, and he would be acting irrationally. But Konovalenko had no doubt he would succeed. His staying power was legendary during his KGB days. He was a man who never gave up.

He lay on the bed and slept for a few hours. As dawn broke he packed his bag and carried it out to the BMW.

Before he locked the front door he primed the detonator to blow up the house. When the explosion came, he would be a long way away.

He drove off a little after 6 a.m. He would be in Stockholm by late afternoon. There were two police cars by the junction with the E14. For a moment he was afraid that Mabasha had given himself up and betrayed Konovalenko's whereabouts, but no-one in the cars reacted as he drove past.

Kleyn called Malan at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. "We have to meet," he said briskly. "The Committee will have to meet as soon as you can arrange it."

"Has something happened?"

"Yes. The first bird wasn't up to the job. We'll have to find another."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Konovalenko parked outside the apartment in a high-rise building in Hallunda late in the evening of Tuesday, April 28. He had taken his time on the journey from Skane. He liked driving fast and the powerful BMW invited high speeds, but he had been careful to stay within the speed limits. Just outside Jonkoping he observed that a number of motorists had been waved down at the side of the road by the police. As several of them had overtaken him, he assumed they had been caught in a radar speed trap.

Konovalenko had no respect at all for the Swedish police. He supposed that the basic reason for this was his contempt for the open, democratic Swedish society. Konovalenko hated democracy. It had robbed him of a large part of his life. It would take a very long time to establish - perhaps it would never become a reality - but he left Leningrad the moment he realised the old, closed Soviet society was past saving. The final straw was the failed coup in the autumn of 1991, when a number of top military officers and Politburo members of the old school tried to restore the former hierarchical system. But when the failure was plain for all to see, Konovalenko at once began planning his escape. He would never be able to live in a democracy, no matter how diluted a form it took. The uniform - the
esprit de corps
, the ideology - he had worn since he joined the KGB as a recruit in his twenties had become an outer skin as far as he was concerned. And he could not shed his skin. What would be left of him if he did?

He was not the only one to think like that. In those last years, when the KGB was subjected to severe reforms and the Berlin wall came down, he and his colleagues were forever discussing what the future would look like. It was one of the unwritten rules of the intelligence service that somebody would have to be held responsible when a totalitarian society started to crumble. Far too many citizens had been subjected to treatment by the KGB, far too many relatives were eager to exact vengeance for their missing or dead kin. Konovalenko had no desire to be hauled before the courts and treated like his former Stasi colleagues in the new Germany. He hung a map of the world on his office wall and studied it for hours. He was forced to grit his teeth and accept that he was not cut out for life in the late 20th century. He found it hard to imagine himself living in one of the brutal but highly unstable dictatorships in South America. Nor did he have any confidence in the home rule leaders who were still in power in some African states. On the other hand, he thought seriously about building a future in a fundamentalist Arab country. In some ways he was indifferent to the Islamic religion, and in other ways he loathed it. But he knew the governments ran both open and secret police forces with far-reaching powers. In the end, though, he rejected this alternative as well. He thought he would never be able to handle the transformation to such a foreign culture, no matter which Islamic state he selected. Besides, he did not want to give up drinking vodka.

He had also considered offering his services to an international security company. But he lacked the necessary experience: it was a world with which he was unfamiliar.

In the end, there was only one country he could contemplate. South Africa. He read whatever literature he could lay his hands on, but it was not easy to find much. Thanks to the authority that still attached to KGB officers, he managed to track down a few literary and political works. What he read confirmed his impression that South Africa would be a suitable place to build a future for himself. He was attracted by the racial discrimination, and could see how both the regular and secret police forces were well organised and wielded considerable influence.

He disliked coloured people, especially blacks. As far as he was concerned, they were inferior beings, unpredictable, usually criminal. Whether such views constituted prejudice, he had no idea. He just decided that was the way things were. But he liked the thought of having domestic servants and gardeners.

Anatoli Konovalenko was married, but he was planning a new life without Mira. He had tired of her years ago. She was no doubt equally tired of him. He never bothered to ask her. All they had left was a routine, devoid of substance, devoid of emotions. He compensated by indulging in regular affairs with women he met through his work.

Their two daughters were already living their own independent lives. No need to worry about them.

As the empire collapsed around him, he thought he would be able to melt into oblivion. Anatoli Konovalenko would cease to exist. He would change his identity, and perhaps also his appearance. His wife would have to cope as best she could on the pension she would receive once he was declared dead.

Most of his colleagues had organised their own emergency exits over the years, through which he could escape if necessary from a crisis situation. He had built up a reserve of foreign currency, and had a variety of identities at his disposal in the form of passports and other documents. He also had a number of contacts in top echelons in Aeroflot, the customs authorities and the foreign service. Anybody belonging to the
nomenklatura
was like a member of a secret society. They were there to help each other, and as a group had the certainty that their way of life would not give way beneath them. That was until the unimaginable collapse actually took place.

Towards the end, just before he fled, everything happened very quickly. He contacted Kleyn, who was a liaison officer between the KGB and the South African intelligence service. They had met when Konovalenko was visiting the Moscow station in Nairobi - his first assignment in the African continent, in fact. Kleyn made it clear that Konovalenko's services could be useful to him and his country. He planted in Konovalenko's head visions of immigration and a comfortable future.

But it would take time. Konovalenko needed an intermediate port of call after leaving the Soviet Union. He decided on Sweden. Several colleagues had recommended it. Apart from the high standard of living, it was easy to cross the borders, and at least as easy to keep out of the public eye. There was also a growing colony of Russians, many of them criminals, organised into gangs, that had started to operate in Sweden. They were generally the first rats to abandon the sinking ship. The KGB had always had excellent relations with the Russian criminal classes. Now they could be mutually helpful in exile.

As he got out of the car he noticed that there were blemishes on the face even of this country, and it was supposed to be a model society. This grim suburb reminded him of Leningrad and Berlin. It looked as though future decay was built into the facades. And yet Vladimir Rykoff and his wife Tania had done the right thing when they settled in Hallunda. They could live here in the anonymity they desired.

That I desire, he thought, correcting himself.

When he first came to Sweden, he used Rykoff to help him settle in. Rykoff had been living in Stockholm since the beginning of the 1980s. He had shot a KGB colonel in Kiev by mistake and fled the country. Because he had a dark complexion and looked like an Arab, he travelled as a Persian refugee and was rapidly granted refugee status, though he did not speak a word of Persian. When in due course he was granted Swedish citizenship, he took back his own name. He was only an Iranian when he dealt with the Swedish authorities. In order to support himself and his supposedly Iranian wife, while he was still living in a refugee camp near Flen, he carried out a few simple bank robberies. This produced sufficient capital to start out with. He set up a settlement service for other Russian immigrants who were now making their way to Sweden, more or less legally, in increasing numbers. His somewhat unorthodox travel agency became well known, and there were times when he had more potential clients than he could cope with. He had a number of Swedish civil servants on his payroll, including at times people in the immigration office, and it all helped to give the agency its reputation of efficiency. He was sometimes irritated by how hard it was to bribe Swedish civil servants, but he generally managed it eventually, as long as he was discreet. Rykoff had also established the much appreciated custom of inviting all new arrivals to a genuine Russian dinner in his apartment at Hallunda.

It did not take Konovalenko long to grasp that behind the hard exterior, Rykoff was in fact a weak character and easily led. When Konovalenko made a pass at his wife and she proved to be far from unwilling, he soon had Rykoff where he wanted him. Konovalenko arranged his business so that Rykoff did all the legwork, all the boring and routine assignments.

When Kleyn contacted him and offered him the job of taking care of an African contract killer, it was Rykoff who dealt with all the practical arrangements. It was Rykoff who rented the house in Skane, fixed the cars, and brought in the food supply. He dealt with the forgers and the weapon Konovalenko smuggled out of St Petersburg.

Konovalenko knew Rykoff had another virtue. He never hesitated to kill, when it was necessary.

Konovalenko took out his bag, locked the car, and took the lift to the fifth floor. He had a key, but he rang the doorbell instead. The signal was a sort of morse code version of the "Internationale".

Tania opened the door. She looked at him in surprise, seeing no sign of Mabasha, and alarmed at the bruise on his head.

"What happened?" she said. "Where's the African?"

"Is Vladimir here?" Konovalenko said, without troubling to answer her questions.

He handed her his bag and walked in. The apartment had four rooms and was furnished with expensive leather armchairs, a marble table, and the last word in stereo and video equipment. It was all very tasteless, and Konovalenko did not like living there. Right now, though, he had no alternative.

Rykoff emerged from the bedroom dressed in a silk robe. Unlike Tania, who was so slim, Rykoff looked as if he'd been given an order to get fat - an order he had been delighted to obey.

Tania prepared a meal and put a bottle of vodka on the table. Konovalenko told them as much as he thought they needed to know. He said nothing about the woman he had killed.

The thing that mattered was that Mabasha had suffered a mysterious breakdown. He had run away and had to be found and got rid of as rapidly as possible.

"Why didn't you do it in Skane?" Rykoff said.

"There were certain difficulties," Konovalenko said.

Neither Rykoff nor his wife asked any more questions.

While he was driving to Stockholm, Konovalenko had thought about what had happened, and what needed to happen now. Mabasha had only one possibility of leaving the country. He would have to find Konovalenko. Konovalenko was the one with the passports and tickets; he was the one who could supply him with money. Mabasha would most probably make his way to Stockholm. He was indeed most likely there already. Konovalenko and Rykoff would be ready to find him.

Konovalenko drank a few glasses of vodka. But he did not get drunk, even if that was what he most wanted to do right now. He had an important job to do first. He had to call Kleyn on the Pretoria telephone number he was only allowed to use in case of absolute necessity.

"Go into the bedroom," he said to the Rykoffs. "Close the door and switch the radio on. I have to make a call, and I don't want to be disturbed."

He knew that both of them would listen if they had the chance and he wanted none of it. He needed to explain to Kleyn about the woman he had been forced to kill.

That would give him the perfect reason to imply that Mabasha's breakdown was to their advantage. It would be obvious that it was thanks to Konovalenko that the man's weakness had been exposed before it could do any damage. Killing the woman could have been another plus. It would be clear to Kleyn, if he did not know it already, that Konovalenko was ruthless. As Kleyn had said, when they were in Nairobi, this was the kind of person South Africa needed most right now. White people with a disregard for death.

Konovalenko dialled the number he had memorised as soon as he was given it in Africa. During his many years as a KGB officer he had always honed his powers of concentration and memory. He had to dial the string of numbers four times before they were picked up by the satellite over the equator and sent back to earth again.

The call was answered at once in Pretoria.

Konovalenko recognised the slow, hoarse voice.

He described what had happened. This time he used a new code. Mabasha was the entrepreneur. He had prepared himself thoroughly while driving up to Stockholm, and Kleyn did not once interrupt him. When Konovalenko was finished, there was silence. He waited.

"We'll send you a new entrepreneur," Kleyn said, in the end. "The first one must be dismissed immediately, of course. We'll be in touch when we know more about his successor."

Konovalenko replaced the receiver and knew the call had turned out as he hoped. He would be seen as having prevented a disaster in the final stages. He could not resist tiptoeing up to the bedroom door and listening. There was no sound apart from the radio.

He sat at the table and poured himself half a glass of vodka. Now he could afford to get drunk. Since he needed to be alone, he let the bedroom door stay closed.

He thought about taking Tania now to the room where he slept when he was there, but she would come later, in her own time.

He got up early, taking care not to disturb Tania. Rykoff was sitting in the kitchen over a cup of coffee. Konovalenko got a cup for himself and sat on the other side of the kitchen table.