Trackers (49 page)

'Becker made the call from a public phone box at Eden on the
Bay in Blouberg,' the operator told Quinn.

'A hotel?'

'I think it's a new shopping centre
...'

'Another one?'

'I'm trying to find out.'

'Get me a map on the big screen,'
Quinn said. 'Mark the place where the number plate was stolen. Then the
shopping centre. How are we doing with the guest houses?'

'We've phoned more than twenty. Nothing
so far.'

'Make sure you include Blouberg as
well.'

Then silence, until Janina Mentz's
voice came from the back. 'Good work, Quinn.'

Masilo had hurriedly set up the
coordination office on the ground floor of the Wale Street Chambers. Network
cables snaked across the floor along with temporary phone connections, a long
table stood in the centre, a few chairs gathered around.

Burzynski came in carrying files and
a laptop, talking before the door even closed behind him. 'Your man Becker
works for himself,' he said and put the stack on the table, the laptop on one
side, and picked up the uppermost file.

'My man?'

'Figure of speech.' He handed the
file to Masilo. 'We received this from the FBI an hour ago. Turns out, Lukas
Becker is a smuggler. Of ancient and historic artefacts.'

Burzynski sat down and pulled his
laptop closer. 'I'll be using wireless and my mobile, if you don't mind. Not
that I don't trust you, of course, standard operating procedure ...' He pointed
at the file: 'As you'll see, the FBI opened a file on Becker in 2004, after he
was sacked by an archaeology professor from the University of Pennsylvania
during a dig in Turkey. They caught him with a two-thousand-year- old pendant,
worth a small fortune. The prof fired him on the spot, and, as he didn't want
to report it to the Turkish authorities for fear of losing his excavation
license, he made a call to the FBI. Told them other artefacts went missing too,
but they couldn't pin it on Becker. When the Bureau started looking at Becker's
past, they found that he was under suspicion at earlier digs, too, but nobody
had any proof.'

'And then he
went to Iraq.'

'Exactly. He must have known he had
no hope of working in archaeology again. So, he joined Xe Services to train Iraqi
boat crews patrolling the Tigris. Which runs all the way down to the Persian
Gulf, a highway to smugglers' heaven. A month ago, Interpol started uncovering
a massive syndicate trafficking in ancient artefacts, starting at the museums
in Baghdad, pipelines to New York and Amsterdam, ancient Persian stuff, art,
jewellery, you name it. Somehow, the info leaked, and the network started
disbanding very rapidly. And your man Becker resigned from Xe overnight, and
caught the first flight home, via London ...'

'Ahah ...'
said Tau Masilo.

'But there's one more thing. When
Interpol and the US Military Police started questioning some of the smugglers
they arrested, they were told Becker got away with a tidy sum belonging to the
syndicate bosses. Sterling. And, apparently, the syndicate caught up with your
man in Johannesburg, where he told them a sad tale of car-jacking, and a
fortune lost. Word is, he has six weeks to repay them, or they take him out.'

'Jeso.'

'Jeso,
indeed,' said Bruno Burzynksi. 'Now
that we've cleared the air, let's catch us some extremists.'

'Sir,' said another operator, 'here's
a call from Jarryd January, he says it's urgent,'

'Put him through.' He waited for the
little light to flash, and answered. 'You've got news?'

'My informant with the Ravens just
phoned. He said someone told Terror Baadjies and them that the Golf has been
spotted ...'

'In Blouberg?'

'Yes.' Surprised.

'Where exactly?'

'The guy drove out of the shopping centre,
Eden on the Bay. They were too late to tail him. But now everyone is on the way
there, every gangsta on the Flats.'

Quinn swore, barely audibly. He
turned to Mentz. 'Ma'am, I want to move the Reaction Unit to Blouberg now.'

'Do it.'

Right at the back of the FBI report
Masilo found a paragraph that made him suddenly pick up the phone and call
Mentz's Ops Room extension. 'Mentz.'

'Becker worked for himself. Smuggler
in antique artefacts, I've got a dossier here from the FBI, a report from
Interpol. But tell Quinn, he has three aliases, all with forged passports ...'

'Let me write them down.'

'John Andreas, Dennis Faber ...'

'His parents ...' 'Excuse me?'

'Those are variations on his parents'
names.'

'Oh .. .Yes .. .The last one is
Marcus Smithfield.'

'I'll tell Quinn. Any other news?'

'Nothing.'

She had asked Lukas over the phone,
where would he get weapons?

For the first time there was
irritation in his voice, impatience with
her, as though she was a
bothersome child. '
Jissis
, Milla, five years in Iraq, you get to know people,' and
then, 'I have to go, see you as soon as I can.' Brusque and hasty.

She dropped down in an armchair,
hurt, she had just been asking, she just wanted to know, there was no need to
talk to her like that. Self- pity clashed with a desire to be understanding of
his tone with her, indignation and the impulse to pack up and go against the
knowledge that she didn't want to return to her flat. She knew they were
waiting there for her, the ones who had bugged her, the ones who had studied
her whole life in her diaries, she never wanted to see them again.

She had to go back. She had to
collect her car, and her cellphone, there would be a message from Kemp, the
attorney, about someone who could find the microphones in her flat. She would
have to clean up and tidy up, she would keep the cellphone close at hand to
call Kemp if they tried to interrogate her again. This time she would fight
back, let them go ahead and charge her with something, she had broken no laws.

She would have to sit and wait until
Lukas was finished, until he came back from this other world, the one where you
got weapons because you knew people, the one where ships carried smuggled
cargo, where people hijacked and stole money. A man's world of organised crime
in Gauteng and the Cape Flats, and Muslim extremists. And poverty and
unemployment and drugs, a reality she was only vaguely aware of, because she
had been locked away in the prison, the fort of Durbanville, behind walls and
alarms, a pseudo world built on ignorance, denial and enclosure, by huddling
together with others who helped preserve the phantom of prosperity and
security.

The irony was that she hadn't felt at
home there. Durbanville was just as strange a landscape as this other one that
Lukas wanted to expose himself to. And here she stood, a foot in each of these
worlds, and she belonged in neither. Milla Strachan, permanent outsider. Her
instinct was to get up and pick up pen and paper and write about it until it
made sense, but she suddenly realised she was doing it again, trying to create
a safe haven with words, a home, a place she belonged, a universe that made
sense, even if just to her. Was that all she was destined to have?

She rose from the chair with the urge
to do something, to take part
in some sort of action that would
save her from this limbo, a lifebelt in the river of words.

Her eye fell on the laptop on the
counter, the one from which Lukas had extracted the explosive and the equally
dangerous information, and she thought, let me take a look, I can at least know
what he knows, it will make the wait for him more bearable.

'I've got him,' an operator called,
hand cupped over the telephone receiver. 'Under the name of Dennis Faber, in
the Big Bay Beach Club.'

'Hotel?' Quinn asked.

'No, it's self-catering units ...'

'Where is it?'

'Last place on the right when you
drive out of Blouberg towards Melkbos.'

'Which number?'

'Sir?'

'Which number is Becker in?' Quinn
lifted his phone receiver, called Major Tiger Mazibuko, commanding officer of
the Reaction Unit.

'Oh ... hold on ...' the operator
said. 'Ma'am, Dennis Faber, what is the number of his unit... Twenty-seven ...'

'Mazibuko.'

'The Big Bay Beach Club, it's a
holiday resort just outside Blouberg. He's in number twenty-seven ...'

'We're on our way.'

'How long?'

'Fifteen minutes.'