Vortex (54 page)

“For now.”

“Yeah. For now. ” Ian rubbed angrily at a smear of groundin dirt from the road on his own face. It served as a grim reminder of the night’s disaster.

“But when the police identify Sam’s body and trace that car, they’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.”

Images of the burning Mercedes and of Muller’s car speeding away to safety flashed into his mind and he slammed his fists into the wall, making both Emily and Matthew Sibena jump.

“Goddamnit! I should have known! I should have known that bastard was giving in too easily!”

He took a deep breath, fighting for control.

“We have a

day or so before things really start to cave in. Sam wasn’t carrying any ID tonight.” He looked somberly at Emily and Sibena.

“I’ll call my friend at the embassy. He should be able to rig up some kind of temporary papers for the two of you. With luck, we can be on a plane out of this fucking country before they start looking for us.”

Sibena nodded gratefully, but Emily turned away without saying anything.

She moved to the console where Knowles had spent so many of his waking hours splicing and re splicing tapes, bringing structure and theme out of a confusion of recorded sights and sounds.

Ian watched her quietly, praying that her Afrikaner stubborn streak wasn’t about to erupt. They’d gambled and lost. Now it was time to back away before any more of them lost their lives. He felt his hands ball into fists. Damn. He didn’t want to leave either. He wanted to nail Muller’s head on a pole-personally. But there was a world of difference between wanting something and being able to make it happen.

“Ian!” Emily’s voice sliced through his increasingly morose thoughts.

“Look at this!”

She held out a single sheet of notepaper.

“I found it there.

She pointed to a pile of videocassettes stacked neatly atop the computer casing.

He recognized Knowles’s sloppy, almost illegible handwriting.

“Some extra copies of the hotel hijinks … just in case the creep cheats. Get him for me.” Tears bluffed his vision until he blinked them away. The little cameraman had known he might not come back, and he’d still gone through with it.

Emily touched his arm.

“We can’t abandon this, Ian. It would mean that

Sam’s death was for nothing.”

He took her by the hand and looked deep into her eyes.

“Believe me, I don’t want to give up. It’s just that I can’t see any way left for us to get those damned documents without getting killed.

”

She started to nod and then stopped abruptly, sudden excitement creeping in past her sadness. Ian had seen that look before.

“You’ve got an idea?”

Emily answered by tugging him over to where they’d tacked up a spare city map of Johannesburg. She pointed to the site they’d picked for their disastrous rendezvous.

“Tell me, what was wrong with the area around

Madderfontein?”

Reluctantly, Ian mentally ran through the painful, frightening sequence of events yet again. As always, hindsight operated with perfect 20/20 vision.

“It was too empty, too deserted. We thought that’d help, but all it did was make it easy for Muller to zero in on us.”

Emily nodded seriously and pointed at another spot on the map.

“So if we try again, but here this time . She paused significantly.

Ian followed her finger and sucked in his breath, beginning to understand what she had in mind.

Emily saw the comprehension dawning in his eyes and motioned Matthew

Sibena closer. He was going to have to be a full partner from now on.

“This is how I believe we should proceed .. .... Both Ian and Sibena listened with mounting respect and confidence as she outlined her idea for snatching the Gawamba-raid documents out from under

Erik Muller’s nose.

OCTOBER
25-
DIRECTORATE
OF
MILITARY
INTELLIGENCE
,
PRETORIA

The early-mo ming phone call ruined what had begun as a delightfully routine day.

“Your cowardly treachery failed, meneer.”

Muller gripped the phone so hard that the blood drained out of his knuckles. That same cold, arrogant, demanding woman’s voice! Damn that idiot Reynders! He’d failed.

“Several of my friends wanted to distribute the tape immediately-to the

President, your cabinet colleagues, and other interested parties.”

Muller shivered, imagining the gleeful reaction of his enemies and the hatred of his former allies if they ever saw

those pornographic images, He licked suddenly dry lips.

“Well?”

“You are a fortunate man, Meneer Muller.” Her sarcasm bit deep.

“I

persuaded them to give you one last chance.”

He felt a faint stirring of hope. The fools were going to give him another chance to destroy them! He pulled a thick booklet of street maps closer to him and picked up a pencil.

“Where?”

The woman’s instructions were, like her voice, clear, clinical, and painstakingly precise. Muller frowned at the notes he’d scribbled.

Whoever these people were, they’d definitely learned a thing or two from their failure the night before. It wouldn’t be so easy this time. He cleared his throat.

“And what about the tape? When will I get this duplicate copy you claim to have?”

“You’ll get the tape when we are satisfied that you’ve given us the real documents. Not before.”

Muller grimaced.

“And how do I know that I can trust you?”

This time the woman didn’t bother concealing her contempt and her hatred.

“You don’t know, meneer. It’s that simple.” Her voice hardened.

“Do not attempt to double-cross us again, boy lover. You won’t get a third chance to save your neck. ”

The phone went dead in his ear.

JOHANNESBURG
RAILWAY
STATION

The platforms of the Johannesburg Railway Station were jammed with a sea of irritable black and white faces.

Despite the Vorster government’s best repressive efforts, strict apartheid had proven impossible to reimpose on the city’s overburdened public transportation systemat least during peak commuting hours. A flood tide of tens of thousands of black store clerks, janitors, and factory hands leaving Johannesburg for their Soweto hovels mingled with thousands of white businessmen and wealthy, bored house wives heading for home in the rich northern suburbs. There wasn’t enough space under the train-station roof for the evening commute to be anything but a deafening, sweaty, milling madhouse.

The crowding made it impossible for the detachments of uniformed soldiers and police assigned to enforce order to do more than deter the most obvious kinds of crime or trouble making And they weren’t trained or equipped to carry out covert surveillance operations.

In a word, Erik Muller thought sourly as he watched from the station manager’s second-floor office, the security troops were useless. He adjusted the office’s venetian blinds again, opening them a fraction more to get a better view of the main station concourse below.

The sight of the swirling crowds brought a scowl to his narrow face. The six agents he’d posted around the concourse were going to have a damned hard time keeping the drop point in view. He lifted the field glasses hanging from his neck and focused them on the trash bin near a central pillar.

The papers were still there, stuffed awkwardly between the bin and pillar-held together only by a thin rubber band. Something that bitch who’d called him had insisted on as a precaution against hidden explosives or tracking devices.

Muller swore as a sudden surge of black day laborers heading for an arriving train blocked his view of the drop point. He lowered his field glasses, impatiently waiting for the small mob to pass by.

When he looked again, the papers were gone. For an instant, Muller stiffened in shock. Then he whirled, looking for the black workers who’d just swarmed past the drop point. They were several meters farther on, pushing their way through the milling crowds to clamber aboard the closest train. Muller swore again. Every one of the blacks was carrying a lunch pail or shopping bag of some kind-perfect for concealing documents. As he watched, they mingled with a throng of white commuters moving in the opposite direction.

Muller dropped his field glasses and reached for the walkie talkie hooked to his belt.

“Captain, order your men to stop

those blacks trying to board at Platform Two! Stop them and search them for stolen state security papers!”

Shrill whistles tore through the air and boots slammed rhythmically on the train station’s concrete floor as a platoon of heavily armed soldiers jogged forward through the crowds and deployed along the edge of the platform. In seconds, they were in position-patting down men and women alike and poking rifles into bags and lunch pails with brisk, impersonal efficiency.

Muller allowed himself a brief, humorless smile. So there were blacks involved in this little conspiracy, eh? So much the better. He knew how to extract information from blacks. A half hour’s work in a well-equipped interrogation center should give him the names of the other plotters. And with luck, he’d have them all swept away into oblivion before they had a chance to post that damning videotape.

But his smile faded as the search went on and on without any sign of success.

Two people passed through the station’s sliding doors and emerged, blinking, into the lateafternoon sunlight. The first, a stylishly dressed young white woman, carried only a gleaming leather briefcase. The thin, young black man following five paces behind her strained under a heavy load-the bags and boxes that seemed to represent the fruits of a day-long shopping expedition.

The woman glanced back once at the station and then strode confidently across Joubert Street to the parked car waiting for her-a battered Ford

Escort. The black chauffeur hurried ahead to open the rear door for her.

She slid gracefully into the backseat and kissed the man already there.

Ian Sheffield gently disentangled himself and asked, “Well, did you get them?”

Emily van der Heijden smiled happily and pulled the sheaf of papers out of her brand-new briefcase. They had the last piece of the puzzle they needed.

Muller and his master, Karl Vorster, were about to be exposed as men who’d betrayed their sacred oaths and their own people in a quest for power and position.

NETWORK
STUDIOS
,
JOHANNESBURG

Ian finished his photocopying and laid the last sheet of paper to one side.

“All set.”

Emily looked up from her reading. She pushed a loose strand of hair away from her eyes and shook her head slowly from side to side.

“My God, even though I had some idea of what to expect, I still can’t believe it! They knew everything that would happen. The time. The place. Even the weapons and coded signals that would be used. Everything!”

Ian nodded grimly and slid his copies into a manila folder along with a videocassette.

“Your recorded narration?” Emily pointed to the tape.

He nodded again.

“Yeah. It’s just a rough cut. Sam was going to…”

He faltered briefly before continuing, “Sam was going to do the final editing, but I’ll have to leave that up to the guys in New York instead.”

He shrugged into his jacket and picked up the manila folder.

I thought I’d better drop this off at the embassy so my friend there can send it out in tomorrow’s diplomatic bag.” He reached over for one of the two remaining tapes showing Muller’s Sun City encounter.

“I’ll leave this for that bastard to find at the same time.”

Emily narrowed her eyes.

“Why give it to him at all? He murdered Sam and he would have murdered us if he’d had the chance.”

Ian sighed “I know. But we made a deal … and a deal’s a deal, even if you’re trading with the devil himself.” He waggled the tape.

“Besides, we’ve got what we wanted. And I’ll be damned if I ever stoop low enough to really use something like this against anyone for real-even someone like that son of a bitch Muller.”

Emily didn’t say anything more as he leaned forward, kissed her, and left on his errands. Instead she sat quietly, thinking furiously. Ian was a good man. Too good, perhaps. His sense of honor wouldn’t let him seek revenge against Erik Muller-not even after the man had killed his best friend. She wiped away tears that rose unbidden as she remembered Sam

Knowles’s always cheerful, ever-irreverent face.

At last, Emily shook her head and picked up the last remaining copy of the videotape. She couldn’t let Muller’s treachery pass unpunished.

She opened the phone book. Another of Johannesburg’s many messenger services would soon be delivering a sealed package to the Ministry of

Law and Order.

OCTOBER
27-
DIRECTORATE
OF
MILITARY

INTELLIGENCE
,
SPECIAL
SECURITY
OPERATIONS

BRANCH
,
PRETORIA

Even with the air-conditioning off, the office felt cold. Erik Muller stared in disbelief at the police report sitting faceup on his desk. A combination of forensic medicine and dogged detective work had finally identified the dead man found in the bomb-mangled Mercedes.

Samuel Knowles. Age: thirty-seven. Citizenship: American. Profession:

television news cameraman.

My God. The very magnitude of the disaster was stunning. It couldn’t possibly be any worse. He’d given the
ANC
documents seized at Gawamba to

American journalists! And they’d already had them for nearly forty-eight hours-two precious, uninterrupted days to smuggle the information they contained out of South Africa.

Disaster indeed. Even the country’s whites were growing increasingly dissatisfied and disenchanted with the Vorster government. A costly foreign war, bloody internal rioting,