The Last Trade (12 page)

11

Johannesburg

S
awa Luhabe has an hour.

The second-year broker at Rosehall Fund Managers, a private equity firm conveniently located across from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, taps on the wheel of her nine-year-old Toyota Celica, waiting for a light to change. Every day, while her partners sneak out to grab lunch in some upscale Sandton eatery, Luhabe hustles to her car and drives the eight kilometers back to her flat in Alexandra (Alex) township all, traffic permitting, to spend a precious half hour with her three-year-old daughter.

When she first started at Rosehall, one of Johannesburg's oldest and most respected firms, Luhabe's coworkers laughed at her for being in such a rush to leave the most affluent section of the city to visit one of its most impoverished and dangerous townships. In fact, they didn't understand why Luhabe still lived in Alex at all.

But they weren't black, female, and single. They hadn't grown up in a shantytown or had to scratch and hustle their way out of an overcrowded grammar school to a university scholarship. They hadn't worked forty-hour weeks and a series of unpaid internships at banks and brokerage houses while taking a full course load. And they had never met her daughter, Wendy. Sure, it would be easy to get a fancy condo in Sandton, and if her fortunes at the fund continue to rise, it won't be a problem at all. But still, it would be an extravagance, and in many ways a betrayal.

She is torn. She wants her girl to grow up and appreciate the heritage and culture of Alexandra, and of her family, but she doesn't want her to fall in with the wrong crowd, or worse, to die young, a victim of senseless street violence, as have so many of Luhabe's friends and extended family in Alexandra. Including her father, her brother, and her husband.

On the other hand, while a move to Sandton would be safer and more comfortable, she doesn't want her daughter to be one of the only black faces in an enclave of material indulgence and white privilege. The final reason that Sawa Luhabe still lives in a modest home Alexandra and not Sandton is she can't help but think that at any time someone or something will pull it all away from her: the job, the opportunity, the money. The future. Not an uncommon fear, she knows, for someone raised in a shack without a father, and whose husband was gunned down in the street three months after her wedding.

The light changes and the landscape transforms in a rush. One minute she's passing the exclusive stores and restaurants of Nelson Mandela Square, and the next she's making sure the windows are up and the door locks are down as she rolls through the crowded, trash – cluttered streets of Alex.

Plastic bags dangle from high wires like prayer flags. Men drinking home-brewed
umqombothi
, a traditional African beer, sit in front of tin-roofed squatter shanties, glaring until they see the color of her face. Then, unless they recognize her, their eyes shine with a different manner of resentment.

Luhabe is oblivious to any threat. For starters, it's daylight, and she's been passing through these neighborhoods as long as she can remember. It's not as dangerous as it would be if say, she happened to be a white, drug-seeking stock broker visiting Alex after dark.

Normally she'd be anxious, but her Tuesday morning has been better than good. After the 8
A.M.
call with the analysts, she spent the rest of the morning dealing with a money manager in Berlin representing an American client who was taking a number of short positions, each chopped into almost a thousand micro-transactions, all on American new media stocks. She's never heard of some of the stocks, but then again just a couple of years ago she'd never heard of YouTube or Facebook or foursquare. Regardless, once she gets back to the office, once she checks on the progress of the ongoing transactions, she plans on looking into the numbers of the companies in play, the philosophy behind the mystery client's picks, if not the mystery client himself. Despite the fact that the client requested that she not tell anyone about the moves, she feels obligated to look into them. She's worked too hard to get here to have it all blow up over one client, no matter how wealthy he appears to be.

Plus, for Luhabe, every number tells a story, every transaction changes a life, and every moment is a new opportunity to learn.

She notices the white van trailing her when she's within ten blocks of her house. Six blocks later, she follows her instincts and takes an abrupt left without using her signal. A peek in the mirror reveals the van breaking hard and making the same sharp left. Luhabe's been followed before and robbed before, more times than she cares to remember. But never in the daylight, at lunchtime. Still, she knows that something is dangerous and odd about this van—perhaps they targeted her as a money mark coming out of Sandton?—so she responds accordingly.

At the next stop sign she taps the brakes, then races forward through another stop sign before swerving to the left. She's already decided that she won't go home for lunch this afternoon. In part because she was running late to begin with, but mostly because she'd never lead whomever this is anywhere near her home. She'll call and let her mother know not to expect her as soon as she's able to break away from the van, when she's back on safer streets.

Before her wedding, when she first started working in Sandton, her husband-to-be bought her a gun. She doesn't know what kind. Some kind of pistol. He wanted her to be able to protect herself. She responded with a tantrum, said that she would not carry a gun to work, and would not abide a gun in her house. He promised he'd take it back to the person from whom he'd bought it. But one day after his death, she found it in a bag with his soccer gear in their closet. Where it wasn't going to do her very much good at this moment.

She glances in the rearview and sees the van dropping back. Stopping. To be safe, she makes another turn, a right down a street whose sidewalks are covered with bagged and unbagged refuse. Then another turn, a right onto a side road that runs parallel to the N-3 highway. She doesn't remember being on this street before, but she's fairly sure that if she hugs the highway it will take her back to Sandton. She comes to a complete stop at the next red light and takes a deep breath. No one will believe this in the office, and no one will think twice about it back in Alex, so why bother mentioning it to any of them?

Mom will be worried, she thinks. And Wendy will be disappointed. She wanted to perform a dance she's been practicing. Luhabe leans across the passenger seat, reaching for her mobile with one eye trained on the light. Of course she won't mention the van to them, either. She'll simply tell them that she got caught up in the machinations of one of the biggest transactions of her career, which is true. And that perhaps as a result they'd soon be able to take a long weekend to visit Cape Town, or the relatives in Swaziland. It's been too long since she's taken them on vacation.

She's still reaching for her phone when she sees the young man in the black woolen mask rounding the corner on the passenger side of the car. She knows instantly, before he locks in on her car, that the shooter is coming for her. As he drops into a firing stance, Luhabe rams her foot down onto the accelerator. Stretched halfway across the front seat, she drives blind, from memory, for her life.

Sawa Luhabe's Toyota makes its way into the center of the intersection before the shooter locks in on his target and squeezes off a seventy-nine-bullet burst from a Tec-9 pistol on full-auto discharge.

The seemingly driverless car careers through the intersection and manages to swerve to the left onto a side street before crashing to a stop in a pile of bagged sidewalk trash. Smoke hisses from underneath the crumpled hood. Nothing else moves.

The gunman stares across the street at the silenced car for a moment, takes a half step toward it, then changes his mind. He lowers the pistol, turns, and runs back down the street from which he appeared.

Seconds later a young man on a fat-tired bicycle rolls to a stop alongside Luhabe's car, leans to look inside the front seat, then continues on. He's just curious, interested in neither the fate of the driver nor the gunman. In Alexandra, one of the worst townships in a country where more than fifty people are murdered every twenty-four hours, the scene is not out of the ordinary.

12

Hong Kong

S
obieski looks at the incoming number on her cell, doesn't recognize it, and decides to let it ring. She's standing in her sparsely furnished apartment, staring out its lone window at the bustling stalls of Stanley Market. Five seconds after the phone stops ringing, it starts again. Same number. What the hell.

“Who is this?”

“This is your friend on the barge.” She turns her back to the window and closes her eyes. Cheung.

“How'd you get—”

“How do you think? You think TFI has all the surveillance toys?”

She doesn't answer. “What?”

“Your information was not exactly proprietary. Not particularly exclusive or at all valuable.”

“I see.”

“In fact, I look rather foolish now, after attempting to pass this off as some kind of inside—”

“We shouldn't be discussing this. I can come—”

“No,” Cheung says with force. “You will not come anywhere near here until you have something substantial. And if you don't, by the end of the week we will come to you.”

“I can't do it. I'll find a way. I can't compromise myself like this.”

“Too late,” he answers. “You already have. On tape.”

After Cheung hangs up, Sobieski turns and looks at her leather duffel, packed for Berlin, and at her computer screen, tracking the latest activity initiated by Siren in Berlin and going down in Johannesburg.

13

Johannesburg

S
awa Luhabe's Toyota Celica sits smoking and hissing beneath an overpass for the N-3. The hood is crushed in the front and humped up in the middle from the impact of the refuse pile. The sheet metal of the front and rear passenger-side doors is punctured by dozens of bullet holes. The passenger windows on both sides of the car are gone, reduced to scattered blue shards on the faded seats and floor mats.

Luhabe gets out and takes inventory of her trembling body. Nothing. Then she walks to the passenger side and gasps when she sees the damage. She looks around. Cars zip past on the highway overhead. Garbage is piled against the concrete abutment, plastic bags and newspapers pressed against a chain link fence whisper in the breeze.

You still can die, she thinks. They still can kill you. She gets back in the car, which she was afraid to turn off because who knows how much longer it will last, and shifts into reverse.

Common sense tells her to drive directly to the office in Sandton, but her street instincts tell her otherwise.

She surges backward, then jerks the gearshift into drive and heads toward the streets of Alex. Back toward her house. That was not a robbery, she assures herself. That was a hit. And unless it was mistaken identity, it had to do with work. The call this morning. The client. The odd and specific set of rules. You should have known, she tells herself. Anything that easy can't be good. Anything that good can't be true.

This you, of all people, should know.

En route, she calls her office. “Hello, Lucy, it's Sawa. Have I had any calls?”

Her admin, a cheery young woman from Soweto, says, “Oh, yes, Miss Luhabe. One from your mother, who wants to know if she should still expect you. One from, believe it or not, a man in the United States. One from a man in Hong Kong and at least three from Berlin. Twice in the last five minutes.”

“What did he want?”

“To know if you'd returned yet.”

“Listen,” Luhabe says. “If anyone else calls . . . anyone . . . do not tell them whether I've returned or have called. Tell them you don't know where I am, that you just answer the phone.”

“Is everything all right, Miss Luhabe?”

“Yes. There's been . . . Some unexpected things have come up today, and I'm going to have to take some time to address them . . .”

“Yes.”

“So I'm not going to be coming back to the office this afternoon, and perhaps tomorrow, as well.”

She parks a half block down the street from her house and walks through a maze of narrow alleys in order to enter her lot from the back. Clean clothes hang from a nylon line stretched from the back wall of her house to a metal post in the center of the yard. A well-tended patch of vegetables—carrots and broccoli and tomatoes—runs along the length of the concrete wall that separates her house from the neighbors. She climbs the back steps and gently opens the kitchen door.

“It's about time,” her mother says as she enters the kitchen. “That child has been waiting for you all day.”

“Mother,” Luhabe responds. “I need you to pay attention. We have to leave. Someone just tried to kill me on the way here and I believe they'll be back soon to try again.”

“Jesus, girl. What have you gotten yourself involved in?”

“I haven't . . .”

“This related to your brother? Because he—”

Luhabe raises her voice. “Mother! I don't know!”

“Who, then?”

“I don't know. It was a few blocks from here. They shot at me and I lost them. I believe they think I'm wounded, or heading back to Sandton. But that won't last. I need you to quickly pack a bag. Enough for a day or two.”

“I understand.”

“I'll pack for Wendy.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the cousins.”

“Cousins?”

“Yes. To your nieces and nephews back home in Swaziland. We should be safe there. And Mother . . .”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember when Tau brought home the gun ? The fight we had over it?”

Her mother nods. “What of it?”

Luhabe looks down. Her daughter calls her name from the next room. “Do we still have it?”

Her mother nods.

“Then I would like you to pack it as well.”