The White Lioness (16 page)

De Klerk raised his hand. Van Heerden did not need to spell it out. De Klerk could picture only too clearly the resulting catastrophe.

"There is another detail which worries me," van Heerden said. "We keep a watch on a number of known murderers, both black and white. People who are prepared to kill anybody at all if the contract is right. I think I'm right in claiming that our precautionary measures against possible attacks on politicians are quite efficient. Yesterday I received a report from the security police in Umtata saying that a certain Victor Mabasha paid a visit to Johannesburg a few days ago. When he returned to Ntibane, he had a lot of cash with him."

De Klerk made a face. "That sounds a bit circumstantial," he said.

"I'm not so sure about that," van Heerden said. "If I were planning to kill the President of this country, I would probably choose Mabasha to do it."

De Klerk raised his eyebrows. "Even if you were going to assassinate Nelson Mandela?"

"Oh, yes."

"A black contract killer?"

"He is very good."

De Klerk got up from his deck chair and poked away at the fire, which was dying out. He did not have the strength just now to absorb what constituted a good contract killer. He put a few branches on the fire, and stretched his back. His bald head glittered in the light from the fire, which flamed up once more. He looked up at the sky and contemplated the Southern Cross. He felt very tired. Nevertheless, he tried to come to terms with what van Heerden had said. A conspiracy was more than plausible. He had often imagined being killed by an assassin sent by furious white
Boere
who were forever accusing him of selling out and handing their country over to the blacks. Of course, he also wondered what would happen if Mandela were to die, irrespective of whether it was a natural or an unnatural death. Nelson Mandela was an old man. Even if he did have a strong constitution, he had spent nearly 30 years in jail.

De Klerk went back to his chair. "You'll have to concentrate on exposing this conspiracy," he said. "Use whatever means you like. Money is no problem at all. Get in touch with me at any time of day or night if something significant happens. For the moment, there are two measures that must be taken, or at least considered. One is perfectly obvious, of course: my guard will have to be intensified as discreetly as possible. I'm rather more doubtful about the other one."

Van Heerden suspected what the President had in mind. He waited for him to continue.

"Shall I tell him, or shan't I?" wondered de Klerk. "How will he react? Or should I wait until we know a bit more?"

Van Heerden knew de Klerk was not asking him for advice. The questions were directed towards himself. The answers would also be his own.

"I'll think about it," said de Klerk. "We live in the most beautiful country on earth. But there are monsters lurking in the shadows. I sometimes wish I could see into the future. I'd like to be able to. But to be honest, I don't know if I dare."

The meeting was over. Van Heerden vanished into the shadows.

De Klerk sat staring into the fire. He was really too tired to make a decision. Should he inform Mandela of the conspiracy, or should he wait? He remained by the fire, watching it die down. At last he made up his mind. He would say nothing to his friend just yet.

CHAPTER TEN

Mabasha had been trying in vain to dismiss what happened as just a bad dream. The woman outside the house had never existed. Konovalenko, the man he was forced to hate, did not kill her. It was just a dream that a spirit, a
sangoma
, had poisoned his mind with, to make him unsure, and possibly unable to carry out his assignment. It was the curse hanging over him because he was a black South African, he was aware of that. Not knowing who he was, or what he was allowed to be. A man who ruthlessly wallowed in violence one minute, and the next minute failed to understand how anybody could kill a fellow human being. He realised the spirits had set their singing hounds on him. They were watching over him, keeping tabs on him; they were his ultimate guardians, infinitely more watchful than Kleyn could ever be . . .

From the very start everything had gone wrong. He instinctively disliked and mistrusted the man who met him at the airport outside St Petersburg.

He was devious. Plus, Anatoli Konovalenko was racist. On several occasions Mabasha had come close to throttling him and telling him that he knew what Konovalenko was thinking: that he was just a
kaffir
, an inferior being.

But he controlled himself. He had an assignment, and that had to come before anything else. Yet the violence of his own reaction surprised him. He had been surrounded by racism all his life. In his own way, he had learned to live with it. So why did he react like this to Konovalenko? Perhaps he could not accept being regarded as inferior by a white man who did not come from South Africa?

The journey from Johannesburg to London, and then on to Russia, had gone without a hitch. He sat awake on the night flight to London, looking out into the darkness. Occasionally he thought he could see fires blazing away in the darkness far below, but he realised it was his imagination. It was not the first time he had left South Africa. He had killed an ANC representative in Lusaka, and on another occasion he had been in what was then Southern Rhodesia as part of a team that had attempted to assassinate the revolutionary leader Joshua Nkomo. That was the only time he had failed. And that was when he decided he would only work alone in the future.

Yebo, yebo
, never, ever again would he subordinate himself. As soon as he was ready to return to South Africa from this freezing cold Scandinavian land, Konovalenko would be no more than an insignificant detail in the bad dream that his
sangoma
had poisoned him with. Konovalenko was an insignificant puff of smoke that would be chased out of his body. The holy spirit hidden in the howls of the singing hounds would chase him away. His poisoned memory would never again need to worry about the arrogant Russian with grey, worn-down teeth.

Konovalenko was small and sturdy. He barely came up to Mabasha's shoulders. (But there was nothing wrong with his head, something Mabasha had established right away.) It was not surprising, of course. Kleyn would never be satisfied with anything less than the best on the market.

On the other hand, Mabasha could never have imagined how brutal Konovalenko was. Of course, he recognised that a senior officer in the KGB, whose specialty had been liquidating infiltrators and deserters would have few scruples. But as far as Mabasha was concerned, unnecessary brutality was the sign of an amateur. A contract killing should be carried out
mningi checha
, very fast and without unnecessary suffering for the victim.

They left St Petersburg the day after Mabasha arrived. The ferry passage to Sweden was so cold that he spent the whole voyage in his cabin, wrapped in a blanket. Before their arrival in Stockholm Konovalenko gave him a new passport and his instructions. He discovered he was now a Swedish citizen named Shalid.

"You used to be a stateless Eritrean exile," Konovalenko said. "You came to Sweden at the end of the 1960s, and were granted citizenship in 1978."

"Shouldn't I at least speak a few words of Swedish after more than 20 years?" Mabasha said.

"It'll be enough to be able to say thank you,
tack
," Konovalenko said. "No-one will ask you anything."

Konovalenko was right.

To Mabasha's great surprise, the young Swedish passport officer had done no more than glance casually at his passport before returning it. Could it really be as simple as this to travel into and out of a country? He began to understand why the preparations for his assignment were happening so far away from South Africa.

Even if he distrusted - no, positively disliked - the man who was to be his instructor, he was impressed by the invisible organisation behind him. A car was waiting for them at the docks, the keys were on the left rear wheel. As Konovalenko didn't know his way out of Stockholm, another car led them out as far as the southbound highway before disappearing. It seemed to Mabasha that the world was being run by secret organisations and people like his
sangoma
. The world was shaped and changed in the underworld. People like Kleyn were mere messengers. Just where Mabasha fitted into this secret organisation, he had no idea. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

They drove through the Swedish countryside. Here and there Mabasha glimpsed patches of snow through the conifer trees. Konovalenko did not drive especially fast, and said practically nothing as he drove. That suited Mabasha, as he was tired after the long journey. He kept falling asleep in the back seat, and immediately his spirit would start talking to him. The singing hound howled away in the darkness of his dreams, and when he opened his eyes he was not at all sure where he was. It was raining non-stop. Everything seemed clean and orderly. When they stopped for a meal, Mabasha had the feeling that nothing could ever go wrong in this country.

But there was something missing. Mabasha tried, but in vain, to determine what it was. The countryside they were travelling through filled him with a nostalgic longing.

The journey took all day.

"Where are we making for?" Mabasha said after they had been in the car for three hours. Konovalenko waited several minutes to reply. "We're headed south," he said. "You'll see when we get there."

The evil dream of his
sangoma
was still some way off. The woman had not yet entered the yard, and her skull had not yet been shattered by the bullet from Konovalenko's pistol. Mabasha had no thoughts beyond doing what Kleyn was paying him to do. Part of the assignment was to listen to what Konovalenko had to say to him. According to Mabasha's imagination the spirits, both good and bad, had been left behind in South Africa, in the mountain caves near Ntibane. The spirits never left the country, never crossed borders.

They arrived at the farmhouse, well off the main roads, at 8 p.m. Even in St Petersburg Mabasha had noted with surprise that dusk and night were not as in Africa. It was light when it should have been dark, and dusk did not drop down over the earth like the heavy fist of night; it wafted down slowly like a leaf floating on an invisible breath of air.

They carried the few bags into the house and installed themselves in their separate bedrooms. The house was comfortably warm. That too must have been thanks to the perfectionism of the discreet organisation. They would have assumed a black man would freeze to death in polar regions like this. And a man who is cold, like a man who is hungry or thirsty, would be unable to do or learn anything.

The ceilings were low. Mabasha could barely fit under the exposed roof beams. He wandered around the house and noticed a strange smell of furniture, carpets and wax polish. But the smell he missed most was that of an open fire.

Africa was a long way away. It occurred to him that making him feel the distance might be intentional. This is where the plan was to be tested, retested, and perfected. Nothing should be allowed to interfere; nothing should arouse thoughts of what might be in store later.

Konovalenko produced frozen meals from a big freezer. Mabasha realised he should check this out later to see how many portions were stored there; that way he could calculate how long he was expected to stay in the house.

Konovalenko opened his bags and took out a bottle of Russian vodka. He offered Mabasha a glass as they sat at the dining table, but he declined. He always cut down his drinking when he was preparing for an assignment: one beer a day, two at the most. But Konovalenko drank heavily and was clearly drunk even the first evening. This presented Mabasha with an obvious advantage. If he needed to, he could exploit Konovalenko's weakness for alcohol.

The vodka loosened Konovalenko's tongue. He started talking about paradise lost, the KGB during the 1960s and 70s, when they held undisputed sway over the Soviet empire and no politician could be sure that the KGB did not have extensive files on their secrets. Mabasha thought the KGB might have replaced the
sangoma
in this Russian empire, where no citizen was allowed to believe in holy spirits except in secrecy.

To Mabasha it seemed that a society which attempted to put the gods to flight would be doomed. The
amakosi
know this in my homeland, and hence our gods have not been threatened by Apartheid. They can live freely and have never been subjected to the pass laws; they have always been able to move around without being humiliated. If our holy spirits had been banished to remote prison islands, and our singing hounds chased into the Kalahari Desert, not a single white man, woman or child would have survived in South Africa. All of them, Afrikaners as well as Englishmen, would have been annihilated long ago and their miserable skeletons buried in the red soil. In the old days, when his ancestors were still fighting against the white intruders, the Zulu warriors used to cut off their fallen victims' lower jaw. An
impi
returning from a victorious battle would bring with him these jawbones as trophies to adorn the temple entrances of their tribal chiefs. Now it was the gods who were on the front line against the whites, and they would never submit.

The first night in the strange house, Mabasha enjoyed a dreamless sleep. He shed the lingering after-effects of his journey, and when he woke at dawn he felt entirely rested and restored. Somewhere in the background he could hear Konovalenko snoring. He got up, dressed, and searched the house. He did not know what he was looking for, but Kleyn seemed always present, his watchful eye was ever on him.

In the attic, which surprisingly smelled vaguely of corn, reminiscent of sorghum, he found a radio transmitter. Mabasha was no expert on advanced electronics, but he had no doubt this equipment was capable of transmitting to and receiving messages from South Africa. He continued his search, and eventually found what he was looking for - in the form of a locked door at one end of the house. Behind that door was the reason he had undertaken this long journey.

He went outside and urinated in the yard. He had the impression his urine had never been so yellow. It must be the food, he thought. This strange, unspiced food. The journey. And the spirits struggling in my dreams. Wherever I go, I take Africa with me.

There was a mist lying motionless over the countryside. He walked round the house, and came upon a neglected orchard where he could recognise only a few of the trees. All was silent, and it seemed to him he might have been somewhere else - possibly even somewhere in Natal on a June morning.

He felt cold, and went back into the house. Konovalenko was making coffee in the kitchen, dressed in a red tracksuit. When he turned his back to Mabasha, he saw that it had CCCP embroidered on it.

The work started after breakfast. Konovalenko unlocked the door to the secret room. It was empty, apart from a table and a very bright ceiling light. On the table were a rifle and a pistol, but what makes they were Mabasha could not say. His first impression was that the rifle looked awkward.

"This is one of our prize products," Konovalenko said. "Effective, but not exactly sleek. The starting point was a run-of-the-mill Remington 375 HH. But our KGB technicians refined the weapon until it reached a state of perfection. You can pick off whatever you like up to 800 metres. The only things to rival the laser sights are on the American army's most guarded secret weapons. Unfortunately, we were never able to use this masterpiece in any of our assignments. In other words, you have the honour of introducing it to the world."

Mabasha approached the table and examined the rifle.

"Feel it," Konovalenko said. "From this moment on, you will be inseparable."

Mabasha was surprised how light the rifle was, but when he raised it to his shoulder, it felt well balanced and stable.

"What type of ammunition?"

"Superplastic," Konovalenko said. "A specially prepared variation of the classic Spitzer prototype. The bullet will travel fast over a long distance. The pointed version is better at overcoming air resistance."

Mabasha put the rifle on the table and picked up the pistol. It was a 9mm Glock Compact. He had read about this weapon in various magazines, but he had never held one.

"I think standard ammunition will be OK in this case," Konovalenko said. "No point in overdoing things."

"I'll have to get used to the rifle," Mabasha said. "That'll take time if the range is going to be nearly a kilometre. But where can you find such a training range that's sufficiently private?"