Trackers (44 page)

'Where are they?'

'North Atlantic, I'll have to check. Grand Banks, something
like that. The weather should clear within the next twelve hours, and we'll be
ready.'

'Bruno, I can't thank you enough.'

Milla Strachan struck Advocate Tau Masilo on his left
cheekbone. She hit out again, but he stopped her, grabbing her wrists.

'Thiba
!'
he shouted in his mother tongue,
shocked. He pushed her away, straightened up and forced her back into her
chair. She struggled furiously, kicking at him.

'Se
ke...
He let go of her suddenly, raised his
hand to slap her, but stopped himself, and went over to the door.

'Nkwenyane
,' he said, out of breath. 'What a
fishwife!'

'I quit,' Milla screamed, her blood still boiling. 'You can
keep your job.'

Masilo, gingerly probing his cheekbone, looked at her and
smiled slowly.

'Very well,' he said and took the key out of his pocket. 'Let
me get someone to escort you, and you can pack up your things.'

The Director phoned Rajkumar in his office. 'I need to know
what the weather is like in the North Atlantic right now. The Grand Banks
area.'

'Call you back?'

'I'll hold.'

'OK.'

She heard the click of Raj's mouse, his laboured breathing.
'Getting there ... getting there ... OK. I have a satellite image of... twenty
minutes ago ... looks pretty good ...'

'No bad weather? No clouds?'

'Just a second ... Weatheronline in the UK says ... nope, no
bad weather, let me just check the NASA Earth Science Office ...'

She waited.

'Clear as a bell, a few clouds off
Canada, but that's it.'

'Could you double-check and get back
to me?'

'Absolutely.'

She put down the phone.

Why would Burzynski lie?

With anger and shame burning inside her, and two muscular officials
walking behind her, Milla collected her handbag and the few items in her
drawer.

Dead silence hung over the Report Squad, only Donald
MacFarland challenging the two escorts with a look, and then giving her a
slight nod, in sympathy. The others avoided her eyes and only later, when she
sat beside the sea at Milnerton, did she realise someone must have talked to
them. She wondered what they had been told.

But now she put only the personal items in her handbag, gave
Mac one last look, and walked out.

At the security door one said, 'Your
card, please.'

She took it out and threw it down in
front of him.

The other one opened the door for
her.

In the flat Milla found chaos. Cupboard doors stood wide, the
floor was strewn with articles.

In her bedroom she saw they had taken her diaries. And her
laptop. Helplessness and rage and injustice overwhelmed her, but she knew there
were microphones somewhere in this place, and she wept silently, her fists
clenched.

She suddenly had to get out, this space was polluted now. She
picked up her handbag, took out the things she had packed up at the office,
threw them hastily down on her writing table and left. Just before she got to
her car, she stopped with a sudden anxiety. She opened her handbag, searched
furiously for her purse, found it. She opened it carefully, to see whether
there was evidence of some other fingers going through it.

Lukas's letter was there, beside the banknotes, still folded
up as she had placed it there that morning.

She took it out and thought back, her handbag had been in the
office, hanging over the back of her chair.

Would they have searched it?

She was going to memorise the number, get rid of the letter.

Quinn and Masilo watched the screen, saw over the video feed how
Miss Jenny suddenly stopped to look in her handbag.

It was Quinn who read her body language, put her urgency and
the object of her interest together.

'We didn't search her handbag,' he said, in self-reproach.
'It was here, in the office.'

'Ay, ay,' said Masilo, and touched the slight swelling on his
cheek with his fingertips.

'Looks like it's a piece of paper.'

They saw her fold it up again, put it back in her purse, and
continue to the car. He picked up the radio and said: 'Stand by, Miss Jenny is on
the move.'

'How many teams?' Masilo asked.

'All three who were following Becker.'

'And lost him.' No reproach, just a statement of fact.

'And they know how unacceptable that is. Becker was on foot,
in the early hours, he knew we were tailing him, and he is a pro. She isn't. We
have GPS on her car, we are plotting her cellphone for position, we hear every
call, we have microphones in her flat...'

'OK,' said Masilo. He watched the screen where Milla's car
was now a moving arrow on the map. 'Where is she going?'

At first she just drove, instinctively, in the direction of
Durbanville. Until she realised what she was doing, and why. A sense of panic
came over her, she turned off at the Koeberg exit, not knowing where she could
go, no place was safe, she must phone Lukas now, right now. She reached out her
hand for the phone in her bag, found it, the number in her head, typed in the
first three digits.

A car beside her hooted, shrill and sudden. She looked up,
shocked, saw she was veering across the lane, jerked the Renault back, looked
across at the other car: a man grimacing, arm waving, finger raised, angry
words forming soundlessly.

Then he was past and her hands were trembling. She knew she
must stop, first stop and then phone. She saw the Caltex service station beyond
the traffic lights, she would turn in there. And only then, from somewhere, a
voice in her head said don't phone, they're listening.

The realisation reverberated right through her.

Lagoon Beach was the first place she could park, she turned
off without thinking, she just wanted to get off the road, get out of the car.
She got out, locked the Renault, and walked blindly, her handbag over her
shoulder, her hand clutching it desperately, as though it were her sole
possession.

Masilo's allegations were flickering, blinding lights that
obscured everything, so that she could not think at first, could neither recall
her conversations with Lukas nor the content of the reports she had read, only
see the fireworks that had just exploded into her life.

She walked for six kilometres, past the golf course, the
houses, past other people, unaware of the four men trailing her on foot. Then
she sat down without warning, in the sand some distance from the sea, handbag
on her lap, chin in her hands, eyes gazing over the ocean, and she thought,
long and hard.

The agent lowered his binoculars and told Quinn over the
cellphone: 'No, she's just sitting there.'

'Listen carefully: we suspect she is waiting for Becker. You
all know what he looks like. Let me know immediately you see him, but lie low.
He's a professional, and most likely armed.'

'Roger.'

'The reaction unit is on the way. If Becker comes, they will
bring him in. Stand by.'

It was the knowledge that she had
come so close to phoning Lukas that forced Milla to try to calm down.

She sat with her eyes closed, trying
despairingly and at first in vain to suppress everything: the fears, emotion,
the doubt, the humiliation and self-pity.

It was the pain in the knuckle of her
right hand that gradually penetrated, shifting her focus: why was it so sore?
Then she remembered how she had hit Masilo, and recalled the sudden, deep sense
of injustice that she had experienced at that moment. She saw herself again,
striking out at him. 'What a fishwife.' And she couldn't help smiling; Lord,
Milla, was that
you,
the little
housewife from Durbanville?

It lifted the awful tension - not
entirely, just enough for her to breathe out slowly and deliberately, find a
foothold against the storm in her head. She thought, I have made progress after
all, I have grown: in that blow-striking moment I fought back, instinctively.
And it was good.

She clung to the positive thoughts, she tried to recall
others, like the entry in her diary,
This morning I found a piece of myself I have a habit. To suppress fears, to
hide them from myself. And then to do strange things.
And,
Milla, the anxious cat, takes
anxious leaps, and mostly I don't know that I am anxious.

She decided she wasn't going to
suppress these fears. She wasn't going to deny these anxieties, she was going
to tackle them head-on, she was going to plan her leaps. She was going to find
the truth, she was going to make a plan. In the words of Lukas Becker and
Voltaire, she was going to play the cards that life dealt her in a reasoned way.

She sat there for over an hour, a lonely figure on a wide
beach.

'She's standing up, she's walking
back to her car,' the agent said.

'Nobody came near her?' Quinn asked.

'No one. Hold
on ...
Looks like she's phoning ...'

Quinn turned to one of the team
members in the Ops Room. 'I want to hear the call.'

The technician nodded and made the
adjustments.

'Yes, she has the cellphone to her
ear ...'
the agent on Milnerton Beach
confirmed.

Milla's voice came over the sound system. 'This is Milla
Strachan, may I speak to Gus, please?'

'Hold on,' said an unfamiliar voice.

Music on the line.

'I want to know whose number this is,' Quinn said to his
team.

'Milla, how are you?' A male voice.

'Fine, thanks. Gus, I need your help ...'

'Don't tell me Christo is giving you trouble?'

'No, this is work related. The place I began working at on
the first of September is the PIA, the Presidential Intelligence Agency. Their
offices ...'

'The PIA, the spy guys?'

'Yes. Their address is ...'

'You became a spy?'

'No, I just wrote reports. Their offices are in the Wale
Street Chambers, on the corner of Wale and Long Street...'

'Hold on, I want to write this down.'

Someone whispered to Quinn: 'The number belongs to a firm of
attorneys in Durbanville. Smuts, Kemp and Smal.'

'Get one of the surveillance teams to drive in that
direction.'

'OK,' the man's voice said over the phone.

Milla's voice: 'I will SMS you the telephone number of their
switchboard, and the name of the Deputy Director involved. They broke into my
flat this morning and stole my laptop and all my diaries. I want them back, Gus
...'

'Jissis
,' someone in the Ops Room whispered.

Quinn raised his hand to request silence. It was the calm in
Milla Strachan's voice that worried him the most.

'... and then I want someone to come and remove the bugs that
they have planted.'

'Fuck, Milla,' said the one she called 'Gus'. And then, a
short, hard laugh.

'And I want you to know,' said Milla, 'the chances are good
that they are listening to this call, but it doesn't really matter. I want my
things back, and the more public and open the process is to get them, the
better. Gus, they mustn't be able to hide.'

'An urgent interdict is completely public. If you want I can
phone one of my buddies at Media24 ... but you must know, tomorrow it will be
all over the papers.'

'Let me just call Barend first and tell him that his mother
is going to be in the news.'

Masilo told Mentz about Miss Jenny's call to Kemp, the attorney,
and ended with: 'She SMSed my name to him. I think it's personal because I told
her about Becker's misdeeds.'

Then he waited for the explosion, but it didn't erupt. Mentz
stared at him. For a long time. Then she said coldly: 'The Americans are lying
to us.'

He had to make the mental leap first. 'What about?' 'About
the weather in the North Atlantic Ocean. It's a delaying tactic, Tau. It has
something to do with the fact that Becker has given them Osman, or that they
still haven't retrieved what was stolen from Becker. We will have to get
Becker. And fast.' 'Miss Jenny is the way to him.'