Trackers (47 page)

'I have to have my medicine,' Osman groaned.

Lukas ignored him, concentrating on the road ahead, and the
rear- view mirror.

Then Osman collapsed. Becker cursed and stopped. Picked up
Osman's head, saw the eyes rolled back. He grabbed the man's wrist, felt the
dreadful pulse and knew it was a heart attack, he had training in basic first
aid, he knew the next fifteen minutes meant life or death to Osman.

That changed everything, he raced into the city, to the
nearest medical help, the Chris Barnard Memorial Hospital, with an unconscious
Osman. He stopped at Casualty, carried Osman in with a fireman's lift and
called for help. The medical personnel rushed up to them, ordering him to put
Osman down on a hospital trolley. He explained that the man had had a heart
attack, he lied and said he had found him just down the street.

They ripped open Osman's Muslim robe, pressed stethoscopes to
his chest, put an oxygen mask over his face and pushed him through the swing
doors.

'I phoned the hospital just before I picked you up. They
still haven't identified him, but they say his condition is critical. If he
dies ... I thought the people following him were his people. His bodyguards. I
thought the people following me were his people. But when you spoke about the
PIA over the phone ... That changes everything. They can connect me. They think
I murdered Shabangu. Now they will think I killed Osman as well.'

Janina Mentz threw the stapler first. The paperweight
followed, leaving another mark in the door of her office.

Then she said, 'Jesus Christ,' before striding up and down
her office, her face crimson with fury.

Tau Masilo just sat there. He had no defence.

A housewife, a report writer, an amateur, had evaded the
professional surveillance teams of the Presidential Intelligence Agency.

What was there to say?

He unlocked the door of the holiday unit at the Big Bay Beach
Club and let her walk in. The interior was gaily decorated, cottage furniture,
sea-blue and white walls, an open-plan sitting room and kitchen. She put her
shopping bag on the kitchen counter beside a black carry bag.

She turned to him, held him tightly. His arms wrapped around
her, but with tension in his body. 'Milla, you can't stay here ...'

She looked up at him in query.

'This is
my
trouble,' he
said. '
My
problem.
My
risk. They can't do anything to you, you are not guilty of anything.
You have to walk away from it all, until it's over ...You .. .Your
circumstances ...'

She just shook her head, knowing that she couldn't answer him
now, the words would come out wrong, like when she had confessed in the Golf.

'When did you last eat?' she asked.

Lukas, my love,

Alliteration, unintended, but I am
immediately delighted by it. And therein lies the root of the problem.

Because my life is a flood of words,
a stream, a river that never stops flowing. I am not a drowning person being
washed along, but a water- word creature. I frolick here, in the words of my
thoughts, the words I hear, the words I read and write. The words are in me and
around me and through me and they never stop. I bob and swim and dive in them,
splish and splash, this is the world I live in, my natural habitat, I can see
the words and feel, hear and taste them.

The word-water is brown; a thousand
drops of colourless conjunctions, and in-between words, and
only-there-to-serve-other words. But some words are silver, like fish that dart
and leap, glittering bows in the sun. Action words, wholly dynamic. Verbs.
Living words. And others are heavy, dark, riverbed words, round rolling boulder
words that scrape and chip and erode, and here I go again, compulsively, I am
an addict, this letter is my intravenous feed, my dose for the day.

Speech is different. There the
current frequently drags me away, there are whirlpools and rapids and submerged
rocks; then the words slip away. But when I write, when it is just me and the
river and I can open my eyes under the surface, I see every word, and search
and select.

So I write. Much, and often, and have
done for a long time. It gives me control. And that is the dilemma.

Thoughts and written words don't make
a life. They can tell the stories, but they can't make the stories. They can
fantasise (and I am good at that), but fantasies are phantom stories, word
shadows, mirages that fade away when you get too close. They are rivers that
dry up.

I don't have a story, Lukas. I began
to write a book, the other day, and my best resource was to tap everything from
my single major act - my running away, my making-life-new-at-forty. That is the
sum total of my doing, my single source of character conflict, the climax of my
existence and the depth of my story river. Perhaps you will understand better
if I

say, before I knew you, I was in love
with your story, the one I was required to write as a profile and a report. You
are everything I wanted to be, everything I fantasised for my own life: a
discoverer, a doer, a traveller, a risk-taker, you followed your heart and
passions and interests, you experienced, lived. I sat in front of that computer
and thought, how eagerly would I love to write your story. How wonderful your book
would be.

This morning (it feels a lifetime
away) I sat on Milnerton Beach and the pain in my hand rescued me - because it
reminded me of something I did. And in that act, never mind that it was through
shame and anger, I did not walk away, I fought back.

And this afternoon I fought back
again; through a phone call to retrieve my diaries, since then I have sneaked,
evaded, camouflaged and outmanoeuvred. Action words. My heart beat, my hands
shook, I rode in a minibus taxi, sat in a suburban train - both firsts for me,
what would the Durbanville wives say? I discovered another world, I crossed
borders, I lived (just a little bit dangerously) and I can write about it,
Lukas, one day I can use these small scraps of experience.

By now you must be able to guess what
I am trying to say: that I dare not, in your words, ‘walk away from it all'.
That I want to have more, to live more, to experience more.

I know what you meant to say with
'your circumstances .. .'and I can't blame you.
You
wanted to say that I am a mother,
I have a child, I have responsibilities, I don't have to (or can't, or ought
not, or must not) stay in this great adventure. It is a question I have been
wrestling with for months, and I still don't know where the truth lies. For
seventeen years I lived for my son and my husband. Now, for Barend's sake as
well, I must live for myself.

You
said, 'you can't stay here'. But I
must.

Please ...

10
October 2009. Saturday.

She came out of the bedroom wearing one of his shirts. She
saw him at the breakfast counter, his bare back to her, bent over, all
attention on the disassembled parts of a laptop, tools spread over the counter
top. And her letter nearby.

She
leaned against the door jamb, looking at him, at the long muscles of his back, at
his neck, his dark hair so neat in its military cut. She wanted to touch him,
went closer.

His head jerked around, and he looked at her for a second.
'Milla,' he said, stern and urgent, scaring her. 'Stop right there.'

'What?'

He turned back to the innards of the computer. 'Explosives.
It's Osman's laptop ... Just let me ...' She saw him carefully pull out a thin,
silver tube, with two thin wires attached. He put it to one side, with great
respect. Then he slowly lifted out a thin worm of greyish white stuff, it
looked like children's modelling clay.

'C4,' he said, keeping it still, touching it respectfully.
'There might be another detonator here ...'

Until he was satisfied, had taken the clay out of the
interior of the computer and put it aside. He wiped perspiration off his
forehead and turned to her.

'Good morning,' he said.

She came close, leaned against him, her hand on his bare
back, kissed him on the cheek. 'So that's what you do before breakfast...'

He held her tightly, said nothing.

'Did you read my letter?'

'I did.'

'And?'

He let go slowly. 'Look,' he said, and pointed at the
explosive.

'I understand. But...'

He shook his head, put his hands on her shoulders, his face
solemn. 'Milla ...'

'I can help you,' though she knew what he was going to say.

'Milla, I want you, I want to be with you and I'm coming back
to you when this thing is over, I swear to you. But look at it objectively,
please; if things get rough ... I can't afford to worry about your safety, I
can't allow that to affect my choices ...'

She couldn't keep the disappointment from her face.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

Later, while she drank coffee and he put the computer
together again, he told her about the laptop, how he understood now why Osman
reached for his cellphone first during the kidnapping.

'This receiver was on top of the computer lid. Osman wanted
to phone a number that would activate the explosive. The charge is small, just
enough to destroy the computer. And when I took the phone away from him, he
tried to get to the computer, because there is a switch as well...'

'But why?' she asked.

'That is what I want to find out.'

When he had finally put the computer back together, there was
another obstacle.

'It needs a password,' Becker said.

Milla came to look. A box on the screen.
Enter your Windows password.

'You don't know what it is.'

'No idea.'

'Perhaps I can help.'

'You know about computers?'

'No, but I know someone.'

Janina Mentz and Tau Masilo on one side of the table, the
Americans on the other, in a meeting room at the Department of Home Affairs in
Plein Street, the nearest to neutral ground that Mentz could find at short
notice.

From the outset she was cool towards the four CIA people.
Burzynski's reaction was a small, secret smile, as though he knew something. It
irritated Mentz, she decided to fire the first salvo: 'Bruno, I haven't
informed the Minister about the CIA's shenanigans yet, but if we can't find a
resolution by lunchtime, I will have no choice.'

'Shenanigans?' with the surprise of the innocent.

'Please. I really don't have time to play games.'

'Janina, I honestly don't know what you are talking about.'

'Adverse weather conditions in the North Atlantic? Do you honestly
think we are so backward that we don't know how to check the weather?'

'I said I wasn't sure exactly where ...'

'Oh, nonsense, Bruno. You knew exactly. You always do. You
were playing for time, and I deeply resent that, because it is putting South
African citizens in harm's way. Do you really want that on your conscience?'

'There's risk to your public? You never said that. Perhaps,
Janina, you could start by levelling with us, especially in view of the fact
that you expect us to throw all our resources at your problem.'

'Here's a bit of levelling, Bruno: We don't have an operative
snooping around the CIA at the moment. We don't do that with our allies.'

'Are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?'

She clapped her hand on the file that lay before her, decided
to play her trump card. 'Be careful now, Bruno. I have some very interesting
information in here.' She saw a momentary hesitation, and she thought,
I've got you.

'Then, by all means, share it with us,' said Burzynski.

She opened the file, took out the photograph of Lukas Becker
and skimmed it across the table to him, keeping her eyes on him like an eagle.

Burzynski gave nothing away, squared up the photo slowly, and
studied it. Then looked up at her, the little smile back again. 'So who's this
guy?'

'He's the one who's been working for you since at least 1997.
Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, and, more recently, Iraq.'

'Not for me, he hasn't.' Burzynski slid the photo across to
one of the new people, Grant, a middle-aged man with a big half-grey beard and
an intense gaze.

'Oh, please, Bruno. We know about his attempts to befriend
one of our staff members, we know about the very important item he lost in
Johannesburg, we know he eliminated Julius Shabangu. And you've paid him a
small fortune. So stop insulting my intelligence, and let's move on ...' She
watched Grant, saw the negative shake of the head. Then she asked: 'Where are
you keeping Osman?'

It was with this last name that she finally spotted a
reaction, slight, a narrowing of Bruno's eyes, just as quickly it was gone. He
looked at his three colleagues. The two new ones, Eden and Grant, nodded at
him, one after the other.