successor. If he had known, perhaps he might have chosen the sanatorium.
He felt tired now and discouraged. His store of energy and enthusiasm was all used up, just as only a few years ago his hair had been jet black and dense, and now was white, tinged only with yellow like sun-dried seaweed, and he could not walk a dozen paces without wheezing and coughing like an asthmatic.
Recently he had been waking in the night, drenched with those terrible night-sweats, and when he fought for his breath he lay awake in the darkness and was assailed with terrible doubts. Had it been worth it, a lifetime of dedicated painstaking work? What did he have to show for it?
What little solid success had he achieved?
For almost thirty years he had served in the African department of the fourth directorate of the KGB. For the last ten of those years, he had been head of station South, the division responsible for the African continent below the equator, and quite naturally most of his attention and that of his department had been devoted to the most developed and richest country in his region, the Republic of South Africa.
The other man at the table was a South African. Up until this time, he had remained silent, but now he said softly: 'I do not understand why We are spending so much time discussing this woman. Explain it to me.' Both the white men at the table diverted their attention to him. When Raleigh Tabaka spoke, other men usually listened. He had about him a peculiar intensity, a charged air of purpose that held the attention of others.
All his life, Joe Cicero had worked with black Africans, the nationalist leaders of the forces of liberation and the socialist struggle. He had known them all, Jomo Kenyatta and Kenneth Kaunda, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere.
Some of them he had come to know intimately: men like Moses Gama, who had been sent to a martyr's death, and Nelson Mandela, who was still languishing in the prison of white racism.
Cicero placed Raleigh Tabaka in the forefront of that illustrious company.
In fact Raleigh had been Moses Gama's nephew, and Raleigh had been present the night the South African police murdered his uncle. He seemed to have inherited Moses Gama's tremendous personality and force of character, and he had stepped squarely into the wide gap left by Gama. He was thirty years old, but already he was deputy director of Umkhonto we Sizwe, 'The Spear of the Nation', the military wing of the South African National Congress, and Joe Cicero knew that he had proved himself time and again in the field and in the councils of the ANC. He had the talent, the guts and the verve to rise as high as any other man in Africa.
Joe Cicero preferred him to the white Spanish aristocrat, but he recognized that despite their difference in colour and lineage they were men cast in the same mould. Hard and dangerous men, well versed in death and violence, adepts in the subtle shifting world of political power and intrigue. These were the men to whom Joe Cicero must hand over the reins, and he resented them and hated them for it.
'The woman,' he said heavily, 'could be of extraordinary value, if she is controlled and developed to her full potential, but I will let the marquds explain that to you. It is his case, and he has studied the subject fully.' Abruptly Ramsey Machado's smile thinned, and his eyes turned flat and hostile.
'I would prefer the Comrade Director not to use that title,' he said coldly. 'Even in jest.' Joe Cicero had learnt that it was probably the only way he could penetrate the Spaniard's slick armour-plating.
'I beg your pardon, comrade.' Joe inclined his head in mock contrition.
'But please do not let my little lapse interrupt your recitation.' Ramsey Machado opened the loose-leaf binder that lay on the table in front of him, but he did not even glance at it. He knew every word it contained by heart.
'We have assigned the woman the case-name 'Red Rose', and we have had our psychiatrists develop a detailed profile of her. The evaluation is that she is highly susceptible to skilful recruitment. She is uniquely placed to become an extremely valuable field-operative.' Raleigh Tabaka leant forward attentively. Ramsey noted that he did not interject question or comment at this stage, and he approved of that restraint. They had not yet worked together extensively, this was only their third meeting, and both of them were still evaluating each other.
'Red Rose can be placed in an emotional dilemma. On her father's side she is a member of the white ruling class in South Africa. Her father is just finishing a term as his country's ambassador to Britain, and he returns now to take up an appointment as the chairman of the national armaments in dustry. He has enormous holdings in mining, land and finance; after the Oppenheimers and their Anglo-American Company, the family is probably the most wealthy and influential in southern Africa. In addition, the father has conduits to the very highest levels of the ruling racist regime. Most important, however, is the fact that the father dotes on Red Rose. She is able to obtain from him, with little effort, anything she sets her heart upon. This would include an etw& to any level of government and any information of whatever classification, even that relating to his new appointment on the armaments corporation.' Raleigh Tabaka nodded. He knew the Courtney family, and could find no fault with this assessment. 'I have met Red Rose's mother, but she is on our side of the political fence,' he murmured, and Ramsey nodded.
'Precisely. Shasa Courtney has been divorced from his wife Tara for seven years. She was an accomplice of your uncle, Moses Gama, in his bomb attack on the white racist parliament, for which he was imprisoned and subsequently murdered. She was also Gama's mistress and bore his bastard son. Tara Courtney fled from South Africa with Gama's child 29 after the failure of the bomb plot. She lives now in London where she is very active in the anti-apartheid movement. She is also a member of the ANC, but she is not considered sufficiently competent or emotionally stable for any but junior rank and routine assignments. At present she operates a safe house for ANC personnel here in London and occasionally undertakes courier work or assists in the organization of rallies and demonstrations. Her real potential value lies in her influence over Red Rose.' 'Yes,' Raleigh agreed impatiently. 'I know all about this, especially about her relationship to my uncle, but does she in fact have any influence over her daughter? It appears that Red Rose's sympathies lie heavily on her father's side?' Again Ramsey nodded. 'At present this is the case. But, apart from her mother, there is another member of the family who holds radical views: her brother Michael, who has a much greater influence on her. And there are other ways of turning her.' 'What are those?' Tabaka asked.
'One of them is the honey trap,' Joe Cicero said. 'The marquds - forgive me - Comrade Machado has made the initial contact to that end. The honey trap is one of his many specialities.' 'You will keep me informed of progress.' Raleigh made a statement, and neither of them replied immediately. Although Raleigh Tabaka was an executive of the ANC and a member of the Communist Party, he was not, unlike the other two, an officer of the Russian KGB. Joe Cicero was, on the other hand, a KGB officer first and foremost, although his promotion from colonel to colonel-general had been confirmed only a month previously, at the same time that the Moscow clinic had diagnosed carcinoma of both his lungs. Joe Cicero suspected that the promotion had been given to him merely to allow him to retire at the higher pension, after a lifetime of loyal service to the department. Nevertheless, he was an officer in the ANC only after his loyalty to Mother Russia, his lines of allegiance were not diluted, and the ANC would receive only what information it was necessary for them to have. Ramsey Machado's lines of allegiance were also clear-cut. He had been born in Spain, and his title of nobility was Spanish, but his mother had been a Cuban woman, sloeeyed and raven-haired. She had met Ramsey's father when she was a young housekeeper on the Machado estates near Havana in Cuba. After the marriage, the marques had taken his beautiful commoner bride back to Spain.
During the Spanish Civil War, the marquds had opposed General Francisco Franco's Nationalists. Despite his noble background and inherited wealth, Ramsey's father had been an enlightened and liberal man. He joined the Republican army and commanded a battalion at the siege of Madrid where he was severely wounded. After the war, the Machado family found oppression and discrimination under the Franco regime intolerable. The marquesa prevailed on her husband to take her and her young son back to her native island in the Caribbean. Although they had been stripped of most of their Spanish property and possessions, the family still owned the Cuban estates.
However, the Machado family found that life under the dictatorship of Batista was no great improvement on that under Francisco Franco.
Ramsey's mother was an aunt of the young left-win$ student firebrand Fidel Castro and one of his avid admirers. She became active in the campaign of agitation and intrigue against the Batista regime, and young Ramsey gleaned his own first political convictions from her and from her celebrated nephew.
After Fidel Castro was imprisoned for leading the gallant but abortive attack on the Santiago barracks on 2e July 1953, both Ramsey's father and mother were arrested along with the rebels.
Ramsey's mother died under interrogation in a police cell in Havana, and his father died in the same prison only a few weeks later of ill-treatment and a broken heart. Once again the family estates were confiscated, and Ramsey's only inheritance was the derelict title of marques, void of all property or fortune. At the time he was fourteen years old. The Castro family took him in and cared for him.
When Fidel Castro was released from prison under amnesty, Ramsey went with him to Mexico, and at sixteen years of age was one of the first recruits to the Cuban
