swooped over Burn and his platoon driving through the smoldering wreckage on the Highway of Death.
The four-lane highway through the desert, jammed with vehicles laden with plunder from the Iraqi sack of Kuwait City, had been bombed the night before. Vehicles were riddled with bullet holes, cars blown up, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and civilians incinerated.
Then Burn woke up. He was in Cape Town. The mountain was burning, and he had the mother of all hangovers. He lay in the spare bedroom, and the windows were closed, the room airless.
He pulled himself to his feet, still fully dressed. His mouth tasted like shit. He put a hand in his pocket and found a wad of notes. Last night’s blackjack winnings. He cursed himself for his weakness and stupidity.
He headed off to the kitchen to find an aspirin.
Susan was making breakfast. Bacon and eggs. The smell of the food was enough to make him puke. Matt sat at the counter, swinging his legs, reading Dr. Seuss. A book that Burn used to read to him at night back home. Jesus, how long ago had that been?
Burn ruffled his son’s hair. “Morning, Matty.” His voice sounded like a work in progress. A poor one.
Matt nodded, absorbed in the book. Susan didn’t look around from the stove.
Burn found aspirin in the drawer and washed two of them down with a glass of water. Susan dished food for herself and Matt. She set the boy’s plate before him and walked out onto the deck with hers. It wasn’t much after seven but the sun was already fierce.
Burn followed her outside, squinting.
The mountain above them was charred, black, smoldering. Choppers were dousing any last sparks. The wind, mercifully, had stopped.
Susan sat down at the table on the deck, her eyes hidden behind black Ray-Bans.
Burn didn’t sit. He hovered over her. “I’m sorry.”
She said nothing. It was as if he wasn’t there.
There was nothing more he could say to his wife. He knew that she would find peace only when he turned his back on her and left.
Disaster Zondi sat at a table in his room at the Arabella Sheraton and ate his breakfast. Fruit salad with extra kiwi, poached eggs, and whole-wheat toast. Freshly squeezed orange juice. No bacon. He never touched pork. He wore his suit trousers and white shirt without a tie. His Italian loafers gleamed.
When you worked for the ministry, you were looked after. You flew business class; you rented BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. You had an expense account that allowed you to afford the Cavalli suits. Almost. And why the hell not? It was a tough job, trawling the dark pits of corruption, facing the very worst of human nature day after day. A few small luxuries were a balm to the soul.
He carefully picked crumbs off the white tablecloth and placed them on a plate. Then he put the breakfast dishes on a tray and deposited it in the corridor.
Zondi returned to the table and booted up Rudi Barnard’s laptop once again. He had spent the previous night, into the early hours of the morning, trawling through the contents of the hard drive. It didn’t reveal much, which didn’t surprise him. Barnard wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave details of his activities on a computer.
Searching his e-mail files had produced mostly innocuous correspondence: police pension fund updates, an objection to a rental increase at his apartment. Then Zondi had found the e-mail to an anonymous Yahoo address with a JPEG of a fingerprint attached. Zondi had pondered it at length the night before, studying the whorls as if they would lead him to some further understanding. None came, and he had forced himself to sleep.
After breakfast he returned to his meditation on the fingerprint. He knew somehow that this was important, that it could lead him to Rudi Barnard. Who had vanished.
Zondi had the photograph of the smiling men at the bush barbecue propped up next to the laptop. As he sipped his cup of Earl Grey, he allowed himself the indulgence of memory.
It was 1988. Zondi was eighteen, at university in Johannesburg, running with a crowd of youth activists. His best friend, Jabu, was a student political leader with a high profile. Zondi was at Jabu’s Soweto house one night when the security cops raided. Beefy white men in jeans and T-shirt, with blunt haircuts and shoulders like rugby forwards. One of them was the captain in the photograph. They threw Zondi and Jabu into a car and drove them to John Vorster Square in Johannesburg.
Zondi and Jabu were separated, locked up alone. Over the next few days a succession of men came into Zondi’s cell and tortured him, demanding to know the names of Jabu’s associates. Zondi didn’t know the names.
The younger Barnard had pulled a wet sack over Zondi’s head and then pushed his head into a bucket of water, until he was sure he was going to drown. Then the fat man had kicked him and stomped him. Barnard and another man tied Zondi’s legs together, kept the wet sack over his head, and carried on kicking him. Broke his ribs.
They pulled the sack off his face, just as he was about to lapse into unconsciousness. He was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears.
Barnard again demanded answers that Zondi couldn’t give him.
Barnard kicked him into unconsciousness.
Zondi woke up bleeding and wet, in the cell. He was held for another two days, beaten regularly; then without explanation they took him to a car. He was driven to Soweto and dumped in a field. Aside from the broken ribs, his kidneys were bruised and his right arm was fractured. But he was alive.
He never saw Jabu again.
Nine years later Zondi sat with Jabu’s mother and sister, in an anonymous Johannesburg office building, listening to the captain in the photograph offer his apologies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To avoid prosecution. On the tribunal facing the captain were an Anglican archbishop, a lawyer, a doctor, and an academic, their faces haunted by the horrors they had absorbed over the past years.
The captain, an ingratiating man with a shit-eating grin, told how Jabu had died during interrogation. His body was taken to an isolated spot and cremated over a log fire for seven hours until all traces had been destroyed. During the cremation a group of security policemen drank and cooked meat at a separate barbecue.
As Jabu’s mother folded forward in silent horror, the captain had provided more detail. While the security cops were drinking, cooking, and eating their supper, they would tend the cremation fire, turning the buttocks and upper part of the legs frequently during the night to make sure that everything burned to ashes. And the next morning, after raking through the ashes to make sure that there were no pieces of meat or bone left, they had all gone their own way.
When Zondi had been given the file on Barnard, he had not remembered him immediately. It was only when he read Barnard’s Security Police record and saw the ID shots from the eighties that Zondi had realized who he was dealing with.
Knowing who Barnard was changed nothing for Zondi. He was a professional. And he would behave like a professional. But Zondi knew he’d raise a glass of single malt to Jabu when he brought Rudi Barnard down.
CHAPTER 15
Barnard reversed a brown eighties Ford out of the storage container, leaving it empty. He locked up and drove through rows of similar containers to the exit.
He had kept the Ford for just such an emergency, making a ritual of charging the battery every second Sunday. On those Sundays, while the battery charger ticked over, he had sat and cleaned and oiled a Colt Cobra. 32 and a Mossberg 500 Special Purpose pump-action shotgun. The weapons, and the small stash of banknotes he had kept in the container, were in the trunk of the Ford.
After dumping his police Toyota in Goodwood the previous night, he had caught a taxi into the city center and booked into a cheap hotel, far from his usual haunts. He had paid cash in advance. He hadn’t slept well. Not out of fear; he didn’t believe the door was about to give way and Disaster Zondi enter like an avenging angel. No, it was the anticipation of what was to come.
In the morning he had caught another taxi to within a few blocks of the storage depot, waiting for the cab to disappear into the rush-hour traffic before he went to retrieve the Ford and the weapons.
