spent a week or more trying to sort out and understand the papers van Heerden left behind after his death. He needed time to think. They would be away on Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday, May 17, he would spend his time trying to master van Heerden’s computer files. He wanted to do that when he was alone at work, when there was nobody in the corridors at the prosecutor’s office. The police investigators had made sure all his material, all his diskettes, had been placed in a cardboard box and sent to the public prosecutor’s office. His boss Wervey had given the order for the intelligence service to hand over all the material. Officially Wervey himself, in his capacity as chief public prosecutor of Johannesburg, should be going through the material, which BOSS had immediately classified as top secret. When van Heerden’s superiors refused to release the material until their own people had gone through it, Wervey threw a fit and immediately contacted the Minister of Justice. A few hours later BOSS relented. The material would be delivered to the prosecutor’s office. It would be Wervey’s responsibility. But it was in fact Georg Scheepers who would go through it all, in circumstances of extreme secrecy. That was why he intended to work on Sunday, when the building would be deserted.
They left Johannesburg early in the morning of Friday, May 15. The N4 freeway to Nelspruit took them quickly to their destination. They turned off onto a minor road and entered the Kruger National Park at the Nambi Gate. Judith had called to book a bungalow in one of the most remote camps, Nwanetsi, not far from the Mozambique border. They had been there several times before, and liked going back. The camp, with its bungalows, restaurant, and safari office, appealed primarily to guests looking for peace and quiet, people who went to bed early and got up at dawn in order to see the animals coming to the river to drink. On the way to Nelspruit Judith had asked him about the investigation he was undertaking for the minister of justice. He said he did not know much about it yet. But he needed time to figure out the best way of approaching the matter. She asked no more questions as she knew her husband was a man of few words.
During their two days at Nwanetsi they were out on game drives all the time. They looked at animals and scenery, leaving Johannesburg and its troubles far behind them. After meals Judith would bury her head in one of her books while Georg Scheepers thought over what he now knew about van Heerden and his secret work.
He had started methodically by going through van Heerden’s filing cabinet, and very soon realized he would have to step up his ability to read between the lines. In among formally correct memoranda and reports he found loose scraps of paper with hurriedly scribbled notes. Reading them was slow work and needed a lot of effort; the difficult handwriting reminded him of a pedantic schoolteacher. It seemed to him they were sketches for poems. Lyrical insights, outlines for metaphors and images. It was then, when he tried to penetrate the informal part of van Heerden’s work, that he had a premonition something was going to happen. The reports, memos and loose notes- divine poems, as he began to regard them-went back a long way. At first they were often precise observations and reflections expressed in a cool, neutral style. But about six months before van Heerden died, they began to change character. It seemed like a different, darker tone had crept into his thoughts. Something had happened, Scheepers thought. Something had changed dramatically either in his work or his private life. Van Heerden was starting to think different thoughts. What had previously been certain suddenly became unsure, the clear voice became hesitant, tenuous. He thought he could see another difference as well. Before, the loose papers had been haphazard. From now on van Heerden noted down the date and sometimes even the time. Scheepers could see van Heerden had often worked late into the night. Most of the notes were timed after midnight. It all started to look like a poetically expressed diary. He tried to find a basic and consistent theme as a starting point. Because van Heerden never mentioned his private life, Scheepers assumed he was only writing about what happened at work. There was no concrete information to assist him. Van Heerden’s diary was formulated in synonyms and parallels. It was obvious that Homeland stood for South Africa. But who was The Chameleon? Who were The Mother and Child? Van Heerden was not married. He had no close relations, according to what Chief Inspector Borstlap of the Johannesburg police had written in a personal memo responding to Scheepers’s request. Scheepers entered the names into his computer and tried to figure out the connections, without success. Van Heerden’s language was evasive, as if he would prefer not to be associated with what he was writing. Over and over again Scheepers had the feeling there was a note of threatening danger. A trace of confession. Van Heerden was onto something significant. His whole world suddenly seemed under threat. He wrote about a kingdom of death, seeming to imply we all had it inside ourselves. He had visions of something falling apart. At the same time Scheepers seemed to detect feelings of guilt and sorrow in van Heerden, which grew dramatically stronger during his last weeks before he died.
Scheepers noted that what he wrote about all the time was the blacks, the whites, the Boers, God and forgiveness. But nowhere did he use the words conspiracy or plot. The thing I’m supposed to be looking for, the thing van Heerden informed President de Klerk about. Why is there nothing about it?
On the Thursday evening, the day before he and Judith were due to drive to Nwanetsi, he stayed in his office until very late. He had switched off all the lights apart from his desk lamp. Now and then he could hear the night guards talking outside his window, which he had left ajar.
Pieter van Heerden had been the ideal loyal servant, he thought. In the course of his work for the intelligence service that was growing more divided, acting more autonomously, he had come across something significant. A conspiracy against the state. A conspiracy whose aim was somehow or other to spark off a coup d’etat. Van Heerden was sparing no effort in attempting to track down the center of the conspiracy. There were a lot of questions. And van Heerden wrote poems about his worries and the kingdom of death he had discovered inside himself.
Scheepers looked at his filing cabinet. That was where he had locked away the diskettes Wervey had demanded from van Heerden’s superiors. That is where the solution must be, he thought. Van Heerden’s increasingly confused and introspective musings, as expressed on the loose scraps of paper, could only be part of the whole picture. The truth must be in his diskettes.
Early in the morning of Sunday, May 17, they left the Kruger Park and returned to Johannesburg. He took Judith home, and after breakfast he drove in to the ominous-looking building in the city center in which the public prosecutor’s offices were housed. The city was deserted, as if it had suddenly been evacuated and people would never return. The armed guards let him in, and he walked along the echoing corridor to his office.
The moment he walked through the door, he knew someone had been there. There were tiny, barely noticeable changes betraying a visit by an outsider. Presumably the cleaners, he thought. But he could not be sure.
I’m starting to let my assignment get to me, he said to himself. Van Heerden’s unrest, his constant fear of being watched, threatened, is now starting to affect me.
He shook off his uneasy feeling, took off his jacket and opened his filing cabinet. Then he slid the first diskette into his computer.
Two hours later he had sorted out the material. Van Heerden’s computer files revealed nothing of significance. Most striking was how immaculately everything was organized.
There was just one diskette left.
Georg Scheepers could not manage to open it. He had the instinctive feeling this was where van Heerden’s secret testimony was to be found. The blinking message on his screen demanded a password before the diskette would open the doors to its many secret chambers. This is impossible, thought Scheepers. The password is just one single word, but it could be any word at all. I suppose I could run the diskette with a program containing a whole dictionary. But is the password in English or Afrikaans? Even so, he did not believe the answer would be found by working systematically through a dictionary. Van Heerden would not lock his most important diskette with a meaningless password. He would choose something significant as his secret key.
Scheepers rolled up his shirtsleeves, filled his coffee cup from the thermos he had brought with him from home, and started looking through the loose papers one more time. He began to worry that van Heerden might have programed the diskette so it erased everything of its own accord after a certain number of failed efforts to find the unknown password. He compared it with trying to storm an ancient fortress. The drawbridge is up, the moat full of water. There’s only one way left. Climb up the walls. Somewhere there must be steps carved into the walls. That’s what I’m looking for. The first step.
By two in the afternoon he had still not succeeded. Despondency was not far away, and he could sense a vague feeling of anger boiling up inside, aimed at van Heerden and the lock he was unable to prize open.
A couple of hours later he was on the point of giving up. He had run out of ideas about how to open the diskette. He also had the feeling he was nowhere near finding the correct word. Van Heerden’s choice of password had a context and significance he had not yet managed to pin down. Without expecting any particular help he
