Had she been sold out by the Americans?
No.
Mpayipheli?
Had he made a call for help somewhere along the road? Did he have links with the extremists? Had he, like some of his KGB masters since the fall of the USSR, gone in search of Middle Eastern pastures? Had he built up contacts on the Cape Flats while he worked for Orlando Arendse?
But Kleintjes was supposed to be his friend. That didn?'t fit.
The treachery lay elsewhere.
The treachery lay here. In their midst.
Would it not be ironic to have two traitors in one intelligence unit? But that was the scenario that fitted best.
Luke Powell had said he had lost his two agents yesterday time of death not yet determined, but if the Muslims had left yesterday evening as the news broke here in the Ops Room, then the timetable fitted well.
She dropped her head into her hands, massaging her temples with her fingertips.
Who?
Vincent? The reluctant Radebe?
Quinn, the colored man with Cape Flats roots? Rajkumar? Or one of their assistants? The variables grew too many, and she sighed and sank back into her chair.
The plan was so good. The operation was so clever, so demonically brilliant, her creation. So many flies with one stroke of genius. She was so self-satisfied that she found secret pleasure in it, but it was born of need and panic.
Lord, how that transcript of Ismail Mohammed had shaken her.
All she could think of was her children.
Williams had called her from the police cells and said he had a bomb; he had better meet her at the office. He had played the tape for her and she had to keep cool because he was sitting opposite her and a part of her wondered if the shock was visible on her face. Could he see the paleness that came over her face? The other part was with her children. How was she going to explain to her girls that their mother was a traitor? How would she ever make them understand? How do you explain to someone that there was no big reason, no great ideological motivation, just an evening of succumbing, that strange night in the American embassy, but it had to be held in the light of a lifetime of disappointment, of disillusion, of fruitless struggle and frustration, decades of pointless aspiration that had prepared her for that moment.
Would anyone believe that she had not planned it? It had just happened like an impulse buy at the supermarket. She and Luke Powell were in conversation among forty or fifty people. He had asked her opinion on weighty matters, politics and economics; he had fucking respected her, deferred to her as if she were more than an invisible gear in the great engine room of government. Because the PIU belonged to the director, despite his promises, despite the initial sales talk to recruit her. She made no difference, she had no real power, she was just another civil servant in just another African intelligence agency.
So, in that moment when Luke Powell made his move, all the flotsam and jetsam of her life pressed on her with unbearable weight and she had thrown it off.
Who would ever understand?
Powell made her a player, gave her significance; for the first time in her life her acts were making a difference. Of course, it became easier, after September 11, nobler, but that did not change the fact that it simply just happened.
When Williams turned off the tape recorder she did not trust her voice, but it came out right, soft and easy just as she wished.
?You had better transcribe that personally,? she said to him. Once he had left, she remained sitting in her chair, crushed by the weight, her brain darting this way and that like a cornered rat. Strange how quick the mind was when there was danger, how creative you could be when your existence was threatened. How to draw attention away from yourself? The cells in her brain had dreamed up the Johnny Kleintjes plan out of what had long lain stored away? the rumors that Kleintjes had forbidden data. That had not been a priority with her, just something to store in the files in the back of her head. When the need was greatest, it had come springing out into her consciousness, a germinating seed that would grow diabolically.
So brilliant. Those were Luke Powell?s words.
He had appreciated her from the beginning. Sincerely. With each piece of intelligence that she sent to him through the secret channels, the message came back.
And here she sat. Eight months later. Priceless and wonderful and brilliant, with a traitor?s identity that was probably secured, but heads would roll and chances were good that one would be hers.
And that could not happen.
There must be a scapegoat. And there was one.
Ready to sacrifice.
She was not finished. She was not nearly finished.
She smoothed her hair down and pulled the fax nearer.
This was the story the minister was talking about. The one that had appeared in the
