?He wouldn'?t salute,? said the lieutenant reproachfully, and stood up, shaky on his feet, the brown shirt stained darkly with his blood.
?So you set the dog on him?? Mazibuko strode forward. The Parabat raised his hands reflexI'vely Mazibuko grabbed him by the collar, jerked him forward, and smashed his forehead into the broken nose. The man fell backward again. Red dust billowed in the midday sun.
The cell phone in Mazibuko?s breast pocket began to chirp.
?Jissis,? said the sergeant, ?you?re gonna kill him,? and knelt beside his mate.
?Not today ??
The ringing got louder, a penetrating noise.
?Nobody fucks with my people.? He unbuttoned the pocket and activated the phone.
?Captain Mazibuko.?
It was the voice of Janina Mentz.
?Activation call, Captain. At eighteen-fifteen there will be a Falcon 900 from Twenty-first Squadron standing by at Bloemspruit. Please confirm.?
?Confirmed,? he said, his eyes on the two Parabats still standing, but there was no fight in them, only bewilderment.
?Eighteen-fifteen. Bloemspruit,? Mentz said.
?Confirmed,? he said once more.
The connection was cut. He folded the phone and returned it to his pocket. ?Joe. Come,? he said. ?We?ve got things to do.? He walked past the sergeant, treading on the hind leg of the German shepherd. There was no reaction.
?My father said ? more than once ? if anything ever happened to him, I should get you, because you are the only man that he trusts.?
Thobela Mpayipheli only nodded. She spoke hesitantly; he could see that she was extremely uncomfortable, deeply aware of her invasion of his life, of the atmosphere that she had created here.
And now he?s done a stupid thing. I? we ??
She searched for the right words. He recognized her tension but didn?'t want to know. Didn?'t want it to affect the life he had here.
?Did you know what he was involved with after ?ninety-two??
?I last saw your father in ?eighty-six.?
?They ? He had to ? Everything was so mixed-up then, after the elections. They brought him back to help? . The integration of the intelligence services was difficult. We had two, three branches, and the apartheid regime had even more. The people wouldn'?t work together. They covered up and lied and competed with one another. It was costing a lot more money than they made provision for. They had to consolidate. Create some order. The only way was to split everything up into projects, to compartmentalize. So they put him in charge of the project to combine all the computer records. It was almost impossible, there was so much: the stuff at Infoplan in Pretoria alone would take years to process, not to mention the regime?s weapons manufacturers like Denel and the Security Police and the Secret Service, Military Intelligence, and the ANC?s systems in Lusaka and London, four hundred, five hundred gigabytes of information, anything from personal information on the public to weapons systems to informants and double agents. He had to handle it all, erase the stuff that could cause trouble and save the useful material, create a central, uniform, single platform database. He ? I kept house for him during that time, my mother was sick. He said it upset him so much, the information on the systems. ??
She was quiet for a while, then opened her big black leather handbag and took out a tissue as if to prepare herself.
?He said there were some strange orders, things that Mandela and Defence Minister Nzo would not approve, and he was worried. He didn?'t know what to do, at first. Then he decided to make backups of some of the material. He was scared, Mr. Mpayipheli, those were such chaotic times, you understand. There was so much insecurity and people trying to block him and some trying to save their careers and others trying to make theirs. ANCs and whites, both sides of the fence. So he brought some stuff home, data, on hard drives. Sometimes he worked through the night on it. I kept out of it. I suspect he ??
She dabbed at her nose with the tissue.
?I don'?t know what was on the drives and I don'?t know what he meant to do with it. But it looks as if he never handed it in. It looks as if he is trying to sell the data. And then they phoned me and I lied because??
?Selling it??
?I ??
?To whom??
?I don'?t know.? There was despair in her voice, whether for the deed or her father, he couldn'?t say.
?Why??
?Why did he try to sell it? I don'?t know.?
He raised his eyebrows.
?They pushed him out. After the project. Said he should go on pension. I don'?t think he wanted that. He wasn'?t ready for that.?
He shook his head. There had to be more to it.
?Mr. Mpayipheli, I don'?t know why he did it. Since my mother died ? I was living with him but I had my own life, I think he got lonely. I don'?t know what goes on in an old man?s head when he sits at home all day and reads the
