five-mile journey to the former Portuguese colony of Macau.
The boat was one of Fishermen Zheng’s favourite toys, and this voyage gave him particular pleasure. He had brought a diamond dealer along to inspect the stones Mabeki had agreed to sell him. The dealer assured him, in a Hoklo dialect incomprehensible even to the vast majority of Chinese, that they were worth almost twenty million US dollars. On Friday night, Zheng and Mabeki had shaken hands at six million, subject to delivery and acceptance. Now the money was paid directly into Mabeki’s personal account in the Cayman Islands. Everyone was happy.
Mabeki made his excuses and went to the cabin where the next stage of the extraction plan he had agreed with Zheng was due to take place. A doctor – Hoklo, like all Zheng’s associates, and thus guaranteed to keep his silence – injected Zalika with a heavy dose of nitrazepam, which knocked her out cold.
They were met at the Macau shore by an ambulance driven by two more of Zheng’s men, dressed as uniformed paramedics. The ambulance took Mabeki and his unconscious companion to Macau International Airport, which is specifically geared to the private aviation needs of the high-rollers who gamble their money at Macau’s twenty-eight casinos. There, a Gulfstream 550 ultra-long-range jet, equipped with medical facilities and with a doctor and nurse on its crew, was waiting to fly Mabeki and the comatose Zalika to a medical facility near Paris. No one enquired why she needed to travel so far for treatment. The airport’s officials had long since become accustomed to the foibles of the rich.
An hour into the flight, the pilot was re-routed on to a new southwesterly course, towards Sindele airport, Malemba.
They were barely two thousand miles from their destination when Zalika Stratten began very groggily to wake up. She cast bleary eyes around the cabin and asked where on earth she was.
75
Gatekeeper Wu had been told very clearly where his duties lay. At half-past ten on Sunday morning, when the delivery van had first pulled up by the barricade at the entrance to Hon Ka Mansions, the two men inside had assured him that they knew precisely where he, his wife and three small children lived. They’d made it plain that not only his life but those of his family were at stake. If he wished to live, he would turn his eyes from anyone who came in or out of the development over the next ninety minutes. If he was approached by any policemen, he should play dumb and claim not to remember anything about any of the cars or people who’d gone past his post. It was made very clear that the boss for whom the men worked had contacts within the police who would tell him in an instant if Wu had told them anything of interest. On the other hand, his discretion would be much appreciated and his family would be greatly rewarded.
Wu had got the message.
The first police car had arrived shortly after midday. The officers inside told Wu they were responding to a report of gunfire. Wu assured them, truthfully, that he had heard none. One of the cops had shrugged and told him he didn’t expect there was any reason to be concerned. The woman who had reported it said she and her husband had waited for more than half an hour before calling the police because they were arguing about what the sound had been.
It took the two cops almost ten minutes to determine that the noise had come from the Gushungo entrance and another five to decide they should force their way into the house. Twenty seconds later, they discovered the two bodies of the maids in the hallway, followed by the Gushungos and their four bodyguards in the living room.
The cops reported back to their station. The chief inspector, who was the senior duty officer, took the instant decision that he did not wish to be in any way responsible for the investigation of a head of state’s violent death on Hong Kong soil. He got straight on to the Hong Kong Police Force’s headquarters, where a chief superintendent went straight to the top, disturbing the Commissioner of Police, who was standing over a tricky putt on the fourth hole of the Ocean Nine course at the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club.
By happy chance, the commissioner’s playing partner was the Secretary for Security, a member of the Executive Council that assisted the Chief Executive of Hong Kong in governing the territory. The two men immediately decided that every available police resource would be devoted to investigating the deaths at Hon Ka Mansions. They also agreed that it would be most unwise to alarm the public, or jeopardize the international reputation of Hong Kong, by making any statement whatsoever until the perpetrators responsible had been identified and, if possible, apprehended.
Around two in the afternoon, the first detectives came to interview Gatekeeper Wu. Like Zheng’s men, they told him not to tell anyone about what he had seen if he knew what was good for him.
To any Chinese, a threat from a government official is at least as terrifying, if not more so, than one from a gangster. No gangster, after all, has killed even a tiny fraction of the Chinese citizens sacrificed by their own state over the past sixty-odd years. That night, Wu ordered his wife to gather together the family’s pitiful quantity of possessions. On Monday morning they were getting on a train and heading back to their old fishing village, two hundred miles away on the coast of Guangdong province. The family Wu had had enough of Hong Kong.
76
Carver’s flight got into Johannesburg at quarter-past seven on Monday morning. As soon as he’d made it through immigration and customs he sat down in an airport cafe with a double espresso and his iPhone. Then he logged on to the BBC news pages and looked for headlines about Malemba.
It didn’t take long for his worst fears to be confirmed. The whole Gushungo operation had been blown and Tshonga’s supposedly peaceful takeover had collapsed in a swift series of massacres. Meanwhile, there were rumours of a simultaneous attack on President Gushungo and his wife at their home in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong authorities were remaining tight-lipped, but neither the President nor his wife had been seen in more than twenty- four hours and although a local vicar reported that he had been told that they were suffering from a stomach-bug, some Hong Kong bloggers were suggesting that they were dead and that local authorities were engaged in a massive cover-up. Carver liked the sound of that. The more the truth was glossed over, the less chance there was that anything would ever be traced to him.
Malemba itself was now under the control of a self-proclaimed Committee of National Security, a group of senior military officers who had decreed a state of emergency pending the reestablishment of civilian government. The committee members, like the Hong Kong authorities, refused to comment on stories that Henderson Gushungo was dead. They preferred to focus on Patrick Tshonga, who was described as a traitor, an anarchist and a threat to peace. He was being hunted without mercy, one general stated, and would soon be cornered like a rat. In the meantime, a press conference was being scheduled for the following morning, Tuesday, at which time the people would get a chance to hear the committee’s plans for the country.
The timing seemed about right, Carver thought. If Mabeki had flown direct to Sindele, he would have arrived at roughly the same time as Carver got to Johannesburg. He’d need a day to get his feet under the table, prepare the various bribes, threats and blackmails with which he’d bend everyone to his will, and then appoint whichever stooges would nominally run the country. He’d also have to decide what to do with Zalika. Assuming she was still alive.
In any case, Carver now had his deadline. His best, maybe only chance of killing Mabeki and rescuing Zalika was to do it before Mabeki had the chance to assemble and announce his new regime. Once that African Machiavelli had the full resources of the Malemban police state at his beck and call, he would be almost impossible to touch. It had to be now.
First, though, he had to confront Klerk. He leaned back in his chair, wanting to think through the best approach, one that would give him the flexibility to respond equally effectively, whether Klerk had betrayed the plan or not. Then something caught his eye, a copy of the Johannesburg Star discarded along with the empty coffee cups on a nearby table. The front-page headline screamed ‘Slaughter in Sandton’. Next to it was a sub-
