Two-Way Cut

chapter 5

The target left work every afternoon at six, so Evert van Wyk got to the carpark at five-thirty. Only one car was there, the targets Audi, together with some scraggly shrubs and a rubbish skip full of broken concrete paving. Van Wyk waited. In the old days you had to break into a car in order to set the trap, but now all he had to do was wait for the target to push a button on his key ring.

Sure enough, at six on the dot the target crossed the carpark and a moment later van Wyk heard an electronic beep and the soft oiled click of locks disengaging. He waited until the target was halfway in the drivers door before making his move. By the time the target had his door closed but before he could lock it, van Wyk had slid into the back seat and was shoving his .22 pistol against the hinge of the mans jaw.

Don’t do anything stupid.

What do you want?

Drive out of here slowly, left at the lights, were going to the golf course.

The man slumped. He knew. Look, I can pay you next week. All I need is

Thats nothing to do with me, van Wyk said. I don’t know why they want you topped, I just know they do, okay? Drive. Don’t talk.

It was an easy hit and he was home by seven-thirty. The thing about your .22 pistol is, its small and quiet. A .22 wont necessarily stop an enraged or vigorous target, but it wasn’t designed to. It was intended for competition shooting…and for putting a bullet inside the skull of a human being.

Van Wyk always used a .22 for close work. The trick was to shoot when the targets defences were down. Like tonight. The guy in the Audi expected to be shot in the woods off the main fairway, but van Wyk shot him inside the car, the moment he’d turned off the ignition.

Last month van Wyk had shot a guy in a toilet cubicle, the guy at his most vulnerable, trousers around his ankles.

Earlier in the year he’d tracked a target to a busy pub. The guy was a heavy in an organised outfit, always surrounded by minders, and van Wyk had no idea how he’d get close to him. Maybe this would have to be long range, with a sniping rifle, the kind of job that didn’t bring the same sort of satisfaction to van Wyk. So he tailed the guy for a few days, noting his routine and looking for vantage points, and learnt that the guy was a regular at the pub.

In fact, as if mindful that a mobile phone is less secure than a land-line, he did business there, on a public phone in a dark corridor that ran behind the main bar. There were two phones, one on either side of a door marked cleaner. Van Wyk noticed that the target always used the phone closest to the entrance to the corridor, and both made and took calls. If it rang, the barman would answer and return to the bar, calling the targets name. So on the fourth day van Wyk picked up the second phone, rang the first phone and asked for the target by name, then broke the connection without hanging up. He was faking a drunken, pleading conversation with an imaginary wife when the target picked up the other phone and said, Yo. Van Wyk turned and shot him at the hairline, saying, Yo, yourself.

Ten seconds later he was walking calmly through the main bar and out onto the street.

A sweet hit, like tonights. After dumping the gun, he’d picked up Thai takeaway and gone home to eat it. In his old life he’d had black servants, but that wasn’t possible in Australia. In his old life he’d been a sanctioned killer for the government. Hed put a lot of woolly heads into body bags. Now the woolly heads were running South Africa, and he’d emigrated and was a killer for hire and did all of his own housework. It wasn’t so bad. He was used to it. But he’d met plenty of his countrymen who couldn’t adjust. They were lost without their servants. Once, when collecting his residency documents at the Australian High Commission in Pretoria, he’d overheard a telling exchange between fat, indignant whites and the immigration officials…

But shes only a servant!

That doesn’t matter, sir, she still needs a passport, a visa and a work permit.

But who is going to do our cooking and cleaning when we get to Australia?

You, sir? Your wife?

It was a sign of the times. Van Wyk always moved with the times, stayed ahead of the times.

At 8.30 the phone rang. It was another job, down in Victoria this time. Van Wyk went to his study, dismantled his spare .22 and silencer, and distributed the pieces inside a shaving-cream can, an electric razor and a video camcorder, ready for the X-ray machines at the airport tomorrow morning.