Dictator

73

Carver dashed for the door on the far wall, wrenched it open and charged through. It led into a bare concrete passage that stretched for a good twenty yards in either direction, lit by occasional naked bulbs. Carver turned right and started sprinting, waiting for the sound of pursuit, his back prickling in dread anticipation of the first shot.

Up ahead, he saw a doorway. He glanced back. The passage behind him was empty: no sign of the man in the army shirt.

Carver kept running flat-out for the door. It was wooden, flimsy-looking, roughly painted in flaking blue gloss. He tried the handle, but it was locked.

He looked back again. Still no one in the passage.

Carver stepped back, kicked the door open and walked through into a store very like the one he had just left: more boxes, more shelves, but this time they all seemed to be laden with jars of herbs and strange-looking liquids. By the look of them, and the huge antique black cabinet divided into hundreds of small drawers, it was some kind of traditional chemist’s or apothecary’s. The counter in front of it was fancier than the one in the grocer’s shop, fronted with glass and filled with brightly coloured boxes covered in Chinese script. The woman behind it was talking to two diminutive middle-aged customers who were competing to get their point across to her. Carver realized with a shock that these were the same women who had been in the grocer’s store. They turned at the sound of the opening door, recognized him too, and raised the pitch and volume still higher as they pointed and shouted at him.

‘Afternoon, ladies,’ he said as he walked by as casually as he could, half-wondering if the old biddies might be crazy or angry enough to attack him as he went.

Once outside, he turned left and began walking back towards his car. Then he stopped. Now he knew why the gang leader had not followed him. He was heading for Carver’s car, presuming that it would be his first port of call.

Carver took out his phone as he watched the man in the old army shirt walk up to the Honda, looking around as he went. Confident that Carver was not yet in the area, he leaned back against the car and took a packet of cigarettes from the chest pocket of his green shirt. Either he was a well-known local hardman or he simply carried an air of violence with him wherever he went, because the crowds seemed to part round him, leaving plenty of open space around the car – a good thing as far as Carver was concerned.

As the man tapped the bottom of the packet to punch out a cigarette, Carver tapped a key on his phone. He had always expected that he might need to do this at some point during the day, but it had only been planned as a means of destroying evidence, rather than taking out the enemy. Still, you couldn’t complain about two birds with one stone.

The speed dial called up the number of the phone Carver had bought the previous day. The phone that was held down with zip-ties on to the piece of wood he had brought from Geneva. Two AA batteries were also tied to that piece of wood, as was the rocket sparking device. The two screws, their bolts and washers were also fixed to the wood, between the phone and the batteries.

Two crocodile-clipped wires ran from one screw to the batteries and from the batteries to the sparker. A third wire was clipped from the other screw to the sparker. Two much shorter lengths of plastic-coated electric wiring ran from the screws into the hole Carver had made in the side of the phone casing. Their bare ends were just a couple of millimetres apart inside the hole.

When he called the phone, the vibrator did its job and started vibrating. In so doing it touched the two bare wires together and completed the circuit that led to the batteries and the sparker. The sparker ignited the rocket engine, which in turn set off the acetone and then the petrol, and then the whole car went up in an explosive burst of flame, taking the man in the army shirt with it.

As screams and shouts echoed down the street and hordes of people poured out from shops, bars and restaurants to catch a glimpse of the drama, Carver walked ignored and unnoticed into a bar, and went to the men’s room. Having made sure he was alone, he chose one of the toilet cubicles and locked the door. He took off his wig and glasses. He transferred the wallet with all the Bowen Erikson papers and cards from his jacket to his trouser pocket. Then he removed the jacket and his vicar’s bib. He stopped, listened to make sure the men’s room was still empty apart from him, then came out of the cubicle and stuffed all the vicar gear into a tall wire-mesh wastepaper bin that stood beside the toilet’s washbasins, covering it all up with paper towels from the dispenser on the wall.

As he walked back out through the bar, attracting no more attention than he had on the way in, Carver considered trying to find Mabeki, but dismissed the thought at once. By now he would have disappeared into the apartment blocks on the Aberdeen shore, or, much more likely, the boats crammed in its harbour. Wherever Mabeki was, there, too, Zalika would be. Carver could not believe he would kill the girl, not before he’d extracted his full helping of pleasure at her expense. And he wouldn’t do that in Hong Kong, either; not when there was work to be done and power to be grabbed in Malemba.

Mabeki had known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Gushungo hit was going down that day. He’d known, too, that Carver and Zalika would be doing the job. All that being the case, it followed that he’d known about the coup in Malemba. Carver was prepared to bet every cent in his offshore bank accounts that the coup had not succeeded – or not in the way he had been told about, anyway.

Someone had tipped Mabeki off about the entire plan, someone who had been willing to sell out Carver and Zalika. But who? Had Klerk been lying all along about his love for his niece? If Mabeki had offered him a better deal than Patrick Tshonga had done, would Klerk have put money before family? Carver didn’t want to believe that, but he had long since learned the hard way that men who truly love money always value it more highly than any mere human affection. And what of Tshonga himself? Had he just been playing Klerk, leading him on with the promise of easy money, when all along he’d cut a deal with Mabeki? It would be an abdication of all Tshonga’s principles to ally himself with Gushungo’s right-hand man. But for anyone who really wanted power in Malemba that might be the smart, cynical move to make.

Whatever had happened, the answer to the puzzle lay in the same place to which Moses Mabeki was certainly travelling, and where he would hide Zalika Stratten until he had done with her: Malemba. Carver had no choice. He had to go there, even if it meant going alone and unprotected against overwhelming odds. He thought of calling Klerk and Tshonga, but decided against it. If one of them really had double-crossed him, letting them know he was on his way was the last thing he should do.

When he got back out on the street, Carver walked down to the harbour promenade. Taxis were dropping off tourists. He hailed one of them.

‘Take me to the airport,’ he said.