Dictator

90

Carver had already struck once, though Justus did not know it. The first of the sentries had been eliminated and his body dragged off the path on which he’d been walking. Carver had walked on a little further, towards the oncoming second sentry, and now he was invisible in the undergrowth by the side of the path, waiting for his next victim.

He was a young soldier who looked little older than the Iluko boy he’d rescued a few hours ago, and who carried himself with the nervous bravado of any squaddie in any army forced to mount a solitary patrol in the dark. It was almost too easy to let him go by and then slip out on to the path and approach the soldier from behind, place his left hand over the lad’s mouth, pulling his head back, and then slide the blade in a single smooth stroke across the exposed neck, slicing through the trachea and feeling his body go as limp in his arms as an exhausted lover.

Slowly, with almost tender care, Carver lowered the dead soldier to the ground. Then he stepped back off the path and dropped to his belly to snake across the ground to his next position. When he got there, he pulled round the M4 carbine that had been slung across his back and found a comfortable shooting position. He imagined he was back on one of the stands at Campden Hall, waiting for his targets to be released. He thought of the sequence of shots he would be firing, the various adjustments he would have to make as he tracked from one target to another. He calmed himself, let every last dreg of tension be bled from his neck and shoulders. And then he got to work.

From where Justus was watching, what happened next had an eerie calmness, even a detachment, to it that made him wonder for a moment whether he was back in the world of his dreams. There were four gentle but quite distinct popping sounds, each less than a second apart. And then a spell seemed to be cast over the card players. The man who had just seconds earlier been looking so purposefully into the darkness fell to the ground without so much as a murmur of pain or surprise. A card player suddenly jerked backwards, his head resting against the back of his sofa, a bright-red hole between his wide-open, sightless eyes. The man sitting next to him was knocked sideways by the impact of a bullet in his temple. The third slumped forward over the card table, his beer glass still gripped in his right hand. As his head hit the table, his grip relaxed and the glass smashed on the stone-tiled floor – the first loud noise since the first shot had been fired.

Justus realized that the two sentries must also have fallen to Carver. Six men dead, and still Justus had no idea of where, precisely, their killer was.

The sound of breaking glass alerted the two men posted inside the house. From the first-floor landing it was possible to see right through the open-plan interior to the terrace where the four bodies now lay. Whoever had killed them was surely on their way into the house. Nervous fingers tapped out a number on a satellite phone, and the voice that spoke into the mouthpiece trembled with fear.

‘We are under attack. At least four men are dead, maybe six. Please come quickly, I beg you, or it will be too late.’

In the back of the helicopter transporting him south from Sindele, Moses Mabeki felt a mixture of fury and delight. Carver’s sheer effrontery was intolerable, and the possible seizure of Zalika Stratten was a nuisance, to put it mildly. But at least this gave him an opportunity to deal with Carver once and for all. It had been a mistake to expect a gang of Chinese peasant gangsters to solve his problems for him. From now on, Mabeki would rely on his own resources and do the job himself.

He checked his watch. He would be at the house in twenty minutes. He did not expect Carver to have got too far away by then.

Back at the house, the last two members of the unit detailed to stand guard over Zalika Stratten were not planning a desperate last stand to defend their master’s chosen woman. They were climbing through a window at the back of the building, sliding down the thatched roof, falling the last seven feet to the ground and then running away as fast as their legs would carry them.