Pinnacle Event

18

Unusually for a back country road, there were streetlights on the telephone poles every hundred meters as the road meandered from an abandoned mine near Cullinan, east toward Mamelodi. Just before the Bedford step van turned at the bend, the streetlights went out.

“What was that noise?” the guard in the truck asked.

“We ran over something,” the driver said.

The truck made a flapping sound and slowed.

“I’ve got a flat,” the driver said.

“You’ve got more than one, my man,” the guard said, and drew his Beretta from its holster. As he did, the bullets came through the window, two in his head, two in the driver’s.

The three men in the Range Rover escorting the truck did not hear the shots, since the shooters used silencers. The Range Rover hit the same set of spikes on the road, but the driver did not stop. He swung the wagon into reverse, but not in time. The bullets that sprayed the Ranger Rover came from three automatic weapons, also with sound suppressors. The Range Rover kept backing up and fell off the road into a ditch. The shooters shot out its lights. Then they moved quickly, in two teams of two, to give each of the five men in the two vehicles a coup de grâce in the head. A third team, of three men, blew open the back door of the Bedford van with a small charge. Then they took one small black case, containing five special bottles. They left two other cases with similar content. They only needed five bottles.

It had taken four minutes and then they were gone. The cars that had been blocking the road up ahead and behind, left quietly without ever seeing another vehicle. The Mercedes S-Class and the ambulance carrying the heisted material drove south to the N4 and then on to the airport at Midrand, where a medevac flight was waiting. The chartered Boeing Business Jet, a modified 737–800, took off with a “patient,” his family, his aides, and one small black case.

The speakers on the server began playing the opening stanza of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It was a sound that Dugout did not want to hear. He had programmed that music to play when one of a handful of unwelcome events were observed by the scanners he had set up looking for key words in the flood of raw intelligence that the United States vacuumed up around the world, all day, every day.

He walked to the monitor connected to that set of servers and woke up the screen. There were reports from South Africa: the police, security service, the Interior Minister’s office, the Prime Minister’s office. They all seemed to be about a hijacking or a robbery from a truck east of Pretoria. What had triggered the alert was the phone call to the Prime Minister’s office in which the Interior Minister had said the word “tritium.”

Dugout picked up his Bowman-paired iPad and tapped a red app with a white exclamation point in the middle. The app was labeled ALERT. It was after midnight in the Clock hotel near Jaffa in Tel Aviv, when Ray’s iPad made a noise he had never heard from it before. It woke him from the first deep REM sleep he had enjoyed in a week. When he woke, he knew neither where he was nor what the awful buzzing sound was. In a minute after talking with Dugout, he knew both. In five minutes, he knew that a different clock had just started ticking.