Pinnacle Event

8

“My name is Cammil,” the bartender began. “You look like you have had a long day.” The small Traders bar was empty, but a welcoming fire was lit in the fireplace, despite the fact that the air conditioning was on.

Having been until recently a bartender himself, Raymond Bowman felt suddenly at home with Cammil’s greeting, even though he had never been to South Africa before. “Yeah, long flight. Just checked in to the hotel. Very nice place.” He had not known what to expect, but the clean, modern airport, the quick ride to this beach resort, the sleek hotel, all made him feel more like he was in Malibu than in South Africa. “What local beer do you recommend?”

“Well, most people will have Windhoek, maybe their Tafel, but if you be asking me what I would drink on expense account, I would go micro,” Cammil explained as he reached for a beer mug. “Best microbrewery now be Robson’s East Coast. You like a pale ale, try theirs.”

“Well, that’s what I’ll be having then.”

Cammil poured it perfectly, almost to the point of overflowing, but not quite. Then he excused himself. “I be right back, if anyone else show up, you tell them, I be right back.”

Ray liked the idea of being alone in a bar again, as he was when he closed up at Skinny Legs. He looked out at the ocean, dark as night beyond the beach. He thought a nice run on the sand and a dip in the waves would be a good way to start the day in the morning, before he got a taxi into downtown Cape Town to meet his hosts, the local security service.

“Is the bartender here?” It was a woman who was seated behind him in a wingback chair by the fire. He hadn’t noticed her before.

“No,” Ray said, turning and smiling. “He’ll be right back.”

“That’s what the termite asked,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Ray said, shaking his head at the striking, tall woman in the chair. As he walked toward her, he realized he was staring at her long legs. “I didn’t get that.”

“Most people don’t. Termite walks into a bar and asks, ‘Is the bartender here?’” she said. “Here, have a seat with me by the fire, Mr. Bowman.”

The jet lag, the strangeness of the last few days, the incongruity of him being in Cape Town, and now a beautiful woman who knew who he was. “My name is Brad Radford,” he said, sitting in the chair opposite her.

“No, that is the name on your passport, but you are Raymond J. Bowman” she said in an accent he could not place, a formal, precise, lilting, slightly pinched English. “And you like Cohibas. So there is one here for you. After all, Traders is the best cigar bar in Cape Town. That is why I booked you into the hotel here. That and the fact that it is a little bit out of town.”

He shook his head in surprise, then laughed. “You are my host?” Ray asked, sniffing the Cohiba.

“Mbali Hlanganani, at your service, sir.” She reached a long bare arm across the drinks table. “Forgive my rudeness. I wanted to meet you at the airport, but the day went long so I thought I would come out and share a drink with you.”

Cammil had returned and was standing by their seats.

“Mbali, sorry for the delay. I had to go downstairs to find your Pinotage. Here you go. The L’Avenir ’99 from Stellenbosch.”

“Thank you, Cammil, and thank you for closing the bar tonight for us.” She sloshed the purple liquid in the glass and then delicately sniffed the air above it. “Perfect.”

“Mondays are slow,” the barkeep admitted.

“We’ll still pay the usual for closing the bar,” she smiled back at him.

“You’re a regular?” Ray asked.

“I live nearby. Small place near the beach my father bought for me. I could never afford it on a civil servant’s salary, but he has done very well for himself in Durban, part owner of a food store chain with some Indian gentlemen. Durban has always been a place where the races got along, not like Joburg and Pretoria.”

“So you’re from Durban?”

“Yes, well, KwaZulu. We were Inkatha up there,” she said after sipping the wine. “So my family was not ANC.”

“And yet you are the Director of the Special Security Services Office. A Zulu? How did that happen?” he asked.

“I did my graduate work on the AWB, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. You know, the guys with the Nazi flag imitation? My professor introduced me to Thabo Mbeke and he hired me as a young security advisor. Then, when he became President after Madiba stepped down, Tabo created the SSSO, Special Security Services Office, and put me there. Then after him Zuma liked the work I did tracing some of the state assets that disappeared just before Madiba became President. President Zuma is a Zulu. He wanted a fellow Zulu running the shop. So, like a tree vine in the forest, I kept getting higher because I happened to be attached to the right tree.”

Bowman suddenly had the impression he was sitting across from one very accomplished individual, one who had probably overcome a lot of obstacles of race, gender, ethnicity, bureaucracy. “So, where was this very well-connected professor? Where did you go to university?”

“Oxford. They needed a black girl so they didn’t feel like racists,” she smiled.

“Sounds like you are an expert on racists, the AWB and all that,” Bowman observed.

“They are not the real threat, Mr. Bowman.”

“Call me Ray, please, or Brad, or…” he said. “Who is the real threat?”

“The AWB are farmers, like the Boeremag group were. Big, tall men, overfed, but dumb as oxen. The real white power structures, Afrikaner and English, laugh at those guys and their little Hitler clubs,” she said in a softer, but deeper, more serious tone. “The power men ran the banks, the mines, the defense industry, the labs. They had the money and the real arms. They had the Special Forces in the Army and the intelligence units.”

“I thought the whites still do run the banks and industry?” Ray asked.

“They do, but we took control of the Army, even Special Forces. We took over the intelligence services and the elite police units right away in the mid-nineties. They still run what’s left of the defense industry, but it’s nothing like what ARMSCOR was in the eighties. And we no longer have WMD programs in the labs. That I can assure you.”

Ray was beginning to think that he might like working with this woman. She was a no-nonsense professional. “So, again, who is the threat?”

“The people I worry about are the expats. When they left they took billions in gold and diamonds, their own and the state’s, plus what they could steal from the corporations. That kind of money is power, even if they haven’t used it yet. And they do have an organization, still.”

“The Trustees?” Ray asked.

“I’ve known about them for twenty years now. I gather Washington just figured out they exist,” she laughed.

“Well, let’s say Washington’s recent attention to them was occasioned by their all acquiring a lot of money and then, their simultaneously dying by walking into bullets and falling off boats and balconies, and being hit by trolleys and trains,” Ray replied.

“Washington does not share enough with us. We are not one of the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes are not just all English-speaking nations, they are all white majority nations.” Mbali sat back in her chair. “You all shared with each other, the Brits, the Canadians, Australians, even New Zealand, but not with English-speaking nations run by brown people, not with India, not with Barbados, not with us. So, yes, we do not normally share much with Washington. We believe in two-way streets here, even if we do drive on the left.”

“So when Washington asked about the five dead South African expats, you told them about the Trustees,” Ray added.

“Yes, and only then did Washington tell us about the flash. Eight weeks earlier it had been. Eight weeks and you did not tell us.” She looked like steam might soon come from her ears.

“So you also think the events are related?” Ray asked.

“You know they are. That is why you are here, Mr. Bowman,” she said, sounding more South African than British now.

“It’s one theory we have, but it’s odd that no nuclear bombs have shown up in the months since the flash. No rumors of bombs, at least not that we have heard,” he said, half asking if they had heard any and not told Washington.

“Last week, when our embassy in Washington reported to us that your government’s theory is that South African expats may have had nuclear bombs for the last twenty-five years and now they sold some of them, Mr. Bowman, that caused a very great panic here at a very high level, the highest. My boss wanted to know how I could be following the Trustees so closely and miss that they had nuclears in storage all these years. It is now our only priority to find those bombs, before they go off in Soweto, and Joburg, and here on Table Mountain.”

Ray squinted in the darkened room, puzzled. “You think that they would detonate them here? Why would anybody want to do that? The folks back home think they will be detonated in Washington and New York just before our presidential election.”

“Tell that to my President, who has been having us do a secret search of all sorts of places — ships, airplanes with Geiger counters. He thinks if the expats had nukes, they had them to cripple black-run South Africa, to create some white breakaway nation, some white Bantustan. He is obsessed with the possibility of these bombs going off here. And if he’s not calmed down, it will leak out and there will be a huge panic.”

Now Ray sat back in his wingback chair. “Well, it would seem that our two Presidents have at least that much in common.”

“So, if you, the ex-bartender, are Washington’s answer to how we find the bombs, then I will be like the termite. I will stick with you until you find these bombs and the people who stole them or bought them.” She put down her wineglass and stood up. “So, we begin in the morning. Get some sleep. You look like you need it. I will send Marcus and the truck for you at nine. Call my Ops Room if you need anything before then. Here’s the number.” She dropped a card on the table and for the second time, she was extending her hand.

“Sala kahle, ukuthula,” she said.

“I’m sorry, my Zulu is rusty,” Ray replied.

“Sala kahle means good-bye and ukuthula, peace,” she said.

Ray stood. “Ukuthula. I will see you tomorrow.” He shook her hand and she promptly moved to the door.

“Cammil, next time we try the Delheim ’99. It aged longer in the wood.” She was gone.

Then the penny dropped and Raymond Bowman laughed aloud. Termite walks into a bar. Is the bartender here? Wow, this was going to be a ride.