Dictator Read online

  The official’s name was Hester Thompson. She could not remember the last time she had stepped into a hot bath, or grabbed more than four hours’ sleep. Her greasy, unwashed hair was pulled back into a bedraggled ponytail, held in place by a rubber band.

  She looked at Justus through eyes made red by fatigue and dust. ‘We don’t have more food,’ she said. ‘The UN has cut its food aid budget. We’re giving you all we’ve got.’

  ‘But people are dying of starvation. There is no fresh water, no sanitation. Yesterday we had twenty new cases of cholera, but we have no doctors, no medicine to treat them.’

  ‘I understand, and I sympathize, really I do. But even if I had all the money in the world to spend on food it wouldn’t make any difference because your government—’

  ‘They are not my government,’ Iluko snapped. ‘They are hyenas, feeding on my country’s corpse.’

  Thompson sighed wearily. ‘Whatever, the Gushungo regime refuses to import more than a hundred thousand tons of maize into Malemba. The President says he does not need any more than that. In fact the minimum amount required to keep this country alive is close to six hundred thousand tons. Last week we cut our basic maize allowance to five kilos per person, per week. That works out at six hundred calories a day. And yeah, I know, that’s a starvation ration.’

  ‘So you will not help …’

  ‘Not unless I suddenly develop superpowers, no.’

  Justus drove home empty-handed. He tried to call his family from the Toyota Land Cruiser he had bought, second-hand, with half the money Samuel Carver had sent him a decade earlier. There was no reply.

  When Justus finally returned home he discovered the reason for their silence. Overwhelmed by grief and rage, he screamed out curses against Henderson Gushungo, and cried out to God for vengeance. As the sun set behind the western hills, he began digging Nyasha’s grave, completing the task by the light of a torch. She was buried wrapped in a blanket, and as a handful of refugees gathered round him, Justus said a few prayers to speed his wife’s soul on its way. When he asked the people what had happened to his children, no one knew. They had been taken away, two more recruits to the ranks of the disappeared. What difference did it make where they had disappeared to?

  Late that night, in a brief moment of calm before the tears and fury consumed him again, he thought of the one man on earth who might be able to help him. He had always kept in touch with Carver, marking every Christmas with a long letter detailing his children’s progress as they made their way up the school ladder. Less regularly, Carver had replied, but the Englishman had always shown him friendship and respect. Justus could not afford to make an international mobile phone call, but what did that matter now?

  He had a number for Carver. So he dialled it and hoped for the best.

  40

  Twenty-four hours after Carver’s arrival, he was back in Klerk’s drawing room, standing in front of the elephant painting. But this time he had his back to the charging tusker. His attention was focused on Wendell Klerk, Patrick Tshonga and Zalika Stratten. Carver wasn’t normally given to public speaking. But he had to admit he was getting a buzz out of feeling the anticipation in the air. He knew the answer they all wanted from him. But he was going to make them wait till he was good and ready to give it to them.

  Terence had provided drinks, as always. Carver swilled his whisky in the glass, putting his thoughts in order as he watched the motion of the golden liquid. Then he said, ‘A long time ago, a couple of years before I went into Mozambique to get Zalika, I spent some time in a clinic near Geneva. I’d done a job that started going wrong right from the start, and only ended up worse. I imagine you knew about that, Mr Klerk.’

  He nodded. ‘I was aware you’d been in a bad way, ja.’

  ‘Well, then, I’m sure you also knew that my case was handled by a psychiatrist called Geisel, Dr Karlheinz Geisel. Once I started functioning a little better – stopped being a vegetable, basically – we used to have therapy sessions. He said he had a problem with making me better. He was worried that once I was well, I’d just go back to doing things that he thought were morally inexcusable. So it troubled his conscience, feeling like he was my enabler.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘I’ve spent the weekend listening to you three going on about your precious land of Malemba. Now you’re going to listen to me.

  ‘Geisel and I got into the whole question of killing. How did it feel? Could you ever justify it? I came up with an imaginary situation for him. Suppose you’re put in a time machine and taken back to Germany, 1936. You’re at the airport in Berlin. Adolf Hitler is getting on a plane. Someone sticks a detonator in your hand and tells you that there’s a bomb on the plane. All you have to do is push the switch, the bomb goes off and Hitler dies. No World War Two. No Holocaust. Trouble is, there are other people on the plane. Nice, clean-living folk: the crew, a couple of pretty stewardesses, maybe some cute, smiley little blond kids from the Hitler Youth. So if Adolf dies, they die too. Question: do you push the button?’

  ‘Of course!’ snapped Klerk. ‘A few lives against tens of millions. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Geisel had a problem,’ said Carver. ‘He wasn’t the one who was going to kill all those millions. But he was going to kill all the people on the plane. Their deaths would be down to him. So he wanted time to think about it. I said, “You don’t have time. You’ve got to do it now or never.” Then I gave him all this macho crap about how he’d screwed up the job. It was too late, the plane just took off, and now Hitler’s alive and seventy million people are going to die. I remember I told him, “That’s why I don’t waste too much time worrying about the things you like to worry about. In my line of business, there isn’t time.” ’

  ‘That’s the right attitude,’ said Klerk, approvingly.

  ‘No it isn’t. That’s the attitude that ends up with people in black uniforms with silver skulls on their caps and SS badges on their shoulders, shoving Jews into cattle trucks: “Don’t worry. Don’t think about morality. Just obey your orders and do the job.” See, it took me a while to grasp that Geisel was right. None of us ever knows what the consequences of our actions will be down the line. All we can look at is what’s in front of us, and ask ourselves, “Is this the right thing to do, right here, right now? Can I justify it to myself?” Maybe I’m going soft in my old age, but as much of a mad, genocidal, fascist bastard as Gushungo is, I can’t justify killing him in cold blood. So my answer is that I’m not going to take your job, Mr Klerk … Mr Tshonga … Zalika. You want the old bugger dead so much, you go and kill him. See how that works for you.’

  Klerk shook his head in disbelief and disgust. ‘You telling me that you’ve lost your nerve, Carver?’

  ‘No, just my interest in other people’s dirty laundry.’

  ‘Please, Sam, it’s not like that,’ Zalika pleaded. ‘This is a matter of principle, of saving lives. It’s totally justifiable.’

  ‘You think so? From where I’m standing it looks like one man who wants power, another man who wants money and a woman who wants revenge for a ten-year-old crime, and, oh, while we’re at it, can I have all my land back? All those dying, suffering people you keep going on about aren’t the reason for killing Gushungo. They’re the excuse.’

  ‘So what about everything I told you yesterday?’ Klerk asked. ‘You going to throw all that back in my face?’

  ‘What, that killing Gushungo and Mabeki will do more for Zalika than any shrink ever could? Like it’s some kind of therapy? Trust me, it isn’t.’

  ‘I see. Well, if that’s what you think, Carver, there’s no purpose in extending your stay here any further. Terence will arrange a taxi to take you to the airport. I’m sure there will be a flight that’s going somewhere near Geneva.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s all I need. I appreciate the hospitality, Mr Klerk. It was good seeing you again. You too, Zalika. Mr Tshonga, I wish you the best of luck with your next election.’

 
Tshonga gave a gentle, knowing smile. ‘Thank you, Mr Carver. But somehow I do not think it will come to that. I believe I have not seen the last of you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

  ‘Think about it, Sam,’ Zalika urged. Then her voice turned much harder as she added, more like an ultimatum than a request, ‘Think very carefully about what you’re throwing away.’

  Carver had thought about that. He’d very nearly discarded all his rational, carefully marshalled arguments for turning down the job, just for the chance to be next to Zalika Stratten. It had taken a serious effort of will to turn his back on everything she had to offer. He had no answer for her now; no explanation that would justify his rejection of her.

  Klerk, meanwhile, having got nowhere playing hardball, tried the softly-softly approach. ‘There are still a few days before the Gushungos fly to Hong Kong. If you change your mind, the offer’s still open.’

  Carver nodded in acknowledgement. ‘I’ll find my own way out,’ he said.

  41

  Carver didn’t leave Campden Hall quite as quickly as he’d anticipated. Just before he got to the front door, he heard a low, urgent voice behind him: ‘Mr Carver! Please! Wait!’

  He turned to see Brianna Latrelle striding towards him, her head darting from side to side as she made sure there was no one else around to see her.

  ‘Did you agree?’ she whispered again, even more quietly, when she’d caught up with Carver. She reached out a slender brown arm and grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. ‘Whatever they asked you to do, did you agree?’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ said Carver. ‘I have a plane to catch.’

  ‘So you said no?’ She relaxed her hand a fraction and her shoulders dropped as the tension in them abated. ‘I hope so … for your sake.’ Her hand tightened again. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is you guys have been talking about. But just the way everyone’s been acting, it gives me a real bad feeling. Before you arrived, Wendell and Tshonga were shut away for hours, no one else allowed near the room. Then Zalika, dressing up like that, faking you out … I can’t tell you why it bothers me. I mean, Wendell has meetings all the time. Why should this be any different? I guess it’s just my female intuition. Silly, huh?’

  Carver removed her hand from his arm as gently as he could. Brianna Latrelle meant well, but she wasn’t in any position to know what had really been going on.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, not unkindly.

  By the time he’d walked through the doors, he’d already put Brianna Latrelle out of his mind and switched his attention to his travel plans.

  The last flight out of Luton to Geneva was already about to leave by the time Carver’s taxi pulled away. He went online, checked the schedules and found a British Airways flight out of Heathrow leaving in two hours’ time. There were seats left in business class. Carver bought one and checked in online.

  Heathrow Terminal Five was a hundred and eleven miles from Klerk’s front door. He took four fifty-pound notes from his wallet.

  ‘Yours if you get me there in eighty minutes or less,’ he told the driver, who was called Asif.

  The money made no difference. There were roadworks on the M11 with a forty-mile-an-hour limit and speedcams. Then they hit traffic on the M25. Asif clocked a hundred and twenty trying to make up for lost time, but arrived fractionally too late for Carver to make the plane. He gave him the two hundred anyway, and got another ticket at the airport: a Swissair flight to Zurich.

  By the time he got there, the only way of getting to Geneva was the train. It left at four minutes past eleven and arrived a little before half-past two in the morning. Carver caught a cab from the station to the Old Town, went up to his apartment and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

  He had turned off his mobile as he got on the Zurich flight and had not bothered to turn it back on. He had a feeling Zalika might call him to try to persuade him to change his mind about the Gushungo job, or just give him hell for saying no. His refusal of Klerk’s offer must have felt to her like a personal rejection. She’d offered herself and he’d walked away. She wasn’t likely to be too happy about that. And if he told her the truth, that his decision was nothing personal, it was only likely to make matters worse.

  It wasn’t till he woke up around nine that he finally opened up his connection to the outside world again and heard Justus’s message.

  And his first reaction was that he’d made a mistake. It wasn’t Zalika playing tricks. It was Wendell Klerk.

  42

  They came back for Justus Iluko in the morning. He wasn’t surprised. Even the ignorant apes who ran the local branch of the National Intelligence Organization, the secret police who enforced Gushungo’s never-ending campaign of fear and oppression, would have worked out that if they had a man’s children, they would not be safe until they had him too. Justus let them come. He took it for granted that he was a dead man. And he reasoned that the nearest jail was at Buweku, some thirty miles away. Canaan and Farayi were almost certainly being held there. If he were taken to Buweku too, that would be his best chance of getting close to them, however fleetingly, before they all vanished for good.

  All he wanted was to speak to Carver first. Justus knew that there was nothing his friend could do now. But perhaps, if he could only tell Carver what had happened, that might, in the end, give him some hope of revenge.

  ‘I know you’re a ruthless bastard, Klerk, but I never thought you’d stoop that low.’

  ‘What the fuck, Carver – what’s this “stoop that low”? What are you talking about, man?’

  Carver stopped pacing round his living room and spoke with steely clarity. ‘I’m talking about the message I got from Justus Iluko.’

  ‘Justus who?’

  ‘Iluko. He worked for you, remember? You fought together in the war. He helped me get Zalika away from Moses Mabeki.’

  ‘Ah shit, that Justus. Sure I remember him. Good man, quit working for me a while back. But what’s this about a message?’

  ‘He called me last night – someone who claimed to be him, anyway. The connection was crap and the guy’s voice was shot to hell, could have been anyone. He said his wife was dead and his kids had been taken by Gushungo’s men. He was begging me to help. So you’re telling me this isn’t some stunt you’re trying to pull, faking some tragedy with a family I know, trying to get me to change my mind? Because it’s a helluva bloody coincidence. I walk out on you and a few hours later, hey presto, there’s one of your old employees calling me up—’

  ‘Hey, I swear, I had nothing to do with it. And to prove it, I’ll get my guys in Malemba to check this out, find out what the fuck’s going on. All right?’

  There was a bleeping in Carver’s ear.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘someone on the other line. Shit, it’s Justus’s number. I’ll call you right back.’

  ‘Samuel, is that you?’

  The voice on the other end was tight and high-pitched with anxiety and the reception was terrible, but now that Carver could hear him live he was in no doubt: this was Justus Iluko.

  ‘Yeah, I’m here. What’s happening?’

  ‘They are coming for me. They killed my wife and took my children. Now they are here for me too.’

  Down the line, Carver could hear shouting and a hammering noise – someone trying to batter down a door. He felt a desperate sense of helplessness and guilt at his inability to change any of what was about to happen.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked, though he knew it was a futile question.

  ‘Do not worry about me, I am a dead man,’ came the reply. ‘But please, Sam, I beg you, if there is anything you can do for my children … anything … I …’

  Justus’s final words were drowned in the crash of the splintering door and a cacophony of heavy boots and raised voices as the room was invaded and Justus was seized.

  There was one last despairing cry of ‘Sam, please!’ then a brief burst of feedback and static be
fore the line went dead.

  Carver stood alone in his Geneva flat, surrounded by all the possessions and comforts that many years in a lucrative trade had bought him, shamed by the ease of his existence; shamed, too, by his initial scepticism about Justus’s call. While Carver had been tucking into breakfast and shooting at clay pigeons on Klerk’s estate, Justus and his family had been torn apart, their lives destroyed on a madman’s whim. He thought back to the psychiatrist Karlheinz Geisel, who had baulked at the idea of doing something that would cause the death of a few specific individuals, even if it might save many more faceless, unknown people. Now Carver faced the precise opposite situation: people he knew would die if he did not do something. There was a moral imperative to act.

  The children whose education Carver had supported and whose father had saved his life were imprisoned, facing interrogation, torture, even execution. Every year Canaan and Farayi had sent him hand-drawn cards at Christmas, along with letters earnestly describing their progress at school. In the past few years, childish descriptions had given way to growing maturity. He had seen them blossom as individuals with minds and opinions of their own, young people of the kind Malemba desperately needed if it had any hope of recovering from the devastation wrought by Henderson Gushungo. How could he stand by and let such promise go to waste?

  Justus had begged Carver to do something for his children, but it had to be something effective: no cheap gestures, no grandstanding, but something that would make a difference. He had to give the Iluko kids, and others like them, the best chance of surviving now and prospering in the future. And there was only one way a single individual could do that.

  Carver went over everything he had been told about Malemba and its ruling élite. An idea began to take shape in his mind. It grew clearer and more strongly defined as he went online and looked at maps and aerial views of Hong Kong. Then he surfed websites dealing with tropical medicine and marine biology. He took out a notepad and wrote down ‘pyx’, ‘patten’, ‘cruet’, ‘chasuble’, ‘lavabo’.