60
Carver kissed the red silk stole and draped it round his neck. He took out the cruet filled with wine, the chalice and finally the pyx, the weapon with which he would carry out the killing.
As he took out his service book, Carver began to feel nervous for the first time; but these were the nerves any performer – actor, athlete or assassin – needs if they are to do their best work. They sharpened Carver’s senses and honed his concentration. He had no doubt now about the rights or wrongs of what he was about to do. Once the decision to take the job had been made, the argument was over so far as he was concerned. He had made up his mind and he would stick with it.
From outside the room, Carver could hear the sound of footsteps and respectfully lowered voices coming down the stairs. His stomach tightened. The action was about to begin. The door of the living room opened and the bodyguards snapped to attention as Moses Mabeki came in, then stood to one side to let his master and mistress through.
Faith Gushungo caught Carver’s eye first. She was much taller than he had expected, at least as tall as Carver himself, her height exaggerated by a brightly patterned silk headdress. Her eyes were hidden behind impenetrable dark glasses and her mouth was set in a downward curve of stony disapproval.
‘Why is Gibson not here?’ she snapped, not waiting for any introductions.
Carver adopted the ingratiating manner of a meek and easily intimidated vicar. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but he’s suffering an attack of food poisoning.’
The First Lady gave a dismissive ‘Pah!’ And only then did Carver realize that she had so dominated the past few seconds that he had paid no attention whatsoever to her husband.
‘The President of Malemba, the Honourable Henderson Gushungo,’ said Mabeki.
The man who stepped forward, his hand outstretched, was as surprising in appearance as his wife, but in the opposite direction. Carver had expected a man exuding the same sense of power and malice as Mabeki, but magnified a hundredfold. This, after all, was the dictator who had maintained an iron grip on his country for three decades; who had torn down its economy around his ears; tortured his people, destroyed his enemies, outraged global opinion, yet left it impotent to harm him.
And all that was left was a wizened husk.
Gushungo’s face was as wrinkled and shrivelled as a dessicated prune. Just a few thin tufts of curly silver hair clung to his scalp. His body had shrunk to the point where he wore his suit like a child dressing up in his father’s clothes. The hand he offered Carver was visibly quivering. The other hand clung to an ivory-topped walking stick.
This doddery old geezer was the man Carver had travelled halfway round the world to kill.
For a second he wondered why he should bother. Gushungo’s life expectancy could surely be measured in months, even weeks, rather than years. But then he thought about Canaan and Farayi Iluko, rotting in their Malemban cells, and realized that their life expectancies were shorter still.
In any case, it was clear that, as Patrick Tshonga had suggested, Faith Gushungo was now the real power in the room. She was his primary target. And then he caught something between her and Mabeki – a fractional turning of her head towards him; the faintest twisting of his lips – and thought, ‘They’re in this together.’ And then other thoughts, half-formed, crowded into his mind, bringing with them a jumbled, inarticulate sense of danger, something not quite right. But there was no time to follow them because Carver was shaking Gushungo’s hand, murmuring ‘Mr President’ and making his way to the bar, to stand in front of the cross, as Mabeki ushered the Gushungos to their seats.
The two bodyguards, joined now by another pair of men, took their places, standing behind the Gushungos. And then, even though it was still open, there was a gentle tap on the living-room door and a pair of young Chinese women wearing housemaids’ grey cotton dresses and starched white aprons tiptoed into the room and formed a third line of worshippers behind the bodyguards. Carver recognized one of them as Tina Wong. She did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Either she did not recognize him through the disguise or, more likely, she was just as good a professional as she’d seemed when they’d met on the ferry thirty-six hours earlier.
Carver had to repress the urge to shout out, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ It had never occurred to him that the Chinese staff would be required to take communion as well as everyone else. Was Faith Gushungo really that much of a religious maniac? Or were Wong and her colleague simply Christians themselves? It was possible, Carver supposed. Hong Kong had been British for a hundred and fifty years. Why shouldn’t ex-colonies people choose to worship in the Church of England? He cursed himself for not thinking of that sooner.
Mabeki took up his position, standing by the door, watching over the service. He nodded at Carver to start.
‘Good morning,’ said Carver, trying to think of his next lines. His mind was momentarily blank. His concentration was awry. He had not yet even begun and things were already going wrong.
61
‘Today,’ said Carver, ‘is the festival of Pentecost, or Whit Sunday as it is traditionally known in the Anglican Church, when we commemorate the appearance of the Holy Ghost among the apostles and its bestowal of the gift of tongues. I shall only be giving one reading, from Acts, if that is acceptable to you, sir, and will be using the traditional King James version. I find the poetry of the language far outweighs any loss of comprehension.’
Carver looked at Gushungo, who nodded his assent.
‘Very well,’ Carver continued, ‘then let us now begin our worship.’
In the road outside the house, Zalika Stratten started walking.
Carver read the words from his service book: ‘May grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.’
‘And also with you,’ the congregation of eight replied, with a far greater intensity than the mumbled responses Carver was used to from his British churchgoing.
The next item in his book was referred to as the Prayer of Preparation. The Gushungos and their staff seemed to know it by heart, joining in as he declaimed,
Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, Carver mused. Now there was a line. How many people in the room could even pretend that their hearts were unsullied?
They moved on to the Confession, and Carver wondered what the Gushungos thought of when they told God that they had sinned against him and against their neighbours in thought and word and deed. Did they believe that? How could they then go right back and sin all over again? Perhaps the words were a sort of expiation, wiping the slate of atrocities clean and freeing the Gushungos to go back and commit more.
He read the collect for Pentecost, the special prayer dedicated to that day. It asked God to give his people ‘the right judgement in all things’. Carver was about to act as judge, jury and executioner. Never in his life had he been in such close, intimate contact with his targets so soon before their deaths. Even for someone without much religious feeling there was something very special about the act of joining together in prayer. It made them all complicit, in some way he could not quite define. It made the cold finality of what he was about to do all the more stark in its cold-blooded calculation.
Zalika was at the front door now. She pushed it gently and it swung open noiselessly on hinges oiled earlier that morning by Tina Wong. Zalika was equally soundless as she made her way across the marble floor, heading for the stairs.
The reading for the day was taken from Acts, chapter two, verses one to eleven. It spoke of the Holy Ghost entering the building where the apostles were gathered.
Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
Carver felt like a ghost himself, slipping into this house and falling upon its inhabitants. He was quite calm now, dispassionate, the nerves having begun to vanish as soon as he set about his business.
When the reading was done, he led them all in the Creed, that confident declaration of a belief he could not quite share. It spoke of Jesus coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead. As he read those words from the service book, Carver happened to look up for a second and catch Moses Mabeki’s eye. There was a look of utter contempt on his face – the look of a man who had long since abandoned any concept of right and wrong in favour of calculation and expediency.
Carver was making his calculations, too. Very soon now he would have to find a way of killing Mabeki, independently of the rest. He assumed the guards would be carrying guns. If they were not, he would need another weapon. There must be a corkscrew behind the bar; held between the knuckles with its point slashing at Mabeki’s skin, it could be a useful weapon. The curtains had tie-backs; wrapped round a neck and pulled tight they would serve to strangle him. Wherever Carver found himself, there were always weapons to be found if he looked hard enough.
He was thinking this even as he brought the Creed to a close with an invocation of ‘God the giver of life’, and at that point even he could not deny the sacrilege, even the obscenity, of what he was about to do. But that knowledge did not stop him, any more than the Confession altered the Gushungos’ behaviour.
Now they were beginning the prayers that led to communion itself. Carver found himself laying a hand on the pyx filled with wafers, the chalice and the cruet of wine, to consecrate them. He led them all in the Lord’s Prayer, almost wincing as he said some of the words: ‘forgive us our trespasses … lead us not into temptation … deliver us from evil’.
Once they’d all intoned ‘Amen’, Carver said, ‘We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.’
And the Gushungos, their bodyguards and their servant-girls replied, ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’
Carver opened the pyx and looked very carefully at the small round communion wafers inside it. He picked out one of the wafers, said, ‘The body of Christ,’ and popped it into his mouth. It was arid, flavourless, and stuck like a cream cracker to the roof of his mouth, forcing him to prise it away with his tongue.
Carrying the pyx, Carver stepped forward to the Gushungos’ two chairs. The old man was sitting with his eyes closed and his hands held out, slightly cupped, in front of him.
‘The body of Christ,’ Carver repeated, placing another wafer into Henderson Gushungo’s hands.
‘Amen,’ Gushungo murmured.
He lifted his hands to his mouth and consumed the wafer. And from that moment, the President of Malemba, the Father of the Nation, the most notorious dictator in a continent filled with psychopathic leaders, was, irrevocably, a dead man.
62
Saxitoxin, which has the chemical formula C10H17N7O4 and is named after the clam Saxidomus giganteus in which it was first discovered, is a neurotoxin or nerve poison produced by a small number of species of dinoflagellate phyto-plankton. These microscopic life-forms are ingested by other, bigger species such as shellfish and puffer fish, most commonly when the waters which the fish inhabit are affected by ‘algal bloom’. This occurs when the population of algae, including the types of plankton that contain saxitoxin, multiplies rapidly, covering the water with a thick layer of red or brown scum. The fish eat the plankton, humans eat the fish, and then the humans are struck down by a condition known as paralytic shellfish poisoning, or PSP.
Saxitoxin is heat resistant, so cooking cannot nullify its effect. Once it has been consumed, symptoms appear within minutes and include any or all of the following: a feeling of nausea, followed by diarrhoea and/or vomiting and/or abdominal pain; tingling and/or burning sensations in limbs and extremities, including hands, feet, lips, gums and even the tongue; shortness of breath and choking; confused and/or slurred speech; and loss of limb coordination. Someone who has saxitoxin poisoning could easily be mistaken for a drunk. The crucial difference is that a hard night’s boozing will only give you a hangover. PSP, however, can very easily be fatal. In fact, saxitoxin is so dangerous that a single dose of 0.2 milligrams is enough to kill an average human. That makes it approximately a thousand times more toxic than sarin nerve-gas.
Naturally, the CIA became very, very interested in saxitoxin. Back in the fifties, its undercover operatives were supposedly given suicide capsules containing it, but in 1970 the agency was ordered to destroy its entire stock by, ironically enough, that most toxic of all presidents, Richard Milhous Nixon.
Saxitoxin, however, did not go away. Nature kept on producing it, and precisely because of its effects on the nervous system medical researchers discovered it could be an extremely effective laboratory tool. In time, scientists discovered how to synthesize it, using the methods described by Carver to Klerk. It had proved relatively simple for Klerk’s people to replicate the process so painstakingly mapped out in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and then mix extremely high doses of saxitoxin, many times greater than that needed to kill, into the flour and water used to make communion wafers. The baking process did nothing to make the wafers any less poisonous. The intensity of the poison, however, ensured that its effects would be felt far more quickly than those of a naturally inflicted dose of PSP.
The timing was a delicate issue, though. It was absolutely vital that Carver reach the end of the line of communicants, dosing them all, before anyone realized that anything had happened. Ideally, he wanted a few extra seconds in which to attack Mabeki before he too was alerted. Finally, it was essential to coordinate the timing of everything he did downstairs with that of Zalika’s theft of the diamonds upstairs.
Zalika was in the master bedroom. She had located the safe, hidden behind another portrait of the Gushungos. Now she was reaching into her canvas shoulder-bag and retrieving the envelope Tina Wong had given her. She opened it and pulled out a clear, sealable plastic sandwich-bag. Inside the bag was a thin latex glove, of the kind worn by surgeons. Zalika removed it and placed it on her right hand. Then she turned back to the safe.
Faith Gushungo accepted her wafer with uncharacteristic meekness. Then Carver moved on to the bodyguards kneeling on the floor behind. From the corner of his eye, he saw Moses Mabeki slip from the room. He thought he heard Mabeki’s footsteps first in the hallway and then slipping up the stairs.
Zalika was up there, unarmed and unaware that she was in danger of detection.
But there was no way Carver could warn her that Mabeki was loose inside the house without blowing his own cover.
And if that were not enough, he had a more immediate problem to consider, the one that had struck him just before the service. And with every step he took, it was getting closer.
63
To avoid poisoning himself, Carver had placed two saxitoxin-free wafers into the pyx, as well as a dozen poisoned ones. That allowed one for the actual service and another in case anyone asked him to prove, in advance, that the wafers were edible. The two wafers were each marked with a very slight notch, to distinguish them from the rest. He had only needed one of them, leaving the second spare. But now there were two Chinese housemaids, one of them a woman who had gone undercover in this madhouse to help him, expecting communion.
Upstairs, Moses Mabeki was walking slowly but as inexorably as the angel of death down the corridor towards the master bedroom. As he moved, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
In the bedroom, Zalika Stratten was reaching into the safe and grabbing a green velveteen bag. It was heavier than she’d expected and there was a scrabbling sound of cold, hard surfaces rubbing against each other as she picked it up.
Carver was doing his best to be cold-bloodedly professional. His mantra had always been: don’t worry about things you cannot control. It was Zalika’s responsibility to look after herself. It was his to carry out the assassination. So think about that and come to the obvious conclusion: find the damn wafer, split it in two, and give them half each.
But the bloody thing had disappeared. It had become jumbled up with the others while he was serving the bodyguards.
Christ, had he given one of the guards the dummy wafer?
Carver told himself to calm down. There were still seven wafers left in the box. One of them, with any luck, was safe. Six to one: hardly needle-in-haystack time. So just look.
He riffled around the inside of the pyx with his right index finger. Tina Wong was looking at him with a quizzical expression.
‘Close your eyes, my child,’ Carver said.
She obeyed.
A cough came from one of the chairs behind him, the wheezing cough of an elderly man. It tailed away in a dry retching sound.
At last, Carver found the wafer he was looking for and halved it.
The Chinese girls were kneeling in front of him, Tina Wong perfectly composed, the other leaning to the side, eyes wide open, trying to see round him and find out what was happening up at the front.
Now Faith Gushungo had started coughing.
‘The body of Christ,’ said Carver, firmly, and shoved half a wafer into the hands of Tina Wong.
‘Amen,’ she said, and put it in her mouth.
Carver stepped a pace to one side, blocking the view of the second maid.
‘The body of Christ,’ he said.
The bodyguards were starting to suffer now. One was bent over, clutching at his guts.
‘This bad!’ the maid said, casting horrified glances at the sickening men before throwing the half-wafer to the floor. ‘You give us bad bread!’
‘You’re fine,’ Carver hissed. ‘Now get out of here.’
The girl didn’t move, just knelt there.
‘Scram!’ Carver said.
Tina Wong jumped to her feet and started dragging the servant away, screaming at her in Chinese.
Carver spared them no more time. He could hear movement behind him. He spun round on one foot, uncurled his fist and punched the heel of his hand into the face of one of the guards, who had got to his feet and was clumsily trying to reach inside his suit for the handgun holstered to his ribcage.
The blow snapped the bodyguard’s head sideways, straining his neck ligaments and sending his brain bouncing round his skull like a pinball against the bumpers. The guard reeled backwards, collided with Faith Gushungo’s chair and landed in a heap on top of his mistress, who was physically incapable of resisting his momentum. The two of them collapsed on to the floor where Henderson Gushungo was already lying like a landed fish, gasping for air, incapable of any movement bar the occasional spasm of his body or limbs.
Moses Mabeki stood quite still a couple of feet inside the door to the master bedroom, watching Zalika Stratten. She had not noticed he was there. All her attention was on the bag. She had been unable to resist opening it and pulling out an uncut diamond the size of a quail’s egg. It sat in her palm, the light glinting off its countless rough, irregular surfaces, just waiting for the diamond cutter’s skill to bring it to full, sparkling life. Mabeki was happy to let her enjoy the sensation of holding such a magnificent gemstone. It was a pleasure to watch her and almost to enjoy the self-denial of delaying for those last few seconds before he took possession of her again.
Finally, he could wait no longer. He coughed quietly, as if politely clearing his throat.
Zalika spun round, her eyes widening as she saw Mabeki and the gun in his hand.
‘I think you’d better give me the diamonds,’ he said, quite calmly, watching the emotions play across her features as she took in the reality of his presence, and his actual flesh-and-blood appearance.
He crooked his right index finger and wordlessly gestured for her to come to him.
Even after ten years, the obedience drilled into her in Mozambique had not entirely gone away. The fiery pride and independence that had animated Zalika during the time she had spent with Carver vanished as swiftly as a desert mirage. She went to him without the slightest act of defiance.
‘Put the diamonds in your bag and then give it to me,’ Mabeki said.
She did as he asked. Mabeki slung the bag over his left shoulder and then, without warning, smashed the grip of his pistol, clasped in his right hand, into her temple.
Zalika was taken completely by surprise. She made a noise halfway between a gasp and a whimper and tottered unsteadily on her feet.
Mabeki grabbed her round the neck with his left arm. He pressed the gun to her head with his right.
‘Come with me,’ he hissed into her ear. ‘Time we dealt with your boyfriend.’
64
Downstairs in the living room, the fourth of the guards was the only one still standing, although he was already losing his coordination. Carver slammed his left elbow into the guard’s Adam’s apple, let him follow the others to the ground, then crouched over him. He placed one hand over the man’s throat, gently squeezing the already damaged airway, while his other hand felt for the handle of the man’s gun and pulled it out of its black leather shoulder holster. He shoved the gun in his waistband and felt around on the other side of the chest. The ribs were moving as the guard made his last feeble attempts to breathe. His feet flopped about as he tried to kick himself free. Carver ignored all that. His only interest was the two clips of ammunition in the holster’s second pocket. He took them out and placed them in his jacket pocket, then got to his feet.
Henderson Gushungo was silent and motionless now. In his last moments, he had coughed blood on to the marble tile in front of him. He had also evacuated his bowels and the stench of it was now hanging heavily in the air. The great dictator, dying in his own blood and shit. His wife, half her body trapped beneath her bodyguard’s, made a weak mewling sound and with one last desperate effort reached out to grab her husband’s lifeless hand.
From outside the room, Carver heard the sound of footsteps running down the stairs and into the hall. There was a high-pitched scream; the sound of two shots being fired; more screams, wounded ones this time; then two more shots.
There had been three women left alive in the house. Some, if not all of them, were now dead. But which ones?
Carver started to move past the twitching, gasping bodies of the dying guards towards the door of the living room, his gun out in front of him, ready to fire at any moment.
Then Carver felt something grab at his ankle. He stumbled to the ground, wincing as he cracked his kneecaps on the hard marble surface. He turned his head and saw that one of the bodyguards had somehow summoned the strength to reach out and wrap a hand round his leg. Carver kicked out with his other leg, hitting the guard’s nose and feeling the crack as it broke beneath his heel. There was a gurgling sound as air left the guard’s lungs, a final breath. But he did not let go. The dead fingers still had Carver in their grip.
Up ahead, Carver saw a shadow against the wall by the door as Mabeki’s head bobbed into the doorway, then disappeared from view. Carver fired two quick shots towards the doorway then writhed desperately to change his position as Mabeki’s gun-hand appeared.
Mabeki shot four rounds in quick succession. One went straight through the giant window on the far side of the room. Two ploughed into the marble floor, one so close to Carver that he could feel the stabs of tiny, needle-sharp splinters of stone against the side of his face. The fourth hit the glossy bald head of the man whose hand was clasped round Carver’s ankle, entering just above his nose and blowing away the back of his skull.
The fingers jerked open with a convulsive twitch.
Carver jumped to his feet, ran to the wall next to the door and pressed his back to it. Then, with his newly acquired gun held vertically next to his head, he slid sideways along the wall towards the door.
That was when he heard the single word ‘Carver!’
Zalika had survived!
Carver could make out the sound of feet scrabbling for purchase on the marble floor. Now he too had to move fast. He abandoned his cautious progress and dashed to the door, throwing himself forward into the hall then rolling to one side as Mabeki fired into the space where he had just been.
Carver came to rest by the body of Tina Wong. She was lying next to the other servant, so close that the blood from their wounds was mingling into a single pool on the floor. Wong’s eyes were open, looking straight into his in mute accusation: ‘I’m dead because of you.’
He looked up and brought his gun to bear. Mabeki was silhouetted against the light from the open front door. Carver’s gun was pointing right at him. Or rather, it was pointing right at Zalika Stratten, who was standing there, directly in front of Mabeki, his arm round her throat.
Her eyes looked dull. There was blood trickling from a cut on her left temple. A decade after Moses Mabeki had first kidnapped her, he had her at his mercy once again. And this time Carver had no clear shot, no answer as Mabeki rasped, ‘You try to shoot, she dies. You come after me, she dies.’
Zalika herself was silent now. But Carver could clearly see her mouth the words ‘Help me … help me!’
Carver lay on the cold marble tiles, beneath the vulgar wallpaper. The blood from the two women’s bodies was slowly spreading towards him. He cursed himself: why had he let himself be persuaded to bring an amateur, however capable, on a mission as important as this? Eaten up by frustration and helplessness, paralysed with fear for the woman he was supposed to have protected, Carver barely moved a muscle as Mabeki hustled Zalika out of the door. Only when he heard the sound of two car doors slamming shut and an engine coming to life did he get to his feet, hurdle the pathetic corpses in their blood-soaked grey dresses and start running frantically down the hall.