'Now we can test the transmitter,' he told himself and hurried upstairs to Shasa's office.
He inserted the new torch batteries in the transmitter and checked it. The test globe lit up brightly. He switched it off. Next he took the radio detonator from its cardboard box and placed the hearing-aid battery in its compartment. The detonator was the size of a matchbox, made of black bakelite with a small toggle switch at one end. The switch had three positions: 'off', 'test' and 'receive'. A thin twist of wire prevented the switch accidentally being moved to 'on'.
Moses switched it to 'test' and laid it on the sofa, then he went to the transmitter and flipped the 'on' switch. Immediately the tiny globe at one end of the detonator case lit up and there was a loud buzz, like a trapped bee inside the casing. It had received the signal from the transmitter. Moses switched off the transmitter and the buzz ceased and the globe extinguished.
'Now I must check if it will transmit from here to the assembly chamber." He left thee transmitter on and descended once again to the chamber. Kneeling beside the prime minister's bench, he held the detonator in the palm of his hand and held his breath as he switched it to 'test'.
Nothing happened. He tried it three times more, but it would not receive the signal from the office upstairs. Clearly there was too much brick and reinforced concrete between the two pieces of equipment.
'It was going too easily,' he told himself ruefully. 'There had to be a snag somewhere,' and he sighed as he took the roll of wire from the tool kit. He had wanted to avoid stringing wire from the chamber to the office on the second floor; even though the wire was gossamer thin and the insulating cover was a matt brown, it would infinitely increase the risk of discovery.
'Nothing else for it,' he consoled himselfi He had already studied the electrical wiring plan of the building that Tara had procured from the public works department, but he unrolled it and spread it on the bench beside him to refresh his memory as he worked.
There was a wall plug in the panelling behind the back benches of the government section. From the plan he saw that the conduit was laid behind the panelling and went up the wall into the roof. The diagram also showed the main fuse box in the janitor's office opposite the front door. The office was locked but he picked the lock without difficulty and threw the main switch.
Then he returned to the chamber, located the wall plug and removed the cover, exposing the wiring, and was relieved to find that it was colour-coded. That would make the job a lot easier.
So he left the chamber and went up to the second floor. There was a cleaner's cupboard in the men's toilet that contained a step-.
ladder. The trap door that gave access to the roof was also in the men's toilet. He found it and set the step-ladder below it. From the top of the ladder he removed the trap door and wriggled up through the square opening.
The space below the roof and the ceiling was dark and smelled of rats. He switched on his Penlite and began to pick his way through the forest of timber joists and roof posts. The dust had been undisturbed for years and rose in a languid cloud around his feel He sneezed and covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief a he went forward carefully, stepping from beam to beam, countinl each pace to keep himself orientated.
Above the exposed section of wall that was certainly the top of th rear side wall of the chamber, he found the electrical conduits. Thert were fifteen of them laid side by side. Some had been there a ion time, while others were obviously new additions.
It took him a while to isolate the conduit that led down to th chamber below, but when he unscrewed the joint in it, he recognizec the coded wiring of the wall-socket that it contained. His relief was intense. He had anticipated a number of problems that he might have encountered at this stage, but now it would be a simple matter to get his own wire into the roofi He uncoiled the long flexible electrician's spring that he had brought from his tools and fed the end of it into the open conduit tubing until he felt it encounter resistance. Then he began the tedious journey back through the roof, down the step-ladder, along the passage, down the staircase and into the chamber.
He found the end of the electrician's spring protruding from the open wall-socket, and he attached the end of the coil of light detonator wire to it and laid out the rest of the wire so that it would feed smoothly into the conduit when he drew the spring in from the other end.
Back in the roof he recovered the spring and the end of the wire came up with it. Gently he drew in the rest of it, working overhand like a fisherman recovering his handline until it came up firmly against the knot that held the far end to the bench in the chamber below. He coiled the wire neatly and left it, while he returned to the chamber. By this time his overalls were filthy with dust and cobwebs.
He untied the loose end .of the wire from the bench and laid it out on the floor, leading it to the 'pack of plastic explosive under the front bench, making certain he had given himself sufficient slack.
Then he worked carefully to conceal' the exposed wire from casual detection. He threaded it under the green wall-to-wall carpeting and stapled it securely to the underside of the government benches. He filed a notch in the enamelled metal plate that covered the wallsocket and laid the wire into it while he screwed the cover back into place.
Then he went carefully over the floor and carpet to make certain he had left no trace of his work. Apart from the few inches of unobtrusive wire protruding from the wall socket, there was nothing to betray his preparations and he sat on Dr Verwoerd's bench to rest for a few minutes before beginning the final phase. He returned upstairs.
The most difficult and frustrating part of the entire job was placing himself in the roof directly above Shasa's office. Three times he had to climb down the ladder into the toilet and then pace out the angles of the passages and the exact location of the office suite before once more climbing back into the ceiling and attempting to follow the same route through the dust and the roof timbers.
Finally he was sure he was in the correct position and gingerly he bored a small hole through the ceiling between his feet. Light came up through the hole, but even when he knelt and placed his eye to the aperture, it was too small to see what lay below. He enlarged it slightly, but he still could see nothing, and yet again he had to make the journey back to the trap door and along the passage to Shasa's office.
Immediately he let himself into the office he saw that he had misjudged. The hole he had bored through the ceiling was directly above the desk, and in enlarging it he had cracked the plaster and dislodged a few fragments which had fallen on to the desk top. He realized that this could be a serious mistake. The hole was not large, but the network of hair cracks around it would be apparent to anyone studying the ceiling.
He thought about trying to cover or repair the damage, .but knew that he would only aggravate it. He brushed the white crumbs of plaster off the desk, but this was all he could do. He would have to take comfort in the unlikelihood that anybody would look at the ceiling, and even if they did, that they would think nothing of the minute blemish. Angrily aware of his mistake, he did what he should have done originally and bored the next hole from below, standing on one of the bookshelves to reach the ceiling. Between the window drapes and the edge of the bookshelves, the hole was almost invisible to any but the most painstaking inspection. He went up into the roof and paid the end of the wire down through the second hole. When he returned to the office he found it dangling down the wall, the end of it lying in a tangle on the carpet in the'corner.
He gathered and coiled the end and tucked it carefully behind the row of Encyclopaedia Britannica on the top shelf and then arranged the window drapes to cover the two or three inches that were visible protruding from the puncture in the ceiling. Once again he cleaned up, going over the shelf and floor for the last speck of plaster, and then, still not satisfied, returning to the desk. Another tiny crumb of white plaster had fallen and he wetted his finger with saliva and picked it up. Then he polished the desk top with his sleeve.