Dingane heard the faint voices of Wahab and Nabeel coming from the library. Obviously, something was amiss, as Lady Beatrice was wont to say. That husband of hers was trouble. Much trouble. He remembered the time Lady Beatrice and he had that short conversation out in the gardens.
“You Zulus don’t have problems with multiple wives, do you?” she had asked.
Somehow, he had always thought it odd that she had mentioned the fact that Wahab had another wife in Saudi Arabia. However, from the time he had told her that his blood was royal Zulu, the two of them had formed an understanding.
He had answered her, “Not with Zulus, no, mum, but one must remember it was allowed in the holy book, the Old Testament.”
She had thrown her head back and laughed. “But Dingane, my good man, that helps me not. I’m all New Testament.”
From down the hallway the pantry door creaked, then closed. Without seeing, he knew Lady Beatrice had switched on the recorder hidden behind the side panel. Later on today, she would retrieve a little black object from the machine, which no doubt held the conversation of her husband and that vile man, Nabeel Asuty.
Before dinnertime, Dingane could expect to be paid a visit from his friend in the South African Secret Service wanting to know about the visit of these two Arabs. Two days ago his friend said he would bring another person from the SASS who was interested in questioning him about both Wahab and Lady Beatrice. Dingane had no trouble providing information on Wahab; however, they need not know about Lady Beatrice’s suspicions of her husband and things like her electronic device. The SASS people would be happy enough when he handed them the water glass with the fingerprint impressions of this bald-headed thug.
Abdul Wahab allowed Nabeel to rant. Both remained standing in the middle of the book-lined library. Nabeel’s dark face glistened with sweat, which in Wahab’s mind made him appear even more unctuous. They spoke in Arabic.
“We were infiltrated! They placed this man within our group. This, this Englishman.”
“Who is they?” Wahab demanded. “And who is this man?”
“The British MI6. I’m certain.” Nabeel paced and wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. “He is English. A convert to our faith, he insisted.”
“Who allowed this Englishman into the group? Why was he allowed in? Why was I not informed?”
The number of questions appeared to slow Nabeel’s fuming. He ceased pacing. “Our group decided he was of value. He had contacts with airlines and shipping companies. He was very devout.”
Wahab eased into his chair at the desk and studied the man standing before him. In a way, it was a pleasure to watch him squirm. Truth of the matter, he neither knew nor cared about Nabeel’s group of thugs. They were all uneducated, except for their reading the Koran, and had one-track minds — jihad and the destruction of Western civilization. He asked again, “Why was I not informed about bringing in a Westerner?”
Nabeel shrugged. “It seemed of little consequence at the time.”
“Let me go over this again. You discovered this man was a spy. You neglected to say how you found out, but that matters little right now. You planned to take him in a boat to the middle of the bay and kill him. What happened at the wharf?”
“Someone shot him.”
“Your people shot him on the pier? Why?”
“No. Most strange. None of my people fired. Someone else did. The police came and arrested two of my men because they found they were carrying guns. Mohammed, sitting outside, and I escaped and came here.”
“You came directly here, you idiot!”
“No. We took a roundabout route. One other member of our group escaped. Don’t know his whereabouts.” Nabeel folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t like being called an idiot. “The Englishman was taken away by the police.”
Wahab leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. His beautiful plan for a major terrorist blow was unraveling. Van Wartt demanded that he take possession of the nuclear device within the next few days. Now they were minus two men and didn’t have sufficient manpower to transport the nuclear weapon.
“When we take possession of the bomb, we need at least six people to transport it to … Where have you planned to take it?” Wahab asked, realizing that he had mistakenly placed a great deal of the plan in the hands of this fool.
Nabeel regained his composure. “Where is the bomb now?”
“Up north in the desert. How and to where will we move it?”
“We were thinking to Douala, Cameroon.”
“Who are we?”
“The Englishman had contacts with a shipping company. Now, that plan is—”
“How did you discover he was a spy?”
“By chance. He wanted a woman and we all went to a whorehouse he knew. We caught him passing a piece of paper, a message of some kind, to one of the prostitutes. A fight broke out between the Englishman and two of our men. We were thrown out by the pimps.”
“Where were you at the time?”
Nabeel looked down at the floor. “In one of the rooms. Busy.”
That poor woman, thought Wahab. Having to share a bed with this slime. He gathered himself. “My good friend. Things have gone astray, but we shall prevail. The greatest strike against the infidel is in our grasp. Go. Stay alert and await my call.”
Nabeel blinked, turned, and hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. “One more thing. That man Hayden Stone is in Cape Town. I will find him and kill him.”
“I told you before, Stone is mine.” Wahab rose. “I’ll show you out.”
After he watched Nabeel and his man drive off, Wahab asked Dingane to bring him a cup of fresh coffee. Back in the library, he eased the door shut, hoping his wife would not interrupt him with a tirade on Nabeel’s visit. He needed time and quiet to think. The plan to explode the nuclear device off the shores of Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Tel Aviv needed immediate fixing. After an hour the realization came that his control of events was tenuous. Perhaps, control had never been in his hands.
Wahab thought back to the events on the Riviera and how all his plans, organization, and contacts had been lost. The support and trust of his benefactor, the prince, father of his first wife, had vanished. Saudi Arabia barred him from his homeland. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups mistrusted him. The French intelligence service made him flee his beloved South of France. The CIA wanted retribution for his hand in the deaths of two of their operatives, and they had sent Hayden Stone to settle the score. As for Stone, the man had constantly hounded him from Afghanistan, to the Riviera, to here in Africa.
Perhaps Stone was not the jinn he had believed, haunting and hounding him. The fault might lie within. He picked up his worn copy of the Canterbury Tales from the table, opened it, and saw the Middle English text. He thought of his Oxford don in the worn cardigan sweater and his days as a student in England. A young Arab in a strange, fascinating world that he had reluctantly grown to love.
Wahab laid the book on the desk, keeping his hand on the leather binding. He heard his English wife’s voice from beyond the closed door. He closed his eyes and wondered, who was he, really?
Chapter Twenty
As Dawid van Wartt maneuvered the curves of Kloof Road, he pressed down on the accelerator, enjoying the power of his new Bentley coupe. The way the car held to the road impressed him. At least something was going well today.
The first thing that morning, he had received an urgent telephone call from the manager of his real estate firm. A sizable group of trade unionists were demonstrating in front of his main commercial building downtown. The reason given by the strikers to the press was “inadequate wages” for their maintenance people. What had really happened was Van Wartt’s corporation had been late and parsimonious with the requisite omkoop, the bribes to the union leaders. A second phone call determined that certain politicians had offered to help in easing tensions — that meant more bribes. Such was the cost of doing business in South Africa.