Drive, he thought. Drive away now, before she attacks.
The driver shifted into reverse. The engine coughed. Georg Scheepers thought his heart would stand still when the engine almost stopped. But the driver increased pressure on the gas pedal and the car started rolling backwards. The lioness turned her head away to avoid being blinded.
It was all over. Judith’s fingernails were no longer digging into his arm. They clung tightly onto the rail as the safari vehicle bumped and jerked its way back to the bungalow where they were staying. The nocturnal outing would soon be over. But the memory of the lioness, and the thoughts her presence on the riverbank aroused, would stay with him.
It was Georg Scheepers who suggested to his wife they should go up to the Kruger for a few days. He had spent a week or more trying to sort out and understand the papers van Heerden left behind after his death. He needed time to think. They would be away on Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday, May 17, he would spend his time trying to master van Heerden’s computer files. He wanted to do that when he was alone at work, when there was nobody in the corridors at the prosecutor’s office. The police investigators had made sure all his material, all his diskettes, had been placed in a cardboard box and sent to the public prosecutor’s office. His boss Wervey had given the order for the intelligence service to hand over all the material. Officially Wervey himself, in his capacity as chief public prosecutor of Johannesburg, should be going through the material, which BOSS had immediately classified as top secret. When van Heerden’s superiors refused to release the material until their own people had gone through it, Wervey threw a fit and immediately contacted the Minister of Justice. A few hours later BOSS relented. The material would be delivered to the prosecutor’s office. It would be Wervey’s responsibility. But it was in fact Georg Scheepers who would go through it all, in circumstances of extreme secrecy. That was why he intended to work on Sunday, when the building would be deserted.
They left Johannesburg early in the morning of Friday, May 15. The N4 freeway to Nelspruit took them quickly to their destination. They turned off onto a minor road and entered the Kruger National Park at the Nambi Gate. Judith had called to book a bungalow in one of the most remote camps, Nwanetsi, not far from the Mozambique border. They had been there several times before, and liked going back. The camp, with its bungalows, restaurant, and safari office, appealed primarily to guests looking for peace and quiet, people who went to bed early and got up at dawn in order to see the animals coming to the river to drink. On the way to Nelspruit Judith had asked him about the investigation he was undertaking for the minister of justice. He said he did not know much about it yet. But he needed time to figure out the best way of approaching the matter. She asked no more questions as she knew her husband was a man of few words.
During their two days at Nwanetsi they were out on game drives all the time. They looked at animals and scenery, leaving Johannesburg and its troubles far behind them. After meals Judith would bury her head in one of her books while Georg Scheepers thought over what he now knew about van Heerden and his secret work.
He had started methodically by going through van Heerden’s filing cabinet, and very soon realized he would have to step up his ability to read between the lines. In among formally correct memoranda and reports he found loose scraps of paper with hurriedly scribbled notes. Reading them was slow work and needed a lot of effort; the difficult handwriting reminded him of a pedantic schoolteacher. It seemed to him they were sketches for poems. Lyrical insights, outlines for metaphors and images. It was then, when he tried to penetrate the informal part of van Heerden’s work, that he had a premonition something was going to happen. The reports, memos and loose notes- divine poems, as he began to regard them-went back a long way. At first they were often precise observations and reflections expressed in a cool, neutral style. But about six months before van Heerden died, they began to change character. It seemed like a different, darker tone had crept into his thoughts. Something had happened, Scheepers thought. Something had changed dramatically either in his work or his private life. Van Heerden was starting to think different thoughts. What had previously been certain suddenly became unsure, the clear voice became hesitant, tenuous. He thought he could see another difference as well. Before, the loose papers had been haphazard. From now on van Heerden noted down the date and sometimes even the time. Scheepers could see van Heerden had often worked late into the night. Most of the notes were timed after midnight. It all started to look like a poetically expressed diary. He tried to find a basic and consistent theme as a starting point. Because van Heerden never mentioned his private life, Scheepers assumed he was only writing about what happened at work. There was no concrete information to assist him. Van Heerden’s diary was formulated in synonyms and parallels. It was obvious that Homeland stood for South Africa. But who was The Chameleon? Who were The Mother and Child? Van Heerden was not married. He had no close relations, according to what Chief Inspector Borstlap of the Johannesburg police had written in a personal memo responding to Scheepers’s request. Scheepers entered the names into his computer and tried to figure out the connections, without success. Van Heerden’s language was evasive, as if he would prefer not to be associated with what he was writing. Over and over again Scheepers had the feeling there was a note of threatening danger. A trace of confession. Van Heerden was onto something significant. His whole world suddenly seemed under threat. He wrote about a kingdom of death, seeming to imply we all had it inside ourselves. He had visions of something falling apart. At the same time Scheepers seemed to detect feelings of guilt and sorrow in van Heerden, which grew dramatically stronger during his last weeks before he died.
Scheepers noted that what he wrote about all the time was the blacks, the whites, the Boers, God and forgiveness. But nowhere did he use the words conspiracy or plot. The thing I’m supposed to be looking for, the thing van Heerden informed President de Klerk about. Why is there nothing about it?
On the Thursday evening, the day before he and Judith were due to drive to Nwanetsi, he stayed in his office until very late. He had switched off all the lights apart from his desk lamp. Now and then he could hear the night guards talking outside his window, which he had left ajar.
Pieter van Heerden had been the ideal loyal servant, he thought. In the course of his work for the intelligence service that was growing more divided, acting more autonomously, he had come across something significant. A conspiracy against the state. A conspiracy whose aim was somehow or other to spark off a coup d’etat. Van Heerden was sparing no effort in attempting to track down the center of the conspiracy. There were a lot of questions. And van Heerden wrote poems about his worries and the kingdom of death he had discovered inside himself.
Scheepers looked at his filing cabinet. That was where he had locked away the diskettes Wervey had demanded from van Heerden’s superiors. That is where the solution must be, he thought. Van Heerden’s increasingly confused and introspective musings, as expressed on the loose scraps of paper, could only be part of the whole picture. The truth must be in his diskettes.
Early in the morning of Sunday, May 17, they left the Kruger Park and returned to Johannesburg. He took Judith home, and after breakfast he drove in to the ominous-looking building in the city center in which the public prosecutor’s offices were housed. The city was deserted, as if it had suddenly been evacuated and people would never return. The armed guards let him in, and he walked along the echoing corridor to his office.