television news cameraman.
My God. The very magnitude of the disaster was stunning. It couldn’t possibly be any worse. He’d given the ANC documents seized at Gawamba to
American journalists! And they’d already had them for nearly forty-eight hours-two precious, uninterrupted days to smuggle the information they contained out of South Africa.
Disaster indeed. Even the country’s whites were growing increasingly dissatisfied and disenchanted with the Vorster government. A costly foreign war, bloody internal rioting,
and a moribund economy had all taken a heavy toll on Karl Vorster’s popularity. For the most part, though, the white opposition had been confined to isolated, angry muttering or an occasional ineffective and easily crushed student demonstration. But all that was bound to change when the true story of the Blue Train massacre broke overseas.
Muller smiled mirthlessly. Most Afrikaners and other white South Africans would forgive their self-appointed leaders almost any atrocity directed against blacks, coloreds, or Indians. Treachery and deceit aimed at fellow whites wouldn’t be so easily condoned or overlooked.
He pushed the police report to one side and started fumbling through the drawers of his desk. South Africa’s impending crisis didn’t concern him-but his own fate did. He’d better be several thousand miles beyond Vorster’s iron grasp when the American television network began broadcasting its story.
Muller spread an array of forged bank cards, passports, and traveler’s checks across the desktop-enough to sustain the three or four false identities he’d need to disappear completely. He shoveled them off the desk into his open briefcase. There wasn’t any point in dawdling. The first news of what he’d given those damned Americans would spread around the globe like wildfire.
He stood up, grabbed his jacket and briefcase, and strode briskly out into his outer office.
Red-haired Irene Roussouw looked up in surprise from her Dictaphone.
Muller patted his briefcase.
“I’m taking the rest of the day off, Miss
Roussouw. I have some personal business to take care of. Tell the garage to have my car ready.”
He turned away without waiting for her acknowledgment. If he hurried, he could just make the afternoon flight to London. And by dawn the next day, he’d have vanished somewhere into one of Europe’s crowded cities.
Wrapped up in his own thoughts, he missed Irene Roussouw’s reluctant, uncertain reach for her telephone.
Muller took the steps down to the Ministry’s garage two at a time. He was breathing easier already. Better to be a rich exile in Europe than a corpse in an unmarked grave in South Africa.
He was smiling when he emerged into the small underground garage reserved for the Ministry’s senior servants.
The smile flickered and died when he saw the four men waiting close to his black Jaguar. The deputy minister of law and order, Marius van der
Heijden, and three others-men whose grim, almost lifeless eyes quickly scanned him and as quickly dismissed him as any serious threat.
“Going somewhere, Erik?” Van der Heijden nodded at his bulging briefcase.
The fear was back. Muller moistened lips gone suddenly dry.
“Just taking a bit of work home with me, Minister. Now, if you’ll excuse me?” He took a step closer to his car.
At a barely perceptible nod from van der Heijden, two of the grim-faced men moved forward to block his path. The third stayed by the older man’s side.
Van der Heijden shook his head.
“I’m very much afraid that I can’t excuse you just yet, Erik.” He smiled unpleasantly.
“There’s a small matter the
President has asked me to… well, let us say, discuss with you. “
Muller realized his hands were shaking and he tried to hide that by moving them behind his back.
“Oh?”
Van der Heijden nodded slowly, his smile twisting into a sneer.
“A small matter of a videotape it seems, Erik. A videotape showing you and a kaffir boy.”
They knew! Those bastard Americans had lied! They’d betrayed him after all. Muller’s stomach knotted abruptly and he swallowed hard against the taste of vomit. Oh, God. They knew…
His knees buckled and he sagged forward, watching numbly as his briefcase clattered onto the concrete garage floor and broke open-spilling forged documents and traveler’s checks out in a damning pile. Van der Heijden’s agents grabbed his arms and hauled him upright.
The older man looked down at the multiple passports and money and then back up into Muller’s horrified face.
“Well, well, Erik. Your work is almost as unusual as your sexual
habits. One would almost think you planned to flee our beloved fatherland.” His smile disappeared, replaced by a disgusted scowl.
“Take this boy-loving pig away. I have some questions to ask him in more private surroundings.”
No! Muller felt his blood run cold. He knew exactly what van der Heijden had in mind. Torture. Lingering, mind-flaying torture. His knees buckled again. Pain was something to be inflicted—not suffered! Please God, he prayed for the first time in decades, grant me a swift bullet in the back of the neck. Anything but this.
“Marius, wait! Please!” He squirmed in the grasp of the two men still holding his arms.
“You don’t need to do this! I’ll tell you everything!
Everything! I swear it!”
Van der Heijden nodded again to his men. One of them shifted his grip and locked an elbow around Muller’s throat -choking him into silence.
The older man leaned forward and took Muller’s red, tearstained face in one deceptively gentle hand.
“Oh, Erik, I know you’ll talk. I know you will. But you mustn’t deprive us of our little fun, eh?” He shook his head in mock regret.
“In any event, the President has already ordained the manner of your death. You, meneer, have nothing left to bargain for, and soon you will have nothing left to bargain with.”
He stepped back and stood watching as his men dragged Erik Muller kicking and gagging toward a waiting unmarked van.
South Africa’s onetime director of military intelligence was about to learn what it felt like to lie helpless and at the mercy of merciless men.
NETWORK STUDIOS, JOHANNESBURG
The photocopier flashed again and again, throwing rhythmic pulses of blindingly bright white light against Emily van der Heijden’s tense, determined face. She stood close to the copier, watching intently as the
ANC documents they’d blackmailed out of Muller fed themselves one by one into the machine, emerged, and then cycled through to begin the whole process over again. Complete sets joined a growing pile on one end of the copier table.
Ian Sheffield spoke from behind her.
“I’m still not sure this is necessary. Or wise. I mean, to all intents and purposes, the story’s out already.” He glanced at his watch.
“People all over the world are going to find out what really happened to the Blue Train and your government in a couple of hours or so. Vorster can’t possibly put the cork back in this bottle.”
Emily brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and leaned forward to check the copier counter. Twenty down and twenty sets of duplicates left to go. Then she turned to face Ian.
“He may not be able to stop the rest of the world from finding out what’s going on, but he can certainly clamp down on the news here in this country.”
Ian looked unconvinced, doubting whether any wall of censorship could hope to keep the story they’d so painfully and painstakingly pieced together from eventually leaking through to South Africa’s restive populations. If nothing else, too many people owned shortwave radio sets that could pick up news broadcasts from around the world. He said as much to Emily.
“True enough.” She pulled another collated and stapled set out of the machine’s grasp.