The White Lioness Page 14

  Sweden, he thought. You are welcoming Ben Travis with fog, cold, and silence.

  Chapter Nine

  Foreign Minister Pik Botha was first to notice the snake.

  It was almost midnight and most members of the South African government had said goodnight and withdrawn to their bungalows. The only ones left around the campfire were President de Klerk, Foreign Minister Botha, Home Secretary Vlok and his private secretary, plus a few of the security men handpicked by the president and his cabinet. They were all officers who had pledged special oaths of allegiance and secrecy to de Klerk personally. Further away, barely visible from the campfire, some black servants were hovering in the shadows.

  It was a green mamba, and difficult to see as it lay motionless at the edge of the flickering light. The foreign minister would probably never have noticed it had he not bent forward to scratch his ankle. He started when he caught sight of the snake, then just sat motionless. He had learned early in life that a snake can only see and attack moving objects.

  “There is a poisonous snake two meters away from my feet,” he said in a low voice.

  President de Klerk was deep in thought. He had adjusted his lounger so that he could stretch out in a semi-recumbent position. As usual he was sitting some distance away from his colleagues. It had struck him some time ago that his ministers never placed their chairs too close to him when they were gathered around the campfire, in order to show their respect. That suited him perfectly. President de Klerk was a man who often felt a burning necessity to be on his own.

  The foreign secretary’s words slowly sunk in and intruded into his thoughts. He turned to look at his foreign secretary’s face in the light of the dancing flames.

  “Did you say something?” he asked.

  “There is a green poisonous snake by my feet,” said Pik Botha once again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a big mamba.”

  President de Klerk sat up slowly in his chair. He hated snakes. He had an almost pathological fear of crawling animals in general. Back at the presidential residence, the servants knew they had to make a meticulous search of every nook and cranny every day for spiders, beetles, or any other insects. The same applied to those who cleaned the president’s office, his cars, and the cabinet offices.

  He slowly craned his neck and located the snake. He felt sick immediately.

  “Kill it,” he said.

  The home secretary had fallen asleep in his lounger, and his private secretary was listening to music in his headphones. One of the bodyguards slowly drew a knife he had stuck in his belt, and struck at the snake with unerring accuracy. The mamba’s head was severed from its body. The bodyguard picked up the snake’s body, still thrashing from side to side, and flung it into the fire. To his horror de Klerk saw how the snake’s head, still lying on the ground, was opening and closing its mouth, displaying its fangs. He felt even worse and was overcome by dizziness, as if about to faint. He leaned back quickly in his chair and closed his eyes.

  A dead snake, he thought. But its body is still writhing away, and anyone not in the know would think it was still alive. That’s just what it’s like here, in my country, my South Africa. A lot of the old ways, things we thought were dead and buried, are still alive. We’re not just fighting alongside and against the living, we’ve also got to fight those who insist on coming back to life to haunt us.

  About every four months President de Klerk took his ministers and selected secretaries to a camp at Ons Hoop, just south of the border with Botswana. They generally stayed for a few days, and everything was done completely openly. Officially, the president and his cabinet gathered away from the public eye to consider important matters of various kinds. De Klerk had introduced this routine right from the start when he first came into office as head of state. Now he had been president for nearly four years, and he knew some of the government’s most important decisions had been made in the informal atmosphere around the campfire at Ons Hoop. The camp had been built with government money, and de Klerk had no difficulty in justifying its existence. It seemed he and his assistants thought more liberal and perhaps also more daring thoughts while sitting around the campfire under the night sky, enjoying the scents of ancient Africa. De Klerk sometimes thought it was their Boer blood coming to the fore. Free men, always linked with nature, who could never quite get used to a modern era, to air-conditioned studies and cars with bulletproof windows. Here in Ons Hoop they could enjoy the mountains on the horizon, the endless plains, and not least a well-cooked braai. They could have their discussions without needing to feel hounded by time, and de Klerk thought it had produced results.

  Pik Botha contemplated the snake being consumed by the fire. Then he turned his head and saw de Klerk was sitting with his eyes closed. He knew that meant the president wanted to be left alone. He shook the home secretary gently by the shoulder. Vlok woke up with a start. When they stood up, his secretary quickly switched off his music cassette and collected some papers that were lying under his chair.

  Pik Botha hung back after the others had disappeared, escorted by a servant with a lamp. It sometimes happened that the president wanted to exchange a few words with his foreign secretary in confidence.

  “I think I’ll be going, then,” said Pik Botha.

  De Klerk opened his eyes and looked at him. That particular night he had nothing to discuss with Pik Botha.

  “You do that,” he said. “We need all the sleep we can get.”

  Pik Botha nodded, wished him good night, and left the president on his own.

  Generally de Klerk would sit there alone for a while, thinking through the discussions that had taken place that day and evening. When they went out to the camp at Ons Hoop, it was to discuss overall political strategies, not routine government affairs. In the light of the campfire, they would talk about the future of South Africa, never about anything else. It was here they had set up the strategy for how the country would change without the whites losing too much influence.

  But on that night, April 27, 1992, de Klerk was waiting for a man he wanted to meet by himself, without even his foreign secretary, his most trusted colleague in the government, knowing about it. He nodded to one of the bodyguards, who disappeared immediately. When the guard returned a few minutes later, he had with him a man in his forties, dressed in a simple khaki suit. He greeted de Klerk and moved one of the loungers closer to the president. At the same time de Klerk gestured to the bodyguards that they should withdraw. He wanted them close by, but not within earshot.

  There were four people de Klerk trusted in this life. First of all his wife. Then his foreign secretary Pik Botha. And there were two others. One of them was sitting right now in the chair beside him. His name was Pieter van Heerden, and he worked for the South African intelligence service, BOSS. But even more important than his work for the security of the republic was the fact that van Heerden played the role of special informer and messenger to de Klerk, bringing him news of the state of the nation. From Pieter van Heerden, de Klerk received regular reports about what was foremost in the minds of the military high command, the police, the other political parties, and the internal organizations of BOSS. If a military coup was being planned, if a conspiracy was under way, van Heerden would hear and inform the president immediately. Without van Heerden, de Klerk would be missing a pointer to the forces working against him. In his private life and in his work as an intelligence officer, van Heerden played the role of a man openly critical of President de Klerk. He performed skillfully, always well balanced, never exaggerated. No one would ever suspect him of being the president’s personal messenger.

  De Klerk was aware that by enlisting the aid of van Heerden, he was restricting the confidence he placed in his own cabinet. But he could see no other way of guaranteeing himself the information he considered essential to carry out the big changes South Africa needed to avoid a national catastrophe.

  This was not least associated with the fourth person in whom de Klerk placed absolut
e trust.

  Nelson Mandela.

  The leader of ANC, the man who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years on Robben Island off Cape Town, who had been incarcerated for life at the beginning of the 1960s for alleged but never proven acts of sabotage.

  President de Klerk had few illusions. He could see that the only two people who together could prevent a civil war from breaking out and the inevitable bloodbath that would follow were himself and Nelson Mandela. Many a time he had prowled sleepless through the presidential palace at night, gazing out at the lights from the city of Pretoria, and thinking how the future of South Africa would depend on the compromise he and Nelson Mandela would hopefully be able to reach.

  He could speak quite openly with Nelson Mandela. He knew that feeling was mutual. As human beings they were very different in character and temperament. Nelson Mandela was a truth-seeker of philosophical leanings, who used those qualities to achieve the decisiveness and practical drive he also possessed. President de Klerk lacked that philosophical dimension. He would head straight for a practical solution to every problem that cropped up. For him the future of the republic lay in changing political realities, and constant choices between what was possible to achieve and what was not. But between these two men with such different qualifications and experiences was a level of trust which could only be destroyed by open betrayal. That meant they never needed to disguise their differences of opinion, never needed to resort to unnecessary rhetoric when they were talking one on one. But it also meant they were fighting on two different fronts at the same time. The white population was split, and de Klerk knew everything would collapse if he could not manage to make progress bit by bit, by means of compromises that could be accepted by a majority of the white population. He would never manage to reach the ultra-conservative bastions. Nor would he ever convince the racist members of the officer class in the army and the police force. But he was forced to ensure they did not become too powerful.

  President de Klerk knew Nelson Mandela had similar problems. The blacks were also split among themselves. Not least between the Inkatha movement, dominated by the Zulus, and the ANC. This meant they could come together in an understanding of each other’s difficulties, but at the same time they need never deny the disunity that existed.

  Van Heerden was a guarantee for the information de Klerk needed to have. He knew it was necessary to stay close to his friends, but to stay even closer to his enemies and their thoughts.

  They normally met once a week in de Klerk’s office, usually late on Saturday afternoons. But on this occasion, van Heerden had requested an urgent meeting. At first de Klerk had been unwilling to let him come to the camp. It would be difficult to meet him there without the rest of the government finding out. But van Heerden had been unusually persistent. The meeting could not be put off until de Klerk returned to Pretoria. At that point de Klerk had given way. He knew van Heerden was thoroughly cold-blooded and disciplined, and would never react impulsively; he realized he must have something extremely important about which to enlighten the president of the republic.

  “We’re alone now,” said de Klerk. “Pik found a poisonous snake right by his feet just a few minutes ago. I wondered for a moment if it might have been fitted with a concealed radio transmitter.”

  Van Heerden smiled.

  “We haven’t yet started to use poisonous snakes as informers,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to one of these days. Who knows?”

  De Klerk looked at him searchingly. What was so important that it couldn’t wait?

  Van Heerden moistened his lips before starting to speak.

  “A plot to assassinate you is currently at an intensive planning stage,” he began. “There is absolutely no shadow of a doubt that this is a serious threat even now. To yourself, to government policy in general, and in the long run to the whole nation.”

  Van Heerden paused after his opening words. He was used to de Klerk firing questions at him. But on this occasion de Klerk did not say a word. He merely gazed attentively at van Heerden.

  “I’m still short of information about many details of the plot,” van Heerden went on. “But I’m aware of the main trend, and that’s serious enough. The plotters have links with the military high command, and with extreme conservative circles, notably the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. But we must not forget that many conservatives, most of them in fact, are not members of political organizations. In addition there are signs that foreign terrorist experts, primarily from the KGB, are involved.”

  “There’s no such thing as the KGB anymore,” said de Klerk, interrupting him. “At least, not in the form we are familiar with.”

  “There are unemployed KGB officers, though,” said van Heerden. “As I have told you before, Mr. President, we get lots of offers nowadays from former officers in the Soviet intelligence service, offering us their services for some future occasion.”

  De Klerk nodded.

  “A conspiracy always has a hard core,” he said after a while. “One or more people, usually very few, in the background, very much in the background, pulling the strings. Who are they?”

  “I don’t know,” said van Heerden. “And that worries me. There’s somebody in the military intelligence service called Franz Malan—you can be quite sure he’s involved. He has been careless enough to store some material connected with the conspiracy in his computer files, without blocking them. I noticed it when I asked one of my trusted colleagues to run a routine check.”

  If only people knew, thought de Klerk. It’s come to something when security service members spy on one another, hack their way into one another’s computer files, suspect one another of permanent political disloyalty.

  “Why just me?” asked de Klerk. “Why not Mandela as well?”

  “It’s too soon to say,” said van Heerden. “But of course, it’s not difficult to imagine what effect a successful assassination attempt on you would have in the current circumstances.”

  De Klerk raised his hand. Van Heerden did not need to spell it out. De Klerk could picture the resulting catastrophe very clearly.

  “There is another detail which worries me,” said van Heerden. “We naturally keep a constant watch on a number of known murderers, both black and white. People who are prepared to kill anybody at all if the contract is right. I think I’m right in claiming that our precautionary measures against possible attacks on politicians are quite efficient. Yesterday I received a report from the security police in Umtata saying that a certain Victor Mabasha paid a short visit to Johannesburg a few days ago. When he returned to Ntibane, he had a lot of cash with him.”

  De Klerk made a face.

  “That sounds a bit circumstantial,” he said.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said van Heerden. “If I were planning to kill the president of this country, I would probably choose Victor Mabasha to do it.”

  De Klerk raised his eyebrows.

  “Even if you were going to assassinate Nelson Mandela?”

  “Even then.”

  “A black contract killer.”

  “He is very good.”

  De Klerk got up from his lounger and poked away at the fire, which was dying out. He did not have the strength just now to hear what constituted a good contract killer. He put a few branches on the fire, and stretched his back. His bald head glittered in the light from the fire, which flamed up once more. He looked up at the sky and contemplated the Southern Cross. He felt very tired. Nevertheless, he tried to come to terms with what van Heerden had said. He realized a conspiracy was more than plausible. He had thought many a time about being killed by an assassin, sent by furious white boere who were always accusing him of selling out and handing his country over to the blacks. Of course, he also wondered what would happen if Mandela were to die, irrespective of whether it was a natural or an unnatural death. Nelson Mandela was an old man. Even if he did have a strong constitution, he had spent nearly thirty years in jail.

  De Klerk went back to his
chair.

  “Naturally, you’ll have to concentrate on exposing this conspiracy,” he said. “Use whatever means you like. Money is no problem at all. Get in touch with me at any time of day or night if something significant happens. For the moment, there are two measures that must be taken, or at least considered. One is perfectly obvious, of course: my guard will have to be intensified as discreetly as possible. I’m rather more doubtful about the other one.”

  Van Heerden suspected what the president had in mind. He waited for him to continue.

  “Shall I tell him, or shan’t I?” wondered de Klerk. “How will he react? Or should I wait until we know a bit more?”

  Van Heerden knew de Klerk was not asking him for advice. The questions were directed towards himself. The answers would also be his own.

  “I’ll think about it,” said de Klerk. “We live in the most beautiful country on earth. But there are monsters lurking in the shadows. I sometimes wish I could see into the future. I’d like to be able to. But to be honest, I don’t know if I dare.”

  The meeting was over. Van Heerden disappeared into the shadows.

  De Klerk sat staring into the fire. He was really too tired to make a decision. Should he inform Mandela of the conspiracy, or should he wait?

  He remained seated by the fire, watching it slowly die down.

  Eventually, he made up his mind.

  He would not say anything to his friend just yet.

  Chapter Ten

  Victor Mabasha had been trying in vain to dismiss what happened as just a bad dream. The woman outside the house had never existed. Konovalenko, the man he was forced to hate, did not kill her. It was just a dream that a spirit, a songoma, had poisoned his mind with, to make him unsure, and possibly unable to carry out his assignment. It was the curse hanging over him because he was a black South African, he was aware of that. Not knowing who he was, or what he was allowed to be. A man who ruthlessly wallowed in violence one minute, and the next minute failed to understand how anybody could kill a fellow human being. He realized the spirits had set their singing hounds on him. They were watching over him, keeping tabs on him; they were his ultimate guardians, so vastly more watchful than Jan Kleyn could ever be. . . .