Chapter 32

September 2019

Whitehead had few day-to-day principles on which he stood firm, but one of them was not working on weekends. This weekend, though, he was going to make an exception. With Bongi gallivanting with Masilela in Mpumalanga, the house was not a home. It had taken him years to entrench this resolution, which he attributed to the need for work-life balance. In reality, it was an official-work-private-work balance.

When he was still employed, his weekends were spent reading, making notes and concocting fragments for the memoir he was never to finish. It had become a habit. Saturday and Sunday mornings he would have a breakfast in bed, always two slices of toast, thick butter, cheese and marmalade, with a cup of coffee; read in bed for an hour or two, and then spend time in the study, pretending to write but mostly embroiled in perpetual research. It – his work, his life – all needed a context, and context was his rationale.

Of course, once he retired, the weeks had no end and the weekends no boundaries either, but still he divided them in his mind and in his habits, measured by Bongi’s absence on weekdays. Now, with the investigation, weekends were back to their old format. Some weekends, instead of the toast and cheese in bed, he and Bongi would walk to the nearby House of Coffees for the full-on breakfast of bacon, eggs and all the trimmings. But, over time, Bongi had weaned him onto smoked salmon, rye bread, one poached egg and avocado, no sugar in the coffee.

This Sunday, with Bongi departed the day before, he left early for House of Coffees, ordered extra bacon, two fried eggs, hash browns and baked beans; coffee with cream and sugar. He read the Sunday papers. The Sunday Times ran a front-page story about a group calling themselves the RETD – the Radical Economic Transformation Detachment – who were claiming that President Moloi’s so-called radical agenda was no more than a cover for his own corruption. They were demanding his recall. Whitehead had heard about them. He wondered about their provenance – a strange collection of acolytes of the former president, former bantustan bureaucrats and securocrats, the recently discarded of the ANC Youth League and others. The social media sympathisers with the new regime had dubbed them the #RETarDs.

Whitehead finished his breakfast, sent a text to Steven while he waited for the bill, paid and then walked to the nearby hardware store that stayed open for a few hours on a Sunday for the still mainly Afrikaner men in Pretoria East who DIYed on Sundays. He bought a bolt cutter, walked home and took the car to Steven and Gail’s place.

As it was a Sunday, he didn’t let himself in. Gail answered the door. ‘What’s so urgent, working on the weekend? The counter-revolution about to start?’

‘Hi, Gail. No, Bongi’s away for the weekend. Home is boring.’

She ushered him in. Steven was on the couch watching TV, a James Bond movie guessing by the soundtrack. Gail went to sit next to him.

Whitehead waved. ‘Okay, let me get straight to it then.’

Steven paused the movie. ‘With bolt cutters?’

‘Yep. One more lock to open. No key.’

In the room, Whitehead dropped his sling bag, cleared the desk and, bolt cutters in hand, went straight over to the trunk with the big yellow ‘O’. He struggled to cut through the tempered steel of the combination lock. He twisted his arms and his body this way and that to seek better leverage, but the thing wouldn’t give. He thought of calling in Steve, but that would be a breach of security. He sat down on the trunk, breathing through his mouth, big breaths. He dabbed at his hairline with his red handkerchief. He ran his hands around the edges of the trunk, hoping to find a secret ‘Open Sesame’ latch. Then, suddenly, he stood up, took the bolt cutters to the hinges at the back of the trunk and sliced through them like butter.

The trunk was full to the brim with files, cardboard folders, some borrowed or pilfered from the Zambian civil service, it seemed, others newer and more colourful, with the CNA logo. Whitehead picked up a file on the top with the neatly stencilled letters on the cover – ‘The Oracle Project’. He took it over to the desk.

Four hours later he had not moved, except once to drag the trunk closer to the desk and then to bend now and again to extract another file. The desk and floor around his chair were now strewn with folders, just a small space kept clear for his notebook. He had abandoned his flexi-tab for the older technology of pen and lined paper, his barely legible handwriting already covering tens of pages of notes.

‘The Oracle’ – this was a trove of treasure, but why hidden for so long? He had heard whispers of it in the Green House days in Lusaka, but, coming as the whispers did during drinking sessions, he put it down to wishful thinking or boastfulness – after all, ANC intelligence sources in the heart of apartheid security? Really?

What intrigued him now, though, was that the stream of intelligence had continued to flow after the return from exile and even, from some of the files, into the early years of democracy. Who knew about this? He knew at least one person who did, and that was perhaps the bigger surprise: the quiet, apparently evanescent Casper, had been the handler of the primary source, The Oracle himself. The Oracle, who had visited Botswana in 1980 and made contact with Casper in the regional underground intelligence machinery there, offered his services, having taken the decision to infiltrate the security police after they had killed the only child of his sister.