Tuesday, 16 June 2009

4

The phone rang at 7 a.m., twenty-four hours after the first call. Weber was still at his house in The Gardens in Durban North. In Auckland, it was early evening already.

‘Listen carefully because I am going to tell you once and once only.’ It was the same voice as the day before.

Johann Weber listened without a word until the line went dead. Then he phoned Pierre de Villiers on his secret number.

‘Pierre, this is what they want. They want you to come to South Africa and then they want you to go to Hamburg with the major. You are to use your UK passport at all times.’

How do they know I have a UK passport? De Villiers wondered. ‘What is there in Hamburg?’ he asked, but there was a nagging thought at the back of his mind. He had been to Hamburg before, with the major and others. The major had been running the operation and De Villiers had been just one small cog in the machine.

‘I have no idea. I wasn’t allowed to ask questions,’ Weber said.

De Villiers made his decision quickly. ‘You can tell them that I’ll do whatever it is they want from me, but if they harm as much as a hair on Zoë’s head, I’ll come after them and wipe them out, every single one of them.’

‘Pierre, this is not the time to make threats.’

De Villiers ignored the rebuke. ‘And there is a condition: I want to talk to Zoë every day. If they miss a call, I stop cooperating. This is non-negotiable.’

‘What if they say no?’ Weber asked. It was not an unreasonable question.

De Villiers measured his words carefully. ‘Johann, there are three things you need to know about these people. First, they are men who understand negotiating positions and the value of a bargaining chip. They have Zoë and Liesl, but there is obviously something they want even more. And that is the reason they are putting pressure on me.

‘I want to speak to Zoë every day. This isn’t negotiable. And you should demand to speak to Liesl once a day, without exception. They have to know that we are not going to cooperate on the basis of vague promises.’

‘But why put pressure on me?’ Weber asked. ‘What could I possibly have that they want? What has this got to do with me?’

‘I don’t think it has anything to do with you,’ De Villiers said, looking for the right answers as he spoke. ‘Not directly, anyway. I think it has something to do with me. Putting pressure on you is just another way they can put pressure on me, and make sure I do as they say.’

Weber didn’t answer. De Villiers continued. ‘The other thing about them is that they won’t harm a child or a woman, not if they can help it.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Weber asked.

‘I worked for them, and I know. They are Calvinist to the core.’

In a sense, De Villiers was relieved. The demand that he should go to Hamburg meant that there was some rational purpose behind Zoë’s abduction. People with rational demands tend to act rationally towards their captives; otherwise their demands would not be met. And he thought he knew the men concerned. As long as he cooperated, Zoë would be safe.

The problem was that De Villiers was not the kind of man to give in to an unlawful demand. He suspected that his brother-in-law was the same.

‘What’s the third thing?’ Weber asked, interrupting his thoughts.

‘They’ll be safe,’ De Villiers said. ‘They know me and they know they won’t get anything out of me unless they can prove to me at all times that Zoë is safe. They know I don’t trust them and won’t give them what they want unless I have proof that Zoë is safe.’

‘Who are these people, Pierre? Who are they?’

‘They’re soldiers. I am sure of that. From long ago. I know them from the Angolan days.’ He addressed Weber’s fear. ‘I know them and their kind. Believe me: they want something from me and as long as I have whatever it is that they want, Zoë and Liesl will not be harmed.’

‘But what if you’re wrong?’ Weber asked.

‘Johann,’ De Villiers said slowly. ‘They’ve chased me through the Kalahari and detained me and tortured me for months. And they got nothing out of me. They know me. They know—’

‘But what if you are wrong, Pierre?’ Weber repeated. ‘What then?’

‘If I’m mistaken,’ De Villiers started. His voice broke. ‘If I’m wrong, they’re already dead.’

De Villiers couldn’t think clearly. His instincts cried out for immediate action, not for waiting, but his training as a Special Forces soldier required him to do some careful planning before he made a move. It was difficult to keep an open mind on the issue when he had no idea where his daughter was. Or how she was coping. He knew he needed some sleep, but first he had to persuade Emma to take a flight to Indonesia and to stay there until he had found Zoë.

‘Why?’ Emma kept asking.

‘Because I have a job to do and I don’t want you to be in danger while I’m doing it.’

‘This is my house and this is where I’m staying until you bring my daughter back.’

She blames me for this, De Villiers thought, and she’s right to.

He pleaded with her. ‘I’ll get her back, but I need you to be far away …’

‘Why? Just tell me why I should go.’

‘I’ve had trouble with these men before.’ She deserved to know the truth, but this was not the time to tell her.

‘Who are they?’ Emma asked.

De Villiers ignored the question. He had a fairly good idea, but he could not work out why.

‘And you think it is they who have taken Zoë?’ Emma asked.

‘I know they have taken Zoë. They’ve also taken Liesl Weber in Durban. They won’t hurt them, I’m sure.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘They want something very badly, and they want it from me. This is not about them, it’s about me. Do you understand now why I want you out of the way?’ he asked.

Emma knew just enough about his past to be able to venture a guess. ‘You’re going to kill someone,’ she said.

De Villiers thought about it. ‘If I have to, I will.’

Emma didn’t waste time making her decision. ‘I’m not going,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to do something on your own, not working with the police, I had better be here to look after you when things go wrong.’

‘But, Emma,’ De Villiers tried to argue, ‘what could go wrong? What?’

Asking a question was an unpersuasive way to start an argument and she pounced immediately. ‘You could get hurt. You could be locked up. You could be shot.’ When she saw him shaking his head as she spoke, she added, ‘You said yourself that they are dangerous.’

De Villiers descended into a series of denials, starting with, ‘I said they were dangerous to you, not me,’ but Emma would hear nothing further.

In the end, they had the first serious fight of their marriage and lay in bed with their backs to each other.

De Villiers lay still although he couldn’t sleep. He was certain that Emma wasn’t sleeping either. Her breathing was irregular and she lay too still. She was a restless sleeper at the best of times, lying now on this side, then on that, then turning over onto her stomach, and often bumping into him. Sometimes she kicked him hard enough to wake him up. But most of the time she held a foot against him, or had an arm across him, deliberately maintaining some form of physical contact as if she could possess him merely by a touch. She always lay close to him, even when she had her back to him.

But now she lay away from him at the edge of her side of the bed.

‘I’m not going,’ she said quite clearly in the middle of the night.

De Villiers sighed and turned over. He put his hand on her shoulder. She was trembling and he realised that she was crying. He knew about his wife’s resilience. She was from a small Indonesian village that had seen more than its fair share of death and destruction. There, the enemy was not human, but a mountain that regularly spewed hot lava and ash into the air to chase the villagers living in its shadow from their homes and to kill the stragglers who slowed down to look. De Villiers was aware of the fact that Emma had lost most members of her family in such an event. Her father was the only one left, and he refused to leave.

But Emma had left her home behind, and it had worked to De Villiers’s advantage, because that was how he was able to meet her when they were both in London. Having fled from the countries of their respective births, they had fallen into each other’s arms with the desperation of the lonely and the lost.

Emma did not often cry, but she was crying now.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to go.’

She turned to face him. She knew him as well as he knew her. She knew that, just as much as she would not leave her home until her child had been found, De Villiers wouldn’t stop searching until he had found Zoë, no matter what official restrictions or prohibitions there might be against his being personally involved. They were personally involved. It was their child, not some stranger’s. ‘Promise me you will be careful,’ she said.

‘I will,’ he said.

They found comfort in their lovemaking. Neither found it odd that they could make love under such circumstances.

De Villiers woke up early. He could hear Emma in the kitchen and knew she would be bringing him coffee and a biscuit. There was something wrong with the scenario and it had kept him awake long after he and Emma had made up. Now, with the sun up, the question surfaced more clearly. What did Liesl Weber have to do with any of this? Or put another way, how could she possibly be involved?

De Villiers had got to know Liesl Weber well. Less than a year before, he had spent nearly three months in her house. She had looked after him as if she were his personal nurse when he was undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer. On days when Johann Weber needed his car, she had driven De Villiers to the Oncology Centre and had waited for him in the reception area when he was called in for his turn under the radiation machine. It was Liesl Weber who had talked him out of his misery and self-pity, who told him that cancer was not the end of the world, that he should fight it as if it were an enemy soldier on his spoor. And on the subject of spoor, it was she who had traced !Xau, his bushman companion on a long trek though the Kalahari when he had been hunted by soldiers of 32 Batallion, to Schmidtsdrift, and it was she who had accompanied him to see !Xau. It was Liesl Weber who had helped him to find closure of a sort by persuading him that, although his memory of the events that followed his flight through the Kalahari was fragmented, it wasn’t inaccurate. The existence of !Xau was proof of that.

He owed Liesl Weber.

The smell of coffee interrupted his thoughts. He opened his eyes to find Emma next to the bed.

‘What have you decided?’ she asked.

He sat up. ‘There’s something odd about Liesl being abducted at exactly the same time as Zoë,’ he said. ‘It must mean something. I just can’t work out what.’

Emma nodded and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘There must be something common to the two of you,’ she said. ‘Could it be something you did together?’

The question was too vague to have an answer and De Villiers thought of something else. ‘Last year,’ he said, ‘just before I was to catch my flight, they arrived at Liesl’s home looking for me. She lied to them, saying she didn’t know where I was, but then she and Johann arranged for me to catch an earlier flight, which I did.’

Emma was nonplussed and stood up. ‘Are you telling me that these people were looking for you last year already? You didn’t tell me.’

‘I’ve told you before, Emma, that there are things that you don’t need to know.’

She interrupted him. ‘When those things, as you call them, affect me or my daughter, or even you, I am entitled to know,’ she said.

De Villiers had no answer. How could he tell her that he might have to return to South Africa, not for the purpose of further treatment, but to ensure that Liesl Weber was rescued? It seemed to him that the simultaneous abductions of Zoë in New Zealand and Liesl Weber in Durban would require an operation that ensured that they were rescued simultaneously. Trying to rescue one before the other would leave the second at risk.

Even as Emma stood over the bed glaring at her husband, his mind was working on a scheme. But De Villiers knew only too well that he could not be in two places at once. Going to South Africa meant leaving the search for Zoë in the hands of a police force ill-equipped to deal with the situation they were facing. It also meant making parallel arrangements of his own.