‘Don’t look so surprised, Straker,’ said Manheim in Afrikaans through clenched jaw.
Clay stared down the barrel of the silenced automatic. He couldn’t see the head of the bullet waiting in the breech, but he knew it was there.
‘You really thought we couldn’t track you?’ said Manheim.
‘Just leave her alone,’ said Clay.
Manheim’s face twisted into what may have been a smile. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me, Straker?’
‘Go ahead. Tell me.’
Manheim turned his head. ‘Bullet went through both cheeks. All I lost was a couple of teeth and part of my jaw.’
‘Should have made sure.’
‘Ja, ja,’ said Manheim. ‘Hindsight.’ He pulled aside his shirt, revealed a custom-fitted ballistic Kevlar vest. ‘Never go anywhere without it.’
Clay glanced at Rania. She was staring right at him, terror in her eyes. He shook his head, opened his hand palm out to her.
‘She’s safe as long as she doesn’t try anything,’ said Manheim, switching to English. ‘Understand bokkie?’
Rania nodded and moved Eugène so that her body was shielding him.
‘Where’s Crowbar?’ said Manheim.
‘Dead.’
Manheim’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bullshit.’
‘Sudan?’
Clay nodded.
‘Shit.’ Manheim glanced at the porthole. ‘I wanted to ask him something. I tried to tell you, back at the airstrip.’
‘Maybe it was the way you opened the conversation.’
Manheim ignored this. ‘He and I, we—’
‘He saved your sister’s life, and you fucking hunt him down and kill him. He was right, you have no honour.’
Manheim swallowed hard. ‘What did you say?’
‘He saved your sister. During the break-in at your parent’s farm. That’s what he told me. They killed your parents, but he got them all before they could touch your sister.’
Manheim took a step back, lowered the gun a few inches so that it was now pointing at Clay’s knees. ‘Fok me.’ He raised the gun again. ‘No, it can’t be. She never told me.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want her big brother to know that she was screwing one of his army buddies.’
Manheim seemed to wither again, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back. He was thinking about it.
Clay looked for an opening. ‘He thought you knew. Ask her.’
Manheim took three more steps back, leaned against the cabin door and lowered the pistol so that it was pointing at the floor. ‘Fokken moeder van God,’ he said. ‘I always thought…’ he began, but cut himself short. ‘What did you do, anyway, to get the AB so pissed at you?’
‘They didn’t tell you?’
Manheim forced a smile. ‘They don’t tell us shit.’
‘Operation Coast. Our nation’s secret biological and chemical warfare programme. I helped tell the world what they were doing.’
Manheim considered this a moment. ‘That’s all over now.’
‘Tell them that.’
Manheim made little circles with the pistol’s barrel, as if he was aiming to hit the circumference of a target painted on the floor. ‘To think that old bastard was working from the inside, all that time,’ he said. ‘The AB knew for years they had a leak, a Torch Commando mole, but they could never pin him down.’
Clay had first become aware of Torch – the underground movement dedicated to the creation of a free, liberal, multi-racial South Africa – and the bravery of its mostly white members, back in 1981. He cycled through a few deep lungfulls of air, tried to push the memories away.
‘It wasn’t just you, Straker. He helped dozens of people escape, tipped them off, helped them get out of the country. Killed at least five AB assassins in the process. We had a name for him: Rooikat. The Caracal.’ Manheim wasn’t speaking to Clay or Rania, now. He was speaking to himself, a soliloquy for the fallen. ‘He was a good friend, and a fok of a good fighter.’
‘He said the same about you.’
‘When I came looking for whoever was tipping you off, I never believed for one second that it would be him.’ Manheim stared at the floor for a long time.
‘Crowbar said that you fell out. What happened?’
‘Let’s just say we grew to have opposing views of the world.’
‘You joined the AWB.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then why the hell are you working for the AB?’ Clay had slowly gathered himself, put himself into position for a last desperate lunge. With Manheim on the other side of the cabin now, it would be a long shot. But he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
Manheim nodded slowly. ‘We’re not so different – you, me, Crowbar, even her.’ Manheim pointed the gun at Rania.
‘Fok jou,’ said Clay. ‘We’re nothing like you.’
Manheim swung the gun back towards Clay. ‘You don’t see it, do you Straker? We’re all fighting the same enemy. Each in our own way.’
‘That’s not the way it looks to me.’
‘I don’t give a damn what you think, Straker. I really don’t give a shit.’
‘The innocents you killed on Zanzibar?’ said Clay, barely holding himself back. ‘Were they the enemy?’
‘You know I didn’t kill that woman and her kid, Straker. I told those two kaffirs to keep it clean.’ Manheim lowered the gun a moment. ‘That was unnecessary.’
‘Well so is this.’ Clay opened his arms wide. ‘We’re done fighting. We’re leaving. Leave us be. You don’t need to do this.’
Manheim ran his free hand across his face, thumb on one cheek, fingers on the other, entry and exit wounds. ‘My sister. She’s married now. Has three kids.’
Clay tensed, readied to charge. Next time Manheim looked away, he would go.
‘Claymore, chéri. Please, do not.’
Both men looked at Rania. Clay unwound.
‘Please, monsieur,’ she continued, setting her gaze on Manheim now. ‘I knew your friend, Jean-Marie. His wife is my friend. She is pregnant with their first child. He saved your sister. Be the honourable man your friend thought you to be.’
Manheim stared at her as if she were an oracle come to presage his destiny.
‘There has been enough killing,’ she said.
Manheim stood there for a long time, drawing those little circles with his handgun. And then he sighed, breathed in and out slowly, and lowered the pistol. He glared at Clay, as if to warn him against a sudden attack, shoved the pistol into his waistband and covered it over with his shirt.
‘G told me everything,’ he said. ‘Gave me the photos and the ear. Wire me the money you promised him within three days. Here are the account details.’ He placed a card on the table near the door. ‘And then go. I’ll look after the AB. You ever surface again, you’re dead. You hear me, Straker? Both of you. No more fucking Operation COASTs, no more goddamned bleeding-heart court cases trying to right the world’s wrongs.’ He glanced at Rania. ‘Raise that kid of yours. Hell, have a few more for all I care. Just don’t ever show up on anyone’s radar again.’ He cracked the cabin door, stepped over the threshold.
‘And that goes for your little girlfriend in Zanzibar, too,’ said Manheim, leaning back in. ‘Consider my debt to Crowbar repaid. We’re even.’ And then he was gone.