Larry Bond - Vortex

curtains. And barely one in three of the suburb’s streetlamps were lit, leaving dark pools of shadow at regular intervals.

A battered Ford Escort sat idling quietly in one of the patches of darkness-parked near a collection of scarred and rusting trash haulers and maintenance sheds used by the refuse dump’s work force. A man and a woman stood on either side of the Escort, their attention riveted on a car two hundred meters farther down the road.

Ian adjusted the focus on his binoculars, trying to make out more than the faint silvery outline of Knowles’s rented Mercedes as it sat under one of the few lit streetlamps. Nothing, damn it. The stretch of two-lane road running alongside the garbage dump was just too dark.

On the other side of the Escort, Emily stirred as the walkie talkie she held in her hand crackled into life.

“You guys awake? I think we’ve got company. Coming off the freeway ..

. “

Ian swiveled his binoculars right, scanning the exit ramp. There. The twin headlights of another car moving off the highway, fast at first but visibly slowing. He nodded abruptly. It had to be Muller.

Emily pressed the talk button.

“We see it, Sam. We’re ready. “

Ready. Sure they were, Ian thought bitterly. He’d had two hours to think of all the things that could go wrong with this secretive exchange. Two hours to realize just how much trouble they could be in if Muller didn’t come through with his end of the bargain or tried to double-cross them.

The other car, a Jaguar, turned left off the ramp and pulled alongside

Knowles’s Mercedes.

Emily’s walkie-talkie crackled again.

“It’s him. I can see him through the windshield.” Knowles sounded calm, with only the clipped endings of his words revealing any anxiety. Static hissed over the radio.

“He’s rolling his window down. Stand by.”

Ian tensed and stared hard through the binoculars. No good. He still couldn’t see anything but the bare shapes of the two parked cars. Seconds passed, dragging first into one minute and then into two. He could hear Emily whispering what he suspected was a prayer.

“I’m back-Did you miss me?” Beneath the banter, both of them could hear the relief in the cameraman’s voice.

“Transaction completed. Looks good so far.”

Thank God. Ian felt his back and neck muscles starting to un knot

Muller’s Jaguar pulled out from the curb, turned left again, and rolled away down the dimly lit Lombardy Link-heading for the ramp leading back onto the highway. Ian followed the Jag with his binoculars until it vanished among the stream of other cars and trucks moving north to

Pretoria. He turned and nodded to Emily.

She pressed the talk button again.

“It’s clear, Sam.”

“Far out! I’m on my way. Get ready to pop the champagne corks, ‘cause it looks like little Mrs. Knowles’s boy has hit the frigging jackpot this time! Names. Dates. The whole schmear! “

Ian laughed aloud, caught up in Knowles’s infectious enthusiasm.

Two hundred meters down the road, the Mercedes shifted gears and turned through a smooth half-circle to end up moving straight at them. Ian bent closer to the Escort’s open driver’s-side window.

“We’re almost ready to head for home, Matt. No fuss and no muss.”

Sibena smiled up at him from behind the wheel.

Suddenly the Mercedes braked and came to a complete stop while still twenty meters away.

Emily thumbed the walkie-talkie button.

“What’s wrong, Sam? Why have you stopped?”

Knowles sounded puzzled.

“I’m not really sure, There’s something rattling around in the back. I’m going to check it out. Hang on for a sec.” They both heard the click as his car door opened.

The Mercedes blew up in a spectacular rolling, billowing ball of fire-throwing pieces of glass, shards of metal, and shreds of rubber high into the air. For a split second, the explosion turned the night inside out-lighting up the surrounding landscape as though it were day.

Before the flash faded away, a roaring wall of superheated air knocked fan off his feet and rolled him hard against the Escort’s underbody. From the other side of the car, Emily cried out in terror as the shock wave threw her to the ground. Fragments pattered down all around, spanging off the

Escort’s chassis and starring its windshield in half a dozen places.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the noise of the explosion died away-leaving only a crackling roar as the Mercedes burned. Ian and Emily climbed shakily to their feet and stared in horror at the flames leaping high into the night sky.

Sam Knowles was gone, and the evidence of Vorster’s treachery had gone with him.

ALONG THE N3 MOTOR ROUTE, NORTH OF

JOHANNESBURG

Erik Muller pulled onto the shoulder and braked sharply. Then he slid out from behind the wheel of his Jaguar and got out to smile in satisfaction at the funeral pyre blazing brightly to the south. He stood watching the flames with his hands planted squarely on his hips. Good riddance. The mind-numbing fear that had been his constant companion since he’d first seen the videotape was already vanishing.

A dark-colored sedan turned off the highway and halted ten meters behind his car. Its driver’s-side door popped open and a tall, burly man clambered out. He glanced briefly at the fiery glow staining the southern sky and then trudged through the loose gravel until he stood before Muller.

“A fine job, Reynders. Very professional. I’ll see that you get a commendation for this night’s work.” Muller resisted the temptation to pat the taller man on the shoulder.

Field Agent Paul Reynders acknowledged the compliment with a brief, almost bored nod. In truth, it hadn’t been a terribly difficult or even interesting mission. The heaped mounds of trash had provided more than a dozen perfect hiding places within easy reach of what he had been told was an ANC agent’s parked car.

He frowned.

“There was another car, Director, with two or three occupants. But no one else.” Reynders shrugged.

“Definitely amateurs. I detected no signs of any other backups or surveillance teams.”

He glanced again at the fire still burning fiercely.

“I hadn’t expected the second car, but I changed the timer to catch it inside the blast as well. We should have no more problems with these spies.” He said it flatly, absolutely convinced that he spoke the truth.

Unfortunately for Erik Muller, Reynders couldn’t have been more mistaken.

NETWORK STUDIOS, JOHANNESBURG

The studio’s offices, workrooms, and broadcast facilities lay wrapped in silence and darkness-apparently utterly empty, abandoned for the night by a fast-shrinking American staff. Even the South African security guards who normally patrolled the hallways guarding valuable electronic gear were safe at home in bed.

The lights flickered on in the main editing room and stayed on-revealing banks of racked VCRs, monitors, reel-to-reel machines, and the squat, white-eased shape of the studio’s computerized-imaging system. Ian shut the door leading into the main hallway and sagged back against the wall.

“We’re clear. “

Emily looked up at him, her cheeks still stained by new dried tears.

“For now.”

“Yeah. For now. ” Ian rubbed angrily at a smear of groundin dirt from the road on his own face. It served as a grim reminder of the night’s disaster.

“But when the police identify Sam’s body and trace that car, they’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.”

Images of the burning Mercedes and of Muller’s car speeding away to safety flashed into his mind and he slammed his fists into the wall, making both Emily and Matthew Sibena jump.

“Goddamnit! I should have known! I should have known that bastard was giving in too easily!”