Tony Park - Silent Predator

Sannie realised that she and Isaac had been blinded by the drugs and Carla’s deception, which now seemed heavy-handed. She believed Tom: he wasn’t the sort of man who would take drugs — and if he was, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave them lying about. And Sannie wouldn’t put anything past Carla.

‘She suggested you use my room for the command post in order to lead you to the drugs. And how stupid would I be to leave a line of coke unused in the bathroom? You’ve got to help me, Sannie.’

She turned her back on him and paced across the thick Persian rug on the floor of the suite and stood, arms folded, staring out over the Sabie River. An elephant sucked up a trunkful of muddy water and showered itself with black goo. She, like Tom, knew that minutes counted at this point in a pursuit, and that valuable time was being sacrificed to the dictates of petty bureaucracy. Men’s lives were at risk while they waited for diplomats to get out of bed and return phone calls.

‘I’ve got to get to Mozambique, Sannie.’

‘Isaac’s just arrested you, man. If I set you free now I’m breaking the law. I’ll be branded a racist for going against a black superior and siding with you — whether you’re right or wrong. That’ll be it for me and the police service. I’ll end up working security at a Pick ’n’ Pay.’

‘Two men will die if we don’t move now.’

She shook her head. Damn him. He was right, and probably right about Carla Sykes as well. Tom had made a mistake by falling for the woman’s advances and Sannie had been almost as guilty in falling for her set-up.

Sannie strode across to the writing desk and took out a Tinga pen and some stationery. She sat down and started writing. ‘Go to the mini-bar, get a bottle of soft drink, empty it out, rinse it and piss in it,’ she said, not looking back at him.

‘What?’

‘I’m writing a note for Tshabalala. I don’t want to explain this over the phone. I’m telling him I watched you give a urine sample and that he should get it analysed and get Carla Sykes thoroughly checked at the same time. If the urine sample comes up negative for drugs you’ll be partly vindicated. If it comes out positive, I’ll bring you back to Skukuza and he can lock you up. In the meantime, I’m taking custody of you and doing what he told me to do — keeping an eye on you. I’ll be sidelined off this investigation as soon as the detectives from Nelspruit get here, so I won’t be missed.’

Tom opened the mini-bar and tipped the contents of a bottle of soda water down the bathroom sink. As he unzipped his shorts, his hands still cuffed, he called out to her from the toilet. ‘You said you won’t be missed. Where are you going?’

‘Mozambique.’

Helen MacDonald sat at her desk in her office in Westminster and tried again to get the words right for the holding statement. She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.

The phone rang.

‘Hello, I’m calling from South Africa. My name is Pauline le Roux, from Radio 702. I’m glad to get through to you at last, Helen. Look, we’ve had a call from a reporter in the east of the country near our Kruger Park and she says that Robert Greeves has gone missing. I need you to confirm that, please, and tell me all the details you have so far.’

‘Have you gone to air with this yet?’

‘No, and no one else has either. So it’s true?’

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to you that will stop you from running this story for twenty-four hours, is there?’ It was worth a try, Helen thought morosely.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, then. And no, you’re right, there’s nothing you can say that would stop me running this story. If you want to go on air, I’ll take you now.’

‘I’ll send you a statement in half an hour.’ Helen hung up. She had neither confirmed nor denied that Robert was missing. She’d bought herself enough time to finish her statement, but the news was out now. She called the Prime Minister’s office.

Forty-five minutes later, at midday South African time, Eugene Coetzee, freelance photographer, tuned the radio in his Corolla sedan to 702 to listen to the news. There had been some funny goings-on around Tinga that morning.

Eugene guessed his quarry, the English politician Robert Greeves, would be going on an early morning game drive from Tinga. Having missed getting the shot the previous afternoon, he was determined to ambush the minister this time.

Eugene had booked himself into a rondavel at Skukuza camp the night before — he was sure the British newspaper he was stringing for would cover the expense of a self-contained hut — and set the alarm on his cell phone to wake him at five. He’d recovered quickly from the several Klipdrift and Cokes he’d had the night before and been in the head of the queue of cars waiting at the camp gates when they had opened at five-thirty.

He knew Tinga’s schedules. It had only taken a phone call a few days ago, with him pretending to be interested in staying at the lodge, to find out how many drives they offered per day and their departure times. He knew the official guests wouldn’t leave the lodge before six-fifteen, and they first had to drive along the private road that linked Tinga Legends Lodge with the main sealed road. Eugene was waiting on the corner, parked on the dirt verge, at six-fifteen sharp. But no game vehicles had come.

He had wondered if they had deliberately changed the schedule after his bid to get a picture of Greeves yesterday. In all his twenty years as a member of the paparazzi, Eugene had never encountered a politician so shy — mostly they lived for getting their pictures in the newspaper. He had no idea why the World was so interested in this guy, and didn’t particularly care. But Eugene loved a challenge, and this was shaping up to be a battle of wills.

Not long after six-thirty, he heard the growl of a Land Cruiser and started his own engine as the Tinga game-viewing vehicle came into sight. Oddly, there were only two people in it — an African guide driving and a white man sitting next to him, the one who had been sitting in the rear of the vehicle that had cut him off and prevented him from getting his shot yesterday. The pair accelerated rapidly, quickly reaching a speed that looked dangerously close to illegal, and they pulled away from Eugene’s Corolla.

He smiled. Such an obvious decoy. Did they expect him to follow them? Perhaps he was supposed to think that Greeves’s game viewer, with Minister Dule on board, had left earlier and they were speeding out now to catch up with them. Eugene switched off his engine and waited. And waited.

He listened to the radio news at seven — nothing of much interest on the bulletin — and then decided to turn on his radio scanner, which was tuned to the police and national parks frequencies. Immediately he picked up some agitated chatter. A Tinga game viewer had been reported speeding. Isaac Tshabalala, the old man in charge of the cops in Kruger, was heading from Orpen down to somewhere in the south of the park. Something funny was going on.

Throughout the rest of the morning he had watched an odd assortment of vehicles coming and going from Tinga. Cop cars, an unmarked detective vehicle — at least, a detective was what the beefy white man behind the wheel had looked like. Then, a short while ago, the pair from the Tinga vehicle — the guide and the man he assumed was Greeves’s bodyguard — had returned, but in a different game viewer. They were hunched over something or someone in one of the back seats.

The midday news brought some clarity and sent a jolt of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Robert Greeves was missing from the luxury game lodge, presumed kidnapped. Dule was unharmed. And he, Eugene Coetzee, was the only photographer on the scene — for now, anyway.