Tom Cain - Dictator

At last her outstretched hands felt Peter’s cotton blanket, tightly curled hair and soft, warm skin, and she clutched him desperately to her breast. Then the truck’s ignition key was turned, its engine coughed into life, and they rumbled off into the night.

A black Rolls-Royce Phantom was parked by the turning into Severn Road. It had been stretched to more than twenty-two feet in length and fitted with armour plating by Mutec, a specialist carriagemaker in Oberstenfeld, Germany. From behind tinted, bulletproof windows, its passengers watched as the trucks went by.

‘Let that be a lesson to them,’ said Faith Gushungo. ‘Have you allocated the properties yet?’

She was sitting in one of four passenger seats, arranged in two facing pairs behind the divider that separated them from the driver, guaranteeing total privacy.

Moses Mabeki gave a jerky twitch of his brutally distorted head. ‘Of course,’ he said, the last word dissolving into a drooling slur.

‘And the new owners are aware that the trucks will come for them, too, if they ever question their loyalty to our cause?’

Mabeki’s laugh was a hacking cough. ‘Oh yes, they know, and they believe it, don’t worry about that.’

‘And the diamonds: you have a buyer lined up?’

‘Yes. They’re offering ten million. I will make them pay twelve.’

‘Twelve million dollars,’ purred Faith Gushungo with something close to ecstasy. ‘All for us.’

‘It will almost double our holdings,’ said Mabeki.

‘You’re sure Henderson doesn’t know that we control the accounts?’

‘He does not know that we control the country. Why would he know about the accounts?’

Faith laughed. She reached out to stroke Mabeki’s face, feeling the hard, shiny knots of scar-tissue under her fingertips. His terrible ugliness appalled her. The drops of spittle that fell from his lips on to the palm of her hand disgusted her. Yet they thrilled her, too, and she felt herself melting with desire for him.

‘You are my beast,’ she whispered.

She ran her hands over the whipcord muscles beneath his suit and lowered her head over his body. Moses Mabeki’s face had lost all its beauty and his shoulder was a twisted wreck. But he was still a man, for all that.

The dinner was as magnificent as Klerk had promised. The truffle souffles were almost as light as the air around them. The main course was a leg of tender pink roast spring lamb, served with fondant potatoes and a fricassee of baby vegetables picked barely an hour earlier. For dessert they ate fresh strawberries and cream, dusted with ground black pepper to bring out the sweetness of the fruit. All the ingredients came from Campden Hall’s own home farm. Even the truffle had been found in one of the patches of woodland that dotted the estate. Only the wines had been imported, and for Carver, the journey from Geneva was entirely justified by the chance to sample the 1998 Cheval Blanc, a red wine from the Bordeaux commune of St Emilion, which accompanied the lamb. He wasn’t a man who sat around thinking of pretentious adjectives to describe what he was drinking. It was simpler just to say that the wine tasted even better than Zalika Stratten looked.

No one talked about Malemba, or Gushungo, let alone the reason why Carver was a guest at the meal. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement to keep the conversation light and trivial.

After the meal, the diners began to drift upstairs to bed. Carver’s room was on the same corridor as Zalika’s. They went up together.

‘Well, this is me,’ she said, stopping outside her door.

They stood opposite each other, so close that it would take only the slightest inclination of their heads to join in the kiss that would open the door and take them both inside. The tension between them mounted. Then Zalika leaned across and gave Carver an innocent peck on the cheek. He did not move as she turned the handle, half-opened her door and then paused at the entrance to her room. She looked him in the eyes. And then she was gone.

Before long, only Tshonga and Klerk were left downstairs. They discussed their impressions of the afternoon’s discussion over brandy and cigars. Then the Malemban called it a day, leaving only Klerk behind.

In the small hours of Saturday morning, when all but one of the inhabitants of Campden Hall were lost in sleep, a mobile phone was used to contact a number in Malemba.

‘Carver arrived here today,’ the caller said. ‘We offered him the Gushungo assignment. He hasn’t accepted yet.’

The voice on the other end of the line was hard to make out. The reply had to be forced through a lazy mouth filled with spittle and incapable of precise speech: ‘Did you make sure he was tempted as I suggested?’

‘Oh yes. He knows you are still alive. We told him this is his chance to finish the job he started ten years ago.’

‘Did he like that idea?’

‘Hard to say. He wouldn’t commit himself.’

Moses Mabeki gave a long, rattling sigh, like a hiss from an irritable venomous snake.

‘I want them all dead: Gushungo, his bitch wife and Carver. All of them.’

‘Relax. He’ll take the job. It’s just a matter of time.’

‘Good. Everything we planned depends on that.’

‘I’m well aware of that,’ said the caller.

Then the phone snapped shut, the call ended, and within three minutes every bed in Campden Hall was occupied once again.

Wendell Klerk didn’t like to be hurried on a Saturday morning and saw no need to hurry his guests. The staff were on hand from the crack of dawn to provide anything anyone might want, but the first set event of the day was a midday brunch.

‘So, Sam, are you ready to shoot some clay pigeons?’ Klerk said, emphasizing his words with jabs of a sausage-laden fork.

Zalika smiled at Carver. ‘My uncle is very proud of his shooting ground. He had to bulldoze half of Suffolk to make it.’

‘At least half!’ said Klerk. ‘Patrick, will you be joining us?’

Tshonga smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Wendell, I have never had any skill with a gun. While my brothers were fighting for freedom in the bush-’

‘Ja, fighting me!’ Klerk interrupted.

‘I was studying law. All these years later, I am still happy just to read while others play with guns.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Klerk. ‘Brianna is not a great fan of shooting either, are you?’

‘Well, it’s not as boring as golf,’ Brianna sighed.

Carver laughed. So the plaything had a sense of humour hidden away inside that doll-like figure. There was more to her than met the eye. She had that, at least, in common with Zalika.

‘Very good,’ said Klerk, sounding rather less amused. ‘So now we three who will be shooting must agree on the stakes. What do you say, Sam, how about the two losers each give the winner ten thousand US?’

‘If you like,’ said Carver, unenthusiastically.

‘Not enough for you? What if we make it fifty grand each?’

‘Honestly, Wendell, can’t you see Sam’s not interested in money?’ Zalika said.

‘He was the last time I paid him.’

‘Well of course, that was business,’ Zalika insisted. ‘But if we want to get him interested today, it has to be something more personal. Now, I seem to remember that yesterday he called me, and I quote, a “screwed-up schoolgirl who’s got bugger-all training, experience or competence for this kind of work”. Sorry, Sam, but that’s not the sort of thing a girl forgets in a hurry. So my wager is this. I bet you can’t beat little schoolgirl me in a straightforward head-to-head shooting match. And I’m not going to put any money on it because I know that if you, the great Samuel Carver, action hero extraordinaire, can’t shoot better than a helpless, weak and feeble female, you’ll lose something – well, a couple of things, actually – that say more about you than cash ever can.’