Tom Cain - Dictator

Mabeki took out his phone and brought a photograph up on the screen. It had been taken at Heathrow airport and showed a Caucasian male, full length, as he waited with his baggage by the Cathay Pacific desk. Mabeki flicked a finger across the screen and a series of further shots spun by, showing the man from varying angles and distances.

‘The man in these pictures is called Samuel Carver. I want him dead. You will ensure that he dies at a time and place that I will specify. The killing will be carried out in such a way that no suspicion attaches to me. Do this and I will give you the bargain of a lifetime. So, do we have a deal?’

Fisherman Zheng sat silently as Mabeki ran through his proposal. Then he cleared his throat like a man gargling gravel and phlegm and spoke to his nephew in perfect English: ‘Tell this African that the favours he asks can be granted with one wave of my hand. But tell him also that even the meanest beggar in Hong Kong knows about his precious diamonds and that no dealer would value them at more than a third of the figure he mentions. If I am to make a fair profit, I therefore cannot offer him more than two million dollars. That is my offer, and it is final.’

Moses Mabeki cast his eye over the three other mah-jongg players. ‘One of you give me your chair,’ he said. ‘I can see that this will take some time.’

Fisherman Zheng barked an order. All three men left the room. Mabeki sat himself down, as did Zheng Junjie. Fisherman poured them all drinks from one of his liquor bottles. And so the negotiations began.

On Saturday morning, Carver set about acquiring the final pieces of equipment he would need for the Gushungo assassination. First, he went to a hobby shop that sold amateur rocket-making kits and bought a couple of cheap engines in the form of cardboard tubes like small fireworks, filled with fast-burning explosive powder. At a hardware store, he acquired some acetone paint thinners. At a phone store, he picked up two handsets: one to be used as Zalika’s tracking device, the other for his own purposes. Then he went back to collect the suit trousers and the refitted Honda Civic, which he left in the darkest, least conspicuous corner he could find in one of Kowloon’s underground car parks. Before he left the car, he opened the boot and spent a few minutes working with the rocket accessories, the acetone and the various bits of kit he’d brought from his Geneva toolbox. By the time he’d finished, Carver had both a getaway car and the means to destroy it, along with any evidence it might contain.

Satisfied with his morning’s work, he called Zalika and met her for lunch. Afterwards, they took a cab up into the New Territories and found a spot where they could look down on to the Hon Ka Mansions and see the gaudy pink-painted home that was the Gushungos’ Asian bolthole. It was one thing working on a mockup, but there was no substitute for getting a first-hand look.

‘Fine,’ he said, once he’d committed the view of the house and its surroundings to memory. ‘I’m ready. There’s nothing to do now but wait.’

Zalika smiled. ‘Not quite nothing.’

‘No, maybe not.’

It was not easy for Moses Mabeki to smoke a cigarette. He had to hold it permanently to his mouth, his lips being too misshapen to grip it tightly by themselves. The drool in his mouth was apt to make the filter soggy. As he stood outside the Gushungo residence, slurping and sucking, blinking his eyes against the smoke, he made a grotesque, even bleakly comic sight. Mabeki could not have cared less. The sole purpose of his newly acquired habit was that it gave him an excuse to leave the house, within which Faith Gushungo had banned all smoking, and get outside. Once there he could walk to some quiet, unobserved corner, get rid of the cigarette and make phone calls in peace, without risk of being overheard.

He speed-dialled Zheng Junjie, and they spoke for less than thirty seconds, just enough time for Mabeki to give the precise time and location for the attack on Carver. ‘I expect him to have made an effort to change his appearance,’ he added. ‘If so, I will of course update you. You will spot him easily enough. Have no fear of that.’

Mabeki’s second call was made to General Augustus Zawanda, commander-in-chief of the Malemban National Army. Together they ran through a series of operations planned for the following morning. The conversation was notable for the unspoken assumption that even the most senior member of the nation’s armed forces was junior to the President’s unelected, unofficial right-hand man.

‘Carry out your orders precisely as specified, and I will ensure that you receive a twenty-five per cent share of all the monies I will liberate from the President and the First Lady’s private offshore accounts – accounts to which only I have the codes. Fail, or try to double-cross me, and I will ensure that your wife, your children, your mother, your brothers, your sisters and all your family die, very slowly. And all the soldiers in Malemba will not be able to save them.’

The Reverend Simon Dollond, rector of St George’s Anglican Church in Tai Po, had faced an ethical dilemma when he discovered that Henderson and Faith Gushungo had bought a property in the Hon Ka Mansions development, within the boundaries of his parish, and wished to join his congregation. On the one hand, he could not turn away two people who wished to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion just because he believed they were profoundly evil. Dollond had served for a time as a prison chaplain. He had given communion to murderers, rapists and paedophiles. It was God’s place, not his, to judge them. On the other hand, if the Gushungos ever turned up at his church on a Sunday morning they were liable to attract a great deal of unwanted attention.

Within days of buying their house, the Gushungos had set their bodyguards on to reporters and photographers who had attempted to get close to them. One reporter was taken to hospital suffering from concussion, a broken nose and two cracked ribs following a beating by Gushungo’s thugs. Faith herself had lashed out at another newsman who had followed her on a shopping expedition, slapping and scratching his face, and had only stopped when physically hauled away, still screaming obscene abuse, by her own guards. Dollond ministered to a peaceful, respectable, family-friendly congregation. He did not need that kind of aggravation.

Nor, it had transpired, did the Gushungos. When Dollond and his assistant priest Tony Gibson were invited to meet the couple in their home, they were delighted to discover that Henderson Gushungo felt that for reasons of age and ill health he might not be able to manage the rigours of a full church service. Ignoring for a moment the many parishioners far more frail than Gushungo who managed to attend every week despite being blind or incapable of walking unaided, Dollond nodded thoughtfully and said that he quite understood. It was therefore decided that the Reverend Gibson would make a personal visit every Sunday after the church service was over to administer communion in the Gushungos’ living room. There was nothing unusual about this: communion was often given in hospitals, rest homes and private houses to the dying or infirm. It was no trouble at all to add one more stop to Rev. Gibson’s weekly round.

Shortly after nine o’clock on this particular Sunday morning, however, Simon Dollond received a call from Faith Gushungo’s personal assistant informing him that the First Lady and President had both been afflicted by food poisoning and would not be able to receive communion as usual. Rev. Dollond sympathized with the Gushungos’ plight, agreeing that few things were more unpleasant than food poisoning and assuring the PA that he would make sure Tony Gibson got the message and would not disturb them.