Деон Мейер - Cobra

The station commander was a captain with twenty-two years’ service. He pushed the pen he had been using into his pocket, stood up quickly, asked precisely what had been reported, and ordered the constable to tell his two most experienced detectives to meet him at his official SAPS car. ‘As in now .’

While he hurried to the car park, he thought of the style of the meetings he had had with the provincial commissioner over the past months. And the bulletins that had been issued in that time with monotonous regularity, all in support of the same basic message: the president, the minister and the national commissioner were deeply concerned about the fact that the SAPS’ reputation stank. In the last year there had been the Marikana massacre, the Oscar Pistorius case, and the video of a police van dragging the Mozambican Emidio Macia to death. Trumpeted out from here to Time magazine and the New York Times. It had to end now. Keep our individual and collective butts out of the media and out of trouble. Maintain discipline in your people. Don’t let raw blougatte , still wet behind the ears, mess up your crime scenes. Don’t let inexperienced people be placed in a position where they need to take important decisions. Take them yourself. With wisdom and balance.

Or bear the consequences.

The Sea Point commander had three children at school, a bond on his house of over a million, and a wife who thought he worked too much and earned too little. He didn’t want her to bear the consequences. He frowned, feeling the tension in his body. And the urge to go to the V&A Waterfront himself. Along with his two best detectives. Because the Waterfront was a key area, an international tourism jewel. It was the sort of place where ‘a bad shooting’ would bring down the media vultures in hordes. Including those of Time magazine and the New York Times. It was the sort of place where you could very quickly land very deep in the soup if you didn’t make the right decisions – with wisdom and balance.

The two detectives approached, their jackets flapping in the cold wind. ‘Bad shooting at the Waterfront,’ said the station commander. They quickly got into the car. The captain switched on the sirens and the lights, and they drove away.

At the main entrance to the V&A Waterfront in Breakwater Lane, the station commander parked on the pavement. A SAPS sergeant had heard the sirens and came running up. This was the one sent out after the original call from the Waterfront security about the pickpocket. The one who had discovered the scene of the homicides.

‘This way, Captain,’ he said, eyes wild.

‘How many?’ asked the station commander as he and the detectives jumped out and ran after the sergeant.

‘At least five, Captain.’

Christ. He didn’t say it though, just thought it. ‘Where did it happen?’

‘At the security centre. It’s a bloodbath.’

And it was. Standing in the doorway of the Security: Control Room , the station commander saw five people crumpled into the characteristic helpless awkwardness of death. As he stared at the blood and brain spatter, the pools of blood, the spray and the footprints, he knew it was going to be impossible to keep anyone’s collective butt out of the media, thank you. The best he could hope for was to keep everyone’s butts out of trouble.

So he turned around and led the whole team of two detectives and the uniformed sergeant, and the seven black-clad security men who stood in stupefied curiosity in the corridor, to the door that opened into the shopping centre (where he spotted a bullet hole in the door frame). He walked out, closed the door, and said: ‘Nobody goes in here.’

And then he phoned the Hawks.

Brigadier Musad Manie was the commander of the Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation, the ‘Head Hawk Honcho’, as Cupido sometimes referred to his coloured brother with a measure of pride. Manie’s nickname in the DPCI was ‘the Camel’, because ‘Musad’, one of the Hawks detectives had learned from a Muslim friend, meant ‘camel set free’ in Arabic. And the Hawks, like most SAPS units, liked to give each other – and especially senior officers – nicknames. But Manie didn’t look like a camel. He had the looks of a leader. He was a powerful man, broad of breast and shoulder, with a granite face of strong lines and a determined jaw.

It was this jaw that entered Nyathi’s office first. In his deep but always muted and calm voice he said, ‘Zola, there has been a shooting at the Waterfront. Five security guards dead, as far as we know. Sea Point has requested our assistance.’ Only the final word was coloured with a light shade of irony.

‘What sort of assistance?’

‘Full crime scene and investigative assistance.’

They exchanged a look that said: ‘Can you believe it . . .’

‘I can send Mbali.’

‘That would be perfect.’

‘And I’d better get Cloete out there too.’

22

Griessel hurried back to Cupido and Davids. He had asked Davids to make a copy of Lillian Alvarez’s email to Adair urgently, and then delete it. ‘Quickly, Lithpel. Please,’ he said, with Cupido’s suspicious gaze on him.

When it was done, he asked that the Facebook photo of Lillian Alvarez be sent out as a bulletin to all SAPS stations. And as he walked out of Lithpel Davids’s kingdom, he said to Cupido, ‘I want to show you something.’

Cupido followed him with a half-spoken ‘What?’ forming.

Griessel held a finger to his mouth and trotted down the stairs, to the basement, with Cupido in pursuit.

Right at the back, beside the ‘clubhouse’ door, he stopped.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Cupido.

‘I didn’t want to talk in there. I think the SSA is eavesdropping on us.’

‘The SSA?’

‘Yes.’

‘ Jissis ,’ said Cupido. ‘Benna, are you serious?’

‘I had a call from a Spook. And she didn’t mind me knowing that she had intercepted my email.’

‘ Now ? That call that you took just now?’

‘Yes. And she said she would know if I told anyone about the call.’

‘How do you know she’s a Spook?’

‘Put two and two together. She knows about Emma Graber, the MI6 agent at the British Consulate. The thing is, I think they tap our cellphones, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were microphones in some of our offices too.’

‘She could be CI also,’ said Cupido, now muted and wary, as if they were being listened to here as well.

Griessel considered the possibility. It wasn’t far-fetched. ‘CI’, as the SAPS Criminal Intelligence unit was known, had become a sinister place in recent years. First there was the fiasco with Lieutenant-General Richard Mdluli, the former station commander for Vosloorus, who had been appointed as head of Criminal Intelligence – and who was subsequently sacked due to alleged involvement in fraud, corruption, attempted murder, and conspiracy. Now rumours were flying about his successor, the new acting chief of Criminal Intelligence, especially about his close ties with the highest authority of the state. In the halls it was whispered that this unit concerned itself more with the dirty laundry of the president’s enemies, than with collecting evidence to fight crime.

‘I don’t think so. CI wouldn’t bug the Consulate. It’s SSA . . .’

‘Crazy country, Benna,’ said Cupido. ‘Crazy world . . . OK. So what did the bitch say?’

Griessel told him everything.

‘Why now, Benna?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, I mean, why trust me now?’

‘Vaughn, it was a mistake. I didn’t have a choice.’

‘Apology accepted. And you believe me now about Adair and the great digital bank robbery?’