Деон Мейер - Cobra

It was easy. He would just swap the card for his sister.

Then why are you so afraid?

He walked along Perth and Vredenburg, towards Long Street.

He was afraid, because that guy with those eyes, a guy who strolled in so calm and collected and shot mall cops, like one, two, three, four, five, fish in a barrel, no emotions . . . That guy wasn’t going to stand there and say: ‘Thanks, my brother, pleasure doing business with you’. He was going to take his memory card, and he was going to shoot him and his sister just like that.

He shivered, because he had got Nadia involved in all this. If they laid a finger on his sister . . . His heart beat in his throat. He turned left into Long Street and walked south, towards the mountain.

Keep moving.

Get those pictures out of your head. Think.

Tyrone Kleinbooi slowly suppressed his fears, and he walked, and he thought. He went through the whole thing from the beginning. He must forget about what happened to him, he must get into the mind of the man with the cool eyes, he must get a bird’s-eye view, that’s what he needed.

He walked over the Buitesingel crossing and up Kloof Street, through the hubbub of students, business people, tourists, slim models, and bergies trying to guide motorists into parking places. He walked to the front of Hudsons The Burger Joint Est. 2009. Then he stopped, his hand resting a moment on the back of his head, deep in thought.

Tyrone turned around and began running in the opposite direction.

Griessel drove with Mbali to Schotsche Kloof so that he could tell her everything. He left nothing out.

It wasn’t easy. She was a painfully law-abiding and over-cautious driver. And she was upset. She interrupted him, shaking her head, over the interference of the State Security Agency, over the ‘colonial tendencies’ of MI6, over the fact that she was an accessory to the destruction of evidence in a robbery and five murders.

Griessel pressed on. He only finished when they had been parked in front of the house at 18 Ella Street for five minutes, beside the ambulance and the six SAPS patrol vehicles.

‘This is completely unacceptable,’ said Mbali.

‘I understand. But it is what we have,’ said Griessel.

‘This is a democracy,’ she said.

‘You think so?’ said Cupido.

‘ Hhayi !’ said Mbali as if he was committing blasphemy.

‘That’s why I asked you to switch off your cellphones at the Waterfront,’ said Griessel. ‘Because I am now absolutely sure they are eavesdropping on our calls, and they can track us. We don’t want them to know we are here. We must remember they have access to exactly the same technology as us, but they don’t need subpoenas. And there’s a good chance our offices are bugged . . .’

Mbali shook her head.

‘We have to assume,’ said Griessel.

She merely nodded.

‘I’ll ask the Green Point SC to suppress the info of the cobra markings on the shell casings. If this shooting,’ Benny pointed at the big house, ‘. . . leads us anywhere, we’ll stay ahead of them.

‘Now, let’s talk about what happened at the Waterfront. With the pickpocket, I mean. Mbali how did you see it?’ He hoped Cupido would understand what he was trying to do, and shut up now.

Mbali was quiet for a long time, her hands on the steering wheel.

From the back seat Cupido sighed impatiently.

‘I think that this Cobra person kidnapped David Adair, and he is still alive.’

Griessel heard a detached note in her voice. Her usual self-confident matter-of-fact manner was missing.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘I think Adair contacted Lillian Alvarez, because she had to bring something from Cambridge to Cape Town. Something this Cobra person wants. I think she was going to hand it over to him at the Waterfront, but then the pickpocket stole it.’

‘I’m not sure that makes sense,’ said Cupido.

‘Why?’ asked Mbali.

‘Because that pickpocket is quick. We couldn’t see what he stole, and I saw nobody in that video of the theft itself that looked like the Cobra. So, if he didn’t see, he couldn’t have known.’

‘Maybe he spoke to Alvarez just after the wallet was stolen, and she told him what happened. Maybe he saw it happen, from a distance. Maybe he wasn’t sure what was stolen. We could have seen all that on the other cameras, if we hadn’t destroyed the evidence. And then this Cobra person followed the security officials, he was only about twenty seconds behind them on the video. And he shot everybody. The pickpocket escaped.’

‘Maybe . . .’ said Cupido, but he wasn’t convinced.

Mbali shifted in her seat, eventually, turned to them. ‘The backpack is important,’ she said.

‘Why?’ asked Cupido.

‘The pickpocket had it on his back when he was arrested. But when he ran out, it was not there. The man who might be this Cobra person was carrying it in his left hand.’

‘So?’

Mbali shrugged.

Griessel nodded.‘Vaughn? You sound as if you have another theory.’

‘There’s no evidence that the Cobra thought Knippies still had the stolen item. Maybe he found what he was looking for, and just ran away from the crime scene . . .’

‘He would not have run if he had what he wanted. He’s a professional,’ said Mbali.

‘Maybe. But my theory still stands: Adair skimmed money on TFTP. And the Cobra is after the money. Alvarez brought something that said where the money is, or how you can get it. Swiss Bank account number . . .’

‘She could have emailed that,’ said Mbali.

‘Maybe,’ said Cupido.

Griessel nodded, and opened the door. ‘Let’s go and see how this fits in with the rest.’

From the sitting room of the big house, where he sat with the grieving owner, the Green Point SC saw the three detectives approach. In front walked the stout, short Mbali with her big handbag swinging from her shoulder, then the taller Vaughn Cupido in a black coat that made him look a bit like Batman, and then Benny Griessel, in height just nicely in the middle between the Zulu and the coloured man. His tousled hair needed a trim, and he had strange Slavic eyes. Everyone who had been in the Service for more than ten years knew about Griessel, the former Murder and Robbery detective who had once arrived at a murder scene so drunk that they had to load him in the ambulance along with the victim’s corpse.

These were the Hawks, thought the SC. The crème de la crème. A vetgat , windgat and a dronkgat . The fat, the vain, and the drunk.

What was going to become of this country?

Woodstock lies only two kilometres from the heart of Cape Town’s business district.

Two hundred years ago it was a farm, and an outstretched white beach where the wintry northwester spat up the wrecks of sailing ships like driftwood. A hundred and thirty years ago it was the third biggest town in the Cape Colony. And fifty years ago it was one of the very few suburbs in South Africa where brown, black, and white could live undisturbed side by side under apartheid, before it decayed ever faster into poverty, with all the social evils that brought with it.

The minibus taxi dropped Tyrone off in Victoria Road, where the neighbourhood was going through a systematic revival – new boutiques, décor, and old-fashioned furniture shops existed comfortably beside old businesses selling hardware and motor vehicle spares. Office buildings, warehouses, and old bakeries were being restored, and to the south more and more yuppies were buying the pretty old houses.

But when Tyrone jogged north up Sussex Street, this sense of resurgence evaporated rapidly. The little houses here were dilapidated, squat and poor, despite the lovely old Cape architecture. Like the one on the corner of Wright Street, a corrugated-iron building bearing a weathered, insignificant sign, red letters on a blue background, indicating that it was the home of PC Technologies .