A Sailor's Honour (29 page)

There were several cars parked behind the church, out of sight from Bei den Mühren. One in two was unlocked. A man could insist on a meeting inside a car and do the business there. He looked up at the spire of the church, as a tourist would. There were no windows. No one would see what was happening inside a car parked in the churchyard. There were no
CCTV
cameras in sight.

There was a notice board in front of the church with a stack of brochures for tourists. De Villiers took one. It was in English. It invited contributions towards the restoration of the choir organ. He put the brochure in his pocket and started making his way back to the city centre. At fifteen degrees and with a clear sky, the Hamburgers might think it a nice summer's day, but to De Villiers it was cold. Auckland might be wet, he thought, but it isn't cold. Yesterday, in Durban's winter, the temperature had been in the mid-twenties.

He zipped up his jacket and walked on.

At a bicycle stand near St Pauli, he surreptitiously snipped two stainless-steel bicycle spokes from a thick wheeler chained to the rack. It appeared abandoned, its rear tyre flat and its front wheel missing.

St Catherine won't do the job for me, he thought. She might cleanse by fire, but she won't do the job for me.

The bicycle spoke as an assassin's weapon had its origins in the townships southwest of Johannesburg. The gangsters of the fifties and sixties – the tsotsis – plied their trade on the trains that carried workers from Soweto to and from their jobs in the city. The workers were usually paid in cash and, packed like sardines in the coaches of the dilapidated trains, were easy prey for the tsotsis.

The workers knew that you did not, under any circumstances, resist the tsotsi holding the sharpened spoke against your spine or under your throat. You didn't even make eye contact as the tsotsi rifled through your pockets.

‘Tsk, tsk,' the other passengers would say when you alighted. They knew their turn was just around the corner.

A sharp spoke in the ribs or in the spine: guaranteed to produce an instant heart attack or paralysis of the lower limbs. If you resisted, that is.

Those who did resist – perhaps they were new to the city or from a country to the north – were thrown off the moving trains, stripped of all identification and any valuable possessions. The railway police patrolling the lines would find them next to the tracks, the bodies mangled by the fall against the ballast and the railway sleepers. They didn't care enough to investigate. There was far less legwork and paperwork involved in an inquest than a murder investigation. The head of the railway police in the area was a member of the Third Force and he had issued instructions not to bother with such cases. ‘Let them kill their own,' he said in private. In public he vowed to make the trains safe, but never by risking the life of a single policeman.

The district surgeon – another member of the Third Force – routinely recorded the cause of death as
Accidental death; multiple injuries consistent with a fall from a moving train
. The workers were migrants – many without the papers that allowed them to be in the city in the first place, men who moved in the shadows – and their families in their distant villages would never learn what had happened to their breadwinners. Many assumed their men had taken new wives and were forever lost to them, but it was the spokes that had claimed them.

The bicycle spokes had numerous advantages over other weapons of the robber's trade. They were ubiquitous. All you needed was a pair of pliers and a rough stone on which to sharpen them. They were disposable too, and no great loss when left in the victim's body, where they would remain undetected during the cursory police investigation and the superficial postmortem. They could be concealed in the seam on the side of your trousers, just below the pocket, should an overly ambitious railway policeman brave it onto the platform to conduct a random search of the passengers streaming past. Possession of a dangerous weapon meant instant arrest and jail. While an assortment of home-made knives and sharpened screwdrivers and the Zulu's beloved ntshumetshu clattered onto the gravel as the snaking queue came nearer the policeman, a stealthy hand would slip the spoke into its sheath in the seam.

The simple effectiveness of the spoke as a means of killing in public places and escaping detection, did not go unnoticed. The sharpened bicycle spoke became the tool of choice of a select band of assassins trained to kill on behalf of the state, sometimes in the local streets, sometimes in the concourse of an international airport or the lobby of a five-star hotel abroad, and sometimes in a public restaurant, where a man would suddenly slump over his plate and not respond to the Heimlich manoeuvre.

The Rathaus was less than five hundred metres away and De Villiers walked back through the business district. The buildings were old but solid. The brochure he'd read at the hotel said that the central district of Hamburg had been destroyed by Allied bombers during the latter part of the Second World War and there were photographs to support the fact. Still, De Villiers found it difficult to believe that a defeated nation could rebuild a whole city exactly as it had been before.

He walked past the Rathaus and sat on a small wooden bench on the Alter Wall, diagonally across from the bank. The HypoVereinsbank was housed in a nineteenth-century building three storeys high. He hid the Leatherman under the bench and went into the bank: there was no security, he noted. He went up to the customer services desk in the foyer and asked for a balance slip. There was $19,805,307.55 in the account. He went to the teller behind her bulletproof glass window and withdrew sixty thousand converted to euro to cover his expenses. He went back to the customer services desk to ask for a detailed account statement and folded it carefully. There would be time to study it later. He needed to know how much was government money and how much was interest.

He asked if he could speak to Herr Schmidt. Mr Schmidt had been his contact at the bank during the
Alicia Mae
operation, but no longer worked at the bank. De Villiers was directed to Herr Amsinck's office. There he explained the nature of his business.

‘Yes,' Mr Amsinck said in good but heavily accented English, ‘we could close the account. There will be no bank charges. What do you want to do with the funds in the account?' Mr Amsinck asked.

‘There will be transfers in US dollars,' De Villiers said. ‘And one domestic transfer.'

‘If you have the account details, it will be no problem. Just bring your passport again,' Mr Amsinck said.

De Villiers stood up. ‘I'll come back tomorrow afternoon with the details,' he said and shook hands with the banker.

De Villiers retrieved the Leatherman and went to the university grounds near the hotel. He found a protected spot under a tree where there was a small wooden garden seat and sharpened the spokes with the Leatherman's steel file. He tested the fit of the first spoke in his right hand. The head of the spoke was bent at a ninety-degree angle with a small bevelled head at the end where it would rest against the hub of the wheel. He pressed the head of the spoke hard against his palm and concluded that it would not cut the hard skin at the base of his palm, even if the spoke had to be driven through bone.

Two spokes, and then I'll be done with this business, he said to himself. But if everything goes right, I'll only need one.

He sat under the tree and closed his eyes, visualising the moment of the killing. In his mind's eye, he slipped the spoke into his hand so that the head of the spoke would sit flush against the base of his palm, the length of it between the index and ring fingers. He practised with both hands, not knowing in advance which hand would have the best opportunity to strike when the time was right. His hands followed his thoughts and a passer-by might have thought that he was crazy.

The major's face was constantly in his mind. He alternated hands in practising the moves.

De Villiers had killed before, but he was a soldier then and the killings had been his duty. A Russian colonel at Techamutete in Angola. Several Cuban officers and low-ranking soldiers. An assassin lying in wait to shoot a visiting foreign minister in Pretoria. He had used a sniper's rifle then and had shot them from long range. He had no qualms about those killings, although the Russian woman still entered his dreams from time to time. He could see her falling backwards under the impact of the bullet, her blonde hair escaping from her military cap.

The sniper's rifle is a long-range weapon, almost impersonal, and useless at close quarters. The spokes were for face-to-face contact: you had to look into the victim's eyes.

De Villiers wasn't sure he could do it. He had been trained to use the spokes and had once had the opportunity to use them, but he had walked away. He wondered if he would walk away again.

It was hardly a year earlier, when he had tracked the killers of his wife and children to Loftus, where they were security guards for a soccer boss. The killers had been convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, but the president had given them a pardon, calling them heroes of the African struggle for equality and democracy. De Villiers couldn't understand how the killing of women and children could turn you into a hero. He'd decided to take his own revenge.

He had dreamed of the opportunity for years.

Yet, when the moment came, he couldn't do it. He'd had the killer at his mercy in the toilets at the back of the stand. The man was coughing blood, the victim of a drug-resistant and untreatable strain of tuberculosis combined with Aids. He'd been likely to die in months, if not weeks. His two companions were in no better shape, having also contracted the deadly combination while in prison. In a way, De Villiers realised at the time, they had been sentenced to death, not to life imprisonment.

But it wasn't the fact that they were dying and would be dead soon that stopped him using the spokes he had so carefully prepared. With the spoke pressed against his throat, the killer had divulged the identity of the man who had ordered the killings.

White man. Afrikaans. Completely bald. Pink eyes with white eyelashes. Said a general had sent him.

The major whose name De Villiers still didn't know after all these years.

The man he was due to meet in less than twenty-four hours.

De Villiers tested the sharpness of the spokes on his index finger. He drew a drop of blood. He had time to spare and took a stroll along the lakes. He thought of his promise to Emma not to take any risks. He resolved not to, no matter what the provocation might be.

I have to be cold, clinical, like a soldier. And not just any soldier, he said to himself.
More like a sniper. Taking deep breaths. Waiting for the heartbeat to slow. Relaxing every muscle except the trigger finger's. Watching the target intently. Suffering no distractions. Waiting. Waiting and waiting, until the right moment. Then pack up and leave quickly, without leaving any trace behind.

De Villiers woke to the noise of the early morning traffic on Rothen-baumchaussee. He packed his bag and went downstairs for breakfast. It was 8 a.m. Central European Time. It would be the same time at the lodge, where they would be setting off on the day's first game drive. Earlier would have been better, but the luxury guests' sense of opportunity did not match that of the animals they had come to watch. In Kawerau, he knew, it was 10 p.m. and pitch-dark, but that would be good for an assault on the kidnappers' house.

But it was too early for action. Everything had to be synchro-nised.

It was going to be a busy day once De Villiers had made the phone calls to set the operation in motion.

He took his time over breakfast, but it was still not 10 a.m. when he left the brasserie. There was a travel agent with a small kiosk in the hotel foyer. He headed in that direction, but the sign on the door said that it would open at 10.30. He sat down in the lounge and read
The Australian
, the only English-language paper with news he had any interest in.

Then he waited.

With Teutonic precision, the travel agent's door opened at exactly 10.30. De Villiers went across and bought a first-class ticket on Singapore Airlines for Hamburg-Frankfurt-Singapore-Auckland and paid in cash. The first flight would leave at 4.30 p.m. He had less than six hours to complete the operation.

He checked out, paying in cash. He left the hotel with his backpack slung over his shoulder. It contained his New Zealand passport, a clean shirt, two pairs of clean socks, two pairs of underpants and a pair of well-worn Australian boots. He had his UK passport and about a thousand euros in cash in the right-side pocket of his cargo jeans. The opposite pocket held the three cellphones he had bought at Frankfurt International. His own cellphone was in its usual place around his neck. The Leatherman was strapped to his ankle. The bicycle spokes he kept in his shirt pocket in a drinking straw cut in half.

He took an apple from the bowl on the reception counter and ate it on the way past the railway station to the central business district. He sat down on the grass in front of a statue of Friedrich Schiller. He looked at his watch again. It was exactly 11.00 a.m.

It was time.

He took out the three operation-dedicated cellphones and made the calls.

It was 1 a.m. in New Zealand. The hour sailors call the ghost watch, the hour when the body is in its deepest sleep.

They answered on the first ring.

‘Lieutenant, it's time.'

‘Right, Major.'

‘Is she safe?'

‘The whole house is quiet. The lights are off. The rubbish went out this morning. There were children's drawings in it.'

‘They'll have someone standing guard. Be careful.'

‘We've done this before, Major. No need for you to worry about the finer details.'