Faith Gushungo caught Carver’s eye first. She was much taller than he had expected, at least as tall as Carver himself, her height exaggerated by a brightly patterned silk headdress. Her eyes were hidden behind impenetrable dark glasses and her mouth was set in a downward curve of stony disapproval.
‘Why is Gibson not here?’ she snapped, not waiting for any introductions.
Carver adopted the ingratiating manner of a meek and easily intimidated vicar. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but he’s suffering an attack of food poisoning.’
The First Lady gave a dismissive ‘Pah!’ And only then did Carver realize that she had so dominated the past few seconds that he had paid no attention whatsoever to her husband.
‘The President of Malemba, the Honourable Henderson Gushungo,’ said Mabeki.
The man who stepped forward, his hand outstretched, was as surprising in appearance as his wife, but in the opposite direction. Carver had expected a man exuding the same sense of power and malice as Mabeki, but magnified a hundredfold. This, after all, was the dictator who had maintained an iron grip on his country for three decades; who had torn down its economy around his ears; tortured his people, destroyed his enemies, outraged global opinion, yet left it impotent to harm him.
And all that was left was a wizened husk.
Gushungo’s face was as wrinkled and shrivelled as a dessicated prune. Just a few thin tufts of curly silver hair clung to his scalp. His body had shrunk to the point where he wore his suit like a child dressing up in his father’s clothes. The hand he offered Carver was visibly quivering. The other hand clung to an ivory-topped walking stick.
This doddery old geezer was the man Carver had travelled halfway round the world to kill.
For a second he wondered why he should bother. Gushungo’s life expectancy could surely be measured in months, even weeks, rather than years. But then he thought about Canaan and Farayi Iluko, rotting in their Malemban cells, and realized that their life expectancies were shorter still.
In any case, it was clear that, as Patrick Tshonga had suggested, Faith Gushungo was now the real power in the room. She was his primary target. And then he caught something between her and Mabeki – a fractional turning of her head towards him; the faintest twisting of his lips – and thought, ‘They’re in this together.’ And then other thoughts, half-formed, crowded into his mind, bringing with them a jumbled, inarticulate sense of danger, something not quite right. But there was no time to follow them because Carver was shaking Gushungo’s hand, murmuring ‘Mr President’ and making his way to the bar, to stand in front of the cross, as Mabeki ushered the Gushungos to their seats.
The two bodyguards, joined now by another pair of men, took their places, standing behind the Gushungos. And then, even though it was still open, there was a gentle tap on the living-room door and a pair of young Chinese women wearing housemaids’ grey cotton dresses and starched white aprons tiptoed into the room and formed a third line of worshippers behind the bodyguards. Carver recognized one of them as Tina Wong. She did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Either she did not recognize him through the disguise or, more likely, she was just as good a professional as she’d seemed when they’d met on the ferry thirty-six hours earlier.
Carver had to repress the urge to shout out, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ It had never occurred to him that the Chinese staff would be required to take communion as well as everyone else. Was Faith Gushungo really that much of a religious maniac? Or were Wong and her colleague simply Christians themselves? It was possible, Carver supposed. Hong Kong had been British for a hundred and fifty years. Why shouldn’t ex-colonies people choose to worship in the Church of England? He cursed himself for not thinking of that sooner.
Mabeki took up his position, standing by the door, watching over the service. He nodded at Carver to start.
‘Good morning,’ said Carver, trying to think of his next lines. His mind was momentarily blank. His concentration was awry. He had not yet even begun and things were already going wrong.
61
‘Today,’ said Carver, ‘is the festival of Pentecost, or Whit Sunday as it is traditionally known in the Anglican Church, when we commemorate the appearance of the Holy Ghost among the apostles and its bestowal of the gift of tongues. I shall only be giving one reading, from Acts, if that is acceptable to you, sir, and will be using the traditional King James version. I find the poetry of the language far outweighs any loss of comprehension.’
Carver looked at Gushungo, who nodded his assent.
‘Very well,’ Carver continued, ‘then let us now begin our worship.’
In the road outside the house, Zalika Stratten started walking.
Carver read the words from his service book: ‘May grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.’
‘And also with you,’ the congregation of eight replied, with a far greater intensity than the mumbled responses Carver was used to from his British churchgoing.
The next item in his book was referred to as the Prayer of Preparation. The Gushungos and their staff seemed to know it by heart, joining in as he declaimed, Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, Carver mused. Now there was a line. How many people in the room could even pretend that their hearts were unsullied?
They moved on to the Confession, and Carver wondered what the Gushungos thought of when they told God that they had sinned against him and against their neighbours in thought and word and deed. Did they believe that? How could they then go right back and sin all over again? Perhaps the words were a sort of expiation, wiping the slate of atrocities clean and freeing the Gushungos to go back and commit more.
He read the collect for Pentecost, the special prayer dedicated to that day. It asked God to give his people ‘the right judgement in all things’. Carver was about to act as judge, jury and executioner. Never in his life had he been in such close, intimate contact with his targets so soon before their deaths. Even for someone without much religious feeling there was something very special about the act of joining together in prayer. It made them all complicit, in some way he could not quite define. It made the cold finality of what he was about to do all the more stark in its cold-blooded calculation.
Zalika was at the front door now. She pushed it gently and it swung open noiselessly on hinges oiled earlier that morning by Tina Wong. Zalika was equally soundless as she made her way across the marble floor, heading for the stairs.
The reading for the day was taken from Acts, chapter two, verses one to eleven. It spoke of the Holy Ghost entering the building where the apostles were gathered. Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
Carver felt like a ghost himself, slipping into this house and falling upon its inhabitants. He was quite calm now, dispassionate, the nerves having begun to vanish as soon as he set about his business.
When the reading was done, he led them all in the Creed, that confident declaration of a belief he could not quite share. It spoke of Jesus coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead. As he read those words from the service book, Carver happened to look up for a second and catch Moses Mabeki’s eye. There was a look of utter contempt on his face – the look of a man who had long since abandoned any concept of right and wrong in favour of calculation and expediency.