"Suppose I don't want to go to New Delhi?" I asked mildly.
"But you must. It's for your own safety. And it's an order. If you wish to remain in S.M.U.T., you must learn not to question orders, Mr. Victor."
"New Delhi it is, then," I agreed because at the moment I didn't have any other idea of how to pursue my search for Dr. Nyet and there seemed no point to severing the tenuous connection I'd made with S.M.U.T.
They worked fast. All the arrangements were made for us, and that very evening Singh and I were at Kennedy Airport, all set to leave for New Delhi. But while we were waiting I saw something that made me abruptly decide to change my plans.
I spotted one of the S.M.U.T. girls I'd helped escape the brothel. It was the Slavic-looking brunette who'd gone through the window with Crampdick the night before. She was standing in a line-up of people waiting at one of the gates for their plane to begin loading.
I checked the flight schedules. The plane she was waiting for was bound for Johannesburg, South Africa. I had to work fast.
I told Singh I wouldn't be going to New Delhi with him after all and waved away his questions. Fortunately, thanks to Putnam's foresight, my passport was validated for any destination I chose. Now I chose Johannesburg, bought a ticket for the same plane as the brunette, and made haste to board it.
Once in my seat, for a moment I thought I might have goofed. She wasn't aboard. I peered out the window and finally I spotted her. She was talking to a man at the gate. Her figure blocked the man's face. Then, as she turned away, I saw him. It was Peter Highman!
A moment later she boarded the plane. Shortly after that, another man came racing up just as they were removing the stairway. They held it for him, and he boarded the aircraft, much out of breath. He seemed to be looking for someone as he came down the aisle. He made such a point of not staring that I guessed that I was the man he was seeking. But when he chose the seat behind the girl, it inspired me to twist my conclusion for my own ends.
The opportunity came about an hour after we were in the air. He got up and went to the men's room. I quickly moved to take the seat beside the girl.
"Do you recognize me?" I asked in a low tone.
"Why, yes," she said, sounding surprised. "I think I do. Aren't you the one who helped me last night? Mr. Crampdick's friend?"
"That's right. I'm Steve Victor. What's your name?"
"Ilona Tabori."
"Well, listen, Ilona. Listen carefully. We don't have much time to talk. That man in the seat behind you is following you. Don't ask me how I know. Just take my word for it."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"We're on the same side, aren't we? We both work for S.M.U.T. And we're in the same fix. We're both on the lam from New York because of what happened last night. Only I think that guy following you may be one of the bunch we're on the lam from."
"Is S.M.U.T. sending you to Salisbury, too?" she asked innocently.
Salisbury! So that was it. She wasn't going to Johannesburg to hide out there. She was going to change planes for Salisbury, the capital city of Rhodesia! "Yes," I lied. "They're sending me to Salisbury, too." Just then I spotted the door to the men's room opening. "He's coming back," I told Ilona. "I don't want him to see me with you. We'll have to talk later." I scurried back to my seat.
Once there, a swarm of questions buzzed through my mind. Who was the man following me? Which side did he represent? Why had S.M.U.T. sent Ilona to Rhodesia? How come she was talking to Peter Highman at the airport? What was Peter Highman's part in all this? Why had he murdered his wife and tried to murder me? Was it more than mere jealousy? And then there was the most important question of alclass="underline"
Was Ilona Tabori really Dr. Nyet?
CHAPTER FIVE
At Johannesburg I arranged to continue on to Salisbury. Ilona Tabori was already booked through. It was no surprise to either of us to see the man who'd been following me board the plane at the last minute.
Fortunately, his kidneys were as weak as ever, and so I had a chance to exchange a few words with Ilona while he was in the john. It seemed wise not to let him see us together. If he hadn't connected us up together already, why make the connection for him?
During our short talk, Ilona gave me the name of the hotel she'd be staying at in Salisbury. I assured her that I'd contact her there. I suppose she took it for granted that the contact had to do with S.M.U.T. I would have liked to ask her some questions then about Peter Highman, but there was no time. I barely made it back to my seat before my urinary tail was back on the job. Not long after that we set down in Salisbury.
We landed in the middle of quiet chaos. It was late in the evening of November 11, 1965 – the day Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian D. Smith declared the country's independence from Great Britain and subjected four million Africans to rule by a small voting minority of the country's 172,000 white Europeans. In the wake of this announcement, as I left the airport by cab with the man who'd been following me in another cab close behind, the Salisbury I found was a city of silence broken by the sound of sudden gunfire, a city under surveillance by patroling white soldiers trying to ferret out the secret meetings of liberty-minded black men risking their lives to plan for freedom in cellars and attics, a time-bomb of a city whose fuse was the policy of apartheid.
But there was another aspect to Salisbury which struck me as my cab crawled down the quiet streets, halted frequently by one of the patrols, then waved onward when it was determined that the driver and passenger were both white. This other aspect was of an extremely modern metropolis with a popultion of over 314,000 people, a population which had multiplied almost tenfold in less than thirty years. Yet the part of the city through which I was traveling showed no hint of the overcrowding which might have been expected to result from such a population increase. It was clean, with tall, white apartment buildings spaced well apart. Later I would learn that this view was typical only of the major portion of the city in which the white population lives. Like most modern African cities, Salisbuy has its slums. And like Johannesburg, the slums of Salisbury are set off by the invisible line of apartheid and house only non-whites.
But the section through which I was traveling said something important about both the city and the country. It said that where there is gold, people live well. It said that the living standard is the gold standard in Rhodesia.
Gold!
Even today it is still the chief resource of Rhodesia. Before the country had a recorded history, it contained what was probably the greatest gold field of the ancient world. The ancient shafts used to mine this gold back then are still to be seen today in the are of the gold fields, an area which measures rougly 400 miles by 500 miles. Estimates by archeologists are that some four hundred million dollars in gold was taken from these mines in ancient times.
Yet these ancient miners barely scratched the surface. For some reason, they stopped digging up the gold long before the white man came to Rhodesia. Perhaps it was so abundant that it no longer had any great value in their economy. Or perhaps they had arrived at a philosophical stage beyond that of civilized man today, a philosophy that turned its back on slaving and killing for precious metal and took refuge in a more naturalistic tribal culture, a culture based on survival rather than competition.
In any case, such was the culture that the white man found when he came to Rhodesia. And so he plundered the land of its gold and used as his justifiction the fact that the natives hadn't developed their natural resources. And by "natural resources," he meant gold.
With his arrival, the natives developed their natural resources, all right. Actual slavery and semi-slavery forced them back down into the ancient mine shafts to bring up still more of the inexhaustible supply of gold. At gunpoint they flushed the gold from the bowels of the earth for their white masters. And the masters grew fat on the gold, and built houses and then cities, the greatest of which is Salisbury. And now Salisbury ruled the golden land and defied the British Empire to give the native Rhodesians any share of the city of Gold.