What are you doing?
I have got some friends, you know, Tess flounced. Not that its any of your business.
It is my business. Mobile phones can be tracked. Calls can be monitored.
Giving Leah a hunted look, Tess put the mobile away. Leah wanted to say more, but fear was clearly apparent in the younger woman, breaking through the shallow cuteness and bravado. I don’t blame her, Leah thought. But I have to put on a brave front.
Tomorrow we alter our appearance, she said. If we have to go out to the shops, then we don’t leave a trail. We use cash, not credit cards, okay? And no calls from public phones.
Boring.
I’ll sleep on the sofa, Leah said.
Can I watch TV?
Only the news, if you keep the volume down.
God! What about e-mail?
There was a computer on a card table in one corner of the sitting-room. No, Leah said, glancing at it. We don’t do anything that signals where we are.
God.
chapter 5
The target left work every afternoon at six, so Evert van Wyk got to the carpark at five-thirty. Only one car was there, the targets Audi, together with some scraggly shrubs and a rubbish skip full of broken concrete paving. Van Wyk waited. In the old days you had to break into a car in order to set the trap, but now all he had to do was wait for the target to push a button on his key ring.
Sure enough, at six on the dot the target crossed the carpark and a moment later van Wyk heard an electronic beep and the soft oiled click of locks disengaging. He waited until the target was halfway in the drivers door before making his move. By the time the target had his door closed but before he could lock it, van Wyk had slid into the back seat and was shoving his .22 pistol against the hinge of the mans jaw.
Don’t do anything stupid.
What do you want?
Drive out of here slowly, left at the lights, were going to the golf course.
The man slumped. He knew. Look, I can pay you next week. All I need is
Thats nothing to do with me, van Wyk said. I don’t know why they want you topped, I just know they do, okay? Drive. Don’t talk.
It was an easy hit and he was home by seven-thirty. The thing about your .22 pistol is, its small and quiet. A .22 wont necessarily stop an enraged or vigorous target, but it wasn’t designed to. It was intended for competition shooting…and for putting a bullet inside the skull of a human being.
Van Wyk always used a .22 for close work. The trick was to shoot when the targets defences were down. Like tonight. The guy in the Audi expected to be shot in the woods off the main fairway, but van Wyk shot him inside the car, the moment he’d turned off the ignition.
Last month van Wyk had shot a guy in a toilet cubicle, the guy at his most vulnerable, trousers around his ankles.
Earlier in the year he’d tracked a target to a busy pub. The guy was a heavy in an organised outfit, always surrounded by minders, and van Wyk had no idea how he’d get close to him. Maybe this would have to be long range, with a sniping rifle, the kind of job that didn’t bring the same sort of satisfaction to van Wyk. So he tailed the guy for a few days, noting his routine and looking for vantage points, and learnt that the guy was a regular at the pub.
In fact, as if mindful that a mobile phone is less secure than a land-line, he did business there, on a public phone in a dark corridor that ran behind the main bar. There were two phones, one on either side of a door marked cleaner. Van Wyk noticed that the target always used the phone closest to the entrance to the corridor, and both made and took calls. If it rang, the barman would answer and return to the bar, calling the targets name. So on the fourth day van Wyk picked up the second phone, rang the first phone and asked for the target by name, then broke the connection without hanging up. He was faking a drunken, pleading conversation with an imaginary wife when the target picked up the other phone and said, Yo. Van Wyk turned and shot him at the hairline, saying, Yo, yourself.
Ten seconds later he was walking calmly through the main bar and out onto the street.
A sweet hit, like tonights. After dumping the gun, he’d picked up Thai takeaway and gone home to eat it. In his old life he’d had black servants, but that wasn’t possible in Australia. In his old life he’d been a sanctioned killer for the government. Hed put a lot of woolly heads into body bags. Now the woolly heads were running South Africa, and he’d emigrated and was a killer for hire and did all of his own housework. It wasn’t so bad. He was used to it. But he’d met plenty of his countrymen who couldn’t adjust. They were lost without their servants. Once, when collecting his residency documents at the Australian High Commission in Pretoria, he’d overheard a telling exchange between fat, indignant whites and the immigration officials…
But shes only a servant!
That doesn’t matter, sir, she still needs a passport, a visa and a work permit.
But who is going to do our cooking and cleaning when we get to Australia?
You, sir? Your wife?
It was a sign of the times. Van Wyk always moved with the times, stayed ahead of the times.
At 8.30 the phone rang. It was another job, down in Victoria this time. Van Wyk went to his study, dismantled his spare .22 and silencer, and distributed the pieces inside a shaving-cream can, an electric razor and a video camcorder, ready for the X-ray machines at the airport tomorrow morning.
chapter 6
The first morning Leah stripped and washed at the sink, not in the shower, knowing how thin the walls were in these places, how noisy the plumbing. Then she patted herself dry with paper towels from the kitchen and went to work on her appearance. In the cabinet above the sink she found hair gel, scissors, a comb, rubber gloves and a box of black permanent hair colour. The woman depicted on the package was frozen in a toss of her beautiful head, her hair arcing in a long, glossy black fan: well, apart from the colour, Leah was going in the opposite direction. She chopped her hair short all over, then applied the dye to her hair, leaving it on for almost an hour before rinsing off the excess. Finally she dried her hair with paper towels and used her fingers to coax it into a carefully dishevelled style.
Who am I now? she thought. She seemed to have a darker cast to her face, her features thin and drawn. She finished by mopping up with more paper towels and stuffing the paper and wrapping into a plastic shopping-bag along with last nights rubbish.
She was drinking coffee when Tess wandered into the kitchen, yawning, puffy with sleep, wearing knickers and a T-shirt. She saw the girls jaw drop. Radical.
We can work on you later.
No way, Tess said.
Yes, Leah said.
Think again.
Leah watched as Tess flopped into a kitchen chair and yawned hugely, unappealingly. She didn’t care about Tess’s feelings, but did care if giving orders to her was going to be counterproductive. How about some coffee?
Tess glowered, suspecting a trap, then smiled widely and Leah could see how young and pretty she was under the attitude and puffy face. While Tess was sipping her coffee, elbows on the table, the mug in both hands, steam rising dreamily around her sleepy face, Leah said, Okay, if we don’t cut or colour your hair, how else can we alter your appearance?
Tess frowned, giving it some thought, and they went to and fro for thirty minutes. In the end, Tess decided on temporary face tattoos, dark glasses and some streaks of hair mascara. Leah was satisfied. You should eat something.
Tess shuddered. God, too early.
Muesli and long-life milk, Leah said. Shed found plenty of both in the pantry and didn’t think theyd be missed by the residents of the flat.