Thirteen Hours (53 page)

'I want to phone my lawyer,' said Mouton.

'Later. Let me tell you what happened. Barnard phoned
you, last night, just after nine. You knew we would find a record of the call,
that's why you volunteered it so easily ...'

Mouton's Adam's apple moved, he wanted to say
something, but Dekker silenced him with a hand. 'Adam didn't phone you to tell
you how silly Ivan Nell's accusations were. He was worried. Nell told me
Barnard was disturbed. He wasn't himself. He had a suspicion. He had a feeling,
he knew someone was fucking with the money. I don't know why yet, but I will
find out. In any case, Adam said he wanted to see you. Did he tell you to come
to the office, you and Wouter? Or was it your suggestion - keep trouble away
from home? So you came in here, probably very worried, because you
are
guilty. What time was that,
Willie? Did he tell you to come at eleven so he could look at the figures
first?

I know he worked on his computer last night. He was so
upset by what he saw that he never turned his laptop off. It was still on this
morning. Maybe he loaded all the records on a CD so that you couldn't go and
fiddle with them. You sat here, or maybe in his office, and he confronted you.
Did you deny everything, Willie? How am I doing so far? Never mind, let me
finish. You argued and fought from eleven o'clock to half past one in the
night. Barnard must have said something like; 'Leave it, we'll talk more
tomorrow.' He must have been tired. Thinking of his drunken wife at home. And
you and Steenkamp followed him out into the garden. Argued some more. You went
in just when the girl arrived. You got lucky, in more than one way. Because if
you had been standing there, you might also have been shot. But then they shot
Adam. Problem number one solved. There you two were, looking out the window at
the body, and you thought: what now? Your big problem was Ivan Nell. Because,
whatever you did, if Ivan came and told us there was a snake in the grass, you
were in trouble.

'So you wondered how you could make it look different,
as though you had never been here. Give someone else the blame. Then you
remembered about Josh and the Big Sin. And Alexa and the pistol. Fucking
brilliant, Willie, I have to tell you. So you carried Barnard to the car. If he
was in your or Wouter's car there will be blood and hair and fibres and DNA,
and we'll find it.

'Now, I must say, I couldn't figure out the shoe and
the cell phone. Until about half an hour ago, when I put the whole story
together. The shoe came off when you picked up Adam to carry him to the car.
You must have picked him up by the feet. And the cell phone was in his hand
when he was shot. So you picked up the phone and you remembered that he had
phoned you. So you deleted his call history. And you put the cell phone in the
shoe and the shoe in your pocket, or on top of Barnard, we will probably never
know. And then when you reached the car and opened the boot, you put the shoe
on the roof of the car. Just for the mean time. And then in your hurry you
forgot about the shoe. You drove off, Wouter in front with Adam's car and you following.

Something like that. And up there on the corner, as
you turned, the shoe falls off and you don't even know it. How am I doing,
Willie? I'm telling you, I had a really hard time figuring out that shoe, until
I went up there to the corner again. It came to me in a flash. Fucking
brilliant, let me tell you.'

Mouton just stared at Dekker.

'You and Wouter carried him up the stairs and you put
him down there with Alexa. And you went and got the pistol out of the safe that
you installed in the house. Somewhere you fired off three shots. I'm guessing
you couldn't do it in the house. Even if you used a pillow or something to
reduce the noise, you were too scared of waking Alexa, drunk or not. You must
have driven somewhere, Willie. Up the mountain? Somewhere that it wouldn't
matter. Then you went back and put the pistol down there. Clever. But not
clever enough.'

'I want to call my lawyer.'

'Call him, Willie. Tell him to come to Green Point
station. Because this is a warrant for your arrest, and this is a warrant to
search these premises. I will be bringing smart people, Willie. Auditors,
computer boffins, guys who specialise in white-collar crime. You stole Adam
Barnard's and Ivan Nell's and who knows how many other people's money, and I'm
going to find out how you did it and I'm going to put you and Wouter away,
Willie, and that fucking Frankenstein lawyer of yours won't be able to do a
thing about it. Or is he also a part of your little scheme?'

Benny Griessel pushed the man through the front door
of Caledon Square. His full beard and hair were trimmed short, neat, plain
brown turning prematurely grey. He looked fit and lean in denim shirt and khaki
chinos and blue boat shoes. It was only the handcuffs on his wrists that showed
he was in trouble, his face was expressionless. Vusi was waiting in the
entrance hall.

'May I introduce you to Duncan Blake?' Griessel asked,
with great satisfaction.

Vusi looked the man up and down, as though measuring him
against newfound knowledge. Then he applied himself to Griessel
with a worried: 'Benny, we will have to bring the Commissioner
in.' 'Oh?'

'This thing is big. And ugly. We will have to send a
team to Camps Bay, to a hospital. A big team.'

Only then did a shadow of emotion cross Duncan Blake's
face.

They sat in the station commander's office - Griessel,
Vusi and John Afrika.

'I just want to say I am proud of you, the Provincial
Commissioner is proud of you. The Minister says I must convey her
congratulations,' Afrika said.

'It was Vusi who cracked it,' said Griessel.

'No, Commissioner, it was Benny ... Captain Griessel.'

'The SAPS is proud of you
both.'                                                                                                                         

'Commissioner, this thing is big,' said Vusi.

'How big?'

'Commissioner, they smuggled people in, eight at a
time, through Zimbabwe. Somalians, Sudanese, Zimbabweans ...'

'All the trouble spots.'

'That's right, Commissioner, people who have nothing,
who want to make a new start, who will do anything ...'

'They must have charged bags of money to bring them to
this honey pot.'

'No, Commissioner, not much.'

'Oh?'

'We thought it was just illegal immigrants at first.
But Barry Smith, one of the guides, told me the rest. The hospital, the whole
thing ...'

'What hospital?' John Afrika asked.

'Maybe we should start at the beginning. Benny talked
to Blake, Commissioner.'

Griessel nodded, scratched behind his ear, paged
through his notebook and found the right page. 'Duncan Blake, Commissioner. He
is a Zim citizen, fifty-five years old. He was married, but his

wife died in Two thousand and one of cancer. In the
Seventies he was part of the Rhodesian Special Air Services. For thirty years
he farmed the family farm outside Hurungwe in Mashonaland- West. His sister,
Mary-Anne Blake was a surgeon at the hospital in Harare. In May Two thousand,
the leader of the Veterans' Movement, Chenjerai 'Hitler' Hunzvi, occupied
Blake's farm. Apparently, Blake's foreman, Justice Chitsinga, tried to stop the
squatters and was shot dead. For two years, Blake tried to regain possession of
his farm through the courts, but in Two thousand and two he gave up and he and
his sister moved to Cape Town. He brought Steven Chitsinga, his foreman's son,
with him and started African Overland Adventures. Most of his staff were young
men and women from Zimbabwe, children of dispossessed farmers, or their
workers. De Klerk, Steven Chitsinga, Eben Etlinger, Barry Smith ...'

'And the Metro man you shot dead? Oerson?' the
Commissioner asked.

'That's another story, Commissioner,' said Vusi.
'Smith said Oerson was with Provincial Traffic. Two years ago he was working at
the weighbridge on the N-seven, at Vissershoek, and he pulled one of their
Adventure lorries off the road. It was overweight. Then he began hinting, they
needn't pay the fine, and de Klerk was immediately ready to pay something under
the table. Oerson took it and let them go. But he began to wonder why the
Adventure people paid so easily and so much. He thought about it. They came
from the north, through Africa, and he was sure they were smuggling something.
He waited for them to pass through again a month later. He pulled them off
again. He said he wanted to have a look in the lorry and the trailer, in all
the cavities. Then de Klerk said that wouldn't be necessary, how much did he
want? And Oerson said, no, he wanted to look, because he thought they had
something to hide. De Klerk kept offering him more and Oerson said open up. De
Klerk said he couldn't and Oerson said: "Then cut me in, because I smell
big money." So de Klerk phoned Blake. And they put Oerson on the payroll.
But on one condition, Oerson must apply to Metro, because they needed another
man to keep an eye on the Somalis and Zimmers who had already donated organs
and were all in the city ...'

'Donated organs?'

'I'm getting to that, Commissioner. Lots of the people
who have already donated have opened street-vendor stalls in the city with the
money they were paid. There were a few who threatened to talk if they didn't
get more money. It was Oerson's job to shut them up.'

'As in permanently?'

'Sometimes, Commissioner. But never personally, he had
other contacts for that. Other Metro people too ...'

'Jissis
said John Afrika and folded his hands in front of him.
Then he looked at Vusi. 'And the organs?'

'Blake started the Adventure business, and he and his
sister bought the old Atlantic Hotel in Camps Bay in Two thousand and three, and
fixed the place up and started a private hospital. She is the
"director" now ...'

'A hospital?'

Vusi had an idea. 'Excuse me, Commissioner,' he said
and pulled the keyboard on the desk towards him, then the mouse. He turned the
computer screen so that he could see better, clicked on the web browser icon
and typed in the web address.

Google South Africa
read the screen.

Vusi typed in the word 'AtlantiCare' into the box and
clicked on
Google Search.
A long list of choices appeared. He picked the top link and a website slowly
loaded on the screen. It showed a white building on the slopes of the Twelve
Apostles, with a banner headline: ATLANTICARE:
Exclusive International
Medical Centre.
Another photo appeared - the building from behind, with the Atlantic Ocean
stretching to the horizon.

'This is the place, Commissioner.'

John Afrika whistled. 'Big money.'

'Steven Chitsinga said they were big farmers. They
owned and rented a lot of farms, there was cattle, tobacco, maize. Big business.
There were some investments ... But the thing is, Commissioner,' Vusi shifted
the mouse to a link that said
Transplants,
'they do organ transplants.' Another web page opened
up with the same white building in the banner across the top. Underneath it the
heading:
Transplants
you can afford.
Vusi read out loud to them. 'The average cost of a heart transplant in the
United States of America is three hundred thousand dollars. A lung transplant
will cost you two hundred and seventy-five thousand, an intestine almost half a
million dollars. Impossible to afford without health insurance, but even if you
are covered, there is no guarantee that you will receive a donated organ in
time. For instance, the waiting list for a kidney transplant in the USA has more
than fifty-five thousand people on it...'

'Don't tell me they ...?'

'That's right, Commissioner,' Vusi said, and he read
from the web page again. 'With the most modern medical facilities available,
including dedicated, specialist aftercare in a beautiful environment,
world-class surgeons and an international network of donors, you can receive
your transplant within three weeks of arriving, at a fraction of the cost.'

'That's what they smuggled the people in for,' said
Griessel.

'For the organs,' said Vusi.