57

An hour before dawn on Sunday morning, South Africa time, three black couples, dressed up to the nines and waving bottles of Dom Perignon in the air, came laughing and flirting out of the huge, opulent and achingly fashionable Taboo club on West Street in the wealthy Sandton district of Johannesburg. As they tumbled into a massive white stretch Hummer, they certainly attracted attention. But that was only because the young women were wearing exceptionally tiny dresses, even by the proudly sinful standards of Taboo.

The uniformed driver closed the limo door behind his last passenger and drove away. Behind the blacked-out windows, two of the women wriggled out of their frocks, as party girls do in the backs of limousines. There was, though, nothing remotely sexual about the way they undressed. The giggling had stopped, as had the pretence of being drunk. The party clothes and skyscraper heels were discarded and immediately replaced by black combat fatigues, bulletproof vests and rubber-soled military boots, handed out by the third woman from one of four plastic storage boxes that had been placed on the floor of the passenger compartment. The three men put on identical uniforms, taken from the second box. The third contained a variety of automatic weapons, all with noise-suppressors, knives and small-scale explosive charges. In the fourth and smallest box were radio headsets and night-vision equipment. Swiftly, without needing to be told, the five black-uniformed figures checked their weapons and tested their radios.

The car left the central business district and headed into Sandhurst, a top-of-the-market residential area where palatial mansions stood in grounds covering acres, on blocks that measured a quarter of a mile on every side. It was followed all the way by a dusty white minivan that remained at least a hundred yards behind it at all times. The two vehicles passed houses barricaded behind high walls and heavy gates, and watched over by CCTV cameras. Every property seemed to bear a metal plate by the entrance, stating that it was guarded by XPT Security. The company liked to boast that it had reduced the local crime-rate to zero, thanks to its combination of regular armed patrols and constant video surveillance. Its cars were a round-the-clock presence on the streets and its customers were assured that the company’s response time, coordinated from a control room that operated for twenty-four hours of every day in the year, would never exceed six minutes, under any circumstances.

The white van pulled up in the moonshadow cast by a large jacaranda tree growing by the side of the road. Up ahead, the limo had stopped in front of a gate that would not have looked out of place outside a maximum-security prison. It rose at least twelve feet into the air and was made of thick stainless-steel plates, topped with four rows of barbed wire, angled outwards to prevent anyone climbing over the top. The gate opened by sliding across the entrance from left to right, from the point of view of the road. To the left-hand side of the gate, a guardhouse was built into the property’s thick concrete-covered wall. South Africans drive on the left, so anyone driving into the property would therefore pass directly by the guardhouse and the gate would only need to be half-opened to let them in.

This was Wendell Klerk’s principal South African townhouse. Its protective features befitted a man of his wealth, prominence and exposure to possible threat.

There were always two men in the guardhouse, working eight-hour shifts round the clock. One acted as the sentry and gatekeeper, watching the world go by through a thick plate-glass window; the other monitored the network of cameras, motion detectors and other alarms that covered the entire house and grounds. The feeds from all the properties’ cameras were also available to staff back at the corporate control room. And just in case anyone should somehow get into the grounds, a kennel to the rear of the guardhouse contained three German Shepherds, bred for speed, strength and aggression. They could be released at any moment without the guards having to leave their post.

The men and women in the back of the limo knew all this, just as they knew about the maximum six minutes that would elapse between the first alarm sounding and the arrival of the XPT personnel, guns out and sirens blaring. They would be long gone by then.

One of the passenger doors opened and the woman who’d kept her party clothes on almost fell out on to the pavement. She was a fine-looking girl, and her micro-skirted, backless, halter-necked excuse for a dress revealed every inch of her toned, glossy-skinned figure. She paused for a moment on the pavement to gather her wits, then teetered towards the guardhouse, brushing away the tumbling waves of golden-brown hair extensions from her face then holding a hand to her mouth to stifle her giggles.

The two men in the guardhouse were entering the sixth hour of a shift in which precisely nothing had happened. The boss and his woman had stayed home. No one had come to visit them. Almost no one had even driven by. They were bored out of their minds, and their body-clocks were telling them they really ought to be asleep. When the guard on sentry duty saw the girl, he sighed, grinned cheerfully and waved his mate over to feast his eyes, too.

The girl tapped a finger on the window, smiled alluringly and started speaking. She appeared to be trying to ask some kind of question. Maybe she and her friends were lost: it was impossible to hear her through the thick glass.

The guard held a hand up to his ear and shook his head.

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, but very prettily.

The guard had a bright idea. He gestured to her to come round to the side of the guardhouse where there was a window that opened, allowing staff to speak to anyone waiting by the gate.

The girl smiled and nodded then walked round to the window.

The guard slid it up and leaned out of the opening to get the fullest possible view of every inch of the woman in front of him. He was not disappointed. Putting on his most charming, debonair smile, he said, ‘How can I help you, Miss?’

His pal was standing just behind him, peering over his shoulder to get a good look, too.

The girl gave a coy, embarrassed smile. ‘We’re lost.’ She giggled.

‘Ahh …’ said the guard, nodding, his suspicions confirmed. ‘So where is your destination?’

‘Coronation Road,’ she said. ‘I have the address in my bag. Wait a moment.’

She was carrying a small gold sequinned clutch-bag. She opened it, rummaged inside and pulled out a Walther TPH pistol, a ‘pocket-gun’ barely five inches long that fires just six .22 calibre rounds.

The party girl used four of them to put a pair of head-shots into the guard closest to her, then shifted her aim and put two more in the one behind. From the first shot to the last took less than three seconds.

The only entrance to the guardhouse was at the back, on the far side of the gate. So the woman kicked off her shoes, pushed the first guard’s dead body out of the opening and clambered through the window.

The .22 is a very neat bullet. Being such a small calibre, and especially when fired from a gun as modest as the TPH, it lacks the power to pass right through a human skull and instead ricochets around the brain. This causes appalling damage to the victim while avoiding the mess of bone, brain and blood-spatter caused by a through-and-through round. There was thus no obvious carnage for the woman to step through on her way to the guardhouse control panel. Not that she would have been put off if there had been. She had seen a great deal worse in her time.

She turned off all the alarm systems and opened the gate. The other five passengers got out of the limo, taking care to shut the doors silently behind them, and slipped through the gate, which closed behind them. The limo gently eased into motion and drove away. Then the road was silent again. As silent as the grave.