Kill Four Read online

“I’ll play it safe and take both.”

  We made more witty yet scandalous laughter and I went and found the cocktail bar. There I downed two stiff martinis laced with vodka and climbed the hill to my cabin, where I collapsed on the bed and slept for the next three hours.

  I came to at just after eight, showered and changed into my other pair of jeans, which were slightly cleaner than the ones I was wearing. I put on a linen jacket, which I had carefully rolled inside out in my bag, and then hung for the three hours while I was sleeping, and headed down to the dining room, by way of reception, to see if my friend Janine was still there. She was and smiled when she saw me.

  “You look almost human.”

  “You know? That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me since I woke up.” She giggled and wrinkled her nose. Before she could come back with repartee, I went on in my cut glass, faultless English. “I say, is it true Ruud van Dreiver lives around here?”

  She raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Right across the bay. He has a ten bedroom mansion there, swimming pool, tennis courts, stables. It’s palatial!”

  “My father knew him, back in the day. It would be amusing to drop in and say hello, but one doesn’t want to be pushy.”

  She looked impressed. “Really? They have some kind of billionaire party going on this weekend. We have a table booked tonight, actually.”

  “Not Ruudy and Jelly? Mind you, I doubt they’d remember me.”

  She shook her head and tapped at the computer. “No, Ameya Dabir. They say she’s a Brahmin Princess. I thought India was a republic, but what do I know?” She raised an eyebrow. “And I see she’s dining alone. Maybe you’re in with a chance.”

  I gave a single, dry laugh. “A forlorn one, I fear. On another, more interesting subject. Do you rent out scuba diving equipment, and if you do, is there anyone, like yourself for example, who could show me the more interesting parts of the lagoon?”

  She cocked her hip and arched her eyebrow. “Yes, yes, and are you flirting with me, Mr. Sinclair?”

  I smiled. “Would you be very upset if I said I was?”

  “Not very, no.”

  “Then I am. Will you take me scuba diving tomorrow morning, please, Janine?”

  “You’re awful.” She said it like she didn’t really mean it, then added, “But I will.”

  “Actually, I’m quite delightful in a bathing costume, you know.”

  I left her giggling and made my way to the dining room. It was surprisingly elegant, with a high, wooden-beamed ceiling, crystal chandeliers and waiters in bow-ties carrying buckets of champagne and dishes of oysters among tables of people, all of whom glittered in the candlelight.

  The maitre d’ gave my jeans a frigid look and led me to a table where I would not be too visible. I ordered a dozen oysters, a glass of house white, a sirloin steak and a bottle of Diemersdal Cabernet Sauvignon. Then I settled back to observe the dining room.

  Practically every table was occupied by either a couple or a group, and I couldn’t see anyone who looked like a Brahmin princess, though there were a few tables empty, and one, tucked in a corner beside a palm, did have a reserved sign on it.

  The oysters came, with red and green Tabasco sauce, and I took my time eating them, sipping the white Sauvignon and thinking of Njal, stuck in the desert sleeping in the Land Rover. Life is rarely fair.

  She appeared at nine o’clock, just as the waiter was clearing my plate. She wasn’t beautiful. Beautiful was the baseline where she began. Beautiful was boring beside what she was. She was stunning. She wore an oxblood sari embellished with gold and dark, royal blue. Her hair was thick, blue black and hung down to her waist. Her skin was olive, her eyes were black and she wore an absurd amount of gold. It should have looked vulgar and excessive, but instead it looked absolutely appropriate, as though to have any less gold on her would have been somehow a transgression of some unwritten law.

  She walked with grace and elegance, and the waiters flocked to her, like bees and butterflies to an exotic flower. She smiled and accepted their bows as her due, sat and allowed herself to be served, as though it were she who was granting favors to them. I watched her and knew that this was a very, very dangerous woman.

  She ordered oysters, which seemed to be the thing here, and while I took my time eating my steak and sipping my wine, I watched her eat her oysters. It was as she was slipping the last one down her throat that the guy came in.

  He was in an Italian suit that probably cost as much as the Audi I was driving. He was tall and slim the way you can afford to be when you’re a billionaire and have a gym, a tennis court and a swimming pool all en suite to your bedroom. His black hair was tightly curled and his goatee was trimmed short to make him look like a sultan from the Thousand and One Nights. This, I figured, was Prince Mohamed bin Awad.

  He stopped beside her table and made a show of surprise that was as transparently false as her surprise at seeing him. He bowed over her hand and she gestured to a chair at her table. He graciously accepted and instructed the waiter that he would be dining with the lady.

  Here was two fifths of the cabal, Tau and Sigma, alone, having a very public clandestine meeting, and I wondered why. Why the subterfuge? Was it because he was a Muslim and she a Brahmin? Or did Omega frown on intimate relationships within the cabal? A rule against office romances.

  I scanned the room looking for his bodyguards, or hers, but I didn’t see any.

  They both had lobster, and while they had that, I ordered black coffee and a glass of Bushmills in a cognac glass, with no ice. Nothing much happened then, except that their body language spoke volumes about an unresolved mutual attraction which needed, with increasing urgency, to resolve itself somehow. I wondered briefly at the kind of crazy world where you can be among the five most powerful people on the planet and still have to keep your infatuations secret. It was a situation that intrigued me.

  I signed my bill and took my drink out to the terrace. The moon was in its first waning, but still large and fat, and reflected a long, silver path across the lagoon. I set my glass on a table and lit up a Camel. The sky was dark yet translucent, and though it wasn’t cold, a breeze off the Indian Ocean chilled my skin and made me shudder. I walked to the edge of the terrace and looked right, up the slope to the pinewoods where the lodges were. I saw no men standing guard, no covert security. Left was the reception building and the parking lot. There were several cars there, all expensive, impossible to tell which were theirs. Either way, there was no sign of any bodyguards there either.

  I sat a while with my ass against the parapet, smoking and finishing my drink, then made my way out to my car. I climbed in and sat for half an hour, watching and waiting. Eventually, they stepped out into the courtyard that lay between reception, the café and the restaurant and stood a while, chatting and laughing softly. Then he took her hands in his and she took a few rapid steps into the shadows, toward the parking lot, pulling him with her. There she closed in, standing so close their bodies were touching, looking up into his eyes. He cupped her face in his hands and they kissed. Finally she pushed him gently away, speaking hurried words I couldn’t catch. He hesitated and I heard her voice, raised for any possible eavesdroppers: “Good night, Mohamed. We must catch up soon. Bye!”

  And she turned and made her way up the hill, toward the cabins. He hesitated a moment, then loped across the lot to a cream Porsche 911. He climbed in, fired up the engine and drove out of the lot at high speed. But by that time, I was out of my car and running silently up the path through the pines where I had seen Ameya Dabir disappear.

  I stopped when she came into sight, and moved in among the shadows of the pine trees. The paved path came to a fork, where one branch curled away to the right, climbing the hill toward my own cabin, and the other branched left, leveled off and led to a large cabin with a veranda. This was the path she took and I watched her climb the steps, fumble for a moment inserting a key, and disappear inside. After a second, a warm, amber light came on in t
he window. Then a second light came on at the back. I figured that would be the bedroom.

  I continued on my way up to my cabin. From my veranda I knew I would have a clear view of the back of her cabin, and the fork in the path. I settled back with my feet on the rail, lit another Camel and waited, thinking.

  After ten minutes, the light at the front of the cabin went off, but the one at the back stayed on. Then there were steps, and the figure of Prince Mohamed bin Awad appeared at the fork, hesitated, looked about, and made its way up to her veranda. There might have been an exchange of whispered voices, it was hard to tell, but there was definitely the soft clunk of a closing door.

  Both bin Awad and Dabir were guests of Ruud van Dreiver. They must have suites at his palatial mansion where they could meet, yet here they were, at the resort, making clumsy, ineffectual attempts at a clandestine meeting in a cabin she had hired, barely a mile from her host’s house. I knew she was single because we had read up on her background. He had three wives and was entitled to have as many more as he pleased. Their difference in religion went some way to explaining why they were keeping their affair secret, but it didn’t explain why they were keeping it secret from van Dreiver and the other members of the cabal. Unless the divisions between their religions were a part of Omega’s own internal policies. That was entirely possible. Whatever the case, it played right into my hands.

  Two hours later, shortly after midnight, he emerged from the cabin and made his way quickly and quietly back toward the parking lot. A minute or two later, the light at the back of the house went out, and fifteen minutes after that, I watched a small light proceed steadily across the dark water of the lagoon, and the faint whine of a speedboat carried across the chill night air. The prince was going back to the van Dreiver palace.

  The next morning, I was up at six. I ran down to the lagoon, went for a long jog along the sand, had a swim in the cold water, then spent an hour training in the sand and ran back up the hill to shower and dress for breakfast. A little later, I found Janine in reception. Her expression was somewhere between surprised and curious.

  “Good morning, Janine. Are you going to take me scuba diving this morning?”

  “You are persistent, Mr. Sinclair.”

  “I’m known for it.”

  “You realize I could be married.”

  “I don’t want to take you away from your husband, I just want to swim with you.”

  She laughed out loud.

  I insisted. “Will you?”

  “What?”

  “Swim with me.”

  She regarded me for a moment, still smiling. “Yes, all right. Meet me down on the beach in half an hour.”

  I went to the café, had a couple of espressos and a croissant, returned to my cabin to change into some shorts and met Janine down at the lagoon half an hour later. She was in a yellow bikini and looked slim, tanned and fit. She was standing by a parasol, a basket and a couple of towels. As I approached, she pointed to what looked like a boathouse forty or fifty feet down the beach.

  “Give me a hand to get the gear.”

  I followed her over, pushing through the soft sand with bare feet, and watched her unlock the padlock on the door. “This is where you keep your scuba diving gear? Don’t you worry about it getting stolen?”

  She wrenched open the door and stepped in. The place was packed with rubber suits, air bottles, masks and flippers, gas tanks and a generator. There was also a stack of canoes and oars. She grabbed an air bottle and shoved it at me.

  “Believe it or not, despite South Africa’s crime statistics as a whole, Knysna has practically zero crime.” She shoved a mask and some flippers into my arms too. “And if people do steal, they don’t steal swimming gear. They steal money.”

  “Good to know.”

  “You ever used these before?”

  “Yup.”

  “How often, once? Twice?”

  I thought about lying, but shrugged and shook my head. “I lost count.”

  She frowned. “So what do you need me for?”

  “You mean apart from the pleasure of your company? To show me around. Where are the good places to dive? The shallows, the quicksands, the deep parts where there are fish…” I grinned. “You know, the tour of the lagoon.”

  Her frown became skeptical. “OK…”

  “I mean…” I pointed over to the mouth of the lagoon, where large waves were crashing against the reefs that secluded it from the Indian Ocean beyond, a hundred yards from where van Dreiver had his small, private pier. “Is it safe to swim over there? Are there dangerous currents… Is it beautiful…?”

  She nodded. “It’s beautiful. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I was about to start pulling on the gear, but she pointed to a small, wooden boat with an outboard motor, pulled up on the sand.

  “Give me a hand.”

  We dumped the gear in and she climbed aboard while I pushed it out into the shallows. She yanked the cord and fired up the engine as I clambered aboard and we started a slow putter. For a good fifty or sixty feet, the sand was white and the water completely transparent and shallow, barely above my knees. Then it grew slowly deeper, dipping toward a deep channel that curved in from the mouth of the lagoon.

  As we moved out toward those deeper waters, she watched me for a while, and I saw her eyes flick over my body. I saw her take in the various scars I’d collected over the years, and I guess she noticed I was in shape. Finally, she said, “So, what do you do for a living, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “Call me Richard.”

  She waited. I smiled. “What do you do for a living, Richard?”

  “I’m an instructor. I teach martial arts and extreme sports.”

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded. “Seriously. Which is why I am a little more careful than other people might be when it comes to…” I gestured over at the mouth of the lagoon. “Situations like this one. I know only too well how dangerous currents can be in a place like this. So I prefer to have somebody like you show me around first.”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked away at the approaching, darker water. “You are bullshitting me, Richard Sinclair. I don’t know why, but I know that you are, sure as eggs is eggs.”

  I ignored the comment. “So, are you married?”

  “Divorced. Why?” There was a challenge in her eye, but also amusement and pleasure.

  “In case I want to take you out. I need to know if I’ll have a jealous husband to contend with.”

  “What makes you think I’d go out with you?”

  I gave my head a little twitch. “I don’t know. Maybe you strike me as a risk taker.”

  She gave a small laugh that was almost a snort and shook her head. “What are you like?”

  “So how come you can just skive off work to come swimming with the likes of me?”

  “Because I’m not skiving off. I own this place. It’s my business, and despite your shabby clothes, your rental car and your wildly improbable stories, I can smell money and potentially a good, repeat customer.”

  The water beneath the boat had turned suddenly dark. She cut the engine and we slowed to a gently rocking drift. A quarter of a mile away, I could see the rhythmic explosions of surf against the reefs at the entrance to the lagoon, and the air was filled with a steady background roar. Janine pointed to my feet. “You’ve got the anchor there, just behind your feet. Drop it over, would you? We’re in about six to eight meters here, there are rocks and small fish, and seaweed. But all the sharks are on the outside, beyond the reef.”

  “Great whites?”

  “Less than before, but yeah, also raggies, silvertips, cows, duskies…” She shrugged. “We got a lot of sharks, about ten different types along the south coast.”

  “But not in the lagoon.”

  She grinned with a hint of malice. “Not in the lagoon. You’re comparatively safe with me. Put your gear on and let’s go swim.”

  NINE

  We swam for an hour, going first s
outh, exploring the rocks and caves along the southern edge of the lagoon, beneath van Dreiver’s mansion, and then heading west and a little north, along the deep channel that cut through the lagoon, to where the depth dropped to little more than two and a half meters, and schools of brilliantly colored fish darted in and out among algae and rocks with rigid, startled eyes. And while Janine showed me her sub-marine treasures, I made a map in my mind of what lay beneath the water between my log cabin and van Dreiver’s palatial mansion.

  What I found was that a fifteen minute run along the beach would bring me to a dogleg in the lagoon where to the right there were oyster beds and to the left there was that long, deepening trench along which we had been swimming, which would carry me all the way to the mouth of the lagoon, past the small, private quay which the van Dreivers had had built at the foot of their hill.

  After an hour, our tanks began to run low on air, so we returned to the boat and pulled ourselves out of the water. Janine sat in the stern, tossed me a towel and started rubbing dry her hair and her face. When she’d moved down to her arms and her shoulders, I said, “Did you know that your hotel was the clandestine meeting place for Prince Mohamed bin Awad and Ameya Dabir?”

  She toweled her thighs, smiling, and raised an eyebrow at me. “Gossip now?”

  “Hey, lay off, or I’m going to think you have it in for me. What’s wrong with a little harmless gossip?”

  She shrugged. “I knew she had both booked into the hotel. I didn’t know they were having a clandestine meeting. Besides, it really is none of my business.”

  “I couldn’t help seeing it. Their table was opposite mine. And when I was sitting on my terrace having a nightcap, I saw her go into my neighboring cabin, and a little while later he joined her. It was rather hard not to see.”

  Her face said she was impressed but trying to hide it. “Really? Did he stay all night?”

  “How should I know? I wasn’t spying.”

  She laughed. “Liar.”

  “He stayed two hours, then left and took a boat across the lagoon.”