Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
The name 'White Sword' kept plaguing Shasa all though the Armscor meeting. They were discussing the new air-to-ground missiles for the airforce but Shasa found it difficult to concentrate. He was plagued by the memory of his grandfather, that good and gentle man whom Shasa had loved and who had been murdered by White Sword. His death had been one of the fiercest tragedies of his young life, and the rage that he had felt at the brutal killing came back to him afresh.
'White Sword,' he thought. 'If I can find out who you are, even after all these years, you will pay, and the interest will be more onerous for the time the debt has stood." Manfred De La Rey went directly to his office at the end of the corridor after he had left Shasa. His secretary spoke to him as he passed her desk but he did not seem to hear her.
He locked the door to his own office, but did not sit at the massive mahogany desk. He prowled the floor restlessly, his eyes unseeing and his heayy jaws chewing like a bulldog with a bone. He took the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his chin and then paused to examine his face in the wall mirror behind his desk. He was so pale that his cheeks had a bluish sheen, and his eyes were savage as those of a wounded leopard caught in a trap.
'White Sword,' he whispered aloud. It was twenty-five years since he had used that code name, but he remembered standing on the bridge of the German U-boat, coming in towards the land in darkness, with his hair and great bushy beard ded black, staring out at the signal fires on the beach where Roelf Stander waited for him.
Roelf Stander had been with him through all the dangerous days and the wild endeavours. They had planned many of their operations in the kitchen of the Stander cottage in the little village of Stellenbosch. It was there in that kitchen that he had given them the details of the action that would be the signal for the glorious uprising of Afrikaner patriots. And at all those meetings Sarah Stander had been present, a quiet unobtrusive presence, serving coffee and food, never speaking - but listening. It was only many years later that Manfred had been able to guess at how well she had listened.
In 1948, when the Afrikaners had at last won at the ballot box the power which they had failed to seize at the point of the sword, Manfred's hard and loyal work had been rewarded with a deputy minister's post in the department of justice.
One of his first acts had been to send for the files of the unsolved attempt on the life of Jan Smuts, and the murder of Sir Garrick Courtney. Before he destroyed the files he read them through carefully, and he learned that they had been betrayed. There had been a traitor in their gallant band of patriots - a woman who had telephoned the Smuts police officers to warn them of the assassination.
He had guessed at the woman's identity, but had never extracted his full retribution, waiting for the moment to ripen, savouring the thought of revenge over the decades, watching the traitor's misery, watching her growing old and bitter, while frustrating her husband's efforts to succeed in law and politics, in the guise of mentor and adviser, steering him into folly and disaster until Roelf Stander had lost all his sustenance, his property and his will to carry on. All that time Manfred had waited for the perfect moment for the final revenge stroke - and at last it had arrived. Sarah Stander had come to him to plead for the life of the bastard he had placed in her womb - and he had denied her. The pleasure of it had been exquisite, made more poignant by the years he had waited for it.
Now the woman had turned vindictive. He had not anticipated that.
He had expected the blow to break and destroy her. Only the greatest good fortune had given him forewarning of this new betrayal she planned.
He turned from the mirror and sat down at his desk. He reached determinedly for the telephone and told his secretary, 'I want Colonel Bester in the bureau for state security." Bester was one of his most trusted officers.
'Bester,' he barked. 'I want a detention order drawn up urgently.
I will sign it myself, and I want it executed immediately." 'Yes, Minister. Can you give me the name of the detainee?" 'Sarah Stander,' Manfred said. 'Her address is 16 Eike Loan, Stellenbosch. If the arresting officers cannot find her there, she should be on platform four of the Cape Town railway station at five-thirty p.m. this afternoon. The woman must speak to no one before she is arrested - your men must make certain of that." As Manfred hung up he smiled grimly. Under the law he had the power to arrest and detain any persons for ninety days, and to hold that person completely incommunicado. A great deal could happen in ninety days. Things could change, a person might even die. It was all taken care of. The woman could cause no further trouble.
The telephone on his desk rang, and Manfred snatched it up, expecting it to be Bester again. 'Yes, what is it?" 'Pa, it's me - Lothie." 'Yes, Lothie. Where are you?" 'Caledon Square. I landed twenty minutes ago, and I have taken over the investigation. There is news, Pa. The divers have found the ferry. There is no sign of the prisoner's body but the cabin door has been forced open. We must assume that he escaped. Worse than that, somebody engineered his escape." 'Find him,' Manfred said softly. 'You must find Moses Gama. If we don't, the consequences could be disastrous." 'I know,' Lothar said. 'We will find him. We have to find him." Centaine refused to eat the food in the parliamentary dining-room.
'It's not that I am fussy, ch6ri, in the desert I ate live locusts and meat that had lain four days in the sun, but --' She and Shasa walked down through the gardens, across the top end of town to the Car Royal on Greenmarket Square, where the first oysters of the season had arrived from Knysna lagoon.
Centaine sprinkled lemon juice and tabasco sauce, scooped a gently pulsating mouthful from the half shell and sighed with pleasure.
'And now, ch6ri,' she dabbed the juice from her lips, 'tell me why yca are so far away that you do not laugh at even my best efforts." 'I'm sorry, Mater." Shasa signalled to the waiter to top up his champagne glass. 'I had a strange phone call this morning - and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything else. Do you remember White Sword?" 'How can you ask?" Centaine laid down her fork. 'Sir Garry was more dear to me than my own father. Tell me all about it." They spoke of nothing else for the rest of the lunch, exploring together ancient memories of that terrible day on which a noble and generous man had died, a man who had been precious to them both.
At last Shasa called for the bill. 'It's half past one already. We will have to hurry to reach the House before it begins. I don't want to miss any part of Verwoerd's speech." At sixty-six years of age Centaine was still active and agile, and Shasa was not forced to moderate his stride for her. They were still talking animatedly as they passed St George's Cathedral and turned into the gardens.
Ahead of them two men sat on one of the park benches, and there was something about them that caught Shasa's attention even at a distance of a hundred yards. The taller of the pair was a swarthycomplexioned man who wore the uniform of a parliamentary messenger. He sat very stiffly upright and stared straight ahead of him with a fixed expression.
The man beside him was also dark-haired but his face was colourless as putty, the dead black hair fell forward on to his forehead. He was leaning close to the parliamentary messenger, speaking into his ear as though imparting a secret, but the messenger's face was expressionless and he showed not the least reaction to the other man's words.
As they came level with the bench, Shasa leaned forward to see
