‘Have a super weekend, Mrs Courtney – and thanks a lot.’
Tara locked the door after her and hurried through to the inner office.
‘That was a bit of luck,’ she whispered.
‘We should give her some time to get clear,’ Moses told her, and they sat side by side on the sofa.
Tara looked nervous and unhappy, but she kept silent for many minutes before she blurted out, ‘Moses, about my father – and Shasa.’
‘Yes?’ he asked, but his voice was bleak, and she hesitated, twisting her fingers together nervously.
‘Yes?’ he insisted.
‘No – you are right,’ she sighed. ‘It has to be done. I must be strong.’
‘Yes, you must be strong,’ he agreed. ‘But now you must go, and leave me to do my work.’
She stood up. ‘Kiss me please, Moses,’ she whispered, and then after a moment broke from his embrace. ‘Good luck,’ she said softly.
She locked the outer door of the office and went down the staircase into the main lobby, and halfway down she was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of doom. It was so strong that she felt the blood drain from her head and an icy sweat broke out on her forehead and upper lip. For a moment she felt dizzy, and had to clutch the banisters to prevent herself from falling. Then she forced herself to go on down and cross the lobby.
The janitor was staring at her strangely. She kept walking. He was leaving his cubicle and coming to intercept her. She felt panic come at her and she wanted to turn and run back up the stairs, to warn Moses that they had been discovered.
‘Mrs Courtney.’ The janitor stopped in front of her, blocking her path.
‘What is it?’ she faltered, trying to think up a plausible reply to his demands.
‘I’ve got a small bet on the polo this afternoon, do you know how it’s going?’ She stared at him, and for a moment it did not make sense. She almost blurted out, ‘Polo, what polo?’ and then she caught herself and with an enormous effort of will and concentration chatted with the man for almost a minute before she could escape. In the carpark she could no longer control her panic and she ran to the Chev and flung herself behind the wheel sobbing for breath.
When he heard the key turn in the lock of the outer door, Moses went back into Shasa’s office and drew the drapes over the windows.
Then he went to the bookshelves and studied the titles. He would not unpack the altar chest until the last moment. Tricia might return for something she had forgotten, there might be a routine check of the offices by the parliamentary staff. Shasa might even come in on the Saturday morning. Although Tara had assured him that Shasa would be fully occupied at Weltevreden with his guests over the whole weekend, Moses would take no chances. He would disturb nothing in the office until it was absolutely necessary.
He smiled as he saw Macaulay’s History of England on the shelf. It was an expensive leather-bound edition, and it brought back vivid memories of the time when he and the man he was about to kill had been friends – of that time long ago when there had still been hope.
He passed on down the shelves until he reached a section in which Shasa obviously kept all those works with whose principles he differed, works ranging from Mein Kampf to Karl Marx with Socialism in between. Moses chose a volume of the collected works of Lenin and took it across to the desk. He settled down to read, confident that any unwanted visitor must give him sufficient time to reach his hiding-place behind the drapes.
He read until the dusk fell and the light failed in the room, then he took the blanket from the package he had brought up from the Chev and settled down on the sofa.
He woke early on Saturday morning, when the rock pigeons began crooning on the ledge outside the window, and let himself out of the panel door. He used the toilets at the end of the passage in the knowledge that it was going to be a long day, and took a cynical pleasure in defying the WHITES ONLY sign on the door.
Although the House did not sit on a Saturday, the main doors were open and there would still be some activity in the building, cleaners and staff, perhaps ministers using their offices. He could do nothing until the Sunday, when Calvinist principles forbade any work or unnecessary activity outside the body of the church. Again he spent the day reading, and at nightfall he ate from the supplies he had brought with him and disposed of the empty cans and wrappers in the rubbish bin in the toilets.
He slept fitfully and was fully awake before dawn on Sunday morning. He ate a frugal breakfast and changed into workman’s overalls and tennis shoes from the package before he began a cautious reconnaissance of the House. The building was utterly silent and deserted. Looking down the stairs he saw that the front doors were barred and all the lights were extinguished. He moved about with more confidence, and tried the door to the press gallery. It was unlocked and he stood at the rail and looked down into the chamber where all the laws that had enmeshed and enslaved his people had been enacted and he felt his rage like a captive animal inside his chest, clamouring to be set free.
He left the gallery and went down the staircase into the entrance lobby and approached the high main doors of the chamber. His footsteps echoed from the marble slabs. As he had expected, the doors were locked, but the locks were massive antiques. He knelt in front of them, and from his pocket took the folding wallet of locksmith’s picks. His training in Russia had been exhaustively thorough and the lock resisted him for less than a minute. He opened one leaf of the door a crack and slipped through, closing it behind him.
Now he stood in the very cathedral of apartheid, and it seemed to him that the evil of it was a palpable thing that pressed in upon him with a physical weight and shortened his breathing. He moved slowly up the aisle towards the Speaker’s throne with the massive coat of arms above it, and then he turned to the left, skirting the table on which the mace and dispatch boxes would lie, until he stood at the head of the Government front benches, at the seat of the Prime Minister, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, and Moses’ broad nostrils flared open as though he smelled the odour of the great beast.
With an effort he roused himself, setting aside his feelings and his passions, and became as objective as a workman. He examined the bench carefully, going down on his stomach to peer beneath it. Of course, he had studied every photograph of the chamber that he had been able to obtain, but these had been pathetically inadequate. Now he ran his hands over the green leather; the padding was indented by the weight of the men who had sat upon it, and at this close range it was scuffed and cracked with wear over the years. The bench frame was of massive mahogany, and when he groped up beneath the seat he found the heavy cross members that strengthened it. There were no surprises here, and he grunted with satisfaction.
He returned to Shasa’s office, letting himself in through the panel door, and went immediately to unpack the altar chest. Once again he was careful to lay out the contents so that it could be repacked in exactly the same order. Then he climbed into the chest and lifted the floor panels.
The food he set aside for his evening meal, and he piled the blocks of plastic into the blanket. One of the advantages of this explosive was that it was inert and could endure the roughest handling. Without a detonator, it was completely safe.
He picked up the four corners of the blanket and slung it over his shoulder like a tent bag, and then hurriedly went down to the assembly chamber again. He stowed the blanket and its contents under a bench where it would escape casual discovery and went back to the office to fetch the tool kit. The third time he descended to the chamber, he locked the main doors behind him, so as to be able to work in total security.
He could not risk the noise of using an electric drill. He lay on his back beneath the Prime Minister’s bench and began laboriously setting the staples into the mahogany above his face, boring the holes with the hand drill and then screwing in the threaded staples. He worked meticulously, pausing to measure and mark each hole, so it was almost an hour before he was ready to start placing the blocks of plastic. He arranged
them in stacks of five, ten pounds of plastic in each stack, and wired them together. Then he wriggled back under the bench and secured each stack of five blocks in place. He threaded each tag end of wire through the loop of a separate staple and twisted them up tightly, then he reached for the next stack of bricks and set that in neatly against the last until the entire underside of the bench was lined with explosive.
Then he crawled out and checked his progress. There was a lip of mahogany below the leather cushion which completely hid the layer of blocks. Even when he squatted down as a person might do to retrieve a pen or fallen order paper from under the bench, he could not see a trace of his handiwork.
‘That will do,’ he murmured, and started to clean up. Meticulously he brushed up every speck of sawdust from the drilling and the offcuts of wire, then he gathered his tools.
‘Now we can test the transmitter,’ he told himself and hurried upstairs to Shasa’s office.
He inserted the new torch batteries in the transmitter and checked it. The test globe lit up brightly. He switched it off. Next he took the radio detonator from its cardboard box and placed the hearing-aid battery in its compartment. The detonator was the size of a matchbox, made of black Bakelite with a small toggle switch at one end. The switch had three positions: ‘off, ‘test’ and ‘receive’. A thin twist of wire prevented the switch accidentally being moved to ‘on’. Moses switched it to ‘test’ and laid it on the sofa, then he went to the transmitter and flipped the ‘on’ switch. Immediately the tiny globe at one end of the detonator case lit up and there was a loud buzz, like a trapped bee inside the casing. It had received the signal from the transmitter. Moses switched off the transmitter and the buzz ceased and the globe extinguished.
‘Now I must check if it will transmit from here to the assembly chamber.’
He left the transmitter on and descended once again to the chamber. Kneeling beside the Prime Minister’s bench, he held the detonator in the palm of his hand and held his breath as he switched it to ‘test’.
Nothing happened. He tried it three times more, but it would not receive the signal from the office upstairs. Clearly there was too much brick and reinforced concrete between the two pieces of equipment.
‘It was going too easily,’ he told himself ruefully. ‘There had to be a snag somewhere,’ and he sighed as he took the roll of wire from the tool kit. He had wanted to avoid stringing wire from the chamber to the office on the second floor; even though the wire was gossamer thin and the insulating cover was a matt brown, it would infinitely increase the risk of discovery.
‘Nothing else for it,’ he consoled himself.
He had already studied the electrical wiring plan of the building that Tara had procured from the Public Works Department, but he unrolled it and spread it on the bench beside him to refresh his memory as he worked.
There was a wall plug in the panelling behind the back benches of the government section. From the plan he saw that the conduit was laid behind the panelling and went up the wall into the roof. The diagram also showed the main fuse box in the janitor’s office opposite the front door. The office was locked but he picked the lock without difficulty and threw the main switch.
Then he returned to the chamber, located the wall plug and removed the cover, exposing the wiring, and was relieved to find that it was colour-coded. That would make the job a lot easier.
So he left the chamber and went up to the second floor. There was a cleaner’s cupboard in the men’s toilet that contained a stepladder. The trap door that gave access to the roof was also in the men’s toilet. He found it and set the stepladder below it. From the top of the ladder he removed the trap door and wriggled up through the square opening.
The space below the roof and the ceiling was dark and smelled of rats. He switched on his Penlite and began to pick his way through the forest of timber joists and roof posts. The dust had been undisturbed for years and rose in a languid cloud around his feet. He sneezed and covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief as he went forward carefully, stepping from beam to beam, counting each pace to keep himself orientated.
Above the exposed section of wall that was certainly the top of the rear side wall of the chamber he found the electrical conduits. There were fifteen of them laid side by side. Some had been there a long time, while others were obviously new additions.
It took him a while to isolate the conduit that led down to the chamber below, but when he unscrewed the joint in it, he recognized the coded wiring of the wall-socket that it contained. His relief was intense. He had anticipated a number of problems that he might have encountered at this stage, but now it would be a simple matter to get his own wire into the roof.
He uncoiled the long flexible electrician’s spring that he had brought from his tools and fed the end of it into the open conduit tubing until he felt it encounter resistance. Then he began the tedious journey back through the roof, down the stepladder, along the passage, down the staircase and into the chamber.
He found the end of the electrician’s spring protruding from the open wall-socket, and he attached the end of the coil of light detonator wire to it and laid out the rest of the wire so that it would feed smoothly into the conduit when he drew the spring in from the other end.
Back in the roof he recovered the spring and the end of the wire came up with it. Gently he drew in the rest of it, working overhand like a fisherman recovering his handline, until it came up firmly against the knot that held the far end to the bench in the chamber below. He coiled the wire neatly and left it, while he returned to the chamber. By this time his overalls were filthy with dust and cobwebs.
He untied the loose end of the wire from the bench and laid it out on the floor, leading it to the pack of plastic explosive under the front bench, making certain he had given himself sufficient slack. Then he worked carefully to conceal the exposed wire from casual detection. He threaded it under the green wall-to-wall carpeting and stapled it securely to the underside of the government benches. He filed a notch in the enamelled metal plate that covered the wall-socket and laid the wire into it while he screwed the cover back into place.
Then he went carefully over the floor and carpet to make certain he had left no trace of his work. Apart from the few inches of unobtrusive wire protruding from the wall socket, there was nothing to betray his preparations and he sat on Dr Verwoerd’s bench to rest for a few minutes before beginning the final phase. He returned upstairs.
The most difficult and frustrating part of the entire job was placing himself in the roof directly above Shasa’s office. Three times he had to climb down the ladder into the toilet and then pace out the angles of the passages and the exact location of the office suite before once more climbing back into the ceiling and attempting to follow the same route through the dust and the roof timbers.
Finally he was sure he was in the correct position and gingerly he bored a small hole through the ceiling between his feet. Light came up through the hole, but even when he knelt and placed his eye to the aperture, it was too small to see what lay below. He enlarged it slightly, but he still could see nothing, and yet again he had to make the journey back to the trap door and along the passage to Shasa’s office.
Immediately he let himself into the office he saw that he had misjudged. The hole he had bored through the ceiling was directly above the desk, and in enlarging it he had cracked the plaster and dislodged a few fragments which had fallen on to the desk top. He realized that this could be a serious mistake. The hole was not large, but the network of hair cracks around it would be apparent to anyone studying the ceiling.
He thought about trying to cover or repair the damage, but knew that he would only aggravate it. He brushed the white crumbs of plaster off the desk, but this was all he could do. He would have to take comfort in the unlikelihood that anybody would look at the ceiling, and even if they did, that they would think nothing of the minute blemish. Angrily aware of his mistake, he did what he should have done original
ly and bored the next hole from below, standing on one of the bookshelves to reach the ceiling. Between the window drapes and the edge of the bookshelves, the hole was almost invisible to any but the most painstaking inspection. He went up into the roof and paid the end of the wire down through the second hole. When he returned to the office he found it dangling down the wall, the end of it lying in a tangle on the carpet in the corner.
He gathered and coiled the end and tucked it carefully behind the row of Encyclopaedia Britannica on the top shelf and then arranged the window drapes to cover the two or three inches that were visible protruding from the puncture in the ceiling. Once again he cleaned up, going over the shelf and floor for the last speck of plaster, and then, still not satisfied, returning to the desk. Another tiny crumb of white plaster had fallen and he wetted his finger with saliva and picked it up. Then he polished the desk top with his sleeve.
He left the office through the panel door, and went back over everything he had done. He closed the trap door in the roof of the toilet and brushed up the dust that he had dislodged. He replaced the cleaner’s ladder in the closet and then returned for the last time to the chamber.
At last he was ready to wire up the detonator. He removed the wire safety device and switched the detonator on. He bored a hole in the soft centre block of explosive and placed the detonator into it. He taped it firmly in place, and then scraped the last inch of insulation from the gleaming copper wire and screwed that into the connector in the end of the black cylindrical detonator and crawled out from under the bench.
He gathered up his tools, made one last thorough check for any tell-tale evidence, and then, satisfied at last, he left the chamber, locking the main doors behind him and carefully polishing his sweaty fingerprints from the gleaming brass. Then he let himself into the janitor’s office and switched on the current at the mains.
He retreated up the stairs for the last time and locked himself in Shasa’s office before he checked his wristwatch. It was almost half-past four. It had taken him all day, but he had worked with special care and he was well satisfied as he slumped down on the sofa. The strain on his nerves and the unremitting need for total concentration had been more wearying than any physical endeavour.