Carte Blanche

tonight.”
    Hydt scowled. “One of the charities I donate to is having an event. I have to be present. But . . . if you’re free why don’t you meet me there?”
    “Do I have to give money?” Theron asked.
    Hydt couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Not necessarily. You’ll have to listen to a few speeches and drink some wine.”
    “All right. Where is it?”
    Hydt looked at Dunne, who said, “At the Lodge Club. Nineteen hundred hours.”
    Hydt added, “You should wear a jacket but don’t bother with a tie.”
    “See you then.” Theron shook their hands.
    They left his offices and made their way outside.
    “He’s legitimate,” Hydt said, half to himself.
    They were en route to the Green Way office when Dunne took a phone call. After a few minutes he rang off and said, “That was about Stephan Dlamini.”
    “Who?”
    “The worker we need to eliminate in the maintenance department. He’s the one who might’ve seen the e-mails about Friday.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    “Our people found his shanty in Primrose Gardens, east of town.”
    “How are you going to handle it?”
    “It seems that his teenage daughter complained about a local drug dealer. He threatened to kill her. We’ll set it up to make it seem that he’s behind Dlamini’s death. He’s firebombed people before.”
    “So Dlamini has a family.”
    “A wife and five children,” Dunne explained. “We’ll have to kill them too. He could have told his wife what he saw. And if he’s in a shantytown, the family will live in only one or two rooms, so anybody could have heard. We’ll use grenades before the firebomb. I think suppertime is best—everybody will be in one room together.” Dunne shot a glance toward the tall man. “They’ll die fast.”
    Hydt replied, “I wasn’t worried about them suffering.”
    “I wasn’t either. I just meant that it’ll be a pretty easy way to kill them all quickly. So there is no chance of survivors. Convenient, you know.”
    After the men had left, Warrant Officer Kwalene Nkosi rose from the desk where he’d been scrolling through price lists for automatic weapons and nodded at the screen. “It is truly amazing what you can buy online, isn’t it, Commander Bond?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “If we buy nine machine guns, we can get one for free,” he joked to Sergeant Mbalula, the relentless two-finger typist.
    “Thanks for that fast thinking about the LRA, Warrant Officer,” Bond said. He hadn’t recognized the abbreviation for the Lord’s Resistance Army—a group that any mercenary in Africa would have been familiar with. The operation might have ended there and then in disaster.
    Bond’s “secretary,” Bheka Jordaan, peered out of the window. “They’re heading away. I don’t see any other security people.”
    “We fooled them, I think,” said Sergeant Mbalula.
    The trick indeed seemed to have been successful. Bond had been convinced that one of the men—the quick-minded Dunne, most likely—would want to see his branch in Cape Town. He believed that a good, solid set—a cover location—would be critical in seducing Hydt into believing he was an Afrikaner troubleshooter with a great many bodies to dispose of.
    While Bond had telephoned Hydt to talk his way into Green Way, Jordaan had found a small government office leased by the Ministry of Culture but presently unused. Nkosi had printed some business cards with the address and before Bond had gone to meet Hydt and Dunne, the SAPS officers had moved in.
    “You’ll be my partner,” Bond had told Jordaan, with a smile. “It’ll be a good cover for me to have a clever—and attractive—associate.”
    She had bristled. “To be credible, an office like this needs a secretary and she must be a woman.”
    “If you like.”
    “I don’t,” she had said stiffly. “But that’s how it must be.”
    Bond had anticipated the men’s visit but not that Hydt would want to see pictures of the killing fields, though he supposed he should have. The minute he’d left Hydt’s office, he’d called Jordaan and told her to find photos of mass graves in Africa from military and law enforcement archives. Sadly, it had been all too easy and she’d downloaded a dozen by the time he’d returned from Hydt’s office.
    “Can you keep some people here for a day or two?” Bond asked. “In case Dunne comes back.”
    “I can spare one officer,” she said. “Sergeant Mbalula, you will stay for the time being.”
    “Yes,