“Nothing you can do, lad. It’s in the Lord’s hands. I’ll call if anything changes.”
Simon turned off the phone and disposed of the SIM card in a like manner. It was three a.m. He doused the lights and lay down. He looked up at the ceiling and whatever was beyond it. “Please,” he said. “Take care of her.”
Finally, he closed his eyes.
What choice did man have but to believe?
Chapter 22
Bangkok
Pleasant dreams, Mr. Riske.”
The man named Kruger turned from the darkened window on the first floor of the ramshackle tenement and retraced his steps to Charoen Krung Road, heading back to a group of street vendors he’d passed earlier. Fish, eels, meatballs. He stopped in front of a large wok, oil bubbling, a vendor scooping out the deep-fried chicken feet and chicken heads with a woven ladle. He breathed in the sharp, salty scents. The smells of his childhood.
“One,” he said, a finger raised.
The vendor prepared a plate of three feet and three heads. Kruger paid him and moved down the street, finding a quieter spot to eat. Not bad, he thought, chewing the feet off a wooden skewer. “Walkie-Talkie,” they called the dish in his native South Africa. There, in the slums of Jo’burg, chefs prepared the dish two ways: breaded and fried or braised over hot coals. Add a little sweet chili sauce and there was nothing better.
Kruger tossed the paper plate into the trash, crouching to pick up a few cups and bottles that had missed the target. He detested litter.
His given name was Solomon Kruger Mkwezi. He was thirty-eight years old, the illicit offspring of a South African father, a supervisor at the De Beers mine in Kimberley, a member of the Xhosa tribe, as black as the coal seam he’d worked his entire life, and a German mother, the mine’s director of finance, blond, blue-eyed, and built like the mighty Valkyries who adorned the prows of old-time sailing ships. “Illicit” because at the time of his birth in South Africa it was illegal for a black man and a white woman to have sexual relations. Apartheid was the law of the land. “Apartheid,” the Afrikaans word meaning “apartness,” a system of institutionalized segregation based on the principles of white supremacy. Being born was the first criminal act Solomon Kruger committed.
Until the age of ten, he lived with his father in a company town for miners outside the fences. Forbidden to go to the school for children of mine employees—white children—he attended local schools. Dirt floors. Thatched roofs. A blackboard. He was the only student with mixed blood. His straw-colored hair made him stick out more than his toffee-colored skin and pale blue eyes. His schoolmates made fun of his straight nose and his thin lips, teasing him mercilessly, beating him, calling him“Wite,”the white one. Hatred ran both ways.
He learned to fight at a young age. At first, he lost. Then, as he grew, no more. His father called him “Shaka,” after the invincible Zulu chief, a symbol of pride for all black South Africans. His father taught him to box, to grapple. He gave him a set of weights and each morning supervised his training, doing calisthenics alongside him. “You are Shaka. You are a warrior.”
And then, tragedy. A cave-in at the mine. His father buried alive alongside forty others at the bottom of an open pit a thousand feet deep. Shaka considered his nickname his father’s lasting gift. With no family in the village, he was sent to live with his mother. It was 1992. Mandela had returned from exile. De Klerk had yielded power to the African National Congress. Apartheid was rescinded. But attitudes long ingrained were not easily dispelled. A mixed-race boy was not welcome, law or no law. Under pressure, his mother resigned her post and with her son returned to her home.
The Federal Republic of Germany was a liberal country, in politics and worldview. Still, Shaka was an outsider, struggling to learn a new language, his English scarred by a strong Afrikaans accent. He took his mother’s family name but thought of himself simply as “Shaka.”
By temperament, he was possessed of a short fuse and a simmering rage. An offhand glance, the wrong word, a misunderstood gesture, could set him off. People avoided him. He had few friends. He found solace in sport. His schoolmates had been playing soccer for years, real soccer—not kicking a deflated ball across a dirt field. He chose gymnastics instead. It was a good fit, the various disciplines tailor-made for an unnaturally strong and agile young man. His favorite was the rings. No one could hold the “iron cross” longer. His body grew accordingly, his arms, shoulders, and chest a tangled knot of muscle. There was talk of the national team, a trip to the Olympic Games in Sydney. An argument ended his dreams. Athletes did not shatter the jaw of their coach, no matter how badly they disagreed with him.
From high school to the army. By now he spoke German fluently, as well as English, Afrikaans, and his father’s Xhosa. His language skills and innate intelligence combined with his physical prowess made him a natural for special forces, the GSG 9—the Grenzschutzgruppe 9. He thrived in the atmosphere of discipline and comradery, for once accepted as an equal. He trained with the Delta Force at Fort Bragg and the SAS at Hereford. He deployed to Kosovo and Afghanistan. In combat, he discovered his true self. He was a killer, especially adept with a knife and his bare hands. No one moved more quietly. They called him “The Wind.”
An altercation with a superior ended his military career. A pattern was emerging, an inability to control his temper, a disposition to violence toward his peers, mental unrest.
He returned to his home, to the new South Africa. It was 2008. There was only one place for a man of his training. The Hawks, formally known as the Directorate for Priority Criminal Investigation, in reality the president’s Praetorian Guard. A sniper, a master of hand-to-hand combat, a man in peak physical condition, Shaka quickly found himself assigned to “Night Operations,” a euphemism for the death squads charged with liquidating the president’s most stubborn enemies, and sometimes his friends, too.
When the minister of finance refused to pay a reasonable percentage of the funds he skimmed from the education budget, Shaka infiltrated his luxury, gated community in Cape Town and cut his throat while he slept between his two wives.
When the president’s cousin, holder of a diamond concession in Kimberley, balked at a royalty fee of ten million dollars, Shaka crossed thirty kilometers of open veldt, breached a twenty-foot security fence, killed two bodyguards, and gained entry to his home in order to cut off the man’s left hand. A warning, nothing more. The cousin promptly paid up.
Word of Shaka’s reputation spread in those circles where men of his peculiar skill set were appreciated. One day he received a call from his former commander, General Moltke. Moltke wanted Shaka’s services for a new army, a secret force charged with the protection of Europe, a rampart against the barbarian hordes. Shaka was a good German. Given the current state of affairs, surely he could appreciate the urgency of the request. The irony was not lost on him. He would be protecting Europe against people like himself. He accepted at once.
And so here he was in Bangkok, studying his hands beneath the glare of a streetlamp. The skin on his fingertips had started to go black with frostbite from his excursion in the Alps.
Shaka checked his phone. An app showed a map of the city, a pulsing red dot indicating Riske’s location. He was not tracing Riske’s phone. That would require cooperation from the local authorities. Strictly a last resort. Shaka disliked working with intelligence agencies, friendly or not. The same went for law enforcement. He preferred to operate below the surface. Under the radar, so to speak. Unseen and unbeknownst. The pulsing red dot came from an RFID transmitter—radio-frequency identification.
He’d tagged Riske as the American passed through baggage claim at Suvarnabhumi Airport. It had been easy enough, the sea of humanity making for the exits practically doing his job for him. A nudge from the rear. One body jostling another. A slight stinging sensation, gone before it could be questioned. It was over in a split second.
A miniature surgical instrument, what they called a “mosquito,” had implanted the device beneath the skin of Riske’s upper arm, a spot nearly impossible to see without the help of a mirror, the transmitter smaller than a grain of rice.
Shaka sent a text.R has the goods. Permission to intercede?
The reply:Negative. Stand down. Possible additional targets. Await instructions.
Shaka frowned. It was a mistake to leave when the target could be so easily taken. He debated disobeying the order. He could be upstairs and inside Riske’s room in a minute and back on the street a minute after that. He felt a sudden throbbing at the base of his neck.Do it,he thought.Get it over with. The man is exhausted. He’s been on the move one way or another for more than a day. There won’t be a better opportunity.
