Danger Woman (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

Superintendent Mwambe had a bad day, at least for him it had been. The presence of the officials from Gaborone had set him off. He knew what people in the capitol thought of him, that he was old, overweight, and inefficient. Some nights, when sleep eluded him and his bones ached, he conceded that the impression might have some merit. Admitting the possible truth to it did not, however, mean that he could not function in his job. No, he would admit it; he was not a modern man. He remained “old school' and it worked for him. Inspector Joseph Ikanya, at least, understood that. The two of them had conversations about how times had changed and this intruder from Gabz who'd arrived with Inspector Modise had agreed. He did not share the same level of negative as Mwambe. He sighed. This one thing he knew; no one worked a crime scene better than he did. He never boasted about his work. He knew that when he'd had serious crimes, he'd managed them. So, why did the director believe he needed help from Modise? Clearly down in Gaborone they did not understand. This far north, things were to be approached differently, had to be dealt with in a manner more nearly suited to the locale and its people. Why couldn't they see that?

He thought of his nephew, Derek. Derek was his only living relative. Mwambe was a very private person when it came to his personal life. His wife of thirty-five years had died four years previously. There had been no children. He regretted that as much as anything he'd failed at in life. It had been his failure. The doctor said it had something to do with acquiring a serious case of mumps as an adult. Really? How that could be was beyond his comprehension. Mumps were in the jaw, not…there. His wife never said a thing but, her disappointment filled every room every day and every night. For twenty-five empty years his failure to father children was the “gorilla sitting on the sofa.” To be childless in his time brought with it head-shaking from neighbors and talk behind their backs. Whether the cause of their unhappy state fell to him or an act of God, it was their unhappy lot nevertheless. After a while, she took to drink, he to overeating. Her response to their problem killed her. His made him a local joke, the fat policeman. Well, there could be no fixing that now. He had to travel on, do his job and wait. Wait for something. He couldn't rightly say what that something would be.

His musing was shattered by his phone ringing. He started to admonish Derek for not picking up and then he realized he'd sent his nephew over to spy on Sanderson. He lifted the receiver.

“Yes?”

Inspector Ikanya from Gaborone wanted to meet. What now?

***

Their picnic took place in the trees by the river once again. It was safe enough. Even though they were in the dry season, this spot, because of it steep bank, would not be visited by thirsty animals coming to the river to drink, nor would those in the river likely be climbing out to threaten them. Sanderson handed Modise the pen she'd received from Greshenko and watched as he unscrewed the barrel and retrieved its small scrap of paper with Greshenko's message.

“What does the Russian say?” she asked.

“He tells us…Wait. You are not cleared to know this.”

“I am not cleared? You declared me the deputy. I am the carrier of these messages both to and from. I am the taker of the risks. What do you mean I am not cleared, Modise?”

“I mean, the director would not wish you to take even greater risks by knowing the contents. What you don't know—”

“Can't hurt me? That is great nonsense, Mister Policeman. If I know what the message is, I can anticipate what is coming next and maybe help you to avoid danger.”

“I am sorry, Kgopa…Sanderson. It is for the best. Besides I am in very deep on this operation and if it fails, if it becomes costly, it is likely I will lose my position. I have stepped over the line and the director is not happy with me.”

“Well, you can tell the director he is being stupid and you can tell him I said so.”

“That is never going to happen.”

“No? I don't like it and that is that. Another thing, why don't I have a badge? I am the Deputy, I need a badge.”

“There are no badges.”

“Then a ribbon or a card with my picture that says I am a Deputy Constable.”

“Sanderson…”

“It's not fair, Modise.”

They sat in silence, Sanderson pouting, Modise wondering if he shouldn't say something about the contents of the Greshenko message. Sanderson possessed a cheerful nature which could never be suppressed for long. She turned to Modise. “Okay, there are no badges and I am not to be trusted with secrets, just used as the messenger baboon. We are not done with this conversation, Inspector Modise. So okay, here is one for you. Didn't you ask me to tell you if anything odd happened at the casino?”

“I did. Has something odd happened?”

“What would you describe as odd?”

“Odd? I don't know, exactly. Something unexpected. Something ordinary in an extraordinary place. Something somebody said that doesn't quite match up with what is going on, that sort of thing”

“I see. Well, here is something very ordinary happening in a very ordinary way that I am still wondering about. One of the trainees asked to borrow my phone. She said her battery had gone flat.”

“And?”

“And, I let her have it and she was out of sight and then she returned it.”

“And that is odd, how?”

“I saw her talking on her phone outside after the session. I don't think she had her phone on a charger while we were in class. I do not think she has a self-charging battery. Why does she need to borrow my phone?”

“Did she see you seeing her on her phone?”

“No.”

“Good. May I borrow your phone for a moment?”

“Your battery is also flat?”

“No. I just need to see your phone.”

She handed it to him and sat back to watch. He snapped off its back and removed the SIM card. He squinted at it for almost a minute and then replaced it.

“This is a new one,” he said. “They are after cloning phones.”

“What? How can you tell?”

“I have seen this before. We will use them sometimes in the pursuit of criminals. See, this card is identical to the one you purchased but has an addition. Your phone is always on even when you think it is off. It will not draw down your battery very much, but you will notice you must recharge more often.”

“It is on now?”

“Yes.”

“So people can hear what I am talking about all the time?”

“No, it's not that kind of on. There is a card programmed to do that but, this is not one of them. No, this one is different. It is set to search for another phone. Mine for example, and it will then steal the information from my phone and store it. Then, you will receive a wrong number call and while you are saying ‘so sorry' to the caller, all my settings and so on will be downloaded to that phone. Then, the next time I receive a call, that other phone will ring as well and the holder of that phone, the clone, will be able to hear everything I say.”

“This is true?”

“Absolutely.”

“I am so sorry, Kgabo. I didn't know. Why would that nice girl do this thing?”

“There is nothing to be sorry for. You couldn't have known, in the first place, and you have done us a favor in the second. The girl is either one of them or she is in their power somehow.”

“You will arrest her for this foolishness?”

“No, I think we will leave her in place. She could be very useful to us now that we know what she is up to. Also, if we did pick her up, Lenka would know and assume, correctly, that we know what they did to the phone. I want him and his people to believe they were successful making the switch.”

“I have done you a favor? How is that?”

“Well, I will see to it that you clone the ‘correct' phone. We will set up a dummy phone and fill their ears with buffalo droppings. Sorry, with false information. That way we can send them on many wild goose chases.”

“Goose chases?”

“False trails.”

“Oh. What if this thing, this cloning has already happened? Maybe it is too late.”

“The phone they wish to clone must be on and you must be within a very few feet of it for that to happen. I did not want our meeting be disturbed. My phone has been off since you arrived and is sitting in my coat pocket in the truck. So, the cloning hasn't happened and even if it had, it would be of no use to them. I have two phones, Sanderson, one for personal use, one for official business. The official one is encrypted and is off. Even if they had cloned that one, they will know nothing. The personal one? Well let's just say, be careful what you wish to tell me about your love life.”

Sanderson punched him on the arm. “You know that I am not one of those women who does things like that.”

“No sexting?”

She smacked him again.

“So, for the time being, let us be careful what we say on our phones. When we return to Kasane, I will set up the false phone. Perhaps your friend Mwambe will operate it for us.”

“Superintendent Mwambe? Kgabo, he is like one of the elephants grazing in the bush, always in search of food. Why would you give such an important job to him?”

“Ah, you are almost right. Not the elephant, he is like a hippo and what do we know of hippos? If they are set up right, they are very, very dangerous. Do not underestimate the large policeman. He may be reluctant to move into this century, and wishes crime would occur somewhere else than in his jurisdiction, but he is not incompetent when challenged. He will do the job.” Sanderson shook her head. Modise must know something she didn't, for sure. “Time to go back to work,” he said. It didn't sound like he believed it.

“So soon? Are we truly finished with our picnicking now, Kgabo?”

He turned, saw the twinkle in her eye. “Maybe not just yet.”

Chapter Twenty-three

For his part, Joseph Ikanya made a very passable director on the “cloned” phone Modise set up. Superintendent Mwambe sounded very convincing as the local police. He should have. He
was
the local police. The two men, happy to be involved in a real way and in what they described as “hi-tech” police work but also, well out of harm's way, began a series of sporadic calls back and forth intended to distract and misinform Lenka's people. They would do so at odd hours and irregular intervals for the next several days. If Lenka was listening, he would have discovered several interesting things. He would hear that numerous people with questionable visas were attempting to enter the country and join the personnel at the casino. That there was an emergency at the border with Zambia which involved a shipment of liquor that had not been properly taxed. They might have wondered at the report that game rangers were being armed with side arms and posted to secure the park from unauthorized entry, specifically to curtail the dropping of corpses in the bush. Lenka's people in the Ranger Service said they knew nothing about that. They would ask. One did and disappeared. There were references to operations with names like “Lion Strike” and “Baboon Watch.” Mwambe made that one up.

They also would have heard that the American who owned the casino had left the country and that the ownership of had been transferred to a Botswana-based corporation. That message happened to be the only truthful one. Leo Painter had flown back to Chicago to attend to his sick wife. As his health was also questionable and his return to Botswana uncertain, he'd incorporated the operation and placed Greshenko as its COO. Greshenko had objected. He felt that he'd done nothing to deserve the position. Leo said he agreed. He would do it anyway, he said, because…well, because he wanted to and because he could.

The news came as a surprise, but a good one. Modise wanted Lenka to know that the American was out of play and that his only point of entry to the casino now would have to be through Greshenko. This move by Painter, he realized, had both good points and bad; good because assuming control of a corporation should be easier for Lenka than wresting it from a private owner. The bad part: it significantly reduced Modise's hold on Greshenko. He wondered if that hadn't been Painter's intent all along. Well, what was done was done. He would worry about Lenka's next moves later. At least, Modise figured, he'd baited the hook. Now, he would do some fishing.

The intercepted phone calls confused and worried Lenka's sources in Cape Town and Gaborone. They could not confirm any of the information in them except the one concerning the American's departure. Lenka struggled with who or what to believe. In the past, the sources in Gaborone and Cape Town had been spot on. Now he weren't so sure. Had any of the information they had forwarded up to Kasane previously been correct? What was going on? One of the men monitoring the wire traffic in Gaborone suggested that because the data at his end and that coming from the cloned phone seemed so wildly different, it might be a diversion. He suggested that the police may have tumbled to the scheme to clone the phone and were deliberately feeding them disinformation. Lenka dismissed the idea out of hand. He declared these local people hadn't the brains or capability to pull off something as sophisticated as that. Bigotry frequently creates its own punishment.

The upshot of all this was that Lenka decided to retrench. He would wait for Greshenko to make the first move. He would go on the defensive. It was not a position he played well. Irena took him aside.

“What are you thinking, Oleg?” she asked. Aggressive behavior, bullying had brought him this far, why would he change now? “You must move quickly now. You see? You can grab the casino so easily. Do it now while the American is away and this company he set up is still new.”

He shook his head. “You don't understand, Renee. We will soon be outnumbered. We will wait and see how many people Greshenko brings in. In the meantime, I will bring the men up from Cape Town and Gaborone. We need reinforcements.”

“What? Reinforcements? How can you believe that and at the same time tell everybody that the natives aren't worthworrying about?”

“Something is not right here and I want to fix it, that's all.”

“If you do that, what will hold the groups left in those places together? If they are gone from there, we lose the little bit we have built. We were going to make a base, remember? We need to cover the country from Gaborone. Oleg, you are going to be too thin in Gaborone to hold onto anything. The men at
Рес
t
оран
are not enough to keep something in place. What will we have there? The old man, a cook, and manager, that's what we are leaving behind. Not even the waiters. What can they do if we need something done in Gaborone? We pull the street people and then what? No, you must go after the casino now. No calling in reinforcements. No waiting.”

“It is only temporary. You will see. When he sees what we have against him, he will be the one to back down. He will come begging.”

Irena threw up her hands. “You are an idiot.”

Lenka backhanded her and she tumbled on the sofa. He would be sorry later. He always was. She stood and left. Later, she pulled out her phone, went to online banking and wire transferred all of the money she'd skimmed from his business and had dumped into a local Barclay's Bank to her account in Geneva. She had finagled the combination to the safe from him the last time he'd lost control but reckoned it would not be the right time to clean it out. She hoped he'd realize what he'd done and ask for forgiveness. If Lenka's contrition was great enough, she might squeeze some diamonds from him. Diamonds, everybody knew, were a woman's best friend. A blond American actress sang that song at a cinema she'd attended a long time ago. The woman had a big mouth and sang it in English but the words were sub-titled in Russian on the screen,
Алмазы, а девочек лучший друг
. She would make some…what do the bratty children on America TV say? Some BFFs. Yes some new best friends, the sparkly kind.

***

Leo's sudden departure and amazing gift left Yuri Greshenko in a state of euphoria which quickly evaporated when he realized that he now had an even larger target on his back. Before, his fate had oscillated between dead and deported. Now the dead part seemed more likely than the deported bit. But, more than that, he missed the gruff old American with his plans and schemes, his endless stories about the rich and powerful, and the uses he'd made of both. He hoped he'd come back soon, but in his heart he knew he'd seen the last of Leo Painter.

He turned his attention to his current dilemma: what to do about Oleg Lenka and Modise the policeman. He pulled a scrap of paper from the desk drawer and scrawled a note which he placed in the barrel of one of the pens supplied by the police. The game ranger woman would be arriving soon and he wanted something in writing from the authorities guaranteeing him permanent residency if he fulfilled his end of the bargain. He hadn't asked for it previously. At that time, he was in no position to bargain. He felt he was in a stronger position to do so now.

“No guarantee,” he muttered, “no goodbye to Lenka.” He still had options. He was the chief executive officer of a Botswana corporation. He had a legitimate claim to remain in spite of his previous status, or non-status. And those men Leo imported to play at being Bratva
agents, well they would be happy to leave all this behind as well. Take them out of play this late in the operation and the police had nothing. Less than nothing.

Even from far away America, Leo had demonstrated the genius that had made him the CEO of the second largest power and mining conglomerate in the world. The one he had left to others to run in order to build a modest casino/hotel in Botswana. A facility which now sat completed and ready for business on the banks of the Chobe River under the capable stewardship of his odd friend, Yuri Gresenko.

So, good news, bad news. Yuri relaxed and celebrated the former with a cold beer. The bad he'd ignore.

***

Michael snapped his out-of-date mobile phone shut. He did not seem happy. Sekgele waited for what came next.

“Sekgele, that was my mother calling. She says she is not supposed to be telling me this thing and then she tells it to me anyway.”

“What is she saying, exactly? Michael, you are worried. Tell me what she said.”

“We are being watched round the clock by the police.”

“Watched? Why? We are doing nothing wrong. We are planning on a wedding. What is so wrong with that? My father is having us watched by police? Is that it? How can he do that?”

“It's not that, Sekgele. There is some trouble brewing here. It's not your father who brought the police. My mother set it up. There is the business with the Russians trying to move in on Rra Botlhokwa's old business and she worries about that. At least that is what she says. It is not too clear to me. Why does what is happening to that old crook's corrupt operation have anything to do with us?”

“Who is Rra Botlhokwa?”

“You don't know? No, you wouldn't. Your father sent you to school with the nuns. Back in the day, among his other enterprises, Botlhokwa was a thief and a smuggler. He seems pretty small-time now but then, he was someone to deal with in the Chobe. His real name was Livingston Boikobo. He changed it to Botlhokwa when he became a famous gangster, you could say, so he is Rra Botlhokwa, in English, Mister Big, see?”

“Did you ever have something to do with this Rra Botlhokwa? You weren't a smuggler or something? Are you not telling me something?”

“No, of course not. I was too sick to do anything even if I had wanted to. And I surely did not want to. I had some school mates who…never mind. Not me. Now, with you here, when do I have time for crime?”

“But, your mother says we are being watched by police because of that? Do you believe that? Or is it because of…you know?”

“I don't know. No, I take that back. My mother is many things but devious is not one of them. So, if you see a police constable peeking in the window, do not worry. He is here to protect us.”

“You are being a joker, Michael.”

“I certainly hope so.”