Gold Page 35

  ‘Until there is a response from the two absent directors, I suggest that the auditors’ examination be deferred,’ continued Collington. Again the vote was unanimous.

  ‘You went soft,’ complained Platt, as they left the boardroom.

  ‘Disinterested,’ corrected Collington.

  Two days later, there was solicitors’ confirmation that Janet Simpson’s shares were offered for disposal. They were equally divided at a board gathering convened the day before the annual general meeting.

  At the meeting, the expansion of the London division passed unremarked. Collington declared an overall dividend of twenty-two per cent, which was an increase of seven per cent over the preceding year. The resignations of Metzinger and Wassenaar were recordedas being for personal reasons; Collington proposed a vote of appreciation for their work for the company during their directorships and the vote was unanimous. There was an unopposed acceptance of the chairman’s report and of the statement of accounts. The meeting ended with a vote of confidence in the SAGOMI board in general and James Collington in particular.

  ‘You should feel very satisfied,’ said Jenkins, as the meeting ended.

  ‘Yes,’ said Collington. ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’

  Why then, he wondered, didn’t he?

  In the first days of his vacation, Paul had been suspicious, looking to see if their togetherness was an act for his benefit. And so there had been a pretension, evetyone performing with rehearsed attitudes. Collington had held Hannah back from over-reacting, knowing the child had to make his own decision. If they attempted to intervene, it might delay rather than hasten the process.

  By the time of the safari, the child’s acceptance was practically complete. Collington had bought him a movie camera and they shot gazelle, giraffe and once, surprisingly, an ostrich. The white hunter later concluded that it had lost its mate and, instead of running away in its grief, as it should have done, it had charged straight-necked at them, splitting its beak against the observation lorry. After that it could not have eaten properly, so they had to kill it. Paul wept and Hannah cried with him.

  Collington deferred to the hunter, agreeing that they should run the perimeter of the desert edge, to give them time to acclimatise. By the fourth day they had adjusted to the need to rise by four and rest beneath the awnings during the breath-sucking heat of mid-day. And that night they camped, laager style, around a camp fire. They had insect lamps to trap the mosquitoes, and after the campfire supper they put Paul to bed in the air-conditioned, shower-provided, flush-toiletted camper.

  So much alcohol was unwise, even though the heat had gone from the day and the problem of dehydration didn’t exist, but Collington needed the help. And then he told Hannah of the confrontation with her father and what he had done to win, uncertain of her response. The acceptance surprised him, as so much had surprised him in the final, decisive days. There was no anger. No accusation of falsehood or trickery or deceit. She just seemed sad. For a long time she sat head bowed while the cicadae chirruped about them and the thorn trees scraped in the bullying wind and then she said, ‘It never ended, did it?’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘The war. He still thought it was 1900, with his stupid wagons and his stupid mementoes. Nothing has happened for him since then.’ She looked up. ‘He tried to stop it happening, you know – our getting back together. During all the trouble with the mines.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Enquiry agent reports.’

  ‘What did you do with them?’

  ‘Threw them away, without reading them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I did it for me, not you.’

  Paul learned to stamp a camp area, to clear it, by the vibrations, of snakes and then rake it for scorpions, and on the Monday of the third week the hunter awarded him the prize that went to every child on the Monday of the third week, attesting that he was fully qualified in safari survival technique.

  And on that Monday, amid secrecy so complete that no knowledge of the hearing emerged until the government made it public in a terse, four-line statement a fortnight later, Sidney Englehart appeared before a Pretoria court, charged with espionage. He was sentenced, after a four-hour hearing at which his complete confession was read out, to seven years’ imprisonment. He was to serve four, two under hard labour, before a diplomatic exchange was surreptitiously arranged. During his imprisonment his wife divorced him, and because the President had declared the operation unofficial and therefore unauthorised, his pension rights were lost. Englehart became the security officer for the Flagler dog track in Florida and his luck held during his ten years of employment: until he died from a heart attack which caused a two-mile traffic jam on Biscayne Boulevarde, there was never a security problem. That employment finally produced a pension of $5000, but there was no one to whom it could be given. It went back into the fund.

  Of the operational staff he was the luckiest. There were four operatives under Hank Barrett. They were all imprisoned in a jail in Massangena. Barrett and two others contracted malaria, but it was really the malnutrition which broke their health and when it became obvious that they were terminally ill the Mozambique government returned them to America where all three died within four months. Siebert, always the most volatile, collapsed under the unremitting pressure of his hard labour sentence and became insane. Peter Grant led an escape, after eighteen months of his imprisonment, succeeding in getting eight of the Americans out of their jail and into the bush thirty miles from Bulawayo. Without a compass, they fled the wrong way into the jungle. They were already emaciated and suffering from malaria and it only took a week for them to die, predominantly from exposure. Only Grant survived and when he was discovered, he was so deeply infested with parasites that his left foot had to be amputated. There were five men sentenced in Angola with Walter Blake. All contracted dysentery and before proper treatment could be provided, three of them died. Blake was the first.

  It took three years for Nikolai Leonov to get the ambassadorship he sought and there were times when he despaired of ever receiving his reward. It proved a worthwhile, if ironical wait. He was posted to Washington just in time to attend the swearing-in ceremony of John William Pemberton for his second term of office as President of the United States of America.

  Henry Moreton began watching the ceremony on the small portable television in the Boston department store where he had managed to get a job as senior costing clerk after his dismissal from the bank. After thirty minutes the memories became too much for him, so he backed away through the crush of people around the screen and went back to work. No one in the store was surprised; he had the reputation of being a dedicated worker.

  Because of the executive echelon she had occupied at SAGOMI, Ann Talbot had a reputation among multi-nationals with offices in London and had no difficulty in obtaining a job, although not initially as a personal assistant. It took her three years to achieve that rank. She resisted any romantic attachments, which gave rise to rumours about frigidity and even, briefly, lesbianism.

  Even if it hadn’t been part of her function, she would have monitored SAGOMI. She read the announcements of Metzinger’s and Wassenaar’s resignations and guessed that Collington had outmanœuvred them. She even considered writing to Collington out of professional curiousity, but discarded the idea, recognising its stupidity.

  She got a board appointment at forty and took a positive career decision, subjugating her sex drive to her ambition. The commitment was absolute. The chairmanship came at forty-six, with disconcerting publicity. She endured it for the benefit of the company, but she didn’t enjoy it. There were numerous congratulations and she hoped there would be one from Collington. There wasn’t.

  At the press conference to which she agreed on the day her appointment was announced, a television reporter asked, ‘Do you consider yourself a complete, satisfied woman?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ann replied at once. Frequently afterwards, she wondered if Collington had
seen the interview. She hoped he had: she’d watched the video recording and knew the response sounded completely honest.

  Epilogue

  There had been times in those early months after his resignation from SAGOMI when Janet had been concerned at Metzinger’s mental health. She knew it came from his complete humiliation in her eyes: he’d even suggested cancelling the wedding, unable to accept that she would still want to marry him after the way he had failed her. She had hoped her insistence upon the ceremony would have helped, but it hadn’t. He became increasingly withdrawn and taciturn, hardly speaking to her and spending hours among his Boer memorabilia: once she had even surprised him on the driving box of one of the wagons, the reins in his hands.

  The Broederbond appointment saved him. His election as society chairman came unexpectedly and he seized it with an excited eagerness that had surprised and then pleased her. It gave them a social life again, frequently with some government involvement, and Janet enjoyed that. She made herself their social secretary, always making discreet enquiries to ensure that neither Collington nor Hannah would be present at any occasion to create an embarrassment. Sometimes she regretted the lack of contact. Not with Collington, of course: she hated him as much as Marius. But she genuinely liked Hannah and had wanted to make a friend of her.

  The couple were never mentioned in the household. Nor would they have been, Janet supposed, but for the announcement of Collington’s knighthood. Even then, she waited for her husband to remark upon it.

  ‘Not bad, for a bastard,’ said Metzinger, throwing the newspaper down.

  ‘Was he?’ asked Janet, remembering Collington’s orphanage upbringing and momentarily misunderstanding the remark.

  ‘Yes,’ said Metzinger bitterly. ‘An absolute bastard.’

  She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. She knew everything else, but she wouldn’t know about this – not the final defeat. The Broederbond chairmanship had been his chance to beat Collington. It would have taken a long time to create sufficient opposition to the companies, but he knew the organisation was powerful enough to destroy them, finally. And to have destroyed Collington he would have done anything. That had been the first thought when he knew the appointment was to be his, and he carried it with him through the initial meetings and then the induction ceremony. It would have been through Knoetze, he supposed, that Collington had learned of the chairmanship: the security chief was the obvious source, from what he now knew.

  The package had arrived a week after his election. Photostats of all the share transactions, dated so the attempted share manœuvre and his part in it was clearly, criminally, identified. It had been anonymous, but Metzinger hadn’t needed any explanation for the warning. Because not everything was unidentified. The file had been assembled by the same enquiry agents who had discovered so much about Ann Talbot, which he supposed Collington considered clever.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said again.

  A Biography of Brian Freemantle

  Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

  Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.

  Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

  In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.

  Freemantle lives and works in London, England.

  A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.

  Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.

  Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.

  Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.

  Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.

  A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.

  Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.

  Freemantle working on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.

  Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.

  Many of the staff secretaries are dressed as Vietnamese hostesses to commemorate the many tours Freemantle carried out in Vietnam.

  The Freemantle family on the grounds of the Winchester Cathedral in 1988. Back row: wife Maureen; eldest daughter, Victoria; and mother-in-law, Alice Tipney, a widow who lived with the Freemantle family for a total of forty-eight years until her death. Second row: middle daughter, Emma; granddaughter, Harriet; Freemantle; and third daughter, Charlotte.

  Freemantle in 1999, in the Outer Close outside Winchester Cathedral. For thirty years, he lived with his family in the basement library of a fourteenth-century house with a tunnel connecting it to the cathedral. Priests used this tunnel to escape persecution during the English Reformation.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locale
s is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1981 by Innslodge Publication Ltd

  cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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