Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [146]
The men now vanished in a tidal wave of flame, a roiling thunderhead. The guards and the ground they’d stood on were simply gone, the fire widening as panicked birds fled into the air, the trees and brush bursting into flames as if they were soaked in incendiary accelerant.
Twenty feet away Jordaan rose unsteadily. She started towards the Bushmaster. But Bond ran to her, shouting, ‘Change of plan. Forget it!’
‘What should we do?’
They were thrown to the ground as another mushroom cloud of flame erupted not far away. The roar was so loud Bond had to press his lips against her sumptuous hair to make himself heard. ‘Might be a good idea to leave.’
61
‘You are making a terrible mistake!’
Severan Hydt’s voice was low with threat but a very different state of mind was revealed in the expression on his long, bearded face: horror at the destruction of his empire, both physical, from the fires in the distance, and legal, from the special-forces troops and police descending on the grounds and office.
There was nothing imperious about him now.
Hydt, in handcuffs, and Jordaan, Nkosi and Bond were standing amid a cluster of bulldozers and lorries in the open area between the office and Resurrection Row. They were near the spot where Bond would have been killed . . . if not for Bheka Jordaan’s dramatic arrival to arrest the ‘poachers’.
Sergeant Mbalula handed Bond his Walther, extra clips and mobile phone from the Subaru.
‘Thank you, Sergeant.’
SAPS officers and South African special forces roamed through the facility, looking for more suspects and collecting evidence. In the distance, fire crews were struggling – and it was a struggle – to put out the methane fires, as the western edge of Elysian Fields became just another outpost of hell.
Apparently the corrupt politicians in Pretoria, the ones in Hydt’s pocket, had not been so very high up, after all. Senior officials stepped in quickly and ordered their arrest and full back-up for Jordaan’s operation in Cape Town. Additional officers were sent to seize Green Way’s offices in all South African cities.
Medics scurried about here too, attending to the wounded, which included only Hydt’s security staff.
Hydt’s three partners were in custody, Huang, Eberhard and Mathebula. It was not clear yet what their crimes were but that would be established soon. At the very least they had all smuggled firearms into the country, justifying their arrest.
Four of the surviving guards were in custody and most of the hundred or so Green Way employees who’d been milling about in the car park had been detained, pending questioning.
Dunne had escaped. Special-forces officers had found evidence of a motorcycle, which had apparently been hidden under a tarp covered with straw. Of course, the Irishman would have kept his lifeboat ready.
Severan Hydt persisted, ‘I’m innocent! You’re persecuting me because I’m British. And white. You’re prejudiced.’
Jordaan could not ignore this. ‘Prejudiced? I’ve arrested six black men, four whites and an Asian. If that’s not a rainbow, I don’t know what is.’
The reality of the disaster kept coming home to him. His eyes swivelled away from the fires and began taking in the rest of the grounds. He was probably looking for Dunne. He would be lost without his engineer.
He glanced at Bond, then said to Jordaan, his voice laced with desperation, ‘What sort of arrangement could we work out? I’m very wealthy.’
‘That’s fortunate,’ she said. ‘Your legal bills will be quite high.’
‘I’m not trying to bribe you.’
‘I should hope not. That’s a very serious offence.’ She then said matter-of-factly, ‘I want to know where Niall Dunne has gone. If you tell me, I’ll let the prosecution know that you helped me find him.’
‘I can give you the address of his flat here—’
‘I’ve already sent officers there. Tell me some other places he might go to.’
‘Yes . . . I’m sure I can think