Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [83]
‘There’s plenty of other work,’ Theron said.
Hydt was amused by his sense of morality.
Another half-dozen pictures rolled from the printer. The last few showed a large field from which protruded bones and partial bodies with desiccated skin.
Hydt showed the pictures to Dunne. ‘What do you think?’ He turned to Theron. ‘Niall is an engineer.’
The Irishman studied them for a few minutes. ‘The graves look shallow. It’s easy to get the bodies out. The trick is to cover up the fact that they were there in the first place. Depending on how long they’ve been in the ground, once we remove them there’d be measurable differences in the soil temperature. That lasts for many months. It’s detectable with the right equipment.’
‘Months?’ Theron asked, frowning. ‘I had no idea.’ He glanced at Dunne, then said to Hydt, ‘He’s good.’
‘I call him the man who thinks of everything.’
Dunne said thoughtfully, ‘Fast-growing vegetation could work. And there are some sprays that will eliminate DNA residue too. There’s a lot to consider but nothing seems impossible.’
The technical issues fell away and Hydt focused again on the images. ‘May I keep these?’
‘Of course. Do you want digital copies too? They’d be sharper.’
Hydt gave him a smile. ‘Thank you.’
Theron put them on a flash drive and handed it to Hydt, who looked at his watch. ‘I’d like to discuss this further. Are you free later?’
‘I can be.’
But Dunne was frowning. ‘You’re at the meeting this afternoon and there’s the fundraiser 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 emails 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 shanty town, 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. 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 recognised the abbreviation for the Lord’s Resistance Army – a group that any mercenary in Africa would have been familiar with. The operation