Deon Meyer Read Online Free

the elections. They brought him back to help… . The integration of the intelligence services was difficult. We had two, three branches, and the apartheid regime had even more. The people wouldn’t work together. They covered up and lied and competed with one another. It was costing a lot more money than they made provision for. They had to consolidate. Create some order. The only way was to split everything up into projects, to compartmentalize. So they put him in charge of the project to combine all the computer records. It was almost impossible, there was so much: the stuff at Infoplan in Pretoria alone would take years to process, not to mention the regime’s weapons manufacturers like Denel and the Security Police and the Secret Service, Military Intelligence, and the ANC’s systems in Lusaka and London, four hundred, five hundred gigabytes of information, anything from personal information on the public to weapons systems to informants and double agents. He had to handle it all, erase the stuff that could cause trouble and save the useful material, create a central, uniform, single platform database. He … I kept house for him during that time, my mother was sick. He said it upset him so much, the information on the systems. …”
     
     
She was quiet for a while, then opened her big black leather handbag and took out a tissue as if to prepare herself.
     
     
“He said there were some strange orders, things that Mandela and Defence Minister Nzo would not approve, and he was worried. He didn’t know what to do, at first. Then he decided to make backups of some of the material. He was scared, Mr. Mpayipheli, those were such chaotic times, you understand. There was so much insecurity and people trying to block him and some trying to save their careers and others trying to make theirs. ANCs and whites, both sides of the fence. So he brought some stuff home, data, on hard drives. Sometimes he worked through the night on it. I kept out of it. I suspect he …”
     
     
She dabbed at her nose with the tissue.
     
     
“I don’t know what was on the drives and I don’t know what he meant to do with it. But it looks as if he never handed it in. It looks as if he is trying to sell the data. And then they phoned me and I lied because—”
     
     
“Selling it?”
     
     
“I …”
     
     
“To whom?”
     
     
“I don’t know.” There was despair in her voice, whether for the deed or her father, he couldn’t say.
     
     
“Why?”
     
     
“Why did he try to sell it? I don’t know.”
     
     
He raised his eyebrows.
     
     
“They pushed him out. After the project. Said he should go on pension. I don’t think he wanted that. He wasn’t ready for that.”
     
     
He shook his head. There had to be more to it.
     
     
“Mr. Mpayipheli, I don’t know why he did it. Since my mother died … I was living with him but I had my own life, I think he got lonely. I don’t know what goes on in an old man’s head when he sits at home all day and reads the white men’s newspapers. This man who played such a major role in the Struggle, pushed aside now. This man who was once a player. He was respected, in Europe. He was somebody and now he is nothing. Maybe he wanted, just one more time, to be a player again. I was aware of his bitterness. And weariness. But I didn’t think … Perhaps … to be noticed? I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
     
     
“The information. Did he say what was so upsetting?”
     
     
She shifted uneasily in the chair; her eyes slid away from his. “No. Just that there were terrible things… .”
     
     
“How terrible?”
     
     
She just looked at him.
     
     
“Now what?” he asked.
     
     
“They phoned. From Lusaka, I think. They have some hard drives, but that is not what they want. I had to get another drive from my father’s safe.”
     
     
He looked her in the eye. This was it.
     
     
“In seventy-two hours I must deliver another hard drive in Lusaka. That’s all the time they gave me.”
     
     
“Not a lot of