I thought hard for some moments. ‘If we are right about Tsenong, then he’s a major find, and he could lead us straight to the lion’s den. But if he gets the slightest bit of wind up, you can be sure he’ll just lead us up blind alleys. He’s evidently working with a substantial team of accomplices and we don’t know who they are beyond Horace Whalley and a man called Cleary who doesn’t appear to exist. They could be anyone in the nuclear energy industry, at any level. If we start asking questions about where Tsenong has visited, word undoubtedly will get back to him. For the time being, we can trust no one in the nuclear energy industry. We can’t tap Tsenong’s phone, because he hasn’t got one. We’ll bug his room with a micro-video camera, and put a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him, but they will have to keep their distance – which won’t make their task easy. We cannot risk his blowing us.’

Arthur nodded in agreement. ‘Someone ought to go to Africa and have a chat with a Namibian or two.’

‘I have a source through which I might be able to get some introductions out there,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’ He smiled. ‘Not unconnected with a certain lady friend?’

‘Possibly not,’ I grinned.

‘Well, why not?’ said Arthur. ‘At least you’ll get some warm weather.’

Chapter 18

18

Arthur wasn’t wrong about the warm weather; I could feel it through the walls of the Trident as we taxied along the runway at Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. With the country sandwiched between two deserts and straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, it wasn’t surprising that it was hot.

Namibia, or South West Africa, is approximately the size of England and France combined, and has a population of between 900,000 and 1,500,000 depending on whom you talk to. It is bounded, on the north, east and south by Angola, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa, and on the west by eight hundred miles of shipwrecks, shifting sands and buried diamonds.

Like a great many other countries in the world, it had got along quite happily since time began without the assistance of the white man. When white men finally got there, in the late nineteenth century, they consisted not of wise people bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh but of Trek-Boers who were tired, hot and extremely smelly. In 1885, by the Treaty of Berlin, Germany annexed South West Africa, and treated it to its first Governor, one Heinrich Göring. During the next twenty-five years, Göring proceeded to butcher seventy-five per cent of the black population, and produced a son, Hermann, who inherited his talent for genocide, and was given plenty of opportunity to exercise this talent a few decades later in the guise of Air Minister to Hitler.