I sat in one of the armchairs arranged in a cluster near the middle of the room; they looked like they might have been left that way after a meeting. Some kind of late-night brainstorming session … between Mosala, Helen Wu, and a few other colleagues? Whoever it was, I should have been there, filming. I was going to have to push harder for access, or Mosala would keep me at a distance to the end. But I was going to have to win her confidence somehow, or pushing would only get me shut out even more. Mosala clearly had no particular desire for publicity – let alone the desperate need of a politician or a hack. The only thing I could offer her was the chance to communicate her work.

De Groot remained standing, one hand on the back of a chair. I said, “So how did you get to meet her?”

“I answered an advertisement. I didn’t know Violet, personally, before I took the job.”

“You have a science background too, though?”

She smiled. “ Too. My background’s probably more like yours than like Violet’s – I have a degree in science and journalism.”

“Did you ever work as a journalist?”

“I was science correspondent for Proteus, for six years. The charming Mr. Savimbi is my successor.”

“I see.” I strained my ears; I could just make out Mosala in the adjoining room, still talking. I said quietly, “What Savimbi said on Monday, about death threats – was there anything in that?”

De Groot eyed me warily. “Don’t bring that up. Please. Do you really want to make everything as difficult as you possibly can for her?”

I protested, “No – but put yourself in my position. Would you ignore the whole issue? I don’t want to inflame the situation – but if some cultural purity group is issuing death sentences against Africa’s top scientists, don’t you think that’s worthy of serious discussion?”

De Groot said impatiently, “But they’re not. For a start, the Stockholm quote was picked up and mangled by a Volksfront netzine – running the bizarre line that Violet was saying that the Nobel wasn’t hers, wasn’t ‘Africa’s’, but really belonged to ‘white intellectual culture’ – for which she was only a politically expedient figurehead. That ‘story’ got taken up and echoed in other places – but nobody except the original audience would have believed for a second that it was anything but ludicrous propaganda. As for PACDF, they’ve never done so much as acknowledge Violet’s existence.”

“Okay. Then what made Savimbi leap to the wrong conclusion?”

De Groot glanced toward the doorway. “Garbled fifth hand reports.”

“Of what? Not just the netzine propaganda itself. He could hardly be that naïve.”

De Groot leaned toward me with an anguished expression, torn between discretion and the desire to set me straight. “She had a break-in. All right? A few weeks ago. A burglar. A teenage boy with a gun.”