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countries—for the whites. But generations of ruthless oppression had caught up with them. Economic development had compelled them to bring more blacks into the cities, to pay them higher wages, to train them. And now the blacks were no longer willing to play the proletariat; they wanted a greater share of the wealth.
    Pretoria’s intransigence in the face of this demand had isolated the country. An economic and financial boycott had crippled South African industry and threatened the basis of that comfortable world the whites so much wanted to keep.
    The only exception was gold. Nobody boycotted gold. Middlemen with massive sources of finance bought and sold gold regardless of political resolutions or financial withdrawal. There was no right or wrong, moral or ethical, when it came to the dull yellow metal yielded by the bowels of the Rand.
    So now gold was everything for South Africa. It alone could finance the premium prices for the clandestine imports desperately needed to maintain a skeletal industry and basic consumer requirements.
    Du Plessis was not a fanatic. Trim, with thinning hair, wire-rimmed glasses suiting his bureaucratic mien, and a Huguenot chin, the veteran number-two had been a familiar and widely respected figure in international financial circles. Before South Africa suspended its debt payments in 1985 and then imposed martial law, he had been invited regularly to business conferences, a peer discussing the course of world finance. But he was also an Afrikaner. The time for debates, for equivocation, was past.
    If that meant dealing now with the Soviet Union, this is what he would do. White South Africans had little choice. The existence that gave Afrikaners their identity was imperiled. For decades, they had dutifully discharged the geopolitical role assigned to them—guarding the strategic sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope and forming a bulwark against communism in the African subcontinent. And now they had been abandoned. Washington had yielded to short-term political pressures and undermined their very existence.
    A black girl brought in a tray with tea: British influence even in this Afrikaner stronghold, thought Abrassimov fleetingly.
    South Africa was the world’s largest producer of gold, and the Soviet Union the second largest. Soviet production trailed South Africa’s considerably, but not as considerably as Western experts thought. New discoveries in the Siberian tundra had been kept quiet, as well as the new mining technologies that enabled them to exploit the rich ore. For years the Soviets had stockpiled a sizable portion of their production, borrowing on the over-liquid Western financial markets instead of selling their gold at depressed prices. The West’s successful fight against inflation had halted the flight into gold, and the price stagnated at less than half the peak it reached after the oil shocks.
    The news of the terrorist strike in South Africa had changed all that overnight, reflected the deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank, the foreign trade bank of the Soviet Union. Now they could feed their stockpiles of gold to the panic-stricken market at triple yesterday’s price. He had come to discuss with du Plessis how long this price would hold.
    The improved situation gave him a deep secret satisfaction. He had been through a torturous hell for eighteen months after a crooked British trader at the Soviet bank in Zurich had defrauded the bank of millions on the gold futures market. The losses had wiped out the bank’s capital and forced Vnesheconombank to take over the unit, transforming it into a branch. Abrassimov’s career, and, he suspected, his life, had been on the line when he went to Zurich to sort out the mess. The Zurich manager had committed suicide. But now Abrassimov was going to claw back some satisfaction from those markets.
    As the two men talked in the first-floor office, Michael Mijosa crept from flowerbed to flowerbed along the driveway, digging up weeds