Prologue
A terrorist attack on a church in Cape Town in 1989 kills twenty people. Jannie de Villiers, a well-known liver transplant surgeon, narrowly avoids death, but is seriously wounded. The uproar over the killings by a radical black group hides the more sinister involvement of the apartheid government. Two weeks later while recovering at home, Jannie de Villiers is murdered .With too many inexplicable circumstances surrounding her husband’s death, Renata takes her four year old son Christian to live in Australia.
As Christian grows up, he becomes more and more interested in what his father might have been involved, in South Africa. He repeatedly researches the death of his father on the Internet, trying to find the reasons he might have been killed. There is little to satiate his curiosity until one day he discovers a blog site set up by an old anti-apartheid activist. The blog site claims that his father worked for the Bureau of State Security in the old apartheid government, which was implicated in atrocities against black and coloured population groups. Initially, Christian is devastated by the discovery, as the little that he had been able to read up to that point had all been positive about his father. He then becomes convinced that there is a mistake, and wants to return to South Africa to find out more about his father's work
His mother, Renata, is initially opposed to Christian returning to South Africa fearing that some of those who might have been involved in her husband’s death may threaten her son. Christian pleads with his mother and returns to Cape Town shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Unbeknown to him, his return to South Africa is monitored by the National Intelligence Agency and a white underground Afrikaner supremacist organisation. They both have knowledge of Christian’s father's genetic research on racial profiling and believe that he also had a folder containing highly sensitive material on chemical and germ warfare. Both organisations consider that Christian may have information, which will help them find his father’s folder with its racial research and highly embarrassing links to international governments.
Christian, when he arrives back in Cape Town, finds changes under the new post-Mandela South Africa; however, vestiges of the past are everywhere. While legal separation is no longer constitutionally enshrined, years of separation and brutality live on in attitudes, undermining trust and harmonious living. Friends of his father help Christian build a picture of what it was like for his father growing up in apartheid Africa. As he meets more and more people associated with his father, he begins to understand his father’s involvement with the previous government, and he realises that he is being watched by someone or by some unknown organisation.
Christian’s search for the truth about his father is then further complicated when he meets Isabella, the beautiful daughter of his father’s theatre scrub nurse. He falls in love with Isabella but is shattered when she turns out to be his half-sister. After much anguish and soul-searching, they determine to complete the journey of discovery together. Christian discovers his father’s research in an old folder buried in the garden of their house in Wynberg, after one of his father’s old friends delivers a cryptic note. Included in the folder is evidence of the apartheid South African government’s involvement in germ and chemical warfare programmes and the development of nuclear arms. Christian shares the contents of the folder with Isabella and it becomes increasingly apparent to them both that their father was heavily involved in and a trusted member of the apartheid government's President’s Council. A council so secret, they discover that it was answerable only to the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. The primary aim of the Council was to be able to use any means possible to preserve the white government in perpetuity.
Within the folder are also details of the apartheid government’s involvement in the development of nuclear weapons with Israel, and germ and chemical warfare programs with nations who were openly opposed to apartheid. They soon realise that the information has never been released, and understand that it has the potential to embarrass many governments who covertly supported the apartheid government. In a section which has his father's name at the top of it, Christian and Isabella find encrypted genetic research on racial groups, which his father had discovered during his research into the rejection of liver transplants. Christian recognises that the encryption has a code not dissimilar to code that he noticed on the back of a photograph of his mother and himself in Adelaide. He suggests to Isabella that if he can get his mother to find that code and send it to him, they may be able to decipher his father's research.
