He liked what he had seen. What he did not like was the order that the timing of the attack should be for the lunch hour. There had been a fierce argument between those who would carry the bomb and those who gave order for its use. Those who gave the order had said they wanted only damage to the buildings, not casualties. Those who carried the bomb had insisted on damage to the buildings and also to the Whites who were the apparatus of the state and the Blacks who were the accomplices of the state, The compromise had been the lunch hour… He led up the path between the lawns. His right forefinger rested on the switch inside the duffel bag, when he pressed the switch they had half a minute. The two doors were open. The lunch hour, so they said, was the likeliest chance that the lobby of the court would be empty.

The country boy thought it was a wrong decision. A heavy wooden bench was placed across the doorway leaving only a small entrance through which the court's visitors could be filtered by the police when the adjournment was over, when the friends and relations of the accused would be admitted.

On the first floor judges were clustered round the table in the chamber of the most senior of them, talking not of law but of bloodstock form. In the Whites' canteen, waitress service, barristers briefed by the state sat with their poorer Pro Deo colleagues who would make the defence case, seldom successfully, for their clients, and chewed over disinvestment and the slide of the rand and the collapse of residential property prices. In the basement cells a White businessman charged with fraudulent conversion ate the fried chicken sent in by his mistress, and in their separate cells there were Blacks who squatted against the cold concrete walls and bowed their heads over bowls of porridge.

The country boy was on the the bottom step. The doorway yawned in front of him. His finger was rigid on the switch.

They were panting behind him. He pressed the switch.