Cutting Edge (2002)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 06

  Megan quickly shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “No insights.”

  “You’re sure? I can’t shake this hunch that something or someone helped coax them along . . .”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” she said.

  “Oh,” Gordian said. “Because I know you’re about as close to Pete as anyone. Besides Annie, naturally. And that you’ve become very friendly with her since Antarctica . . .”

  “I was too busy with my responsibilities as chief administrator to put on a second hat.”

  “Second hat?”

  “As in social director.”

  “Oh,” Gordian said.

  “Or matchmaker, if that’s what you’re suggesting . . .”

  “Then it was long-time-no-see, I love you for the two of them?”

  Megan shrugged.

  “I suppose,” she said.

  Gordian shot her another glance. “That sounds very un-Nimecian, so to speak.”

  “Like I said, you never can tell.” She shrugged again. “I’d better get back to my office, there’s a ton of paperwork that’s been waiting since Friday.”

  Gordian nodded, watching Megan rise from the chair opposite him.

  “However their match got made, whoever may or may not have given it a kick start,” he said, “it’s wonderful to see Pete and Annie happy.”

  Megan paused in front of Gordian’s desk, a dark mahogany affair roughly the size of a fifteenth-century Spanish war galleon.

  “Yes,” she said, struggling against an insistent grin. “It really is, isn’t it?”

  Port-Gentil sits on the low-lying Ile de Mandji finger peninsula of Gabon amid estuarine swamps and deltas that swell to flood levels in the rainy season, the drainage channels describing its neighborhoods joined by small bridges that are more pleasantly—and safely—crossed on foot than in one of the city’s speeding, careening taxis.

  No such bridges span the social divisions between district borders. In the fringe neighborhoods of Salsa and Sans there is unemployment and periodic lawlessness. Street crime may be scurrying or savage as opportunity bids, the hustle alternating with the gun.

  Downtown in elegant colonial homes, ears sensitive to mannered conversation are deaf to far-off sounds of crime and looting in the night. Was that a crash of breaking storefront glass beyond the canal? A woman’s pitched scream? Ce n’est rien, leave it to the gendarmerie! Instead, enjoy the gentle clink of the champagne flute, the cognac snifter. This is where the magnates and government officials thrive—an upper stratum of wealthy, educated functionairres molded and hardened over a century ago, when Gabon was the capitol of French Equatorial Africa. This, too, is home to the expatriates: bankers, investors, industrialists, and technical engineers drawn by the country’s oil and precious mineral reserves.

  Their nights are calm and long in comforts, their days busy and filled with enterprise.

  The man in the panama hat and white tropical-weight suit had found Port-Gentil a good place to settle. Here he had eluded his enemies and was able to move with freedom, delving into currents where he could satisfy his innate drive to achieve and attain. When not aboard the Chimera attending to his dark occupations, he liked to stroll the city’s conspicuously miscellaneous districts and take in their skewed contrasts: mosque and casino, skull cap and pomade, luxury hotel and hovel, sidewalk café and fetish market. Often he stopped outside the large church where worshipers raised their voices in a fusion of Christian hymns and animistic chants, hedging their bets by musically praising Christ as they recalled ancient initiations to the Cult of Fire.

  The market was among his favorite spots, a crowd of outdoor stalls lined up in aisles in a section of town called Le Grand Village.

  Today there had been a bad moment during his walk. The blazing dry-season heat took his mind back to Bolivia, and the time he had turned his face to the sun and burned away his rage, feeling the layers of skin redden and blister in its searing exposure. Such flashes of that memory were exceptional for him. He had suffered the annealing pain, scoured the leftover contaminants of defeat from within himself, and gone forward with things. But the disappointing news from America had caused the past to seep into his mind lately, and for those few seconds it had found a particularly deep route of entry. At the Beacon District sidewalk stand where he had stopped for pain beurre and coffee, he paid the vender his coins and left the breakfast sitting on his cart. The African street had faded around him and he was again on the veranda of his Chapare ranch house, his dull-eyed, placidly stupid heifers grazing in the distance. And his face was on fire in the sun.

  Then his brief opening to the recollection shut tight, and it was Bolivia that evaporated from thought. He had continued to the market for the item he wished to pick up before calling on his governmental contact at city hall.

  Once there he had gone directly to a merchant of charms and ritual medicines known among the circumspect for his choice stock, transported from around the continent in defiance of endangered species and antiquities laws that intimidated others—all of it stored in barrels, baskets, cartons, crates, burlap sacks, even rusted cans arranged beneath his stall’s straw canopy. He trafficked in back-room merchandise while lacking a back room, pawned smuggled hides and relics with his left hand, and common medicinal powders and charms with his right . . . sometimes shuffling items from one hand to the other.

  That this merchant was an ace of the swindle just gave bargaining with him a crisp edge. His combination of guile and brazenness merited appreciation and kept the man in the white suit’s own cunning instincts honed.

  The dealer sat in his simple kaftan behind a wide display board mounted on loose foundation stones, and cluttered with animal skulls, horns, and hooves. Carved wooden masks hung from one of the thick canopy poles, bunches of desiccated lizard and mammal cadavers from another.

  He acknowledged his customer with a quick smile of recognition.

  “Je suis heureux de vous voir.”

  “Merci, vous êtes trè‘s aimiable.”

  Their polite exchange of greetings out of the way, the man in the white suit had been specific about what he wanted to acquire, and the merchant was quick to declare he could provide it. Indeed, the desired commodity was not, strictly speaking, black market; legalities only discouraged the practice by which it was obtained and put it in short supply. He had turned from his display board, knelt on his haunches, and then begun moving and shifting the containers, taking occasional furtive glances over his shoulders at passersby. The man in the white suit kept an observant eye on him. Soon the merchant located the carton he’d been seeking, unfolded its flaps, pulled a coffee can from inside, took off the can’s plastic lid, and extracted a sealed plastic bag that had been folded double and packed in sawdust.

  He blew bits of shaved wood off the bag as he got back to his feet and returned to his customer.

  “It is in here,” he said. “Forty years old, maybe older. There aren’t many to be found these days. It is valued by collectors—”

  The man in the white suit had stared him into silence.

  “I am not a collector,” he said and held out his hand. “You will vouch for its place of origin?”

  “The highlands in western Kenya, near Lake Victoria.”

  “I see. It is Gusii, then.”

  “Yes. From a warlord, I am told.”

  “By who?”

  “The omobari omotwe himself,” the merchant said. “He still lives to curse those Red Cross and missionary doctors who stole his patients.”

  The man in the white suit had taken the bag, opened it, removed the article inside with his thumb and forefinger, and given it a careful inspection. The shape, feel, and coloration were right; after a few minutes he’d been convinced it was authentic.

  “Tell me your price,” he said, and slipped it back into the bag.

  He had paid what the merchant asked without dickering and left the market for his appointment downtown.

  Etienne B
egela’s title was Minister of Economic Development, and his office was on the fifth floor of town hall, a building of tall colonnades and marble walls that reflected the august sensibilities of the French governors for whom it was originally built. The man in the white suit had announced himself at the main security desk and waited less than a minute before the guard who phoned upstairs motioned him toward the elevator.

  Now he took the short ride up, walked through a hall in profound need of air-conditioning, and turned a bend. A young woman approached, rushing toward the car from which he had just emerged—Begela’s aide. Her gaze averted, she nodded her head in acknowledgment as she swept past him.

  He returned the minor courtesy, sensing her nervousness.

  Another turn of a corner and he saw Begela at his door, leaning out into the corridor.

  “Mr. Fáton,” the minister said. “Bonjour, do come in—”

  The man in the white suit disdained physical contact, but allowed for local custom and shook Begela’s extended hand. The Gabonese were demonstrative in their airs, offering the firm grip and steady eye as they connived.

  As he entered Begela’s office, Fáton noticed a cup of steaming coffee and an open records file on the aide’s unoccupied desk. Not to his surprise, she had been hastily dismissed.

  Begela showed Fáton through to his inner office, pulling its door closed behind them. Fáton had seen the room before, a typical high-ranking bureaucrat’s sanctuary, its walls fortified with certificates of education and accolade, photographs of Begela posed alongside his ministerial cohorts, a flagpole in the corner—in this instance brandishing the green, yellow, and blue national stripes.

  Begela gestured toward his desk with a sweeping wave of his arm.

  “Please, please have a seat,” he said, his too-loud voice another example of that nettlesome overexpressiveness. “I know why you’ve come, but let me reassure you that I did my best in Libreville.”

  “Your best?” Fáton lowered himself into a chair, removed his hat, and watched the minister round the desk to sit opposite him. “It seems, Etienne, that the unwanted newcomers face no greater problem than to choose their lodgings before arrival. Are you going to tell me that is all I was to expect from you? After listening to your pledges? After what I have spent?”

  The minister looked at him. His skin was chestnut brown, his face a long oval. With its flat cheeks and narrow eyes under high, arched brows, it seemed an animated version of a Congolese mask Fáton had once purchased for himself at the fetish market.

  “I’ve kept my promise,” Begela said. “Nothing in life is certain, and in the capitol this is particularly true. Some members of the National Assembly have been swayed by UpLink’s—”

  Fáton’s hissing expulsion of breath instantly silenced him.

  “Watch your words,” he said. “That name is vile to my ears, and its mention further erodes my confidence in you. Only a fool would think this cubbyhole secure as we sit here.”

  Begela opened his mouth, closed it.

  “Monsieur Fáton, I share your disappointment with the results of my trip,” he said at last. “My ties to factions within the assembly have tilted the balance of important decisions affecting Port-Gentil in the past, and I was frankly convinced they would do so again in this instance. It was indicated to me that your, shall we say, financial incentives, would be the glue for a political coalition that could block the Americans from finalizing arrangements with my government. But in the end the assemblymen who signaled they would act in your—our—favor backed down. As did a fellow minister in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications . . . someone with whom I have a clan affiliation and whose promises are normally trustworthy. No offer was enough. The president and prime minister are adamant about welcoming those we wish to keep out. They control the ruling party, and the party holds more than half the assembly’s hundred and twenty seats. And, needless to say, the assembly controls the OPT.”

  “Ah,” Fáton said. “And what am I to take from this lesson in Gabonese civics? Other than further evidence that your prating assertions of influence meant nothing. That you failed me.”

  Begela shook his head in denial.

  “It may be true we cannot keep the Americans out of this city at present,” he said. “Their future is anything but inevitable, however. Port-Gentil is many kilometers from Libreville. And I have recourse to ways of making their time here most unpleasant.”

  Fáton traced a finger around the brim of the panama hat on his lap.

  “If by that you mean your pathetic assortment of greased gendarmes, technicals, and militiamen, then you are once again exaggerating your reach,” he said.

  Begela continued shaking his head, his hands on the arms of his chair. “With utmost respect, I think I know something about my own people—”

  “Perhaps so, Etienne. But you know nothing of the enemy’s strength,” Fáton said. “I cannot afford another fumble . . . which brings me to the reason for this call.” He paused, his eyes on Begela’s. “I’ve picked up a gift. A piece of history that I hope will benefit you. Help you avoid similar misjudgments from this point onward.”

  Fáton reached into an inner jacket pocket for the plastic bag he’d brought from the fetish market, removed what was inside, and leaned forward to set it down on the desk.

  The minister’s high, curved eyebrows became more pronouncedly elevated. A bleached white color, the object was a smooth, not quite flat disk perhaps four inches in circumference.

  “What is this?” he said, drawing back with an involuntary start.

  Fáton kept his gaze on the minister.

  “Come now,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to tell a man of your erudition and deep cultural roots.”

  Begela shuddered a little. He was taking in quick snatches of air, as though short of breath.

  “C’est un rondelle,” he said.

  “There you go,” Fáton said. “My source assures me it was taken from the skull of a Gusii chieftain. I cannot offer independent verification, but that’s of trivial consequence with something of this rarity. As you can see, it is close to a perfect circle. I also think it worth appreciating the even, regular scrape marks around its edges, where the cranial hole was made. All in all, a beautiful specimen. One that would have required an expert bit of filing and scraping with the omobari’s knife.”

  Begela stared at the object, his hands still gripping the arms of his chair.

  “Why?” he said. “Why do you come here with such a thing—?”

  “I shall not repeat myself,” Fáton said. “Surely you know that a patient would be trephined to rid him of demons believed to have lodged within his skull. Similar practices were used in medieval France when surgeons looked to remove pierres de tête—stones of madness—from the brains of idiots and the delusionally insane.” A thin smile touched his mouth. “I don’t know if any were ever found, Etienne. But your people are enamored of French tradition, yes?”

  The minister sat in silence. Beads of sweat had gathered in the depression above his upper lip.

  “Take it,” Fáton said. “Carry it as a talisman around your neck, or in a pocket over your heart. How you wear it is not my concern . . . just so long as it stays on your person.” He continued to smile faintly. “May it guard your head against poisonous thoughts, and serve as a reminder of what can happen to a man who succumbs to them.”

  Begela looked at him. Then he slowly lifted a hand off his chair, reached toward the desk, and closed his fingers around the rondelle.

  “What should I do next?” he said in a dry rasp. “About the Americans . . .”

  “You needn’t do anything for the moment—but I appreciate the fact that you’ve asked. It already signifies a new mental clarity.” Fáton rose and put on his hat. “Between us, I’ve planned an intense study of the enemy that should determine our tactics against him in coming days. Find what he treasures most, and you’ve identified his greatest vulnerability. Take it from him, and you hold the key to hi
s defeat and destruction. It is a simple doctrine that can prove complicated in execution . . . but a game without challenge is hardly worth playing, don’t you agree?”

  The minister had lowered his eyes onto the back of his own clenched, trembling hand.

  “Quite so,” he said.

  Fáton stood before the minister’s desk, his smile growing until it showed a row of small, even teeth.

  “I’m glad we agree,” he said in an indulgent tone. “It seems to me we’ve made progress here today. And progress, Etienne, is always a delightful lift.”

  The adoption center was at the end of a long dirt and gravel drive that led off the coiling two-lane blacktop between Pescadero Creek County Park and Portola State Park, a short fork in the road to the southwest. Julia Gordian considered herself fairly adept at following directions, but because the sign marking the drive was obscured by a thick outgrowth of oak and fir, she had missed it at first and had driven twenty minutes past her destination to the Pescadero Creek Park entrance. There a helpful ranger at the admissions gate had steered her back around, advising her to stay on the lookout for a PG&E roadside utility station about an eighth of a mile before the unpaved turnoff.

  The utility station was nothing more than a green metal shed with a concrete apron that almost blended into the woods to the right, and Julia spotted it only at the last instant. But soon afterward she’d seen the sign with the wood-burned depiction of a greyhound on a rustic post amid the trees. She had swung her brand new Honda Passport onto the mostly uphill drive, muttering a stream of obscenities at the pebbles spitting up from under the vehicle’s tires to pop and rattle against its windows, and sparing some choice words for the jutting branches on either side as they raked across its shiny silver finish.

  Julia drove slowly along. She had just strung together a phrase pairing synonyms for the excretory functions of various farm animals and a particularly objectionable sex act between human family members, when two buildings came into sight ahead of her—a small frame house with a neat lawn to her left and a flat-roofed prefabricated aluminum structure some yards beyond it. There were five greyhounds cavorting in a large pen behind the house. Two of them were fawn colored, two were roans, and the odd dog out was a tawny brindle. It hardly surprised Julia that none of the greyhounds were gray.