There were two bartenders, both young men in white shirts. When DeLuca asked if the kitchen was still open, he was assured that it was, so he asked for a menu. He ordered chicken, only to be told that they were out of chicken. He tried the rock lobster, but they were out of that, too.
“What’s the special of the day?” he asked.
“Beefsteak,” the bartender said softly.
“I’ll have that, then,” he said.
“I am sorry, but we don’t have it,” the bartender apologized.
“Do you have any food at all?” DeLuca asked.
“No,” the man said.
“All right, then,” DeLuca said. “I’ll just have a Guinness. That’s a meal in a glass anyway.”
The bartender smiled.
DeLuca moved to a poker game in the corner of the room where six middle-aged men were playing Texas Hold ’Em, a large loose stack of paper Zudas in the middle of the table, next to a kerosene lantern, its wick turned up just to the point where it was starting to smoke. He stood behind an empty chair for a few minutes, watching. Finally a white-haired man in a black short-sleeved shirt spoke with a South African accent.
“If you’re waiting for an invitation, you’re not going to get one,” he said. “If you want to lose all your money to us, you must do so of your own free will—otherwise you’re going to think we’re taking advantage of you.”
“What’s the buy-in?” he asked.
“One million Zudas,” a second man said. “Which, I believe, is about one dollar and thirty-eight cents, American.”
“Pretty steep,” DeLuca said, sitting down. The man in the black shirt threw in his cards and offered DeLuca his hand to shake.
“Tom Kruger, Fox News,” the man said.
“Don Brown, World Bank,” DeLuca said, shaking his hand and giving him a dollar to change. Rather than count, the man simply grabbed a handful of bills and handed it to DeLuca.
“World Bank,” Kruger said, as if he were impressed. “That means you have deep pockets, Mr. Brown, because I happen to personally know that the World Bank has well over a jillion Zudas in its reserves, and I intend to win them.”
“Roddy Hamilton,” the dealer next to him said, offering DeLuca his hand. He had a British accent, in his early thirties, thin, with a long neck, big ears, close-cropped hair, and a prominent forehead. “London Times/Associated Press. And this is Robert, but don’t tell him anything because he’s a spy.”
The man he called Robert said nothing. He was slightly paunchy, slightly slouched, and listing to the left, dressed in a blue striped oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a navy vest, unbuttoned, the tie around his neck loosened and askew, his eyes watching the cards behind horn-rimmed glasses, in his late forties, but he seemed older, wearier, with good hair and more of it than he deserved, in DeLuca’s opinion.
“And don’t talk about women,” the man next to the CIA agent said with a German accent. He was about forty, with blond hair, and he wore wraparound black sunglasses. “He just got a ‘Dear Robert’ letter from his wife saying she was leaving him. And now the poor fellow is alone and overweight and he drinks too much and he’s stuck here in Baku Da’al in a career that is going nowhere. And he’s ugly.”
“Spoken with the depth of compassion you Germans are so justly known for,” Robert said. “Does Reuters actually pay you a salary, Kurt, or do they just expect you to loot and pillage to support yourself?”
The fifth player was the oldest, perhaps sixty, wearing purple plaid pants, a maroon and yellow rugby shirt, and a blue seersucker sport coat, his reading glasses dangling from a chain around his neck, large bushy eyebrows and gray hair swept back from his face. He was drinking sweet vermouth and lime from a large pilsner glass and appeared to be completely sloshed, his eyes glazed over but twinkling all the same.
“Elliot is with Connoisseur magazine,” Roddy Hamilton said. “Your fellow American. Doing a story on the wine industry of Liger, of which there will be nothing left by the time he’s polished off the national inventory.”
“Connoisseur?” DeLuca said. “Really?”
“Something of a mix-up,” Elliot said. “Some press junkets are better planned than others. You now know the five remaining white men in Baku. Our Arab friend here is Hassan bin-Adel, but don’t bother him—he has a hard time concentrating when he’s about to bluff.”
The sixth man looked up from his cards but didn’t say anything.
“He’s with Al Jazeera,” Elliot said. “Didn’t smoke or drink until he met us, but look at him now—one of the boys. We’re so proud of him.”
“You are the son of Satan and will die a thousand horrible deaths at the hands of the jihadi martyrs,” Hassan spat. “And by the way, Arabs never bluff. Are you going to deal the cards, Roddy, or are we going to simply chat the night away?”
Hamilton dealt. DeLuca folded a six-ten off-suited. The flop turned red queens and the seven of clubs.
“Any of you guys know a guy named Stephen Ackroyd?” he asked. “I met him in Port Ivory.”
A chuckle spread around the table.
“You met Grasshopper?” Hamilton said, betting one hundred thousand Zudas.
“Thank God he’s all right,” Kruger said, calling the bet. “I was afraid somebody would have made him into a casserole by now.”
“He’d be very tender, wouldn’t he?” Kurt said, licking his lips in a mocking fashion. He tossed his cards violently into the pot. “What do you say, Elliot—does your magazine have any good recipes for pretentious young writers?”
“Sucker tartare,” Elliot said, looking at his cards again before betting. “You really don’t want to overcook them, because they’re already half-baked.”
“Oh, good one,” Kruger said sarcastically. “Mr. Brown, we tease because we love. Mr. Ackroyd has the unfortunate habit of telling people they’re not doing their jobs, without ever having done one himself. I think he grew up with too much money.”
The turn was a ten of clubs, the river an ace. Hamilton won the pot with a full house, queens over aces.
“If you see him, tell him we miss him,” the German said. “Tell him we need him to give us more of his advice. Tell him this time we promise to fold our hands when he’s bluffing instead of calling him because we knew every time what he was doing. If you play cards with him, Mr. Brown, watch when he starts blinking his eyes rapidly. It means he’s lying.”
When DeLuca sat out a hand to get another beer from the bar, the man he knew only as Robert joined him, signaling to the bartender that he would pay for DeLuca’s beer and wanted one for himself.
“I hope you’re not staying long,” he said to DeLuca. “Not to sound unfriendly, but this place is a hellhole—I wouldn’t wish anybody to stay long. Bob Mohl.” He offered his hand. DeLuca shook it.
“A week at best,” he said. “I’ll be in and out, but we’re headquartering here. My associates are arranging for a car right now.”
“You have security?”
“We have travel papers,” DeLuca said.
“I hope they have pictures of Benjamin Franklin on the front,” Mohl said. “What sort of work will you be doing?”
“Land conservancy research,” DeLuca said. “Deforestation. With Conservation International.”
“Who’ve you got, handling your payouts inside the government?”
DeLuca shrugged.
“I’m sure the World Bank has people, but I might be able to recommend somebody if you’d like. I know a man who’ll know who to grease and won’t take anything off the top beyond what you pay him. That’s about all you can really hope for.”
“Are you really a spy?” DeLuca asked him. He wasn’t sure yet whether to tell Mohl that David Letterman went to his high school.
Mohl straightened up and gave a mock salute.
“Serving your espionage needs since the National Security Act of 1947.” He slouched again, leaning heavily against the bar. “Don’t listen to them. I’m just a lowly
Boeing executive trying to sell a few planes. I sold Burkina Faso the only two airplanes they owned, and then they hit each other. Just remember—in Liger, there’s no such thing as an NGO—nothing is nongovernment. Bo has a hand, or at least a finger, in everything. No banky, no panky.”
Mohl sipped his beer, staring thoughtfully for a moment at the candle burning on the bar.
“Too bad about the power shortage,” he said. “The air-conditioning doesn’t do a damn thing, but I miss the ceiling fans.”
“Were they teasing about your wife?” DeLuca asked.
“No, no they weren’t,” Mohl said with a weak smile. “But don’t worry—that’s been over for years. Are you married, Mr. Brown?”
DeLuca nodded.
“Happily?”
DeLuca nodded.
“You know what the secret to a happy marriage is?”
DeLuca shook his head. Robert Mohl leaned in, lowering his voice conspiratorially to a near-whisper.
“Don’t get drunk every night and don’t have affairs. And if she hits you, don’t hit her back. You follow those rules and you’ll be just fine.”
Chapter Seven
“NEW DEVELOPMENT,” THE VOICE ON DELUCA’S SATphone said. “Sorry to wake you. You’re not busy, are you?”
“How could I be busy at 5:00 A.M.?” DeLuca said. “I was having a helluva dream, though.”
“Mefloquine?” Phil LeDoux said.
“No doubt,” DeLuca said. “Sometimes I think I’d rather have the malaria.”
“No, you don’t,” LeDoux said, and DeLuca knew his friend was speaking from experience. “Anyway, back to real-life nightmares. Last night a chartered C-130J landed at Liger International containing seventy-two mercenaries, all of them white, about half South African and a quarter Russian and the rest a mix. The leadership is British. The top guy is Major Simon Bell, ex-SAS.”
“Is this Artemis Corp. or something different?”
“Something different,” LeDoux said.
“Okay,” DeLuca said. “What’s it to me?”
“It’s this,” LeDoux said. “Bo knew. He had his Presidential Guard meet the plane. The mercenaries are sitting in a hangar at the airfield, under heavy guard. Bell is being interrogated, but he’s not going to give anything up. I suspect he’s the only one who really knows what the mission was. Him and us.”
“We know?” DeLuca said.
“MI-6 surveillance,” LeDoux said.
“They briefed us?”
“Not exactly,” LeDoux said. “The mission was to take out Dari. Not that we’re necessarily opposed. The sponsor is WAOC. The broker is a guy named Hugh Lloyd. He chartered the Hercules. MI-6 has their panties in a twist. Guess why?”
“I’ll take a stab and say Hugh Lloyd is related to somebody,” DeLuca said.
“Good instincts,” LeDoux said. “His father is Alistair Lloyd, former MP and the current PM’s chief advisor.”
“Again, what’s it to me?” DeLuca said. “Or to us, I should say.”
“Nothing, a week from now,” LeDoux said. “Until then, everything. Liberty barely has the appearance of a coalition. We have the British, the Poles, and Spain, for now, and only the British are sending ground troops. Hugh Lloyd apparently hasn’t spoken to his father in twenty years, but the blood connection still pairs English interests with big oil, since the old man is so close to Blair. If this breaks in the media, we could lose British support. We don’t want that, any more than we want MI-6 to know we’ve been hacking their SIGINT. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of assets in country right now to keep their ears open. We don’t expect you to be able to keep this down, but we’d like to know it’s going to explode, a few minutes before it explodes, if that’s possible.”
DeLuca considered a moment.
“Maybe I’m being completely dense,” he said, “but I’m still not quite sure why you’re telling me. Why not tell CIA? Wait a minute. I get it. MI-6 is hacking Langley.”
“We could go there,” LeDoux said, “but we have better things to do, don’t we? If we’re lucky, our seventy-two mercenary friends sit in their hangar playing Twister, Simon Bell is released, or somebody pays Daniel Bo a few million pounds to let them go, they get back on the plane, and nobody’s ever the wiser. If we’re not lucky, it blows up, the Brits pull out, and John Dari and his friends have even more reasons to kill white people. I’ve got a meeting with Hans Berger in twenty minutes and I’m going to ask him what’s going on. He may or may not tell me.”
“You could always dangle him from a helicopter,” DeLuca suggested.
“It didn’t stop you, did it?” LeDoux said. “There’s one other reason to let you know. You knew that Evelyn Warner, your old friend, is working in Liger?”
“I’d heard that,” DeLuca said. “I wasn’t making any plans to see her.”
“Well, if you do, you should know that Hugh Lloyd, Lord Lloyd, was her first husband. First and only. That might be something you could use. Obviously, she’s media, so if she has any contact with her ex—did they have children, do you know?”
“She never mentioned any. I doubt it. Thanks for the heads-up,” DeLuca said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, if I’m lucky, I still have enough mefloquine in my system for one last bad dream before my real day starts.”
He closed his eyes, but when sleep wouldn’t come, he turned on his CIM and used his satellite uplink to log onto the Internet, where he found an e-mail from Walter Ford waiting for him.
David,
Greetings and salutations. The boys at Doyles were asking about you. Sami says hello as well and to call him when you get back, but not before then.
A couple things. I Googled “Stephen Ackroyd” (also “Steven Ackroyd”) and got nothing. There’s a guy by that name in Alaska studying waterfowl, but I don’t think that’s who you mean. If this guy’s a writer, I can’t find anything he’s published, but maybe he means literary quarterlies and that sort of thing. Not everything is online. Sorry.
Also, see attached or go to www.transparency.org (or www.globalsecurity.org) for the latest on corruption in Liger. I know you don’t have time to download, so in brief (forgive repetitions from previous e-mail), it started before the current President Bo and before his father (British colonial), but kicked into high gear in the late sixties when oil was discovered—the linkage between WAOC members and various ministries is profound/historical. WAOC was basically founded to coordinate the bribes the oil companies had to pay to everybody from the oil minister to Education to Transportation to commissioner of national parks fees/ licenses/inspectors/special taxes, etc. Liger, Norway, and UK were the only countries that stood by U.S. during the first oil crisis in the early seventies and Liger essentially helped break OPEC’s back. In return, gratitude, etc., we sold them weapons—nothing new about that, long history there of countries trading guns for whatever Africa has to offer. Estimates say $3-4 per barrel goes into Bo’s pockets or trickles down from there, and maybe 100,000 barrels a day goes missing entirely. Transparency International estimates Bo has a personal fortune of maybe $65 billion in Swiss accounts. That’s not a typo—billion with a “B.”
Some thought he was cooking the goose that laid the golden eggs before they hatched, so to speak, when he talked about nationalizing the oil industry. Two schools of thought on that—one, he’s bluffing to extort higher kickbacks, after a huge new find of oil in the northeast, Kum territory (estimated 12 mil. bpd ¥ 50 yr. once exploited or 219 billion barrels). The find is officially just a rumor, but the people at TI say it’s for real. The bluff is that Liger doesn’t have the infrastructure or the human knowhow to run their own oil industry, and the U.S. can’t afford the dip in production that would occur while they got up to speed, were they to attempt it. The second thought, however, and the big fear, is that Liger might not have the know-how but IPAB does—Arabs know plenty about oil. Would Bo bring in IPAB? Right now, they’re coming whether he wants them or not, and he’s a survivor who is likely to cut a deal. Either
way, it’s something up with which WAOC cannot put.
Thought you’d be interested. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Walter
When Dan Sykes knocked on the door to the penthouse suite at the Port Ivory Hilton, he expected to be met by a large entourage. A contingent of soldiers had been waiting downstairs and in the lobby, and he’d assumed they were there to escort the actress, but he’d supposed there would be others, stylists and hairdressers and such. He was surprised when she answered the door herself.
“Who are you?” she asked him.
“Dan Sykes,” he said. “Blackwood Security. I think you’ve been expecting me.”
She stared at him. She was easily the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in his life.
“I’m with Blackwood Security,” he repeated, reaching for his ID. “They sent me.”
She scrutinized his identification.
“Who’s ‘they’?” she asked.
“The people insuring your next picture, I believe,” he said. “Apparently they’re going to feel better if I’m here.”
“No one told me anything,” she said. “I have thirty government soldiers traveling with me. Why do I need more security?”
“Because thirty-one is better than thirty,” Sykes said. “Plus I speak English.”
“I would prefer to have a black head of security,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Sykes. My father was white. I’m thinking only of the political climate in this country. I’m simply trying to do everything possible to make certain that I accomplish what I came here for.”
“I understand,” he said. “And I am here to help you. You’re free, of course, to hire somebody else, but I don’t know who you’re going to get, given, as you put it, the political climate. I have a sixth-degree black belt in karate and I’m certified on anything from a pocketknife to an M-4.”
Mission Liberty Page 10
