“What he means,” interrupted Everest Orhii, “is that GRA paid him plenty to allow them secret access to explore deep waters south of the fields Isle de Foree was supposed to share with Nigeria.”
“There was no connection,” Menezes retorted disdainfully. “No Nigerian rights.”
“The geology is incontrovertible. It’s the same patch.”
“The geology is as clear as the history and our sovereignty. They are our waters and our sea bottom. Not Nigeria’s!”
“It would never stand up in court.”
“It doesn’t have to, now.”
“You ripped us off.”
Janson laid a big hand on each man’s arm and said, “Gentlemen, what do the initials ‘GRA’ stand for?”
“Ground Resource Access,” answered Menezes. “I believe.”
“Believe?” snorted Everest Orhii. “You must know who gave you all that money.”
“Their business cards read: ‘Ground Resource Access.’ I never found it listed on any exchange, however, or in any professional society.”
“Ground Resource Access?” Days earlier Janson had listened to Kingsman Helms say, “The problem with the supply side of oil is a problem of accessing the resources in the ground.” Coincidence? But, as Janson had told Helms, he had heard it from other oilmen. Common nomenclature.
“Was it an American company?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Were the people you dealt with American?” he asked patiently.
“The man who called on me appeared to be American.”
“What did he look like?”
“Rather like you. Fit, like a former soldier.”
“Could he have been a soldier?” asked Janson, thinking perhaps GRA was a front company for a U.S. covert service.
Menezes shrugged.
“Do you recall whether his card read ‘Limited’ or ‘Incorporated’?”
“ ‘Inc.’ He was American. No doubt about that.”
“And when was this?”
“Four years ago.”
Someone was taking the long view of Kingsman Helms’s assertion that “a purely logistic problem becomes a political problem when governments claim access.”
Mimi returned. Janson gave her a shadow of a nod. Time to move along. He had learned all he could here. CatsPaw’s freelancers could research the name.
“Finish your breakfast, my friends,” said Mimi. “Thank you so much for coming.”
In minutes she had them firmly out the door. “They weren’t much help, were they?”
“Every bit helps. Thank you.” He glanced at his watch.
“Don’t rush off,” said Mimi.
“I have a full schedule.”
“But I have another guest for you.”
“Who?”
“An angry policeman.”
Janson stifled the impulse to leave. Mimi was gaming him, but with a smile that suggested she had something special in mind. “What do you mean?”
“He is a Frenchman. He held a very high position in security. He ran afoul of the French president, who was not known for treating his officers kindly. He was demoted, unfairly.”
“Are you thinking he knows something about Sécurite Referral?”
“No— I mean for all I know he might, but that’s not why I telephoned him.”
“Then what?”
“Guess where he held his high-security post?”
“Princess!”
“Corsica.”
Janson smiled back at her beaming face. “Bless you, Mimi.”
“He’ll be here in an hour. Would you like a shower or something? You’ve been on a plane all night.”
“A shower would be terrific.”
* * *
DOMINIQUE ONDINE HAD served most of his career on the island of Corsica, a French province, where he had battled national separatists, Union Corse mafia, and the contentious clans that warred over slights, insults, and long-simmering feuds. He was a pale-skinned man who appeared to have worked mostly indoors or at night.
“My life I give my country. My life is snatched from me by a politician.”
It was still not noon, but Dominque Ondine had had several cognacs by the smell of him. Mimi poured him another, which he gripped tightly in a thick fist with scarred knuckles. Janson nursed his as they spoke across Mimi’s table, which was now laden with a hamper’s worth of cheese, bread, and sausages that the nearby Harrods Food Hall had wheeled to her house in a pram.
“Madam Princess informs me that you are traveling to Corsica.”
“Yes, I’m meeting up with an associate there.”
“I hope for your sake you are not in the business of developing property.”
“Why is that?”
“Corsica teeters on the brink of anarchy. The nationalist movement protests ever more vehemently against ‘colonization’ by rich tourists. They hate developers seizing beachfront property for hotels.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m a corporate security consultant.”
Ondine raised a bushy eyebrow, blinked through a haze of cognac, and gave Paul Janson a closer look. Shaved, showered, and wearing a crisp blue dress shirt borrowed from Mimi’s collection, the American with the pleasant demeanor had struck the Frenchman as a banker, physician, or lawyer on a London vacation. Now Ondine wondered.
“Arson and dynamite,” he told Janson, “are the Corsican’s weapons of choice. Vendetta his ‘court of law.’ Corsicans are a people who look in, not out. Such an attitude complicates the task of guaranteeing security for outsiders who annoy them. You’ll have your hands full.”
Janson answered casually, although with earlier Iboga sightings neither as credible nor as current as the ex-SEAL Daniel’s, he was already working up a legend to cover an operation on the island. Jessica Kincaid was there already, doing recon and feeding information back to CatsPaw. Freddy Ramirez’s Protocolo de Seguridad was recruiting an exfiltration force. Quintisha Upchurch was marshaling intermediaries to lease helicopters, boats, and a freighter.
“Fortunately,” Janson told Dominique Ondine, “we have contracted only to guarantee the legitimacy of foreign investors. Their physical safety falls to others.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your government, the French government, desires not to run afoul of EU laws against money laundering. It is my job to vet potential investors in development projects that have French government support. In other words, if a drug smuggler wants to put his illegal profits into a Corsican beachfront hotel he will fail to pass scrutiny and his money will not be allowed into the project.”
“Ah. You’re more of an accountant.”
“Precisely,” said Janson, putting on his wire-rimmed glasses.
“I repeat: Corsica teeters on the brink. If the separatists attack and you happen to be among those sipping champagne in a millionaire’s holiday palace at Punta d’Oro, angry Corsicans may not honor the distinction.”
“Thank you for the warning.” Janson raised his glass and inclined it toward Ondine. “I will avoid the bubbly and stick to honest cognac.”
Ondine smiled at last.
“Tell me,” Janson asked. “In your experience, which Princess Mimi assures me is broad and deep, have you come upon an organization named Securité Referral?”
“Non.” Ondine cut a length of sausage, slapped it on a chunk of bread, and chewed mightily. Janson noticed Mimi’s bright eyes zero in on the Frenchman. He’s lying, Janson thought.
“Does the name Emil Bloch ring a bell? Possibly one of their people.”
“There was a mercenary named Bloch,” said Ondine. “A former Legionnaire.”
“But you’ve not heard his name in connection with Securité Referral?”
“Non!”
“Another I have heard mentioned in connection with Securité Referral is a Corsican. Andria Giudicelli.”
“Merde.” Ondine looked like he would spit on the floor if he weren’t in Mimi’s kit
chen.
“You know him?”
“Know him? I arrested him twenty years ago.”
“On what charge?”
“Corsican recycling.”
“I beg your pardon? Recycling?”
A smile twitched Ondine’s lips. “‘Recycling is what Corsicans call arson. He burned down a rival’s factory. His friends broke him out of prison and he fled. Hasn’t been on Corsica since.”
“Could he have joined up with Securité Referral?”
“I don’t know what Securité Referral is, so how could I answer that?”
“Did I understand correctly that you are retired?” Janson asked.
Ondine finished chewing and wiped his hands on a napkin. “I do occasionally what you do—consult. It is better than sitting around.”
Janson gave him a Janson Associates card. “I wonder if I might have your card so I could call on your services.”
“But of course.” Ondine produced a card and stood up from the table. “Merci, Princess. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Janson.”
“I hope to call you soon,” said Janson. They shook hands.
Mimi saw the Frenchman to the door and came back. Janson was shrugging into his jacket.
“Where are you going?”
“As I told the man, Corsica.”
“He lied about Securité Referral.”
“I believe so.”
“Why?”
“Either he’s heard of it and fears it or he works for it. From what I’ve seen, he’s the type they look for: sharp, professional, connected, and on the edge. On the other hand, he’s a bit over the hill.”
“Why didn’t you question him further?”
“Because he would not expect such questioning from an ‘accounting fellow.’ ”
“But you will follow up?”
Janson kissed her on the cheek. “You have been wonderful. As always.”
THIRTY-ONE
A fire-gutted hotel was the first sight to greet Paul Janson as he steered a motor yacht he had chartered in nearby Sardinia into Porto-Vecchio, a sailing and tourist town that occupied a deep indentation in the rocky southeast coast of Corsica. Shattered windows gaping like dead eyes, walls blackened by smoke, the burned-out twelve-story tower stood grim sentinel over the gleaming boats that crowded the inner harbor. Spray-paint graffiti reading “Resistenza!” and “Corse pour Corsicans” left no doubt how the fire had ignited.
He left the yacht in charge of its captain and walked into the town, watching the narrow streets and sidewalks in the reflections of luxury shop windows, trading imperceptible nods with the muscular proprietor of a dive shop, and stopping briefly at the speedboat dock of a company that offered parasail rides. As he left the waterfront, he paused to look at the hotel. Workmen boarding up the ground-floor windows were banging industriously with hammers and nails, but the cleaners removing the graffiti were trading conspiratorial grins and not scrubbing very hard.
Janson hailed a taxi. It took him up into the hills, through tiny villages, past quarries, olive groves, and empty houses. The French language on bilingual road signs had been painted over and he saw “Corsican National Liberation Front” scrawled on a house that had its roof blown off. SR could do worse than hide Iboga here; restive islanders were not the sort to inform the police about a man on the run.
Janson got out of the taxi at a village café in an ancient stone building and asked the driver to come back in an hour. A patio shaded by a canopy presented views in two directions, turquoise water, east, and rugged mountains to the west. He could see the harbor far, far below opening into the Tyrrhenian Sea, the hundred-mile stretch of water between Corsica and Italy, and up a narrow road switch-backing down from the mountains. Scents of lavender and myrtle wafted off the sun-baked brushy land. The café was nearly empty midafternoon, and Janson had the patio to himself. He ordered a quatre fromage pizza and a glass of Ajaccio rosé and was just finishing the soft, oiled crust and peppery wine when he heard the high-pitched rasp of a powerful machine driven to the max.
Down the mountain road flew a red Ducati 848 sportbike.
One guess, Janson thought grimly, who was driving at that breakneck pace, though he could not help admiring her skill. Boots, knees, and thighs married tightly to the machine, torso levering independently, Kincaid was reading the bends in the narrow road, braking ahead of the corners, throttling early to maximize the engine’s gyroscopic and load-transfer effects, and accelerating smoothly out of them. But formidable skills aside, Janson knew she was pushing the limits of physics and luck. One mistake would flip her fatally end over end into the brush, and he had to wonder whether the near-suicidal speed meant that Kincaid was still so freaked out by the Australia catastrophe that she was pushing herself too hard to make up for it.
The Ducati whipped out of the final turn, throttle blipping a series of high-rev downshifts, braked hard, and stopped in front of the café. Kincaid, clad boot to helmet in black deerskin and festooned with high-power Swarovski field glasses and a Canon digital camera with a foot-long lens, heaved the bike onto its centerstand and swaggered onto the patio. A dog-eared copy of the British Ornithologists’ Union’s Birds of Corsica tossed on the table adjoining Janson’s explained the surveillance gear.
She removed her helmet, spiked her fingers through her hair, and glanced at Janson—one single tourist appraising another. Janson played his role with an expression of sincere interest. She ordered a pizza and a glass of wine, mimicking the local u Corsu dialect well enough to elicit an appreciative smile from the café’s waitress.
When they were alone on the patio, Kincaid said, “Stop looking at me like that. I’m all right, just lettin’ off steam.”
“Glad to hear it, and deeply relieved that they’ve suspended Newton’s Law of Gravity—so what do you think of Corsica?”
“Corsica’s like down home. I thought I was back in Red Creek with all their feudin’ ’n’ fightin’. Of course, if you’re not agin’ ’em, folks are as nice as nice can be. Specially out in the mountains. Beautiful mountains. Wow. Then you come around a bend in the road and there’s this turquoise-blue ocean jumping up at you and white sand beaches as far as you can see. Might be fun to come back sometime, when we’re not working.”
“Hard to picture you sitting still on a beach.”
“I meant rock climbing.”
“Is Iboga here?”
“Looks that way. But he’s moving around a lot.” She opened her bird guide to a blank “Notes” page and hurriedly sketched a map of Corsica. The island, a hundred miles long and fifty wide, looked like a hand closed in a fist with the index finger pointing north. “They started him up here on Capo Corso. Freddy thinks they came in from Italy by boat. Then they seemed to move him down into these mountains down the middle. But I lost them. Now Freddy’s guys think he’s on this private peninsula near Vallicone. That’s here, up the coast from Porto-Vecchio. Freddy’s absolutely convinced that’s where he’s at.”
“Why?”
“It’s a damn fortress.”
THIRTY-TWO
Jessica Kincaid flipped the page in her bird guide and drew a map of the peninsula thrusting into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Fifty-foot cliffs all around, so we can’t come on a boat, nowhere to land. Might do it in a little inflatable into a tiny crack of a fishing cove—though we’d need a fisherman to guide us in—then climb the cliffs. But how do we get him down without a damned derrick? Can’t helicopter in—they got radar.”
“Radar?”
“Whoever is there is scared the locals think they’re resort developers. So if it is SR, it’s kinda ironic that they’re hiding Iboga on an island that is a powder keg where all outsiders are suspect. Rumor has it SR is developing the peninsula into a gigantic resort. They have pissed off Corsican separatists, Union Corse mafia, the poor fishermen they ousted, and the ecologists, who tend to get pretty violent in France. I hear they’ve declared war on the French government and the superrich. F
rom what I’ve seen I don’t blame them—this is the kind of place money destroys.”
“What you’re saying is no one in the government is stopping whoever owns the peninsula from defending themselves.”
“They can hold off an army, but just in case, they also have their own helicopter with long-range tanks. So if they are SR and they do have Iboga, they could make it easy to France or Italy if they had to run for it.”
“What about the road?”
“Not without tanks.” She drew a line up the spine of the peninsula. “This is the only road. They got it enfiladed here and here, with stone guardhouses. I scoped out a Dushka in the one nearest the main road.”
“A Dushka? Looks like they’re taking the separatists pretty seriously.” The DShK (“Dushka”) was a .50-caliber heavy machine gun capable of wreaking fatal destruction on any military target in the air or on the ground, short of a tank.
“I’ll bet SR thinks the separatists pose a bigger threat than little old you and me. Anyway, the machine guns tipped it for Freddy.”
“It fits SR’s way of doing things,” Janson agreed. “Strong position, but ready to jump.”
Kincaid planted a finger on the southeast coast. “They can jump anywhere from here. Across the Strait of Bonifacio is Sardinia, where you chartered your boat. How long did it take you?”
“Twenty minutes to cross the strait. A couple of hours to here.”
“Sardinia belongs to Italy. SR seems plenty comfortable crossing borders. Maybe they’re going there next. Ten, fifteen ships a day pass through the strait. They could put Iboga on one of them. Or they could settle into that Vallicone peninsula, or come down here to Porto-Vecchio. Look at those boats down in the harbor.”
Hundreds of motor yachts and bluewater sailboats packed the harbor, moored cheek by jowl in the many marinas. Several ships stood by the outer piers. Seagoing ferries were arriving from Naples and Marseille.
“They could stash Iboga on one of those big-bucks yachts—take him anywhere in the Mediterranean. Which one is yours?”
“The little hundred-footer at the end of that long row of big ones.”
“Yeah, well, you can see this is the big-bucks hangout for rich Europeans.”
Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command Page 24
