by Tom Clancy
Nze sat without budging for hours before he was shuffled out into the 4×4. At the time, he had no idea why they had kept him at that interim place . . . but much later, after his captors passed out of the city, he would conclude they had been waiting for the night to run itself thin. It only made sense. The roads leading into the bush were slow to traverse by daylight, and filled with unseen hazards in darkness, becoming more arduous as Port-Gentil’s outlying townships and settlements were left behind in the distance. They would have wanted to limit the amount of ground that had to be covered before the first rays of dawn came bleaching through the sky.
Now the sun was up, its heat building in the cargo section around Nze as the 4×4 gyrated along over pebbled, foliage-tangled jungle roads and trenches. In September, the days were quick to grow sweltering, and air-conditioners were useless and unused in motor vehicles. He could feel sweat pouring down his face under the canvas hood, feel the tire rubber wedged against his side getting warm. His entire body ached, besides, and his arms and legs were tingling from lack of circulation.
There was no way to be certain how many men were riding with him, but Nze had mentally indexed at least four voices from snatches of overheard conversation. One of them was very soft, belonging to someone who spoke French with a perceptible foreign accent . . . an American accent, he believed. The khat chewer from the backseat of the Mercedes was also among his hostile, unchosen companions, and Nze did not have to hear the man speak to know it. The combination of his drug of choice’s sickly sweet odor and the stultifying heat inside the cargo section had pushed Nze to the verge of nausea. And his constant tossing about hadn’t helped. With his mouth taped, he’d been afraid he would choke on his own vomit if the trip stretched on much longer, heaving up what little was left of yesterday’s dinner—and fine wine, he recalled miserably, thinking of the glass he had set down to answer the phone.
Nze actually found himself grateful when the vehicle bounced to a halt, its engine cutting off with a shudder . . . and then was struck by how odious his circumstances must be to evoke such a feeling, the constant realist in him serving up another reminder that having reached his destination could not prove a good thing at all.
Doors on both sides of the vehicle opened, shut, and Nze heard footsteps scrambling over earth and scrub toward its rear. The cargo hatch was lifted. Arid—but fresh—air wafted through, easing the stuporous, khat-smelling heat around him.
This time Nze could feel no gratitude. He had already wasted his meager quota.
Hands seized the back of his perspiration-soaked shirt, pulling him from the open hatch like a trussed animal. Nze landed on his shoulder with a thud that knocked the wind out of him. He felt somebody take hold of the cords around his wrists, heard machetes hacking at foliage as he was dragged blindly over what seemed to be a rough footpath. Pebbles and thorns skinned his hands. A spiny clinging vine caught his left pants leg, raked it upward, and tore the flesh above his ankle. At some point he had lost one of his shoes, the foot that wore it twisting sharply. It had elicited a muffled whimper from him.
Nze did not know how far his abductors pulled him as they tramped on through the brush. Fifteen meters, twenty, perhaps farther. He did not know.
Suddenly, they stopped.
Nze was grabbed by the shirt collar again, pulled up onto his knees with a vicious jerk, and steadied from behind so he wouldn’t keel over, as he had in the four-wheel drive.
The tape around his hood was torn off. Then the hood itself.
Up and off.
Nze’s eyes filled with an explosion of glare. He grimaced as they adjusted to the daylight, blinked away stinging tears.
Swooning from fatigue, his vision a watery blur, Nze still found he could discern a great deal about his surroundings. He was in a small circular clearing, its edges shagged by high thickets of Marantaceae with dark green leaves the size of elephant ears. The clearing’s plainly defined boundaries and trammeled-down carpet of sedge suggested it was man made, slashed out of the forest with machetes like those his captors had used on the trail. Around and underneath Nze, the sawgrass growth was especially scorched, almost black, giving it the appearance of a large stain spread across the ground.
Then he spotted the tire lying in front of him. Doubtless the same tire that had been jammed against him in the cargo section for many hours. A portable metal gasoline can was beside it. A row of men nearby to the right, their knees level with his eyes.
He raised his head for a look at their faces. There were four of them—Andre in his conspicuous chauffeur’s suit, and two Bantu with semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders, dressed in coverall fatigues identical to those worn by the khat chewer. Nze could not see the latter, but thought he might be responsible for the shadow falling over him from behind . . . and realized now that he was not the group’s only user. As the minister knelt there before them, one of the Bantu removed a wad of the drug from a banana-frond wrapping in his hand, passed it to the other tribesman, then got a second wad and put it in his mouth with two fingers.
They chewed and watched him with hyped, bright eyes.
Nze looked away from them to the group’s single white, a lance-thin man in a safari jacket and bush hat. His eyes were pale blue, his skin the color of chalk.
Nze at once saw the camera hanging over his chest from a neck strap. It was a 35-mm with a large objective lens.
The white met Nze’s gaze with his own, studying him. Both hands in the gusset pockets of his jacket.
“Bienvenue,” he said in the lightly accented French that Nze remembered from their trip. “Por le maia distance, se bien regarder aà la lumiè‘re du jour.”
Nze was silent.
“I assume you’ve guessed who I am,” the white said.
Nze gave a slow nod.
The tire, he thought.
The gas can.
The burn-stained ground around him.
He felt himself trembling with fear.
“Let’s hear you say my name,” the white said. “It’s been a grueling ride for everyone. But worn out as we are, we must strive to be polite.”
Nze started to answer and his voice cracked. He wet his parched lips, tried again.
“Gerard Fáton,” he rasped.
The white continued regarding him steadily.
“There you go,” he said. A trace of a smile on his lips. “Monsieur Nze, you should be honored that I’ve come down to say good-bye to you, and capture the moment so that it will be remembered and appreciated.”
Nze’s trembling worsened. He couldn’t make it stop.
“I’ve done nothing . . .”
“And your doing nothing has cost me.”
Nze shook his head.
“What happened in Libreville . . . I did my best,” he said. “My arguments were defeated . . . but your desires weren’t made clear to me until very late. Too late. I had to rush to understand them . . . to prepare. If I’d had more time—”
Fáton vented a sibilant breath through his teeth.
“Lie to me once more, and I’ll have your hands separated from your wrists to make the burning worse.”
Nze was shaking uncontrollably. There was no denying what was planned for him. He felt his bladder release and hardly cared that his abductors could see the moist stain spreading across the crotch of his pants. He could live with the shame, if he could somehow find a way to live at all.
“You changed your vote to curry favor with some no-rate government connivers,” Fáton said. “Vulgar rustres. Rubes and yokels who play act at being Mandarins.”
“I’ll try again,” Nze said. “I can do better. Much better. I never meant to give up, you must believe that—”
“Stop. Now. You offend me.” Fáton shut his eyes, inhaled through his mouth, stood quietly holding his breath. After a long while he expelled the air from his nostrils, raised his eyelids with a kind of reptilian slowness, and went back to staring at Nze.
“ ‘I don’t see any chance of making inroads’,
” he said. “Does that statement ring familiar to you?”
Nze’s face showed the anxious terror of a captured animal. Familiar? Of course it was. Of course. Here was another piece of the trap’s framework. Fáton was simply repeating words that the assistant minister himself had spoken to Etienne Begela over the telephone what seemed a hundred years ago.
Fáton stared at Nze for a brief moment longer before turning to the small group of men beside him.
“Let us necklace this faithless swine and be done here,” he said.
Even as he spoke, one of Fáton’s armed guards went to the tire, crouched over it, and began filling it from the can, working the spout through a hole that had been gouged into the tire’s sidewall. He poured until the can was almost empty, took a handkerchief from his pocket, soaked it with whatever was left of its contents, and wadded it into the hole, leaving a small wick of cloth hanging out. Finally he tossed the can into the brush and was joined by another of the guards, who helped him lift the tire off the ground and carry it toward the patch of blackened sedge where Nze knelt helplessly and watched.
Nze tried to move, knowing it was futile. The khat chewer from inside the Benz—or whichever of his captors was standing behind him—had taken fast hold of the electrical cord that bound his arms and legs. He could only squirm with impotent terror in that solid, unbreakable grip.
The tire was lowered over Nze’s head to rest around his shoulders. Fuel sloshed inside it, the stench overwhelming him.
He sobbed.
“Very good,” Fáton told the pair of fatigue-clad men. Then, to Nze, in a tone of calm gratification: “You were warned about lying twice, little piglet.”
Nze sobbed openly.
Fáton was looking past his shoulder.
“Omar,” he said, “Coupez ses mains, si’l vous plaît.”
Omar, cut off his hands, please.
Nze felt a sudden swish of air, glimpsed the bright sun-sparkle of the rising machete blade. He was already screaming when it came down on him with a quick sweeping motion, his cries loud enough to startle a drove of birds from their perches in the hemming brush. Cold pain sledged up from his wrists as the machete carved into them, penetrating deep, momentarily snagging on something, a resistant knot of muscle or bone. It was wobbled from side to side, and then pushed through with a sickening wet crunch. An instant later the coldness turned to pulsing heat.
Nze howled at the top of his lungs, his blood soaking into the thirsty blackened ground. The shadow of the khat chewer, the machete wielder, the butcher who had maimed him, folded and unfolded as he crouched behind Nze, and rose again, and then dropped both severed hands in front of him, let them fall together inches from his knees, crimson streaming from them, tatters of meat flapping wetly around the stubs of his wrist bones, the second and third fingers of one hand twitching like the legs of a dying crab.
Through a haze of suffering and weakness, Nze watched Fáton slide a fist from his right gusset pocket and hold it out before him like a sideshow magician engaged in an amusing bit of hocus pocus. Then he spread open his fingers to display the wooden matchbox in his palm.
“Allumettes,” he said. Again with that even, satisfied calm. “Here is some humane advice, mon ami. As the diesel oil inside the tire bursts into flame, it might be desirable for you to take good, deep breaths of smoke. This goes against involuntary reflex, I know. The fumes will be quite hot, and are apt to sear your throat and lungs. But if you do manage to control yourself—deep breaths, I remind you—they will render you unconscious before the melted tire rubber and burning fuel start to run over your body. They cling to the flesh, you see. And I imagine it must be quite agonizing when flesh cooks.”
Fáton’s left hand appeared from inside his jacket, produced a match from the box, and flicked it against the striker.
Its head budded orange and he moved to within arm’s reach of Nze.
Nze looked at him, tears streaming down his cheeks, his nose and throat clogged with mucus.
“Please, I beg you—” he began.
Fáton frowned with disapproval, touched his flickering match head to the wad of cloth.
“Here, at least, my labor has not been in vain,” he said, and stepped backward as the makeshift fuse ignited with an audible whoosh.
The fuel inside the tire caught almost at once, fire gushing out the large hole in its sidewall, then gnawing through in other places, rapidly tracing its way around the circumference.
Moments later the whole tire went up with a combustive roar. Nze gasped for air and felt broiling heat fill his mouth. Choking on his own scream, he struggled grotesquely to tear free of his bonds with fingers he no longer had, the blaze ringing him in, raking him with its vicious talons. Blots of diesel fuel and gummy, liquified rubber dribbled over his skin, bonded with his skin, ate their way down and down and down into his skin. He could hear his blood sizzle in that blasting, torching heat as the fiery mix splashed the raw bloody stumps of his wrists.
The lids burning away from his eyes, wilting off in curled, blackened strips, Nze endured several remaining instants of sight before the eyeballs themselves were cooked in their sockets—a brief staring agony of horror in which he could see Fáton through breaks in the sheet of flame, standing with his camera raised, his pale lips drawn into a leer beneath the wide, black circle of its lens.
Then Nze’s throat finally unlocked to release the scream that had been trying to force its way out. His body its own raging pyre, he continued screaming for some time, bellows that went climbing high into the air with the flames and smoke. Fáton was cognizant of them long after he and his men had returned to the 4×4 and swung back around onto the snaking jungle trail.
Nze had not taken his advice about the deep breaths, it seemed . . . and, in Africa as perhaps nowhere else on earth, one’s mistakes bore the harshest of all possible consequences.
FIVE
VARIOUS LOCALES
ON HIS LAST EVENING IN MADRID, SIEGFRIED KUHL sat facing his high terraced window above the Gran Vía and watched the sunset bathe his completed scale miniature of the Iglesia de San Ginés in deep burgundy light. Against the wall near the apartment door were his few articles of luggage. Beside his chair was a large paper shopping bag that contained a purchase he had made at an art-supply shop some blocks from La Casa Real.
He had moved with haste to close out his affairs here, and it had now come down to his final act before leaving.
As his eyes took in the miniature, Kuhl thought of the long effort it represented, the concentrated application of his learned skills. Its piece-by-piece construction had been painstakingly slow, but impatience rather than patience had held him to it, an irresistible drive to see the model take on finished shape from its raw makings. He thought of the hours he had spent sketching plans from the digital reference images stored in his laptop computer, of the careful fabrication of its segments with his saws, rasps, files, gouges, chisels, and wood knives. He summoned back to his very fingertips the tactile impressions of working his materials, methodically hand carving unformed balsa to replicate the church’s brick and tile facades; its crests, moldings, and traceries; its every architectural feature and texture—even cutting small pieces of glass to fit its windows.
Inside his church, Kuhl had re-created San Ginés’s three arched naves and the figure of the Virgin Mother in her apparition as the Lady of Valvanera, patroness of remedies, whose grace was sought for healing and protection in war. There, it was said, a group of assassins had once stolen into the vestibule and murdered a young man as he knelt before the Lady in adoration, leaving his headless corpse to be discovered at her feet, and his spirit to haunt the aisles with ghostly elegies to a transgression unpunished . . . and, Kuhl imagined, a restless anger at reverence scorned and unrewarded.
After detailing the model to his satisfaction, Kuhl had sanded and primed its subassemblies for the paints he had mixed to create the earth tones of its outer walls, the darker colors of rail and roof, dome and
steeple, as well as the age-tarnished iron bell in the proud tower of San Ginés, and the crucifix raised high above all. He had applied his coats of paint with precise brushstrokes, done his staining and streaking with a sponge applicator to approximate the effects of age, sun, and soot. Then he had used clever dashes of color to hint at the rare artwork decorating the interior walls—canvases by El Greco, Salvatierra, Nicolás Fumo, and a reproduction of a work by the Venetian master Sebastiano Ricci that had been destroyed in an eighteenth-century fire. Ricci, whose devout paintings commissioned by the authorities in Rome contrasted strongly with his reputation for impiety and willful defiance of religious law.
Kuhl stared at his miniature from his chair across the room, his eyes fixed on the bell tower he had epoxied to its rooftop just minutes before.
Like flames, the westering sunlight boiled through its semicircular arches.
With the dying of the day, Kuhl’s period of latency had also reached its end. Minutes from now he would depart for Barajas airport and exit the country using a fraudulent identity and supporting documents—one of many aliases he’d seeded around the world and kept in reserve for when he received his signal from DeVane. Thousands of miles away, Kuhl’s cell of sleeper agents in America had been activated and made rapid arrangements for his coming. On his specific instructions, they had secured a base that fit his cover and conformed nicely with his tactical imperatives. It would provide crucial seclusion, exploitable terrain, and at the same time place him within close reach of his potential target or targets.
Find what Roger Gordian most loves, and we will know his greatest weakness. Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.
Kuhl was confident of achieving those objectives. He had compiled a thorough mental dossier on Gordian, and knew Harlan DeVane’s intelligence was still more comprehensive. His American operatives had also supplied useful information. Much had been readily acquired, for despite his estimable regard for UpLink International’s corporate security, Roger Gordian had put limited emphasis on his individual secrecy. Kuhl had found this unsurprising. Gordian was a prominent businessman, someone who led a highly public life. Whose success depended in part on his accessibility, and a reputation that inspired widespread confidence. His background was common knowledge. His personal and professional linkages were to a considerable extent open, apparent, exposed. Some of them had already come under Kuhl’s pitiless lens, and he believed their order of importance in Gordian’s life to be a relatively simple determination. Once he was convinced beyond doubt of the link best broken, it would be no less simple to assess its vulnerabilities, and learn whatever remaining facts he needed to move with potent, decisive speed.
