'A' for Argonaut (27 page)

Downstairs, the hotel bar perched on a platform over a series of waterfalls on the Congo River. Maran watched a bunch of children jumping around, splashing each other, up to their waists in the muck. Hot and sweaty as he was, Maran’s better judgment prevailed. He decided against a swim in the polluted and infested water. He ordered an iced coffee and fresh mango juice combination and waited for Goodwin.

Minutes later, Goodwin approached.

“You look pretty fresh.”

“Cold shower. How’re you doing?”

“Sent Kurt out for some stuff. Why don’t you relax, enjoy the delights of beautiful downtown Boma. I’m going over the bridge to meet with Oloobwa after dinner at the Billa Billie office in Tshimpi Belvedere Village just outside Matadi. Here’s a phone number if you need me.”

“When will Kurt be back?”

“Couple hours. You’re on your own to entertain yourself,” Maran said.

Oloobwa’s office in Boma
looked more like a taxidermist’s showroom. Heads and feet of Africa’s Big Five adorned the walls in various poses. A 20-foot python skin hung from the rafters. Maran arrived in the Humvee an hour early. He surprised Oloobwa, who sat at his desk, a slab of unfinished mahogany. It was arranged kitty-corner, to the left of the entrance.

“Sorry to disturb your dinner, Mr. Oloobwa,” he started.

“Go ahead, Mr. Jackson. Any friend of Sola Ubulom’s,” Oloobwa answered. He was a short, wiry man with a Van Dyke beard. He wore a colorful orange and red Kente robe over loose, chalk-white cotton trousers.

Maran told him about the bar in Tshela.

“We are conscious of security, Mr. Maran. Let’s check the most recent phone calls.”

They didn’t have to listen long to determine whether any of the calls contained a threat. The one that did was to one of the hunters, a Belgian.

“Luc, this is Slang. I have work.”

“Luc Ducasse,” Oloobwa told Maran. He paused the recorder. “He just came in from the field. I don’t know about a ‘Slang.’”

The message to Luc informed him that Maran was due to arrive for a meeting at eight. It also contained the lie that Maran was a murderer and that the “firm” wanted to make sure he didn’t leave Oloobwa’s compound alive.

“Use any means. Close him out,”
General Slang Vangaler’s message told the hunter.

“What does he mean, ‘the firm’?” Maran asked.

“Strategic Solutions International, SSI. They run all the action here. For now,” he added.

Oloobwa stepped to a large wooden cabinet at the far end of the office. Inside, a bank of twelve video monitors blinked on when he flipped a switch on the console at the base inside the cabinet. On one of the monitors Maran could see two men stretched out beneath the engine of his vehicle. Oloobwa ran back to his desk, picked up the direct line to his secretary.

“Get security down here. Now!”

Before he put the phone back in its hook, Maran was out the door. As he charged ahead, his mind ran through the main question.

Who are they? Who do they work for? How did they know?

The two men heard him coming. They leaped to their feet, looked at one another, turned to Maran. They were huge, both had shaved heads on necks that looked like pyramids sloping up out of shoulders like big picnic hams. One produced a knife. Maran’s kick sent the blade spinning through the air. The other assassin turned, ran into the forest.

Maran’s remaining antagonist managed a professional kick to his stomach. Maran gripped the man’s ankle, gave it a violent upward twist, sending the man to the ground on his back. Maran’s pent up fury flooded his brain; suddenly he was an animal himself, stomping on the downed man’s midriff. With both hands, predatory claws now, he tore the leg up and out, ripping the groin ligaments from the bone. He dragged the twisted body up, bent the man over the Humvee.

“Who sent you? Who do you work for?”

The man grimaced, tried to speak. Maran dropped him. He wasn’t going anywhere. He rushed back to Oloobwa’s office and confronted him. “If this SSI runs the goons in this neighborhood, he’s getting them from you.”

Oloobwa argued that he had no control over SSI’s criminally insane soldiers that ran every illegal operation in the region. Maran realized that as a supplier of protected species, Billa Billie Safaris was far from legal.

Hours later, Maran arrived
back at their room at the Boma Auberge Tonton. When he saw Tracha, he knew something was wrong.

“Goodwin’s room is empty. He’s gone,” Tracha said. “He must have left last night. We just got a call from the regional police. They want to talk to you. Oloobwa’s dead.”

Goodwin? Oloobwa! Betrayed. Again!

Things were moving fast. The enemy was panicking. The thrill of the hunt revved Maran’s heart rate. He and Tracha were getting closer, flushing them into the open.

The next morning they traced Goodwin to the Hotel Interlochen Phenix, a ratty place overlooking the Congo River in Kinshasa. With Sergei’s electronic surveillance help, they had cross-referenced Goodwin’s name with hotel registrations and car rentals in the entire region for the previous twenty-four hours.

Goodwin had arrived in a rented Town Car and checked in earlier.

They never intended to
kill him.

When Maran and Tracha showed up in his room, Goodwin didn’t stop to consider. He came at Kurt Tracha with serrated-edge field knife and was rewarded with a high kick to the throat.

He fell, choking. Maran dropped, his knees on his chest.

Goodwin couldn’t breathe. Tracha fell down beside Goodwin and stretched his arms out to the sides. He pumped Goodwin’s arms up and down while Maran, on Goodwin’s chest, moved up and down in the hope that they could revive him. He gasped as blood bubbled through his lips seeping into his lungs from his smashed trachea.

“Breathe, Al Ray. Breathe,” Maran ordered. “We’re going to pull you through.”

Goodwin gasped again, his eyes opened, bulging.

“Who put you up to this? Who are you working with?” Tracha demanded, pumping Goodwin’s arms more forcefully.

They couldn’t save him. Just before he died, Goodwin uttered one word, “Pajak.”

Tracha downloaded all the files from Goodwin’s laptop onto a CD, and they left the place the way they had found it. They didn’t want to stir up any more mud than necessary. Goodwin’s body was bound to do enough of that.

Blackness blanketed the area outside the building. Inside, they worked with an infrared light Tracha had packed. It didn’t take them long to find the local Internet Service Provider’s address, but they were shocked to discover it was in Boma. A half-hour later, they were outside the ISP’s building. It was empty. Tracha picked the locks. They took seats in front of the master computer and downloaded the core router master codes.

“Crank it in,” Tracha said. “Spell it out in rotation.”

Maran wheeled through the letters in Boyko’s name. The site came up. Once they were in, the computer allowed them instant access to SSI’s e-mail system.

Boyko’s personal box held two hundred messages in the “read” queue, only ten unread. The information about the diamond smuggling operation from Kinshasa to Cabinda to Antwerp was all there. They scrolled quickly through.

“Hey! Too fast. Go up three or four messages. Did that say ‘ship’ in the subject line?”

Sure enough.

They opened the message and discovered a dozen more within the same family of subjects:

SHIP ARRIVES CABINDA.

SHIP LEAVES NAMIBIA.

SHIP ARRIVES NAMIBIA.

SHIP LEAVES BOSTON.

The clincher jumped out and grabbed them.

SEVASTAPOL BOARDED.

In the next twenty minutes, they learned that the ship had ported in the Azores, picked up three U.S. M-60 Main Battle Tanks, diverted as U.S. surplus from the Egyptian army, a half-dozen M-113 armored personnel carriers and a dozen U.S. Marine Corps Humvees equipped with 14.5 mm heavy machine guns.

The Sevastapol! Is that Boyko’s transport ship?

Thirty-Two

Georgetown, Washington, DC

A
lex Pajak, back from the DRC, walked by the Shops at Georgetown Mall and looked into the window at Cherub Antiques, a pricey shop. A spectacular piece on display reminded him he was looking for a rare art deco cocktail shaker. He noted it for a later purchase. He could afford it. He walked a few more blocks and stood outside the Seafarer Restaurant on M Street a few blocks from Stassinopoulis’ gilded age mansion just around the corner from 3307 N Street in Georgetown where President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961. A man approached, stopped. He wore the crisp light navy-on-white summer uniform with the crossed keys insignia of a Navy Storekeeper, Petty Officer First Class. A brass Navy SEAL trident was pinned on the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. The two men greeted one another.

“How’s everything at your place?” Pajak asked, referring to the command post where the Storekeeper was stationed by the Pentagon. His current position gave him a wide range of friends in the building and among the three-letter Intelligence or “intel” agents that wandered through its halls.

“No problems‌—‌yet. But Signals Intel at Security Group Command found a breach at NEBS,” the Storekeeper said.

“PHALANX?”

“Someone’s gone to great lengths to punch a hole in our firewalls. They’ve been searching the West Africa sales files.”

“Maran?”

“Confirmed.”

Pajak got right to business. “That’s it,” he drawled. “We have to move.”

“I wonder. Why not turn him back? Double him. He’s not working alone. Reopen his file; reinstate his status, his pension. Even offer him the contract,” the Storekeeper said.

“Who should we send?”

“That liaison from CIA, the black fox?”

“Utile Nsangou? Before they pulled us out of Angola we used her to support dos Sampas in Cabinda. She’s on contract now. Uses any one of a number of covers, State Department, Treasury, Education,” Pajak said.

“She’ll know how to handle it.”

“I hope she’s better than Goodwin. I haven’t heard from him and I suspect the worst.”

“Is that all?”

“No. The SSI password, encryption codes are compromised. Boyko’s‌—‌and Chu’s‌—‌e-mail files transferred to a computer‌—‌in Boston.”

“Maran! How much does he know?” Pajak asked.

“He’s got Amber Chu’s calendar, her Antwerp itinerary for her delivery of Boyko’s big packet of stones to Tolkachevsky.”

“Maran may be in Boston, he may be right here in Washington. If he gets to Amber Chu before we do‌—‌”

“He has to be stopped,” the Storekeeper cut in. “We can’t let him get to ‘Plan A.’ He almost made it in his Cabinda raid.”

“We can use Utile Nsangou to track him down, offer him a deal. One chance. If he doesn’t take it, we’ll purge the threat.”

Thirty-Three

Presqu’ile de Banana

A
mber Chu’s life had descended into the abyss. It was the recent series of horrors, Tony kidnapped and Boyko’s sick demands, that drove her to the desperate measure she was taking: In desperation, she had exploited Tolkachevsky’s trust in order to get the stones she needed to enlist Joseph dos Sampas, leader of PFLEC and Boyko’s opposition in the contorted political morass of West Africa. Dos Sampas’ posh estate was no more than ten or twelve miles from Boyko’s and equally hardened with security barriers. Like opposing diplomats, or officers of the KGB and CIA in the Cold War, observant of protocol, the two VIPs shared the town in peaceful coexistence.

As Amber pulled up to the address that had been given to her, she looked out over a large parking lot, beautifully paved in oyster shell and rimmed with star jasmine and cypress vines. Beyond the long lot, far below the cliff on which it sat, the sea sparkled in the sunlight.

Where the hell is this supposed estate?

Her answer stepped out from a hidden ramp on the far side of the lot. An armed guard pointed her to an underground ramp. Amber drove her rented Volvo through the electronically controlled gate halfway down the ramp to an underground holding pen occupied by a red Lamborghini and at least seven luxury sport sedans. Another security man told her where to park. She got out of the car as delicately as she could, careful not to be provocative when she swung her long legs out. The steel doors of an elevator opened. The man directed her to enter. When the doors opened again, she stepped out into a huge living room-office combination furnished with enough upholstered chairs and sofas to accommodate a small platoon of corporate warriors. Outside the wall-to-wall glass windows, blue water flashed and flickered over an infinity pool that spread out, seemingly endlessly. The entire estate was carved into the cliffside.