‘Of course, Father,’ answered Celine guardedly.
‘Robin Mariner is just about to send you a picture. Can you identify it?’
Chaka looked up and Robin sent the picture from her laptop.
Celine gasped. ‘That’s him!’ she said. ‘That’s Odem! When was this picture taken? Where is he?’
‘We’ll talk after the rally,’ decided the president. ‘And we’ll talk as father and daughter, not as political opponents.’
‘As you wish,’ she answered, without hesitation this time.
They broke contact. Chaka looked down for a moment. His campaign chief came in without knocking. ‘Time’s getting tight, Mr President,’ he said in his gentle Harvard accent. ‘Everyone’s waiting.’
Chaka stood up; he seemed to expand in size and stature. Within a second he had moved from concerned parent to magisterial president. Once again, the power of his personality filled the room like a magnesium flare.
‘You said you had more to show me,’ he snapped at Richard, gesturing for the campaign chief to open the French windows.
‘Yes, Mr President,’ answered Richard.
‘Come aboard my helicopter, both of you. You have ten more minutes to brief me further.’
The Mariners joined Chaka and his campaign chief in the executive section of the presidential chopper, whose interior was laid out like the Bashnev/Sevmash Kamov although it was a Chinese Harbin equivalent of the EC175 Eurocopter. Richard sat beside the president next to the window, so he would get the first bullet if there were any snipers about. Robin sat opposite him, looking down at the two government ministers on the ground below whose places they had usurped and whose undying hatred they had earned in so doing. I hope Celine wins the election, she thought as her downward gaze met their upward enmity. If those two stay in office then Heritage Mariner is simply dead in the water.
‘The next point is this, Mr President,’ Richard was explaining. ‘It’s a communication from my commercial intelligence people at London Centre. A photograph, in fact, snapped on a digital phone. It was forwarded to me under our highest company security because there is a legitimate business concern roused by the meeting of these two men in the centre of the picture. It is filed under our Company Most Secret.’ He leaned forward, making sure the campaign chief saw nothing of the picture on the screen. ‘Are the men in the picture familiar to you?’ he asked.
‘These two are,’ answered the president unhappily. ‘This one is Bala Ngama, whom I recently replaced as the minister of the outer delta and removed from my government al-together. This other is Gabriel Fola, the prime minister of Congo Libre, our nearest neighbour inland.’
‘The gentleman whose influence begins where yours ends, sir,’ Richard emphasized. ‘On the north-eastern slope of Karisoke.’ He paused for a moment, making sure his point had soaked in. ‘And have you any idea about the third man?’ he asked.
‘No,’ answered President Chaka. ‘Who is he?’
Richard looked pointedly across at the campaign chief. President Chaka frowned, then gave a brief nod. ‘Go and check on the security squad,’ he ordered. ‘I want things smooth when we land.’
Richard waited until the Harvard man was well away before he continued, in little more than a whisper, ‘He is Chen Shufu, Doctor Chen, chairman of Han Wuhan Extraction, the most cut-throat and ruthless of the one hundred and fifty Chinese mining companies currently working in Africa — fifty of whom, I may say, are working within a five hundred kilometre radius of Lac Dudo. They may not have permission to work on your land, sir, but as Odem and his army prove, there’s no one there to stop them crossing your borders at will, probably from Congo Libre.
‘It’s an open secret that Han Wuhan are the people behind the majority of the conflict mineral extraction in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the last few years. They’ve admitted they have contacts with both the FDLR — Rwanda’s army — and the FARDC, the Congo equivalent. Both have been accused of participating in this bloody business — even after the Dodd-Frank legislation in the US which banned the trading of conflict minerals in the United States — but which of course doesn’t apply to Han Wuhan directly. And they have, so it is believed, been funding the Lord’s Resistance Army and several other unregulated militias who have been involved in supplying this kind of thing.’ He leaned forward even more forcefully. ‘Doctor Chen is up to his armpits in conflict minerals. Conflict diamonds. Anything, profitable, in fact. No matter where it comes from or no matter how it was obtained!’
Robin leaned forward too. ‘I know this is something that would come from Richard under normal circumstances,’ she said quietly. ‘But they don’t call him Dr No like in James Bond. They call him Dr Yao, which is Mandarin for Yes. Yes to anything, no matter what …’
‘You were quite right to bring this to my attention,’ said President Chaka, pulling himself erect and consulting his watch once more. ‘This Doctor Chen sounds like an extremely dangerous proposition. But I’m not certain it was worth interrupting my preparations for the rally.’
‘I agree, Mr President. And if that was all I would have brought it to the attention of Colonel Kebila, your chief of security and, via him, to Mr Ngama’s replacement as minister of the outer delta. But there is more.’ Richard took a deep breath, then continued. ‘If we zoom into the background of this picture as we did to the picture of Lac Dudo … There. You see? A fourth man, trying very hard to remain in the shadows. And I’m sure you can recognize him, now.’
‘Odem,’ said President Chaka. ‘It’s Colonel Odem. Once again.’
The Kivu Gambit
Richard was woken the next morning by the only piece of communications equipment in the Granville Royal Lodge hotel’s Nelson Mandela suite which did not require tantalum processors. He put the handset of his old-fashioned bedside phone to his ear after the third ring. ‘Mariner?’ he said sleepily.
‘This is Andre Wanago, Captain Mariner,’ said the precise voice of the general manager. ‘I have Colonel Laurent Kebila here and he wonders if you could spare a moment to talk to him. The matter is as urgent, apparently, as that with which you disturbed the president’s plans last evening.’
Richard sat up, frowning thoughtfully. Benin La Bas’s chief of security was clearly on his best behaviour. In the past he had simply come banging on the suite’s main door with a squad of soldiers at his back. They had first met like that in the bad old days, when Liye Banda had been president, Celine Chaka had been a political prisoner in the regime’s torture chambers and her father had been the general commanding an irregular army in the delta, seemingly little more politically powerful than Odem’s Army of Christ the Infant. It was in Granville Harbour’s central police station, shortly after Kebila had arrested him, that Richard first met Celine — in the days before her father took over the country and it emerged that young Captain Kebila had been the only reason she had survived her arrest and interrogation. The only reason they had both survived.
Robin stirred sleepily. ‘Who is it, Richard?’
‘Kebila,’ he answered.
She sat up at once, pulling the duvet over her pink-tipped chest like an outraged Victorian virgin. And putting one hand to her golden curls to assess whether they were fit to be seen. ‘Here?’ She looked around, half-expecting the colonel to be standing at the bedroom door.