Julia got to the end of her block and hung left on Trevor Avenue, which by no coincidence happened to be where her favorite pastry shop was located, its hot cinnamon-raisin muffins beckoning from their giant display basket in the storefront about a third of a mile farther along her route.
Paused at a stoplight on the corner of Trevor, the Outback’s driver waited for the signal to turn green, then made the same left as Julia. His digicam ready, a man in the front passenger seat raised it to his window and snapped off a second rapid series of shots as the vehicle reached her.
Click-click-click.
The vehicle passed Julia again and drove off down the avenue.
Another would pick up her movements later on.
Jean Jacques Assele-Ndaki was one of 35 highly ranked Gabonese officials to find a copy of the photograph in his mail. Of those men, 16, including Assele-Ndaki himself, sat in the parliament’s 120-member lower chamber, or National Assembly. Another 6 held seats in the Senate, its 90-member upper chamber; 4 were secretaries in the presidential cabinet; 4 headed important government agencies. The remaining 5 recipients were ministres delegues, or economic ministers appointed to manage and regulate the partial privatization of national industries that had been under full state control before Gabon’s economic restructuring program commenced in the mid- 1990s.
In each case, the photo was enclosed in a plain manila envelope and neatly taped between two rectangular pieces of cardboard to protect it from damage in shipping. Adhesive labels on the envelope’s lower left- and right-hand corners read “Personnelle et Confidentiele”— Personal and Confidential — so it would be opened only by its intended recipient. Their typeface, and the type on the separate address label, was a common boldface Times Roman font produced by an equally common make and model of computer printer. Even the ink-jet cartridge used was of an ordinary, commonplace variety. None of the envelopes bore a return address. And none included a worded message.
The ghastly picture of Macie Nze was a clear enough communication without one.
Although an inspection of their coded postmarks would reveal they were deposited at Libreville’s main postal center on Boulevard de la Mer sometime after the last batch of mail was sorted and processed on the evening of September 26, and before the first batch was loaded onto delivery trucks early on September 27, not even the most sophisticated forensic tests would have shown evidence of handling on either the photographs or their packaging. There were no latent fingerprints, biological samples, trace fibers, or minute particulate materials from which useful information could be extracted. It was as if the mailings had been prepared under aseptic laboratory conditions.
Of course, few, if any, of the public officials to receive the envelope would have considered informing the authorities about it for a moment. They had far too much to lose from any sort of police investigation into their surreptitious contacts and affairs.
Because Assele-Ndaki’s office headquarters was located near the start of the mail route in the Quartier Louis, his deliveries would generally reach it before he arrived for the day. This pleased the assemblyman, whose bent was to read through his morning correspondence over a cup of strong mocha-flavored coffee and a crème tart bought on his way in, at a patisserie on a side street off Boulevard Omar Bongo.
The contents of the manila envelope, however, had left Assele-Ndaki wishing he had never opened it. Not today, nor ever.
While Assele-Ndaki’s terror on discovering the photograph was characteristic of all those who laid eyes on it, the horror that descended on him went many shades deeper, and his grievous sorrow was something entirely of its own. He and Nze had known a close fraternal relationship that went back to childhood. Born into political families, they had grown up neighbors in Port-Gentil, where their elders had often socialized. As boys they had attended the same primary and secondary schools, played soccer on the same youth league. They had shared a dormitory room at the Sorbonne in Paris, graduated that esteemed historic university with advanced economic degrees, and after returning to Gabon held executive positions with the nation’s largest energy and ore mining firms. Some years afterward they had found their lives again intertwined, as both gained National Assembly seats in the same constitutional election.
And together they had attended a string of secret meetings with Etienne Begela and other principal government figures, gatherings at which they were persuaded to accept handsome financial inducements from the blanc, Gerard Fáton… grafted to thwart UpLink International’s overhaul of their country’s telecommunications system. Begela had drawn Assele-Ndaki and his longtime friend into the conspiracy, just as he had doubtless courted the rest of its participants. But Assele-Ndaki would blame no one except himself for his decisions. They had not resulted from any form of pressure or coercion. Rather, he had been enticed by the easy money… and, to be truthful, succumbed to the excitement of slipping across lines of ethics and legality, a visceral delight in probing his untapped capacity for craftiness.
Now that thrill had been replaced by the sickening realization of how mad his actions had been. Their actions — his and Macie’s, perhaps the actions of the rest as well. It had almost seemed a game until their chamber of parliament convened in Libreville for its vote. The amendment they had drawn up to stall legislation that would ensure the extension of UpLink’s temporary operating licenses for at least the next quarter century contained what they had fancied to be marvelously clever revisionist language. But when the president had gotten wind of their intentions through his cadre of appointed loyalists — Gabon’s constitution, drafted under his sharp authoritarian eye, allowed him to handpick nine assemblymen to chair key law-making committees — the authors and supporters of the proposed amendment had been cautioned to desist in far blunter terms than their artful bill flaunted. The choice presented them was stark. They could move forward with their obstructionist plans and invite the scrutiny of the ministry of justice. Find their government and business dealings, financial records, even their sexual activities open to rigorous investigation. Their every affair delved into without deference to social position or regard for privacy.
Or they could instead go with the existing bill. And also go about their lives unburdened by inconvenient, embarrassing disruptions.
The amendment had been scrapped, and UpLink’s regulatory approvals given easy passage through the Assembly.
What Assele-Ndaki and his friend had failed to grasp — what none of the amendment’s sponsors had understood at the time — was that they were in greater jeopardy of being rolled over by the inexorable force that had driven them on until that point. The blanc would tolerate nothing but their moving forward once they had committed to his agenda, would simply plow them down in their tracks if they dared halt or turn back.
Now Assele-Ndaki felt his skin prickle. Beads of sweat slicked his forehead, gleamed on the broad slopes of his cheekbones. Macie. Poor Macie…
He had been murdered. Made a gruesome example. Inquiry and scandal were the tools of politicians. And the blanc was not that.