Assele-Ndaki shuddered, staring at the photo of Macie on his knees with the blazing necklace around his shoulders. Macie burning like a human candle, his face contorted in dying agony behind licks of gasoline-charged flame. Macie burning with his hands cut off at the wrists, dropped on the ground where he could see them as the fire rose around him and the life broiled from his flesh.
An example, Assele-Ndaki thought again.
Though numb with shock, he retained full command of his instincts for self-preservation. Examples were by very definition meant to serve as warnings, and he would not have been sent the photograph if it was too late for him to avoid sharing Macie’s fate. There was still a chance the telecommunications legislation could be defeated, or become so deeply mired in the parliamentary process that the net result was the same. While it had cleared the National Assembly, its ratification would require Senát passage, normally a rubber stamp vote to satisfy the president’s will. But Assele-Ndaki had many confederates, some of them quietly aware of the blanc’s maneuvers. If the venerable senateurs ruled to overturn the bill after their chamber deliberations—if enough of them could be persuaded to vote against it — it would be kicked back down to the lower parliamentary house and resubmitted to committee for changes. Then the amendments could be reintroduced, the process for all practical intents and purposes started from the beginning.
Assele-Ndaki’s heart was racing. It was a plan of abject fear and desperation, he knew. All those who undercut the president would pay the consequences. They would be probed, censured — their personal reputations impugned, their careers in government run into the dirt. Some stood to lose everything. Were Assele-Ndaki’s wife to learn of his own extramarital proclivities—
Everything, yes, the amendment’s proponents would lose everything.
Except their lives.
Assele-Ndaki gazed at the photo of Macie in his smoking ruff of flame and felt a fresh bout of horror and grief.
Better to walk in disgrace than suffer death. Especially that kind of death.
He set the photo into a drawer, reached a trembling hand out toward the telephone — but his secretary buzzed his intercom before he could lift the receiver from its cradle.
Senateur Moubouyi was on the line with a matter of pressing urgency, she informed him.
Were his mood less oppressively bleak, Assele-Ndaki might have smiled.
He had, it seemed, been beaten on the draw.
Nimec had arranged for them to meet the cable ship’s captain and project manager at ten P.M. in a dinner club called Scintillements. His name was Pierre Gunville, and for some reason Vince Scull was having a hard time with that. Scull also had a problem with the name of the club and the fact that their meeting was not taking place in an office building during normal work hours. Nimec could not say these complaints surprised him. Aggravation was Scull’s emotional springboard. If the day ever came when he wasn’t simmering with annoyance, you had to figure it might be worth consulting Nostradamus to see whether it was an omen of something or other being seriously amiss with the world.
Scull had begun his grumbling the second he met Nimec in the corridor outside their guest suites at the Rio de Gabao Hotel. Stepping into the elevator now, he jabbed a thick finger at the LOBBY button and continued to bitch and moan without respite as the doors slid closed.
“So why the hell doesn’t any of this crap bother you?” he said.
“Which crap do you mean?” Nimec said. “Just so I’m straight about it.”
“This guy with the fucked-up name, this fucked-up place where he made our appointment to meet him, this fucked-up time for it when I’m just off the plane from Paris,” Scull said, recapitulating his whole bilious list of complaints. He rubbed a hand over his scalp to smooth down a strand of his nearly extinct hair. “That’s what crap, Pete.”
The car started on its way down. Nimec tried without luck to think of a convenient blanket response, decided to tackle things in reverse order.
“You could have flown Air France with the rest of us, gotten here a couple days ago,” Nimec said. “Nobody twisted your arm into waiting around for a private jet charter.”
“Is that goddamn right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m not going to get into how much I paid for my membership on that service,” Scull said. “An expense the boss might’ve offered to shoulder, incidentally. At least halfway shoulder.”
Nimec gave him a look. “That’s asinine. If you have a fear of flying…”
“How many million times we been through this? I’m not afraid—”
“Okay, we’ll say you’ve got issues with commercial airlines,” Nimec said, loath to step into that sucking bog of dispute. “It’s your problem, you pay.”
Scull sneered.
“My problem, you want to call it that, is with how they run their security,” he said. “You’re the expert. Tell me you feel safe flying the terrorist-friendly skies.”
Nimec leaned against the handrail on the back wall of the car, glancing up at its floor indicator panel. The number twenty-four flicked by. Eleven down, twenty-three to go.
“I don’t waste energy worrying about what I can’t control,” he said. “DeMarco’s got the right take on it, you want to know what I think. If terrorist incidents in the air were the norm, they wouldn’t make headlines. The only reason they’re on the six o’clock news is because they don’t happen every day.”
“Like floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, huh? A guy walking aboard with a Semtex bomb in the heel of his shoe’s just another act of God.”
“Do us both a favor and let it go, Vince.”
“Let what go? It was me who was at those negotiations in Paris all last week, while you were still cooling your heels at the home office,” he said. “If somebody hadn’t sewn things up with the Nautel’s cable-maintenance fleet, we wouldn’t be going to see Captain Gunslinger tonight.”
“The boss had other negotiators there taking care of things,” Nimec said. “You enlisted.”
“That’s where you’re dead wrong, Petey,” Scull said. “I’m the company point runner. The forward scout who’s supposed to go conning for buried mines. The risk assessment man. Which means—”
“It’s your job to assess risks,” Nimec said, completing the familiar mantra. He checked his Annie-Meter. Too long to go. Then he glanced at the floor-indicator panel again. Ten, nine. Almost at the lobby. He would have to settle. “Fact is, Vince, you’re earning the salary that pays for your executive jet plan tonight. We’d need to talk with Gunville even if his outfit wasn’t contracted. Right now our teams just mean to use Nautel for support ops. But two divers from the Africana got killed while making repairs on the same fiber line we’re planning to send our men down to survey. I know the company line about what happened to them. I read the press accounts. And I still want to sound him out. Hear the story straight from his mouth. Because it’s my job to keep our people as safe as can be when they might have to put themselves at risk.”
“Did you hear me say I had a problem with that?” Scull thumbed his chest with indignation. “How about we get back to what I asked in the first place, you don’t fucking mind.”
Nimec shrugged mildly.
“The Gabonese are late eaters,” he said. “Nine, ten o’clock at night’s their usual dinner time. It’s also the custom to invite foreign business guests out for a meal. Entertain them. And the place we’re meeting Gunville is supposed to be pretty decent.” He paused. “You ought to enjoy yourself while you can. Be glad it’s not two days from now, when we have to head into the bush to check out the new ground-station facilities.”