“Okay, let’s compare notes,” Nimec said to him.
“We were tailed.”
“Wheels or heels?”
“Wheels,” DeMarco said. “A-B.”
Meaning he and Wade had been subjects of a two-car vehicular surveillance.
“The lead driver was a cabbie outside the hotel,” Wade said, looking down as he spoke to partially mask his lips from view. “He wasn’t interested in fares, ignored a whole bunch of people at the stand. Pulls out behind us, follows slow and tight. Then he turns off, and somebody else in a regular car picks up the tail.”
“The hack show himself again?” Nimec said.
“Cruises by about five blocks farther on, disappears,” DeMarco said. “I think he might’ve been worried he got burned.”
Nimec stood in thoughtful silence.
“Heels for Scull and me,” he said after a moment. “A-B-C.”
Meaning the surveillance placed on them had consisted of a three-man foot team. And it hadn’t been half bad. There had been a man in an embroidered kufi hat and dashiki talking into a cell phone as he stepped from an apartment building near the hotel. Another two men in casual Western clothes, strolling together on the opposite side of the avenue, moving almost abreast of them. The men across the street had seemed to be conversing with each other, but then Nimec, noticing one of them wore an earbud headset, realized he was also on a cellular. Just as Dashiki had passed Nimec and Scull and turned into a store, Earbud crossed to their side of the avenue, dropping back, taking Dashiki’s position at the rear. A few blocks later they pulled another switch. Earbud quickening his pace, then passing. Dashiki reappearing behind them, trailing them again, a quick shopper that one. Meanwhile, lo and behold, Earbud’s friend had kept pace across the avenue. The leapfrogging had continued almost the entire way to the market.
Nimec glanced at Ackerman.
“How about you?” he said.
“A pair of gendarmes in a patrol car,” Ackerman said. He was shaking his head in the negative, a ploy to confuse hidden eyes. “Right up until I got into the market.”
Nimec kept looking at him. “You sure?”
“Positive. Black uniforms. They split off after Conners.”
Nimec was quiet again. When DeMarco had told him about being caught on camera at the Rio, the first thing to enter his mind was the possibility of corporate espionage. Several Asian and European telecom carriers had been competing to become the African fiber ring’s savior when Planétaire went belly up, and it was conceivable one or more of them could have gotten upset enough to go over the top when UpLink won its contract with the Gabonese government, figuring they could still gum up the deal. There were also various national lobbying groups that had joined in opposition to yet another dominant foreign company moving in its assets and tried to block UpLink’s entry with a passel of legislative maneuvers once they happily bade adieu to Planétaire. A few were still making moves despite the ruling party’s obvious support. Any of these interests, or combination of interests, could have decided to do some peeping.
Except Nimec had nothing but questions about what their game might be. Add them to the questions he’d been left with after talking to Pierre Gunville, and there were more than he could count… though bundling them all together in his head was almost certainly a bad idea. He had a vague mistrust of Gunville, but at this stage, it was merely that. Nimec didn’t know whether it meant Gunville was connected to anything he needed to be concerned about, let alone to whoever was messing with UpLink. The truth was he didn’t know what was going on. But the involvement of the gendarmerie was heavy, and he would need to start producing some answers fast.
Nimec took a bite of his fry bread and chewed. Happy, happy business traveler enjoying a treat on his off day… and how was he to know talking with a mouth full of food was hell on lip readers?
“The termite that hopped out at you this morning,” he said. “You know the real problem?”
DeMarco indicated he did with a grunt as he shook his head no, borrowing Ackerman’s little mixed signal trick.
“For every one you spot, there’s a hundred more you don’t,” he said. “If they’re infesting us, we’d need a Big Sniffer to find all of them.”
Nimec swallowed perfunctorily. The Big Sniffer was Sword’s most sophisticated countermeasure sweep unit. But the device was hardly inconspicuous. Used with a boomerang antenna for scanning walls and other surfaces, its microcomputer-controlled instrumentation was carried in what amounted to a medium-size hardshell suitcase.
“If the termites on the surface twitch their feelers, they’ll stir up the nest,” he said, wiping his lips with his napkin. “We’d get rid of the soldiers and workers, but the breeding colony would just go deeper into the wood.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I’ve been hashing that over,” he said. “And I haven’t come up with a solution.”
Scull shrugged.
“Think garnets,” he said.
DeMarco looked at him.
“And ilmenites,” Scull said.
DeMarco continued to stare.
“Think what?” he said.
“Garnets. Ilmenites. Diamond hunters look for ’em when they analyze soil samples from termite mounds here in Africa,” Scull explained, as if the termite reference would surely make the pertinence of his declarations clear. “They aren’t worth much by themselves, but come from the same underground layers as diamonds. Termites carry tiny ones up from something like a hundred fifty feet underground, where their breeders live, and deposit them in their little hills. That’s how the Orapa mine in Botswana, richest in the world, got discovered.”
DeMarco remained clueless. As did the others.
“I have to confess, Vince,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Nimec was thoughtful. The fact was, neither did he.
Scull frowned, put an arm around Nimec’s shoulders, turned a hundred eighty degrees to his right, and gestured at random toward a vender’s stall. Nimec squared around with him as though to study an item of mutual interest, gazed absently at a woman selling thick cuts of bush meat. They were laid out on a table in the open sunlight, under netting meant to repel clusters of large black flies. The handwritten signs on the table behind them read: MALLE DE ÉLÉPHANT, SERVEAU DE SINGE.
“Elephant trunks, monkey brains,” Scull said, translating aloud. “In case you’re interested in buying, the monkeys around here can carry ebola.”
“Thanks.”
“Any time.” Scull pursed his lips and spouted air up over his face to dry off some sweat, simultaneously fanning himself with one hand. “That problem you mentioned… it occurs to me the best idea might be we don’t do anything.”
Nimec looked at him in silence a moment. Then his eyes narrowed.
“Leave the termites alone?”
Scull squeezed his arm, his expression that of a teacher who had broken through to a slow but earnest student.
“There you go, Petey. We wait. Keep the lights off. Let those droops keep working away figuring they’re safe in the dark,” he said, using Scullian shorthand for “dirty rotten snoops.” “The stuff they leave behind’s worthless crap, ’long as we know it’s there.”
“But it tells us where to find the diamonds.”
“You got it. When we’re ready, we dig down into the nests where the breeders are crawling around and make sure to bring along our cans of Raid… you remember the slogan from those old TV ads?”
Nimec looked at him.
Kills bugs dead, he thought.
DeMarco had joined them in pretending to be interested in the meat seller, comprehension dawning across his features as he listened.
“What do you think?” Nimec asked him.