“More reason to pull the slimebags out by their necks,” Scull said.
“Just like that, huh?”
“Right. You figure out where we’ve got leverage. And use it.”
A prolonged sigh of resignation over the phone.
“Okay, I’ll try my best,” Sherman said. “Where do I fax the docs?”
“You don’t. Send them by ’crypted e-mail,” Scull said. “You need to talk to me about anything, dial up my cell. And from now on, don’t forward any messages to me at the hotel. Not even a hi-how-are-you from my kids. Or that brunette I’ve been seeing.”
“The racked stripper?”
“Amber’s a sultry erotic dancer,” Scull said. “But, yeah, she’s the one.”
“Christ, this does sound serious.”
“I said it was important shit. What the hell, you think I just got an urge to jerk your chain?”
“Christ,” Sherman repeated. “I’ll get back to you fast as I can.”
“Do that,” Scull said. “I’m gonna be waiting at my computer.”
“Look, rush job or not, this could take a while—”
“I’ve got a while. In fact, I’ve got all day. Send me what you can, and make it plenty. Meantime, I need to find an Internet café and plug in.”
“You sitting with a crowd of backpacking hipsters at a cyber café? Somehow I can’t picture it, Vince.”
Scull shrugged in the driver’s seat.
“Why not?” he said. “If a guy’s main goal is to be an anonymous nobody, there’s no better place for it in the whole stinking world.”
The UpLink convoy made good time for the first twenty miles of its trip out of Port-Gentil. But it was barely past noon when the populous townships beyond the city thinned out across the low, barren countryside and the string of vehicles left the paved coastal road to drudge over rutted sand and laterite.
At the head of the column, a group of local guides drove one of the unmodified Rovers. Rumbling along after it was a big, squarish 6×6 cargo truck with a loaded-down flatbed trailer. Pete Nimec occupied the front passenger seat of the tricked-out Land Rover in the third slot, DeMarco behind the right-hand steering wheel, a group of four engineers and company officers in back. Then came another armored Rover for the company honchos driven by Wade and Ackerman, followed by a plain vanilla filled with Sword ops and local hired hands. Next were two more 6×6 haulers. Hollinger, Conners, and an assortment of bigwigs and technicians rode seventh and last in the only remaining armored vehicle.
Soon they were rolling between the southern shore of N’dogo Lagoon and a belt of intermittent jungle and scrubland along the Atlantic Ocean. Sunlight poured down on the trail to throw a blinding white glare off the grainy material spread in uneven heaps beneath their wheels. Nimec could see heat-shimmers over his Rover’s wide steel hood as the feeble output from its air-conditioner vents blew lukewarm on his neck and face. Outside his window, slender smooth-barked cypresses rose straight as lamp poles from small island mounds in the lagoon. Storks and egrets stood in the straw-colored reeds at its fringes, some with their long necks bowed to drink. There was no hint of a breeze. Everything seemed still and torpid in the settled dry-season heat. The only motion Nimec observed was from animals along the lagoon bank darting off at the sound of the diesel engines, but it was always out of the corner of his eye, and always too late to catch more than a blurry glimpse of some startled creature — a sleek body, a whip of a tail — as it splashed beneath the surface.
Then lagoon and forest receded behind the convoy, and for a time there was just flat drab savanna spreading out and away from the margins of the narrow vehicle trail.
Sette Cama had been an active British camp in the middle of the nineteenth century. What remained of it now was a loose scattering of wooden huts and bungalows that rose from the sedge on either side of the road, and an overgrown graveyard with the names of long-dead colonists etched into its crumbling headstones. Beyond there would be nothing but more deserted stretches of jungle and savanna for dozens of miles.
In his Rover up front, the guide radioed back to call a rest stop before continuing on toward the headquarters site. Then he led the vehicles off the trail over a patch of clumped, flattened grass and treaded dirt toward a large A-framed structure Nimec instantly figured to be the village trading post. There was an old pickup parked in front, a stand with some fruits and vegetables under the roofed porch, and a galvanized water bucket and metal dipper next to a slatted bench by the entrance. Out back was a row of three crude outhouses. Except for a Coca-Cola poster whose red background had faded to a pale pink, the signs taped against the dusty windows were handwritten in French. They seemed to have been put up more in defiance of the tyrannical sunlight than for any other reason. A few well-established palms around the building offered it some weak, spotty shade.
The vehicles stopped, and the locals went to stretch their legs and make small talk with a group of men who came out of the place to meet them, looking glad for a break in their monotony. While they stood and chatted, the members of the UpLink party started to dribble from their vehicles in ones, twos, and threes, a few of them wandering off to investigate the trading post, others just to stand around and smoke, a small number heading with reluctant necessity toward the shabby outhouses. Wearing bush shirts with Sword patches on the shoulders, and baby VVRS guns in sling harnesses against their bodies, some of Nimec’s men got out of their vehicles in a loose deployment around the post. They did their best to stay low profile and at the same time ensure they had control of the area, keeping watch over the execs without getting in anybody’s way. A single Sword op remained in the cab of each of the three cargo haulers.
Nimec sat beside DeMarco for a minute or two after their backseat companions had wandered off toward the post.
“I’d better work out some kinks of my own,” DeMarco said, digging his knuckles into his lower back. “Feel like taking a walk?”
Nimec pulled his head off his back rest, glanced at his watch, and thought about how much he missed Annie. He didn’t feel much like doing anything besides getting his job done.
“No thanks,” he said.
“You sure?”
Nimec gave him a nod.
“Yeah, Steve, go on,” he said. “Think I’d rather wait in here.”
The convoy was under way again within half an hour, and soon swung heavily inland through the thickening wilds.
DeMarco glanced over at Nimec as they crawled ahead in their Rover.
“Okay if I ask you something?” he said.
“Why not?”
“Could be it’s none of my business.”
Nimec shrugged.
“Go ahead, shoot,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I noticed you’ve been checking your watch a lot,” he said, keeping his voice quiet so it couldn’t be heard by the passengers in back. “And I was sort of wondering about it.”
Nimec sat looking straight out the windshield.
“Maybe I’m compulsive about the time,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe I just want to keep track of our progress. This WristLink contraption has a global positioning system readout.”
“Maybe.” DeMarco hesitated, then pointed toward the dash console with his chin. “Except we’ve got a big, clear, easy-to-see GPS display right in front of us.”