His smile widened and he pulled heartily on the stubby little Churchill Robusto. He hadn’t been this sick with fear and this excited since he’d lost his virginity to his father’s mistress at the age of fourteen. He took the sweet-tasting cigar out of his mouth and blew a plume of aromatic smoke toward the ornate plaster ceiling of his office. These were the moments a man lived for!
A single figure stepped out of the jungle, his face covered by an ornate wooden mask, its edges trimmed with stiffened gold rattan like a lion’s mane, a round cockerel crest topped with rigid bristle, bloodred like that of a helmet worn by a Roman centurion.
The red wooden eyes of the face bulged and the mouth was a boxy square, wooden bars where the teeth should be, much like a gladiator’s protective head covering. He wore the same white cloth kilt as the others, complete with a short quiver full of darts, but this man’s skin was coal black. His feet were covered in heavy sandals, leather strips crisscrossed almost to his knees.
In one hand he carried one of the long blowgun tubes and in his right hand he carried something very much like the crook and flail of an Egyptian pharaoh: sacred signs of power, divinity and kingship. Like the scepters found in King Tutankhamen’s arms, these were also solid gold. A heavy gold arm ring was set with enormous uncut diamonds and emeralds.
As he approached Holliday and the others the man in the ornate mask slipped the gold flail and crook into the waistband of his kilt and raised his hand to remove the mask. As he did so one of the lighter-skinned men stepped forward, head bowed, and took the mask from him almost reverentially. Like the flail and crook, the mask, too, was clearly some sign of high office.
The face of the man, now unmasked, was dark eyed and intelligent. He smiled, and as he did so Holliday could see an old-fashioned silver amalgam filling in his left bicuspid. Whoever he was, this man was no jungle savage.
He stopped in front of Holliday and extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Colonel Holliday, my name is Dr. Amobe Barthelemy Limbani. Perhaps you could introduce me to your friends.”
23
Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s experience of the United States was limited to a fourteen-day package holiday to Miami he took out of simple curiosity one August. His experience of Canada and Vancouver amounted to even less: a few satellite TV interviews he’d seen shot on rainy city streets during the recent Winter Olympics.
Getting off the Air Canada 747 he was pleasantly surprised to find a modern, clean and reasonably efficient airport terminal. The customs agents, while obviously naive about the ways of the world, were at least polite, which was a step up from the uniformed gorillas he’d dealt with at Miami International.
He had purchased a Vancouver travel guide during the brief layover in Paris, and picked an appropriately lavish downtown Vancouver hotel in case his plan B required taking the elderly ladies out for tea. He booked a suite online using one of Euhler’s credit cards, so when he picked up a taxi outside the arrivals terminal he simply told driver, “Hotel Vancouver.”
As he left the airport it quickly became apparent that Vancouver was very much a city of water and bridges. The airport itself was on an island in a river delta, and on his left he could see the Pacific Ocean.
They traveled down Granville Street, a wide boulevard lined with pink-and-white blossoming cherry trees. There were mountains in the distance, cloaked in evergreens, and even more water as they passed over something called False Creek that seemed to be some sort of tourist shopping attraction.
Within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport the taxi arrived at the Hotel Vancouver. It was a city block-sized structure built like a French chateau, with a distinctive copper roof, long since gone green with age and the elements. He signed in using one of Euhler’s credit cards again. Unlike most European hotels, there was no requirement to hand over or even show a passport, and no one seemed to care that a black man who spoke English with a decidedly French accent would have such an obviously Germanic name as Euhler. Saint-Sylvestre smiled.
Back in the Cold War days, and even now, Canadian passports were the document of choice among intelligence agencies, since they offered visa-free entry into 157 countries and visa on arrival for most others. In the sixties it was said that there were more spies entering the United States on shuttle flights from Ottawa and Toronto than there were ordinary passengers, and even as late as 1997 the Mossad used Canadian passports in their botched assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal, the infamous Hamas leader. Very naive, these Canadians, Saint-Sylvestre thought for the second time that day.
An aging busboy took his suitcase up to the small suite he’d booked and he gave the man a five-dollar tip from the multicolored wad he’d changed his Swiss francs into before leaving the airport.
The suite was beige, conservative and came with all the bells and whistles, including big-screen TVs, Wi-Fi, a jet tub and bathrobes. Like advertisements in the Sunday New York Times for four-thousand-dollar A.P.O. Jeans and thirty-thousand-dollar purses from Marc Jacobs, this was the kind of luxury that provided the seeds of revolution to the masses, something that his esteemed superior, General Solomon Kolingba, with his bumblebee Range Rovers, his diamond-encrusted Rolex President and his three-thousand-dollar Dolce amp; Gabbana sunglasses, seemed to have forgotten.
And now, it seemed, his forgetfulness was catching up with him. Sadly, the fat, bullet-headed president of Kukuanaland was not the Robin Hood he’d pretended to be at first. The wealth he earned by the criminal enterprises he oversaw with Gash rarely went much farther than the garrison walls in Fourandao or beyond the front doors of the bank directly below Saint-Sylvestre’s offices. Certainly none of it reached the impoverished people of the country.
Unlike the policeman, General Kolingba was not a reader of history, nor a reader of anything at all, for that matter, and was unaware of a truism that most high school history teachers and every overthrown dictator in the world could tell you: he who lived by the coup d’etat had a very good chance of dying by it.
There were several restaurants within the hotel and an extensive room service menu, so, antirevolutionary or not, Saint-Sylvestre ordered himself a breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, cream cheese on a bagel with British Columbia smoked salmon, a breakfast steak frites with a perfectly fried egg on the top and a thermos of Viennese coffee. He had a quick shower, dressed himself in the fluffy white robe and was just settling in with a complimentary copy of the Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, when the food arrived. He ate heartily and plotted out the day ahead.
By eleven he was ready to begin. A quick check of the local telephone directory revealed that the Brocklebank sisters lived on a street simply called the Crescent in a district of Vancouver known as Shaughnessy. He spent twenty minutes in the hotel’s business center Internet kiosk on the lower-lobby floor and discovered that the Brocklebanks were a respectable old Vancouver family with the requisite skeletons in the closet, including a huge silver mine that had gone bust in the 1920s after A. G. Brocklebank, the sisters’ grandfather, had overleveraged himself, the bust virtually cleaning him out.
P. T. Brocklebank, A.G.’s son and the sisters’ father, had married into a huge sugar fortune, but the marriage turned sour when his heiress wife discovered that he was not only having an affair with her sister’s husband but had also embezzled millions from the family business to squander on the Standard Stock and Mining Exchange in Toronto.
The scandal in Vancouver was enormous, but womanizer, embezzler and poor businessman he may have been, he did love his daughters and had made them the beneficiaries of an extremely large life insurance policy well before he “accidentally” drove his wife’s rather swank 1936 Packard V12 Convertible Coupe over the two-hundred-foot-high cliffs at what was now Wreck Beach near the Point Grey Campus of the University of British Columbia.